Getting Un-Stuck on the Love Journey

This short article is designed to help you get “unstuck” in your journey into creating successful relationships. For the purposes of this article I consider you “stuck” when relationship is among your most important priorities in life and you are not satisfied with your current relationship, or lack of one, and are not sure what to do.

There is a truth that is valuable to remember on this journey:

There is enough love on the planet for you. There are people who if they knew you would want to love you in the ways you most want to be loved. The challenge is in becoming visible to those people and in expanding your picture of a lover to include the people who want to fill that role.  There is only a small chance of being loved exactly the way you want by the exact person you want when you want. There is a good chance of you giving and receiving lots of love in a variety of ways if you are open to that coming to you in a variety of forms.

So who are you available to be loved by? Let’s go through your choices one by one:

Do you need to be loved by a human?

Many pets are more loyal and have more integrity, consistency and submissiveness than human beings. If these qualities are really important to you, consider a loving relationship with a dog or some other pet. A pet could increase your experience of love in your life significantly.

Does the gender matter?

Both men and women are capable of love. And if sexuality is either not the highest priority or you enjoy sex with both men and women, are you willing to open up to being loved by both genders? Consider also that this is not as black and white as it may seem. While I find I am not available to be fully sexual or in primary relationship with a man, I have several heterosexual  male friends where we express some degree of both verbal and physical affection – including cuddling upon occasion. Touch stimulates feelings of belonging and relaxation and overall well being and is not limited to sexual expression or gender.

What is your age range?

Some of my best relationships have been with women twice my age. Are you willing to give and receive love that you really enjoy with someone half or twice your age? Someone older than you may have more experience, wisdom, compassion and self confidence. If those qualities are important to you, consider seeking someone older. Younger people may have higher functioning bodies, enthusiasm and innocence. I find that because the emotional and mental relationship with a lover is more important to me than the physical relationship, it serves me to focus on the inner being before me and simply notice what body that happens to show up in. Are you willing to widen your choices?

Does love need to come in one form?

You may not be able to find exactly what you want all in one partner within a reasonable timeframe. If you are particular, once you have defined your ideal box of acceptability, it is likely that many people will have certain qualities but no one you meet may have everything you need and want. One person may have the body type you prefer, while another has the lifestyle you want. Yet a third may share your interests in this or that. Do you turn them all away or is there a way that you can consciously engage with different people for different reasons? Consider forming a sexual relationship with your perfect lover, a buddy relationship with someone you have ease hanging out with and a spiritual partner with someone who challenges your growth.

There used to be a time when one person built a whole house. As the complexity of our luxuries have increased, houses are built now by a series of specialized teams, allowing greater speed, detail and luxury in greater volumes.

There is something to be said for relationships becoming more specialized as well. And there is something lost in the intimacy and craftsmanship of building a complete home from scratch or having a renaissance partner. As always, if you are not finding what you want around you, you can choose to wait, increase your search or expand your choices to include what is available. There is no right way and you are both the only one that can make the choice and the primary person who will live with the results of your choice.

Waiting for Grace or Making it Happen:

What is your current strategy? Are you assuming that one day you will meet the one and just know? If that were to happen, what do you imagine happens next? Once you “know” are you going to tell them or will they just “know” as well and no clear plan needs to be made? That does happen rarely. As such it is a valid approach. But what if you just “know” and don’t say anything and they don’t “know” and the moment passes? Or what if they do “know” and were expecting you to say something because they did not have any plan either?

I often meet people who have been waiting for years in a mixture of despair, frustration, sadness and shame with nothing to show for the wait but more bitterness or apathy. This could happen to any of us. What is your choice? You have a continuum of assertiveness and surrender and can choose anywhere on that continuum to place yourself. My bias is towards action because I have a lot of confidence in my ability to create what I set my mind to and I enjoy it. However, if waiting for grace is working for you, then by all means continue. If you are feeling frustrated or despairing or angry, consider some of the following ways to move things forward:

• Actively engage in therapy to change the energy you are putting out around relationships. This often affects who you draw to you.
  

