Relationships: The Ideal, The Ordeal, and The Real Deal

My best friend Scott McGregor told me something he'd heard from Micheal Boyle that landed in my body like a truth-bomb:

In relationships: first you have your ideal… then your ordeal… then the REAL DEAL.

It was so simple. So funny. And so painfully accurate.

“We're born alone, we die alone, and we live alone, each on our own planet of perception. No two people have ever met… Even the people you know best and love with all your heart are your own projections… You're the one who orders your favorite food and loves your favorite music… You've always been your favorite subject — your only subject. It's all about you.”
— Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy

And honestly, that’s why relationships are such a powerful spiritual path.

Because love, connection, healing, commitment, and agreements… they’re not just about “the other person.” They’re a journey into ourselves — a chance to remove our blocks to love and discover something deeper:

Love is safe. Love is real. And I can trust it.

Not just in romantic relationships — but in friendships, communities, personal development, sexuality, and even the relationship we have with ourselves. Let’s explore this more deeply:

1. The Ideal: The Fantasy That Pulls Us In
The ideal is intoxicating -  It’s the honeymoon phase. It’s the time where we project all of our hopes and dreams onto the person in front of us. The ideal is what inspires us -  It shows us what we long for, but the ideal is also often a spiritual bypass in disguise. Because what we’re often idealising isn’t the other person. It's the idea that love will mean no discomfort.

Even after the honeymoon phase we can keep coming back to fantasy. God knows I LOVE fantasy. Just the other day I was imagining being given a 2 week prognosis of dying and thinking of all the ‘Fuck it’ things I would do. Because this helps me avoid reality

For me I have always imagined constant adventures, hedonism and ease of money making. Everything flows and my partner is so sexually open that we can play with others with zero jealousy and complete compersion.  Playing with fantasy helps me avoid reality.

The problem is that the more I attach to my fantasy the more I begin to see how reality cannot measure up… and so I lose all that yummy gratitude and inspiration and resentment and blame kicks in, leading to… 

2. The Ordeal: Where the Work Actually Begins

If we are lost in our thoughts this is where life gets very stressful. The cracks in the relationship become so large that they engulf us and we feel hopeless and lost. Negative thoughts can spiral and send us into anger, resentment and then guilt and depression. This is where couples come to couples therapy with me. The good news is that this is a fertile time. This is the compost of personal development! 

The ordeal is where we discover our attachment wounds, our nervous system patterns, our unmet childhood needs, and our resistance to accountability. And this is where many people unconsciously quit - Including me. I’ve been in so many relationships where things got vulnerable and real and then I pulled away, seeking the next fantasy and the next dopamine hit of novelty. 

Different attachment styles flavour the ordeal differently:

• Anxious attachment often fears abandonment and disconnection.
• Avoidant attachment often fears engulfment and being trapped.
• Disorganised attachment often carries a deeper nervous system terror — love and danger tangled together.

Most of us have a mix.

This is actually gold dust.
By stepping out of our thoughts and observing we can follow the gold dust back we get to the original wound, either as imagination and memory or as somatic sensation in the body (or both). This is why I love the world of personal development. It's a time where I get to explore my pain and learn to open myself to more love and joy. I love working with couples and I love working on my own relationships. I love this shit! Because deep down I (and I imagine all of us) really want…

3.  The Real Deal: Love, Beyond Fantasy

I believe that when one truly understands someone one cannot help but love them.

That doesn’t mean you always like everything they do or say or always want to hang out, but it points to a deeper love - an opening to who we really are and a deep sense of welcoming and belonging, together and a sense that we can be real with them and they can be real with us! Doesn’t that sound like a relief? No more pretending. No more secret resentments. A celebration of truth!

This requires integration of truth, which includes conflict , rupture and repair. The real deal is when:

• you can tell the truth without collapsing into shame
  
• you can hear feedback without defending
  
• you can admit you broke an agreement without disappearing
  
• you can feel your nervous system activate without making it your partner’s fault
  
• you can choose love even when it isn’t exciting
  
  

The real deal is intimacy that has been tested. Not performative closeness. Not “good vibes only”. Not the ideal. In fact if you really look into the ideal and follow it to its logical conclusion you’ll see you don’t actually want that anyway! It is just a hedonic treadmil that will enslave you and kill your love. 

“There are two tragedies in life. The first is not getting what you want. The second is getting it.”

This misquote is often attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw, though sometimes credited to Oscar Wilde. It highlights a paradox: the pain of failure and the disillusionment of success, suggesting that desire often causes suffering, regardless of the outcome.Suggesting that beyond desire and longing is something more important to our soul - the need for intimacy and love, which requires working through our blocks to love - our fear of pain. 

Agreements and Broken Agreements

Agreements it turns out are a gauge for our progress in this area. I’ve often struggled with the sense of obligation that goes along with agreements and commitment. When I look deeper into myself I find something hard to admit;  If I continue to never commit or to break agreements then I can never trust myself. 

Damn! That sucks. In my personal investigations and in my work with clients the themes of responsibility and commitment is a common sticking point. This is why in counselling we form a counselling contract and uphold the boundaries quite strictly. It helps people to understand the importance of agreements in building inner security. 

The challenge is that making agreements can often activate anxiety and shame, because the moment we break an agreement, we trigger the fear of being judged, of disappointing someone, of being seen as selfish... of losing love
And so the ordeal begins. Our insecure attachment patterns play out.

The hardest part is actually facing up to the breaking of agreements, both with ourselves and with others. This is the deep truth that all boundaries and agreemenets are with ourselves and we break them regularly! 

Agreements Help Us Identify Integration or Disintigration

The Hidden Gift of AgreementsAgreements aren’t there to restrict us. They’re there to reveal us.

They shine a light on where our belief systems are delusional, where we’re over-giving to earn love, where we’re avoiding truth, and where we’re not fully in integrity with ourselves or others. Agreements show us.  When we show up to do THE WORK and go through the ordeal we learn 

Integration means learning to hold fear, guilt, and desire with awareness and compassion — not trying to get rid of them, but letting them be present without letting them run your life. Remembering that fear doesn’t go away just because you want it to. If you try to “get rid of it”, you usually end up suppressing it (it leaks out sideways as irritability, avoidance, shutdown), or projecting it (blaming others). So fear ends up running your life from the shadows.

When I coach people it's helping them see thier inner fears and acknowledge them, but then make a new agreement not to react from them. For example John was finding he was rescuing his girlfriend from her fearful emotions and he was getting burned out. He now knows to pause and say: “A part of me really wants to rescue you right now because I hate seeing you in pain. But I trust you can feel this, and I can stay close while you do.”
That’s integration, without the need for the ideal (which is born from fear of pain).

What Is The Real Deal, Really?

The real deal is presence in the face of the reality of our beautiful imperfections and learning to love them all in ourselves and each other. Imagine that? Imagine feeling that you adore yourself and each other in the same way you would a little toddler who is doing their best, trying to walk and falling over. The human spirit is beautiful in its trying and all its little coping mechanisms.

When we can reveal and integrate our fearful blocks to love then we are living in THE REAL DEAL. 

Want some help navigating your ordeal? Contact me for some counselling or coaching and I’d be happy to be alongside you and celebrating your progress.​