Reconciling Childish Dreams

I used to want a man to be assertive, but I didn't want to do my part.

I wanted to be brittle, avoidant, even cruel, and have him want me so much he would come close anyway.

I wanted him to fight to get close to me.

I would tell myself he wasn't meeting me in the tender place, that's why I needed the walls keeping him out of the tender place.

I wanted him to know the secret yes behind my deceptive no, but NEVER get it confused with my real no.

I wanted to go on pretending I did not want what I wanted, and I wanted to get it in spite of that.

These are the dreams of a child. The people who "cannot" leave you, who must own and bear all your behavior, who are meant to come close no matter what, are your parents (and ONLY when you're a child).

There's nothing wrong with childish dreaming, but I did have to stop taking adult actions based on my rage at how they didn't play out. I did have to stop making adult plans based on these childish dreams.

I had to learn to take adult actions and plans based in *reality* in order to receive and have the essence for which these childish dreams were yearning.

My desires' essence is that I want to be met in the tender place. I want to believe someone really wants to be there with me and can show up fully.

The childish fantasy is that I have no responsibility to craft an inviting offer, to open the doors, to select someone worthy and treat him as an honored guest. The childish fantasy is that he will prove it, that I will not be required to tremblingly trust, to enact faith, to have skin in the game of uncertainty.

The childish fantasy is that I could have this with any man who is really willing to do what relationships take.

In Something Like This, we are going to be there in every part of what it takes to embody a new template of relating to partnership, dating, and men. We will grieve, we will speak complaints and criticisms for the graveyard, we will speak to the grief of What We Expected and Did Not Receive, letting go of the childish parts of our fantasies.

What we will be left with is the essence of our desire for partnership, comfortably worn each day as a garment of adornment, inviting the very rightest, greatest, goodest, most admirable men to delight us in every moment. We will feel the embodied imprint of this man and this partnership *inside our bodies,* physically claiming the sensation of compatibility, peace, and relational harmony.

It doesn't take long to find a man who is hungry to devote to this delight. (It actually takes skills to discern the worthy from the merely hungry.)

It's not hard to tell when a man is a fit for this embodied template--a fit, even a partial fit, shows up in your life and the felt-sense of it deepens immediately. A non-fit is neutral noise, like static on the radio.

This is an embodiment, a beingness, the safety and relaxation and security you know you will feel with your partner, available here and now, actually part of what will help him identify you to claim you.

Not only does it invite and catalyze the claim, it is also the BEINGNESS of the radiant devotion you want to have in your marriage.

It is sustainable. It is the soul of maintenance of relationship, the skill of looking with loving eyes, the skill of using words to speak life, the skill of communicating nonverbally with one who knows you like no one else.

The habits of Devotional Love are here and now. Do not wait for your man. Do not ask that he suffer your clumsy beginnings. Start now.

Look with loving eyes.

Something Like This.

Something Like This.