I no longer give relationships workshops or relationships counseling, because my spiritual calling now lies in a different direction. But at one time, about twenty years ago, I found lots of people coming to me for counseling in this area. And a remarkable thing is that all of the women wanted the man to change, as they put it, “just a little bit.”
They didn’t want him to change radically, but they wanted him to change a little.
I remember how, at the time, I was hammering on my husband to change just a little – to be a little more expressive, a little more attentive, a little more careful in the way he spoke. And it seemed so little to ask.
But I finally figured out that what I was asking had to do with the difference between how men and women are made.
We’re a great deal alike. We’re part of the same species, and we aren’t all that different. But there’s a little bit of a different orientation, and I kept wanting my husband to shift his orientation and become a little bit more like me. And he instinctively pulled back, as most men would, wisely or not. It depends on how self-integrated they are, and he was very self-integrated, and he wisely recognized that he wasn’t born to do that.
A great part of what I admired in him was a certain reticence about, and resistance to the kinds of issues that women can spend a great deal of their time endlessly pondering. You can wrap it all up and label it: “What is me?”
He would look at it, and he didn’t find it attractive. It was fine for me to ponder, but trying to drag him into my world was a waste of energy.
And yet I wasn’t entirely wrong. And when I stopped hammering and started giving him space to walk into without nagging him all the time, I found that it worked better, and I got what I wanted.
His refusal to play my game was extremely good for me, because if he had capitulated to my little demands, we’d be wallowing in a strictly yin part of our relationship, with a very real risk that it would be destroyed. I hated it when he resisted me, and I hated it when he said I wasn’t right. But over the long haul, I can look back and realize that there was some truth in it.
The fundamental purpose of a relationship is to expand your consciousness so that you can experience the complementary nature of female and male energies and integrate it in yourself.
There’s absolutely no reason you have to be married to do that. You don’t have to marry at all, but if you want to be truly happy, and if it’s the only way you’re going to be able to learn, you may have to do it.
If you’re ever going to be truly happy, you have to learn to access the kind of energy that will help you find a balance inside yourself, so that you can expand your awareness to include the opposite side of you, and honor that energy in others.
That’s really what our relationships are about. Life is asking us to expand our awareness on the spectrum of yin and yang. And even if ours is a very female nature and lifestyle, there’s an inner strength that life demands we develop from within that yin lifestyle, even if means just having the discipline to be very yin and have integrity in that way of living.
People sometimes ask me if I think men and women really need one another.
They used to need each other a lot more. Men basically needed to marry because it was expected of them. If you didn’t marry, it was difficult for your career. One of the first questions you would be asked in a job interview was if you were married, because it was considered an indication of a man’s stability and character and values.
If a man wanted a good job and the stability and support of a family, marriage was the only clear and obvious path. And it was obvious that if a woman wanted children, she would have to get married.
And you had to marry for sex. That’s being blunt, but it’s a large part of what drives us together. And now that the world has shifted, and we’ve become more focused on the quality of energy that we’ll allow into our lives, we’ve more or less taken marriage out of the picture. But there’s still this question: “What’s going to drive us together now?”
A lot of the emptiness and doubts that people are feeling about their intimate relationships are due to the fact that we now need to find good reasons to be together.
Women created an interesting new reality when they dove headlong into the sexual revolution. It’s basically that they lost their trading card. That may seem like an overly crude and old-fashioned way to put it, but it’s a simple fact. And now that we’re living with the consequences, we have to see the new reality for what it is.
I don’t mean to define men as animals, because it’s not true. But sex is a very powerful drive for men and women both, and it causes us to do things that, if we had no sexual drive, we wouldn’t do.
There wouldn’t be anything that pushes us together in the same way. And then that push causes you to discover all sorts of other realities, including the desire to make the relationship work on many levels, including, if you’re so inclined, the need to make a home.
Another way the revolution in sexual morality has changed our relationships is that sex now enters the picture long before we’ve really gotten to know each other.
