INVITATION AND RELATIONSHIP

Every real relationship has as its heart and soul a real, beautiful and mutually experienced invitation. In a true love relationship the invitation is felt not only one to another but to the horizon of the future that both participants first intuited and then promised to themselves. This beckoning invitational horizon is continually kept alive by the depth and profundity and heartfelt nature of the invitation made one to another on the present ground of the relationship. From this ground the future is continually kept as a living possibility. In inviting someone else into our lives and into our future we not only say we see the mystery of a person, but that we wish to join that person and their mystery to the mystery of a shared future. When this future, beckoning horizon ceases to exist in the shared imagination of two people, the relationship has already fallen into a form of amnesia and heartbreak. The future disappears because the individuals are not any longer making heartfelt invitations to one another in daily life or the original invitation was found to be false or projected onto the other with no real living basis, nor any follow through in return. No love affair survives when one side is doing all the asking, and no relationship can survive one person never finding promise in the horizon of the future, no matter how hard the other may try to hold on to it in their heart, their mind and their imagination. ~ David Whyte, Invitation and Relationship: November Thoughts