Nowhere do we have more illusionary ideas of what love means than in the area of romance.

We’re trained by a world of cultural imagery to believe there is someone, one special someone, who will complete us and make us whole. 

Exclusive love is not the prize it purports to be, and in truth, romantic love works far, far better when it is grounded in a larger, more inclusive love.

Romance is one form that love takes—certainly a magnificent one—and yet it is content, not form, that determines love’s meaning. If we’re attached to that particular form of love, then we are on a slippery slope toward the fires of hell.

And what are those fires? 

They are the anxiety we feel when that person doesn’t call or acts in a way we interpret as unloving or doesn’t want us anymore. 

But what if the feelings we want the other person to have simply don’t express themselves the way we think they should?

Relationships aren’t black and white, and people aren’t good or bad. We’re complicated. We’re trying our best. The more we live, the more we realize that the failure of others to love us the way we wish they would is as unintentional as our own such failures. 

A Course in Miracles teaches the difference between special love and holy love. 

Special Love

Special love means we are attached to another person being a certain way. We think we know what we need from a person and put our focus on trying to make it happen. Not realizing we are looking to a human relationship to fill a space that only God can fill, we are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make the other person, or ourselves, fit into the picture our ego thinks is perfect. 

The problem with this is that control and manipulation, however subtle, are not love. Love is repelled by any effort to hold onto it too tightly.

Holy Relationship

God’s response to the ego’s special relationship is the creation of the holy relationship, in which we allow a relationship to be what it wants to be and reveal its meaning to us rather than trying to determine its meaning first. 

Relationships that Mend the Heart

The Holy Spirit has many ways of paving a path for us, saving us from the pain of our own delusions. Sometimes it’s a teacher or a book. And often it’s simply another human being.

I’m often grateful for how much help I receive from people around me who can see something I can’t see at a time when I most need to see it.

Someone will just happen to call, and I’ll just happen to tell them what’s going on, and they’ll just happen to share their thoughts in a way that brings clarity my mind was seeking or the peace my soul was longing for.

The closer we grow to God, the closer we grow to our natural talent at protecting our brothers. The more aligned we are with the love of God, the better we are at being true friends. We know how to be there, to say the right things, to give casual counsel to the people we love.

There are three people I often talk to on the telephone late at night. If someone were to ask me to write down on a piece of paper my most significant activities, I probably wouldn’t write, “Talking to Richard, Victoria, and Suzannah and telling them everything.” Yet it is one of my most important activities because it clears my head for everything else. In fact, I think such phone calls are more important than they appear.

Sociologists have now amended a traditional theory about how people respond to stress. As it turns out, the “fight or flight” syndrome that had been taken as gospel for the last few decades was derived from research based on the reactions of men only.

When women were added to the research, researchers found another kind of reaction: “tend or mend.” In other words, women tend to build relationships as our primary response to stress.

All of us have male and female aspects to our psyche; all of us fight or flee sometimes, and all of us tend or mend sometimes. But when we call each other to process our thoughts and feelings, it’s no accident that those calls often happen late at night, when a deeper quiet is available to the soul.

From the earliest days of recorded history, people told stories around nighttime campfires.

We share stories as a way of holding our psyches, indeed our cultures, together. It is difficult to feel the love of God when the love of others is unavailable. The times when we bring His comfort to each other is hardly a less important time of day.

From Focus on Guilt to Focus on Innocence

Imagine your life as a long-running movie. Now see it made by two different directors. The first movie, in the hand of one director, is a movie about fear, anger, scarcity, and anxiety. The other, in the hands of a different director, is a movie about love, peace, abundance, and happiness.

Because my own life has gone back and forth so much between depressing and uplifting drama, I have a good sense of the difference between the two—and how each is created. One thing I’m clear about regarding both is that when I’ve looked up close, I’ve seen these words: “Produced by Marianne Williamson; Directed by Marianne Williamson; Starring Marianne Williamson.”

