Enchanted Love

by Marianne Williamson

  Any time there is a chance for deep love, there is standing in front of that love a wall of fire. That fire might take the form of something burning within you—an inner condition—or it might take the form of an outer circumstance. But there is never love without fire. To the mystic, the presence of that fire does not say, “Go away.” To the mystic, the presence of that fire says, “Here, if you are strong enough to take it, is love.”

  Chaka Khan sang a song years ago, in which she proclaimed that she was willing to “go through the fire” for her man. The truth is, it is that fire which molds us. The fire is not the danger of the relationship, but its greatest gift. It does not burn up the essential self, but rather it burns up everything else. When a wall of fire stands in front of you, but one you truly love is on the other side of it, then reaching through the fire for your beloved’s hand will make you a magical being who can walk through fire without getting burned. At that point, we take on another frequency of consciousness. When we can do that, we can do most anything.

  The world gives prizes for many things. There’s a prize for the best everything that anyone can imagine. But the only prize for the artist at love is the thrill of knowing you’ve made it through that fire to the other side. There is no worldly prize that can match the thrill of this accomplishment, and the smile it brings to two people’s faces.

  The thrill of knowing that that fire is behind you, that the metal in your heart is now turned to gold, makes of a relationship a sacred chalice. Humanity’s romantic energies are ready for that chalice; we have the water, we just haven’t had the cup. A civilization that doesn’t acknowledge the sacred in any meaningful, practical way, but rather leaves it in a completely dry and sexless context, has no guidebook for sacred romance. It doesn’t see the divine in most anything truly human, so how could it see the divine in the most human thing in the world?

  We will bathe in magic water and we will allow the sun to dry our skin. We will close our eyes and take in new light. We will listen to the whispering counsel of angels.

  We will look at each other with the eyes of the new. We will honor each other with the crown of the sky. We will touch each other with the touch of the earth. And love will be our medicine. God will smile, and we will smile, and the world itself will become more glad.

  Come with me. I want to show you love.

  The biggest block to love is the human personality. I drove up to my daughter’s school one day, and I saw a little girl, around age five, talking to a little boy. Talking isn’t the right word, really. It was a perfect flow of energy between these two little people. She was open, smiling, flirting before she could even know what the word means. And he was a little cocky, just eating it up. Another twenty years, and—barring some dramatic shift—the world will surely have done its thing to these two children. The same conversation will be laden with emotional issues.

  I stared longingly for a moment. That little girl was so unguarded and yet so safe. She had nothing to fear here because fear had not occurred to her yet, or to him. She was completely vulnerable, completely undefended, completely adoring, and completely herself. I felt jealous. Each of us carries a little girl or little boy like that inside ourselves, like a remembrance of our lost innocence. We want to be that free, but who has the guts anymore? We want to be that adoring, but who has the skill? We want to be that innocent, but we can’t remember how.

  I was reminded of a painting I saw once at a museum in New York City. A young man and woman are running naked through the woods in some mythical setting. They both have perfect, sensual bodies, yet there is no sense of sexual prowess or shame. They have the smiles of angels. I stood for a long time before that painting, wondering, “Does that really exist? Did it ever? Is it just an ideal? Can we love as adults, yet reclaim the trust of a child? Can we be this, and also that? Can we live in this world, and in Eden simultaneously?”

  Perhaps we can, if we try. If we let fall into the sea what is ready to fall, then ground that is new will arise to the surface. Paradise exists. It is merely submerged.

  Dear God,

  I used to pray to You because I was lonely,

  but then You came to me and I was lonely no more.

  Then I prayed to You to make me better,

  and You came to me and healed my heart.

  Now I ask You, dear God,

  for a glorious mission.

  May I contribute to the life of another

  in the deepest way,

  the most holy way,

  the most loving way,

  that together we might serve You more.

  May I help a beloved

  grow closer to You,

  may a beloved help me

  grow closer to You.

  May I delight in my partner,

  and my partner delight in me,

  that Your light which unites us

  might light up the world.

  Thank you, God.

  Amen

  Now that you have said that prayer, you might wish to prepare your inner room. Write down on a piece of paper the characteristics of your personality that you most want transformed by the Holy Spirit. Own these things, take responsibility for your defects, and then surrender them to God. Ultimately, all work is inner work.

  Now you might wish to look around your house. Is it a place where your love would find comfort? Are the items here for his or her delight? Is there an area of your existence that would keep love away? Deal with these things now, for his or her footsteps are near.

  Be patient and be calm. For the hour is nigh, for all of us.

  And I am all fitted now, in a gown of light. My sisters and I have dancing shoes, and we dance most every night. Musicians play, and we sing our songs, and breathe life into the words. Our little sisters come and join us as we prepare the otherworld.

  Know you that we wait for you? We do. We do.

