Day 2 - The book, from the beginning...(introduction continued)

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“More intimacy sounds like it might be nice, but I hear that it involves so much talking. Is it really worth it?”

Insofar as a relationship is two people moving together in some way, any relationship, no matter how smooth or compatible, will require movement in order to continue. People move together in different ways, in a large range of personal meaning and intensity. Some people would describe themselves as vibrating near people at the same frequency. Some people would use language of joint seeing, or joint understanding. Some people speak of playing tennis. Some people describe souls burning around each other. Some people describe their interactions with people as dancing. The dance will involve at times the holding of a hand, at times the reaching towards each other while apart, at times taking a step in a complimentary direction with your back towards each other. There are a number of movements, from any one spot, that can create more flourishing, joy, growth, and understanding of each other.

This is a book about constellations of feelings. It provides resources for examining individual feelings and the connections between feelings, with the aim to increase positive moods, and improve transitions between moods, while staying in touch with both your external and your internal reality.

It will be a book of exercises and principles for deepening your relationship to your own authentic feelings, and to see the people around you with more granularity, different though they may be. Because emotions change over time, the hope of the book is to help you begin or maintain a practice of uncovering your authentic feelings as they move through time and circumstances, and to gain increasing mastery over them. You may have moments in which you discover new feelings beneath what you think are your authentic feelings, and discover new moves for those authentic feelings, to, even as times change, continue to over time be more and more like what you see as your best self!

This book was created for advanced practitioners, including curious people in positions of spiritual leadership, people who are hoping to decrease discouragement in their communities, organizers of kink and polyamory meetup groups, therapists, and coaches. I do not start with a premise that some relationships are better than others, or that some end states for relationships are more virtuous or enlightened than others; rather, I believe that certain aspects of relationships can be improved through intentional practice, deeper consideration, tools for noticing your own feelings and actions, and tools for noticing more the feelings and nervous system states of others people.

In conceptualizing the book, I had decided it that a “choose-your-own-adventure” style would be suitable both for those who want to teach the material to others, as well as those who want to learn and complete the exercises for themselves, or with a partner.

It is for people who had already decided they have reasons to be learning more about their own intimacies, and helping with the intimacies of others. Now, they want to be good at it.

This book is also suitable for guiding people around the topic of marriage. The exercises in this book are intended to be useful to individuals in any relationship circumstances, including being single, being hopeful about marriage, being engaged, being divorced and newly searching, and anything in between. It is suitable for people who are in various stages of polyamory, or various stages of opening up, but it does not go into much detail about which lifestyle choice is better.

This book is meant to fill a niche, which is cataloguing a set of reflective techniques that are inclusive both of monogamous and polyamorous lifestyles. The book aims to explore the “general building blocks of relationships” that you can then explore on your own terms.

There are “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in monogamy. There are also “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in polyamory. In both systems, people can have a “fish in water” syndrome and not see that what they take is obvious may not be universal. Both systems tend to borrow from the explicit tradition of the other. This book investigates both the visible and invisible structures in both, in order to see what the actual building blocks of relationships are, in order to find the leverage points where you can either change yourself, or find the relationship that you want to be in, either by more fully understanding the kind the person you want to be with or the shape of the relationship you want to be in. Sometimes you want to be with a different person, and cannot explain to yourself why. Sometimes you want to be with your person, but change the shape of your dynamic to be different, either having greater autonomy or greater intimacy.

This is not a book examining “types of people.” It is more a book about how to turn a feeling into a feeling you may like more.

A lot of people live their lives doing what they want, or deferring to their partner’s wishes, and then maintaining that fixed holding pattern for a long time, in order to either not push themselves out of their comfort zone, not offend their partner, or not look at things that are too painful to look at. This book is meant to show you what you can look at; whether you choose to look at it is up to you.

