Over the course of 15 years marriage, I realized that loving, honouring and respecting one another is not enough to sustain a vibrant, committed, sexually passionate relationship.
I’m sharing here our journey of transformation through intimacy and offer a fresh perspective on marriage, grounded in spiritual wisdom, personal responsibility and real inner freedom.
In the past, marriage was mostly a financial and social contract.
Overall, men considered themselves the superiors of women.
They were the protectors and providers, bearing the full (financial) responsibility of the household. The man was dominant and generally put the woman down.
The woman had to be “pretty and polite but not too aggressive, not too outspoken and not too smart.” She saw to it that the man received every comfort and convenience but made no demands for herself. In exchange for her services, which included being an object for man’s mostly impersonal lust, the woman received material security.
Mating was generally considered a marital duty and sexuality was mostly experienced as transactional, filled with guilt and shame.
The man was typically initiating physical intimacy, ‘possessing’ the woman, without sharing any real vulnerability. The only real responsibility of the woman was to be an adequate object to fulfil her master’s desires, reinforcing feminine submissiveness.
Significant limitations existed on the personal growth from both men and women. People marrying for love were the great exceptions.
The typical marriage of former times was a complete suppression, repression, and denial of the powerful spiritual energies flowing between men and women.
In recent times, collective consciousness made a great leap.
The women’s liberation movement, the sexual liberation movement, and a very different attitude toward marriage manifested a new consciousness.
Women started owning their power, their independence, their voice, their sexual desires and their bodies.
Some men started supporting gender-equality and identifying with their softer, sensitive side.
Men and women began to choose romantic partners freely, motivated generally by genuine love and attraction.
What a progress compared to ancient times!
But what is the situation today?
50% of married couples end up divorced and 73% of those divorces are due to lack of commitment.
55% of divorces are due to infidelity, 25% of couples have sex less than once a month and 15% of marriages are sexless.
45% of the divorces are due to lack of equality in the relationship.
Isn’t that crazy?
Welcome to the free world.
The world of limitless choices, instant gratification and lack of commitment.
If those statistics suggest one thing, it’s that the traditional model of marriage is unfit and failing for our times!
So, let’s come to my marriage.
I married when I was 30.
I considered myself a relatively conscious, rather progressive, ‘modern’ man, strongly influenced by my independent, feminist mother.
I chose my partner based on genuine attraction and love, but in reality I was still young and immature. I neither had deep knowledge of myself nor of my partner.
Over the course of 15 years and raising 3 kids, throughout our ups and downs, our couple felt stable, safe and strong.
As a man doing my inner work (link), I discovered what gender-equality really means in relationship.
We always felt like we belonged together and had a robust emotional connection.
Our sexuality was varied and pleasurable.
But, unintentionally, we started trading passion for stability. Things became a little too certain, too predictable.
We started taking each other for granted.
Our sexual desire decreased…
It became increasingly difficult for me to experience strong sexual, passionate feelings for the woman I love, honour and respect most.
We started having desires for others.
We were longing for something more
As Esther Perel says:
“We were seeking connection, predictability and dependability to root us firmly in place. But we were also having a need for change, for the unexpected, for transcendence.”
In a subtle way, there was still a partial suppression, repression, and denial of the powerful spiritual energies of love, Eros and sexuality flowing between us.
So, we decided to open our marriage
For a while, we experienced and discovered the rewards of this sexual openness: a renewed sense of freedom and exploration, a new, exciting thrill.
It felt reinvigorating and liberating.
It brought novelty and brought us again closer together. We got to know each other differently. We realized that we do not possess each other and that other people find our loved one attractive.
This jolted us out of complacency, in the most positive sense. We didn’t take each other for granted anymore.
We also discovered that being in an open relationship takes a lot of work and requires a lot of responsibility and care:
- it requires mature, transparent, vulnerable communication
- it requires honouring and valuing each other’s time
- it requires respecting shared rules and agreements
- it requires moderation and empathy
- it requires inquiry into jealousy and possessiveness
We made mistakes and learned a lot on all of the points above.
We still needed to bring into the light some hidden parts of our selves.
Overall, we had a lot of fun, but gradually it dawned on us that this model of sexual openness, sexual freedom and uncommitted free-floating exchange of partners wasn’t the end of the story…
As we were navigating open relationship, a new wisdom started to emerge.
We became conscious that we were still afraid of the unified love-sex-eros current flowing through us.
