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Understanding each other's language “I finally discovered that my greatest fear is not being alone; it’s being vulnerable.”
When choosing coupling committedly with someone who is also your lover, therein, you are equal, adult partners; you love one another. Psychologist William James believed that possibly the deepest human need is the need to feel appreciated – knowing that you are valuable (precious, if you like) to your lover.
“We struggled for years trying to love each other more, or better, or something, but . . .” said Tony*, in a committed relationship of eight years with Allen* who concludes Tony’s consternation, “... but our efforts have missed each other, first emotionally, then sexually, and now, we’re both on different tangents altogether."
It requires great character strength, and not insignificant foolishness, to walk away from years of personal investment and endearment. Sometimes it is what needs to be done; most times, getting your coupling situation to a translator is all the remedy needed. Let me explain.
As a human being, as a person, I am not without tangents and neither is my beloved of near nine years. Both building our respective professional practices over the past couple of years put us out of step with each other. We even noticed, corrected our relationship course, and sailed forward. He made course corrections. I made course corrections. More than a year later, we found ourselves navigating our relationship, our emotions, and desires in different directions. We had misunderstood each other. What he said he needed from me, and what I heard, was as tangential as what he heard me say I needed from him, and what I meant.
Only by seeking out coupling guidance could we be sure that our very real partnership needs would be translated without fear or favor into language each of us could understand respectively, thereby enabling us to dialogue our way out of dilemma together. Now that we better understand each other’s language, the emotional climate of our relationship has radically improved.
If I were to develop my intimate emotional relationship with my partner, my lover, then he and I needed to understand each other’s needs and desires. If we are to love each other better and kindle more the lust in our coupling (a fire can always burn higher and hotter), I need to understand what he requires to turn him on, emotionally and erotically, and he vice versa. Your emotional and erotic language, how you personally express such needs and desires, is however all-important to them being understood. We need to speak our lover’s language if we are to get them, and get them to understand our needs.
In this, coupling guidance (marriage counselling, relationship counselling, couples therapy, whatever you want to call the process of learning greater love in partnership) is an awesome tool by which to tune your understanding in on your lover’s language. It is a tool you should pick up gratefully and with great enthusiasm; just a decade ago such a tool for gay men and women would have been considered ludicrous.
“Same-sex-couple” undeniably positions sex central to gay coupling commitment (please share your comment below if your opinion differs – dialogue is development). It is thus vital to work with coupling guidance consultants who, like myself, give this due respect in coupling guidance. The love and sex shared by two people is a dialogue. We do not intrinsically understand each other’s erotic language – which we develop ourselves from our experiences – but with undulating arms, torsos, and legs all wrestle-rubbing us to orgasm, we seem to get by on each other’s body language. Devoted, sexy partnership is NOT about ‘getting by’. It is about how to provide and share in ecstatic appreciation with your lover for each other. IMAO (in my arrogant opinion). That’s where the colloquial expression “to make love” surely found its romantic roots. I am adamant to become as fluent as possible in my lover’s erotic language, so that when I make love the ecstasy might be out of this world. What better gift to your beloved, right?
Notice the word ‘gift’ right there? If every time you make whoopee is ecstatic, kudos is due to you, but most couples practice an all-sorts staple of hearty sex for the great pleasure of getting off. Making love, on the other hand, is perhaps only a human ability: an art, a poem to your lover in his own personal erotic language.
To understand this deeper meaning within another person requires knowing your own depths: physically, mentally, and spiritually. What a marvellous adventure to share with your lover once on the road to discovery, one without end in sight. One you need not brave alone with a committed partner by your side. I finally discovered that my greatest fear is not being alone; it’s being vulnerable. Learning what has deep meaning for my lover is necessarily reciprocity of honesty and transparency. If it were not, intimacy would hardly be possible.
