Excerpt from TRANSCENDENT

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.