“Neale Donald Walsh: When will I learn enough about relationships to be able to have them go smoothly? Is there a way to be happy in relationships? Must they be constantly challenging?
God: There is a way to be happy in relationships and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you may have designed. 
Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself. You create ever more magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impact-fully and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.
Once you clearly understand this and deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter and especially personal human relationships. You see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, to construct Who You Really Are.
Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’d like to see ‘show up,’ not what part of another you can capture and hold. There can be only one purpose for relationships — and for all of life: to be and to decide Who You Really Are.
It is very romantic to say that you were ‘nothing’ until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not. They will try very hard but they cannot fill the roles to which they have been assigned by you.
It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.
Relationships are sacred because they provide life’s grandest opportunity — indeed, its only opportunity– to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of Self. Your first relationship must be with your Self. You must first learn to honor and cherish and love your Self. You must first see your Self as worthy before you can see another as worthy.
This is the message you have not been able to hear; this is the truth you have not been able to accept. Your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other – rather than your beloved Self. The test of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours, your highest conceptualization of Self.
And that is why you can never truly, purely fall in love with another. You have never truly, purely fallen in love with your Self.”
Neale Donald Walsh, Conversations With God – Book 1, p. 121-127.
