I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

You know the one....

Relationships.

I am sitting here thinking this morning that marriage is perhaps one of life's most productive paths for growth. You have endless opportunities to work on yourself while the threshold over which you relate to your spouse continues to move. What worked yesterday will not work today.

I am reminded of when I lost physical intimacy in my marriage, and what led up to that. For a while I thought myself frigid, and carried a lot of pain from that. But then one day, I got hot for someone else, quite unexpectedly, and I realized frigidity was hardly my problem.

In relationship, the ground between two people has to be kept clear of debris so they can relate to each other freely. That ground is sacred stuff, and is called intimacy. I do not mean sex, or merely physical intimacy . I mean the place where you share your mind and heart, and then your body. It is the space in which two people can be together completely. But you have to keep it clean, or you start hampering the relationship. The first time you fight, and you judge her or she judges you, some shit turns up on that ground. You have to clear that as soon as possible, because if you don't, it sits there and festers, and pretty soon, no one wants to go near it. If you don't learn to keep it clean, guess what? The next fight, someone throws a little more shit on the ground, and now it's kind of stinky. And then perhaps one day she ignores you. Woops, there's some more shit. Later, you ignore her. Oh, there's another pile. Or you hide the bills.

Now, how do you maintain intimacy in a partnership when you hide things? Really important things, like financial affairs that affect you both.

You can't have intimacy and hiding. They are mutually exclusive.

So by this point, the ground is fairly covered in shit, and you each retreat to your corners because you can no longer enter the space between you. It's covered in crap.

And since you have no emotional or mental intimacy, it doesn't take long for the body to give up being stimulated into chemical reaction.

So if you want to regain intimacy with your beloved, you have to make yourself vulnerable. That is the first step to clearing the shit. You wade into it, not swinging a sword, but listening with your whole being. You take a good look around, and stop seeing the world like you think it works, and start seeing how it REALLY works. That means you have to suspend judgment. The nice thing about judgment is that it absolves you of responsibility to act. See, if you hurt me, and I judge you as an asshole, then I have no responsibility in what happened. If I don't judge you, I might get to see how I treated you poorly, and caused you to hurt me.

See how this works?

So, you withhold judgment, and start seeing reality. One of the best ways I know to do this is to shut up and observe. Really take in what's going on around you, but don't judge or react to it. A couple of days of this can be really liberating because you no longer feel like you have to hold your ground, or fight for something you probably don't even care about. You just see what is.

And as we all know, there is great power in truth because it sets you free.

Once you know the truth, you can then act. But if you want love, you have to be vulnerable. Love isn't where ego is. Being vulnerable doesn't mean you capitulate. Being vulnerable means changing your pattern by really opening to the other person. Of course they will attack you. They've been trained to, probably by you. So you also have to realize attack is futile. Let them attack. Let them throw words at you. Let them rage on. Stay quiet, stay loving, and be there when they come to you. When they attack, instead of engaging, ask why they want to hurt you. Then open yourself for the answer. It might surprise you.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about these things, after a long hiatus from relationship. That's a good thing to do too - take a haitus. It helps you strengthen your discrimination powers, and keeps you from wading into things you know aren't good for you. I refuse now to even test chemistry with people with whom I don't have a strong mental and emotional bond. What's the point? I have had plenty of chemistry, and after 7 years (or sooner), it disappears. You better have something else in common, like some interests or projects you enjoy doing together, or else you will have nothing when chemistry makes its exit.

The point of life, I think sometimes, is the point. Some people really need to work on partnership, and unification with the opposite sex. Think about it. All this tension and retreat by each sex only points to one direction: unification. Why have the oppositions and do the work otherwise?

And I also realize that love really is the cure for everything. But not huggy kissy love. Not sex love. Not demanding love. The real love that heals is the love of friendship because you freely accept your friends. You appreciate them as they are. You see them with their flaws, and you don't feel a need to fix them. You just let them be. Well, what if we treated EVERYONE that way? I do see how friendship is truly one of the highest octaves of love, and how sexual chemistry can make demands that kill love quickly.

Love is not where the ego is.

Love and learn.