11/07/2025
Successful and shared relationships start from within:
“You know, many people have this very strange idea that just because you're becoming more spiritual that you won't have any challenges anymore. Just the opposite is the case. You'll have more challenges because you're more capable of handling them.
Now, here's the funny part. One of the biggest surprises of awakening is not that you float around in perfect bliss, but that it becomes almost impossible to fall in love again. At least in the way you used to. The swooning raptures, the feverish anticipation, the little dramas and sentimental scribblings. All of that becomes strangely unconvincing. It isn't that you've lost the capacity to love. Far from it. In fact, love becomes richer, deeper, quieter. But the old game of projection and pursuit just doesn't work anymore. You can't unsee what you've seen. You know now that most of what passes for romance is simply two hungry selves making arrangements with one another. And once you've spotted the trick, it's very hard to be enchanted by it again.
So there you are, alive, awake, full of wonder, and at the same time, utterly incapable of falling in love in the way the world has so long instructed you ought to. What we ordinarily call falling in love is, in truth, a curious kind of hypnosis. You meet someone and suddenly the mind begins to weave like a spider spinning threads of memory, desire, and projection until you are no longer relating to the person at all, but to a tapestry of your own imagination. And then quite intoxicated by your own creation, you say, "I am in love."
But notice the oddity. Much of this so-called love thrives not on presence but on absence. It burns brightest when the beloved is away, when there is uncertainty, when one is left in that delicious torment of longing. It is a love that feeds on hunger rather than on wholeness. A sweet madness. You see, the ego is very clever at disguising its loneliness. It calls it passion. It dresses it in fine words and trembling glances. Yet at bottom it is saying I am incomplete and I want you to make me whole.
That is not love but need. And so long as love is mistaken for need, it will forever waver like a flame that only survives so long as the fuel of insecurity is supplied. Most of what we've been taught to admire as romance is precisely this, a subtle bargain, a secret exchange. I will soothe your emptiness if you will soothe mine. Which is why after the first intoxication fades, so many find themselves disillusioned, asking whether they ever loved at all or merely struck a deal without signing the contract.
Now awakening is nothing mysterious. It is simply the moment when the veil slips and you see the machinery of the whole performance, the self, the ego, desire, and the endless games they play. You notice how what you once called love was often entangled with fear of being alone, with longing, with projection. And when that recognition dawns, you cannot fall into it quite as blindly as before. The spell is broken not because you reject love, but because you now see its counterfeit forms for what they are. For the awakened eye, the illusions that once passed for love no longer hold the same power. Where before you might have sworn you had found your missing half, you now see more plainly. A human being with their own joys and their own shadows. The enchantment of imagining them as your savior, your completion, begins to dissolve. And with that vision, the old spell of romance no longer sweeps you off your feet in quite the same way. What once felt like fire now feels like smoke. Cravings that once seemed irresistible now appear flimsy, like paper boats on a vast sea. The thrill of pursuit, the drama of waiting, the agony of uncertainty. All these look faintly absurd beside the stillness you have tasted within yourself. It is not that you despise them. It is that you no longer mistake them for love.
You see, once it dawns on you that the whole business is a kind of play, you find it very difficult to go on pretending it's deadly serious. Of course, you can still enjoy the performance, the laughter, the tears, the embraces, but you know it now as theater, not ultimate truth. Thus, what the world calls romance begins to lose its glamour. The awakened one does not stop loving, but the illusions collapse. The game, once taken with deadly seriousness, is now revealed as precisely that a game. And with that recognition, you step out of the trance and into something infinitely more spacious.
Once you have tasted awakening, the whole texture of love changes. You no longer carry that knowing hunger to be completed by another because you know now that no one can fulfill you but yourself. And you are already whole, formed by the same life that gave you birth. And it is precisely this wholeness that makes the old way of falling in love so difficult. For what fueled it before was not fullness but emptiness. It was the ache of loneliness, the fear of being unseen that gave such fire to romance.
But when you awaken, the fire no longer burns in the same way. You are no longer chasing someone to mend the hole in your heart, for the whole is gone. And so the old drama which once felt so intoxicating now feels strangely hollow. The storm that once seemed exciting now looks like nonsense when you have discovered the calm of the sea. You notice too how much of ordinary romance depends on blindness. The little lies we tell ourselves, the illusions we willingly embrace. But awakening strips those blindfolds away. You see too clearly the bargains hidden beneath the vows, the ego's secret tricks, the fears masquerading as devotion. And once you see, you cannot unsee.
