Sex and HeartHow I transformed devastation into love and loving lust

When you find yourself wondering where you are going in your relationship, maybe wanting to lay out an agenda such as where to take it, how to take it there, how about thinking in terms of day by day, moment by moment even.

If you feel sure you are both exclusive with each other, yet you haven’t been together very long, not long enough to really know each other, then there is really nothing to do right now but continue to get to know each other through ever deepening levels.

It takes a long while to REALLY get to know someone, especially the older you are, more time for more experiences and thus more secrets to be hidden away.You may think within a few months or a year possibly, but I guarantee you, ghosts from before can and will show themselves, and they are more likely to do so the more comfortable you become with each other which takes time.

If you live together, all or most all cards are revealed within two to three years. Longer if you don’t. I’m not advocating dating for this long before you make a commitment to each other, but what I am saying is don’t rush the ring and the proposal. Don’t even rush the words, the I love yous. Take your time to KNOW this other being, feel him, his heart, his essence. Give him the time to do the same.

What’s the hurry? Really and truly what is the hurry?

The wedding or the marriage is for some unnecessary. If you are both committed, and no one is planning on going anywhere, the rest is simply legalities which do make things easier in some respects, yet it can also feel like an imposition. Still the trappings of all of this can seem very attractive, alluring.

For others it makes them feel that little bit more secure, like it’s all that little bit more real, and this is quite valid.

But I say again. What’s the hurry? Don’t you want to be sure this is really and truly your “the one”?

Wouldn’t it feel good to explore each other, swim the uncharted waters together, dive ever deeper, to the deepest of depths with each other? I mean REALLY, REALLY develop intimacy and authenticity?

In reality there is no “future”. There is only right now. Yes you can plan for things, hope for things, yet this moment is all there is.

I’m not suggesting to take this piece I’m giving you and go forth to live recklessly with no thought of consequences, nor am I saying you should live your life just as you wish, selfishly, with no thought for those you care about or even those you don’t or don’t know at all. You still have responsibility. You still have feelings about how others might feel or be affected by your actions.

But if you are not hurting anyone, and it feels good to you, then go and do. And enjoy. Relish every second. Be curious. Be in awe. And BE this way with your man. BE with him.

Discard the rose colored glasses, and keep your eyes wide open. Please try to take the stars out of your eyes, and please put down your romance novel notions. Think about this. You are a real live human being, beautiful yes, yet you are full of foibles, wonderful ones no doubt, but you are not perfect. You are a perpetual work in progress.

So is he. There will be times for sure when you do see moonbeams and rainbows, and fairy dust falls everywhere around you and on you, evoking all the most lovely things imaginable, and he will sweep you off your feet in perfect white knightly fashion. But he too has bumps and bruises and warts and probably some other very gross things. You need time to discover them all or most of them and decide for you if these things are okay, if any of them are deal breakers.

THIS TAKES TIME. This takes living for right now.

Once you fully and honestly know him, then and only then can you have your own version of happily ever after.

xxoo

Committed love What is it? What does it look like? How does it play out in the real world?

My definition of committed love looks like this.  It means I want to be with you and only you, body, mind, heart, and soul. I adore you and cherish you.

I am passionate about you, can’t imagine being with anyone but you.

I love being with you even if we’re doing nothing, just BEING together.

I am whole onto myself, yet you fill me up even more, take me to places I can only touch on alone. You don’t complete me, but you make me feel bigger, more expansive than I do alone. We feel great by ourselves and even better together.

I love you and want you more every day, nearby me, inside my body, inside my heart. I feel more at ease and comfortable, more ME the more we are together, separate yet as one. You bring out the best in me in all ways.

And this kind of commitment isn’t necessarily voiced aloud, yet the understanding of it is so profound. There is no question in either person’s mind, no words needed even though they may slip out now and then or more often. I have come to prefer the randomness and spontaneity of the occasional. The words never carry lost or diminished meaning this way.

Yes it does feel really good to hear, yet the actions say so much more, in the open, welcoming, glowing eyes, a safely comforting embrace, the warm, accepting, enveloping heart, through passionate lovemaking. Committed love is not calculated. It just is.

The deeply intimate bond I speak of rarely if ever happens without having been together for a while, years even, that place you can only get to with time, as your energies and spirits intertwine and feel almost as familiar as yourself.

