kitandkat.com

My Dear Kat,

I want to talk about how sex is between us.  It’s fabulous, it’s instant, it’s mutual and it’s shared.

By fabulous, I mean that it’s breath-taking; time and time again, we go to places and achieve highs that we never did before.  I’m not talking about the physical positions; they don’t seem to have much to do with it.  It’s a strong sense that wow, we never danced like this before, we’re going hand-in-hand (maybe make that gland-in-gland) down paths we’ve never been before.  Afterwards, the experience seems so other-worldly, it can be hard to believe it actually happened.

By instant, I mean that the sexual energy emerges full-blown: pow, there it is!  We’re in this place again.  There’s no contradiction with what I’ve just said about each time being different; these two things exist simultaneously.  That’s just the way it is.

Then there is the magical way it’s mutual.  I get turned on, and you respond, and I respond to that, and it’s 0-60 in 5 seconds again.  It happens nearly every time.  Oh, occasionally the other fails to respond due to tiredness or illness, but that causes no grief; we merely flow into a different place.

This mutuality is magical because of its improbability, because it says that I touch you, I affect you, because it is wonderful to be seen and to have my sexual needs so ecstatically met.  And we synchronize like this not just sexually, but also with most other things we do together; we rapidly find the choice that accommodates both our needs.  We do this by being present, by wanting the best for the other, by not clinging to our ideas of how things should be.

Lastly, the experience is so self-evidently shared.  We move together, responding to each other, becoming the junction between the two of us, treating that skin like our own, each our side of the fence, but holding hands through the railing, proof positive of the other, touching and merging to be us together at the same time as remaining completely myself.  I have nowhere in my cosmology to place this, yet there it is.  Not just once or twice, but again and again, over and above my sense of self, that sense of us.

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My Dear Kat,

One of the main reasons for our lack of conflict is that we agree on the ground rules.  The funny thing is that originally we were never explicit about them, with maybe the exception of sexual monogamy, and it wasn’t until we came to write our wedding vows that we put our common understandings into words.

I love the way we did it.  We sat side by side on the bed, and each wrote down what was important for us.  Then we exchanged lists and talked about our responses to each item.  Often, we had said the same thing in different ways.

We came back to this a number of times over several days, talking about everything until we had identified and clarified the essence of what we were saying, and out of this, we crafted our vows.

• I promise to be your partner and lover through life.
• I promise to dwell in love, to act from love, to hear with love, to speak from love.
• I promise to always be truthful and to share what I feel.
• I promise to recognize and honor who you are and to always remember that “you are you and I am me”.
• I promise to choose the positive and strive toward the good and act in support of you always all ways.
• With these promises I celebrate our union and rejoice in the Grace that brought us together.

It was, as is always the case with you, a delightful organic process.  There were no points of significant disagreement; maybe some of emphasis, at most.

I was about to say that because we have this shared agreement on how we live life together, there is no need for conflict, but that doesn’t follow: we could still argue over which movie to see.  That doesn’t happen, because the choice of movie is just not that important.  The sense of peace that comes from our joint understanding of how we live our lives together far outweighs my desire to see a particular movie!

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My Dear Kat,

Your delightful list of reasons why we are special ends with its effortless nature, that it doesn’t take work.  So many people write about the necessity of working on a relationship; I reject that idea.  Working on something is what I call a job, not a relationship.

We never feel the need to work things out in the sense of resolving a conflict.  Firstly, we are in agreement on things large and small to an uncanny degree, but when we’re not, they are never seen as a conflict; we simply talk about it, and out of that, comes a conclusion.  It happens every time.

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.  We prefer the peace of co-existence; the drama of alienation has no attraction for us.  How and why we do this is unclear to me; did we learn this, or is it in our natures?  Certainly, to do this requires a degree of non-attachment, and also an understanding of how much influence one can and can’t have with another person.

We both revel in the pleasure of the other, and feel no need to change them; indeed, their difference is a source of pleasure and wonder.  This non-interference is a key aspect of this lack of conflict.

We are like trees in the wind; when storms come, we bend before them.

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My Dear Kat,

The sleeping together is a very strange and wonderful thing.  I have never been big on touch – I have a massage certificate that’s a year old – but the experience of being in physical contact with you is very soothing.  It occurs elsewhere, too; I love walking in step with you, holding hands or linking arms, it feels like we are in it together, that we act as one.  I mean that literally; I get little flashes of union as we walk down the street, whether murmuring to one another or walking in silence.  It is connecting at a very primal level.  People stroke each other for comfort, hug each other for sympathy; ancient messages are passed, pre-dating language by millions of years, and you and I can hear and trust this unspoken communication.

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My Dear Kat,

I love what you write about peace.  Before we met, I sat in zazen most mornings; after we met, I never sat on the mornings we awoke together, and never missed it because being with you was (and is!) so centering that it acted just like sitting by pulling me into the present.

