How do you balance companionship and eroticism?

The following is a partial transcript from my session of the Conscious Sexuality and Relationship Conference!

I think we get married and make a commitment to someone to feel safe. When you first meet someone and you’re first attracted to them, you long for them I the space in between you.
You’re attracted to someone because they’re over there. Once you have them, once you’re attached to them, they’re sitting next to you on the couch every night, no so much because there’s no space. But, it’s safe and it’s nice and you go into the maintenance phase of your sex life or what I call the sweat pants phase. It’s lovely and it’s great and we all want that because we want to feel safe, but safety is antithetical to eroticism.

Eroticism is naughty. It’s elicit. It’s forbidden. It’s a little bit wrong. All those things that make it hot are the opposite of what we’re looking for in a committed partnership. We don’t want it to be wrong or bad. We want to be safe and secure, mostly to have kids and to make it safe for children and family. The longer you’re in a marriage, the less safe it is to talk about what might be dangerous or might feel elicit or might be that darker side of your sexuality.

We have in our culture what’s called the Madonna/whore split. The good girl/bad girl and also the good boy/bad boy. That’s what we have, sort of pirate fantasy. I call it the Johnny Depp fantasy, the guy that throws you to the deck of a ship and you say, “No, no, please.” We have that fantasy of the guy that we want to have sex with, but we don’t want to marry. Just like guys have the fantasy of the girl they want to have sex with, but they wouldn’t marry.

Your sexuality starts to get split off from the safety of a committed partner to the person that you would have the bad sex with. Over time, that erotic energy has to go somewhere. If you’re not going to put it into your marriage or your long-term committed partner, because it doesn’t feel safe, it’s either going to go into porn, it’s going to go into an affair, it’s going to get shut down until the kids grow up. It’s got to go somewhere because it’s part of your erotic self.

It’s just naturally part of who you are. It keeps you alive. It’s Eros energy. It’s the creative life force. If you start to shut that down in yourself, you start to feel dead. You start to feel depressed. You start to feel hopeless. Those are the people that come into my office and say, “I love my partner, but I’m not in love with them. I don’t feel passion. I don’t feel alive.”

They use words that sound like Thanatos energy. Thanatos was the Greek god of death and destruction. It’s the opposite of Eros. It’s the hopelessness that people feel. It’s not necessarily because they don’t love their partner. It’s because that Eros energy has gotten split off or has been denied in the relationship because they’re afraid of destroying what they have, the safety and the comfort. It makes total sense.

If you don’t take that erotic energy and put it back into the marriage, it’s going to go somewhere. It’s guaranteed. It’s going to go somewhere. You can bring it back into the relationship or you can split it off. If you don’t work on that erotic piece – there are two parts of your relationship. There’s your companionship, which is the day-to-day, business of your marriage. Who’s going to pick up the kids? Who’s going to get the pizza? The day-to-day corporation, really, of your marriage.

That’s really what people spend the most of their time on. The whole other part of your marriage, your committed partnership, is your eroticism. You have to work on that as much, if not more, than the rest of your relationship. If you don’t, it’s not going to happen on its own, like I said earlier. People put very little time and energy into this. They spend most of their time on the companionship part.

This is where that Eros energy is. Even if you spend a couple hours a week focused on this you keep it alive. People that come into see me come in because they’ve either been neglecting this and it’s been years since they put any energy into it. They’ve been doing this hoping this would take of itself or there’s been a trauma to this erotic piece of their relationship and they’re coming in going, “Oh my God, we’re damaged now because there’s been an affair or porn or something horrible happened to this and now we have to heal from it.” Sometimes they can and sometimes they can’t.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *