Authentic Relationships: Waking Up From The Trance

                            

 

This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a con­ver­sa­tion we began in my last arti­cle pub­lished in the Huff­in­g­ton Post on The Soul of Rela­tion­ships   In an effort to explore the sub­ject in more depth, let’s dive beneath the sur­face and explore the chal­lenges and promises of authen­tic, inti­mate rela­tion­ships. 

 A com­mon pat­tern that passes itself off as an inti­mate rela­tion­ship often goes like this:  two peo­ple meet and have a strong attrac­tion to one another.  She can’t believe how present and emo­tion­ally avail­able he is, he can’t believe how “hot” she is. 

 She finds him adven­tur­ous, intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing, cre­ative, and into the things she adores like travel, going to con­certs and movies and best of all, he cooks!  He finds her incred­i­bly “hot”.  She’s great in bed, always wants sex when he wants it, is adven­tur­ous in that depart­ment and best of all did I men­tion he finds her incred­i­bly “hot”?

 She doesn’t notice at first how dri­ven, con­trol­ling and right­eous he is.  He fails to notice that she can’t cook, doesn’t have a job, many friends, or inter­ests out­side their rela­tion­ship.  And the trance begins.

 Each of them is on their best behav­ior for a while.  They try their best to please each other by being the way they think the other wants them to be and doing the things they think the other wants them to do.  And for a while, every­thing seems to work just fine.

 All rela­tion­ships have a court­ing stage and by def­i­n­i­tion, “court­ing” requires that cou­ples place them selves into a cer­tain kind of “trance”.  To court some­one is to lit­er­ally do a dance in which you put your best face and best foot for­ward.  Warts and other anom­alies are best kept deftly con­cealed, hope­fully for­ever, but at least until such time as the fate of the rela­tion­ship is sealed, when slowly or some­times abruptly, the guard is let down.  And the trance becomes a dif­fer­ent kind of dance.

 The court­ing stage gen­er­ally lasts any­where from three to six months before “real­ity” begins to set in.  The care­fully crafted char­ac­ter each part­ner in the dance has been por­tray­ing begins to fray just a bit around the edges. 

 She doesn’t seem quite so hot any­more or ready to engage all his sex­ual fan­tasies as fre­quently as before and is a ter­ri­ble cook besides.  She not inter­ested in find­ing a job and doesn’t show much curios­ity about life out­side the rela­tion­ship.  She’s become bor­ing and bored.

 He’s not so emo­tion­ally avail­able as he once was.  She never noticed how dri­ven he is.  He nags her about find­ing work or get­ting some kind of a life and has become down­right judg­men­tal about how she chooses to live.  Besides, she’s not so hot in bed any­more, so “who needs this?” he won­ders. 

 The trance of seduc­tion becomes the trance of dis­il­lu­sion­ment and dis­ap­point­ment.  They each dis­cover the “other” as not being the one they signed on for.  Sud­denly, the warts they’d over­looked in the begin­ning start to look and smell like boils, and this unbe­liev­able per­son they’d met just a few months before becomes unbe­liev­able, only not in a good way.  The blame game begins. 

The for­mer red-hot lovers, now sim­ply tol­er­at­ing each other, look at each other as being the source of the “prob­lem”.  If the other one would only change, every­thing would be fine. “Just go back to being the way you were when we first met”, they say to each other.  “You’re the one who changed.  What hap­pened to the per­son I fell in love with?”  And so it goes. 

 What we fail to see in this trance is how we are the ones who deceive our­selves and the other per­son by not being who we authen­ti­cally are in the first place.  But humans are basi­cally wired to do the court­ing dance.  It’s a sur­vival mech­a­nism built in to insure the species will continue.

 In the ani­mal king­dom, the dance is more obvi­ous.  The male of the species puffs him­self up to look grander; his col­ors become brighter.  He lit­er­ally dances to attract his part­ner.  Among ani­mals, the court­ing dance has a sin­gle pur­pose: per­pet­u­at­ing the species. 

 Among humans, the dance becomes more com­pli­cated.  Not only are we charged with the con­tin­u­a­tion of the species, but we also layer over this dance a cul­tural neces­sity to be in rela­tion­ship. 

 In the­ory at least, humans like to think we mate for life.  In actu­al­ity, in the 21^st cen­tury, this idea has been rel­e­gated to the junk heap of his­tory.  A life-long rela­tion­ship that remains monog­a­mous is so rare as to be unheard of.  Per­haps only among clois­tered nuns and their vows with Christ. 

 In the ani­mal king­dom, gib­bon apes, wolves, ter­mites, coy­otes, barn owls, beavers, bald eagles, golden eagles, con­dors, swans, brolga cranes, French angel fish, sand­hill cranes, pigeons, pri­ons (a seabird), red-tailed hawks, angler­fish, ospreys, prairie voles (a rodent), and black vul­tures — are a few that mate for life and even they are known to “cheat” on occa­sion. 

 So it doesn’t look good for the human ideal of monogamy and fidelity and find­ing hap­pi­ness in our inti­mate rela­tion­ships.  How­ever, all is not lost.  We humans have big brains and devel­oped minds for a rea­son.  There is a way out and a way for­ward.  Please stay tuned as we con­tinue this con­ver­sa­tion in future posts. 

 What are your thoughts and com­ments about this sub­ject?  What have you expe­ri­enced in your own rela­tion­ship trance dances?  I’d love to hear from you………

 

 

 

Tagged as: authentic relationships, dance, dr. judith rich, fidelity, intimacy, monogamy, relationships, Rx For The Soul