The purpose of partnership

An essay by Barry Long, reproduced as-is. Is there purpose to partnership beyond having babies and paying off a mortgage? In this edited version of an interview with Barry Long, he describes how living honestly in partnership frees us of our negativity and how making love rightly leads to a union of being which is called God consciousness – pure love.

The purpose of love is to enjoy being together and the process of love is to bring that about by getting rid of our negativity so that we can then enjoy being together.

The process of partnership is to diminish my self. My self is my negative emotions: my anger, my resentments, my jealousy, my self doubt.

When I'm in partnership with a woman, because she is my opposite number, she's like a mirror to me. She's going to reflect those parts of my self that I'm not really facing. So the process of partnership is for me, the man, to face my self through her mirroring and for her to face her self through my mirroring. There's no doubt that there's nothing like a partnership to bring up my self and her self in the forms of emotion and argument and all the discontent that arises between us - as well as the love that is naturally there.

There is no problem with love. Nobody ever has any problem with love. We only have a problem with our self: our emotions, our discontent, our unhappiness and our conflict together. So it's the conflict we've got to deal with - the love is okay.

But what we tend to do is to look only for the love, without dealing with the conflict and eliminating its cause.

A woman might say, 'The cause of my conflict is that you, man, are not loving me as I know love to be'. And man says to woman, 'But you're not loving me as I know love to be because you’re emotional’.

So we get this terrible discontent and conflict between us that seems insoluble.

Love is endeavouring all the time to converge to enter the body - and the self of each man and woman grimly fights to hold on to its negativity, to hold on to its unhappiness, to not yield to love. So it's a war of attrition.

It is a battle between love and my self and my self eventually has to be given up, my self being my negativity and my resistance to giving and to love.

The purpose of love between man and woman is for you to enjoy me, man, and for me to enjoy you, woman. Is that the truth in your experience?

If that is the truth in your experience then you start to know what you are doing in partnership. So if anything arises between the man and the woman, such as a restlessness in the man, the woman has to be able to say, 'Why are you restless, my love?'. And he has to be able to say, 'I am restless because so and so and so and so'. For there's always a reason for everything. If I can't say why I am restless, then I'm not being honest.

The next essential element in this purpose of love is honesty. If I'm not honest in my partnership then we are never going to enjoy being together for long.

What is this honesty? It's not what the world thinks is honesty. It's not the honesty of telling everything. It's not that at all. It's an inner honesty. Honesty begins first of all with me facing my self, my negative emotions. These negative emotions are always going to spoil anything good in my life, and that applies particularly to the love of each other - man and woman.

What I've got to do to be honest is to start facing my self, and not allowing these emotions to determine my life, to push me around, to spoil my relationships - for they certainly will. So every time I get angry I have to say, 'Why am I angry?', because who wants to live with an angry man or an angry woman? The answer is so obvious. And how do I get rid of anger? First I have to get rid of it in my self before I can even hope to get rid of it out of others. That's what love between man and woman is about. First, the purpose of love is to enjoy being together and the process of love is to bring that about by getting rid of my negativity so that we can then enjoy being together.

Now when we enjoy being together, we then come into the making of love which is the fundamental thing in a partnership.

The purpose of making love is, again, to face one another so that we actually make love with our bodies and not with our unhappy emotions - with our doubts and fears and our problems.

Generally speaking, the whole world makes love with their emotions. They want to be excited, which is sex.

When you get excited you get into fantasies. When you get into fantasies you are not making love with your body, you are making love with your mind. No mind has ever made love yet and ever will. It is bodies that make love. As you get rid of your negativity, you start to make love only with your body. When you do that, you enter a natural state which is the natural state of life on this earth. You enter a state of innocence.

So we've got to still the mind in the making of love. The way you do that is to be one with the sensory pleasure - because the making of love is a great pleasure in a sensory sense. The senses are alive in the making of love and if you keep the mind still and focus only on the sensory pleasure, you don't get excited. You are simply in a state of passion and that passion can go on making love without going towards some end. It is simply the pleasure of making love.

When you make love innocently - just making it with the body and not with the fantasies or the imagination or the emotions - pleasure turns into beauty. More and more beauty comes into your life because you are bringing more and more pleasure into your body. It energises it in a different way. It makes it more vital, more healthy. But that's only if you keep the mind out of it and become innocent. Purpose has no end. So, if the purpose of love between man and woman is for them to enjoy being together, the next question I would ask myself would be, 'What's the purpose behind that purpose?’

Because you are not there just to enjoy yourself: you don't make love to get something for yourself.

If you make love rightly in your body and you go through pleasure into beauty, where does this lead? What's the purpose of that? Its whole purpose is to realise the union between the two principles called man and woman. It is to realise this union inside the body, inside the intellect, to actually make it a living reality.

Man and woman will always remain separate as two separate bodies; they can never merge and become one body. That is absolutely impossible. If they are going to become one, how is this done? It is done within. It is done in consciousness.

The purpose of making love and enjoying one another is to have a union of being which is called God consciousness pure love. For the principle of man and the principle of woman behind their forms is God and when the two forms are truly united in love, it leads to God consciousness.

God consciousness is the complete elimination of your self: complete elimination of all your negativity, of all your wanting, of all your trying to do something. And that can be brought about by the love of man and woman, the right love between man and woman. It is the rarest state on earth: to reach an end of my self, an end of all my negativity and to realise the one divine consciousness which of course is behind everything on earth, behind your body and my body as man and woman. The way to do it is by man loving woman and woman loving man in the way I have described.

To realise God or love is a climacteric which changes irreversibly the consciousness of the man or woman. Then I no longer ever fear again. I no longer ever doubt again, because I have realised the one perfect principle, love or God, by uniting the two principles of man and woman through my love.

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