Truth about Love, Multiple Partners and Marriage
“You have romanticized “soul partner” to mean the “other half of you.” In truth, the human soul—the part of Me that “individuates”—is much larger than you have imagined. Much bigger. It is not the air in one room. It is the air in one entire house. And that house has many rooms.
The “soul” is not limited to one identity. It is not the “air” in the dining room. Nor does the soul “split” into two individuals who are called soul partners. It is not the “air” in the living room-dining room combination. It is the “air” in the whole mansion.
And in My kingdom there are many mansions. And while it is the same air flowing around, in, and through every mansion, the air of the rooms in one mansion may feel “closer.” You might walk into those rooms and say, “It feels ‘close’ in there.”
So that you understand, then—there is only One Soul. Yet what you call the individuated soul is huge, hovering over, in, and through hundreds of physical forms.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
Neale Donald Walsch: “And, if we can have more than one “soul partner,” that would explain how it is possible for us to experience those intense “soul partner feelings” with more than one person a lifetime— and even more than one person at a time!”
God: “Indeed.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Then it is possible to love more than one person at a time. “
God: “Of course.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
God: “Why would you ever want to “reserve” love? Why would you want to hold it “in reserve”?”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Because it’s not right to love more than one person “that way.” It’s a betrayal.”
God: “Who told you that?”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Everybody. Everybody tells me that. My parents told me that. My religion told me that. My society tells me that. Everybody tells me that!
God: “These are some of those “sins of the father” being passed onto the son. Your own experience teaches you one thing—that loving everyone full out is the most joyful thing you can do. Yet your parents, teachers, ministers tell you something else—that you may only love one person at a time “that way.” And we’re not just talking about sex here. If you consider one person as special as another in any way, you are often made to feel that you have betrayed that other.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Right! Exactly! That’s how we’ve got it set up!”
God: “Then you are not expressing true love, but some counterfeit variety.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“Any attempt to restrict the natural expressions of love is a denial of the experience of freedom—and thus a denial of the soul itself. For the soul is freedom personified. God is freedom, by definition—for God is limitless and without restriction of any kind. The soul is God, miniaturized. Therefore, the soul rebels at any imposition of limitation, and dies a new death each time it accepts boundaries from without.
In this sense, birth itself is a death, and death a birth. For in birth, the soul finds itself constricted within the awful limitations of a body, and at death escapes those constrictions again. It does the same thing during sleep.
Back to freedom the soul flies—and rejoices once again with the expression and experience of its true nature.
Yet can its true nature be expressed and experienced while with the body?
That is the question you ask—and it drives to the very reason and purpose of life itself. For if life with the body is nothing more than a prison or a limitation, then what good can come of it, and what can be its function, much less its justification?”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“The soul will always rebel at limitation. Of any kind. That is what has sparked every revolution in the history of humankind, not just the revolution which causes a man to leave his wife—or a wife to suddenly leave her husband. (Which, by the way, also happens.)”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“I am not for or against “open marriage.” Whether you are or not depends upon what you decide you want in, and out of, your marriage. And your decision about that creates Who You Are with regard to the experience you call “marriage.” For it is as I have told you: Every act is an act of self-definition.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“Love is that which is unlimited. There is no beginning and no end to it. No before and no after. Love always was, always is, and always will be.
So love is also always. It’s the always reality.
Now we get back to another word we used before—freedom. For if love is unlimited, and always, then love is… free. Love is that which is perfectly free.
Now in the human reality, you will find that you always seek to love, and to be loved. You will find that you will always yearn for that love to be unlimited. And you will find that you will always wish you could be free to express it.
You will seek freedom, unlimitedness, and eternality in every experience of love. You may not always get it, but that is what you will seek. You will seek this because this is what love is, and at some deep place you know that, because you are love, and through the expression of love you are seeking to know and to experience Who and What You Are.
You are life expressing life, love expressing love, God expressing God.
All these words are therefore synonymous. Think of them as the same thing:
God Life Love Unlimited Eternal Free Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.
You are all of those things, and you will seek to experience yourself as all of these things sooner or later.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“You will strive as a species to experience a love that is unlimited, eternal, and free. The institution of marriage has been your attempt at creating eternality. With it, you agreed to become partners for life. But this did little to produce a love which was “unlimited” and “free.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
Neale Donald Walsch: “Why do we prefer marriage if we know that it is so difficult?”
God: “Because marriage was the only way you could figure out to bring “foreverness,” or eternality, into your experience of love.
It was the only way a female could guarantee her support and survival, and the only way a male could guarantee the constant availability of sex, and companionship.
So a social convention was created. A bargain was struck. You give me this and I’ll give you that. In this it was very much like a business. A contract was made. And since both parties needed to enforce the contract, it was said to be a “sacred pact” with God—who would punish those who broke it.
Later, when that didn’t work, you created man- made laws to enforce it. But even that hasn’t worked.
Neither the so-called laws of God nor the laws of man have been able to keep people from breaking their marriage vows.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “How come?”
God: “Because those vows as you have them normally constructed run counter to the only law that matters.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Which is?”
God: “Natural law.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
God: “Marriage, as most of you have practiced it, is not particularly beautiful. For it violates two of the three aspects of what is true about each human being by nature.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Will You go over it again? I think I’m just starting to pull this together.”
