dave_a_mbs
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central california
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Hi George- The question, at least as I see it, is whether you desire a friend or a mate.
Friends are just like us, so that we all do the same things together. Friends are easy, agreeable, always sharing the same feelings as us, and dependebly stable. With our friends we are a "Me", and secure in it. But to try to build a life together with a friend is rather like trying to keep on being yourself as you change. Eventually there is no more glue to hold the friendship together when things get tough, and especially when we grow. Then we outgrow the old friends and slowly reevolve through a new group. People who try to marry their best friends often discover that they have made a mistake, just as if they married their own mirror image, or a photograph of themselves.
Spouses are complementary, and often lack some of the properties that we seek in our casual friends. In compensation, spouses bring complementarity. Where we lack, our spouses fill in, and we fill in where they have lacks. Thus, between self and spouse there is a whole being of higher order, an "Us", held together by trust, by sharing the burdens of life, and by love. There is no stability, because the life that is built leads to a continuation and elaboration of the complementarity. The essence is growth, development and evolution.
Friends bring us sugar, our spouses bring us spice.
When you look for a woman who is spiritual, or who loves other activities the way that you do, what you are seeking is fulfillment of an image. If there is someone who is otherwise loving, caring and truly interested, and she makes up for the lacks of your experiences and drives with hers, just as you make up for her deficiencies with your own strengths, then you have found a spiritual woman who is, at least at the moment, fully appropriate. The issue is what you mean by "spiritual" in that context. What could be more spiritual than to love with all your strength?
To hang out with friends is always safe. Non-eventful, but safe. To enter into a permanent (or semi-permanent) arrangement with an appropriate spouse type is going to be a roller coaster, but thrilling. Because of this, my advice to my grandchildren is to avoid marriage until they have decided that they want to ride the roller coaster, and that this specific person is the one with whom to ride it. Loving means allowing yourself to leave your comfort zone to face life in the raw.
I suspect that if you were to agree to set a little time apart in which to meditate - obviously not according to present habits in which your other half wants to go shopping, make love, wash the dishes, clean the house, paint the bedroom or whatever - then she would understand. This is the complementarity again, where you do the spiritual thing which makes up for her lack of skills in those areas. She, at the same time, probably has other habits that you totally lack interest in pursuing, in which she would invest her time.
As an example, my personal resolution of this is that I discovered that I have married a witch - meaning a pantheist who finds God in nature, in the trees and winds, and in communion with the animals. I do science and find energies and forces there, and I find God in abstract logical stuff and exotic experiences, or in meditation. I do psychotherapy, she does geriatric nursing (appropriate to both of us!) so between us we cover the field. She finds my ideas a bit bizarre, but is interested, and vice versa. She reads herself to sleep at night, so that's my time to meditate and study. The rest of the time, we live like all people do, trusting that the other actually understands, even if differently.
Were you to come to my clinical office I'd advise you to beware of falling in love with an imaginary woman's image projected onto whomever you are seeing, or even more dangerously, projected onto a friend. - I've tried it - it doesn't work.
That said, I wish you the best in discovering a suitable soul mate. PUL dave
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