The Romance Reverend Interviews "Love Doctor"
Daphne Rose Kingma

Daphne Rose Kingma has spent more than 25 years as a psychotherapist counseling couples and writing books with groundbreaking insights on how to make sense of our relationship experiences. They include Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How To Get Through The Ending of Yours, Finding True Love, Weddings From The Heart and most recently, The 9 Types of Lovers: Why We Love The People We Do & How They Drive Us Crazy (all from Conari Press). Her fans range from Mary Ann Williamson, who wrote the introduction to The Future of Love and Neale Donald Walsh, who raved about it in Conversations With God III. Yet she has taken on her mission to heal our hearts and relationships with much devotion and little media fanfare.

Daphne offers a truly unique and useful look at how spirit moves us into the house--and houses--of love in, The Future of Love: The Power of the Soul in Intimate Relationships (Main Street Press, January 1999). I think this book means even more to us today, post September 11, as we truly stand on the threshold of the transformations she discusses. She brings good tidings about the emergence of the conscious, loving and solid partnership between people who are committed to utilizing relationship as a vehicle to evolution. And she validates our suspicions that something larger than our human personalities is at work in our romances. Yet she warns that, as the status quo shifts, intimate relationships may be in for unprecedented intensity; and we may be shocked and pleasantly surprised by the many ways love will manifest in our lives.

"The real undertaking of relationships is to have an experience of love and we can’t force love to have a particular form of relationship," she said in our interview. "I think we’re going to be surprised by the forms and the people we are being given to love. And we may also be surprised by that the forms are many, and extraordinary, and they all can be a container for love."

"It’s all in the process of transforming," she said. "Something larger than us is breaking up the relationship pattern. Its not as if we all woke up one day and said lets make mayhem in our relationship lives. This transformation really is to show us that, no matter how diverse the forms, love is still operating. I think we’re being shown that, through awareness, we can honor love -- wherever it occurs. If we can expand through our prejudices and limitations, more love can occur."

Daphne Rose Kingma: I think in a way it's because we’ve been sold a mess of pottage. We believe relationships are supposed to be perfect, that partnership will always be ideal, that marriage is the one thing in life that can’t corrode or corrupt. But the purpose of relationship is to really grow our souls. It’s very hard to keep that in mind because we are so romanticized about relationships.

We’re just so engaged with our emotional lives that to find out that they too are going to go through the chaos (of the times) is very disturbing. Looking at the whole phenomenon of our relationship lives in a spiritual context really is the only way that the suffering experiences of relationships make sense. I think we’re all trying to make this transition from personality to spirituality. That’s a very big step, a huge step--and we’re not certain we’re ready to take it. It’s very scary--in this culture, especially--because we’ve really elevated relationships to the level of a God. So, to not have them be absolute in our lives--absolute fulfillment, absolute security, absolute comfort, absolute witnessing of who we are, absolutely indestructible and forever--is every challenging.

The human experience is an interesting tension between the material and mundane world, and, on the next level, the emotional. It’s a mixture of those levels with the transcendent spiritual. We are uniquely called to continue to move back and forth in this reality where we get to experience it in terms of great awakenings, soul connection and divine love, along with Saturday night dates, co-parenting the kids, socks on the floor, red roses, car accidents, hospitalizations. We’re being invited to experience love as it is infused in this material plane.

Consider that beautiful image of the Kundalini and the two chords interwoven. I think people need to know we are always simultaneously personality and spirituality and the development of those aspects may be parallel and synchronistic or it may be very uneven. People who are "seeking" are more likely to have the soul opening through their personality experience and vice versa. People who are just watching television are going to have a harder time in general. Awakening is a combination of a divine gift --and it’s purely a gift--and ones own movement toward it.

In general, there is a great movement toward soul connection. In the American culture we tend to romanticize it. We’ve elevated the relationship to the level of soul mate, as in you’re going to find your soul mate and live happily every after. I think more and more soul connections are being made and acknowledged and it’s not just lovers or marriages. It’s more like people crossing paths with kindred spirits and recognizing they’re undertaking something together.

Absolutely and I call that "Illumined relationships." But I think what we need to realize is sexuality is the divine attraction and romance is the Spirit’s way of inviting us into the relationship which will then invite us to grow. American consciousness is stuck at the romance step.

