This note is about love and relationships, commitment and marriage, four completely different things, four separate forces, four distinct chambers of the human heart that we have been told beat as one. The four chambers reflect the four elements – Fire, Air, Water and Earth – Commitment is Water; Marriage is Earth; Love is Fire; and Relationship is Air.
What I am writing may not be comprehensive or indeed the entire truth, but given the shifting narrative regarding ‘relationships’ in this ‘awakening time’, I thought I would pen some reflections based on client work I’ve been engaged in for quite some time.
Let us begin with Water and the concept of commitment, because commitment feels the most intimate of the four. It sounds like this: I choose you. In the fullness of health and in the diminishment of sickness, I choose you. In abundance and in the austerity that strips everything back to what matters, I choose you. When choosing is easy, I choose you. When choosing costs me something, I choose you still, again and again. Commitment is your word. That is one sOul standing before another and saying: this is who I will be for you. It needs no court, witness, or contracts. It is an act of moral integrity, freely chosen, privately renewed where no one else can see.
Commitment differs from marriage, which is the element of Earth, though it is largely seen as one and the same. But a marriage contract contains none of the language of commitment. It does not ask you to stay. It does not ask you to love. It says nothing of loyalty, of choosing, of the tender and difficult work of staying ‘till death do us part’ – those heart based ideals —are nowhere on the document. For those who are married, take a look at your decree! What you will find is a legal instrument: a status change that alters taxes, assets, inheritance, medical authority, debt, and the structures of what remains when things fall apart.
Despite the romance of a marriage, you did not sign a forever contract. You signed a default exit agreement. From what I have observed, most jurisdictions have already written the terms of your marriage dissolution. If you are like me, the concept of a prenup smacks of distrust and dishonesty, placing money over love, and yet, ironically, when you marry, you already have one. The issue is that you didn’t consciously write it, but you have entered into a state defined prenup!
On to chambers three and four – love, Fire, and relationships, Air. They are not the same thing either.
Love, in its deepest expression, is Fire, transforming the heart of those who receive its light. Love of this quality is a seeing, a radical, unflinching capacity to behold another sOul in its fullness and to want, with every faculty of your being, their flourishing, regardless of what that flourishing costs you. This is the lOve that releases, the lOve that can watch someone walk toward a life beyond your shared horizon and still wish them, genuinely and with open hands, every grace that life can carry. For lOve burns away every last condition, every expectation, every quiet demand that the beloved remain within reach. It simply burns, cleanly and with great tenderness, toward the good of another, even when that good carries them far from where you stand.
A relationship is something different, and Air is its element — moving, circulating, requiring constant renewal to remain vital. It is an exchange of time, of energy, of attention, of care, of presence, and there is no dishonour in naming it as such, for Air sustains life precisely through its giving and receiving, its endless circulation between one body and another. We have constructed an entire vocabulary around its valuations: compatibility, investment, worth, and return, and whilst these words carry little of the poetry we associate with lOve, they carry something true about what relationship actually is beneath the romantic veneer we so willingly drape across it. Quintessentially mutable, exchange is the breath that moves between two people across the long, ordinary, unrepeatable stretch of a shared life. Yet it is not lOve, and conflating the two has brought enormous grief to many people I have sat with across the years. When someone says I lOve you but I am no longer in lOve with you, what they are reaching toward, imprecisely and painfully, is precisely this distinction — I want what is best for you, but I can no longer sustain this particular exchange. That truth deserves more honest and more courageous language than we have yet learned to give it.
And here is the part we may not be prepared for – people say one thing and live another! They speak of forever, but they may choose later to leave. And that fact was never emphasised in the stories and films I read or watched as a lad. Nope! Passionate, yearning romance danced in my retina with music of becoming one, merging and living happily ever after. They never showed what waits on the other side of it: the slow revelation of another person’s full humanity, the places where Water meets resistance, where Fire dims to ember in the ordinary Wednesday of a life, where Air grows stale in a room where two people have stopped truly breathing together, where Earth, so solid at the beginning, shifts beneath the weight of everything that was never spoken.
We arrive into our relationships carrying the accumulated imagery of a culture that confused intensity with depth, and when the intensity settled, as it always does, into the quieter and more demanding country of genuine intimacy, many find themselves grieving a place they had never actually lived in, mourning a version of love that was always more imagination than incarnation. This is not a failure of love. It is the invitation of it — the moment when all four chambers ask, together and with great seriousness, whether you are willing to know and be known beyond the version of yourself you first brought to the door.
Let’s pause and breathe. Please note what is happening inside you as you read this, as you have likely one of three voices – the one that is agreeing; the one that says you are simplifying and missing so much more; or the defensive one trying to protect something held for a long time. All three are worth sitting with, for each reveals something about where you currently dwell within these four chambers.
Beneath the noise of those voices, however, the framework holds, albeit modified by personal and cultural morality and belief. That pressure is not an argument against clarity. It is simply the evidence of how deeply these four forces have been woven together in us, and how much courage it requires to begin to separate them.
But rarely are movement and change, evolution and growth acknowledged as agencies of life, despite the fact that everything is in motion. The stars, despite appearing as fixed entities, are in motion, drifting slowly apart across distances. No one day ever repeats itself, even if each day carries one of seven names. Nothing in the universe holds its shape forever, and perhaps the goal was never permanence, despite the encouragement of a system that prefers continuity and consistency. Perhaps the goal was something more like orbit, two people moving through the years with enough gravity to draw toward one another, and enough integrity of self not to collapse into one another, ever spiraling together, near enough to matter, free enough to remain. It is an orbit that requires intention, that requires daily recommitment and requires devotion to the relationship itself as a living entity that has its own needs, its own seasons, its own particular hungers
You can have love without relationship. You can have commitment without marriage. You can hold all four, or move through life with fewer of them, and live with great depth either way. But the life worth examining is not the one that checked every box. It is the one that understood what each box actually contained and chose, with open eyes, what to carry forward.
And perhaps that is where we begin again. The four separate chambers can find a more truthful way of belonging together and as you understand them separately, they open up the fifth chamber – Aether – a living wholeness that arises when each element is free to be fully itself. Being honest with yourself as to what you want from any given relationship, as well as recognising which ‘chamber (s)’ you inhabit in any given relationship as well as knowing which chamber your beloved/ companion/ friend/ child/ colleague is inhabiting, is empowering, as it offers a clear demarcation of what the connection truly is, and what needs to be clarified, worked upon, or accepted if the connection is to move forward.
To offer lOve where lOve is called for, commitment where commitment is required, honest exchange where the Air between you has grown thin, and the grounded realism of Earth when the structures of your shared life need tending.
Whatever you carry, may these four chambers offer it some light. And may you find, in the clarity of that light, the particular courage that your own life is asking of you.
