kitandkat.com

Today is busy, but I wanted to respond to your last post by adding that it was not some “Wow that was great sex because we were pleasantly drunk and had unwound from the day and the movie was erotic and the stars were aligned” one-off exceptional event, but we reach this transcendental state on a regular basis  (I’m not quite bold enough to claim that it is every time), and this is extraordinary in and of itself.  How lucky we are.

Kit

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My Dear Kat,

I struggled to post tonight.  I didn’t want to just reiterate what we have been saying about agreement and balance because I felt the words would not differ enough to be useful.

This led me to thinking about language, and so I finally pulled out the metaphors we have used in this blog.

Thumbtacks
Imagine being barefoot in a room with thumb-tacks on the floor.  Even a few will inhibit your ability to dance, but once you find the room to be free of them, no limits apply.

Riding a bicycle
But how we do this is hard to pin down.  Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle.  At first, you fall over all the time; later, staying balanced becomes second nature.

The present is the path
And yet “do” is almost the wrong term, because there is no sense of effort; things happen effortlessly, again and again and again.  It is as if there is a path through life called the present that is clear and easy to walk.  To left and right, the past and the future have barbs, snares, pits of tar, that make progress so much more difficult.

On a leash
A partner who is only ninety-something percent accepting gives the feeling of being on a leash; you can run free most places, but at some point, a violent tug will occur, so the response is to run cautiously, or not at all.  But at 100%, a transforming quality occurs.

Riding in tandem
Many years ago I had the opportunity to ride rear-seat on a tandem.  I was used to steering on a bike, and I jerked the handlebars so fiercely that the forward rider could not keep the machine in balance.  Neither of us are doing that now.

Books and pages
…a book with pages; we think we are individual pages, but we are connected together in ways that are not seen by inspecting an individual page.

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Dear Kat,

There’s nothing to report – we just continue to get on magnificently.

WAIT!  That’s the weird thing – how does this happen?

Firstly I want to distinguish between disagreements and arguments.  The former is possible, the latter unimaginable.  Why would I want to persuade you to do something against your will?  It may improve my lot in some way, but the cost of your compliance must be deducted from the benefit.

Let’s say that I see my benefit as M and the cost to you as Y.  Then I should go ahead if M > Y.

But you may see the benefit to me as M2 and the cost to you as Y2, so I shouldn’t do it if M2 < Y2.

For this clash not to take place, either

• Our assessment of each others’ states must be accurate.
• If not accurate, our assessment of each others’ states must be generous.
• We believe the reporting of the other.

This may be overly intellectual and abstract, but the point I want to make is that we fully accept the reported reality of the other and do not discount it as less important than ours.  This requires two things: that we accept the other as fully equal to ourselves, not in skills and desires but in rights and consciousness, and that we trust the other to be truthful.

Oh, I see I riffed on this a couple of posts ago. Read the rest of this entry »

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My Dear Kat,

We don’t argue.  Realisation of that was the genesis of our exploration of our relationship.  We’ve said “Oh, we don’t argue because we don’t want to”, and that is part of it, but in addition to that, we are able to come to a mutually agreeable decision every time.

Now that is no doubt made simpler by our having similar opinions on tidiness, money, work, politics and more (though anyone who picks a seriously mismatched partner is either inexperienced, masochistic, or working through issues), but it’s not that we always make the same choices initially.  Instead, we each put out our position and then start looking for something that works for both of us.  We don’t defend our position, and we’re not overly attached to it; instead, we want to find something that works for both of us because we recognise that the other has equal rights to their needs, that their desires have equal validity, reality, importance.

It’s not that we’re equal in our desires, but that we see the other as having as much right to their position as ourselves, and that we are affected by the happiness (or otherwise) of the other.

Another thing is (to steal your term) the celebration of difference – that the other introduces a variety into life that would not otherwise be there, and we welcome change rather than fearing it.  Doing so is easier because of our mutual benevolence – that we don’t want to take any course of action that will harm the other, so in the light of that, it is easy to trust the choices and suggestions of the other.

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