If you had ever had a friend show you some texts between them and somebody causing them emotional distress, you have likely had the experience of spending a fair bit of time learning what the emotions are behind the text messages. You might have noticed that you are doing some kind of triangulation between what the texts say, what your friend is telling you about the situation, what kinds of texts you yourself have sent in the past and what you meant, and your general impression of how people in certain kinds of relationships tend to think and feel, and how they communicate about it. There are a lot of things you are doing outside of the immediate objects your friend is presenting to you in order to be helpful to them. You are triangulating between many different things in order to understand what is happening, both in the broader context then what you immediately were seeing, and then in greater granularity and specificity. Often when you present some of your own perspectives from your own experiences, or present novel objects (perhaps some of your own texts), your friend unveils more information about the situation that they did not think to mention before. It takes a while to figure out what is really going on.

This book is meant to be a shortcut to this triangulation process. Of course, you should continue to use your existing support system. It is meant to “fill in gaps” rather than be a replacement for a social support system. If anything, it is meant to augment what you talk to your friends and partners about.

It is a book filled with the post-digested, post-chewing thoughts after experiencing many conversations of the type described above. Usually the conversations included some kind of pain. Some fight, some misunderstanding, some phenomenological overwhelm, something crazy-making, something dark. Writing this book and transforming the knowledge honestly into “a communicated shape” involves getting back in touch with the original pains. The hope was not to erase the pain, but to create a pathway for dealing with the pain that does not recreate the pain. Going through the woods, being poked at by thistle and thorns, does not mean that a book about the path in the woods has to be full of thorns! The jagged painful thorns should not be jutting out of my book, poking myself and my readers — and in part because a book like this would be less honest book in that it is not how it feels inside my brain, it is not how the experiences and the ideas settled, and a book that did that would be “dishonest” to my concept.

I had seen this incredible artist, Mobina Nouri at an exhibition. She painted beautiful Arabic calligraphy on nude bodies, and photographed them in a way that inspired me. Her black line and gold drawings created textures in my mind. In some ways my thoughts about the book feel like the lacy calligraphy of Mobina Nouri. There is a beautiful woven mathematical dimension for me when I look at Arabic calligraphy. I cannot read it, but it creates a kind of peaceful feeling in my brain. Something aspirational, and like I can become better or “more sane” when I go towards it. The ideas in the book settled in my mind, in a way much closer to this. There is complication in relationships, but in the same way that there are complications in celestial bodies, and there is beauty in the geometries.

This book contains exercises, common mistakes, and terms of art that you can use as guideposts in your journey. The ensuing conversations can be difficult because conversations about intimacy naturally will involve discussions of fear, loss, jealousy, priorities, and even grief. When these conversations are most difficult, sometimes it is when parties kick each other’s shins, let go when they need to hold on, or cannot clarify when they need to brace for a fall. But sometimes it is difficult because these conversations are intrinsically difficult. In either case, a compass can help with the navigation.

For teaching, or for mentors when somebody comes to them for help, the book can be used as an addition to your existing toolkit in noticing what is going on with the person coming to you for guidance. It can be a way to guide the people coming to you with perhaps less strain, and leaving more autonomy for the person seeking help. (For example, if somebody approaches you about wanting to open their marriage, the section on power dynamics can be useful for encouraging the person to take an inventory of the power dynamics in their relationship, before certain very complicated fights happen.)

One challenge in navigating extended intimacy (intimacy over long stretches of time, space, or multiple people) is that the navigation even for monogamous couples ultimately ends up involving the desires of more than one other person (the demands of family, children, bosses, the demands of an abstract cultural archetype or ideal) – but this immediate interpersonal navigation is only a small part of the challenge. The greater long-term challenge is navigating how any set of two lovers can help make each other’s dreams come true while buttressing agains and holding each other in their sense of threat and their fears.

Any relationship, open, closed, or anywhere in between, will involve effort, in so far as momentum is force times time. Creating a “force” takes effort, in that you have to observe the outside world, have to observe yourself, have to observe your partner, and have to observe your impact and the size of your impact. If “observation” did not take any effort, then at our resting state, we would need as much food to sustain ourselves as does a snail, with its much smaller nervous system. The truth is that observation does take effort, and putting in the effort to learn to observe better compounds exponentially in your benefit.

The effort can be used to obtain more information, or to prevent yourself from gaining information you would rather not know, because knowing the information would make you accountable in “acting as if you know the information.” Effort can put into a practice of curiosity, or it can be put into a practice of self-defense or resistance. If you know, for sure, that you need to break up, this can be very heartbreaking and require many uncomfortable life changes. Sometimes it seems better to not know for sure.

