The gray

So I am delving back in. Coming back slowly to my innermost, where my thoughts live. A place that I have been reluctant to come to for a long time now. For fear of what? I’m not so sure. Maybe for fear of spending too much time with my thoughts.

But thanks to Esther Perel and her plethora of thought provoking works I am starting the journey back inwards in a new way. I have been listening to her book Mating in Captivity and oh what a wonder of work it is. It has opened my mind in ways it needed to be opened. I shared my favorite insights from it on this thread here. And now that i am an avid follower of hers I make sure to listen in on her podcasts. And so, my first blog in a while is inspired by her latest podcast The Erotic is an antidote to death.

The podcast is a discussion on some of the key ideas that she likes to explore. Such as how we seem to have formed such extreme opinions of our ideas on love and relationships that we forget the gray, that we no longer know how to navigate nuance.

And what happens is that the people that talk about freedom don’t talk about accountability enough, and the people who talk about accountability don’t talk about freedom. So the whole thing gets polarized, rather than integrated. Politically, it is like that, and in the psychological field it is like that. It’s like that all the time.

We assess each other in absolutes, either someone is good or bad, either a relationship is perfect or not, either someone is your soul mate or ‘the one’ or they aren’t, either you know everything there is to know about someone or the relationship won’t work. We want to completely own our partners hence bringing in the aspect of accountability and yet it is in freedom that play, curiosity and other aspects of us thrive. The two ideas need to coexist and not live at opposite ends of the spectrum. Hence her conclusion that we talk about accountability only but not freedom or vice versa.

We forget that every human being is a complex web of experiences, thoughts, upbringing and individuality. Things we can never quite put our fingers on, and all these things start to manifest in our relationships.

…because I think that one of the losses of this moment is the loss, somewhat, of our intuition. There is a different kind of knowledge and information that is much more data-driven, that is systematized, that tries to be rational, and that is taking away our ability to sense things, to be in an iterative process of relationships, and to suss out and to live with ambivalence.

“An iterative process of relationships“…we desire so much to have definite and absolute answers of and from each other and our relationships that we do no leave room for iteration, for those subtle, nuanced changes for the waxing and waning of who we are, of what our relationships are. We are afraid of living with ambivalence. And I suppose rightfully so. Uncertainty is scary. But how we fool ourselves into thinking we can have all the answers especially when it comes to our partners, ourselves and, our relationships.