God: “Okay. Once more from the top.
Who You Are is love. What love is, is unlimited, eternal, and free.
Therefore, that is what you are. That is the nature of Who You Are. You are unlimited, eternal, and free, by nature.
Now, any artificial social, moral, religious, philosophical, economic, or political construction which violates or subordinates your nature is an impingement upon your very Self—and you will rail against it.
What do you suppose gave birth to your own country? Was it not “Give me liberty, or give me death”?
Well, you’ve given up that liberty in your country, and you’ve given it up in your lives. And all for the same thing. Security.
You are so afraid to live—so afraid of life itself—that you’ve given up the very nature of your being in trade for security.
The institution you call marriage is your attempt to create security, as is the institution called government. Actually, they are both forms of the same thing—artificial social constructions designed to govern each other’s behavior.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
Neale Donald Walsch: “I always thought that marriage was the ultimate announcement of love.”
God: “As you have imagined it, yes, but not as you have constructed it. As you have constructed it, it is the ultimate announcement of fear.
If marriage allowed you to be unlimited, eternal, and free in your love, then it would be the ultimate announcement of love.
As things are now, you become married in an effort to lower your love to the level of a promise or a guarantee.
Marriage is an effort to guarantee that “what is so” now will always be so. If you didn’t need this guarantee, you would not need marriage. And how do you use this guarantee? First, as a means of creating security (instead of creating security from that which is inside of you), and second, if that security is not forever forthcoming, as a means of punishing each other, for the marriage promise which has been broken can now form the basis of the lawsuit which has been opened.
You have thus found marriage very useful—even if it is for all the wrong reasons.
Marriage is also your attempt to guarantee that the feelings you have for each other, you will never have for another. Or, at least, that you will never express them with another in the same way.”
Neale Donald Walsch: “Namely, sexually.”
God: “Namely, sexually.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
God: “Marriage as you have constructed it is a way of saying: “This relationship is special. I hold this relationship above all others.”
Nothing. It’s not a question of “right” or “wrong.” Right and wrong do not exist. It’s a question of what serves you. Of what re-creates you in the next grandest image of Who You Really Are.
If Who You Really Are is a being who says, “This one relationship—this single one, right over here—is more special than any other,” then your construction of marriage allows you to do that perfectly. Yet you might find it interesting to notice that almost no one who is, or has been, recognized as a spiritual master is married.
Neale Donald Walsch: “Yeah, because masters are celibate. They don’t have sex.”
God: “No. It’s because masters cannot truthfully make the statement that your present construction of marriage seeks to make: that one person is more special to them than another.
This is not a statement that a master makes, and it is not a statement that God makes.
The fact is that your marriage vows, as you presently construct them, have you making a very un-Godly statement. It is the height of irony that you feel this is the holiest of holy promises, for it is a promise that God would never make.
Yet, in order to justify your human fears, you have imagined a God who acts just like you. Therefore, you speak of God’s “promise” to his “Chosen People,” and of covenants between God and those God loves, in a special way.
You cannot stand the thought of a God who loves no one in a way which is more special than any other, and so you create fictions about a God who only loves certain people for certain reasons. And you call these fictions Religions. I call them blasphemies. For any thought that God loves one more than another is false—and any ritual which asks you to make the same statement is not a sacrament, but a sacrilege.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“Religion and marriage the way you have constructed them is what we are talking about here. You think that this talk is tough? I tell you this: You have bastardized the Word of God in order to justify your fears and rationalize your insane treatment of each other.
You will make God say whatever you need God to say in order to continue limiting each other, hurting each other, and killing each other in My name.
Yea, you have invoked My name, and waved My flag, and carried crosses on your battlefields for centuries, all as proof that I love one people more than another, and would ask you to kill to prove it.
Yet I tell you this: My love is unlimited and unconditional.
That is the one thing you cannot hear, the one truth you cannot abide, the one statement you cannot accept, for its all-inclusiveness destroys not only the institution of marriage (as you have constructed it), but every one of your religions and governmental institutions as well.
For you have created a culture based on exclusion, and supported it with a cultural myth of a God who excludes.
Yet the culture of God is based on inclusion. In God’s love, everyone is included. Into God’s Kingdom everyone is invited.
And this truth is what you call a blasphemy.
And you must. Because if it is true, then everything you have created in your life is false. All human conventions and all human constructions are faulty to the degree that they are not unlimited, eternal, and free.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“Love has no requirements. That’s what makes it love.
If your love for another carries requirements, then it is not love at all, but some counterfeit version.
That is what I have been trying to tell you here. It is what I have been saying, in a dozen different ways, with every question you’ve asked here.
Within the context of marriage, for example, there is an exchange of vows that love does not require. Yet you require them, because you do not know what love is. And so you make each other promise what love would never ask.
You can redesign your social construction called “marriage” so that it does not ask what Love would never ask, but rather, declares what only love could declare.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“How could I be against marriage? We are all married. We are married to each other —now, and forever- more. We are united. We are One. Ours is the biggest marriage ceremony ever held. My vow to you is the grandest vow ever made. I will love you forever, and free you for everything. My love will never bind you in any way, and because of this you are “bound” to eventually love Me —for freedom to Be Who You Are is your greatest desire, and My greatest gift.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