Which director you take your cues from depends on one thing: the thoughts you hold in your mind. To take directions from your ego, all you have to do is focus on guilt. The ego’s cornerstone thought is that the child of God is guilty. To take your direction from the Holy Spirit, focus instead on innocence. Love’s cornerstone thought is that the child of God is innocent. Whichever focus we choose—on someone’s innocence or on their guilt—determines the drama that unfolds in our lives and the part that we play in it.

The ego mind is so invested in the human drama—“He did this, she said that”—that it often takes a higher power to counterbalance the ego’s insistence. It helps to remember that the ego’s true target is you: your ego wants you to see guilt in others mainly so you might stay convinced of all the guilt in yourself.

The perception of guilt in anyone is our surefire ticket to hell. Every time we blame another, we are tightening the chains that keep our own self-hatred in place.

Forgiveness can be very hard when someone has acted horribly. But the truth, whether or not we care to admit it, is that someone did what we too might have done if we had been as freaked out by something as they were; if we had been as scared of something as they were; if we had been as limited in our understanding as they were. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable or that we shouldn’t have boundaries and standards.

It doesn’t even mean we have to stay in contact with that person. But it does mean we can come to understand that humanity is not perfect.

Just knowing that—that we all do the best we know how with the skills we have at the time—is a realization that opens the heart to more enlightened understanding. And that’s what we’re on the earth for, because in the presence of people with enlightened understanding, darkness ultimately turns into light.

Forgiveness isn’t usually an event; it’s a process. An abstract principle has to penetrate various levels of thought and feeling before arriving at the heart, and that’s okay. Our hurt can be real, and our feelings matter. The only thing God is asking of us is that we be willing to see the innocence in another person. As long as we are willing to see a situation in another light, the Holy Spirit has room to maneuver.

With every human encounter, we either affirm for people their innocence or fortify their guilt. And whichever it is is how we ourselves will feel. We cannot escape our oneness, even if we do not acknowledge it.

Because all minds are joined, whatever I choose to think about you I am in essence thinking about myself. To the extent to which I perceive your guilt, I am bound to perceive my own. It doesn’t feel that way at first, of course, because the ego would have us believe that as soon as we place the blame on someone else we’ll feel better.

But that’s just a temporary delusion— something the ego specializes in. Once we get over the temporary high of having cast the blame away from us, it will come back to us a hundredfold. An attack thought is like a sword we think we’re dropping on someone else’s head, when in fact it’s dropping on our own.

Think of the things in your life you’ve gotten away with: things you’re ashamed to think about, that you regret, or that you would do over again if you could. And now think how hard you can be on others whose mistakes are similar and sometimes even smaller than your own.

Think about how guilt is binding you to the past. Wouldn’t we all want the freedom to begin again that forgiveness alone can bring?

Within the world, there are often very serious things we have to forgive. Forgiveness begins, as do all issues of enlightenment, as merely an intellectual concept that has yet to make its “journey without distance” from the head to the heart.

Our experience of a person might be that they mistreated us, while our faith is that they remain an innocent child of God.

A woman might have been divorced by her husband yet left with enough money to live in a beautiful home, travel the world, and do whatever else she wants for as long as she lives. But until she finds it in her heart to forgive him and bless his path although it swerved away from her, she will live in hell although she lives in a castle. None of that is easy, ever. But unforgiveness is a poison to the soul.

We choose to remember the love we experienced, and to let go the rest as the illusion it really was. This doesn’t make us more vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation; in fact, it makes us less so. For the mind that forgives is a mind that is closer to its true nature.

The fact that I forgive you doesn’t mean you “won.” It doesn’t mean you “got away with something.” It simply means I’m free to go back to the light, reclaim my inner peace, and stay there.

Surrender to Our Brighter Nature

Often we fail to develop an aspect of ourselves simply because no one modeled it for us. If a parent demonstrated “success” or “elegance,” then we might have moved toward actualizing those things. But if no such model was present, either in the family or in the culture, then we simply didn’t build the psychological track for that train. God, however, has built His own.

