In the course of
establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging.
We all need
security: permanence, reliability, stability, and community.
Love, beyond
providing emotional sustenance, compassion, and companionship, is now expected
to act as a panacea for existential aloneness as well.
Modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and
has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and
emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide.
While love promises
us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. It is inherently vulnerable.
We tend to assuage
our anxieties through control.
Passion in a
relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.
When we love we
always risk the possibility of loss-by criticism, rejection, separation, and
ultimately death -- regardless of how hard we try to defend against it.
Introducing
uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of
certitude.
The mechanisms that
we put in place to make love safer often puts us more at risk. We ground ourselves in familiarity, and
perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we
orchestrate boredom.
Love nests on two
pillars: surrender and autonomy.
Dynamics in
relationships are always complementary -- both partners contribute to creating
patterns.
Erotic intelligence
is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.
Our ability to
tolerate our separateness -- and the fundamental insecurity it engenders -- is
a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship.
Intimacy has shifted
from being a by-product of a long-term relationship to being a mandate for one.
Intimacy has become
the sovereign antidote for lives of increasing isolation.
In our overcommitted
lives there's a temptation to simplify our existential complexities. We just don't have the time and patience for
open-ended reflection. We prefer instead
to be proactive and thereby reaffirm our sense of control.
It takes two people
to create a pattern, but only one to change it.
Trouble looms when
monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced
compliance.
We live in a world
that offers us little help with staying put or making do. In our consumer culture, we always want the
next best thing.
