If you hold the more masculine energy in your relationship, meaning you identify with consciousness and steadiness while your partner is more energetic, and changing, you’re probably going to have some heated exchanges.
It’s just the way sexual polarity works out.
I used to think this was something you had to suffer through, but I’ve discovered that part of what being in a long term relationship is about is becoming a polished mirror to reflect back when our partner isn’t being loving or when the depth of their consciousness isn’t being fully presented or seen. You can do this without blame or judgment.
My teacher David Deida said to me once, a while ago, “Anything your partner can say to collapse you is what they will say, as long as they can collapse you.”
There’s a quality of testing in intimacy, that partners partake in. Particularly if you have a more feminine partner who wants to wake you up, they instinctively see the potential of you being absolutely free and they want to get you there. Our habitual fights and patterns of tussling with each other come about for a variety of reasons.
I’d like to unpack some of the lessons I’ve learned in my own life that have shifted this, and have led to a lot of fun along the way. I’ve been peeling back layers of closure and limitations that I didn’t even know I was offering or presenting in my intimate relationships.
A disclaimer on this topic is warranted. What I’m sharing is no different than learning how to walk into a cage with a live untamed tigress. You cannot do these practices half-heartedly! You will get eaten alive. Every person’s situation is very different. Proceed with caution and care. This is intended only as an introductory guide.
If you want to dive deeper into your specific experience, please reach out to me.
Extending love vs. asking for love
In my own experience as a man, I tend to listen to the specific content of the words my partners are saying, and not the emotional reality of the moment as it’s happening.
Often, when our partner throws an emotional hand grenade in our laps, they’re just trying to wake us up to something very important to them that we just aren’t perceiving. Sometimes the volume has to get loud when they feel they aren’t being heard or they feel you’re completely on the wrong track. We frequently take the bait and try to parse her words for meaning, and become stressed trying to make sense of things logically. When we do that, we’re missing the intensity of care and love that’s being transmitted or asked for by our partner.
In any situation that’s happening to you, you’re always doing one of two things. You’re either extending love or asking for love.
In the heat of the moment, it may not always seem like this is the case, but if you deconstruct her emotional attack, it’s usually a very heated request for you to see and love them in a way that you are miserably failing to achieve.
The other possibility is that they might be trying to wake you up to something you’re oblivious to. It hurts our ego to hear this sometimes, but in this deep game of long-term love, it’s not about winning. It’s your ability to work with your own heart pain that’s being tested. Not the specific content that they’re throwing at you.
We’re typically hoping for more depth in our intimate exchanges, and maybe we feel we have an excuse for not rocking the boat, but that’s not the depth of what’s possible at that moment.
The whole arc of sexual intimacy is about deepening our capacity to communicate love and playful polarity in any situation. That’s the beauty of a committed long-term relationship. You’ve voluntarily put together your partnership in a container, and it’s a choice to stay within that restriction and find new ways to make it work overtime. It’s a form of martial art. To do this, you have to become more identified with the deeper part of your awareness, the part that’s awake, relaxed, and open on all sides, ready for anything.
Training your capacity for emotional intensity
One of my all-time favorite books is the “Book of Five Rings”, by Miyamoto Musashi. He’s an exemplar of physical and mental fearlessness. He would never engage with an opponent while angry or reactive, despite being the strongest samurai of all time. His inner practice was one of emptiness so that he could connect, feel, and anticipate everything around him. It’s an inner discipline.
If you’re in a committed intimate partnership, then the challenges and testing of intense emotional moments will be part of that. There’s no escaping it. These conflicts don’t mean that anything is wrong or needs to be fixed in your intimacy. As a matter of fact, it’s these crisis points when we hit our edge-of-love capacity that defines who we are.
Certain men have a limited range of how much emotional intensity they can handle, and increasing this range through emotional heart training is actually a reasonable goal. You can physically practice retaining your center when you’re challenged emotionally. This involves working with your breath and unwinding physical tension in your body and in your face. Reactivity is stored and expressed throughout your whole body. It starts deep in your core nervous system, and it is regulated by your heart. That’s why we have so much emotional language surrounding our hearts: heartbreak, heartache, heartless, open-hearted, etc.
Through heart strength training, we can learn to differentiate our deeper sense of self from the part of ourselves that just wants to get out of tricky emotional situations.