• Create a personal dating web site that expresses who you are. This adds a personal touch. I built an effective site for a former lover that has brought her more dates than she can possibly go on which you can view at: www.AliciaForester.net
  

• Make a list of exactly what you want in a relationship partner and put it in a sacred box as an intention and forget about it.
  

• Go online to Yahoo.com, Craisglist.com and Match.com and create profiles.
  

• Go to singles events (arrive early and help out).
  

• Take relationship seminars at the Human Awareness Institute: www.HAI.org (this is a great place to connect with people who want good, conscious relationships)
  

• Work with a dating coach.
  

• Create a personal business card with a photo of you on it (and your web site if you have one) to give out at events.
  

• Browse online profiles and make invitations for phone calls or dates.
  

• Let your friends know what kind of connection you are looking for.
  

• Go dancing in venues you enjoy.
  

• Write a description of your ideal week with a partner.
  

• Attend the Pax workshops to help you better understand your self and your partner: www.understandingmen.com
  

• Take some good photos if you don’t have any for your profile, site and e-mail correspondence.
  

• Brainstorm and make a list of ten other things you could do.
  

If you have decided to explore a more active approach, any time you feel despair, frustration or lonely, channel that energy into an action and see what happens.

Knowing Your Self:

One of the greatest ways to free up stuck energy is to gain clarity on what it is that makes a relationship work for you. It’s not always the easiest thing to pin down because in truth relationships are an eco system in which each variable affects the others. For example let’s say that having kids is really important to you. But in order for this to actually work variables such as money, time, priority, health, attention level and choice all have to be aligned or it can simply bring more pain for all concerned. Other examples of the relationship eco system might include such things as:

• If I could absolutely rely on my partner’s honesty and safe sex practices, an open relationship would be fine. Otherwise, no way.
  

• If I knew that my partner truly loved me and could handle endings well and kindly, I don’t need to know how long we will be a couple before I dive in deeply.
  

• If I met a woman who’s child I enjoyed playing with and had a good relationship with, I would be open to partnering with a woman who has children.
  

• If my partner was good with his hands around the house and we did not need to hire outside help for everything, I’d be OK with him having a lower paying job because our expenses would be lower.
  

• If my partner will stand by me as I go back to school for a new job, I’d also be OK with staying in relationship with him as he takes six months to travel on his own.
  

Good chemistry occurs when there is a healthy balance between two people and an overall eco-system that works. Often this happens in surprising ways. The more we know about our selves and develop the skill of negotiating this balance, the more likely we are to create win/win in ways we could never have imagined – providing we stay open to feeling into what actually works rather than the box we have formulated. This is also one of the greatest pitfalls to online dating, where you search only for the people who fit a narrow box. And then you may not fit their narrow box. In fact if you met in person, many of the people who seem to fit, don’t and many people who don’t meet your criteria might create a beautiful basis for relationship for reasons that you cannot currently imagine.

Strategies of Presentation:

There are several ways to lead into connection with another. One approach is to lead with the form: “I’m looking for a monogamous partnership with someone who wants to spend four nights a week together, have sex each time, and who likes my cooking.” Another approach is to lead with the energy: “I’m looking for an unusually kind and intelligent partner.” Or you could mingle the two: A kind partner who enjoys long conversations and spending lots of time together. It is helpful to be fluent in both languages: the ideal form and the ideal energy. It’s also helpful to understand that they amount to the same thing. Someone who is into young women and someone who is interested in a sensitive lover may both be wanting the same thing: hot sex. It’s valuable to know what you want and why and to understand why someone else wants what they want and are they open to receiving what they want in different forms.

