Keeping the Love in Your Relationship Sacred

In today's society when relationships are a dime a dozen, being able to keep the love in a relationship, if it does exist, sacred can be a monumental task. One of the reasons keeping the love sacred fails so many times is because it gets talked about too often, many times with the wrong people. People who are newlyweds sometimes turn to other people for advice on how to make a relationship work, instead of allowing their own relationship to blossom. The Persian poet Rumi spoke of how love is the sacred bonding between the lover and the beloved and even though he spoke in mystical terms, this can still be applied to the type of intimate relationships people seek in their lives. The seeds for a loving relationship are planted at the beginning, which then blossom into a nurturing relationship (Mathnawi 1, 175-177). Most importantly, Rumi mentions how this love is something to be kept sacred by being silent about it. But what did he mean by "keeping your love silent?"

A quick glance at how the media treats relationships shows how there is a lack of silence in them. Once one makes a relationship public for all the world to see, the real love in that relationship becomes diluted. It is almost as if there is a leak in the relationship where the love starts to slowly escape, due to the exposure of that love to the public. This is much different from a socially sanctioned relationship, such as a wedding ceremony but again, some ceremonies are kept private with only the witnesses and justice of the peace presiding. The deep love that exists between a couple is what sustains the relationship. By treating a loving relationship sacred, one shows a genuine caring for the relationship. Such relationships are not meant to be shared with outsiders the way some people might want to share their religion with others. There is no such "missioning" of a relationship to the outside world. Instead, what happens in such a relationship is that love is able to be realized; it becomes a living entity on its own. Such a love is successfully achieved precisely because it is kept silent and sacred from the outside world. Lovers create their own worlds, according to Rumi, and such worlds are meant for retreating to away from the daily grind of the mundane world. Keep the world of your relationship sacred, private from the outside world, and watch how your love can grow stronger every day.

Rumi: The Path of Love. Translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski. Element Books, Boston, MA. 1999.