So how do we do this?  We honor the present, or to rephrase it, we honor what is present; in other words, our direct experience in the moment.  The present moment doesn’t contain events that happened in the past.  That cuts out a whole lot right there.  And by not trying to direct the other, we relinquish attempts to manipulate the future.  By refusing to be captured by regrets and yearnings from the past, and by accepting what is, rather than what might be, we allow ourselves to see and experience the other completely.

Here’s the amazing part: by doing so, a freshness and vitality enters that I have never known before.  Every day with you is a new and different experience.  It is like taking a walk; it may be the same route, but I would never mistake Tuesday’s walk for the one I took on Monday.  And so with you: talking, sex, touching; all of these spring anew each time.

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My Dear Kat,

This experience of union is a mysterious joy.  I have fleetingly known it before, but with you, it is a regular occurrence.  Yet the rational scientist in me asks if it is an illusion, a trick that nature has dreamed up to facilitate sex, bonding, family and cooperation.  Our senses can often fool us; why is this not the case here as well?

Let me offer some reasons.

• “The fact precedes the explanation” is a phrase I coined in my 20’s to mean that the raw experience of the world trumps any theory.  At some point I have to take a stand and say that my experience of union is real.  It is stronger when we are in physical contact, and strongest when sexual.  It is as though the point of contact between you and me is us.  I want to be very clear here: this is not the same as feeling your body; that happens at the same time, but is not the same as the joint experience.  There is a strong feeling of mutuality, that what is taking place arises not from you or me; we are but observers of the event.
• You and I are complex systems.  When two complex systems are joined, interactions and possibilities are created that do not exist in the individual cases.  Two eyes offer depth perception beyond that of one eye. A finger and thumb can perform manipulations that one digit cannot.  Two digits (the binary system) allow a much more compact representation of number than one digit.
• The idea of a supra-individual consciousness is not prevalent in Western culture, though it has been written about in many places.  See Robert Cloninger, Richard Moss, Ken Wilber, Alan Watts.

This is a rather intellectual response, I know, but it is a radical change in world-view that we’re talking about here, and I feel the need to provide a sound basis for it, both for my own benefit and for use with other people.

Kit

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My dear Kat,

I agree entirely with you about the feeling of our new arrangement of sleeping together every night.  I never expected this feeling of joy; I thought that, if anything, it might produce a little claustrophobia or some territorial issues.  Instead, this extraordinary sense of adventure.

This is just another example of what is so baffling about you and I: that we do something, and it just works, and this happens time and time again.  Yes, I know we’re a fit on paper: same age, liberal politics, etc., but there are many areas that appear mis-matched: different culture, different childhoods, you raised children and I didn’t.  Yet we have this way of agreeing on things and flowing through life that is uncanny in its easiness, or to put it another way, I hardly ever feel that I have compromised at all.  My self, my integrity, remains intact.  Quite how all this happens, I don’t understand, but it is a key aspect of why it is so easy to be with you; I do not have to withdraw to repair myself.

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My Dear Kat,

I am blown away by how we are.  I have never experienced this harmony of being with anyone else.  The way we flow through the world together, taking things just as they come, is like nothing I have ever experienced.  With others, there were always periods of conflict, friction, disagreements.  With you, I have, for the first time, the experience of always being on the same side.  If we want different things, we talk – just talk! – until the choice becomes clear.

You’ve said how much you like that I talk.  I’ve been attacked, grilled, cornered, shouted at by many partners in my life.  I’ve been accused of not communicating, of being closed, withdrawn, uncommitted, separate.  Have I changed?  Have I finally committed?  Certainly, commitment makes it easy to speak, because the voice in my ear suggesting other scenarios is reduced from a constant temptation to an idle fantasy, but at least as much is that I can say whatever comes to mind, and you just hear me.  That is SO liberating.  And every time it happens, it makes it easier to speak truth the next time.

The other side of talk is what you say.  You say what you mean.  I grew up in a family where sentences had hidden meanings, sexuality was taboo, every look and tone of voice had to be interpreted.  I’ve spent a lifetime learning the virtues of direct communication.  So as I have come to know and trust that you say what you mean, I have opened up to you.  Thank you for that.

So have I finally come to commitment, or have I finally met my partner in peace?  I am left not knowing how much is me and how much is you in all this.  I may never come to a definite conclusion, but am happy that we should both take credit for how we are.

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My Dear Kat,

Let me start this dialog by discussing a principal that is completely clear to us: to make no demands upon the other.  That’s none, nil, nada, zilch.

I’ve spent years with the bathroom half-renovated?  You keep checking email when coffee is ready?  He leaves his clothes lying around?  Who are you to control his habits?  She takes 20 minutes to put on make-up?  That’s just what she needs to feel comfortable.

With you, the experience of being able to act without engendering your approval or disapproval leads to an extraordinary freedom that I have never experienced before in a relationship: the possibility of being myself.  Furthermore, it is cumulative; the longer we are together, the more assured we are of this, and the more we are each able to express ourselves.

I want to make it completely clear to our readers that this is not some abstract goal, such that 80% or 90% or 95% is “good enough”.  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.  And so with us, I find that you add to me; I can be myself, and you make room for me to be more.  I am so grateful for your amazing and uncommon skill.

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