Why does passion
ebb over the course of a long-term, committed relationship? Love and sex
specialist Alex Allman investigates that question, proposing ways to
short-circuit the phenomenon.
This article originally appeared at
Reality
Sandwich.
The challenge for so many loving and
committed couples is in keeping desire, attraction, passion, and presence in
their sex lives.
It
can feel like your sex drive is betraying your heart. You wish that you could be
consumed with mad attraction for the person you love, and yet all too often,
familiarity actually kills libido. You might even begin to feel shame around the
simple truth that you are often more sexually aroused by thoughts of complete
strangers than thoughts of the person who is so dear to your heart.
Yet
it would be naive, or worse, self-deceptive, to not acknowledge that this is the
way humans are built, and in absence of some intentional action on your part,
this is likely the way your relationships will evolve.
A
big part of the problem is that most people define “making love” simply as “sex
with someone you love.”
The
danger with that definition is that it assumes that love is passively to be
enjoyed during sex, rather than something that you DO.
However,
if you examine the phrase “making love,” you might notice that it is not
grammatically passive. There is a powerful action term in there. “Making” is
creating — perhaps the most demanding of all actions. One can watch, listen,
or even walk quite passively, but making or creating requires attention,
intention, and presence.
In
my definition, making love is in doing the work of surrendering the mind (or the
ego) in service of relating. It is being present with your shared desire rather
than being wrapped up in your unconnected mental or emotional
experience.
One
of the unexpected consequences of this definition is that it is possible to
engage in profound love-making with a total stranger in a
didn’t-even-catch-your-name one-night-stand.
Being
“in love” is not required for “making love.” Rather, what is required is an
openness to love itself and a willingness to “do love” by being present.
Further, it is often easier for some individuals to do this with a relative
stranger than with someone they deeply love and respect, with whom they have
shared many of life’s trials and rewards, and with whom they’ve developed a deep
and trusting relationship.
There
are two reasons for this counterintuitive experience:
The
first is that for a couple who have not practiced and worked at “doing love”
while “making love” throughout their relationship, the path to being truly
present with each other during sex becomes overgrown with all of the accumulated
disappointments, minor betrayals, grudges, wrong-makings, and resentments of the
years living together as partners in the business of life.
Eventually,
for many couples, they wake up one day to discover that their life partner is
the single most threatening person in the world for them to become sexually
vulnerable, present, and real with.
Their
partner is the person they are most likely to feel judged by, and the person
they most fear judgment from. There is simply too much at
stake.
Read the rest of
this post at Reality
Sandwich.
Alex Allman will be a guest on the
Evolver Intensives course “From Sex to
Super-Consciousness: The Future of Love.” For this live, interactive video
course, host Adam Gilad has assembled 7 remarkable experts on the ways that
sensuality and intimacy provide an ecstatic path to profound spiritual
experience. Joining Alex will be Annie Lalla, Sera Beak, Michael Mirdad, Marc
Gafni, Carol Queen and Reid Mihalko. It all starts on February
10.
Photo by Camdiluv ?, licensed under Creative Commons.
