Your Partnership is Extraordinary

I remember being 16 and falling in love for the first time, completely convinced that our​ bond was unparalleled. When I fell in love in college, that one was obviously the real, destined relationship.

My third love — my first husband — and I used to actually say to each other that we felt bad for other couples because their relationships seemed so hard while ours was so easy. Neither of us had planned to get married, but then we found a way of participating in the institution that felt so far beyond the dominant paradigm — revolutionary, even.

Sometimes those ties — real as they are — belong to a certain chapter of our lives, and are then meant to shift into something else.

My second husband and I — the longest relationship yet, now a long-term platonic partnership — have been convinced we share a many-lives karmic bond. Psychics (unpaid, for what it’s worth) have remarked on the depth of our connection, our old soul contract. The Pattern app calls us extraordinary.

Ugh. Here’s the truth: Any of us who figure out how to commit, to spend significant time with another human, to work through childhood wounding and navigate conflict — we are extraordinary. But we’re not better than other people in love. Tantric teachers say that when we’re falling in love, we see each other as we actually are — in our real, divine perfection.

The bond between two whole people who can truly see each other is, in fact, extraordinary. Full stop.

But sometimes that very conviction keeps us in relationships that need to transform. Sometimes those ties — real as they are — belong to a certain chapter of our lives and are then meant to shift into something else. Our dominant soulmate paradigm does us a disservice here. We can be soulmates and not be in a monogamous, lifetime romantic relationship. Soulmates can be best friends, siblings, people who spend some time as romantic partners and then transition into something more like close friendship or chosen family.

It starts, I think, with loosening your grip on the story you’ve been telling about the relationship — the destined one, the karmic bond, the extraordinary thing — and getting curious about what it wants to become instead.

The shift can be subtle — like adjusting the viewfinder just slightly to let go of the one-person-soulmate-forever-romantic-partner story and see something that can actually be more generative: a relationship that grows as each person grows, one that can do the hard work of ending one form to begin another.

I know from personal experience that this is among the hardest work there is. How do you work with your former romantic partner to mutually transform your relationship away from romantic love and into another kind of connection? The brain regions governing romantic attachment are the same ones we relied on as children with our caregivers — so when that bond changes form, it can trigger something that feels chemically, viscerally like fear of death.

But it can happen. We can transform relationships. We don’t actually ever have to lose anyone close to us — not until ​real death, anyway.

How do we transform our relationships?

It starts, I think, with loosening your grip on the story you’ve been telling about the relationship — the destined one, the karmic bond, the extraordinary thing — and getting curious about what it wants to become instead. That reframe alone can be surprisingly hard. We are attached to our narratives.

Then comes grief. You have to let yourself fully mourn the relationship that’s ending before you can see the one that’s trying to begin. This is not a detour — it’s ​among the h​ardest work. You have to bury one form of the thing before you can name the new form.

And then, when you’re ready, a shared intention: Both people agreeing that the love is real, that it’s worth keeping in some form, and that the shape of it just needs to change. That agreement is everything. It’s the foundation the new relationship gets built on.

I’m offering these as ingredients, not steps. Sometimes the shared intention has to come first — you agree together to try before either of you has done any of the inner work. Sometimes all three happen slowly and simultaneously, braided together over months or years. The grief and the new relationship can coexist. The story can shift gradually. There’s no single right order. There’s just the willingness to keep showing up for the process.

If you started your relationship with the recognition that all relationships will change (see All Relationships End), you’ll already have a foothold in this work.​ Transformation is not failure. It might just be the whole point. Choosing to keep someone, even when the form has to change — that’s not giving up on love. That’s what love actually looks like.