People say that love is not enough to keep a relationship working. However, the love I am referring to here is not personal, romantic love. I am referring to the unconditional love that is the essence of who we are. This love is transformative and available no matter what the state of a relationship. And when we experiencing it, it is the best state of mind from which to make relationship decisions. Unconditional love is available, and it does not mean unconditional relationship, but it allows for truly self-honoring choices to be made that reflect authentic empowerment and inner wisdom.

Love is an experiential knowing of who you are. I am not speaking of desire or lust. I am speaking of an impersonal love where the interests of the personal self fall away and human behavior reflects this impersonal love.

This is the kind of love that allows humans to sacrifice our need for survival and willingly, without a thought, save another’s life. It opens up a reservoir of capacity within that is infinite and profoundly uplifting.

This love may sound extreme, but it is more available than we realize because it is who we are. There is a source within that is beyond personal survival because it is the same source that is inside of each of us. We are all called to experience this unconditional love and the freedom within that experience.

This experience of unconditional, impersonal love is more powerful at transforming relationships than psychology. The realization that we are greater than our personal biological needs for survival is freeing and eye-opening. It also frees us from needing to feel a certain way to be okay. This allows us to relax into our moment-to-moment experience and let go of the desire to feel or be  different. This is liberating.

It is this freedom from the personal that favors impersonal experience that helps relations be more fun and work better.

This might sound like it would be hard to do. And it is when we focus on our psychology, it is. Psychology is about how to get our emotional needs met. How do we feel better? This puts the personal front and center when it comes to relationships. It is impossible for each person to put their psychology front and center and get along. It is too difficult to come into sync that way. One person needs closeness. One person needs space. Finding the overlaps of compatibility is hard work, and oftentimes, the common ground can look very small. That is the nature of our capricious psyches. They are ever-changing and self-focused. The survival of the body evolves into wanting our emotional needs to get met, and this is usually at the expense of the other person getting their emotional needs met. Compromise becomes the norm and is the perfect breeding ground for resentment. Relationships teeter on a precarious balance of give and take with fairness needing to be measured out on a daily basis. And it never feels fair.

The aliveness of love is suffocated by the attempts to fabricate a fairness that does not exist on the human level. I remember my step-father saying to me, “Life is not fair.” Or the saying, “All is fair in love and war.” But this inherent unfairness is not a bad thing.

What I mean by that is the unfairness in relationships requires us to grow beyond our personal needs in order to experience a greater good that is more beautiful and profound than what we have known from our individualistic self.

This is a common description used when people talk about loving their children. New parents will often say to me they did not know that a love so profound was possible. In this new experience, they are open to the impersonal love that puts the requirements of the personal ego aside and simply feels what is beyond personal psychology. There is a feeling greater than our individual needs getting met. And I think most would agree good parenting has nothing to do with fairness and parents getting their egoic needs met.

This kind of love does not need to be limited to our children. It is an experience that is available within us. It seems to get more easily evoked by babies, puppies, kittens etc…, but it is who you are. And it is where the solution to relationship problems lies.

Romantic, sexual partnerships can help wake us up to our impersonal nature of love. This can happen naturally. It can also be chosen intentionally.

If you had a romantic beginning to your relationship, the power of love that brought you together was not personal. You might have felt magnetically drawn to one person, but what you were experiencing was within you. It is who you are.

For relationships that get into trouble, the balance shifts from this impersonal experience of love that has enormous room for our partner’s eccentricities and foibles to an experience of personal needs not getting met and needing to be satisfied.

Psychology offers strategies and techniques to try and get those needs met more effectively, but what it doesn’t offer is the guidance to look beyond your emotional experience and human survival needs to your true nature of unconditional love.

Ultimately, that is what we all want. A deeper experience of that. And we don’t get that from our partner no matter how nice they become and how thoughtful they learn to be. We get that from dropping into that space within ourselves where we realize we are greater than the sum of our human parts. We are infinite. That realization gives us the experience of love and from there we can enjoy our relationship, or, from love, not reactivity, choose to end our relationship.

This is so helpful to relationships because the relationship and our partner no longer have the burden of meeting our deepest need for love that they can’t fulfill. Without this requirement, it becomes so much easier to enjoy each other’s humanness and the relationship, as well as share in the experience of love.

The realization that our true nature is love, and that is what fills us up, takes the pressure off the relationship. And consequently, this lack of pressure brings out the best in us. Our natural qualities of empathy, compassion, and kindness come to the surface, so all of the human preferences we were trying to get met previously are actually met more often and more easily. And, when they aren’t, because we know our source of love lies within, the fundamental unfairness of being human and not getting our emotional needs met all the time becomes so much more manageable.

Rohini Ross is passionate about helping people wake up to their full potential. She is a transformative coach, leadership consultant, a regular blogger for Thrive Global, and author of the short-read Marriage (The Soul-Centered Series Book 1) available on Amazon. You can get her free eBook Relationships here. Rohini has an international coaching and consulting practice based in Los Angeles helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of well-being, resiliency, and success. She is also the founder of The Soul-Centered Series: Psychology, Spirituality, and the Teachings of Sydney Banks. You can follow Rohini on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and watch her Vlogs with her husband. To learn more about her work go to her website, rohiniross.com.