The psyche is like a giant computer with an infinite number of files. Imagine a folder called “God’s Will,” and inside that folder there are various files: Me the strong, Me the self-confident, Me the compassionate, Me the forgiving, etc. Everything that is God’s Love is present as a file we are free to download. And none of God’s files can be deleted.

Yet most of us have created some files that should be deleted. Me the arrogant, Me the sarcastic, Me the judgmental, and Me the cynical are all examples. They all belong in a folder called “Ego”; imagine Jesus sitting at your computer, highlighting that folder and hitting the “delete” key.

Me the angry or Me the arrogant is nothing that has grown to seem like something. It is part of the illusion of the world. It would be easy, however, to convince both ourselves and others that that is who we are, if we behave that way. And even if we don’t act that way, as long as the negative file exists it acts like a seeping mental poison and has the capacity to hold us back.

Another set of imagery that reveals the truth of our eternal nature lies in fairy tales. The wicked stepmother is our Ego, and she wants to kill Snow White, who is the innocent spirit of love within us. She isn’t able to, however, because what God created cannot be destroyed. What she can do is put Snow White into a deep sleep. It is only the kiss of the Prince—unconditional love—that awakens her. If the prince had not kissed Snow White—if instead he had sniped at her, “What the hell are you doing, still sleeping!?!—then she would not have awoken. It is not those who judge and condemn us, but rather those who bless and forgive us, who awaken us from our lower nature and return us to our better selves.

Someone once told me when my daughter was very little that it would always be best, when possible, to communicate with “Do this” rather “Don’t do that.” I think that was some of the best parenting advice I ever received; you can see the damage done to people who are always being responded to in the negative.

In their book called Magical Parent/Magical Child, Michael Mendozza and Joseph Chilton Pierce explain that the nature of the emotional bond between parent and child is more important than the specific information we impart to them. The tenor of our communication is as important as what we say.

I know that for me, someone constantly telling me I’m not okay is hardly what helps me improve. There is a magical power in relating to the good in people. I read in an interview where the actress Uma Thurman, daughter of renowned Buddhist philosopher Robert Thurman, said, “I guess I’ve surrendered to my brighter nature.” She was taught well, I assume, that there is such a nature. The role of the parent is to see it in the child and reflect it back to her. And that nature exists in all of us.

That is a very different psychological approach to change than is normally associated with the Western mind. Usually, we think of our negative qualities as something we have to get rid of” And from that comes all manner of dysfunctional parenting systems, educations systems, justice systems, etc. Imagine what the world would be if we looked at each other and thought, “I know there’s something wonderful in there!”

In fact, our need is to claim and cleave to our spiritual potential, no matter whether it has yet been activated within our personality. That ultimate potential is our Buddha nature and the Christ. To accept Christ is to accept that God’s love is in us and in everyone. An eternal light is within us because God put it there, and invoking what we like is far more powerful than trying to destroy what we don’t like. In the presence of our light, our darkness disappears.

Actors embody a character by finding its life force within their own. It is not so much another person, as it is another dimension of their own selfhood that the great actor inhabits. And most of us—whether we are actors or not—have dimensions of selfhood unexplored for no other reason than that we simply haven’t chosen to explore them. All of us can sing, though only a few of us are actually singers. All of us can paint, though only a few of us are actually painters. And all of us are actors, although usually we pretend we aren’t.

In AA, it’s said that it’s easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting. Just as children learn from playing, so do adults when we allow ourselves to. We vastly underestimate the ability of our subconscious mind to support us in creating change.

“Fake it till you make it” is often good advice.

When little girls play house or little boys play Spiderman, they are following a subconscious strategy of personality development, using their imaginations to prepare for new realms of being. And we need never stop doing this, unless we choose to.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the mood to be gracious to the bus driver today; do it anyway and watch how it begins to affect your mood. Just push the button of the self you wish to be, and the file appears. It was already there, after all, just waiting to be downloaded. We become gracious when we decide to be gracious. We have the power to generate as well as react to feelings; to hone our personalities as we travel through life.