Should Love Feel Safe? – Transcript
On the heels of my last podcast, talking about intense chemistry and whether it’s a green or red flag, today I want to talk specifically about the idea that relationships ought to be “SAFE”.
I hear this word tossed around A LOT now.
In the wake of everyone talking about nervous system resetting and how SAFETY is the holy grail we all ought to apparently be looking for, I have some thoughts.
The idea seems to be that your partner, and your relationship ought to make you feel safe.
You feel safe in their presence.
You feel safe to open up.
And while I sorta see what they’re getting at, the reality is that life—and especially love—is NOT safe.
Ever. Not really, Not actually.
How can you be safe when you open yourself up and let your guard down and let someone in?
You can make a good, educated and maybe logical decision.
And in the end, you could still get screwed.
Let me explain why “safety” is actually the least safe option.
***
The Ache Only Intimacy Could Answer
One of my favorite quotes ever, about love and sex and intimacy is from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
He’s the esteemed Columbian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude—thought by many, including me, to be a masterpiece and possibly the best book ever written— although I’m about to start reading Dostoyevsky, so my opinion might change.
He also wrote Love in the Time of Cholera—another one of my favorite books ever.
This line always stayed with me because it made the most sense of why I felt the way I did and it reflected my own experiences.
“The anxiety of falling in love could only find repose in bed.”
~ Marquez
This idea that the deep hunger, need, restless vulnerability—all of this was a thirst that could only be satiated through lovemaking.
That being in bed, entwined with each other, was the only thing that would temper that love, calm it, quench it.
Momentarily.
Until the next day and night, when you come together again.
And I think. I’m going to theorize.
That the people who have never had that experience of sex—
Where it delivers you. It saves you. It takes you to another realm. It rebirths you into the highest and best version of yourself.
If they’ve never had that, they don’t understand…. The process.
That one offsets and enhances the other.
Your deep, open, wild heart is SOOTHED AND CALMED when you get the shit loved and f**ked out of you.
And that’s where sex becomes medicine.
Daily medicine.
You find each other there.
And you soothe each other.
I much prefer the word “SOOTHED”.
Instead of “safe”.
Safety is an illusion.
Okay look, let’s break this down a bit more.
Do you need to trust your partner? Know they have your back? Do they need to adore and cherish you?
YES YES YES.
The Dark Side of Safety
But safety…. Has another dark side.
It’s also the idea of being stuck in your comfort zone.
Of not venturing out of it.
Of playing things too… safe.
What was the big buzz phrase of 2020?
“Stay safe!!”
Uh, no thank you.
I’m not afraid of invisible, government-manufactured boogeymen.
I’m more afraid of my own potential stagnation.
That’s truly scary.
Anyone I’ve ever really wanted had an element of risk.
Why?
Because I wanted them so much.
The depth of my wanting already made me vulnerable.
The ideal, is that you find someone who wants you as much.
It isn’t about someone having the upper hand.
It’s about both being so open, so raw, so utterly besieged with each other, that the place you connect is in that MUTUAL vulnerability.
And you do everything to maintain that place.
Of vulnerability.
Of NOT letting your walls come up.
THAT’S what so much of my work is about.
Safety or Mutual Surrender
How do we get there?
And then STAY there.
In that armor-less state.
In your rawness.
You both put down your arms.
And surrender.
Perpetually.
The most powerful place to do that—to show it, to embody it—is in bed.
You are literally naked.
Physically. And then emotionally.
People can say they love each other.
And they do say that. All the time.
They love their partner like a brother. Or a sister.
But that’s not… vulnerable love.
When you take your vulnerable heart and you mix it with your vulnerable cock or pussy.
When all these pieces are unguarded.
And open.
That’s as naked as you can be.
THAT is what I call gourmet sex.
You need both dimensions: the emotional and the sexual to be raw.
They both HAVE to be there.
One without the other—in either direction—is empty.
Lifeless. Boring.
But when you combine the two.
This is everything. This is magic.
This is the stuff that makes the world go round.
This is where you unleash the alchemical healing, pro-creative and euphoric, psychedelic potential of your god selves.
Nothing less.
So I’ll ask again, should love feel safe?
Most people don’t know what they don’t know.
They’ve never touched it.
They’ve never tasted it.
The best—the very best—they can come up with in their so limited experiences, is that “safety” is what you ought to aim for.
This is the highest rung of the ladder they aspire to.
Should love feel safe?
Nah.
F**k em.
They need to get deeply heart and soul-f**ked.
If You’re Not Scared Shitless, You’re Not Aiming High Enough
Another one of my favorite life mottos is:
“If you’re not scared shitless, you’re not aiming high enough.”
We all know what this is like.
The only way you keep growing, is that your next steps ought to be tinged with even a little bit of heart flutter, gut flutter, genital flutter.
For me, this is always the radar of “WALK THIS WAY”.
There is magic for you over here, but you’re going to have to earn it.
You need to prove yourself. That you’re worthy.
That you have courage.
And boldness.
And if you don’t? If you can’t right now?
Well, then it will slip through your fingers.
