I think that a love good for the soul should be harboured in two dimensions at once: it should float in a space larger-than-life, while also being moored in the minutia of everyday reality. It is possible to have a down-to-earth, entirely real love with another person, and together, to make of it something spiritual, destined, and beautiful. You can embrace a story of being fated lovers while also making the choice, over and over again, to put in the work of maintaining a realistic, enduring relationship. Making a partnership all one or the other can cause it to suffer, in my experience.
If you don’t together believe that what you have is a special or particular connection, why put in effort to protect and nurture one another and the connection you share, especially when you go through patches of boredom or difficulty?
I’ve only been in monogamous relationships, so I can’t speak for the dynamics of polyamorous ones, though I imagine the above could apply just as well to those.
Holding both the reality and the spiritual idea of the relationship in balance is difficult, though, when one or both have suffered interpersonal trauma. You start off not connecting as yourselves, but rather connecting through one or more layers of survival behaviours and traits–it’s not always necessary or feasible to heal or dispense with them all, but if and when you do, sometimes the connection fades.
It depends on whether or not you choose to connect from a deep, vital part of yourselves from the outset, through some avenue that makes up the core of who you are: something steadfast, that you couldn’t change even if you tried. That you wouldn’t want to change.
I’m certain that many would disagree with me, but I think holding a certain element of magical realism together is essential for a love-filled, longstanding relationship. Human beings have imagination for a reason. My body craves down-to-earth touch and shared glances filled with meaning just as much as my imagination craves the extraordinary, the wondrous, the irreplaceable.
I believe in cause and effect so minute, so intricate, so beautifully complex that it seems like fate–but outside of imaginative art pieces, I don’t believe in destiny as a concept. I hold true to the notion of having free will. Intricate chains of (outside) cause and effect do affect free will, of course. Free will means being able to make a choice between one or more options, not that everything is possible. Some paths are not open to you due to exertions of the collective free will of the universe(s). Moreover, we’re all humans with corporeal bodies, and thus have limitations. We manage to invent ways to get around those limits all the time, though–a testament to how incredible the human imagination and the ingenuity that results from it is.
You wouldn’t be wrong to think of what I called the “universe’s collective free will” as being the will or plan of God(dess), or as the influence from a pantheon of deities. Each of us, at birth, are given a set of life circumstances to begin with that we truly have no control over. As we grow and age, we are able to make choices and find ways around whatever limits we were born into or come into as we live, but there are always things that we cannot in the moment and may never be able to control. There is still a lot of magic and mystery left on Earth (not to mention the universe as a whole) that science has not yet managed to explain, let alone control.
I became a cynic out of necessity, but that is not who I was by nature.