Holy Versus Special Relationships

How very fragile is special love. ACIM describes a special relationship versus a holy relationship.

Lovers over the world like to say “our love was made in heaven, therefore it is true love.

Yet there are differences between a special and a holy relationship.

In a sense, I believe relationships can be made in heaven, in the sense you can make an agreement with another just before coming into a life, here in physical manifestation. For instance, you make an agreement to meet up and work it out together. The honeymoon is fun, the sense that you know this person somewhere and then it seems to be very special as a happy glow settles over the budding relationship.

All to soon expectations arise that the relationship should continue to be satisfying this way, however, it’s like the morning after a drunk, is a honeymoon.

It seems overnight the other has changed, for you cannot see how it might be your fault also that it has turned sour.
The woman strives for “real” communication, the man desires or expects the former pampering that the woman did in the beginning. These are the issues that confront a relationship which is past the honeymoon stage. The agreement they had made before incarnation is always in the background, and neither want to back out of that agreement sensing there is connection between them on a soul level.

The struggle is sometimes worth it, for the result, for understanding, compassion, forgiveness, these are the real items of a successful relationship that has gotten over the hump where the honeymoon ended, before expectations set in, the kind that now are being unmet.
Other times, as we see on the news, a relationship becomes dangerous for one or the other to continue. Dangerous to their very health, speaking of abusive situations where it becomes more than just emotional abuse, but even physical abuse. Battered women do not sit around like ACIM students declaring the body is not real, so I am not experiencing a broken arm, a busted lip. Men, to be fair, can be the more often emotionally abused by women, than the physical abuse, yet you get the picture, it’s a very special relationship no matter what gender you may be wearing around.

This then is a very special relationship, and the original intentions of the joining, the agreement to learn together the lessons of love, they have been forgotten, even though the two people continue to cling onto one another, it cannot be denied, it is unhealthy to continue their patterns of behavior.

Always check to see what the payoff is, if you remain in an unhealthy relationship as an idea of being “committed”.
For there are two kinds of committment. There is like being committed to live in an asylum, and there is dedication to the well being of another kind of committment. One is a prison, one is a joyful place and creates or manifests the original intentions, of a joining made in heaven.

A payoff to getting abused could be reflected in a twisted way by a power struggle between the two people whereby one says I can get to you, by making you hit me. I am superior then, as look, clearly you lost control.
This is distorted, and I refer back to ACIM and the special relationship before I consider what a holy relationship would be like.
If the payoff is a sense of superiority, then there is no equality in that thought. Two people in a good relationship I would suppose walk side by side, respectful of each’s premise, of each verbal or otherwise communication, perhaps not to be conclusive, but open minded to the possibilities of re-entering and maintaining the happy honeymoon area, yet this time with eyes wide open as to how fragile is the first entrails of love’s wispy wistfulness. For fragile is fantasy and tragic can be the consequences for such indulgences.

Course can wake us up to what a holy relationship is exactly. To mean a whole, vital relationship, where the interplay is ongoing, and the two do not consider each other’s interests as separate from their own, even though they may be focusing on completely different areas of life and it’s expressions, they continue to honor each other’s differences through a process called nonjudgment, non-expectation for the partner to act or behave in a certain expected way. These in a holy relationship have brought forth then all their unconscious thoughts into the foreground, despite the conflict it often engenders.

The idea, whether living alone, or with a partner is to disperse with a conflicted mind, to get to inner peace.

Let me tell you a personal story that was told to me.
A man fell into, what I would call admiration of a certain woman. He felt somewhat a victim to her charms. She was a dancer in a bar and also, as goes along with that lifestyle in some cases, she indulged in drugs and became addicted.
One day he took her home and they then and there made an agreement to have this thing called a relationship.
She was honest and told him about her drug addiction so that he would be aware of what he was getting into.

In truth, when one or the other is on drugs or alcohol and the other does not participate, it is a very conflicted relationship being set up. Drugs can seriously damage the ability to make a decision, to get off them. One must experience the “high” everyday, and the body requires more amounts of the substance as the body system eliminates the substance, it also becomes conditioned, to withhold that “high”, which requires a greater amount of the same substance being injected. This man decided to accept the woman right then and there, despite her drug addiction.

She told him this in a tone of, as if it were a question to him. Or perhaps a statement. I wasn’t there. I had only his words before me on this.
He said he accepted her disclosure and they both knew that they were in agreement to have a close, intimate relationship and I assume they entered a honeymoon stage which was quickly over in time.

The man disclosed to me her faults one by one. She was frequently out partying, or spending the night elsewhere. She once nearly drowned in the bathtub and he says he had to save her life, dragging her out of the water I assume.

