In 2019, I had a vision of a man in an iboga ceremony. I saw what he looked like, the first letter of his name, his age, and where he lived. I met him a few months later, and it became clear he was the man in my visions. He’d also done plant medicine, and we had many trips that were similar. I even had journeys where I received information about him, and he’d confirm in person that what I heard was true. We’re still together, and psychedelics have helped us reconnect during times when we grew distant. I’ve since met others with similar experiences, including a facilitator who also saw her boyfriend on iboga before she met him.

Such premonitions are mysterious, bringing up questions about psychic communication and the supernatural. “When the veil is thin—when you are taking medicines that open intuition—sometimes that information can come through,” says Tricia Eastman, founder of Ancestral Heart and author of Seeding Consciousness: Plant Medicine, Ancestral Wisdom, and Psychedelic Initiation. What’s more well-established, however, is that couples who trip together often come together and stay together. A study in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs found that people who used psychedelics with romantic partners formed more intimate, understanding relationships. If they also allow the relationship to unfold in the real world and commit to inner work themselves, psychedelics can save relationships.

Phillia Downs, a 48-year-old shamanic practitioner in New York City, met her boyfriend of 14 years in an ayahuasca ceremony. “I believe the medicine heard two prayers in the night and somehow helped weave together a past, present, and future with the soul who would become my great love, life partner, teacher, and companion,” she recalls. “It felt deeply familiar, as though we were remembering something rather than beginning something.”

Connections formed on psychedelics can be extremely profound. Ketamine, for instance, has been shown in research to increase pleasure associated with spending time with family and friends. “We become so vulnerable, so open-hearted, so connected with ourselves,” says Dr. Elyas Parsa, owner of the ketamine clinic Mind Balance Flow. “This allows us to connect on a deep human level and even beyond the human experience. Almost philosophically, you can say our souls are meeting in another realm.”

However, it’s important to keep an open mind and remember that medicine can bring people together for many different purposes. The relationship may or may not last, but that doesn’t mean you won’t accomplish or learn something valuable together. Dee Dee Goldpaugh, psychedelic-assisted therapist and author of Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality, knew of a couple that got together in ceremony, had a child, then separated. “They said, ‘We came together to bring this child into the world,’” they recall. “They felt the medicine guided them to each other to create life, and not a romantic partnership.”

One should also be mindful of unmet needs or wishes that may cloud their judgment. “Psychedelics can amplify and hasten the feeling of falling in love,” says sexologist Ashley Manta. “The person's heart is wide open, they're in an altered state of consciousness, they're feeling amazing and like everyone is magical and wonderful and—boom! There is their other half. That person they probably would have enjoyed flirting with sober suddenly becomes the one the universe intended them to be with. I hear this story over and over from festival goers, especially the Burning Man crowd. They met their soulmate on the playa and want to go home and immediately U-Haul.” 

This rashness can cause people to ignore signs of emotional abuse, which is not always easy to identify under the influence of any drug, let alone psychedelics or MDMA, that increase the desire for social connection.

At best, “it creates an artificial sense of depth and intimacy when in reality, there's no foundational basis,” says Manta. “It's building a house on the sand. Time is the ultimate antidote to the rose-colored psychedelic glasses. Spend more time together. Have a relational conflict. Be in a high-stress situation together. See how that goes, then decide if this person is truly a soulmate.”

Juliet Owen-Nuttall, a 41-year-old fertility practitioner in the UK, was in crisis when she took ayahuasca in the Costa Rican jungle with her partner. Not only was their relationship on the rocks, but they were having trouble conceiving. In the ceremony, they both got the message not to give up on their relationship — and she heard from the soul of her child, who said “I want to come into your life, but you need to change." She realized she was “very uptight, logical, and restrictive,” which “was affecting my health and relationship,” she explains. “I became more receptive and softer after that.” They mended their relationship and had a child shortly after.

Plant medicine was also instrumental in healing Eastman’s relationship with her husband. When they started doing iboga together, he became more committed to her as he confronted fears of intimacy and loss that had stopped him from pursuing marriage. “He was very noncommittal, and he had concerns over whether he would even be healthy enough to be a father because he had Lyme disease,” she explains. “He had a deep-seated fear that his illness was a burden to other people. Over time, he warmed up to it—and the same thing with getting married.”

