Cosmic Winds

In the special relationship where both partners see the special self in each other, the ego sees 'a union made in heaven'. 

-- A Course in Miracles 

 

Several months ago, a dear friend urged me to sign up for an online dating site. She had recently attended a later-in-life wedding where the couple had met on that website. She even offered to pay the subscription, she was that convinced it was just what I needed!

Since then,  I have read more than 2,500 profiles submitted by men living within a radius of at most 250 miles from my current location.  This is further constrained to men who report their age as between 66 and 73.  I've looked at four different sites.

Reporting back to my friend, I'm sure I've entertained her with my reports.  Early reactions included that many of the photos I saw included baseball caps, indoors, sometimes with t-shirts, not to mention the men who wore sleeveless t-shirts.   These seemed somehow at odds with their verbal protestations of wanting to find that special woman who would somehow make their lives so much more worth living.  That seemed to be at least potentially about laundry skills.

Then there was the issue of distance.  Clearly, since I have spent about 15 years of my life living 12 of the 24 time zones away from where I was born, my view of distance is altered.  But even when the distance seemed "doable" to me, I finally realized it wasn't about distance -- it was about convenience.  Finally, all of the men with whom I interacted personally, no matter what they said in a profile, preferred a woman who was easily and quickly accessible.  Nearby.  On short notice.

It became a special kind of challenge that I assigned to myself.  Eventually I dropped the hope that I would find someone who would be attracted to my unconventional life history, and had lived in a different culture outside the coziness of being "American."  Surely, I still told myself , I could find, even in the USA, at least one potential male partner who was not totally self-absorbed.

Of course, the results will be obvious to most people reading this post.  The problem lay, not in the "stars" of match criteria, but in my own foundational assumptions and expectations of relationships.

Specialness is what ACIM calls it.  It's a trick of the ego-world.  A few other quotes from the UK website "Centre for Inner Peace" will illustrate this:

A special relationship is a device for limiting your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to theirs.

Every special relationship you have made has, as its fundamental purpose, the aim of
occupying your mind so completely that you will not hear the call of truth.

And my favorite:

The special relationship is an attempt to re-enact the past and change it.

So many times the profiles were by men who had experienced a lovely relationship and lost it, through death.  Loneliness is a hard condition to admit to others, when everything about American life is that we are the best, the brightest, the smartest, the most caring.  The widowers were more likely to admit it, and to say in other words that they were hoping to re-enact the past.  The "change it" part sometimes manifested as looking for a significantly younger woman, so as to not have to go through the trauma of that kind of loss again.

If you happen to be a fellow student of "The Course" you will have certainly spotted the most important flaw in my self-imposed Persephonean task:  that of projection.  There is absolutely no way that one can achieve inner peace through finding another ego/self that somehow "fits" what I seek.  Because my seeking can only be a projection of my own lack, and will only find lack. 

The way the Course puts it:

To believe that special relationship, with special love, can offer salvation is the belief that separation is salvation.

When I seek to overcome separation, all I prove is separation.  To find that "special someone" is to declare all others as not-special, and thus increase separation.

The closer you look at the special relationship, the more apparent it becomes that it must foster guilt and therefore must imprison.

The gentle message of the Course articulates that even the special relationship can, through right-mindedness, be transformed.  And become a blessing.  This happens through what it calls the "Holy instant."  As another of my favorite writers about the life of spirit, Paul Tillich, once said: "It happens, or it does not happen."  Loneliness is transformed into solitude when the ego is seen for what it is.

And then, what the world and the ego present to us as pain, is transformed into inner peace. As the Course says:

I have said repeatedly that the Holy Spirit would not deprive you of your special relationships, but would transform them.

The special relationship will remain, not as a source of pain and guilt, but as a source of joy and freedom.