This kind of love goes way beyond lust though lust definitely still factors in. It’s when you know each other so well, there are no more surprises, yet each moment together is a surprise, a happy one even in the midst of challenge or turmoil. Each minute a delight even if there’s pain. Each hour soul filling even if there’s a feeling of disconnect. For even when you feel a distance, there is an energetic cord between you, invisible yet tangible which cannot be broken.

It’s not a question of forsaking all others. The others don’t even figure into the picture. We may or may not recognize there are others, “appealing” others even, but they are passing images in the periphery. We don’t want them. We only want each other.

When two people are deeply connected in love and passion, it’s not that there’s no one else in the world. Yes we notice attractive people, BUT we are not attracted. Yes there may a little buzz of arousal, BUT there is no desire for that person.

And yes we have friends, dear ones, deeply loving ones, but it’s a different feeling, fulfilling in another way altogether.

It is often said that over time love becomes predictable, but I have to say my heart flutters more now when K walks in the door at night than it ever did in the beginning, and the joy emanating clearly from his eyes and through his smile, love radiating from him when he sees me tells me he feels the same.

Sex is never boring, people are. A little creativity and imagination go a long way. Relationships never grow stale, people do. None of this is hard work. It feels easy. The work on self is the challenging bit, difficult at times, painful, but the bond between us is our anchor, our source of respite, home. This is true love. This is committed true love.

xxoo

Is there really a difference? Is one “better” than the other? Isn’t deep commitment far more meaningful than what any piece of paper would dictate? Or are marriage vows the ultimate? Or does it depend on circumstances?

It seems to me that there are many people, women predominantly, who become so consumed with the IDEA of marriage and all they imagine it entails including (and maybe more importantly to them) the pretty dress and the flowers and the party. These women seem to get all caught up in a romantic creation and sometimes seem to close their eyes to the truth of what is.

It seems as though many of these same women lose sight of what this is really all about. Deep commitment, loyalty, fidelity, and most importantly, lovely, luscious love, profound, playful passion, and truly intense intimacy.

I’m not against marriage at all. In fact there is something delicately sweet and special about the real idea of marriage that goes beyond words. Yet paper or no paper, it wouldn’t change my feelings for my partner. Or would it?

We are deeply committed to each other, possibly more so than a great many married couples. Both of us can only imagine being with each other ’til death do us part, so why marry? I could ask this.

There’s something really sweet and lovely about living in the moment too, day by day, and not at all with the thought of “just in case something better comes along”. This notion wouldn’t even cross our consciousnesses, for we have found what we want in each other and then some. In fact we exceed our most secret dreams of what could be possible in a love partner.

There is no question of exclusivity or not. It just is. So in reality there is no “future”. There is only right now. And right now is amazing, incredible. Why would we mess with this? I could ask this.

For in a way, marriage feels like a constraint imposed by society and the government meaning it can be difficult to maneuver within the legal system without it. Meaning if anything happened to either one of us, the other would have no legal rights whatsoever. Which would mean neither one of us would be legally entitled to anything belonging to the other. So why not marry? I could ask this.

I resist and reject this imposition, yet it’s a very real one and one we may very well be faced with one day. It feels like a cruel thing to force onto  couples, those like us who carry fear and distaste around the idea of making what is such a beautiful thing into a contract.

But on the other hand there is still something kind of nice about the idea. If K asked I wouldn’t say no, but he has fear around it as do I, fear that it will change the dynamic between us. It probably won’t, but fear is fear. That said we probably will marry someday, as an afterthought, not as an event, and sadly it feels to me, as a convenience.

The real deal is already between us, so sealing that would feel anti-climatic.

Though actually going through with marriage still scares me. Like I said it wouldn’t change anything unless we set ourselves up for changes. Yet there is still that tiny little piece within that’s afraid this will spoil the fabulous thing we have by maybe unconsciously setting expectations that weren’t there before. I understand these fears are illogical, yet they persist.

But then again it would be maybe a little something extra that only we would share between us. So for us maybe the difference between being deeply committed as we are and actually getting married would be like the difference between a Veuve Clicqout Grande Dame and a Cristal champagne, both delicious and decadently expensive with little if any variance in quality and taste, aside from what WE determine are the subtleties of difference.

The point in writing this piece is this. I have been noticing increasingly that women are rejecting perfectly wonderful men because they don’t want or can’t go just yet to signing what is aside from financial reasons a worthless piece of paper. Love is in the heart. A ring and a fancy party cannot change that. I am asking you to reconsider. A deeply committed man trumps an indifferent man any day or worse a lying, cheating husband.

