frankmaui
New Member
Hello Ladies and Gentleman,
The Text below I DID NOT WRITE.
I found it on the web. I thought it was interesting. I would like some comments on its validity or non-validity.
Is there really a relationship that you can always say "As you wish?"
Here is the web blog:
I've heard people announce and declare that we choose for ourselves for marriage to be the highest expression of the grandest experience of love of which human beings are capable. That's what we have said. Well, the institution the way we have currently devised it – not the institution per se, and not marriage per se – but marriage the way we (society) have constructed it, has no validity, given where we say we want to go. Validity itself is a relative term. Relative to what? Relative to what we are announcing and declaring. That we are choosing for ourselves as a species, and as individuals for marriage to be an expression of the highest and grandest love of which humans are capable? Then we proceed to construct a marriage institution and a marriage experience that produces exactly the opposite of that. It is virtually the lowest form of love which humans are capable. A love that possesses, rather than releases. A love that limits, rather than expands, a love that owns, rather than disowns. A love that makes virtually everything around it smaller, rather than make everything around it larger.
We've created an experience of marriage that has nothing to do with love in far too many instances. We've created a holder, a shell, some kind of encasement, and that's what we want marriage to be. We want it to be an encasement that holds everything exactly where it was the moment you said I love you, and that holds everyone exactly where they were in that first moment. But people and events move around and they change. Life is an evolution. And so marriage, as we have constructed it, works against the very process of life itself, because it produces very little breathing room in the way many societies, religions and families have constructed it.
Largely, marriage has been used by these groups as a mini prison, as a kind of contractual arrangement that says everything will be for now and evermore, the way it is in this moment. You will love no one else, and you certainly won't demonstrate that love for anyone else in the way you demonstrate your love for me. You won't go anywhere else except where I go, you'll do very little that I do not do with you, and in most ways, from this day forward, your life is going to be, at least to some degree limited, and so the very thing that should not limit people and should release the spirit within them, works against that, and limits people and closes the spirit down. That's the irony of marriage as we've created it.
We say “I do,” and from that moment we say “I do” we can't do the things that we would really love to do in life in the largest measure. That's not true, of course, in all marriages naturally, but it's true in enough of them, I'm going to say the majority of them, and that's why we have such a high divorce rate, because it isn't so much that people have gotten tired of each other, not nearly so often as they've gotten tired of the limitations that marriage seems to have imposed on them. The human heart knows when it's being asked to be less. Now this is not an argument against marriage as an institution, let's be clear. This is an exploration of what we've created the institution of marriage to be in the largest number of cases.
And so, our challenge is, can we live in a relationship without condition? Can we live in a relationship that doesn't ever say no, but simply says yes to another? Can we use relationships as an expression of the grandest kind of love we could ever imagine? Do we love our loved ones enough to say the three magic words? Not, “I love you.” They're quite frankly overused, but here are the three magic words of every relationship: “As you wish.” When you're prepared to say that, then we have truly given people back to themselves. Until we are ready to say that we have simply sought to use our relationship with another to bring us what we imagine ourselves to need in order to be happy. Think about it.
The relationship is the most important experience of our lives. Without it, we are nothing -- literally. That is because in the absence of anything else we are not. Fortunately there is not a one of us who doesn't have a relationship. Indeed, all of us are in a relationship with everything and everyone all of the time. We have a relationship with ourselves, we have a relationship with our families, we have a relationship with our environment, we have a relationship with our work, we have a relationship with each other. In fact, everything that we know and experience about ourselves, we understand within the context that is created by our relationships, but what does it take to make a relationship work?
That's been a great puzzlement for me, because here I thought I was doing what it took to keep my significant others from leaving, but they kept on leaving anyway. I never noticed that I was always trading this for that in my relationships. I'll tell you what. I won't laugh like this if you don't cough like that. See, I won't eat like this if you don't forget to put the toothpaste cap back on the tube like that, or whatever it is that we were trading, and the trades were much larger than that, I'm afraid. In fact, I realised I was playing trade when the other person stopped trading me what I thought they were supposed to give me. That was our quid pro quo arrangement: I'll give you this ,and you'll give me that, and when I stopped receiving what I thought was supposed to receive I left the relationship. Or in some cases when they stopped receiving what they thought was implicitly theirs, what they thought I was going to give them, they left the relationship.
That's how I discovered that I was into relationships for all the wrong reasons, that I was somehow searching for that treasure, that negotiable currency that I could have which would be large enough to keep everyone in the relationship. What aspect of myself would be so attractive, so undeniable, so magnetic, that, no matter what, she would stay in the relationship? And I didn't understand until I lost yet another in a series of important relationships, what was going wrong. We're in relationships for what we can get out of them, and were willing to trade all right, but we see relationships as just that-almost a business transaction. We don't understand the purpose of a relationship. And the purpose of a relationship has nothing to do with what you think you can get out of it, and everything to do with what you choose to put into it. But not putting something into it as a means of extracting from it what you wish to receive, but simply putting something into it as a means of noticing who you really are.
So whatever you put into a relationship, be sure that you put into it authentically, and never deny for a moment the real you, and if the real you isn't sufficient enough or attractive enough to keep that person in the relationship, then let them leave, because someone will come into your life who will appreciate you for you.
