Marriage, Pleasure & Power
It’s 2022. Collectively, time has lost meaning. Yet, at an individual level, time means everything. We are stuffing more into our calendars, fighting to prove to ourselves that we can conquer time. But can we?
Age
Did you know that humans are the only species that have the concept of time? Thanks to our highly evolved neocortex, we are able to tell that we’re 20 years old or 30 years old. So what do we do with that? Make resolutions, milestones, deadlines, nostalgia, hair-dyes and anti-aging creams - perpetually evading the present.
On an average, we spend 10% of our lives worrying about partnerships. Most people spend this time in their 20s, and the anxiety peaks around their 30s, if god forbid, they’re still single. Who even came up with this number 30 anyway?
We may have an evolved neocortex, but turns out true evolution for a human is being able to transcend time. But how?! At least as far as getting married is concerned, I try to think out loud here. But for everything else, there’s JK and Eckhart Tolle.
Is Marriage necessary?
Marriage offers different things to different people, and it may or may not be the institution for everyone. My view is that it’s not necessary to get married. But my views or yours don’t matter here. You should get married if you want to, and this is something for each of us to answer for ourselves.
But what kind of infrastructure are we building for people to answer this question for themselves? We have plenty of avenues for people to meet their partners once they’ve decided that they want to get married, but what if they haven’t? How can people build clarity around this decision in their lives?
I figured I couldn’t fully answer these questions without looking deeper into what marriage actually does to our lives. I’ve spent over one year now working with people who are married/ in committed relationships to develop an understanding of this. Recently, I did some pro-bono work to encourage more people to come forward.
What a truly fulfilling experience this was. All it took for me was to open up my calendar for a day, but I could tell that it took a hell of a lot more for so many people to come forward. It’s not easy to acknowledge that there is an issue in your relationship, realise that you need help and overcome the hesitation to seek help.
A big theme that stood out in most of my conversations was a lack of empathy amongst a couple with respect to one particular aspect. This lack of empathy is driven by a difference in boundaries that each partner in a couple has with their own respective families. This is not talked about as much as boundaries within a couple, so it merits a separate post in the future.
Pleasure
While you peel the layers of a relationship, you can’t help but talk about pleasure. It’s still something we’re uncomfortable to discuss as as a society. So, there is a treasure trove of information waiting to be discovered and normalised.
For instance, women can take more than an hour to have one orgasm, yet they can still have more than 3 orgasms in under 10 minutes? Men on the other hand might take less than a minute to have an orgasm yet not have more than 1 in an hour.
I am not saying this applies to everyone, but the reason I am saying this is to illustrate that our bodies are different and we all experience pleasure differently. Irrespective of gender, it takes years of listening and tuning into each others’ bodies in a partnership to really learn how to experience and share pleasure.
I recently heard an interesting bit in a podcast - when a women has an orgasm, her body releases oxytocin, or the affection hormone. A man’s body releases testosterone, and only occasionally, some oxytocin. So if you’re wondering why women are more likely to feel emotionally attached or feel the need to cuddle after sex, there you have it.
Who calls the shots?
A client once told me that he feels very rejected by his partner because she refuses to get physically intimate with him. She’s always too tired or not in the mood. He felt powerless in their physical relationship, and hated that she was the one who always called the shots on when they had sex.
A lot of couples find themselves in this vicious dance. But why?
Sometimes, couples get into this difficult place in their lives where they can’t hear each other. They’re both communicating, but not listening. Not being heard makes them insecure. When we’re insecure, our bodies are wired to protect us. We’re no longer interested in the other person, we begin fiercely guarding our own interests.
How do you then break out of this cycle?
By listening, and learning to respond. It’s still YOUR response, except by listening more intently to what your partner is saying, you learn to choose your responses to generate better outcomes for YOURSELF.
In the case of my client, what really changed his perspective was realising that the playing field was beyond the bedroom. When he listened to his partner through the day and paused to choose his responses instead of defaulting to past patterns, he found it easier to influence the outcomes.
It didn’t happen overnight, it took him 8 months to begin calling the shots too.
Sneak peak into what I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
Difficult Women by Helen Lewis: This book was a present from my husband. It is a history of feminism in the UK. It was a turbulent read because it elicited so many different types of emotions within me, and this doesn’t happen a lot for me with non-fiction. The format of the book is great as it is broken down into 11 areas of life where women have fought their way through. It’s well-written.
Emily in Paris: This is yet another show from my Netflix Trashcan. It’s about an American social media marketer who moves to Paris for work and falls in love with a french guy. The show’s okay but makes me want to go back to Europe.
Human Design: Long story short, off late, I am into a LOT of self-introspection. I discovered something called Human Design. It’s like astrology, but it’s a mapping of energies in your body as a function of your date, time and place of birth. I will confess that I don’t fully understand this yet, but the way it articulated my own mental make-up has me hooked. It’s like I’ve found that instruction manual I came with that my parents lost at my birth.
Shapely Gal song of the month: Temporary by Vize Verza.