Baseret på et uddrag fra Intimate Communion af David Deida.
Suppose you are wearing sexy clothes which compliment the shape of your body. If your business colleague looks you up and down and squeezes your ass, it would probably be a case of sexual harassment. Yet, if your lover did the same thing, you would probably welcome it. When it comes to emotional and sexual expectations, your business colleague and your lover are probably not equal in your eyes.
What do you really desire from your intimate partner? Are you clear about your emotional and sexual expectations? We often expect our partner to be everyone for us: our business colleague, our lover, the parent of our children, even our friendly therapist. It doesn’t work. The spark disappears. The passion peters out. Little things about our partners begin to really annoy us.
In our hopes to achieve a 50/50 Relationship, a relationship based on meeting each other half-way and sharing responsibilities equally, we usually forget what drew us together to begin with: our unique and special gifts as embodiments of Masculine and Feminine. Not just the gift of a business colleague, with whom we can share our financial strategies. Not just the gift of a therapist, who we can visit when we want to talk about our problems. Not just the gift of a childcare professional, who we can hire by the day or by the month. But the unique gift that we share only with our intimate partner. The gift of our uninhibited sexual essence. When we have forgotten this unique gift, our intimacies become flat.
What exactly is your sexual essence?
Imagine that you live in the future, at a time when intimate partners are built from scratch. You look through a catalog, picking and choosing exactly what you want in an intimate partner. First you look at the “Anatomy” section. One page in the catalog displays pictures of arms to select. Do you want a partner with hairy arms or smooth arms? Do you want a partner who’s arms are stronger than yours, or more lithe? You make a selection and continue flipping through the catalog, looking at pictures of eyes, legs, mouths, genitals, and torsos. There are even scratch and sniff pages. You take your pick, creating the intimate partner of your choice.
Then you turn to the “Emotional Character” section of the catalog. On each page is a whole spectrum of emotional qualities ranging from joyous to angry, silly to serious, expressive to reserved.
For instance, one page is dedicated to “Control-Yielding Spectrum.” Do you want a partner who enjoys taking control of a situation, or a partner who enjoys following your lead? Do you want a partner who likes to make the decisions half the time, leaving you to make the decisions the other half of the time? Or, would you prefer one who lets you make most of the decisions? Perhaps you would like a partner who is very dominant in bed, but less so when it comes to daily decisions. You can create the exact partner you want, so why not get specific?
Finally, you turn to the “Sexual Essence Spectrum” section of the catalog. Each page offers a full range of sexual essences, which are described as “expressions of the heart” that are the way your intimate partner will express his or her love, affection, and desire for union. Just as your partner’s potential arms were displayed in a spectrum of hairy to smooth or massive to frail, the sexual essences are also arranged in a spectrum. The range of sexual essences span the spectrum from the extreme Masculine at one end, to the more balanced, or Neutral type in the middle, to the extreme Feminine at the other end.
By choosing a sexual essence you are choosing the texture of your partner’s love. For example, what do you want to feel when your partner embraces you? You can choose from selections like “Visionary Hero,” “Gallant Prince,” or “Big and Dangerous,” which are different types located toward the extreme Masculine end of the spectrum. Or you could choose from “Innocent Waif,” “Wild Goddess,” or “Radiant Dancer” which are types located toward the extreme Feminine end.
Or, you might choose your partner’s sexual essence from the “Good Friend” part of the spectrum, somewhere near the middle. This type of partner has a more balanced or Neutral type of sexual essence, which allows him or her to be able to listen to you and really understand your thoughts and feelings. An extremely Masculine or Feminine partner, on the other hand, may lead all discussions toward deadly serious debate, flowing emotional roundabouts, or delicious sexual embrace. Since the extreme Masculine and the extreme Feminine speak such different languages, they often find it more communicative to passionately embrace each other or turn away in silence, rather than to speak in rational words, which often seem to get in the way of what they really want to “say.” People with more Neutral sexual essences, however, find it quite easy and fulfilling to speak honestly and clearly with each other, without getting into fights or tense silences.
At any given time in our lives, each of us has a preference: we either want a partner who loves us in a more Feminine way, a more Masculine way, or a more Neutral way. And likewise, your own sexual essence is, itself, more Feminine, Masculine, or Neutral. It doesn’t matter whether you are a woman or a man, your sexual essence may still be Masculine, Feminine, or Neutral.
One problem in our intimacies today is that many of us have confused social gender equality with the neutralization of our native Masculine and Feminine sexual essences: We want passion in our intimacies but neutrality in the office. We want our intimate partner to cherish and appreciate our sexual essence and anatomy, and yet we want our sexual essence and anatomy ignored when we are conferring in the boardroom. If we confuse functional roles in the workplace with the naturally different sexual desires of most men and women, everybody suffers.
