Intimacy
is the gift.
‘Performing’
intimacy for the assurance of procuring safety will fail. Always. The act will
tire, the facade will fade, and what you ‘get back’ from the deal will never be
enough.’
Your
worthiness becomes a bargaining chip, a loaded trigger targeted solely on the
street value of your objectified shelf life. Unless of course there’s money
involved, a bright and shiny professional future, a nice pre-nuptial wrapped up
in a neat and tidy bow waiting for you in a bank vault.
A child…
But even
with all of those winning compensations -- as safe and secure and as sound as they
all may seem – at some point, reverberations of falsity will echo through your
soul… ‘I sold out! I could have had more!’
Or not.
As I
have written in the past, relationships at best are usury, worked at so
arduously in the beginning stages to create the coveted coupling, but in the
end, the picture of all that perfection crumbles and falls and the lack of true
intimacy separates the union.
Not
love.
Love is
the commodity traded and exchanged. Never confuse love with the true gift of
intimacy. Love is the service extended, the romantic bow, the lust-filled
evenings, the catchall phrase we use and abuse -- what we simply cannot get
enough of -- until that too ends, reversed without a moment’s notice, sometimes
without even a discussion, without mutual consent… without the love.
What’s
left behind is a hollow exhibition, routine and staged and lonely. Those
committed to a relationship based exclusively on the art of performance will
eventually ‘perform’ outside the relationship. Acting out will become the
avenue of choice. The shadow self, the actor performing inside the union, the
intimate stranger beside you in your bed, will eventually drive him/herself
outside the restrictive gates of matrimony, and sprint toward autonomous freedom
and the opportunity to find their true self.