In general there is greater flexibility in the form once a heart connection is established in person. In other words, once you develop a good relationship you are less likely to throw that away just because they don’t like your favorite food or have a different sleeping routine than you do. On the other hand if you are dealing with someone who is very form based and you are vague in a profile about what you like and don’t like, it could mean you don’t register on their radar at all.

What Are Your Greatest Fears?

Often it is our fears that hem us into our box and prevent us from finding out more of what we want. Our fears can range from: “Not seeming normal.” to “Being abandoned and not able to recover for some time.” Our fears are valuable guides to respect and learn from. They are also less powerful when we write them down. For example let’s say you are in fact open to dating someone half your age if everything else fits, but are afraid of other’s judgments. If you know that that fear is actually what is standing in the way of you and a potentially happy relationship, you can begin to work with it in several ways:

• You might consider forming friendships with people who respect your values so that you don’t need to risk alienating your closest friends to follow your heart.
  

• You could have a secret relationship and simply not tell people that you feel would judge you.
  

• You could address it directly with people you care about: “I have someone I would like to explore relationship with and I don’t want to risk your judgment and distance. Let’s talk.”
  

• You might simply decide that other peoples opinions are not what you will use to form your most important love relationship.
  

• Or you could decide to look for a partner of a different age if the fear is too big for you. What is powerful  is making the choice consciously because you believe that it serves you.
  

All of these possible responses are only possible once you admit and clearly define your fear. Often we don’t want to do that precisely because we are afraid of moving through it. Sometimes our potential success is much more frightening to us than staying in our box because it brings us into unknown territory.

Escaping Prejudice:

Prejudice robs many of us from intimacy more than almost anything else. Our prejudice come in the form of stereotypes and judgments based on those stereotypes. Common to all prejudice is the belief and/or experience that someone is wrong and someone else is right. Whether we are the wrong one or the right one, prejudice separates us.

I invite you to honestly consider the merits of other people’s values objectively. Pick something that you absolutely despise and judge and then notice what you can admire and find beautiful in it. If you are a republican, perhaps you can appreciate the values of environmentalism, social justice and freedom, although your preferences in these areas may be very different. Perhaps you value freedom when it comes to the right to defend oneself but don’t value freedom of choice in cases of abortion. It’s the same in reverse. If you are a democrat and are valuing the qualities of freedom of choice for a mother but not choice for a gun owner, it is valuable to notice that the energy of freedom is mutually appreciated. It is simply being protected in different ways for different purposes.

In many ways the passionate pro-choice and the passionate pro-gun person may have more in common than someone interested in neither or who simply does not have the passion. This does not change your emotional response perhaps, but it is none the less valuable to recognize that any time there is a prejudice that villainizes one and victimizes another, it is probably not so much a reflection of the people involved as it is the eyes that are categorizing one as villain and another as victim. This is often a place people get stuck and are incapable of moving beyond. Sometimes the fear of connection and subsequent loss are so frightening that we hide in our prejudices as a way to avoid the cycle.

Accepting the Cycle of Life and Death:

Many of us are in denial and resistance to one of the most basic realities of being physical: What is born dies. When something physical is created, something else is destroyed. Both faces of life must be embraced in order to move forward. One must inhale in order to exhale. The lung, both literally and metaphorically is not an endless reservoir.

We confuse our physical boundaries with our inner boundlessness. We can imagine anything, travel through space and time in our mind and remember what has died. We can expand our consciousness indefinitely and believe in a level of perfection this earth has never known. It is our spirit that is often upset by the reality of our body’s mortality and limitations that can lead to a refusal to engage with the earth cycles. Intuitively we know that with birth comes death and we often choose to avoid birth in order to avoid death. We can’t deal with another death of a loved one so we don’t want to love. We don’t want to form a friendship because we know that at some point we will lose that friendship.