  And are you prepared to dance?

  AND THEN, he comes. People had said you might meet him in this way or that, but when the day arrived, he just appeared. Funny. He’s not who you would have thought capable of snatching your heart from your chest.

  Love is simpler than it appears, in this complicated world of ours. The secret of love is to tell the beloved how wonderful he or she is, constantly and sincerely, at least a million times every day. Give and then give some more and then give a little more than that. To the extent that love has dried up in my life, it was always because I became miserly with my expression of affection. To the extent that love has blossomed in my life, it was always because I expanded my willingness to express the love that often cowers like a child in a corner of my heart. I have learned that everyone has that corner, and the childlike place where we cower within it. When we honestly speak from that place in ourselves, we encounter that place in someone else, and then two frightened children become two courageous adults, with a very adult capacity to love and to be loved.

  Dear God,

  I don’t wish to be a child anymore.

  I don’t wish to be held back anymore.

  I don’t wish to waste my life.

  Deliver me to new realms,

  repair me where I am broken,

  and ready my heart for everything.

  Thank you, God.

  Amen

  6

  Grown-ups in Love

  And when I reached for you, you said no, you can do better. I said I cannot, I cannot, I am tired and I cannot try anymore.

  After all this time, you told me, you can come to me the way I want to come to you.

  And so I did. And I will do it again, and again and again, for as long as we both shall live. . . .

  AUTHOR AND PSYCHOTHERAPIST Pat Allen has written that a man’s greatest psychic need is to have his thoughts respected, and that a woman’s greatest psychic need is to have her feelings cherished. I have heard many opinions expressed about that thought, but for me it has been a ray of light. Knowing it has transformed my relationships.

  I grew up
in a cultural environment where everyone had an Aunt Bessie, or her equivalent. She had a heart of gold, but boy, was she tough. She would say and do things that people who didn’t know her—or didn’t come from our culture—might not have known what to do with, but people in our family would just laugh affectionately and say, “That Bessie! What a character!” She was the strongest as well as the most loving member of the family. In fact, she held the whole thing together.

  She grew up in poverty, but her sons grew up to be men who brought home half a million dollars each year. This left her unfazed. “So I should show respect? Don’t talk to me from respect! Oh my God, why didn’t you eat?!? You don’t like my cooking? Max, you look sick. Are you sick?! Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, but Aunt Bessie was basically my role model for a powerful woman. That’s how the women who ran things around me behaved! What did I know from anything else? Respect for a man’s thoughts and achievements? What, are you kidding? Do you know how hard I worked today? And Bessie wasn’t exactly emotionally vulnerable. Her family had fled pogroms, for God’s sake. Softness wasn’t one of her tissues.

  So I, like so many women of my generation, between the trials of our grandmothers and trials of our own, grew up with scales on our skin and claws growing out of our fingers. Every woman I know has a version of the Aunt Bessie story. And we didn’t know we were damaged; we thought we were strong.

  According to Pat Allen, our parents’ generation didn’t exactly have things figured out right, either. Fathers patted their daughters on the back at puberty, saying, “There you go! You can do things as well as a boy can!” leading us to believe that achieving something would earn us love from the men in our lives. And boy, were we wrong.

  Mothers of that generation, on the other hand, made the opposite mistake, coddling their adolescent sons’ feelings at exactly the time when those young men should have been heading for the proverbial woods, passing ritualistically from boyhood to manhood, learning to trust their own choices. What a mess we became, with women wearing all the emotional armor and men dropping all their emotional baggage at the feet of women who are not their mothers. “My Daddy said he’d love me if I made an A+—why don’t you?” meets, “My mother indulged me when I acted like a child—why don’t you?”

  Because the beloved is not your father; he is the man who has arrived at your side.

  Because the beloved is not your mother; she is the woman who has arrived at your side.

  The first thing real love will do is make you grow up. And then it will show you how to enjoy the experience.

  OFTEN TWO ADULTS come together and simply reenact their childhood dramas ad infinitum. One rather common passion play takes place when a man who never really grew up falls in love with a woman who thinks that maybe she can make him grow up.

  A woman who tries to do a man’s emotional work for him has chosen to play the role of his mother. It can be very tempting for a woman to do a man’s psychic work in a relationship, until she recognizes that (1) she can’t; and (2), even if she could, if she were an adult herself, she wouldn’t want to. Mothering a man by definition cancels out his manhood and fortifies his dysfunction. A grown man’s inability to take responsibility for his own thoughts, feelings, and actions is neurotic to begin with, and a woman trying to compensate for his lack by putting more of herself forward is matching his neurosis with her own.

  If his mother didn’t release him when she should have, the answer is not for you to carry him. The answer is for someone to release him now. Until a man makes an essential break with his boyhood, he will not have the muscles for real manhood, or for real love. He will not know how to reach far enough for love, and women around him will always be tempted to respond by reaching too far. This spells emotional disaster for both.

