Track and Field

Relationships are shifting. We don’t have relationships the same way our parents did and we certainly don’t have relationships as our grandparents did.Men and women will always be different, but evolution has forced us over the centuries to change the way men and women relate, couple, and choose to be monogamous or not. Divorce has allowed women to get out of oppressive relationships and choose a different way to support themselves.As relationships are changing, then the ideal relationship also changes.A while back you got married to unite families and properties, that was the ideal. Now we have an ideal of “romantic” love through marriage because of hollywood and also because we are moving into love from spiritual places, not just about survival and pooling our resources. If you think about relationships in the caveman era… it was all about pooling resources. And women back then were the main providers because they did all the gathering of the everyday foods, nuts, seeds, berries, vegetables etc. The men only got the hunt every other occasion. The women were the source of 80% of the food. With evolution women took the background as men started to be dominant in providing resources through technology and through controlling women in marriage so the men could track who was the mother of their babies… and just because the whole world become about control. The stranglehold of control is what is starting to shift on our planet. Big time.Take a look at our economy. We are swinging back to women becoming the providers. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and researcher on love across cultures and time has pointed out how women today are coming back to the center of driving the economy. Women are becoming stronger because they are more central in gathering resources, in making choices about our daily lives and taking leadership roles in our governments and communities.Love experts have said that a strong woman is intimidating to a man, while others say a woman needs to create the nurturing space for the relationship, to be being the “soil” for the man to plant his seed and grow. I don’t think this gets to where we are arriving at with the shift in relationships.I think a deeper evolutionary process is happening where we are questioning the biological roles of men and women and exploring how to actually shift these roles, so that both men and women can be aware of their masculine and feminine bodies and hormones and have more choice in relationships, more choice in how to love and more choice in creating the ideal love that they are looking for. I know when my mother got married, she didn’t think of any of those things! She was thinking, what a nice hunk, I hope he picks me!The freedom women have now in relationships, means we need to take our dreams and ideals about relationships to a NEW place. Being a strong woman has been said to be a challenge to a man, but throughout history strong women have been necessary for survival and for keeping families together. Strong women are the ones who recognize that relationships are not what we think they are, but rather what we create within the family and with their love partner.The reason we are experiencing relationship “breakdowns” is not just because we do not want to “work” on the relationship, but rather the relationship itself is allowing us to access every wound, hurt, question about love we have been born to experience. You may find yourself with a great guy or a wonderful woman, but the relationship doesn’t take off because a part of you is still resolving a hurt in love or deciding what exactly is the love you want to create.You may be staying with a certain person in a relationship not for any logical reason, but simply because your soul has made an agreement to be with that person. So our logical mind may question the relationship constantly, but the soul knows you must stay to help you learn your lesson of love and to help the other person get their lesson.Strong women are the ones who recognize that even when our romantic relationships don’t work, we are still creating love at every corner. We still hold open a space for love in our lives. And we are working through centuries of expectations where women were expected to suffer through abusive relationships. But women are no longer forced to stay in a relationship to survive economically or be accepted by their family or society.Women are choosing independence before suffering, because the new ideal of the shift in relationships is self-realization in place of giving up the self for relationships. This does not mean women will focus on self to the neglect of children, but it does mean at a practical level, child rearing will become not the be all and end all or a woman and we will change the way we define to children what is a woman’s role and what is a man’s role in the world and what is the individual’s role within the family. Women are creating choices now that will shift the planet into a world where the individual in the relationship has a voice to change the relationship for the better.Strong women in love are the ones who stay open to the shift in relationships, because we no longer have the guarantee that any relationship will last.That does not mean that strong women do not feel the hurt of a relationship breaking down. In fact, it means we become more emotionally stronger to take separation and hurt and loss into our hearts and heal and look at all the unresolved hurts that we have experienced in love, not just this life – but for all the lives you have ever lived.I know my mother did not have the opportunity to resolve her hurt in her relationship. So I also spend time giving thanks to her. In spite of feeling trapped, unable to express herself and feeling not loved, my mother taught me to be free, independent and strong.Strong women, teach other women and men how to be hurt and still love in spite of the hurt, to give instead of going into “what’s in it for me”. Imagine what the world will be like when we finally shift out of feeling trapped in our choices of love, life and relationships and start healing those old wounds. This shift in relationships is asking to lift every unturned stone and see what remains unloved and love it until we can be free of any suffering.