27 July, 2005 freely received We are lying side by side on our backs. My arm is under his neck and his lies between us. We’ve reached toward each other too with knees and toes. We’re lying there together, drifting into sleep, just as though we were used to this, and comfortable with it, though we never are, quite. We don’t talk about feelings. At all. I may want too much of him. He may want too little of me. Or in some areas it might be the other way around. If we talked about feelings, we’d discover that we’re incompatible. I watched a friend become bubbly-happy as she fell in love a while back. When the newness was over, she moved in with him and her mood was less exuberant, but still contented. Now she’s miserably, urgently unhappy. They have argued. She’s not getting something she wants, something she values. She wants open communication and a healthy relationship. I wanted to tell her something, the other night when we were talking, but it wasn’t clear in my mind, and spoken unclearly, would have demeaned her feelings. It came to me later. It’s not about open communication or even healthy relationship. It’s about love. This man loves her, I can see that, in his manner with her, and even in the things she’s told me about their differences. But if he’s vulnerable, he gets prickly, he puts up defenses of silence or anger. He’s vulnerable because he loves her, and because love stirs up our vulnerabilities. Love always stirs up our vulnerabilities. I can talk about feelings. I have many years of practice behind me. But that was with a different person, not this one, the one I love now. That was with Chris, and it took us some years to develop the open communication we later had. All my women friends, every one of them, envied that communication. It was what they wanted in their own love relationships. But why do we think our lovers, boyfriends, husbands should talk with us the way we talk with our friends? My friend has talked about feelings, and has asked her man to talk about feelings with her. So they’ve discovered that they’re incompatible, that they want the “wrong” things of each other. “Freely given is freely received,” said Phil four years ago, when I wanted to talk about feelings and to pin down the status of our relationship. That’s all he said. I was on my own to understand it and to understand myself. I had no choice. If I’d gone to him, demanding “processing,” he’d simply have vanished, and I would have been on my own in a different way. Thrown back into myself, I began to learn who I really was, not who I was when trying to align with a man. I began, more slowly, to learn who he really was, not who I wanted him to be. And finally I began to receive freely what was freely given, and to give freely what would be freely received. So last night when I came home from an evening meeting, there were delicious smells in the house, there was Phil, on the deck, just finishing something on his computer. There was time for a cooling shower, and then a glass of wine & a good meal on the deck, an hour of conversation as the sun went down and a fresh soft breeze came up. It’s all good. It’s all free and easy, the way it’s supposed to be. I want to give this to my friend somehow, that freedom which has come to me through not talking about feelings.   previous - next