“Our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within ourselves that we have built against its coming. To think that there is a special person out there who will save us is a barrier to pure love. It is one of the most fearsome weapons in the ego’s arsenal. In this way, it tries to keep us away from love, though it doesn’t want us to realize it. We desperately seek love, but that very desperation causes us to destroy it when we find it. The thought that someone special will save us tempts us to dump an enormous emotional burden onto the person who seems fit for the role.
Searching for ‘Mr. Right’ leads us to despair because there is no Mr. Right. And there is no Mr. Right because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is the person in front of us, and the best lessons are to be learned from that person.
If your deepest desire is to have an intimate partner, the Holy Spirit might send you someone who is not your optimal intimate partner, but something far better: someone with whom you are given the opportunity to work on the aspects of yourself that need to be healed before you are ready for the deepest intimacy. Faith in ‘special love’ leads us to undervalue everything that doesn’t seem like the right material for an ‘optimal relationship.’ In this way, I have passed by many a diamond, missing out on situations that would have accelerated my growth. Sometimes we fail to work on ourselves in our current relationships, thinking that ‘real life’ only begins when he (or she) appears. This is again an ego tactic—it wants to make sure we will seek without finding.
The problem with relationships that aren’t taken seriously because the person doesn’t look like ‘Mr. Right’ is this: one day Mr. Right arrives—sometimes disguised as Mr. Wrong—but we ruin everything because we have no experience. He is here, but we are not ready. We haven’t worked on ourselves. We were waiting for Mr. Right.”
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
If this is the answer you receive today from ‘The Lessons of Love,’ the message is very clear. It is an invitation to reflect on how much of your current relational state (regardless of whether you have an intimate partner right now or not) contains the belief that your happiness in love depends on meeting the ‘right’ person for you. And if you find that such a belief truly exists, replace it with another—one that is closer to reality: namely, that in order to meet ‘Mr. Right’ in our lives, we must develop the right partnership with ourselves.
We can do something about this right now by seeing what lessons are still to be learned in our current relationship and actually learning them. And if we don’t have one, we can see how to develop a sense of inner wholeness that is always with us—so that we are not at the mercy of another to feel good only when they are by our side.