The Feminine sexual essence must be honored in its own right if intimacy is to flower, as must the Masculine sexual essence. However, the workplace often places a higher value on the Masculine way of operating and often demands that women and men alike act more “business-like.” Because of this, women often hide their radiance and take on a competitive edge in order to be taken seriously. Men often suppress their language, behavior, and even sexual urges in order to work alongside women. Just because men and women can both wear gray suits doesn’t negate the fact that each of us is a unique sexual being.
As individual men and women, we should all be given the same opportunities and treated with the same respect and “equal eye.” In an effort to achieve this, men and women are learning to treat each other as equal and to some extent even non-sexual. Unfortunately, we have confused the “equal eye” of the workplace with sexual neutralization in our intimate relationships. In our intimate relationships, we have inadvertently negotiated the neutering of our sexual essence in order to be treated as equals.
We need to make a distinction between what we want at the workplace and what we want in our intimate lives together.
Sexual fulfillment in intimacy is not based on neutrality, but on the attractive differences, playful opposition, and pleasurable non-equivalence of the Masculine and Feminine gifts, anatomical as well as emotional. And this is a key to why the modern ideal of a an intimate relationship can be so dissatisfying. In a modern relationship, in which equivalence between men and women is often emphasized, we may never receive the full gifts of Masculine or Feminine loving that we truly desire.
In order to freely express our loving in Intimate Communion, we must be free to express our native sexual essence, whether our essence is Neutral, Masculine, or Feminine.
Suppose you are a woman whose sexual essence is naturally more Feminine. You will lose trust in your partner if you find that he is always ambivalent and undirected, waiting for you to take the lead most of the time. In this case, your partner is waiting to follow your direction, to trust and follow your Masculine sense of “mission.”
“What do you want to do tonight?” you ask.
“I don’t care, what do you want to do?” he answers.
If your sexual essence is actually more Feminine, you will find yourself wishing that your partner would take you into account and just make a decision. Your Feminine essence wants to feel his Masculine energy, direction, presence, and passion. You want to feel him take a stronger lead in your lives together, rather than being ambiguous and unclear.
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“How about if we go out to dinner and then go for a walk in the park?”
However, if your natural Feminine sexual essence is covered over by your own Masculine energy, then you will attract a partner who is polarized by your Masculine energy. Masculine and Feminine energies always attract their reciprocal. If you are putting out Masculine energy, you will attract a man who puts out Feminine energy. You will attract a partner who lacks strong directionality, presence, and confidence. He may be radiant and intuitive, but his life will be ambiguous and undirected, and therefore he will be attracted to your Masculine energy.
If you find that you are repeatedly disappointed that the men (or women) you attract are somewhat weak or lost, unable to completely follow through with what they start, wishy-washy, or threatened by your success, then you are probably animating more Masculine energy than is true of your natural sexual essence. Your Feminine sexual essence may be looking for a really good source of Masculine love, but the Masculine energy you are putting out is attracting men who need more Masculine in their lives, and therefore are attracted to yours. But they don’t fulfill the deepest desires of your Feminine sexual essence.
Suppose that you are a man with a naturally Masculine sexual essence. However, time after time you are disappointed by your intimate partners. You seem to attract women, again and again, who don’t trust your direction, who are more directed in their lives than you are, or who insist that you follow their direction–even though you want to follow your own direction.
If this is the case, you have attracted partners who are animating more Masculine energy than Feminine. If your sexual essence is Masculine, the only way you could be attracting such women is if your Masculine expression is blocked. Thus, your potential partners feel your more Feminine energy. They feel that they have “space” in the relationship to fill with their Masculine directionality, even though, deep inside, you are not turned on by a partner who usually wants to take the lead.
If you have had a series of intimate partnerships that ended because you no longer found your partner was “woman enough” or “man enough,” then you probably are animating a false sexual character yourself. Probably, you are putting out less Masculine or Feminine energy than would be natural for you if your were free. Therefore, you attract a partner who is polarized by your diminished sexual essence–that is, a partner who also expresses relatively less Masculine or Feminine energy. If your are falsely neutralized, you will attract partners who are also falsely neutralized: indecisive men and pushy women.
If your sexual essence is actually Neutral, you will enjoy and even prefer your partner to be more Neutral, or balanced between Masculine and Feminine. For instance, you will enjoy following your partner’s strong lead half the time, and you will equally enjoy providing a strong lead for your partner to follow half the time. If you have a Neutral sexual essence, this is the kind of relationship that you most want, that will turn you on sexually the most, that will inspire love, passion, and gratitude in your intimate life.
But, if you have a more Feminine or Masculine sexual essence, you will find yourself yearning to be ravished by, and to be the ravisher of, your intimate partner. Safe and Neutral discussions by themselves just won’t do.