This effort can take the form of talking; it can take the form of resistance to talking; it can take the form of maneuvering anger or suppressing anger. But unless two lovers choose to let slack their end of the rope, as long as there is a cord between two lovers, effort is what is keeping the rope tense enough to maintain the relationship.

This book was written as an aid for lovers to figure out the steps in their dance, if they want it. Perhaps you are in a happy relationship and want it to be even better. Perhaps you are in an unhappy relationship, and do not know if you want to put effort into the relationship, or end the relationship.

The exercises in this book, if done correctly, could indeed lead you to reconsider some of your existing relationships. With some relationships, more clear-seeing includes seeing that you and your partner do not wish to be together, that both of you have different life goals or learning goals that you do not wish to support each other with, or that conflicts with one or both of your value systems, or that something is badly wrong. Legibility means that something that was previously unclear and bad becomes clear and bad. Often, something hidden becoming “obviously unsustainable” leads to its own upwell of intense emotions.

There are exercises in this book for those situations, too, and I would encourage you to use the “[managing intensity]” and “[aftercare]” sections liberally when you feel yourself dealing with strong emotions. Those exercises are designed to help navigate these higher valence emotions.

In disentanglements, continuing to be able to feel, and maintain, the parts of yourself that you like most about yourself is especially important. And so the principles outlined in this book continue to be relevant in relationships that are breaking down. Many relationships end in boredom, abandonment, betrayal, or, even when everything goes well – sickness and death.

As disentanglement can also include feelings and changing feelings, the general principles and exercises described in this book should still be relevant.

Ballroom dancing is a sufficiently strong metaphor that I do recommend spending some time ballroom dancing with your partner. A clenched hand means you cannot spin your partner without hurting them. A push or a pull with structure or vision can magnify momentum and look very beautiful, but a push or pull without structure often halts whatever momentum you had and restarts it. Sometimes this is exactly what you need, but wouldn’t it be better to know what tools exist, so that you can operate at the precision you desire? Perhaps you want to learn how to do a more delicate step sequence; perhaps the complete opposite. Perhaps you want to know how to expand and be wilder, freer, than you ever thought was possible.

This would mean paying attention to more things. Being good at extended intimacy does not just mean being good at intimacy. It includes being good at a number of different skills, that will be useful in all sorts of domains. It means becoming more attentive, becoming better at noticing, becoming better at noticing other people’s fears, noticing your own fears, noticing other people’s fantasies, letting the hard times roll off, noticing your own hypocrisy, noticing other people’s different ways of “trying to be good,” acknowledgement of how your past trauma affects how you feel and how you perceive, and acknowledging how other people’s trauma affects how they feel and how they perceive. It means being gentle with deficit, scarcity, and imperfection, and not letting those real-life setbacks get in the way of a vision of abundance.

This book is not a “download” of information. It is meant to be a practical book to be picked up and put back down. Some of the exercises and games will feel too hard. They will “bounce” off of you. In those situations, I would encourage you to take what seems relevant to your life, and to do in your real life what feels fitting. It is common for a person to start an exercise, and then start thinking about many things. As long as this is not anxious rumination or avoidance, this can be very good. An exercise as a starting point for getting to what is actually what you want to be thinking about is a good thing. If it is anxious rumination or avoidance, it can still be very good, if then the anxiety and avoidance are explored. These can be very large breakthroughs.

Ultimately, this is a book that is meant to be a texture for people to “bounce off of” and think about their real life in new ways. It is a book of gentle geometric shapes, derived from data collection, that you can then add your specific situational knowledge to. The basis for this book includes thousands of hours of conversations with real people. Now, these conversations have been distilled into a shape you may find usable.

It starts with a premise that “knowledge is not bad, in itself.” This book is designed to lead to actual conversations for people to have with themselves, their partner, and their reality. There is no universal framework or philosophy to be downloaded, except perhaps this: there is always a new angle you can use to look at the same problem. Sometimes it will be very helpful. Sometimes it will not be helpful. But the practice of looking at the same problem again, from another angle, is something that can be practiced, and can lead to something better than before.