For saving her life he says “I SAVED HER LIFE!” As if he could not believe this woman would not be faithful and grateful that he had indeed saved her from this kind of suicide. (J would have said drugs are the way of death to trod)

The woman’s unconscious thoughts which led to this situation I surmise that she would not recall that he was saving her life, only when she had awakened would she perhaps feel a measure of gratitude to be alive, then again maybe she wanted to die. She could have taken that moment to bath after a fight with him, she could have felt she couldn’t get away from the pressure he was exerting on her to change her ways. I don’t know as I don’t have her words here, but I know what it’s like to be addicted to substance. The incident could have been good for her, to begin to think about the road she was on, that she had chosen and no doubt felt victimized by.

It could be explained as a death wish from the repitition of always needing that high and nothing else matters, not even a promising relationship. The only thing which might make her feel normal is the drug high, and not necessarily the man’s presence in her life.

He mentioned her other faults: attracting men, due to her dancing, which was exceptionally good, he explained.
Yet this too was a part of her life, she had never agreed to stop doing what she was doing to please him when they began their relationship. It is for this reason, when women work in such establishments, their husband and lovers are often not allowed on the premises, for fights often break out due to jealousy. Nonetheless, the man was allowed on the premises and couldn’t help but feel jealousy to see other men leering at the girl on the stage, the girl whose life he had saved, and yet she was not able to feel grateful.

We begin to see in the relationship a distinct power struggle of two egos. To her credit, she attempted to get off the drugs and failed in that endeavor. It would have been only a start to mend their relationship, but a step in the right direction.

The relationship proceeds further towards the unholy kind at this point. The woman is highly sexed, as her occupation demands it be so, and many a rock star is also highly sexed as is demonstrated by Elvis and his swivel hips which shocked the nation, but they later grew to love him, as there is always more facets than this procreation drive moving one’s hips around in public.
It’s somehow became in society more appropriate that a man could express his sexuality in public domain, while if a woman did so she was labeled whorish.

The man wants her to stay at home and wear hippy long skirts. She explains to him she wears sexy clothing as that is a part of her work. She explains that is her “cover.” At this point the man agrees, it is her “cover.”
He is temporarily satisfied with the answer and perhaps the relationship reaches a live and let live temporary status.

At one point in his rather lengthy discourse of this poignant and dramatic relationship he recounts that they had taken a drive into the country. Perhaps because they both wanted to work things out, and so off they went to be alone with one another.

Here the reader wishes to see something good about all this occuring. We all want happily ever after it seems, and in the special relationship this does not happen except through very hard inner work of self scrutiny and nonjudgmental atmosphere, and if you are even a tad religious, we may consider throwing in a prayer or two, to include HS in the relationship. For we can be like riders on the storm here, tossed every which way but loose, like we are merely living on a prayer, and the thesis here is that love is fragile on this earth, to not include God in it, is to never reach for the healing of a relationship and the holy instant is just one of several that can appear.

It appears a holy instant did come as he recounts she got out of the car and began to pick wildflowers while he observed this. As she did, she began to be playful. She began to enjoy the now moment, dancing around acting funny and guilty of picking a flower from the earth, she smiled and laughed, and for him, and him only put on a show in the middle of nowhere, she was her professional self.

Perhaps she had a way of playing to make a man feel not quite so serious and stern about everything. Perhaps she relaxed him in this way. He said he enjoyed it or implied he enjoyed her, enjoying herself within a natural setting that she seldom got to enjoy. Presto. A holy moment of a man enjoying his lover enjoying herself.

Then things got dark rather quickly on the ride home, as I understand it, they began to fight all the way back.
Perhaps their relationship was coming to an end, and they both knew it, in the back of their minds and so they fought, as a way to save it.

 As a highly sexually expressing being, part of the charm that drew the man, and the audience of men, the girl once dressed in a school girl outfit for this man’s benefit, jumped into his car and intiated sex right in the car. This shows her exhibitionist expression and the man of course, enjoyed this greatly, as what man wouldn’t?
Yet this is not what I term a holy relationship, although I think it’s funny and I think we do come here often enough for sexual pleasures, there is more to a relationship than sexual pleasure and those elements of bondage and submission implements society sometimes wears behind closed doors.

 This is what she did. This is who she was, and he loved this facet of her.
She may have been reading his mind, what he wanted from a woman. He would tell her how he liked her to wear certain clothing, stay home, not tempt other men, although this was her livelihood and sense of identity, and perhaps she considered she would dress as this little girl enjoying “daddy”, thus build up his sexual excitement to a high pitch and give him this pleasant memory.

