Soulmate Skills

Want to up the voltage in your intimate relationship?  Here’s a sexy thing Jim and I have always done that we want to pass on to you:  Sweet Nuthins!  Those are soul-touching intimate phrases or sentences or questions that you reveal to each other.  Then you huskily whisper them to each other.  It’s dynamite.  So, think about what you want to hear at your deepest level and tell each other, like Jim did in his April 1989 letter to me, “Here are things I would like you to say to me….”

“I have to go into my cave.  I need to unwind; to decompress.”  Some people live this way.  It’s destructive.  Here’s why.  It prevents closeness.  And we’ve discovered, in nine out of ten cases, it’s to avoid feeling humiliated if you were to expose what you did, felt, or thought.  What to do?  Choose openness.  That means readily and voluntarily self-disclosing your thoughts and feelings to your partner.  Instead of silently withdrawing into yourself, you say something like, “Someone at work said something insulting to me today, and I couldn’t come up wtih a retort.”  With that in the open, you can now get free from your Inner Critic:  “I had the right to freeze and not know what to say.  I’m still a good person.”  And as you talk with your partner about it, you’ll be close.  That’s the warmth of high-voltage relating.  So come out of your cave.  It’s lonely in there.

You’ve probably heard people talk about marriage with low expectations.  Don’t buy that.  Know instead that you can dream big dreams for your relationship.  And you can make them come true.  We watched our wedding video yesterday to celebrate our anniversary.  The words my mother said to us I want to pass on to you.  “I bless you with love and gentleness.  And wonder.  And remember:  When love and skill work together, it creates a masterpiece.”  Take your love and passion, add skills for producing closeness.  There’s your recipe for fulfillment.  Serves two.  Can be shared with the world.

Oh, our hearts are overflowing!  Today, July 28, is our 21 year wedding anniversary.  I’m remembering the poem Jim read to me as we began our ceremony.  It comes from Midcentury Love Letter by Phyllis McGinley:  “Stay near me.  Speak my name.  Oh, do not wander by a thought’s span, heart’s impulse from the light we kindle here.  We two have but our burning selves for shelter.  Huddle against me.”  Yes, we kindled a flame in 1989 that has been brightly burning ever since.  And though we’ve savored that profound connection for ourselves, we never thought it was just for us.  We share this blog and our ideas with the wish that the sparks from our flame will ignite your own soulmate love.

Once you find your soulmate, you may want it to be perfect.  But, of course, you aren’t perfect.  We want to assure you.  You don’t need perfection.  You just need retrieval skills.  Those are skills for when you make a mistake in relating.  The mistakes you make may seem devastating to you.  They did to me.  But Jim taught me two things for such moments:  1) All  feeling devastated means is that your Inner Critic is pouncing.  2) Mistakes simply require course corrections.  You can retrieve any situation that has gone astray.  One thing you can say is, “That was just my stuff.  And I want to process it.”  With a determination to immediately correct your mistake and the skills to set it right, you can keep your high-voltage relationship humming along.

Have you noticed that not everyone supports your relationship?  Some want to chew it up.  That was Jim’s and my experience before we got married.  We had to stand strong and defend our relationship against those who were critical of either of us or of marriage in general.  We had to realize that some people have hardened their hearts against love.  In the face of their attitude and comments, you have to tap your inner strength.  Stand for your beloved and your relationship.  Protect each other.

Questioning.  It comes with the territory of the early part of your relationship.  Will she accept me for all that I am?  Will he go away?  Jim and I had all those wonderings too.  We were getting to know each other.  Risking to reveal more and more about ourselves.  Jim even wrote me an entire letter with his “flaws.”  I wrote to him of my insecurities–would he go away once we began a sexual relationship?  For both of us, we were answering the question, “Have we really found our soulmate?”  It didn’t take long to find our answer.  I just found (in an old purse from 1989) a note I had written on a scrap of paper.  It reads, “The question mark has left his voice.”  His words, his tone, his attitude all said, “You’re the one.  I’ll never leave you.”  So, if you’re soulmate questing, listen for it.  Has the question mark left his voice?

On the surface of your relationship, it looks like sweet love.  Beneath the surface, there is more going on.  Much more.  In fact, you are calling each other.  By this we mean evoking feelings, attitudinal shifts, and behaviors you’d never touch if it weren’t for your partner’s influence.  Jim explored this concept in his June 1989 letter:  “We are calling each other to great things–greater depth, greater merging, greater union.  We each call the other to surrender to the love that wants to flow through us and give it its strongest voice possible.  We call each other to inclusive growth–I to include my shamed child, you to include your pain-filled little girl.  And we are each growing into what we are called to be and do.  It will be difficult for a while, but soon we will have the results of these callings as a foundation upon which to deploy and exercise our personal power in the world.”  We wish for you the sweetness of the surface of your love and the growth invoked when you follow your lover’s callings.

Glitches can have a curious benefit to soulmate partners.  A glitch is a strained communication, even an argument, over stuff either partner is having.  You’d think it would harm the relationship.  And, of course, if left unprocessed, it certainly can.  But, Jim and I discovered the gift that a glitch can contain–power.  Jim wrote it this way:  “Our glitchwork gives us, ultimately, more power.  Power to confront a negative feeling in the other.  Power to trust.  Power to soothe our little child parts, as they feel scared by the high voltages of our relationship.”  We were using the skills Jim had developed with his groups.  And they were serving us well.  Skills like asking each other, “What are you feeling?”  and “Can you tell me more about that?”  Try them.  And watch your love and power grow.

“Nothing in the world is single,” writes Shelley.  “All things by a law divine in one spirit meet and mingle.”  Jim quoted Shelley’s poem to me in July 1989, our wedding month.  He was meditating that an archetype of unification was driving us to merge, yet still retain our identities.  It’s an experience you will likely have.  It draws us out of our selves and toward each other.  Here’s more of Shelley’s beautiful poem to bless your day:  “The mountains kiss the heaven.  The waves clasp one another.  The sunlight clasps the earth.  The moonbeams kiss the sea.”