A spiritual awakening shows us what is real.
One of the things that people often discover after awakening is that their romantic relationship is not real.
The relationship is entirely in your mind and the mind of your partner.
This immediately upsets countless people. They suddenly feel like their relationship is crumbling after seemingly being a rock in their lives.
Hence why one of my most popular posts for more than a decade (yeah, more than a decade) has been How to Save Your Relationship During Awakening.
That post can share more on saving the relationship, but in this post, I am doing a deeper dive into the romantic ideals that have been normalized and are creating suffering in countless relationships.
I’ll also offer 5 important steps to help you unbrainwash romantic ideals.
What You Really Want in a Relationship
What you and most human beings actually want in a relationship is this:
Certainty in getting your needs met
Yep.
It’s that simple.
What are some of the basic needs we want:
- Healthy food, good water, clean air, time for rest, and full range of motion activity
- Community with all its abilities to help us regulate emotions, explore joy, protect us from threats (environmental, interpersonal, etc.), teach us important skills, overcome difficulty, help raising children, and more
I am sure more need could be added to that list, but the big part is that certainty.
However, we’re so confused and brainwashed by society that we don’t really understand that we’re trying to get all of those things in the two bullets from ONE PERSON!
Unbrainwashing Big Lies
A lot of you who come to the spiritual path have had narcissistic trauma. You’ve already had your mind psychologically attacked in childhood and likely into adulthood.
I’m sorry this happened to you.
You have to learn how to unbrainwash yourself.
You’re not alone.
Society is a collection of illusory ideas, and some lead us into suffering. Waking up means we begin to see how illusory ideas like romantic ideals cause suffering.
Remember that ideas don’t exist anywhere. They’re not real. However, society needs ideas and beliefs to coordinate, and we need those ideas grounded in reality.
For example, the illusion that a stop sign means that I should stop my car is a useful illusion to coordinate traffic. The stop sign doesn’t physically stop my car or anyone else’s. It’s a word painted onto a metal octagon. Accepting this illusion and adjusting my actions because of it, I and others keep ourselves out of car wrecks.
Unfortunately, there are many other illusory ideas and social standards that cause suffering. Let’s draw from history for a moment.
The following is from Joseph Goebbels, the Chief Propagandist of the Nazi party:
The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Blaming someone else for doing the thing you’re doing is a classic psychological attack. The Nazis took social illusions and ideas to a horrific level, enlisting so many people to do terrible things.
Big lies go on today at a variety of levels. In our unconscious state, human beings believe virtually everything.
That should scare you.
And it should inspire you in digging out your unconsciousness.
The big lie goes on in seemingly benign ways with romantic relationships. All around you are messages on how important it is to find someone who:
- completes you
- is the one
- is your everything
- is your soulmate/twin flame/twin soul
You get told to bet everything on this one person–finding them and keeping them.
Because when you find them, you’ll have everything you need.
Right?
Shocked and Confused About Relationships
Wrong.
There is no way that one person can meet all your needs.
Furthermore, a lot of the things you’ve been told matter either don’t matter or can be cultivated.
Let’s start with having a “spark” with someone.
The spark is some combination of your sexual drive and your subconscious ego giving you instantaneous feelings about this person. Your subconscious may even give you fearful feelings, but since excitement is conflated with arousal, you interpret this to mean you should have a romantic connection.
The spark is a deeply unconscious reaction based out of past experiences and ideas associated with relationships.
It has nothing to do with long-term compatibility of a romantic relationship.
This statement may be unsettling for some of you. However, for those who are going through the unbrainwashing process, you’re like:
“Shit. That makes sense. What have I been doing?”
Living unconsciously.
That’s what we all do until we wake up and choose to keep waking up.
Choosing the Conscious Spiritual Path
Along with hoping for a magical romantic spark, other illusory criteria that people often seek and over-emphasize include:
- Having similar shared activities
- Getting drunk or high together
- Great sex (you can learn how to make it great, but it still won’t be more than 1% of the time you spend with your partner).
- Fashion sense
- How much wealth someone has
- Surface-level beauty (this is different than health–an unhealthy person represents certain lifestyle choices that don’t necessarily align with a healthy person’s lifestyle.)
These agendas are very different than
- having a shared vision,
- a deep toolkit of interpersonal skills,
- the ability to expand your interpersonal skillset,
- a strong community to raise children in (if both people desire that) and have support as the couple ages,
- and a similar lifestyle.
In terms of beliefs that end up being critical, those include how to use money, similar religious and spiritual core beliefs (not the superficial stuff), and whether you want to have children.
On the conscious path, you wake up and figure out the core stuff and create new beliefs and a new kind of relationship.
Instead, most people create an even more elaborate lie–the soulmate lie.
Creating an Unconscious Soulmate Ideal
People struggle to accept how much social brainwashing has happened to define the ideal of a man and a woman meeting and creating a nuclear family.
That’s a new invention, and it’s created so much stress on two people to do everything.
Once upon a time, you had a clan or whole hunter-gatherer tribe to figure out all the survival and social things you need.