I say good for her. She gave him something he will never forget, and he did like it. He does not like what happened next however. It’s literally a relationship that was up and down all the time.

Back to driving back from the country and fighting, I assume at the top of their lungs and killing love’s fragile demeanor here.

The anger and passion within such a fight has hidden sexual undertones. The man is wishing to control the woman’s behavior. He also wants to help her get off drugs and that is a good intention, yet it can be ascertained a drug addict can only make this decision for their self, although counseling can help, it’s a decision that must be made in one’s own closet, whereby a soul decides, I cannot do this thing anymore and then God can help.

When they arrive home they are highly excited, anger and violence can turn into a sexual expression, which it did. The woman tried to convey through a wild kiss that she had this uncontrolled sexuality within her, and this ability to arouse the man to express his own sexual nature; but it’s not love, it’s wild sex. Another memory. Another experience to store in the memory bank.

He says it was incredible sex actually. He got off, and I assume she did too. Yet they were still to part the ways despite this grand romp, for great sex is not enough to make a relationship endure.


For as ACIM says, “bodies do not join.” Minds join. They had been trying to have a meeting of the minds but had failed in this. They may have met emotionally while having sex, yet emotions are not the same thing as a meeting of the minds, joined in an intention to manifest the holy whole and completed congenial relationship.

ACIM says sex is what will be expressed here before we get to the holy relationship, and he does not say don’t do it, what J asks of us is to ask “what is it for?”

Do it, if you wish, but be aware of why you are doing it, and of why the other is doing it as well. Ask questions of one another, if not sure. Is my simple sounding advice, I mean to say communication of the verbal kind, face to face while looking into the eyes, is essential in any relationship.

Here it appears it was a dysfunctional relationship, whereby the two fight, in order to gain the pleasure of making up. So that is what it was for. The passion engendered was done by both, to arise to the peak of the orgasm. The emotions behind it made the relationship a special one.

The ego can in this situation make expectations that they should continue to enjoy this explosive sexual relationshp, however, they broke up as the minds failed to communicate successfully.

The man, to his credit, mentioned, although it was wild, and momentarily fulfilling, he felt like the fight to get to this climax, was draining to consider they might fight again just in order to make up, and he made a decision something was not quite right with this picture.

He decided to project the blame unto the woman and tried harder to get her to change, get off drugs, stay home more often, and stop dancing, or find a classier place to dance perhaps. I don’t know how he tried to change her but it seems throughout his discourse, only several places did he mention he felt love for her, that was when she danced, laughed and played, or pretended to be a little girl while jumping on him. He concluded she was 75% evil.

I did not know you could measure evilness! I disagreed that she was evil. Disillusioned, over sexed, addicted to a substance, but I didn’t see evil. Nor do I see evil in the man’s behavior. I see him having an experience with the opposite sex. I do see him as more controlling than he knows though. I am not the woman in question, I’m the counselor type without the paper to prove it, is all I am, as well, I was a dancer myself for a short stint and came to know these women and the problems they encountered in their work. The establishments are mostly peopled by men as you can imagine. Sex is a commodity here, especially in the special relationship, which most of us has had or currently have.

by way of further definition a special relationship is where you pick one person out of everybody else you see and declare, I would like that one only. Only that one can satisfy me. It is a relationship built on expectations which don’t pan out in general terms. Working on a relationship is something we just don’t normally think is important. We are not with the tools until now, we are with the tools in ACIM, and certain psychologists are helpful, if you can find just the right one for you.

The man continues to see himself as captivated by her charms, never suspecting that he himself needed to exert control over the woman, rather than realize he had gotten himself in this mess willingly, the day she explained who she was and he entered then with his eyes open and his expectations many.

He could just as easily walked away at that crucial moment but he didn’t. We can accept sometimes any relationship opportunity that comes along, we can see that a special relationship is always a gamble. This gamble on special relationship means we must become good losers, should the hand we are dealt proves to not be as good as what the dealer has. The dealer in this case is HS. So a special relationship can be seen as a gamble, rather than projecting always on the other person the fault of the bad hand that was dealt.
Learning to be a good sport in life, is something we each must do, for all of this description makes it look like a game that was played.

The culmination of the disclosure ended somewhat violently, or could have been much worse. To say the woman felt the need to gain protection from the man’s forceful admonitions to change her behavior. There must have been many fights which made her question her entire identity and feel defeated, before she would seek outside assistance. At her place of work there are employed bouncers. These fellows are there to protect the women, so that they continue their job, as it were, and so that no fights break out in the business establishment.

