Living in Compatibility

can you be single and practice devotional partnering?

It's my business whether I want to play with a romantic prospect in the time he makes available to me, within the activities we mutually desire.

I am an observer, I am committed to holding those I love sacred in their enormity, in their limitations, in the reality of who they are as they are now. I exercise discernment in my relational agreements to love each person as they are from a distance that feels safe for me.

This is a practice of compatibility. I commit to compatibility as a technically-single person who is committed to the beingness of devotional partnership. I cultivate devotional partnership in the time my lovers make available to me, devoted to the compatibility that exists between us and staying comfortably within that, adoring them. Only appreciating, not expecting or asking, simply receiving.

In this practice, it's easy to find "the one" if there is one. The better our time together feels, the more of our lives we make available to it, and we each have a set point of fullness, a capacity for partnership, the percentage of our lives we are willing to devote to partnership and partnered activities.

Our lives will always contain a multitude of other habits, relationships, and practices which do not involve the partner or directly relate to the partnership.

It's ok with me if my partner has other lovers. I choose partners whose discernment and disclosure I admire and respect and trust completely. I find sexual exclusivity to be a metric unrelated to real devotion and commitment.

What my partner chooses to do with his sovereign body in the time we are apart is quite simply not material to our connection. If I find myself evaluating lack in our connection, the lack is within me and within the relationship. It is not a feature of outside pull, it is a feature of inside attention.

Am I in an empowered posture? Am I appreciating and enjoying all that is here, and sharing moments of appreciation and enjoyment with my partner in the time we share together? Am I being entitled to his attention, leveraging need or social convention or emotional extremity to receive it? Am I accounting for my own inevitable pain, my insatiability? Is my life full enough of things that are not him?

If my nourishment is well in place and my capacity for partnership is larger than this person is available to fill, that's an incompatibility.

Resenting (really in any way personalizing) the elements of my partner’s life outside of our connection is, in my experience, a nightmare. I've done it with his work, his friends, his family, his hobbies, you name it. At the end of the day, these are ways I was trying to build and create compatibility that did not exist, from the false idea that love was rare. I was in practices that included both appreciation and criticism, so I had a hard time finding my way.

Believing I could engineer compatibility kept me where it wasn't, in practices of wanting it and creating it, not practices of having it and appreciating it. My willingness to criticize and "try to change" drew my attention away from the gracious and gentle direction my appreciation offers.

Love is not rare. Love is everywhere. It is possible to love anyone. Your heart is infinite.

But your time, energy, and attention are limited. I use mine to serve the compatibility of devotion. I remain in an attentional practice of appreciation.

Active inclusion, passive exclusion.