I met a man in June at a weekend immersion.. We were digging on each other and mutually wanted to explore a relationship dynamic.
Today, in October, he says, I don't have an interest in seeing you in a sexual way.
I want to focus my time on my family, my job and my kids. I’d like our relationship to evolve. Are you open to that?
‘Are you stressed?’
No, I feel good.
I struggle to understand.
‘Did I hurt you? Have I done something wrong?’
No, I would be saying that if that's how I felt. You haven't harmed me and you haven’t done anything wrong. I just don't have the interest in allowing my mind to go there at this time.
My mind to go there… go where?
My nervous system shakes with discomfort. I know this feeling. The intolerance of uncertainty. I hate this place.
I take a deep breath. I'm grateful we can both be spacious on the call. He doesn’t rush my words. He is kind, I remember and soften. A dull grief in my chest meets the back of my eye balls. Don't cry. I look up at the roof of my car to stretch the spazzing muscles.
This body. I take another deep breath.
I’ve been sitting in the gym parking lot for an hour. A ritual it seems of late. Pull up, roll up American Spirit tobacco with whatever weed I have in arms reach. Bamboo papers the dispensary gave me with my last two orders.
Traded like goods. A commoditization of a relationship.
My head is spinning with self-criticism and regret. The heaps of worthless self-talk I've been quietly shoveling off my limp body for the past eight years in therapy feel damp and cold on my tired skin. Its raining and everything is heavy
Relationships are not commodities.
I reply with my truth. But it feels forced for some reason.
‘Thank you for telling me what you need and how I can best support you. I honor your choices and I appreciate the clarity with which you can update me with what's important to you and how I can collaborate with you.’
I feel sick. I notice the tension between the social expectation to manage my feelings in a way that makes this interaction comfortable for him and my desire to fuck entirely right off.
I feel vulnerable. My brave heart who yearns for love meets the irreducible difference of another’s
This body. I hate it here.
I remember vairagya - dispassion or nonattachment. In yogic philosophy, it is discussed in relation to the cultivation of steadiness. The freedom from being governed by attachment to experience. But nonattachment doesn’t mean not caring. It invites us to see the way we cling and crave and attempt to make changing circumstances conform to our expectations.
“Well, I love you no matter what. I have only love for you and if this is what you need now, I hear you fully. Thank you for letting me know”
I surrender entirely.
I can’t tell how I feel. I know that desire is not a force anyone can control. That is something so fascinating about desire. How it moves through you and it evolves.
I am evolving. We are evolving.
Desire is evolving.
I look to the doorway I hadn’t considered before this moment-- an adjacent space to exist in where I am not his muse
I am not his muse.
I sink.
I want to be that.
The joy of moving with aliveness, dancing, smiling, loosening the grip on the need to have a function and instead savoring the freedom that is pleasure.
Author Byung-Chul Han in his book “The Agony of Eros” asks, what happens to our capacity for desire when we encounter another person who cannot be assimilated into our own understanding, expectations, or needs?
I am not his muse.
Why don't you want that?
“Are you ok?”
I can't understand what is really happening. I feel like this is a way for him to begin an ending.
I wrestle with his assurance that I didn't do anything wrong. I'm just an overstock commodity not useful enough to be employed.
What relationships are is not commodities.
I scan to feel all the ways capitalist logic can infiltrate intimacy-- transforming people into objects of consumption and relationships into arrangements evaluated according to satisfaction, availability, and usefulness.
I carefully consider the ways an overstock commodity is not useful enough to be employed.
Why does the loss of someone's desire so readily become a verdict on my value?
“Ok. Love you. Bye”
I wonder if I’m ok