  A woman cannot win by mothering a man because a man does not want to sleep with his mother. A woman who emotionally does too much for a man will always end up losing him.

  “But if I don’t do it for him—if I don’t call him when he stops calling, if I don’t make him discuss his feelings and show him what he’s doing, if I don’t explain to him what he’s doing wrong in the relationship when he obviously doesn’t have a clue—then the relationship will end! It won’t continue!” some women then say.

  And that, perhaps sadly, is precisely the point. If a man you want isn’t coming toward you, it might be time to grieve, but it isn’t time to reach for his lapels. He’s not coming toward you for one reason, and that is this: he doesn’t want to. If you seduce, manipulate, strategize, or otherwise try to make something happen that he would not have initiated on his own, then one of two things will happen: One, you’ll fail, which will ultimately make you feel humiliated, rejected, and embarrassed. This will also make you increasingly wary of being bold in situations where it is appropriate to be bold, meaning there will be a mess to clean up from this relationship in ones not even here yet. Or, two, you’ll succeed, but it is bound to be a pyrrhic victory. Someday he will figure out what you’ve done, and it will destroy a fundamental trust between you. If he consciously figures it out, then he will be angry and he will leave. If he merely registers what occurred on an unconscious level, then he will still be angry, although he will not know why—and emotionally he will leave.

  For in that situation, he will not have come to you freely, as a man, but will simply have acquiesced to your willfulness. He will not have genuinely surrendered his heart. You did not win his love, then; you merely temporarily outsmarted him. When he realizes this, he will put his heart back in his pocket, and it is unlikely that it will ever be entrusted to your hands again.

  Why would a woman try to manipulate a man into loving her? At bottom, because she is desperate. She wants a grand, passionate love in her life, which everyone does. Such a possibility is impressed upon our souls, and each of us has wandered the earth looking for such love since the day we were born. There’s nothing wrong with the desire itself. What is wrong is trying to cut corners to get it. Love is granted freely by the universe, but right relationship is earned. Love itself is free-floating energy, but relationship is its worldly container. That container must be built of integrity, righteousness, and compassion or the energy becomes destructive. Violation of self or others is registered by the universe, duly recorded, and sent right back to us with karmic precision.

  The psychological imperative for a man, when he is interested in a woman, is the opposite of a woman’s when she is interested in a man. Unless she’s told you not to, it’s a good idea to help her notice the way you hung the moon and the graceful way you put the stars in the sky. Most women carry a chorus from My Fair Lady around in our heads: “If you’re in love, show me.”

  A woman in love, however, needs to avoid the temptation to act like a man. It doesn’t work to try to convince a man that you are the woman of his dreams. Flirt, yes; connive, no. When a woman connives, she has not yet learned that if a train doesn’t stop at her station, it’s simply because it’s not her train. She wants to flag down the conductor and convince him to stop here, even if his own map says that he should just keep going. Sadly, she doesn’t realize that there’s another train trying to come toward her, unable to get into her station because a train that doesn’t even belong there is being delayed there by her intensity.

  Sometimes a man isn’t coming toward you not because he doesn’t love you, but because he does not know how. Or he is too afraid. That can be very true and very sad; but if you are to be his woman, you cannot be his tutor. The bottom line in love is not whether someone loves you, but whether someone chooses you. The second biggest mistake—after acting like a man’s mother—is acting like his teacher. Put bluntly, he doesn’t get it up for her, either. When a sacred, honoring, and respectful context for love has been established, then indeed we can take on the various roles that make up the many facets of love. Parent and teacher and lover and friend can all be part of love’s emotional mosaic.
But if all those roles show up too early, they can grow fuzzy and muddy and diminish love’s strength. The dominant psychic grooves between two people are set at the beginning of a relationship, and the tracks of both parent and teacher, while perhaps attracting someone in the early phases of a relationship, are bound to repel that person later on.

  Whom we teach, or mother, or help too much, we have a semblance of control over. That’s one of the reasons those roles are such tempting parts to play for those of us who are ourselves afraid of real intimacy. But if you give in to that temptation, the joke will one day be on you, as surely as Eliza broke free of Professor Higgins. It is in the natural order of things for everyone to finally grow up and achieve his or her own strength.

  Our souls are in relationships to grow, not to avoid growth. Something in each of us knows this and wants that growth more than anything else. That is why, ultimately, we are most attracted to people who will not indulge our games.

  The masculine initiates and the feminine receives. Both men and women carry masculine and feminine energy, but in a relationship, one partner primarily plays one part or another. Unconsciously, feminine and masculine attract, while two feminines—or two masculines—cancel each other out. This is as true in gay as in heterosexual relationships.