Lifeletter #181: Erotic Intelligence

Over many years of working with couples, I discovered a very interesting thing. During the course of their relationship,  many of them lost touch with their erotic intelligence. The flame of their sexual intimacy died down, became a tiny flicker, or just went out. In the ashes of that fire, they tried to maintain a sense of real connection, and it didn’t really work.

“We are friends, really good friends,” some of them would tell me.  Underneath those words I would hear something else, a longing for a much deeper and more passionate communion. Sometimes they knew that’s what they wanted, and sometimes they did not. We miss a lot when we are not listening to the voice of our body.

As long as we are living in a human body, we are wired for some kind of sexual intimacy. Friends are friends, they are not lovers. Friends are close, friends are familiar, friends feel easy and comfortable with each other. That’s a beautiful thing: and it’s not what being a lover is. Lovers are more than close, they are intimate. Intimacy is a wild land, a place where friends cannot go. In intimacy we fall into a mystery that is alive, vibrant, pulsating and immediate.

If we try to carry on without that intimacy, things go grey. They shut down. They dry up. And we look elsewhere for the juice that is not flowing in our relationship. We look in the fridge, or in the bottle, or in books, or online. It can become a never-ending search, an exhausting preoccupation.

What it is that awakens the flame of eros and lets it burn bright again? It’s not about what you or your partner look like, its not about a perfect body,not at all, though it’s easy to think that way. And it’s not simply chemistry. I’ve had many women tell me, “I’m just not attracted to him anymore,” as if it was all about him. But it’s not just about the other person. It’s about me and my erotic intelligence, how well I have learned the secrets of unlocking my body and my heart and becoming available to this kind of  healing electricity.

Sometimes, if we have forgotten how to awaken this energy, and how to love another human being in this way, we have go back to school and learn. Awakening our erotic genius is a practice. We need guidance, encouragement, and initiation. And we need a whole ocean of gentleness and patience, because stepping back into this place of deep learning can make us feel extraordinarily vulnerable.

Which is why we turn away, and get involved with other things. It feels too edgy, too difficult, to begin. I’ve felt the same doubts, the same despair, so many times: “I’m too old for this. Why don’t I just give up?”

It helps to know that we are not alone here. People everywhere are stuck in the dryness, in the disconnection, just like we are. And still we long for this wild, sweet energy, this sexual communion, whether we are black or white, young or old, Muslim or Christian, straight or LGBTQ. We can feel the depth of our longing in a moment like this one:

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching —
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after — if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now — you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle
-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
–Ellen Bass

with love
Shayla