There is a twist on this that can be helpful: Embrace the reality of death and choose to be responsible for making it a good one. Accept that every one you connect with you will also disconnect with, either in physical death or because one or both of you choose to. There are beautiful beginnings in relationships and ugly beginnings. You can create a conscious beautiful death when the time is right. Death is not a failure and can be a sign of success. Death is rarely honored equally for the gifts it can bring and this blindness often leads to careless and messy deaths, which perpetuate our futile wishes to avoid it. I have had several relationships in which we carefully crafted our ending together. These were among the most precious moments.

Exploring the Unknown:

Many of us are in resistance to relationship but don’t know why. If we are conscious we may realize all the little things we do to avoid connection or push people away, but that is different from understanding these dynamics. If you are in resistance but don’t know why, a good approach is to not only explore within, but explore outside. Read books that illuminate human psychology and relationship dynamics. My own book: Cresting the waves: A Guide to Sailing through Life on Relation Ships (www.CrestingTheWaves.com) is one such book that can both validate some of your fears and also suggests pathways forward. This can unlock stuck energy bottled in hidden fears.

Creating Safety for Yourself through Boundaries:

Relationships are a vast sea of possibility. In that sea people have killed themselves, been betrayed, lost power, been shamed, beaten and experienced extraordinary pain. Others have experienced beautiful ecstasy, only to lose it. Yet others have steadily prospered in simple pleasurable relationships of relatively calm waters. The thing to remember is that the sea of relationship potential is always far greater than we can imagine. As such, whenever we enter that sea it is with a certain amount of trust in something we can neither fully control or guarantee. This can help you feel compassionate with your resistance. Even if very little in this lifetime has scarred you, you may unconsciously remember others in which you have undoubtedly experienced the full range of human emotion.

Boundaries are necessary in order to maintain our identity and also to guide us through this sea into the terrain we desire. Imagine that your relationships are an eco-system. Certain principles, such as balance are necessary in order for that eco-system to be sustainable. Balance is also important in our overall eco-system of relationships. This is one of the most important things to monitor: What do you expect to give and also to receive in partnership to create this overall balance. Is what you want to give something your partner finds nourishing and vice versa. Clarity will help you stay on course for a healthy relationship.

In parting I want to leave you with three stories that illustrate different approaches to creating win/win connection with clear boundaries that I have used in my own life that have allowed me in each instance to become unstuck:

Aware of how many people blame their relationship partners for their pain and how easy it is to make false assumptions, in my first relationship I decided to approach it much as a business contract. (Notice if you immediately judge this and in doing so deny yourself a tool that could work for you as well.)

The best way to test run the relationship I felt was to rehearse on the phone. It was a long distance relationship and so there was plenty of time to check in with each other about each aspect of our life. I explained to my partner (who was twice my age and agreeable to the approach – one of the benefits of wisdom) that I wanted to write the scripts for each of our likely interactions and process our feelings/reactions up front rather than deal with all our reactions spontaneously. Here’s how we would script things:

“So when you arrive from the airport it would work for me to pick you up at the bus stop rather than the airport itself because I  want our first few hours together to be about us without any distractions and I get stressed driving to and from the airport. What is your ideal script here?” Then she would say: “Well I would like to be picked up at the airport and have a relaxed drive home because that would make me feel important and special.” And I would say: “I want you to feel important and special too and I’m worried about how our evening will go if our first two hours is driving in rush hour traffic. I don’t want to be torn and I would rather pay for a taxi for you so that you feel special than risk a frazzled start to our visit.” Then she would say: “OK, I get that you do care for me. You don’t need to pick me up or send a taxi, but I want you to make me feel special in this way when we get to your house…” So then the airport arrival script was negotiated. We negotiated every aspect of relating: the way we dressed, who would pay for what, when we would go to bed, what kind of music we would or would not listen to.

When we were done we had spent a great month laughing, planning, getting to know each other and felt very safe playing out our scripts and jumping right into an intense and intimate relationship. It was the opposite of trying to be cool, normal, spontaneous and it worked!  It was rich, creative, stimulating and growth-full and eventually led to me moving to a different state to be with her.