It’s almost a given that one of the first things we do is have a sexual relationship. It’s very common, and it’s difficult to avoid. But I think it would be a great help if we could be patient and consign sex more to the realm of future expectancy.
I’m perfectly aware how difficult it is. But the problem is that jumping into an intimate relationship causes you to imagine that you’ve got a lot more in common than you actually have. You’ve released a magnetism that creates a tremendous sense of integration. And it may not have much more than a physical and emotional component.
Then people wake up and get upset because, you know, “He doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t open up to me. He’s not really committed to me.”
And I wonder, “why should he? What have you done together besides have sex?”
Women fail to appreciate what a trap it represents for a man to contemplate the idea of being wholly committed to a woman. I’m not talking about being committed to making babies and earning money, and working for years to support a family. But men are keenly aware that women are very demanding and that they push the envelope a lot.
The reason it’s a stock image is because it’s true. Women are in the lead in this – let’s face it, the feminine is the touchy-feely side of the yin/yang circle. It’s always touching and feeling and wanting to know what’s going on inside themselves and inside their partner. Meanwhile, men are in a charging-forward mode. So it has to come from the feminine side to push to find a balance in the realm of feelings. That’s why we have each other. And men can teach women to think about more than the moment, and to consider the longer results.
My husband said, “you know, everything’s just fine, and then you get upset.”
I was stunned. “How dare you say that? Of course everything wasn’t fine. That’s why I got upset.”
But when I calmed down, I saw that there was a lot of truth in it. I would overreact to something very small, and once I had overreacted, I had committed to create a big experience out of it. Whereas if I hadn’t overreacted, and if I’d taken it more calmly, everything really was fine. There was no crisis until my reaction created one.
And with all due respect, women, that’s very tiresome to a man. It’s tiring because he’s going along, feeling that things are okay, and then she’s suddenly flying up and down, which takes a tremendous amount of energy to absorb and fairly deal with, when he has a lot to do just being a man in the world.
And then there’s the opposite side of the coin, where the man wants her to be there when he wants her, but he doesn’t really care what’s important to her.
Coming back to this business of new kinds of relationships, and people’s unrealistic expectations, I ask people, “What have you done to earn a commitment?
What have you done to earn that person’s trust? How have you shown this person that you’ll be worth the time and energy that you want them to invest in you?”
And from the woman’s side, we have to remember the many compromises a woman has to make in order to live harmoniously with a man.
There’s an inevitable thing that happens, where the male energy sort of takes over the feminine energy. We can talk about it as much as we like, but when push comes to shove, that’s how it works. And before we can deal with it to the benefit of both parties, we have to look at it objectively and understand what’s happening.
When a woman takes up a relationship with a man, she has to adjust to his reality, and it has to be worth it to her. She has to make sure he’s going to give more to her life than he’ll take. And the man has to put up with this endless roller coaster, of her reacting to his nature and constantly hammering him, “Why aren’t you doing it differently?”
The female nag is such a stereotype. I can see it in myself, and I’m stunned sometimes by the things I can say or do. I’m horrified by it. So we absolutely have to make it worthwhile to each other. We have to become such a valuable part of one another’s life that the effort is worth it.
What we have to learn, and it’s a very big lesson, is to behave appropriately. And it’s something that I believe is an absolute key in our relationships – to learn to behave appropriately.
In order to behave appropriately, we have to be very objective about ourselves and the people around us. We have to understand what is a righteous request. And a righteous request will include me as well as you.
The number one question is: “Is this a fair thing to ask of you?” And the second question is: “Is this something I can promise with integrity, and something I really should do?”
I believe nearly all the problems in relationships come from a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of understanding of who I am and what I truly need, what my genuine limits are, and what my values are.
The success that I had in my second marriage was one hundred percent due to the fact that in the ten years when I wasn’t married, I became very, very clear about what was important to me.
When you’re clear about what’s important to you, you won’t be tempted to get engaged in situations that will take it away from you.
What’s important to each of us will vary a great deal, and it isn’t always obvious.