A marriage certificate guarantees nothing on an emotional/spiritual level and not even on a financial level. Ultimately only you can decide what feels best for you, but I ask you to please think deeply about this before saying no to the next guy who in all other ways make you go all weak in the knees, brings a smile to your lips, brightens your day, and makes you feel SO good.

xxoo tinque

The very BEST gift you can give to a man is to be happy yourself. You do this by filling yourself up. With hobbies, people, and activities you love. You fill yourself up with passion.

You do this by only DOING for your man when it makes YOU feel GOOD, when it makes YOU feel like LOVE. Never out of obligation. Never with an agenda such as a seeking of validation or attention.

The biggest part of your happiness lies within YOU and by loving and embracing YOU.

And maybe a critical piece here is if YOUR MAN is an IMPORTANT, contributing part of your happiness, meaning he makes you laugh and love even bigger. Meaning the things he does for you fill you up even more. Meaning the love and adoration he bestows on you make you expand and bloom all the more beautifully.

When your man has created some of this happiness for you and he knows with all he has how happy he makes you feel, then that’s the ULTIMATE gift of all.

If this man of yours, this wonderful being who loves you KNOWS he can and does make you feel GOOD, that you feel DELIGHTED being with him even if it’s doing nothing at all, he will be yours FOREVER.

And he will know this in your beautiful, welcoming smile and embrace at the door when he returns home, in your soft contentment emanating from you in the warm, comforting snuggle you share in bed every night and/or every morning, in your pleasure radiating out of you from the small gestures to the grand ones, in the joy, the ecstasy he brings to you from the mind blowing orgasms he helps give you.

Your satisfaction in all things, sexually and otherwise will flow out copiously in your actions and through your energy. And this will make for one happy man himself. And he will love you all the more for it too.

Not much else, maybe nothing else will make him feel happier than feeling yours.

The VERY BEST thing you can do for your man and yourself is not only to find your joy and love within but also to ALLOW HIM to make you feel happier still.

xxoo

You will always be working through things. That’s life I suppose, that is if you wish to accept the challenge, to live as full a life as you can imagine, create, and maybe even and then some.

There are certainly those who choose to remain stagnant throughout their lives, maybe barely living is more accurate, for the work required to expand their horizons seems perhaps too difficult and/or too potentially painful.

This feels very sad to me, for there is SO MUCH more available to you to experience and with more depth and breadth if you are brave enough to plunge, headlong if need be, onto this path, the one that leads to YOU, to your core inside, your deepest depths.

I won’t lie to you and tell you that your path of life as a human will be entirely strewn with rose petals though some of it most definitely will be. There will be much that is beautiful, and there will be much that hurts. Believe me when I say the hurt is essential, for how would you know just how stunning the beauty if you never know the ugly and the painful? The richness, the joy, the bliss that will be your reward when you take yourself on in this way though is beyond the worth of any agony you might happen upon.

The trajectory of inner growth is never a straight line. I believe all would agree with this, but I have heard repeatedly from many sources that your journey is one of one step forward, two steps back, as you learn new ways of being and behaving, relinquishing habits that no longer serve you, trying on new patterns, releasing old traumas, making room for more, including more love, as you rewire old neural connections. With this I CANNOT agree.

I really hate when this is spoken. It sounds defeatist to me. It smacks of assured failures along the way. It reeks of negativity even though you will also be told, but you WILL make progress, albeit SLOWLY. I can imagine that anyone hearing words like this would want to give up before even starting. It’s feels awful.

There is something I wish to propose to you, an alternative viewpoint I wish to present. Try thinking about this completely differently.

You will NEVER take steps backwards. To go backwards once the journey has been embarked on is impossible. Absolutely, totally impossible. Whenever you are armed with knowledge which enhances your growth however small a tidbit it might be, whenever you let the smallest trace of old residue go, you have moved closer to the real you inside, the love being that you were born as and are still.

Yes you will likely stumble along the way. Yes you may trip over a root or a stone lying in your path. Yes you may twist your ankle. Yes you may even fall down big time, sprawled face down in the dirt, your knees skinned and bleeding, but you will NEVER, EVER fall backwards.

What you are doing is continuously walking that path deeper into your heart with maybe a distraction here or a diversion there, but to go backwards which sounds like retreat to me CANNOT happen. Try calling these as steps sideways. It’s far more positive. It feels doable. And doesn’t this feel so much better? This is the TRUTH as I see it and feel it.

xxoo