The Quest for the Perfect Partner

      

By Joyce and Barry Vissell

Joyce and Barry Vissell Heartfullness      August 2025 with Joyce and Barry Vissell   “The Quest for the Perfect Partner” (Excerpt from Light in the Mirror by Barry and Joyce Vissell)   From the beginning of the workshop, Elsie, a woman in her late sixties who had been divorced for years, was longing to know how to find a mate. She wasn’t looking for just anyone. She felt she was now ready for her soulmate, her life partner, her kindred spirit. And she wanted to know where he was.   Sunday after lunch, partly with Elsie in mind, I spread a deck of the Shared Heart Cards, containing our favorite quotes from our first three books, face down on the floor. I told the group to inwardly ask for a message they needed and then pick a card. I watched as Elsie picked her card, looked at it and then grimaced. I asked her to read her card to the group. She instead announced that she wanted to put her card back and pick another. It was clear to me from the expression on Elsie’s face that she indeed had the perfect card. I again asked her to read it. With much reluctance, this is what she read: “The true soulmate is a state of consciousness ... not a person.”   People sometimes have difficulty with that statement from The Shared Heart. It is a great temptation to look outside of ourselves for the answers we need, but our soulmate, our highest spiritual partner, can never be found outside us, no matter how hard we look. It is not someone separate from us. The challenge is to take responsibility for being our own soulmate, and that requires loving ourselves in the way we wish someone else would love us. It often seems much more convenient to have someone else be our soulmate so we don’t have to look deeply inside of ourselves.   How many times, especially in our earlier years, have I foolishly tried to change Joyce so she could better fit my ideal of the perfect partner. I wanted her to walk and move more gracefully instead of having a childlike bounce in her gait. I wanted her to wear different clothes, to be more reasonable and even-tempered, and less sensitive and emotional. The list went on and on....   Joyce, similarly, wished she could change me. Often, we seemed to pounce on each other, mallet and chisel in hand, determined to create the perfect partner. We eventually softened in this determination to change the other, realized how much we loved one another, and decided to get married. But we hadn’t completely given up the hope of molding one another, even through our love, into a more perfect partner.   I remember after much difficulty finding a person willing to marry us (our religious difference in the early sixties was still a big obstacle), we finally came across a minister who said he would marry us on one condition — that we promise to honor the differences between us! By putting that condition upon our wedding, we knew he was the right person to marry us. And we knew this was the right commitment to make to one another.   Over the years, Joyce and I have been learning to accept one another as we are — complete with differences, personality quirks, flaws and beauty. Trying to change each other is refusing to accept our partner as a soul mirror, reflecting aspects of ourselves which we need to see if we want to learn more about ourselves. Trying to change our partner is, thus, a refusal to grow spiritually ourselves.     We have seen so much sorrow in people’s quest for the perfect spiritual partner. We have also seen profound soul growth. Andrew and Julie, two friends of ours, had what we felt to be a “life-partner” relationship. We saw the issues they were working on, and we knew they had what it took to work through them. Their love was strong, as was their commitment to their hearts and to one another. So we were all shocked when Julie suddenly ran off with another man, claiming she had found her true soulmate. Andrew, however, was devastated. He sank into despondency, at one point even thinking about suicide.   A few months later, Andrew was beginning to pull his life together when he met a woman with whom he fell in love. We saw him soon after that. He looked like he was floating on a bubble that could pop at any instant. There was a “pie-in-the-sky” smile on his face. He wasn’t all there, but what could we do? We weren’t about to point out to him the fragility of his condition. You just don’t do that to someone who feels they are in love, especially when they are not asking for your feedback. We wished him well in his new relationship and let him be.   It took six more months for the bubble to burst. Andrew’s girlfriend left him to be in another relationship. Again, there was the shock, the sinking into despair, the loss of hope, the grieving. We comforted him as much as we could.   About a month later, we bumped into him at another friend’s house. He was beaming. Somewhat cautiously, I asked him how he was doing. He told me he was engaged to be married. I looked closer at him. There was something different about him. He seemed more grounded, more peaceful, more rooted in himself. He smiled at me, turned his head to one side, and showed me his newly pierced ear adorned with a lovely earring.   “This is my engagement present,” he announced with a smile. “I created a ceremony and got engaged to myself. I’m planning a very special wedding ceremony. It’ll just be me, making vows to love myself, all alone at my favorite place in nature.”   I was so happy I embraced him. He had finally learned the “soulmate lesson.” He learned that his true soulmate could never be found in another person. He was about to wed his inner soulmate. By doing so, he would be able to enter relationships with others from a place of more wholeness.   We can all benefit from Andrew’s story. How delightful it would be if each of us created such a ceremony for ourselves. Why not? We all need to consciously love ourselves more and look less for fulfillment from outside?   Some esoteric spiritual traditions speak about the “mystical marriage” as the joining together of the male and female aspects of oneself. We touch upon the mystical marriage when we embrace what we love in a partner as being a part of us. We move towards integration when we accept that our beloved is really a mirror, reflecting back to us all the qualities of our inner partner. Seeing beauty in Joyce is a way of seeing the beauty of my feminine side, but I need to take responsibility for the beauty I see as being a part of me, not just outside me. In this way, every conscious relationship can help each one of us with our own inner “mystical marriage.”    When our inner man weds our inner woman, we become whole, integrated and fulfilled human beings. Then our relationships with others will reflect this same wholeness. We will then dance with our partners as equals, rather than with a feeling of incompleteness. How much greater the joy of the dance! How much deeper the love!     A Couple of Miracles: One Couple, More Than a Few Miracles. Semi-Finalist, Book of the Year, Online Book Club.  Available on Amazon Joyce & Barry Vissell, a nurse/therapist and psychiatrist couple since 1964, are counselors near Santa Cruz, CA, who are passionate about conscious relationship and personal-spiritual growth. They are the authors of 10 books and a free audio album of sacred songs and chants. Visit their web site at https://SharedHeart.org for their free weekly inspirational videos and monthly e-heartletter, their updated schedule, and inspiring past articles on many topics about relationship and living from the heart.