Exactly. We mistakenly think that it should be a 45-year romance as opposed to a 45-year journey of spiritual evolution or of psychological evolution--and hopefully both. The romantic myth is held in a container with very specific attributes: It must be daily, domestic, exclusive and forever. And we really believe that these are the four tent pins that will hold up the romantic myth. In fact, they don’t. They hold up daily life and a lot of times they don’t hold up daily life that well. Romance imagines the 100 per cent connection. It really is like God: You’re going to make all my dreams come true, be the perfect partner, protect me, be the great lover, the perfect parent. It’s the expectation of perfection. That is what the high energy of romance is. Its like you’re the one, forever true, only you, it has that quality of ...

A devotional, yes. And because we haven’t made the distinction between that spiritual longing--the longing for God, for absolute union--we are continually disappointed in our relationships.

A conscious awareness that these relationships are a spiritual as well as a psychological undertaking. And that the tests and crises within them are always an opportunity for spiritual expansion. Which means, put in simple terms, a greater capacity for love, and a more inclusive love. It’s like this: Can you love the person who’s driving you crazy? It’s always a question of can you expand your capacity for love?

In this culture, we have not seen many examples of: what does a relationship look like when it’s really about love? We’ve seen it when it’s about keeping up with the Jones’s, when it’s about healing the wounded child. We haven’t seen it when it’s really an embodiment of love. We need to see what it is to treat your partner as a king or queen, to lovingly hold the person you love, to live your sexuality as an experience of opening consciousness as well as physical passion, to live in an environment that is peaceful. I know a number of couples who’s spiritual work, I believe, is just to hang around and show people what love looks like; to embody what marriage looks like when it’s lived on the spiritual level. And that takes consciousness of saying: We are undertaking this. And we choose to go through those rites of emotional and spiritual passage in a relationship that will bring us to a larger place.

I believe a relationship is a very profound spiritual gift. Think of it this way: You cannot insist a relationship into your life. You can’t say, "This is Friday. I’m going to go downtown and buy myself a relationship." You can buy yourself a shirt, a car or a bottle of orange juice but you can’t do that with a relationship, so it is a spiritual gift.

At the soul level we are open...to that person who is a different color, speaks a different language, or is deaf. This is about surrendering. We are brought the experience of love that our soul needs. The nature of the soul is it’s so powerful that it draws us off our ego, off the path where we think we are in charge, and surprises us about the nature of love.

The truth is, very often, soul connection relationships are the most demanding because they come into our lives to require us to let go of something that we’re really entrenched in or to transform us in a way that’s very difficult. The soul is trying to bring--and bring and bring--home the lessons.

The soul uses the personality--aspects of the personality, such as passion, need, childhood wounds, and hormones--to take us to a lesson. It’s like you walk by the bakery, and smell the fragrance of the fresh bread. That’s what draws you in. That’s why some relationships are such a surprise: oh, why am I with this woman who doesn’t speak my language? Why am I getting married when I swore I never would? I don’t know if we actually know where our souls are taking us, in the moment, unless we are very conscious. We may have that ineffable feeling that says my soul is telling me to be here, but a relationship is always an interplay of the personality and the soul. They are both always growing but it’s hard to see what the soul is teaching is until later.

Whenever we feel love, wherever we are changed by love, the soul is at work. But in a given time frame, it may not look right. You can say, "Well this is the last guy on earth I thought I would of fallen in love with, but I am feeling love here." That’s the soul at work.

You know when the relationship is finished. It may go through a process to get to that point but you move toward it and there’s a poignant understanding of "Oh, I guess we’re not supposed to set up housekeeping together" or "I guess we really have finished what we came here to do." Sometimes there simply is no energy in a relationship. Sometimes it’s announced by another person showing up and sort of holding a lantern: oh here’s the next step I’m supposed to take. Many people find that difficult because of the notion that we can only love one person in a lifetime.

I think when we follow our hearts we’re being led by the soul. We can trust love. Love is always a journey and people want it to be a destination. Its like, okay, I’ve got that nailed down, now I can go and work n my career. But the real experience of love is a continually unfolding journey.

The important thing we need to realize is we are in a time of great change and upheaval in our relationships and this is not a disaster. But it’s an opportunity...to expand our capacity to love and to expand our experience of love. If we can relax into that and trust, we can actually experience more love and the more vast experience of love that our souls are leading us toward. They are not leading us to specific relationships; they are leading us toward ever-expanding experiences of love. Much bigger than we ever imagined. The ultimate goal of all our relationship experiences is to deliver us to a place of pure love. No judgment, no ax to grind, no needs to whimper over or insist on being fulfilled. Just love. Pure love."

Books by Daphne Rose Kingma:

What kinds of relationships will you include in your Future of Love?