I have been fortunate enough to experience many intimate relationships throughout my adult life. That does not qualify me to write a book about how relationships work. If anything, it may qualify me to write about how they don’t.
I have learned a great deal through trial and error—sometimes more error than trial. And when I look back over the landscape of my relationships, a few things have become fairly clear.
Jealousy doesn’t seem to work.
Possessiveness doesn’t work.
Trying to control another person so that I can feel secure doesn’t work.
Expecting another person to behave in a particular way so that I can be happy doesn’t work very well either.
All of these seem to grow from the same basic assumption:
There is something I need from another person in order for me to be okay.
For much of my life, that assumption was hiding underneath my relationships.
The Burden of Need
When I was younger, I entered relationships largely from a position of need. I didn’t necessarily recognize it that way at the time. It felt like attraction, love, desire, companionship and romance.
But underneath those things was often a transaction.
I thought I needed sex. I thought I needed an attractive partner who excited me and satisfied my sexual desires. And if I believed I needed those things, then naturally the person I was with became responsible, at least partly, for providing them.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on another human being.
Once I need something from you in order to be okay, expectations aren’t far behind.
If you provide what I need, I am happy.
If you don’t, I am disappointed.
Then negotiation begins.
I’ll give you this if you give me that.
I’ll behave this way if you behave that way.
Sex becomes part of the currency. Attention becomes currency. Affection, security, money, companionship, approval and freedom can all find their way onto the relationship balance sheet.
Transactional relationships can work remarkably well—for a while.
The problem comes when somebody stops balancing the books.
Then resentment begins.
I don’t think the answer is to pretend we don’t need anything from other people. Intimate relationships naturally involve needs, vulnerability and interdependence. We can reasonably want honesty, affection, reliability, consideration, companionship and support from someone with whom we are sharing our life.
The distinction I see more clearly now is this:
I can need things within a relationship without making another person responsible for my fundamental sense of worth and wholeness.
That is a very different kind of need.
One Person, Many Dimensions
Another thing became apparent through having different partners: no single person ever seemed capable of satisfying every dimension of me.
And perhaps expecting someone to do that was unreasonable from the beginning.
Different people brought out completely different parts of me.
With one person, I could disappear into deep conversations about consciousness, philosophy and the mysteries of existence.
With another, there was physical chemistry, fantasy and sexual intrigue.
Someone else might be wonderful for adventure, play and spontaneity.
Another might be an excellent partner for building a home and raising a family.
Each relationship was different because each person was different.
But something else was happening that took me longer to recognize:
I was different with each of them.
Relationships weren’t simply introducing me to different people. They were introducing me to different versions of myself.
That may be one of the greatest gifts relationships have given me.
Each person became a different mirror.
The Question of Monogamy
Looking back, I no longer believe that spending my entire adult life with one person was necessarily the right path for me.
That isn’t a prescription for anyone else. It isn’t a philosophical argument against monogamy. It is simply what my own life seems to have taught me.
I have genuinely enjoyed the kaleidoscope of personalities, temperaments, lifestyles and experiences that different relationships have brought into my life.
For many years, however, my curiosity collided with the expectations surrounding conventional relationships. Sexual exclusivity was often treated as synonymous with love, loyalty and commitment.
Eventually I began questioning that assumption.
But there is an important distinction I wasn’t always mature enough—or honest enough—to make.
Freedom honestly negotiated is very different from freedom secretly taken.
Earlier in my life, I sometimes accepted or played the role of exclusivity because I wanted the intimacy and connection that came with it. Then, given enough time, I would begin bucking against the reins because I wanted my freedom back.
That wasn’t enlightened freedom.
Sometimes it was betrayal.
At different points in my life, I even played two or more women against each other. It was terribly painful for them, and ultimately painful for me, although at the time I could be remarkably callous and nonchalant about the damage I was creating.
During my marriage, I was also unfaithful. At the time, I justified some of that behavior because I felt that my wife was withholding what I considered an essential ingredient of our marriage: sex.
I can understand the frustration I felt then without using it to excuse what I did.
Her choices were hers.
My choices were mine.
If I believed the marriage wasn’t meeting an essential need, I had honest options available to me—communication, counseling, renegotiation, separation or ultimately leaving.
Infidelity was another choice.
And I made it.
Today, when I think about sexual and emotional freedom, I therefore have to include something I didn’t always understand when I was younger:
Freedom without honesty can simply become selfishness wearing a more attractive name.
When I stopped defining my emotional security through another person’s exclusivity—and stopped thinking of my own sexuality as something another person automatically possessed—I experienced a different kind of freedom.
But genuine freedom has its own responsibility.
It requires honesty.
It requires allowing another person the same freedom I claim for myself.
It requires agreements that both people actually understand.
And it means accepting that another person may use their freedom to walk away.
