Hi power of constancy
Good "spiritual" friends are important on the path. If a good friend is also a romantic partner, then that may or may not be particularly helpful.
I can extrapolate (from my own life) some scenarios:
Example potential pitfall for a romantic dharma relationship: a role reversal, where your partner suddenly overtakes you when you were more advanced (by some agreed-upon standard) originally.
Example potential benefit: mutual understanding regarding difficult or otherwise extraordinary moods which resulted from practice (dark night, A&P...)
All in all I'd recommend not to get hung up on finding the perfect romantic partner for the spiritual quest. Seems an artificial complication.
power of constancy:
To expand the question further, for someone who is quite serious about the spiritual path and also single, if they were to engage in a romantic relationship how important is it that their partner also be serious about the path; either as a buddhist meditator or even a different way like yoga or shamanism?
I'd love to hear any people's personal experiences with this topic, where it has been really important or actually wasn't so much. Thanks in advance!
So I'm married. My wife isn't into Buddhism or any other religion, organized or otherwise, though she has this nature mystic streak.
When I read Daniel's book, I naturally wanted her to read it. There was even a translation in a language she knew. She didn't read it, didn't get into meditation, had no interest in my spiritual vocabulary.
Thus we had to develop our own way of speaking about our individual practice and experience, which took us a few years, and many false starts - my attempt at getting her to use MCTB terms was one such false start: we had this sense of wanting to express something about ourselves which we lacked the words for. Talking about the material expounded in MCTB, in everyday words and in terms of our own lives rather than technical Theravada vocabulary has been highly clarifying for me.
Also, she's such a great bullshit detector.
Cheers,
Florian