When your mind thinks you understand something, you skip over the details and jump to the next thing in awareness.
Around people that we have spent a lot of time with, we like to think that we know them. However, you never fully know your intimate partner.
Keeping a relationship connection alive requires a moment-to-moment practice of seeing them like it was your first date. If you actually think you fully understand them and know who they are, then you are limiting them to the past and who they were before.
The consequences of this are particularly evident in the realm of intimacy.
Erotic connection with one person tends to fade over time.
When you first meet a stranger, you know you don’t know them, so you’re automatically more curious and cautious at first.
There’s a slight nervousness present for most people when they are confronted with new situations and new people, which isn't a bad thing. It indicates that your nervous system is taking in a lot of information and working quickly to determine: is this friend or foe?
In these scenarios, we find ourselves subconsciously analyzing the new person, asking ourselves, “What do they want?” “Can they be useful to me in some way?” And then, we might even check, viscerally, “Am I attracted to them?” “Am I repulsed? Uninterested?” “Do I want to spend time on this relationship?”
It’s that little bit of tension when you meet someone new that can stir up a lot of these interesting questions. The curiosity bubbles up naturally. It pulls you in.
Now, contrast the energy and emotions of meeting a stranger with those of meeting your long-term intimate partner after a day of work. Our nervous system relaxes around familiar people and environments. It’s part of being a mammal—we let our guard down, and our level of awareness around our surroundings relaxes.
Part of why we do this is because our brain thinks we already know them.
Now, this is a delusion, and the source of much pain and misunderstanding. There’s a sort of pompousness that can set in when we’ve been with someone for a long time and we believe we know them, what they like, want, and need. But we don’t.
How many times have you been embarrassed by projecting what you think onto your partner’s desires and motivations?
Attempting mind reading in a relationship is a relationship misdemeanor. Done repeatedly, it can become a relationship felony and can even lead to the end of the relationship.
Mind-reading fails miserably in the realm of sex and intimacy
When we mess up during intimate moments, we often find ourselves defaulting to the plea, “I didn't know!” But the problem really is, we believed we did know. We were driving forward with our preconceived notions, assuming we were correct based on past experiences.
What we should say instead is, “I thought I knew what was going on, but I was mistaken.” This is very different from claiming, “I didn’t know”.
Many people, when faced with the idea of desirable sexual experiences, won’t even bring them up to their partner because they think they know what their response will be. But in reality, we’re projecting forward our own fears and biases in a way that guarantees the predictable outcome of having our love or sexual advances rejected. It becomes a self-fulfilling empty pattern that reifies our suffering and feelings of being alone.
We feel vulnerability in our hearts around sexual desire.
Our unlived sexual fantasies are all linked to the emotional edge of revealing that deeper, more vulnerable part of ourselves. There’s the physical expression of sex, and there’s also the riskier emotional part.
A quote by David Deida that I love is, “Sex can offer an openness that washes your heart wide open, and yet sex is also where the tightest fears can also hold you back.”
This is kind of a critical part of diagnosing how your relationship will go–it’s often not about the frequency of sex, it’s about how we start to back up and withdraw from our partner for fear of getting hurt. This prevents us from having any kind of breakthrough.
Because of this, most people become predictable over time, and they don’t know how to sustain creativity.
As we get deeper and deeper into a relationship, we begin to choose emotional safety over the risk and uncertainty of sexual exploration. When there’s a lot at stake, like when you’ve been with someone for a while, there are a million voices in our head telling us not to mess it up.
On top of our inner emotional turmoils, there’s also the obstacle that we’ve likely never seen creativity and long-term artistry modeled in relationships. It’s not in our vocabulary, or our thoughts and expectations, to even begin to understand the concept.
All of this makes it incredibly difficult to be vulnerable with our partner about our true sexual desires.
Eroticism is the secret to finding depth in intimacy
Eroticism is the critical spark in keeping relationships alive and fresh. It’s the unpredictable part of us that we don’t have direct control over. It keeps us awake and inquisitive. The desire for this kind of intimate connection with someone is all-consuming, so without eroticism in a relationship, it becomes boring and stale.
Not knowing where things will go, or how it will play out, is actually the gravitational force of your attraction to the idea of trying something new. Lackluster sex is intrinsically coupled with lacking erotic energy. If you’re not feeling it, but you engage in sex anyway for the sake of your partner, it almost always leads to a feeling of being used and not seen.
This is then the source of a lot of resentment and separation in relationships.
You miss out on the best stuff when you can’t be honest with your partner
If you’re in a long term relationship, you weather and endure a lot for the sake of your partner and commitments. But are we really mining the depths of gifting and receiving all that is possible? People will suffer through a lot for the sake of a relationship, but how much are we really willing to push the edge and stir things up? Your heart knows the answer. You do yourself no service by lying to yourself.
Discovering your own desires and longing, and being vulnerable enough to show them is necessary to unlock the best parts of your intimate relationship with a long-term partner. Being vulnerable is what we did in the beginning of our relationship, when we first decided to go for it and get to know this person. So why stop now?
The other aspect of this “missing out” is the regret that comes later.
At the end of their lives, people often regret hiding behind their inauthentic selves. They realize that they weren’t willing to feel the edgy, irritating, and vulnerable stuff, and as a result they missed what was possible due to fear and inaction. When we give in to this inauthenticity because it’s easier, our imaginary patterns of seeking safety become a self-imposed prison of mediocrity.
The solution is to invite your partner to tap into this juicy, risque realm with you.
It involves an emotional risk, which can be scary, but isn’t that risk what formed the spark when you first got to know each other?
Empty your mind of all preconceived notions and filters
When embarking on this partnership into your deepest intimate realms, be humble. Know that you don’t know what would turn your partner on, and then use the freedom that comes with this knowledge to explore and try new things.
Don’t drag the history with you.
Remember that it’s much more important to stay playfully engaged with your partner and unattached to how they respond, while holding on to your desire and hunger, than whether your advance succeeds or is appreciated. You need to stay in the game.
Invite, invite, and invite again
Invite your partner’s advances without demand.
Do this through your eyes, your sensual movement, and your gestures.
You want to invite them into your realm while owning and feeling your own hunger and desire. That’s the key. Feel it in your body and be willing to express it through your body. Remember, your partner won’t know what’s going on for you if you’re suppressing it.
Your sensitivity to feeling their heart and inner being is the core goal.
It’s not just about the sex. It’s about the invitation and the desire to know them in this fresh moment, free from the past or future projections.
That kind of caring and deep-seeing frequently may turn a rejected sexual advance into an accepted one with unforeseen delights.
Comfort zones were made to be broken.
At the end of the day, comfort is highly overrated. A slightly edgy quality is needed in all of our intimate lives to keep us awake, interested, and wondering what might happen.
If any of this touches on something you can relate to, I invite you to join me and my wife, Karlene, for the program we are starting in March called Creating a Tantric Consort Relationship. It’s designed for couples to work with each other in the presence of like-minded couples, to transform your intimate relationship and sexuality into a vehicle for spiritual awakening and liberation.
Check it out here:
https://sunyata.info/work-with-me/2022/creating-a-tantric-consort-relationship