We are living through a unique moment in the evolution of the human race. The societal structures as we've known them have become unsustainable in a way we can no longer ignore. More than any other time in history, the choice before us as a human race has become a clear one—evolve or die. This is also true of the way we are meeting one another relationally. If we're going to see the value in joining together in partnership, our relationships will be forced to evolve.

More and more frequently, single people are noting that they don't see a reason to surrender the freedom they find in singlehood. This choice feels understandable, when you look at the current distortions of love that exist within the relation landscape. Casual hookups seem to carry less of a social taboo, women are more capable than ever of taking care of themselves, and our relationships with technology have in many ways offered a subterfuge for the intimacy we once found in the presence of other people. 

What's the Benefit to Healing Our Relationships?

So the question becomes: Why should we prioritize healing our intimate relationships? What is the benefit to us as individuals in doing the work required to evolve and take responsibility for attempting to cultivate a more conscious way of partnering?

There are a few very clear answers to this question. First, our survival depends upon it. We cannot continue to live within a wounded masculine paradigm that suggests that division, destruction, and deprivation of the earth we are inhabiting is a sustainable way to live. Second, because almost all of us have been wounded within the space of relationships, relationships hold the secret sauce that is required for us to heal. They hold up a potent mirror and offer data in the form of our activation points about the truth of how we're feeling inside. And finally, love is one of the most transcendent, clarifying, life-affirming experiences we can possibly have while we are alive. As the character Jen Valjean signs in the musical Les Misérables, "To love another person is to see the face of God." 

The Path of Continued Evolution

Committing ourselves to an authentic version of loving means keeping our hearts open to a love that coincides with various forms of evolution. I have learned more about the healing power of love through my relationship with my child's father, and the grace-filled way that each of us decided to set the other free, than I could have possibly learned if we stayed in the marital container that each of us knew we'd outgrown. Allowing our love to change form illustrated for me of the type of relationships it's possible to create when we make the decision to choose love over fear. When we decide to choose the path that supports our continued evolution over the path that makes us feel most comfortable or safe.

This is the introduction of a feminine principle in the way we choose to love. It prioritizes collaboration and trust, values transparency and authentic aliveness, and continues to believe that anything is possible when we prioritize loving from the space of our Soul.

But a patriarchal model of partnership is not interested in the process of our Soul's evolution. It has no interest in us taking responsibility for our lives and believing that we were always meant to be free. Because free people push back on the systems that are oppressing them and using fear to keep them under control. Free people define their lives for themselves and surrender the need to have the approval of an external authority. Free people heal. They return to seeing themselves through the lens of wholeness, instead of filling their days with addictions and distractions to make up for a lack of aliveness.

Sovereign Sense of Loving

It can be difficult to conceptualize a vision for what a sovereign sense of loving can be, when it's a paradigm we are meant to design for ourselves. To be sovereign means to be goverened by an inner authority. This is the equivalent of defining our Souls' truth for ourselves. The integration of a feminine perspective within our partnerships means living in alignment with our Souls' highest potential. Seeing a side-by-side comparison of loving from the space of our patriarchal programming vs. the space of sovereignty can offer something for us to wrap our heads around:

From the perspective of our Soul, the purpose of an aligned partnership will never be to diminish our personal power. A Soul-driven love inspires us to become more of who and what we are capable of being, not less.

The structural systems that suggested there was only one way for our lives to be lived are in the midst of their final days. An interdependent model of loving is one where we look to an inner authority for insight into what feels like the truths we choose to put our faith in. The point of unpacking how we've been socialized to hold gender roles, where we carry unconscious generational pain, and why we feel a fundamental lack of fulfillment in our relationships, is to understand that the wounded masculine paradigm we've been existing in has never been in alignment with the truth of who we are.

The rise of a feminine perspective does not mean trading in a patriarchal system of dominance for a matriarchal one. No, the rise of the feminine is the reclaiming of the feminine aspects that exist within all of us so that we can embody a felt sense of balance and integration. On a tangible level, this integration of our masculine and feminine energies looks like freedom.

The creation of a New Earth paradigm requires that we value freedom in every facet of our lives—in our structural systems, on our career paths, in our educational systems, and most certainly in our relationships—putting less of an emphasis on a false sense of certainty and finding more value in asking the question, "Does whatever I'm doing make me feel free?" The freedom that each of our Souls is essentially seeking is to decide what living an intentional life looks like for ourselves. This is the conscious transfer of trust from an externalized source of power to a source of power within. It is the knowing that my answers live within, my power lives within, my Trust resides within.

Excerpted from Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within by Dene Logan (May 2024.) Reprinted with permission from Sounds True.