And you can settle for the consolation prize of the thing, the person, the job, the life—you want less.
Or you can train like a motherf**ker for what it is you really want.
So that the next time it comes around.
You’re ready.
You recognize it.
And you leap. You tackle it and grab it and don’t let it go.
**
Elder Wisdom or Folly
Any time I’ve ever chosen a “safe” person, it’s been a f**king disaster.
Like possibly the most disastrous of any of my relationships.
Once upon a time a met an older woman, who was a mentor of sorts to a friend of mine.
We were sitting down at lunch and she tried to espouse some kind of elder wisdom.
Which was:
That women ought to choose men who love them more.
She said this was the only way women could really have their needs met in relationship.
That this was safe.
I pondered it, because I’d never really looked at relationships that way.
A. I wasn’t strategic about them.
And
B. I thought I always wanted to be madly, deeply, passionately in love with someone. I wanted to feel a stirring in the soul of me, like a deep ache of finally recognizing someone and them recognizing me.
Of us knowing—and adoring—each other deeply.
Of being smitten, besieged and brought to our knees.
In every possible way.
It had never occurred to me to choose someone where potentially I could be LESS hurt or LESS vulnerable.
A Union of Rationalization
So I tried it.
I mean, it made a kind of logical sense. I guess.
I met someone. He was cute. Well, he was beautiful, actually. One of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen.
But he wasn’t inwardly strong. Or brilliant. Or someone I admired.
Or felt a deep love for.
I went ahead anyway.
But ultimately, the proof is always in the pudding.
Haha, especially with someone like me, where sex is such an integral part of the relationship.
I liked him. Sorta.
I liked hanging out with him.
Sorta.
But I had no desire to have sex with him.
So what’s kind of hilarious is that for most people, this would just be a “normal” relationship where they don’t have sex that much.
She would say she has a “low libido” and he’d think she just has a “low libido”.
But for me and in my world, this is a really big deal.
And a no go.
It carried on for a while.
And then I ended it.
And I think he knew, that deep down, it wasn’t deep for me.
And he was bitter and resentful.
On his way out the door, he figuratively smashed EVERYTHING he could get his hands on in my life.
Wrought havoc and destruction.
So no.
This whole “safe choice” find “someone who loves you more” was total bullshit and ultimately even more chaos.
Because it’s not built on the deepest truth or the deepest heart.
It’s built on a rationalization.
As I’ve said, I see the outcome of such unions of rationalization years and decades down the road.
The outcome—which is all kinds of reproductive ailments, financial problems, weight gain, and depression.
Because this is what it looks like to take the “safe” choice instead of what the heart wants.
And the genitals want.
And so we wither.
We get smaller.
Committed to Growth
Like I said in the last episode on chemistry, the key is that both of you are committed to your relationship as being a vessel for growth.
You both KNOW that you will need to put in the work and the play—from radical honesty to hours-long sex dates, to make this thrive and become your superpower.
Because without that, yes, it will also die.
This will be an explosive, rather than a quiet death, but die it still will.
***
To Slake
So back to this idea of soothing each other.
The people I’ve been the MOST into, who touched me the deepest, who I was most passionate about—we HAD to have the most sex.
Spending hours in bed with each other, stopping time, connecting to the depths, deeper than we’d both ever been—within us—that was the only remedy for the intensity of how we felt about each other.
I’ll let it be noted, that we never really “had enough”.
The only thing that would get us out of bed and out of that cosmic cocoon was some kind of life responsibility.
We’d emerge as new people. More raw, more open.
And yet stronger. Fortified within it.
And then the rawness becomes almost unbearable.
The great beauty of it all.
And we’d climb into bed again, to be slaked.
To SLAKE – satiate an ache.
For it to tone the volume down just enough so we could get through the day without stopping to daydream at the wonder of it all.
But it lets you walk around with that raw, unguarded heart.
And then you come back again to each other that night, bodies and hearts gliding into infinity.
And again, you get filled just enough to be able to go out into the world again.
Knowing you’ll come back to each other.
And you carry on.
Ad infinitum.
**
The Opposite of Safety
So look it’s not safety you’re looking for.
It’s decidedly the opposite of that.
What you need is someone courageous and bold and brave enough to risk it all.
You come together with that intention.
The great poet Hafiz, has some lines I like:
“Now gather all of your courage.
Throw yourself into his bed.
He will probably kill you.
Fantastic. That’s the whole idea!”
The only parts of us that die, are the little ones.
The false ones. The ego ones.
And every time we experience the little and big death of deep orgasms, we burn off more dross.
We refine ourselves so much, all that remains is pure heart and pure soul.
Your love and intimacy create a great cosmic cocoon that you continually rebirth yourselves out of.
This energy wraps itself around you like a cloak of protection.
NOTHING can f**k with you.
You become… UNF**KWITHABLE because you are so deeply, wildly and profoundly well-f**ked.
**
You don’t need safety.
You need a fellow spiritual warrior.
You need someone who will bravely walk through every fire with you.
Including—and especially—the ones you ignite in your hearts and your bed.
***
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