Coupledom and Companionship

Today’s writing is a short offering because I need to get on with some important things.

These last few weeks have been somewhat challenging for a gal like me; all the theorising, the thoughts, the feelings – all intermingled in a delightfully complex tangle.

And despite everything, despite the anguish, the hurt, the genuine pain I have felt, I do mean ‘delightfully’.

Because I suppose the most important thing to do is embrace complexity and realise that occasionally or indeed frequently in our lives we are challenged to the point of exhaustion on some fundamental ways of living. And that has to be a good thing.

It’s not easy. There are still huge fluctuations at the moment. Whilst being seemingly at calm with myself and new situations I find myself in, I can then suddenly find myself in a complete turmoil, which lasts fleetingly but the damage to my equilibrium is done, leaving lingering questions that I know I should dismiss from my mind and get on with feeling and living for the moment of wonderment that I experience all around me so very often.

In my effort to calm myself, I always find writing and reading to be a great comfort. So I took myself to the internet once more for guidance from a more objective standpoint than either my own or my lover’s.
So here is a small quote from one such piece of internet browsing.

“My heart hurt just as if someone had punched a hole through my chest and ripped it out still beating, as in some Aztec sacrifice ritual. Sometimes it hurt really bad. Sometimes it was just a dull persistent pain. Sometimes it hurt for a while and kind of came to a crescendo and then stopped just as suddenly as it had begun. I tried as best I could to let it go. “

Brad  Warner – my new main man!

He goes on to discuss thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations, ever changing.

“Some were pleasant. Some were not. Most were neither. They just were........... And sometimes after a long while of feeling great my chest would hurt again. So it goes.”

How utterly refreshing to hear the words from a Zen Master who is big enough to admit to his own irrationalities and his own fluctuating thoughts! And I thought I was losing sight of my ability to be Zen-like! But no. In these small clippings from a most sensational book (so far), I recognised myself and felt great comfort that even the most practiced of Zen Masters were troubled with the same forms of anxiety that I am, and sometimes just couldn’t let go of the thinking.

It also made me think that although these pieces were written by a man suffering from a ‘broken heart’ and over spilled love for a woman who turned away, the same can be said for dealing with bereavement of any kind. It certainly resonated with me.

Being me, I couldn’t hold my fire on reading and purchasing such a book and managed to get an additional copy of it to my lover.

Why? Because whatever we are going through, whatever journey we are taking, we often, so very often converge along our pathways – in thought and mind and deed.

This one was so big that I needed to share it with him.

Possibly there is affirmation in this writing for him, learning for me, and possibly the other way round as well to a lesser or greater degree.

I mean – sex and relationships? Is there anything more important, and to have it explained in a Zen way – ooh I am so excited.

I cannot wait for us to sit together and discuss it more – my Zen-mate. Yes, I like that.

However, I shall return to this book frequently, I expect, over the course of my next few blogs. Perhaps it will resonate with me so much that I will be perpetually quoting from it as a book that all should read. We shall see.

But this is not my purpose of writing today. That is for later. However, I suppose I wanted to justify to myself as much as anyone else why I still get the queries and thoughts jumping into my head, and how, in some ways, I need to go through this process to finally embrace the feeling.

I have questions. Why shouldn’t I? I’m an inquisitive type of person and maybe had I not been so, I would never have even considered looking at Zen in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t have been living the life I am leading right now. But I have and I am so incredibly grateful that I have found this pathway of experience and thought and everything. Bloody everything!

But there are still the questions. Niggle, naggle, bollocks!

They are getting fewer by the minute, and hopefully, they are getting more objective, though they are clearly driven by presupposed assumptions on next steps and the journey onwards.

So the main question for the day is this. How do you explain to another person the nature of a relationship that goes way beyond the alleged closeness of coupledom? How do you explain to another about what the companionship, the sexual bonding, the sensational brilliance, the togetherness actually means, actually is, whilst at the same time explaining that there is no coupledom involved? How the hell do you do it?

Of course, one answer is that you don’t need to. Nobody needs to know about the extent of one relationship that is almost impossible to explain. But in polyamorous existences, when other potential friendships, relationships and expectations are being considered, how the hell do you tell another person about the brilliance of one relationship without giving them the wrong impression that it is somehow less significant than it is?

How do you explain about the togetherness, the completeness without them thinking, through no fault of their own, that these people are coupled?
And in not using the ‘couple’ label, how can the unenlightened, the pragmatic, the uninformed possibly understand what this relationship is all about?

Furthermore, how can they understand that in fucking other people, the relationship potentially grows even more intense and that there is nothing taken away from the primary relationship by the fact that one of those involved in this companionship is fucking them?

(NB – I’m still coming to terms with this one myself. So how on earth is anyone else going to understand this if they have not had the sort of grounding, so to speak, that I have?)

I am a human being in my own right. I always have been and always will be. I have been part of a couple, and I don’t like the swallowing sensation involved, even if, on a practical level it does not have to happen.

I do not want to be part of a couple, but I do want others to know the intensity, value and importance of this most significant relationship, and I am not just talking about others who may be involved with my lover. How do I, eventually, tell the important people in my life about this soul-mate of mine, my Zen-mate. How do I explain when all of these people, through western indoctrination, are under the impression that coupledom is the ultimate goal of relationships?

It’s not! It cannot be. We are individual human beings with rights and responsibilities to ourselves as much as to other people. In giving we receive. In receipt we are giving. The Zen way is to enjoy the giving as much, if not more than the receiving, but we cannot lose ourselves in the process.

Doesn’t coupledom actually lose a bit of yourself whereas the relationship I have with my lover, my partner, my soul mate, my friend, my companion, my teacher, my pupil, my Zen mate is something that goes well beyond the realms of this most contrived of preconditioned partnerships?

How the hell do you explain that to someone else without them understanding what it actually is?

I am not sure I know the answer, but of course, I am concerned that if people do not understand the real nature of what coupledom is and is not, how can they see that what I have with my lover is greater than their preconceived idea of what a partnership of mind, body and soul really is.

The conversation goes something like this.

I am in a relationship. I have been in a relationship for x amount of years, which is quite a long time as far as my life history goes. It is a beautiful relationship. We are companions, we are lovers, we are best friends, we are soul-mates. We share everything, we think in a similar way. We adore the same things. We respect and value our individuality and our togetherness.

But what we are not, is a couple. That is not in our language and it is not a phrase that we like to consider to reflect our relationship.

Ah well, if you are not a couple, then you are not committed, especially if you are fucking me, because if you’ve fucked me, how can you be committed to the other person. There’s a crack. That’s all. It is not so perfect as you think, matey boy.................

And so it goes on.

Perhaps I should just accept that there is nothing that could explain this relationship, that nobody could ever really understand its complexities and its brilliance. So why try?

And yet, there are two things with that.

I want people close to me to understand me, to know me, to realise just how significant this is.

And I want other potential lovers of mine or my lovely man’s to know where they are, where they stand before they get themselves involved in a relationship that they do not fully understand.

But can they ever?

Fuck coupledom.

But fuck those also who make assumptions about the status of an inexplicable relationship based on their own misunderstanding of the pinnacle of existence.