We realized that fleeting sexual encounters and sexual freedom was part of a necessary growing process inviting us to discover the real significance of marriage.
It was merely a stage, inherent to a cycle of growth. A cycle of increasing consciousness and liberation of the shackles and conditionings of former times.
Fleeting sexual encounters don’t fulfil our soul’s longing for deep emotional and spiritual connection, and it weakens commitment.
Very few that have experienced this stage of sexual liberation have ever truly been satisfied by it.
Some research indicates that open relationships have only an 8 percent success rate, and that couples in open marriages even have a 38% higher chance of divorce than monogamous couples.
So, we needed to continue our exploration, further crystallizing our model of relating and clarifying our purpose of being together.
We needed to re-frame our logic of commitment.
We needed a paradigm shift.
Towards a new paradigm: the awakened marriage
Today, we are envisioning an awakened marriage, where the powerful energies of love, eros and sex can be unified and embodied within one committed intimate relationship.
A relationship that would be so deeply rooted in commitment that it would be freer, more liberating, and infinitely more desirable than the uncommitted free-floating exchange of partners.
It would be the never-ending re-inventing of romance.
Let’s unfold a few principles of the awakened marriage:
The awakened marriage is committed to each other through personal purification and mutuality in soul development
We are together to help one another grow spiritually, as souls.
Being on a path of profound self-development and bringing into the light the hidden parts of the self are prerequisites to awakened relationship.
We recognize that each of us are on a personal awakening journey. We are individual souls, incarnated in separate bodies, here to liberate ourselves from the illusion of separation and realize our divine True Nature.
As an awakened couple, there is a shared responsibility and a shared commitment to follow together a path of self-purification.
Over time, when both partners are sufficiently free from fear, once the masculine and feminine power currents have sufficiently merged within each individual soul, then the energetic fusion of both together can occur.
What such fusion would unleash is a stream of cosmic energy, a connection to source, that is extremely powerful and liberating, a supreme pleasure.
The awakened marriage is totally open and transparent.
There are no secrets whatsoever. The soul-processes of the partners are totally shared. All levels of the two personalities are open to each other.
Trust is the ground from which both partners actively engage with the unknown. Trust is risky. It is vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith. The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.
Part of the openness consists of revealing our fears of opening the heart, exposing our vulnerabilities, our shadows and our feelings of dependency.
“Dependence is an essential ingredient of real connection. But it can produce terrifying anxiety, because it implies that the one we love wields power over us. This is the power to love us, but also to abandon us.” (Esther Perel)
This kind of openness and transparency must be learned.
When the fear is shared, the obstructions will be eliminated relatively fast, the trust and mutual partnership will grow and a vibrant fulfilment will come from the transparent sharing itself.
The awakened marriage considers sexuality as a gateway to sacred union
We surrender to a sexuality that blends physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, streaming from a unified wholeness between partners.
All the subtle energy bodies are fusing together, combining love, passion and spiritual union. The intensity, vibrancy, ecstasy and bliss of such sexual encounter surpasses anything you can at present imagine.
Sexual union becomes a sacred ritual.
You realize the Divine in the mate and the Divine in yourself.
Each sexual fusion becomes a creative act, bringing forth new spiritual forms, new heights of development in the two selves.
This is the process of learning to love in an awakened, mature way.
This awakened marriage and cosmic fusion cannot be formed early in life. It takes genuine, intense inner work, to reach the necessary maturity for this type of relationship.
This kind of relationship and fusion is the result of infinite patience, growth, change, transformation.
Real committed, monogamous relationship has to be seen not as a shackle imposed by a moralizing outer or inner authority, but as a freely chosen commitment. The greatest gift to oneself and our intimate partner.
The most desirable state imaginable, the keenest pleasure yielding infinite fulfilment for which the soul and the personality have to become strong, resilient, mature and capable.
Monogamous commitment is the only model of relating that truly offers the gift of time. Time as the most precious resource of life.
It takes time and practice, trial and errors until your soul emerges as a whole being. Access to bliss could never be snatched for free.
We deeply long for this depth of relationship because it is our soul’s birthright and our destiny.
It is the never-ending process of becoming.
The journey of our lifetime.
Will you dare to explore the full potential of awakened monogamy?
Disclaimer: this article illustrates a potential future vision for our couple, not (yet) a realized experience
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Anne Nygård on Unsplash