I highly recommend you consider the value of scripting to pre-empt triggering pitfalls in relationship or as a way to be tender to hypersensitivity or anxiety. It is an expression of care and respect for one of the most beautiful expressions in your life. That care is given to even mediocre houses by creating a detailed design before construction begins and making sure there is the money to pay for it. So many abandoned relationships are like half finished mansions on a hill that were spontaneously built without adequate funds or a shared vision. They leave nothing but damage and wasted energy in their wake.

 

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In another relationship I began with little scripting but by creating a very clear container. Over the course of a long and intimate conversation upon meeting, I was clear that I wanted a sexual relationship with a visiting European. What I was also clear about was that during the time it existed I wanted monogamy, alone time with her and undistracted attention. I suggested she consider whether she wanted to be intimate, what her schedule was like in her remaining two weeks and when she could commit to being fully present and undistracted in our time. We agreed we would then close our relationship when she returned to Europe. I made it clear that the only deal breaker was her canceling a date she made as that trust in her commitment was the only thing that would allow me to fall deeply in love with her for such a short period of time.

We spent two weeks in absolute bliss, eye gazing, making love, enjoying good food I prepared and having deep conversations. She kept her agreements around time and  monogamy. When it came time for us to close we did a beautiful ritual facilitated by an artist/therapist who honored our love together. She requested and I  agreed that I would leave her a welcome home message on her answering machine and after that would not remain in contact.

After she got back home, I wrote a poem about her in which I discovered a deep longing for more union. I invited a long distance monogamous relationship, which she gladly accepted. It served us deeply for six months, often talking several hours a day on the phone and having better phone sex than the sex I have experienced with many people in person. We also wrote poetry for one another and had an active e-mail correspondence, visiting each other ever two or three months for a week to a month. This woman was twenty years my senior and we never noticed the age difference at all.

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In yet another relationship I noticed that my body was drawn to an Asian American at a cuddle party. I was practicing listening more to my body than to my mind and decided to follow up. I told the woman I found her attractive and would welcome her as lover in my life. She considered it for a few days and then said yes. We had a conversation on the phone about safe sex and sexual preferences and then met at my house.

I remember my first experience making love with her  was mildly painful. I fall in love and feel connected easily and she was clearly dubious and suspicious, as well as cautious. It was another few weeks before we saw each other again at my house. We had wildly differing political and other views and it was important to set those conversations aside. I focused on appreciating her and getting to know her feelings and sharing my own.

As time went on, she opened up more and more emotionally. Our agreement was to have an open relationship sexually and that I would let her know the safe sex history of each partner and if it looked like any other relationship was going to affect ours, to let her know.

As the relationship deepened, the love grew between us and our communication became less of a mine field and had more genuine understanding of each others very different perspectives in areas. She dropped some of her stereo types about men and money and I came to appreciate more of the challenges of minorities.

Once the emotions opened up, she discovered her highly sensitive energetic abilities and explored sexuality in new ways, while I enjoyed loving and being loved by a truly beautiful woman that I could now clearly see inside her beautiful body.

During the nine months we were together we both had among the most healthy, mature relationships of our lives and saw each other regularly an average of two nights a week. Open relationship was not her first choice but she noticed that in some ways it made her feel less trapped and able to connect deeper. Ultimately what divided us is a deepening of the connection to a point where I wanted to spend more time with her than she had available so we created several closing visits so that I could find that greater depth in a monogamous relationship with someone who had more time. I still love her, as I do each of my former relationship partners, from a distance.

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These are just a few ways that I and others have found to explore some of the beautiful waters of relationship sailing. If you would like to talk more about aspects of this and how it might relate to your own relationship search, feel free to drop me an e-mail at: [email protected].

Many blessings on your journey.

Dane Colby.

Contents

Cresting the Waves:

A guide to sailing through life on

Relation-Ships

Dane E. Rose