What I mean to lead on to is that, like Allan and Tony, my lover and I recognised – only once within the process of coupling guidance, as participants ourselves – that if we do not reconcile ourselves to our fear of vulnerability (a fear in the dark recesses of contemporary man’s masculinity and a fear today’s women harbour in the shadow of patriarchal hegemony), we would not be able to build and develop intimacy in our partnership.
Trust is arguably the greatest intimacy two people can share. This intimacy abused can harm not only your relationship, but also both your hearts and minds.
Honesty and Transparency
Now honesty is simple to grow, if not easy. Sow honesty and you’ll reap honestly. That means more than it may read as, so look at it again. Let me exemplify. Myself, having to lie to my partner, even the ‘white’ lies, implies to me that I could feel shame by sharing the truth. I consider being able to show my partner that I can feel shame makes me a more whole person deserving of his love. So by being open and honest with him, I gain the personal integrity needed to face up to his honesty. My partner’s honesty with me definitely stirs my emotional coals about; deeper the honesty, higher leaps my flame for him. It is a gift I treat with respect and one I try to show my gratitude for regularly by reciprocating with my wholehearted honesty.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I admit honesty can be burdensome. Your shared devotion to one another – and it pleases me to tell you, that honesty is like fertilizer for devotion – will shoulder near any burden harvested from honesty. Transparency is more of a knot. It is dialogical bonding you create between you and your partner. I hear “. . . we have been together for years, we even finish each other’s sentences” from couples, and I have to remind them that this achievement does not mean you are having the same feelings, nor necessarily know what your partner is, in truth, thinking. Knowing this I, myself, still ‘assume’ I know what feelings and thoughts my lover has. Assumption is a naturally evolved aptitude of the human mind. In our partnerships, to fulfil commitment to a beloved, we need to preclude assumption: I need to know what my lover is really thinking and feeling.
Before you ‘assume’, try this mad method called ‘asking’. Within the first couple of months of coupling guidance I had been applying it skillfully, professionally, neglecting to practice it in my own personal life with my lover. Transparency is the willing and open exchange of psychological experience with your lover by asking and honestly responding between the two of you. Inquiring after the feelings and thoughts of our beloved nurtures mutual interest in the lived experience of the partnership, and emotionally invests you both in the commitment between you. Transparency is how deeply I explore into my lover’s heart and mind by asking ‘deeper’ questions, and of course from what depth my partner would respond. This transparency of self that devoted lovers share, being open to one another, can make one feel vulnerable. ‘I feel vulnerable’ is decisively different from ‘I am vulnerable’. Emotions are not a choice. Behavior is. Recognize what you are feeling for what it is: an emotion. We can stand up against our emotions. For a couple that stands by each other through honesty and transparency, trust is forged, and such trust does not render the lover vulnerable. Quite the contrary.
Know more, love better, and understand your relationship.
GetLusty empowers couples, gay and straight, enriching the lives of people in committed relationships around the world. I look forward to providing more gay coupling information while I impart personal and professional experience of men and masculinities as a sex-researcher and -educator to you.
I’ll do near well anything to help you get your lust on for your lover, and share the joy and learning from it with the lovers of the world.
Do It well; do It safe.
Jacsman
*For ethical privacy all person names are given as nom de guerre.
Also, a quick note! Throughout October, we'll be giving away products, discounts and special privileges to our GetLusty community. For example, by October 15th, we're giving away a Sqweel 2, the world's best selling oral sex toy. Become a member of our growing community. 'Like' us on Facebook and/or subscribe to our eNewsletter to join in (and win in the process).
He just started writing, but we're already so excited about JacoPhillip. Our resident advisor on gay long-term relationships, JacoPhillip Crous is also known as Jacsman. He studies & consults on ecstatic & intimate psycho-sexual health & development, promoting & improving male2male dialogue that furthers understanding of masculine sexuality and MSM relationships. A sex educator, JacoPhillip Crous studies about and consults around male psycho-sexual self-development phenomena, behaviours, experiences and knowledgeablity. Find out more about JacoPhillip at: http://about.me/Jacsman.
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