I imagine that most of us can accept this notion when our relationships feel inspiring, supportive, and loving. We know that those types of relationships feel precious to us, and we are typically willing to work very hard to honor and protect them. Yet, I was also acknowledging - at least in my own life - that even the encounters that have felt quite destructive may be equally valuable experiences, which deserve some strange kind of honoring too.
Many of my own most destructive experiences in relationships appear - often retrospectively - to have been calling me to do precisely that: destroy something in myself that needed destroying. (Perhaps something in the other needed to be destroyed too -- but I can't speak for them).
For me, however, it's sometimes been my naivete or idealism that needs destroying. Sometimes it's my passivity. Or my sense of powerlessness. Or my arrogance. Or bitterness. Or dishonesty. Or self-protective emotional numbing. Sometimes I have needed to destroy unconscious patterns of relating to myself or others that I'd learned from equally unconscious role models (not blaming anyone in particular - just noticing that we all seem to sort of cross pollinate one another... for better or worse).
And painful as it has been at times, I know that all of this has ultimately been for my absolute highest good. In fact, it's this kind of 'clearing out' that has subsequently created an ever-deepening capacity to experience true satisfaction in my relationships with others too.
So it seems to me that the opportunity in any relationship (beautiful or painful or both) is to discover whether we're capable of accepting the initiation it's offering us, and allow ourselves to be transformed by the mutual Mystery.
I suppose I would only only add this addendum to my original statement: I believe that all relationships can be made sacred.
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