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Narratives, Part 4

 

 

 

 

 

This series on erotic and sexual “narratives” is designed to shed light on one way that people in committed relationships can understand, re-learn and continue to develop their desire, including for one another. Desire can recur with surprising consistency, if the partners’ levels of personal development can continue apace.

Tension, pushing growth

Whether they are reclaiming, rehabilitating or recharging the desire connection, adult relationships today are trying to integrate partners’ desires with the multiple commitments they’ve chosen. That tension alone pushes personal growth and integrity like nothing else in life.

A poor competitor

Desire doesn’t compete well for time. Neither Seattle’s nor most American cultures fully understand or support the idea of desire getting its proper time and place in relational life. Striving for and achieving success – be it educational, material, spiritual, professional or procreative – is the main agenda. These long term and lifelong commitments all take time.

Feeding desire

Adult desire is like infanthood in one sense – it must be fed. It can’t and won’t feed itself. Adults themselves have to know how to feed it; loss of desire is powerfully distancing and divisive, given how people are now wanting to experience monogam-ous (and -mish) relationships, married and otherwise.

How to cook

Templates and narratives are one way to learn how to prepare or “cook” desire, and partners are the chefs de cuisine. I’ve worked with people who’ve identifed and then invested in both their templates & narratives. They recognize the important role that desire plays in their personal and relational security and fulfillment.

Templates revisited

Templates can be further developed into adulthood, using adult sexual experience. They can seem quite removed from “reality”, but they are usually anchored in certain realities. Are those realities all about “attachment”? I don’t believe so….

Narratives, Part 5 is next.
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