Let me be specific, even though it won’t necessarily be helpful for everyone who hears this. But I think it will give you an idea of how I ran through this, and maybe you’ll find some insights in it for yourself.
There were many, many things that, given my nature and personality, you might think I would want in a partner. And, interestingly, I had a lot of the obvious things in the first man I married.
He was very verbal and clever and witty – all of which are things that I just love. I enjoy verbal conversations immensely. And then there was the second man I married, who was very quiet. He didn’t talk much, and he wasn’t witty. He didn’t have the appreciation of witty repartee that I love. He didn’t understand a lot of my jokes, because he was just not on that wavelength. He had a wonderful sense of humor, but if I was doing some tricky little wordplay, he was sort of standing there looking at me.
With many of the people in my life, including men that I’ve known and appreciated over the years, it was that witty mental and verbal energy that I enjoyed tremendously, and you’d think it would be important to me in a relationship. But in the years when I wasn’t married and didn’t planned to be, because I was a nun at Ananda Village, I really got down to understanding the bottom-line issues that mattered to me.
And because my life is about Ananda and spiritual things, it came down to sharing a certain understanding of the spiritual path, and having a certain equal energy for it, and an equal zeal for it.
It couldn’t just be a supportive attitude in him that didn’t match my energy and my deep commitment, because my energy for the spiritual path was total. And he needed to demonstrate an absolute willingness not to interfere with me on that level, no matter what. And after I made sure of that, I realized that I could live with the other stuff. But I could never live without that.
When I met my second husband, I had no intention of marrying him or anyone, and it took a year and a half for the relationship to develop. One of the things that happened during that period was that I realized that when it came to my bottom-line criteria, he was right there with me.
I had never felt that I would meet anyone like that, because I am fierce. I’m so fierce in my determination that, in fairness, I really thought I should never marry. Because if anybody crosses me on those issues, I’ll eat them alive. So I didn’t think there would be anybody who wouldn’t cross that line with me, and I didn’t think it was fair to be in a relationship with someone who couldn’t meet me on that level, because I would be utterly uncompromising. But, you see, I absolutely knew that about myself, and I knew it so deeply that I was never tempted to break that resolve. But it was a hard-fought battle.
It sounds simple when I describe it from a distance in time. In my first marriage, we had tremendous compatibility on many levels, but on the fundamental issue of my zeal for selflessness as the core principle of spirituality, it fell apart.
And when it fell apart, I found that I was furious with him. Maybe it was because I had suppressed this or that element in myself in order to be with him. But as I allowed my anger to percolate, I realized that I was furious for about seven specific things that had happened during our five years together.
And why did I pick those particular incidents? In every case, I realized that an important principle was at stake – a principle that was fundamental to who I felt myself to be; a deeply moral principle. And I had violated it, but I thought that he had made me violate it, so I was mad at him.
In time, I realized that he hadn’t made me violate it at all. I had given up my power to decide. And I gave it up because I didn’t want to stand up for it, perhaps out of fear of what it would do to the relationship. I didn’t have the courage to accept the consequences of standing up for it.
When I didn’t stand up for what I believed in, I felt that I had disappeared as a person. And the day I realized it, I was no longer mad at him; instead, I was furious with myself. Because he hadn’t known that any big principles were at stake. He had acted honorably according to his understanding. And I was the one who’d known better and hadn’t behaved well. And that, to me, is a level where you can’t go, or you really will lose the relationship. The relationship can’t be saved if you compromise your soul.
But I must admit, you can compromise a lot on just about everything else. You can compromise on your taste in furniture, and where you’ll live, and where you’ll go on vacation – but you can’t compromise your core values, and you can never be with someone who asks you to do that.
Now, I don’t mean that there isn’t a grace period where you can give people a chance to learn what your values are. But it all has be put on the table and looked at.
So when I talk about behaving appropriately, I think you need to consider that you’ll have to give way quite a lot in a relationship, and there’s no alternative.