It’s like fencing; as your partner presents an increased demand or request for the value of her momentary feelings to be acknowledged, you have to meet that intensity with love and emotional contact. Draw your sword of open relaxed consciousness, and keep it in gentle contact with hers. Learn to gracefully parry her emotional slings and arrows. As her emotional intensity grows, and her voice gets louder, as her body becomes more animated, you increase the intensity of your love in response. Radiate openness from your heart, chest, and belly. Amplify and extend that outward towards your partner.
Practice simply seeing them and what they are feeling in the moment as valuable, rather than something to fix or that will hopefully go away.
Steer clear of defensiveness as a reaction
Defensiveness means you are losing the thread of what is happening at a deeper level. Remember that at any given moment, they are either requesting love or extending love. Labeling or viewing your partner as “wrong” will fail every time. As soon as you get into that mindset, you have created a separation that doesn’t need to exist.
When you defensively deny the reality of your partner’s emotional experience, you are essentially stating that you are more vulnerable than they are. Underneath, it’s your fear of intense emotional energy that you can’t accept. Practice sovereignty within your own inner realm of body, mind, and emotions. Appreciate her perspective and emotions for what they are -- separate and likely different from your own feelings. Without seeing the equal validity of both experiences, you won’t have a chance at rectifying any emotional situation.
Recognize that your partner probably doesn’t want to be feeling intense, painful emotions all the time, but sometimes they may. They are experiencing and enduring their pain because they want to help you understand what is going on within them.
If you want to communicate love, you have to understand that your partner’s emotional expression is their natural response to feeling unheard, misunderstood, unwanted, or rejected. Don’t try to fix things, or assume that their emotions have to be eventually removed from the conversation. See their expressions as valuable, and necessary. Step into it a little bit, and allow yourself to be with it, not reacting, not trying to push it away. Root down into the earth as her hurricane passes over and through you.
Extending love efficiently and effectively
Dynamic emotional energy is a form of sexual energy. You’re always going to see the world differently than your partner, and the dynamic energy fueled by apparent differences is what makes your relationship fun, what keeps it exciting and challenging, and what lets it go to a deeper place. What is important to consider about this dynamic energy is that it leads to differences in how we both express and receive love.
So, extending love effectively, in a form that they can receive, comes down to speaking the same language as your partner. If your partner is screaming and crying, then calm and rational words from you are not always going to come across as love. They are asking for something that words will fall way short of delivering.
What you want to consider is, what action will help your partner feel heard, and loved, even if it isn’t what you would prefer to receive if the roles were switched? How can you communicate this through your body so that they can receive it?
The very first therapist I ever went to with my first partner gave us a stick and told us it was called a “crazy stick”. Basically, during an argument, whoever gets the stick first is the one who gets to be in the “crazy” box, they’re the ones who need to be heard and expressed. This really stuck with me, even decades later.
This analogy means that only one person can vent at a time, and the other person has to hold the space of loving awareness and curiosity. Consider which role you are holding within an argument. At any point, you might be the one who feels unheard and who is asking for love, or you might be the one who is required to extend love and deepen in understanding. You can effectively choose to relinquish your grip on the crazy stick, to hold steady while they express themselves, as they ask for your love. Sometimes you get the stick, and sometimes you don’t. Be aware of where the stick is, and whether you’re in the giving or receiving moment.
Now, a lot of people come back to me and say, well, she always gets the stick! But that’s a projection onto your partner. You’re making them “wrong” because you’re putting the desire to “have the stick” above the reality of where your partner is at. Within hot, sexually polarized relationships, you rarely, if ever, get the crazy stick equal time.
Hold your partner’s pain and expression as valuable
The pain that arises within these conversations is very present and real, and needs to be acknowledged. Over time, you learn to become a connoisseur of your partner’s pain. If you can meld your awareness with the colors, textures, and shapes of that pain, they’ll experience that as a kind of enveloping love, even as they viscerally hate you. You’re embracing them at that edge, and your non-reactivity will be experienced as you loving them unconditionally, which is something they’ve probably wanted their whole life.
Remember that you never want to fight below your weight class, and your partner wouldn’t want to either. So, show your partner the emotional strength, the stamina, and the fortitude that they are playing with.
It’s worth noting that this art of tussling is something best learned with assistance and modeling. In my upcoming men’s retreat, we will practice this together, to help ourselves stay steadfast in the face of emotional intensity. It comes down to whether we are extending love or asking for it. Check it out here.