A Conversation with Daphne Rose Kingma
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)

Daphne Rose Kingma (www.daphnerosekingma.com) is a widely recognized expert on matters of the heart and the author of ten books on love and relationships, including The Future of Love: The Power of the Soul in Intimate Relationships; True Love; Finding True Love; The Men We Never Knew, and the classic on the psychological journey of ending a relationship, Coming Apart.

Daphne is also a highly esteemed emotional healer. For more than twenty years, she has offered private consultation to clients in Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara, California, as well as by phone to people all over the United States and in Europe, providing insight, transformation, and healing of the heart. Her remarkable gift for sorting out the emotional issues in any life situation, whether in complex corporate environments or the most intimate relationship, has earned her the affectionate title “The Einstein of Emotions.”

We decided to test Daphne with a tough question from the start: What is love? She didn’t hesitate to answer: “Love is the unmistakable energy in which, for a moment, or a week, or a lifetime we recognize our profound indissoluble connection to another or to all others or to the universe. It’s that energetic flash or vibration that tells us we are not alone. When we, as electro-magnetic bodies, experience love, we’re vibrating at that level of connection. And each of us has had moments in which we feel that. Culturally we have relationships that represent various configurations of connections based on the energy of love, defining how two people stand in relation to one another. Marriage, for example, is a particular configuration of connection that has certain earmarks and traditions. The tricky part about what’s happening these days is that we’ve had a traditional tendency to equate love with marriage and family relationships. We’ve expected love to look like marriage that inevitably involves a certain kind of daily domestic life. It must be emotionally exclusive and there aren’t going to be other people that are a part of it except any children that are born of it. And it’s going to be life-long.

“So, we’ve habitually defined love as belonging to that kind of relationship. What’s happening now is that traditional relationships are blowing apart, and we’re learning about the real nature of love. We’re learning that it can occur in all sorts of configurations; it can occur in a conventional marriage, or it can occur for five minutes in a powerful conversation in a grocery store. It can occur in a fleeting romance. The flip in our view of love is that we are narcissistic basis for relationship to a spiritual basis. In terms of marriage, we’re moving from the form to the content, which is love. We used to be completely focused on the form: ‘Are you married? Do you have children? Oh, you got divorced, now you’re not married any more. Oh, you’re not married yet? When are you going to get married?’ Now we’re moving from the form to the essence; the questions become, ‘Do we love one another? Can we expand our love? Can we continue to love the person we loved in marriage and now love them as a friend? Can we love our enemies and strangers? Can we participate in many forms of relationship and know that each of them can be about love?”

Does this mean that the tradition of marriage is endangered? “The current national statistic is a little more than one out of two marriages end in divorce,” Daphne reveals. “It’s been that high for awhile, so we are getting used to that figure. But inside we’re still having trouble with it. That is, our psyches are still struggling because we cling to the belief that love is exclusive, that it belongs to one person and one relationship, and the relationship has to fulfill everything. So we’re still experiencing emotional shattering when marriages end. We still get overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, shame, or anger. We think it has to be somebody’s fault, instead of thinking: We went on a journey together. We reached our particular destination and now it’s time for something different.

“This is a struggle that I know quite personally. As a young woman, I entered into a very traditional and committed marriage, expecting that to be my one lifetime relationship. It was a tremendous shock for me to reach a point where I felt that relationship was no longer viable. In order to act on that conviction, I didn’t just have to end my marriage. I had to step outside of my own perceptions of what a relationship should be. I subsequently moved from that very traditional relationship to one very similar, in which we owned a house, raised my daughter, and were professional partners for seven years – but we weren’t married. And what has followed for me has been a sequence of relationships, each very powerful and committed. Each relationship changed me and my partner. Each relationship has been about personal, emotional, and spiritual evolution.

“But at the same time that I was experiencing this evolutionary process, I was also becoming painfully familiar with the emotional process that people go through when a relationship ends. That’s a very challenging process, fraught with self-doubt: ‘What did I do wrong? Why did I fail? How can I fix it?’ Unfortunately, people seldom realize that this is such a universal reaction. Each individual feels like they made a terrible mistake, and what they’re going through is happening to them alone. But it’s really a shared human experience. Relationships end all the time. It can’t be that we’re all bad or failures.

“I see the evolutionary experience as universal, too. We’re all going through this process on a personal level in our individual relationships, watching our relationships come to an end and change and ask more of us and teach us through what has transpired. That’s the personal evolution. But, collectively, as the result of all these individual relationships, the human community is also evolving. It’s not just happening to the lonely individual who feels like an isolated exception. It’s actually happening on a mass basis. Individually and collectively, we’re moving beyond the pain and isolation to ask the bigger questions, the questions that are transforming us: ‘Do we have to view the end of a relationship negatively? What is the larger meaning? Why have we gone through this? ‘Are we really alone, or are we listening and participating witnesses for what many others are also going through?’ In time, we realize that the process is meaningful. Life is meaningful. Our journeys are meaningful. And we have a responsibility to share that meaning as we gain awareness of it. That is what has inspired my own writings.

“We are flipping from a conventional psychological investment in ourselves and our relationships to a more spiritual perspective. The forms of relationships matter less than what is going on inside them: Are we loving one another? Are we loving one another in marriage? Are we loving one another after marriage? Are we loving one another in friendship? Are we loving one another in the workplace? I know many people who say they love to go to work because they love all the people they work with. They’re expressing the fact that those relationships are meaningful and nurturing to them.”

What role does Daphne think marriage will play in the future? “Marriage, like any other relationship, is an elective relationship. And it’s becoming more elective. People can say, “We are going to choose to make a marriage out of this relationship, because what we want to do is raise children and we feel that in terms of society and provision and security for these souls we’re bringing into the world, that that will be a better relationship for us. Other people may decide it isn’t necessary to get married. They want to love each other as long as it serves their development and fills their hearts. But they don’t need to be married to feel that love, that energy.”

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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.

To read more about The Flip and additional interviews from other luminaries, experts and bestselling authors, please visit www.theflip.net

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