Downs has participated in around 50 medicine ceremonies with her partner. She says sharing that intimate space has not only brought them closer, but has also created a greater sense of unity, healing, and increased compassion between them.

“There is something profoundly humbling about witnessing another person's healing journey over time: their prayers, fears, breakthroughs, grief, growth, and transformation,” Downs says. "For us, ceremony often became a reset. Life has a way of accumulating stress, misunderstandings, fears, projections, expectations, and the noise of everyday living. Sitting together in ceremony created a sacred space to slow down, reconnect to ourselves and each other, and remember what truly matters. Time and again, it brought us back to the heart to greater presence, honesty, empathy, gratitude, and love.”

On psychedelics, people tend to perceive themselves and understand each other more clearly, says Giulia P. Davis, licensed therapist specializing in psychedelic-assisted therapy and founder of Mycelia Therapy in San Francisco. She notes that various psychedelics are associated with different emotional outcomes that can offer relational healing in nuanced ways.

“MDMA is associated with increased trust, empathy, and connection, which can lower defensiveness,” she says. “People feel genuinely understood and more capable of understanding others. Psilocybin opens symbolic, sometimes visionary states. People often report powerful imagery about love and belonging that feels deeply meaningful and sometimes prophetic. Ketamine can create distance from your usual narrative. When the anxiety and reactivity quiet down, people often see their own relational patterns with more clarity: where they over-function, where they confuse familiarity with compatibility.”

Before doing psychedelics together, a couple should have a solid foundation of emotional safety due to the emotionally vulnerable state psychedelics induce. Manta goes even further to say that a couple should also have a proven track record of commitment to each other's boundaries and consent needs. “From that place of trust, psychedelics can open the heart, help couples see and understand each other in new ways, and expand their pleasure potential by creating space for curiosity and playfulness. If you need the medicine to feel connected, have great sex, or resolve conflict, the relationship would benefit from some rigorous self-examination. Plant medicine is a wonderful tool, but it needs to be used mindfully and deliberately to enhance an already strong foundation in a relationship, not to manufacture one.”

There’s a common misconception that when you meet people in ceremony — or through a psychedelic community, for that matter — you’re engaging with an inherently enlightened being. Or that a relationship blessed by the medicine will run easier than one started at a bar. But that isn’t always the case.

“People often assume that meeting through plant medicine means a relationship will be effortless or somehow spiritually exempt from human challenges,” says Downs. “My experience has been the opposite. Plant medicine didn't remove the work. I would say it illuminated it. It showed us where love was possible, but it was still up to us to learn how to embody that love in everyday life. It has brought immense joy, healing, growth, and expansion but also invited us to confront the unresolved fears, wounds, and emotions we each carried into the relationship. Like all meaningful relationships, it became a mirror, reflecting both our gifts and the places that still needed love and attention.”

The couple’s inner work needs to be ongoing for the journey to have a lasting impact, as forgiving and accepting your partner may feel easy in the afterglow of a ceremony — but the same conflicts can resurface later. “There’s other support that is necessary, like finding a really good psychedelic-informed couples therapist,” says Eastman. 

Journeyers also need to be thoughtful about interpreting what the medicine shows them. For instance, a vision of the future might not be the actual future but a possible future you can create by following the medicine’s guidance.

“Sometimes, we mistake possibility for certainty, a vision for a guarantee, or spiritual insight for the end of the journey,” says Downs. “What I've learned is that medicine may open a door, but relationships are built through choice, communication, commitment, and the willingness to grow. Ultimately, the greatest gift the medicine gave me wasn't a prediction about a relationship. It was helping me become the version of myself capable of loving more deeply, more honestly, and more consciously than I ever had before.”

Take time afterward by yourself and then as a couple to decode what the journey meant to each of you. You may each be able to illuminate the other’s blind spots. “It’s extremely important to look at our shadows, look at our thought patterns on an individual level outside the relationship itself, and look in the mirror first before we make any decisions,” says Parsa. 

Rather than, say, getting engaged right after the ceremony, first discuss the emotions the medicine brought up around such milestones. “If you are constantly feeling this flip-flop of fear in making a decision, you should probably not be making a decision yet,” Parsa says. He recommends coming in with a broad intention like I want to understand my relationship better, then being open to receiving whatever messages the medicine gives you. For instance, you might receive information about you and your partner’s personalities and why they clash, which can help you see what needs work in the relationship. 

