Soulmate or Big Mistake?

Excerpt from Opening A Window To The Soul: A Guide to Living Beyond the Human Drama, a compilation of Spirit guided responses to commonly asked questions.

Why do we fall in love?

Through the bonds of romantic love and sexuality, you peel away the illusion that you are a solitary soul and remember your divine essence. For however long a connection lasts, whether a brief moment or a lifetime, merging with another person turns life into a glorious experience. You are then able to transcend the mundane through the communion of love.

Most relationships don’t fit this ideal love. What’s going on?

Beyond the human drive for love, and the attraction that brings you together, there is also an underlying soul agreement. As you take on soul tasks you might otherwise run away from (like relationships which force you to grow), the magnetic attraction of love is the glue that holds you together. The desire for emotional connection and physical touch adds extra potency and motivation to the dynamic.

Each person has arranged for multiple possibilities with a number of souls, each to fulfill a specific interaction with the other, in order to accomplish a certain goal. Even if the human personalities aren’t aware of the underlying agreement, or if the relationship becomes twisted, enmeshed, or devoid of affection, the deeper soul bond exists.

Agreements can be pleasant and long-lasting or tumultuous and short-lived, but all relationships present gifts and challenges, depending upon what your soul and personality need next. Some are designed as the gentle support you want to feel along your journey, while others force you to stretch. There are partners who will lead you to new opportunities or experiences, while others will provide security and stability. Some connections bring gentle companionship, while others present ongoing struggle.

Why are so many relationships painful failures?

Like climbing a staircase to reach a higher level, each difficult relationship is a step taken to get you from who you once were, at the beginning, to who you became by the end. You have grown with each step.

You cannot go back and change a disappointing relationship, but you can choose how you view it. Instead of focusing on pain, blame, or shame, look back over your “failed” relationships and see how each one brought a specific lesson, a shift to your awareness and abilities. Even if a painful experience simply taught you what to avoid, there is an opportunity to see what you have accomplished. From the soul perspective, the relationship is not a failure.

How do you see the benefit of a failed relationship?

There are different types of soul agreements that most people go through, beginning with soul growth relationship agreements, romantic encounters which compel you to acquire a certain strength, talent or quality. We might learn through encouragement, or we may need challenge, but we will attract which ever kind of interaction is more effective.

Some lessons are gentle, as when one person is an example of how to be, while other lessons force you to address that which you resist the most. If you are stubbornly selfish, your desire to have love may shift your priorities and enable you to put another’s needs before your own. If you are too passive and need to learn not to be bullied, your love relationship may push you to assert your authority.

Emotionally charged connections force you to master whatever skill you might be lacking: asking for what you need, creating your own financial self-sufficiency, or becoming aware of those to avoid. Just like falling and skinning your knees a few times as you are learning to ride a bike, with each experience you become wiser, stronger, and more skilled, even if it hurts.

There are also soul balancing relationship agreements where two people come together to complete some kind of unfinished business. The agreement may be to assist with balancing an extreme from childhood, such as providing financial stability to one whose early life was impoverished. A love relationship with a kind and reliable person helps overcome insecurity and mistrust caused by a sibling who liked to trick you. Your lover could be fulfilling an agreement to correct a previous failure from an earlier lifetime. “I was your husband and treated you badly. This time I’ll be devoted and responsible.”

With a varying balance of loving support versus struggle, you may find yourself in a harmonious and compatible relationship that nurtures your latent talents or the opposite extreme of a hostile environment compelling you to get tougher than you ever imagined.

Why do I keep attracting the same kinds of relationships?

Perhaps you are not quite finished with a particular challenge of growth – learning is done in incremental steps. Or you could be encountering soul growth testing agreements, to test the skills you have developed, in the interest of becoming confident and trusting yourself to make the right choices.

In a series of relationships with controlling partners, a woman was learning how to overcome giving her power away, each time getting a little stronger and smarter. Then she had a few romantic relationships where the soul agreement was to test her resolve, to prove to her what she had accomplished. As she learned to step away graciously, before major enmeshment or conflict, she was able to trust that she would no longer get lost in destructive relationships. The next time she encountered a similar kind of relationship dynamic, instead of being attracted, she wasn’t even interested.

Love relationships are two-way agreements, where each has a specific role or task to perform for the other. One person is a helper while the other is a challenger. One may be teaching while the other is undoing an injustice from the past. One may be soothing a childhood wound while the other is relentlessly testing previously learned lessons.

The relationship may seem unfair in the midst of human dramas and emotional frustrations, but there is balance on a soul level. Sometimes the assistance is obvious, as when one provides financial or emotional support. Other times, what you perceive as mistreatment – conflict, confusion, betrayal, disappointment – is actually service, forcing you to change what you would not have otherwise.

The whole love thing is so painful and confusing! What am I doing wrong?

If you do not have a strong idea about what your needs are, or what kind of person it will take to meet those needs, you may “fall in love” with the first one who comes along. If you have a low opinion about what you deserve, you may take whatever you can get. If you look to another to solve your problems or fill a need that you should be taking care of for yourself, you are picking a lover for the wrong reasons.

Refocus your energies on taking care of what needs changing in your life – dealing with the unhealthy patterns, fears, and false beliefs from childhood and past experiences – and then your soul will no longer attract the type of relationships that force you to grow.

Refocus on the soul essence, rather than human frailties. Let go of obsessive enmeshment with a person as the path to feeling love. Become tough enough to hold a feeling of peace and calm inside, to source your own sense of being loved.

To whatever degree you have attained wholeness, you will attract one who is a reflection of your level of development.

There must be relationships beyond all this pain and struggle!

The reward for your persistence moving through the soul growth and balancing agreements is the soulmate relationship. No longer required to push or prod, the role of the soulmate is to give their partner the emotional support and security needed to bloom and grow.

Love relationships of soul growth or balancing may seem unfair, like a parasitic vine clinging to a tree for support, perhaps even choking the other’s growth. In comparison, the soulmate agreement is two strong trees growing next to each other, both with their own network of sustaining roots and their branches intertwined as they reach for the sky.

When two souls agree to be soulmates, it is to be as equals, without the underlying loneliness or power struggles of soul balancing agreements. They are not drawn together to fill some lack or instill challenge, for they have already worked on their own soul growth. They are well matched, at a comparable level of emotional and intellectual capacity, with the same willingness and capacity to love.

Whereas the earlier relationships effectively point out your weaknesses and wounded places, the soulmate heart and soul connection is like looking in a mirror and seeing the beauty of your own being in the other. While maintaining healthy independence, the union of two in a soulmate relationship brings a sense that there is no “other,” only wholeness. The focus is on the expansion of love rather than the challenge to heal.