The title of this book: Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth - is a Truth that it is vital to recognize if you ever want to have a functional romantic relationship. We were set up to fail in romantic relationships by the dysfunctional perspectives and expectations of love and romance we learned growing up, according to the author Robert Burney. Robert is a Spiritual Teacher and pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing whose first book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called "one of the truly transformational works of our time." His second book Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light - Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing was published in the summer of 2011. Here is what he has to say about his third book that is being published in the September of 2012. Our perspective of love and romance dictates our relationship with love and romance - and that has been the problem, that has been why we have had a lousy relationship with love and romance. There is no happily-ever-after that we can reach when we find our prince or princess. As an adult you obviously know that intellectually - but emotionally you are still looking for it because it is what we were taught as children, it is part of the foundation programming that determines how we relate to life.
On some level you are probably judging your self because you haven't reached happily-ever-after. As I state on my website in the section on Romantic Relationships, "The thing that is so important about the issue of Romantic Relationships is to realize how we were set up to "fail" in romance - to really get it on a gut level, so that we can forgive ourselves." It is very important to start realizing how we were set up, so that we can change our attitudes, definitions, and expectations of romantic relationships into ones that are more functional - into ones that can help us start to learning how to approach love and romance in healthier ways. Once we start letting go of feeling responsible for something we were powerless over, letting go of the false guilt and toxic shame about our "mistakes" and "failures" in romance - then we can start to learn how to take healthy risks and make better choices. It is better to love and lose then never love - but we need to change what we are expecting from love and romance in order to even have a chance of being able to start learning how to have an interdependent relationship that can work for us. You can learn to be more loving to your self and open to the possibility of having a loving interdependent relationship with another person. Loving is the greatest adventure available to us - give your self a chance to experience how wonderful it can be by being willing to do the work to change your programming and heal your emotional wounds. It is very much worth it to learn to love - and reading this book could be a huge step in helping you to become available to have a healthier romantic relationship.
This book is a primarily a compilation of writings from my website that I have edited, rewritten and expanded upon to fit together in this work - that expansion ended up involving writing another 30,000 or so new words to add to those web articles.