“The guideline I'd suggest to a client is not negotiating relationship agreements while you’re on medicine,” says Goldpaugh. “The way to approach a conflict is: ‘How can we deepen our listening to one another so we can discuss it outside the medicine experience?’ I wouldn't decide to stay together or break up while on medicine or negotiate an open relationship. What you can do is talk about your feelings and fears and feel deeply held and listened to.”

Before starting psychedelic therapy with your partner, Eastman suggests mentally preparing to work through triggers, which are inevitably going to come up. “Maybe one person’s feeling raw and sensitive,” she says. “You can bring compassion to that. You can say: ‘I commit to this work with my partner, knowing that it can open something. I will be as compassionate and nurturing as possible.’ Sometimes you think: ‘This is so fun. We’re going to take MDMA together and connect and maybe be intimate.’ Then one person has a trauma that gets triggered, and the other person ends up having to hold space for the partner. It’s really important to be aware of that possibility.”

Even though psychedelics have a profound potential to heal two people as a couple, each individual still must focus on their own growth and self-improvement. On their own, psychedelics can leave you vulnerable to something called spiritual bypassing, where you go to the medicine to seek answers instead of communicating with other people. “Pay attention to what the medicine shows about your own patterns, needs, capacity for connection, and what you have been settling for,” Davis advises. Psychedelics have helped Downs see herself more objectively, allowing her to be more honest and forgiving with her partner as she acknowledged her own flaws: “It gave us a shared language around healing, consciousness, and personal growth.”

Rather than getting caught up in the other person’s journey, centering your own healing sets the foundation for healthier relationships. “I have received a lot of healing in indigenous ceremonies, and that healing had to do with the healing of my own sexual trauma,” says Goldpaugh. “While that didn’t lead me to a partner, it led me to believe I was available for a partner in a way I never was before. That had to do with the medicine and the spirits I worked with giving me guidance and advice that felt very real to me. Guidance on healthy actions in my life, on processing trauma more effectively, and literally on where to live.” 

If the medicine suggests taking a specific action, Goldpaugh recommends sitting with that and seeing how you feel about it. “Be really inquisitive about what you experienced, how your body felt, and if you had any thoughts or reservations,” they said. 

Your own emotional reaction to the guidance you’re receiving is just as valuable as the guidance itself. For instance, while you might uncover a deep attraction or connection to someone else, you might also feel fear or doubt as to whether the attraction is genuine or a projection based on deep feelings from the ceremony. 

“When I encounter someone thinking about whether or not to pursue a relationship, one of the best things we can do is slow down and think about the message we received,” Goldpaugh explains. “Does it feel good to our body? What are other parts of us we’re over-riding? Give those parts space and understand what their concerns are before moving forward with something that involves another person’s feelings as well. A huge thing that gets overlooked is: ‘Do we share values? Do we want to live in the same way?’”

If the relationship doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean that what happened on medicine wasn’t real. In fact, psychedelics can make the process of separating more graceful and meaningful. “When we started dating and got serious, we realized our spiritual connection was aligned, our vision for the future was in sync, and our hearts were present,” recalls Le’ Jai’ La Troi, a 34-year-old medicine woman in Mexico, of a man she met in an ayahuasca ceremony and dated for 15 months. “But over time, we realized our life desires were different. Ayahuasca told him my path was shifting and I would be away more for my work. So the medicine was very supportive in our separation.”

After consciously uncoupling, they both processed the breakup using mushrooms, which helped them stay friends. “In the end, my love for the soul ayahuasca brought me was stronger than my ego’s pain, and I was able to accept my role in my ex’s life and forgive him while opening myself for what the future has to offer us,” says La Troi. “Acceptance and forgiveness were my biggest takeaways from the relationship. I was reminded of the pure essence of love, which can be without needing or receiving anything as a reflection of source. Love is God, and sharing it is sacred, even if only for a short period, a season, or a lifetime.”

In my own relationship, I’ve learned be aware that while doing medicine can open doors to intimacy and connection, what matters most is talking through the themes and issues the journeys dug up. The medicine helped me release inhibitions and blockages that stopped me from opening up to my partner — and it’s when you can share from those depths of your soul that you can form lasting love. 

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