Rilke on Relationships

As someone who has worked through (and continues to work through) the vicissitudes of marriage for 25 years (to the same woman, by the way), as one who has experienced the ecstasy and passion of newness, the comfort of familiarity and history, the utter maddening of trying to be one with--and to be understood by while understanding--another at times so different as to be from another planet, as one who learned early that nobody can change another person, we can only change ourselves, and even if we could change another person we would destroy a uniqueness given to the world and remake them in our own image, and the world does need another me.... As someone who has lived and struggled with all of these things and experienced sweetness and joy as well as pain and suffering...the full range...the following words by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke have the deep and resonant ring of truth to them...for me. I believe the ideal that he writes of in the quotation below is indeed what would make the most enduring, satisfying, nurturing, and freeing relationships. It's also the hardest thing to get there...and the work to do and be this continues....

"The point of [any intimate relationship] is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good [relationship] is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of [her or] his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

Seen at Wild Fox Zen.