Now you have got to do it all.
That’s not possible.
It’s exhausting people and breaking up decent relationships because they expect too much from too few people in their lives.
For some people, the only significant person they have in their lives is their significant other.
However, instead of going through a reckoning and transformation in relationships, people grab onto the big spiritual relationship lie–the soulmate myth.
Soulmates and Other Myths that Bind Our Love
Now, all the unconscious expectations that I’ve already listed out are buried under more rules and criteria.
An example might be that the soulmate must also:
- Look even more perfect and/or spiritual in some way
- Speak in certain types of spiritual jargon
- Go on Ayahuasca and plant medicine journeys with you
- Do certain types of inner work
- Live in Bali, and more
It can get so ridiculous.
Eventually, you’re unnecessarily alone. You’ve eliminated all other human beings who could ever fit this criteria.
In the unconscious world, possibilities diminish. In becoming more conscious, your possibilities for love and connection expand.
Spiritual Loneliness and Feeling Disconnected
You Don’t Know Everything
The totally selfish person is a a foregone conclusion in a culture that has normalized the power of the individual and taken away countless important supports (community, healthy food, clean air, etc.). The power of the individual to do everything they need is another really big lie to unbrainwash yourself from.
We do very little by ourselves.
We receive tons of things with indirect help. For example, in the nuclear family ideal, the only way it works is if you have stoves, electric food grinders, electricity, refrigerators, and more. One person can’t manage everything by themselves. However, every one of those things were created by countless other people, but you don’t know them. That’s indirect community.
Having your aunties hand grind wheat berries into flour would be direct community.
You can’t do everything by yourself, and human beings never have. Furthermore, indirect community isn’t the community people need.
The continued push towards hyper-individualism is leading people to feeling less compelled to work on their romantic relationships. Apps and the online shopping mindset have generated a consumerist mindset toward romance–people think they can find a person like a product on these dating apps.
And there always seems to be something better if you don’t like the first product you picked.
In short, before dumping the romantic relationships you’re in, you need to accept you don’t know everything about being in a relationship.
You don’t know all the ways to interact in a romantic relationship that you need to.
Neither do they. That’s not been what society has most actively taught most of us.
It also means, you both both need to work your butts off. That means learning social strategies that you haven’t been taught.
This is a humbling truth that few peoples’ egos find easy to swallow.
Furthermore, in the spiritual world, we (and I used to do this) talk about having all your knowing and truth inside.
You don’t.
That’s absurd.
The universe is too vast to know everything.
The social world you live in is too big for you to know everything about that.
The truth you have inside is that YOU ARE.
That’s a statement of your being. As far as interacting in the world, those skills have to be taught.
They primarily get taught in community.
You need more community, not a perfect spiritual romantic partner.
You need to be ready to learn.
5 Tips to Help Unbrainwash Romantic Lies
I’ll be brief, but there are tons of blog posts here to help you with each step.
- Accept the reality you’re in and let go of the old beliefs
- Be curious and inquiry deeper into what is real
- Learn how to understand your beliefs and where they come from
- Learn how to let go of issues and attachments that color your perspective on your partner
- Engage with and encourage your partner to do the previous 4 steps and discuss what values truly matter to you both
How to Find and Release Physical Pain During a Spiritual Awakening
Seeing More Relationship Truth
A spiritual awakening is the potential start of a much larger reorientation process.
What you thought was up is actually down.
What you thought was right is actually the color blue.
What you thought was a romantic relationship is actually a glorified sex and outings partner.
What do you do?
Get to work.
On your illusions.
Invite your partner into the transformation.
Work hard together.
You can re-create whatever romantic relationship is possible for you if you both work and you reach out to the broader community to learn the things you need to know.
Along the way, you are likely to be frustrated by all the big relationship lies out there.
Keep going.
Know that at the end of the day that you and your partner can be so much happier together.
4 Comments
Thanks for the blogpost at this critical time in going through my own unbrainwashing process of romantic relationship ideas. I really appreciate it, especially the community aspect and the need for learning. So much to unlearn and to learn for me. What‘s sticking from your post is how ignorant I‘ve been about my needs as a human being, but at the same time unconsciously trying to get it all from this one person, mixed with all kinds of personal wounds and issues like trauma, a huge self-worth-issue and beliefs about romantic relationships or marriage being the final achievement in life so I can live happily ever after. The exaggerated importance people place and I have placed on romance is shocking. It’s a recipe for disaster and disappointment. There’s so much to unpack haha. Thanks again Jim.
You’re welcome, Nina. You’re not alone. So many people have to unpack these romantic relationship ideals if they want to open themselves to the profundity of love and support that is available. Keep going!
Thanks for this post. Do you have any thoughts on how one can determine if they want kids? With all the lies we are taught, it’s very hard to flesh out the truth and likely will take a lot of time and discernment; yet, we only have so much time to make such decisions.
This is a fantastic question, Joe. There’s a lot of biology and social condition to unpack. I probably need to write a whole blog post about it. I’ve added it to my list.