Karma — what kind of relationship are you in?

Here's a question I've asked callers for twenty-five years, and it still stops people cold: is your relationship built on choice, or built on need?

Be straight with yourself for a moment. If your relationship is or was based mostly on attraction and personality — the chemistry, the type, the spark and not much underneath it — that's a relationship of need (what I used to call a third-dimensional relationship, for my longtime clients who remember my old language). If you're staying because of money, or entanglements, or because leaving feels more impossible than staying — that's a relationship of need too. These relationships rest on the idea that another person will make you whole. And that's why they struggle the way they do: two people each waiting for the other to complete them, constantly negotiating and compromising, having the same "talk" to straighten things out one more time — and still ending up unsatisfied.

Now hear the next part, because it matters: these relationships are not mistakes. They have their time and their place. We enter them for many reasons, and not the least of them is karma — old lessons, unfinished business, growth we couldn't get any other way. A hard relationship can be exactly the teacher a soul signed up for. It usually keeps teaching until one half of the couple realizes they can no longer grow in the way they need to. That moment of realizing — that's not failure. That's the lesson landing.

I've watched so many people reach it: they wake up, they see that the relationship can't carry them where they're going, and after the untangling comes a new and very specific longing — for everything the old relationship was not.

And let me say clearly what I say to everyone: I am not telling you to leave your partner. Spirit never tries to control you, and neither will I. We stay in relationships of need exactly as long as we need to — I certainly did, for ten years. But if these words are landing somewhere tender, it may be that you've outgrown the need for this kind of lesson, and part of you already knows it.

If you're uncertain, that's the most human thing in the world — and it's precisely what a reading is for. Not to hand you a verdict. To hold up the mirror, so you can see your own situation clearly enough to choose.

— Shannon Rose

Unsure what your relationship is teaching you — or whether the lesson is done? Book a Reading and we'll get you clarity, by phone.