The Text below I DID NOT WRITE.
I found it on the web. I thought it was interesting. I would like some comments on its validity or non-validity.
Is there really a relationship that you can always say "As you wish?"
Here is the web blog:
I've heard people announce and declare that we choose for ourselves for marriage to be the highest expression of the grandest experience of love of which human beings are capable. That's what we have said. Well, the institution the way we have currently devised it – not the institution per se, and not marriage per se – but marriage the way we (society) have constructed it, has no validity, given where we say we want to go. Validity itself is a relative term. Relative to what? Relative to what we are announcing and declaring. That we are choosing for ourselves as a species, and as individuals for marriage to be an expression of the highest and grandest love of which humans are capable? Then we proceed to construct a marriage institution and a marriage experience that produces exactly the opposite of that. It is virtually the lowest form of love which humans are capable. A love that possesses, rather than releases. A love that limits, rather than expands, a love that owns, rather than disowns. A love that makes virtually everything around it smaller, rather than make everything around it larger.
We've created an experience of marriage that has nothing to do with love in far too many instances. We've created a holder, a shell, some kind of encasement, and that's what we want marriage to be. We want it to be an encasement that holds everything exactly where it was the moment you said I love you, and that holds everyone exactly where they were in that first moment. But people and events move around and they change. Life is an evolution. And so marriage, as we have constructed it, works against the very process of life itself, because it produces very little breathing room in the way many societies, religions and families have constructed it.
Largely, marriage has been used by these groups as a mini prison, as a kind of contractual arrangement that says everything will be for now and evermore, the way it is in this moment. You will love no one else, and you certainly won't demonstrate that love for anyone else in the way you demonstrate your love for me. You won't go anywhere else except where I go, you'll do very little that I do not do with you, and in most ways, from this day forward, your life is going to be, at least to some degree limited, and so the very thing that should not limit people and should release the spirit within them, works against that, and limits people and closes the spirit down. That's the irony of marriage as we've created it.
We say “I do,” and from that moment we say “I do” we can't do the things that we would really love to do in life in the largest measure. That's not true, of course, in all marriages naturally, but it's true in enough of them, I'm going to say the majority of them, and that's why we have such a high divorce rate, because it isn't so much that people have gotten tired of each other, not nearly so often as they've gotten tired of the limitations that marriage seems to have imposed on them. The human heart knows when it's being asked to be less. Now this is not an argument against marriage as an institution, let's be clear. This is an exploration of what we've created the institution of marriage to be in the largest number of cases.
And so, our challenge is, can we live in a relationship without condition? Can we live in a relationship that doesn't ever say no, but simply says yes to another? Can we use relationships as an expression of the grandest kind of love we could ever imagine? Do we love our loved ones enough to say the three magic words? Not, “I love you.” They're quite frankly overused, but here are the three magic words of every relationship: “As you wish.” When you're prepared to say that, then we have truly given people back to themselves. Until we are ready to say that we have simply sought to use our relationship with another to bring us what we imagine ourselves to need in order to be happy. Think about it.
The relationship is the most important experience of our lives. Without it, we are nothing -- literally. That is because in the absence of anything else we are not. Fortunately there is not a one of us who doesn't have a relationship. Indeed, all of us are in a relationship with everything and everyone all of the time. We have a relationship with ourselves, we have a relationship with our families, we have a relationship with our environment, we have a relationship with our work, we have a relationship with each other. In fact, everything that we know and experience about ourselves, we understand within the context that is created by our relationships, but what does it take to make a relationship work?
That's been a great puzzlement for me, because here I thought I was doing what it took to keep my significant others from leaving, but they kept on leaving anyway. I never noticed that I was always trading this for that in my relationships. I'll tell you what. I won't laugh like this if you don't cough like that. See, I won't eat like this if you don't forget to put the toothpaste cap back on the tube like that, or whatever it is that we were trading, and the trades were much larger than that, I'm afraid. In fact, I realised I was playing trade when the other person stopped trading me what I thought they were supposed to give me. That was our quid pro quo arrangement: I'll give you this ,and you'll give me that, and when I stopped receiving what I thought was supposed to receive I left the relationship. Or in some cases when they stopped receiving what they thought was implicitly theirs, what they thought I was going to give them, they left the relationship.
That's how I discovered that I was into relationships for all the wrong reasons, that I was somehow searching for that treasure, that negotiable currency that I could have which would be large enough to keep everyone in the relationship. What aspect of myself would be so attractive, so undeniable, so magnetic, that, no matter what, she would stay in the relationship? And I didn't understand until I lost yet another in a series of important relationships, what was going wrong. We're in relationships for what we can get out of them, and were willing to trade all right, but we see relationships as just that-almost a business transaction. We don't understand the purpose of a relationship. And the purpose of a relationship has nothing to do with what you think you can get out of it, and everything to do with what you choose to put into it. But not putting something into it as a means of extracting from it what you wish to receive, but simply putting something into it as a means of noticing who you really are.
So whatever you put into a relationship, be sure that you put into it authentically, and never deny for a moment the real you, and if the real you isn't sufficient enough or attractive enough to keep that person in the relationship, then let them leave, because someone will come into your life who will appreciate you for you.
