Why Love Can Feel So Difficult: A Lesson from John Welwood

You're having a lovely evening. Then your partner makes one comment, maybe about the dishes, maybe about your mother, and suddenly the person you adore feels like the enemy.

My late teacher and mentor, John Welwood, had a way of explaining that moment that changed how I see relationships. It's in a talk he gave at the California Institute of Integral Studies, later published by Lion's Roar as "Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible." You can read the full piece on Lion's Roar or as a PDF on John's site. I recommend all of it.

Here's what I take from it, and how I use it.

Three levels of connection

John described three levels that partners cycle through: ego to ego, person to person, and being to being.

Being to being is pure openness. You look at each other and feel completely met. Person to person is two real humans with feelings and histories, talking honestly. Ego to ego is the defended version of each of you, protecting territory.

The point is that every couple moves through all three, sometimes within an hour. When your partner is kind, you open. When they say something that stings, you wonder how you ended up with them. John's view was that this isn't a sign something has gone wrong. It's what close relationship is.

Think back for a moment. When did you and your partner last meet being to being? Person to person? Ego to ego? You probably don't have to think very hard about that last one.

What is a charnel ground?

In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, a charnel ground is a place where bodies were left in the open rather than buried. Meditators went there on purpose, to sit with death, decay, and impermanence instead of looking away.

John borrowed the image from his own teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, and applied it to love. Anyone who has been in a long relationship, he suggested, knows its charnel ground quality: the mess, the old wounds, the parts of ourselves we'd rather not see.

Most of us carry a cartoon picture of relationship as a safe harbor that will spare us loneliness, disappointment, and fear. John's point was the opposite. Close relationship is exactly where those things show up. As he put it, "Sooner or later relationship inevitably brings us to our knees."

Trungpa's line, which John quotes, is that we don't need to build a luxury hotel in the middle of the charnel ground. The work happens right there, in the mess.

What I see in my work

I love how clearly John describes the place so many couples get stuck. They love each other deeply. And they keep pressing on each other's oldest wounds, the ones from childhood that badly want to heal but mostly hide out of sight.

Those wounds don't come up with strangers. They come up with the person who matters most. That's what makes it so painful, and it's also why the relationship is where the healing can happen.

John wasn't saying the ego is bad, or that we should just endure pain. He saw our defended, controlling side as the raw material. When it gets exposed, we have a chance to soften it and become more fully ourselves.

He also borrowed an idea from Bernard Phillips: every person we try to get close to is a kind of Zen koan, a riddle with no formula. There's no technique that makes another human easy to love. At some point we have to drop our agendas and see the person in front of us as they actually are.

An everyday example

Say your partner forgets to call when they said they would. You feel a flash of hurt, then anger. Within a minute you've built a whole case: they don't care, they never think of you, this always happens.

That's ego to ego. Your defenses are up, and theirs will go up the moment you walk in swinging.

The charnel ground view doesn't ask you to pretend you aren't hurt. It asks you to notice what got touched. Maybe it's an old feeling of being forgotten that's much older than this relationship. Seeing that doesn't excuse a broken promise. It changes how you bring it up.

A practice for your next hard moment

The next time you feel yourself flip from "I adore you" to "how did I end up with you," try this:

1. Pause and name the level. Silently ask, "Is this ego to ego right now?"
2. Find the older feeling. Ask yourself, "What does this remind me of?" You don't need a full answer. Just notice.
3. Speak person to person. Try: "Something you did just hit an old sore spot for me. Can I tell you what came up, without either of us having to be wrong?"

If your partner says not now, that's fine. Come back to it when you've both settled.

This won't make hard moments disappear. John never promised that. But it can turn a fight into a moment of seeing each other more truly.

I still think about John's teaching nearly every day. If you'd like to know more about him and what he meant to me, I wrote about it in my tribute to John Welwood.

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