Intimacy

In a show today about fidelity and infidelity on Minnesota Public Radio, I heard the guest speak of the desires of everyone for an intimate relationship.  The show just as well could have been about a relationship between God and the individual.   

• It is a dangerous process opening to someone.  There is a need to risk in a relationship before you can be comfortable, have efficient sex, and before you can be truly intimate. 
• Most guys have unbelievable ignorance about their lover.  Women use conversation to get close.  Men do not. 
• Part of the learning process of marriage is to face the truth that all people are imperfect, all people face one day a disappointment in themselves or in a part of that love.  A relationship was learning how to deal with those imperfections and life’s problem.  This process is present in all marriages.   And that was where the theme of forgiveness comes in. 
• Coming slowly to the revelation…of my imperfections.  Of the partner’s imperfections.  And talking about them.  Trying to do better. 
• There is magic revealing yourself to someone else.  A therapist role, as an interpreter when a marriage becomes stressed, is to make it safe to communicate about everything, including sexual fantasy, emotions….What is it that you talk to this person about? 
• There is always a need for a closeness ritual, or you are having trouble getting attention from your lover.
• A man has a need for sexual interaction, revealing embarrassing things, how foolish he is.  These are the endearing things for a woman to hear.  When the foolish no longer is revealed, ways to stay close are lost. 
• The crisis in a marriage IS part of the process of becoming a human being.  It develops character.  Ideas as to what is appropriate in a marriage come from families that we have lived in, and are distorted by movies and TV.  
• Problems in marriage do not make people have affairs.  The lies and dishonesty in an affair do more damage than the sex in an affair. 
• People who get out of the habit of talking to their spouse are vulnerable to infidelity.
• Women desire more, who are lonely inside their marriage
• Infidelity: the looking, the touching, the lying, but the desire to meet that person when intimacy, when the dearth of the soul was again revealed, to fill a void. 
• Touched.  To be truly touched, and its affect on the heart. 
• People trained for honesty and fidelity need to be shown how to communicate efficiently.  Too often an answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop talking, to stop wondering about the mysery of your lover.  The mystery was in the ongoing questions.    

 

Intimacy.  It was waking up in the morning realizing how lucky you were in this life.  Realizing how lucky you were, to have that person next to you.  Especially in modern times, in a pop culture of meaningless junk. 

  

Intimacy.  It involved giving thanks and praise.  At last once a week.  If not every day.  And meaning it.  In good times, and in bad.  It often was harder to stop in good times and pass on a compliment.  There was a daily numbness that set in, when a lot of us just quit seeing all the things close by.   The things that were always there.

   

It could become the normal human experience to quit expressing thanks.  It happened when a certain sense of humility was lost.  And humility was harder to hold on in the modern world than your 401K. 

 

Intimacy.  Learning monogamy.  Prayer and sex were a lot alike.  Monogamy.  Montheism.  Revelation.  Of my imperfections.  And of hers.  Slowly over time.  No marriage was perfect.  Because the 2 people are imperfect.  That was also the revelation that most people came to in their relationship with God.

 

http://

<a href="http://www.blogsurfer.us/?

Unidentified Objects Were Not All Flying

I heard a discussion on race relations on public radio today.  I could not tell until the show’s end that one of the two women in the discussion was an African-American, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune.  She addressed briefly the issue of inter marriage in revealing the depth of prejudice with great insight. 

The concerns of inter marriage, if it reflected my own prejudice, if I was honest, was not so much about skin color as it was about identity.  What was your identity?  The religious tradition, if there was one, led to intimacy.  And men and women struggled, no matter what backgorund, with matters of intimacy.  The real issue of intermarriage in a secular nation called the question how deep you were intellectually, spiritually.  Everyone had a different dimension.  And family history influenced the formation of identity.   How well developed were these 2 young people?

The popular world, formed by media, was so surface oriented.  But one day people all suffered internal quakes.  What would be down below?  What would be shown as having been deep within all along but often unrecognized even by the the spouse you married.  What had history left her/him, whatever the color?  Without similar intellectual background, without a shared belief system, the chances of failure were increased.  It had nothing to do with skin color but everything that was located below the skin.  Though too often, the history of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, had been cruel beyond comprehension and had left a pressure below the surface, unidentified.  It was not the unidentified flying objects that was to be feared but those unidentified objects buried below the surface.  The earth was not just spinning each day but always moving.  My fear was of sinkholes and former toxic waste disposal left behind, internally unknown, through no fault of a spouse.