Two people can freely choose monogamy.
Two people can freely choose something different.
I don’t think the relationship structure itself determines whether the relationship is healthy.
The honesty, consent and consciousness with which two people choose it may matter much more.
Who Paid for My Lessons?
There is an uncomfortable question underneath all of this that I don’t want to avoid:
What did it cost the people who helped me learn these lessons?
It would be convenient to look backward and describe every relationship as another fascinating experience that helped me discover myself.
But some of my discoveries came at somebody else’s expense.
Women trusted me.
Some expected exclusivity because that was the relationship I had led them to believe we were having.
Then I sometimes changed the rules without giving them an equal voice in changing them.
There were times when my choices created jealousy, insecurity, competition, betrayal and pain.
And alcohol added another dimension.
Drinking changed me. I behaved differently under the influence, and I sometimes said hurtful things to the people closest to me. What may have seemed temporary or insignificant from inside my altered state could be considerably more painful to the person standing across from me.
I have had to recognize something about personal growth:
Understanding why I behaved a certain way doesn’t erase the effect my behavior had on someone else.
I can understand the younger version of myself without pretending everything he did was okay.
I can recognize unmet needs without making them excuses.
I can value what relationships taught me while acknowledging that sometimes another person paid part of the tuition.
There are things I would do differently today.
That isn’t self-condemnation.
It is simply part of seeing my life more clearly.
Perhaps accountability is one of the ways experience finally becomes wisdom.
From Sex to Intimacy
Something else has changed as I have grown older.
Sex by itself has become considerably less interesting to me.
There was a time when sexual attraction could carry enormous weight. Today, physical intimacy without emotional or intellectual intimacy feels rather empty.
What interests me now is connection.
Can we talk?
Can we be curious together?
Can we reveal ourselves without constantly defending ourselves?
Can we disagree without trying to control each other?
Can we be quiet together?
Can we allow each other to change?
Can I enjoy who you are without needing to possess you?
That kind of intimacy feels considerably more valuable to me than sex alone.
Perhaps ironically, as I have become freer in my thinking about sexuality, I have become much more selective about sexual intimacy.
I don’t feel much desire to pursue sex simply because it is available.
I want the intimacy beneath it.
And I don’t encounter that very often.
The Relationship Beneath Every Relationship
After all these years and all these different relationships, perhaps the most important thing I have discovered is surprisingly simple.
The most intimate relationship of my life is the one I have with myself.
The periods when I have felt most fulfilled have generally been the periods when my internal relationship was healthy—when the conversation inside myself was cooperative rather than combative.
When my mind and my deeper sense of self were working together.
When I wasn’t constantly judging myself.
When I wasn’t desperately searching outside myself for someone to fill an internal vacancy.
When I felt emotionally safe within my own company.
From that position, another person no longer has to complete me.
They can simply join me.
That changes the entire architecture of a relationship.
Instead of saying, I need you to make my life whole, I can say:
My life already has wholeness, and I would like to share it with you.
That doesn’t mean I won’t need anything from you.
It means I won’t ask you to carry responsibility for my fundamental sense of self.
Instead of possession, there can be participation.
Instead of obligation, choice.
Instead of expectation, curiosity.
Instead of demanding that someone remain the person I fell in love with, perhaps I can remain interested in discovering who they are becoming.
Still Learning
I don’t know the formula for a successful intimate relationship.
Maybe there isn’t one.
Human beings change. Desires change. Bodies change. Circumstances change. The person who fits beautifully into one chapter of our life may not fit the next—and that doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship failed.
Perhaps some relationships aren’t meant to last forever.
Perhaps they are meant to reveal something.
A fear.
A desire.
A wound.
A possibility.
A version of ourselves we hadn’t encountered before.
I remain open to experiencing a deeply intimate relationship that includes emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical connection without falling back into the possessiveness, dependency, expectations and transactions that characterized parts of my earlier relationships.
I don’t know what that would look like.
And strangely, I like not knowing.
For perhaps the first time, I don’t need a relationship to arrive at a predetermined destination.
I can meet another person without handing them a job description.
I can pay attention to what happens between us.
I can notice what they awaken in me and what I awaken in them.
I have also learned that a relationship doesn’t have to become everything in order to be something valuable. I can share affection, history, experiences, and even intimacy with someone without requiring either of us to turn it into a conventional partnership. I can appreciate what genuinely exists between us without exaggerating it, diminishing it, or demanding that it satisfy every dimension of me. Its value does not depend upon forcing it to become something it is not.
And if something beautiful grows there, I can choose to participate in it—not because I need it to make me whole, and not because either of us owns the other, but because two whole and imperfect human beings have freely chosen to share some portion of their lives.
Maybe that is the kind of intimacy I have been looking for all along.