There’s an image that I find useful when I think about marriage – it’s two fried eggs in a pan. When you put the eggs in the pan, you don’t want the yolks to break, but it’s okay if the whites blend.
Similarly, you can’t let your integrity be violated in a relationship, but there’s a large area where you can blend your edges with the other person’s.
I was very happily married for a long time. But in principle I’m not sure that marriage is a good thing for everybody. When you marry, there’s a mushing-together of your auras, and you accept a bit of the other person’s karma and magnetism into yourself, and you don’t have your own complete integrity anymore. And you’ve got to have enough inner strength to ride through it with your core intact. That’s why the scriptures don’t tell us that we absolutely have to have a relationship.
The magnetism in a relationship tends to flow from the man to the woman. It’s expressed in the way our bodies are made. It’s the way sex happens, and sex accomplishes a lot of the mushing-together of our auras and magnetism.
But there’s a line that you must draw, starting before there’s a sexual relationship and continuing after. You need to think how you’ll keep your integrity after there’s been such a major transfer of magnetism and an integration of your auras. And women are especially aware of the transfer.
Swami Kriyananda confirmed that a man’s energy comes into the woman. It’s self-evident physiologically. But what’s not so obvious is that a man’s aura overtakes a woman’s aura, and Swami said that it infiltrates her subconscious. When a woman has a sexual relationship, his energy becomes part of you.
It doesn’t happen the same way for men. That’s why men’s energy in sex is very different. They aren’t as completely taken over, so they can be more impersonal about it. It’s why when a woman gets mad at a man, the first thing she does is throw him out of her bed.
I know that some people draw strong connections between sex and spirituality. But I don’t. I’m just saying that psychologically and energetically, a huge amount of energy gets released in sexual union.
It partly depends on how yin the woman is. And some women are so yang in their nature that they have a more male energy toward sex. But for most women, a trace of the man remains with her. And if it’s an ongoing sexual relationship, she becomes somewhat defined by him.
It might not be true for every woman, but I think it’s true for most. And if you try to fight it too much, you risk creating some strange feelings and some strange disturbances in the magnetic exchange between you.
Once you’ve engaged sexually and blended your auras, you’re much more connected and engaged. And you can’t have it both ways. So you have to make sure it’s the right direction for you.
And this is the real basis for the wisdom of sexual restraint and sexual abstinence or celibacy: to wait until you’re sure of the energy. Because once the woman, especially, takes the man’s energy into her, she becomes in some way part of him. And it takes a while to extricate yourself from that.
That’s why as soon as she gets mad, she sends him out of her bed. And men don’t necessarily feel that way, because sex for the man is more impersonally defined; it’s less about absorbing the woman’s energy, and more a sort of way of breaking the barrier to getting closer to her as an image of the yin quality that he longs to experience and integrate in himself.
But for the woman, she carries him around in her. So you have to make sure it’s an energy that you want, and an energy you can live with, because you’ll have it with you all the time, and it’s what you’ll have to live with.
I’m perfectly enthusiastic about a lifelong single life. I think it isn’t a bad idea at all. Sometimes I’ve suggested it to people. It isn’t necessarily appropriate for everyone, but I’ve said, “just have a romance once in a while. Or if you like him a little bit, have a lifelong romance, but don’t twist your lives up too much.”
These are viable options that we can choose these days. But you need to know your capacity to handle the kind of relationship you think you want to be in. And you need to know who you’re getting involved with, and go slowly and carefully.
Here’s an example of the wisdom of moving cautiously. You need to consider that people have good years and bad years. You may catch them in a nice astrological cycle, and then wake up and realize it’s just a temporary respite, and they’ve got terrible issues that they’ve gone back into and are struggling with.
These cycles can last years, so you can’t always test this in the short run. But if you catch your partner in a good year, or a year that isn’t typical of their life pattern, you may find a new kind of energy suddenly entering the picture that you didn’t know was there.
The main thing is to know yourself, and the limits of your willingness to give and become part of the other person.