She employed these friends of hers, probably bouncers I’m thinking, that should he approach her at her work, that they ask him to leave, or they would make it clear they would assist him to leave. It was merely their job to do so. His perception of her asking them for assistance was to declare her an evil being.

For in his mind he was fighting for their love. Love is fragile remember? Love can be killed. Instead of feeling love for the man, here the woman demonstrates she felt only fear. You cannot feel fear and love at the same time, you cannot feel love and feel angry at the same time; and this is one of ACIM’s premises we have a difficult time understanding.

 He was simply asking too much of her, pushing too hard, he did not display a gentle approach towards the woman whom he made feel wayward, and unacceptable for him to love, for being this sexual entity, which made her money through this kind of work plus indulged in the drug.
He clearly likes to pick this kind of woman for the exciting challenge of controlling her wild nature.

He is not grateful for the experience and it’s hard to be grateful when you think it is yourself who has failed to gain the successful long term relationship and so he does not take 50% of the responsibility for the failed relationship.

What she was doing was fleeing for her own sanity and not being able to satisfy the emotional demands of the man in this case, compounded by her attempts to get off drugs and failing in that regard also. She was making sure her bases were covered when she decided to leave him. Perhaps she feared physical violence? We cannot say why she desired protection, only she can tell us this.

 Frequently in these sort of relationships a woman can attain a court order restricting the man to her place of work, or her home, and yet spouses do resort to violence in extreme cases, killing one another, despite the paperwork is there, it is usually just a trail to follow, of what really went on inside the relationship.

And we call this love? No, it’s an experience in the earth plane called the special relationship. It might have had several holy instants, but it was not a holy relationship. ACIM can give a map to the holy relationship, that map is only now beginning to unravel throughout this time in history.

It is my assertion we make agreements to interact in polarity relationships here, yet the intention of the relationship cannot unfold without participating on the physical level in order to build that manifestation within the slowed down vibratory rate of this world. We tend the soil of the garden, cultivating love, but it is not something promised to us what will be the crop yield.

In other words, it all looks easy from a higher perspective, but once into flesh and bone, the challenge can be immense and the failures many. First, you must love and honor your soul path, whatever that is, you cannot love another fully, without first feeling whole and complete in your life before entering an intimate situation.

This girl was on her path, she did not love herself, but the danger of remaining in such a relationship was that her will and decision making ability was being slowly sublimated by a forceful personality, and she would never be able to love herself and find her self under such a dominating presence, and so intuition was working just fine and she got out before further damage was done to her free will mechanism, and sense of who she was and who she wished to become.

By observing special relationships we can get a glimpse of what a holy relationship entails and how we might ourselves arrive at one. We may ascertain even, our reasons for choosing to be without a partner, for lacking the skills to build a holy relationship.

In a relationship where one is on a path to death, I can believe the man was supposed to save her from drowning. That somebody had to be there, for that was a possible exit point for her soul, and perhaps her higher self did want her to stay in the life, despite there was not much happiness in it for her.
Perhaps her challenges was to make her way alone, and discover her strengths.

We cannot say, but in conclusion, a relationship is made of two parts, it’s 50-50 in that regard. You cannot honestly delare the other is 75% responsible while you are 25% responsible. It’s a lack of mind to mind communication without placing blame and screaming angrily at the other is of no help but perpetuates the power struggle.

If you go back to the very beginning of the relationship you can always discover when you made the decision to go for it, you must also take responsibility that it didn’t work out as expected and you find the moment when you decided to gamble.
In a holy relationship there is very little of that gambling aspect there. It is rather a knowing place, that so few experience. These few that possess such a relationship make it a habit to never let the sun set while holding unto a grievance.

 A couple I know who have been together it seems forever told me this secret, if there is disagreement, one or they other says, I’d rather be happy than right and they never go to bed angry with one another, no matter what is happening. Anger is never something that can be shared. Only love can be shared. They may not settle the disagreement immediately, but they let go of anger and pride emotions, to keep willing to adhere to the notion they will keep the love part, and keep faithful in each other’s ability to surmount the problem area.

In conclusion, we need to go through life either checking to see if the cup is half empty or half full. It is a counting your blessings perspective.

Was the relationship a blessing in disguise? What was the good in it experienced? When we get to the other side, to our true home, it is easy to see the good that was there.
Not so easy to see, is the good that is here now.
We need to get to the place of gratitude for all of our relationships, for it is said it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all and so I maintain gratitude for each encounter with the holy son of God.

Like I told my dead husband in a dream once, “ok, I’ll stop blaming you for this pain I feel since you left, honey, I’ll remember only the good times, I swear I will, and I’ll do it for your sake because I do love you.”

And we will reunite someday. I know.