IMAGINATION IS KEY TO A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP

"For a relationship to stay alive," writes psychologist James Hillman, "love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."



BRINGING OUT THE SHADOW IN EACH OTHER

In psychotherapist John Welwood's book Love and Awakening, he talks about how intimate relationships inevitably bring out the shadow aspects of each partner, usually in vivid ways that don't emerge in relationships that have less powerful bonds.

Welwood sees intimate relationships as a kind of spiritual crucible. The very closeness that makes them beautiful also heats up and exposes our defended, disowned parts—the shadow—in a way that more casual connections rarely do.

+

In Welwood’s view, falling in love or deepening intimacy increases “presence” and tenderness; the “light of love” penetrates layers of the unconscious.

Parts of ourselves we split off in childhood, like neediness, rage, shame, dependency, vulnerability, grandiosity, stir because love threatens the structures that kept them buried. Less intimate relationships don’t get close enough to these fault lines, so our usual persona can stay intact and unchallenged.

+

Welwood emphasizes that partners function as mirrors: your lover’s behavior often constellates an old “setup” or inner pattern, such as “I am unlovable and the Other is powerful and remote.”

The partner doesn’t create this dynamic so much as evoke it, providing a screen onto which early attachment wounds, parental imprints, and internalized judgments are projected.

This is why disproportionate reactions—panic over a delayed text, searing jealousy, stonewalling over small criticisms—have such a vivid, life-or-death feel in intimate relationships.

+

Crucially, he does not treat these eruptions as proof that the relationship is wrong, but as evidence that the relationship has become a “path of soulwork.”

The conflict, defensiveness, and raw need that surface are seen as alchemical material. If met with awareness and “loving-kindness,” they can be metabolized into greater authenticity, compassion, and freedom. In his language, “the elixir is hidden in the poison”: the very reactions that feel most poisonous contain the energy and information needed for awakening.

+

Welwood sometimes describes an intimate partner as a “worthy opponent”: someone whose mere presence and truth-telling expose your ego’s maneuvers and defenses.

When your old strategies—control, withdrawal, people-pleasing, moral superiority—stop working with this person, you feel “up against the walls,” and that friction becomes a form of “sacred combat.” The point is not to defeat each other but to challenge each other’s false self so that more real, undefended being can emerge.

+

Welwood offers very practical directions for how to engage this process instead of bypassing it. Among them:

Naming the underlying setup (“I see you as . . . AND . . . I see myself as . . .”) so that projection becomes conscious.​

Truth-telling as self-revelation: speaking the vulnerable need or fear under the complaint or accusation.

Learning to give yourself some of what you urgently demand from the other, which reduces pressure and softens the reactivity loop.

In that sense, intimate relationship becomes a classroom. The closeness guarantees that shadow material will appear. The shared commitment to awareness allows both people to use it as fuel for awakening rather than evidence of failure.



IS IT HARD TO FIND A SOULMATE

"Why is it so hard to find a soulmate?" asks psychologist Carolyn Godschild Miller in her book Soulmates: Following Inner Guidance to the Relationship of Your Dreams.

Her answer: "Because most of us are actually searching for egomates instead. We place the most limited and unloving aspect of our minds in charge of our search for love, and then wonder why we aren't succeeding. To the degree that we identify with this false sense of self, and operate on the basis of its limited point of view, we aren't looking for someone to love so much as recruiting fellow actors to take on supporting roles in a favorite melodrama."



THE ASSUMPTION OF CLAIRVOYANCE

A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that they should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don't ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can undermine the most promising alliances.

To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.



EARTHBOUND LOVE POEM #2

Your voice is moonlight on the wetland mud. Your lips are blossoms of cool fire. Your hair is a chant offered to the goddess of arias. Your navel? The answers the stars give to the clouds.

Your nearness is the hush before rain, tense with the promise of green. The air trembles, remembering your breath. If I speak your name, the clouds part like silk torn by sunlight. Even the still stones along the path seem to turn their faces toward your warmth.

The tilt of your head is a question the high sky can’t refuse. Even my doubts kneel down like tall grasses. I am reckless with wonder. I am willing to be altered.

When you turn toward me, the world becomes a book of mirrors, each page reflecting what can’t be spoken. The arc of your shoulders carries the weight of ten thousand wishes made by strangers at wells. Your anger is summer lightning that never reaches ground, beautiful and brief as the violet hour.

I study the architecture of your patience. It’s a temple built from driftwood and spider silk, improbable and lasting. Your sorrows move like schools of silver fish through dark water, visible only when they turn. Your hope tastes of honey drawn from flowers that bloom only in dreams.

When you speak my name, it becomes a new constellation. Your presence is the moment between thunder and rain when the air grows dense with possibility. I dare to stand in the weather of you. I dare to learn the language your shadow writes across the wall at dusk.

Your nearness folds the worlds together. Time loses its steps around you; the hours turn to translucent birds circling an unseen altar. The hush between heartbeats becomes a doorway through which dawn spills again and again, unminded of the clock’s insistence.

I could believe you were dream dreaming itself — a shimmer between what’s born and what’s eternal. If I listen rightly, I become the echo that finds you wherever the infinite hides its face.

+

All the art on this page is by Shelby McQuilkin. See more of her work here.