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Every intense love relationship begins with the same set of symptoms. Your heart goes thumpity, your stomach threatens to nauseate itself, and you start to drool when your
loved one enters the room, all with a delicious sense of anticipation. In his/her absence, your heart slowly pierces itself with slivers of wood ("pining"), and you are overwhelmed with a despairing emptiness until the next time you are together, when the sun will begin again to warm the sweet earth.
During this initial stage, you and your partner seem perfectly matched, divinely designed to complement each other in every way. You are infinitely compatible; you feel your disputes and
disagreements are mere misunderstandings or the result of an endearing jealousy. It is a kind of symbiosis, both sexual and spiritual at once.
But that's not real love. It's the euphoric stage of romance, called by some social scientists "limerance." It’s a style of relating which is like a temporary psychosis overlaid with euphoria. It feels wonderful, but it is chock full of delusions like: "God designed this person for me, so we need never have any difficulties with each other." “We are perfectly compatible. Any differences in personality or temperament are trivial." “We can live on this emotional mountaintop forever." "My partner is the ideal human being, without flaws or faults.” "If we can only be together, life will be complete in every way.”
Real Love neither needs nor thrives on such distortions. Real Love is not a hole; you don't fall in it. You nurture it, grow it, like a garden. The mature loving relationship may start with bonfires of feeling and fireworks of passion, but it doesn't depend on them. Real Love is more like a bed of glowing embers that you can cook over. You can't cook over a bonfire; it's just too hot. Too many sparks, too much popping and crackling. Real Love starts like that, but it comes into its own later, when it starts providing sustenance and warmth.
In a Real Love relationship, the sex is a reflection of the whole thing. It’s a wheel with six spokes, each spoke a factor in how partners relate to each other.
The one component of euphoric limerance that does seem to persist in Real Love is Erotic Arousal. Our culture has given sexual attraction a bad name by using it to sell things, by degrading moral limits, and by separating it from emotional intimacy and commitment. But the heart of eroticism is a ferocious energy that we still call love. Real Love doesn’t just make room for Erotic Arousal. It cherishes it, nurtures it, and gratifies its desires. In Real Eros, there is no room for coercion, for withholding as punishment, for ignorance or insensitivity to partner's needs.
The second sexual spoke of Real Love is Sensual Affection. In Real Love, we also love our partner physically but without arousal -- with such things as back rubs, hugs and hand-holding. It’s petting and patting and pleasing each other without turning on. Sensual Affection is comforting and affectionate. It's expressive of love to buy clothes for partners, to brush hair or adjust ties, or to exercise together.
The third sexual spoke of Real Love is Romantic Courtship. This factor includes all of the Hallmark cards, special songs, candlelight dinners and flowers in the relationship. There is poetry in every relationship, whether it's expressed in words, private jokes or nicknames we give each other. The early stages of Romantic Courtship tend to be fairly formal and even predictable. As Real Love matures, romance becomes more individualized, and usually more playful and spontaneous. Partners who have been together for decades may never do candlelight, but they may have myriad ways of playing with each other intimately, of tickling each other's sensibilities. That's the romantic sexuality of Real Love in its mature stages.
The fourth spoke of Real Love is Emotional Intimacy, the conversation of hearts. Partners who are emotionally intimate have a thorough knowledge of the other's personality. They know what frightens, saddens, brings tears to the eyes or lumps in the throat of their partners. Emotional Intimacy gets built when partners talk about their feelings, especially their deepest feelings -- the ones that make them feel vulnerable. In Real Love, Emotional Intimacy is characterized by honesty so rigorous that when talking to each other we may discover things we didn't know about ourselves. That is aural sex, where you are making love through your mate’s ear.
The fifth spoke of Real Love is Committed Loyalty. Real Love never develops fully in a casual relationship held lightly and without investment. Real Love always requires commitment as fertilizer, and for many women, that sense of commitment is essential to a blossoming of sexuality. Committed Loyalty expresses itself as knowing that your partner will be reliably on your side, can be depended on to be there and will not abandon the relationship when it becomes difficult or besieged by external stress. Fidelity and faithfulness mean more than sexual monogamy.
Finally, the sixth spoke of Real Love is Roommate Compatibility. In the married Real Love relationship, partners have to resolve all the same conflicts that roommates do. Real Love is able to figure out who takes out the trash, how the laundry gets done, and how much money will be saved from the monthly budget. Real Love makes sharing a bathroom possible, because it has negotiated how often bathtubs are scrubbed, whether toilet paper rolls over or under, whether the lid is left up or not, and if the toothpaste tube gets squeezed from the middle or the end. (This is the component of Real Love that euphoric relationships and affairs seldom have to recognize and why they are inevitably time-limited. Once you start living together, it either becomes Real Love or it gets more miserable daily!) How is this spoke sexual? If the less aroused partner is preoccupied with dirty dishes or mildew in the shower stall, it’s not likely to be the most exciting of lovemaking sessions.
Thinking of these components of sexuality as spokes in a wheel helps to clarify what maturity in Real Love looks like.
If your personal model of sexuality looks more like a pogo stick than a wheel, because there is one and only one spoke that has developed, don’t be surprised if your relationship won’t roll well. (Men who fixate on Erotic Arousal or women who obsess about Emotional Intimacy can get much better results quickly if they will devote some energy to the other kinds of sexuality in their wheels.)
In Real Love, each spoke of the relationship grows at about the same rate as all the other spokes. If the development of each aspect of the relationships is relatively equal, the wheel rolls smoothly with increasing efficiency and more distance is covered as the spokes grow longer. If some spokes grow out of pace, or if some grow not at all, the wheel may roll for a while, but the ride gets bumpy, and at some point the thing comes to a jolting halt.
So here's a short questionnaire for partners to take as an inventory of their relationship:
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Which spoke does my mate start rolling on? Different or the same as me? (You can usually bet that it will be different.)
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How satisfied am I with the development of each spoke on the wheel? How satisfied is my partner? Am I over-emphasizing one factor, neglecting another? (One way to recognize immaturity in sexuality is an insistence that your partner ride your pogo stick. If the only way you can feel loved is if your partner expresses love by a single spoke, you’re pogo-sticking. Wheels work better. By far.)
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Which way does my partner’s wheel roll (what order are the spokes in)? Am I able and willing to start with a spoke that’s not my favorite in order to get the wheel rolling? Both men and women love to feel loved, and that’s what a rolling wheel produces. In a mature Real Love relationship, the wheel rolls evenly and easily no matter what spoke it starts with, no matter who starts it spinning.
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