Love that is rooted in the fear of being alone simply has no soil left to grow in you. And then there is another truth harder still. Awakening raises the standard of your heart. You no longer measure love by charm or beauty or clever compatibility. Without effort, you find yourself drawn towards something deeper, a kind of connection, a depth, an understanding that goes far beyond appearances and touches the very core of your being. And you see the crowd rather thins out. Where once the world was full of possibilities, suddenly there are only a very few. For it is rare to meet someone who has walked through their own shadows and come out awake on the other side. Most are still playing the old game.
This is why it feels impossible. Not because you cannot love, but because you cannot pretend anymore. You cannot go back to confusing need with love, drama with passion, attachment with devotion. You have outgrown it. The way one outgrows childhood games. And though it may ache at times, though you may long for the simplicity of the old intoxication, you would not trade back, for you know too much now.
Now, of course, this all sounds very fine in theory. You're whole. You're free. You no longer mistake hunger for love. And yet there is another face to this story. For when the familiar intoxications no longer move you, you do not instantly step into bliss. And that gap can be painful. There is a deep sense of standing apart as though you no longer belong to the world you once moved in so easily.
It is not loneliness in the usual sense. You may have friends, companions, even admirers, but there is a sharper kind of solitude. The recognition that very few people are able to meet you at the depth you now inhabit. And when you do try to step back into the old pattern, to pretend you can play along, it rings hollow. You cannot unknow what you know.
And there is fear, fear that perhaps the world will never quite match this new appetite for truth, that the ones who remain will be few, that you will go on carrying your fullness into rooms where no one else has learned to hold such space. Loneliness here is not the petty absence of company, but the profound solitude of being understood by very few.
This is why it feels impossible. Not because love has vanished, but because your eyes are too clear. You cannot fall in love the way you used to. And sometimes that clarity feels more like exile than enlightenment.
So the awakened carry a quiet wish in their heart. They would rather walk alone in truth than be bound in an illusion. They will not bargain away their peace for comfort, nor step back into the theater of half loves and hungry games, for they have seen the trick of it, the blaze that dazzles for a moment, only to collapse into smoke and cinders.
The wish of the awakened is not for the old fever, but for something simpler, quieter. Love, if it comes, shifts its center of gravity. It moves from grasping to giving, from the melodrama of pursuit to the stillness of presence. It must come clean, unmasked, unforced, free. Not as rescue, not as possession, but as the meeting of two whole beings who choose to share their freedom. Anything less would be a sleepwalking of the soul. And no amount of borrowed warmth is worth the price of closing one's eyes again.
There is no clinging, only the joy of sharing, no bargaining demands, but a delight that needs no justification. It is love stripped of theater, yet filled with a spaciousness the old stage could never hold. This is what they wish for, though they seldom say it aloud. Not a love that consumes, but one that expands. Not a love that binds, but one that frees. Better the solitude of clarity than the company of illusion. Better to wait, even if it means a lifetime, than to surrender to the old hypnosis. For once the eyes have opened, peace itself is too precious to be gambled.
For peace is not some shabby consolation prize. It is the treasure itself. The stillness you have discovered is richer than any of the storms you once called passion. The old fire, all sparks and noise, now seems a child's game beside the quiet flame that needs no fuel. And why trade the steady warmth of wholeness for the fever of incompleteness?
And when you live like this, the company grows sparse. It may be a long while before you meet another who has slipped out of the same trance. Such meetings are rare. But then what is a diamond if not rare? Its scarcity is precisely its worth.
So the awakened carry this vow whether spoken or not. Better to stand alone in clarity than to kneel again before shadows. For to pretend again would be to betray the gift that awakening has placed in their hands. And so you wait, not in despair but in patience, knowing that real meeting is rare and therefore precious.
What a strange gift it is. At once a freedom and a solitude. The awakened would rather face the long silence of solitude than the noise of counterfeit loves. They will wait as long as it takes, even if it means a lifetime. For it means that when love does come, it will not be born from hunger, but from fullness, not from fear, but from freedom. And that kind of love, though rare, is the only love that can truly last.
You do not seek to be completed, for you know yourself already whole. You do not beg for permanence, for you have learned that all things move. And because there is no bargain, there is no cage. You can stay or you can go and the love remains free. It is not about rescue nor about possession, but about the joy of presence. two beings who are not half searching for halves but whole already and therefore able to share without fear.
When you no longer need love to rescue you, you are finally free to give it. When you no longer demand that another complete you, you can meet them as they are, not as a fantasy, not as a savior, but as a fellow traveler in the mystery of existence.
This is why the awakened do not fall in love. They rise in it. They are not dragged under by longing, but lifted into freedom. And when love is no longer a prison, it becomes what it always was at its root, the purest expression of life itself. When you are no longer enslaved by the need to be loved, you find that you are freer to love than ever before.”
- Alan Watts
[Clouds Rest, Yosemite, 10-4-2025]
