The Rush of Love

Not everyone wants it, but many men dream to fall cataclysmically in love, to surf the biggest wave, to touch the source of light through a woman’s curves and eyes. He longs to be cut out of his cardboard existence, dare I say it, by love’s knife.

I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman; I want her to take me out of myself, wrote Henry Miller, in 1933. If she could only make me believe that there was something more important on earth than myself… 

Jesus, I hate myself!

Many of us feel encased by the glass ceiling of our egos: we long for an occasion to transcend. Beauty plus lust point us toward a source of potential. And a good woman brings with her the promises of God, to be sure.

So how can one experience, then withstand, the full-blown power of falling in love: one of life’s rare instances of a full-pelt rush of blood to the heart? How can one taste this form of love when it’s a rarity for them… or when they’ve routinely sabotaged love through anxiety, disbelief it could be real, or via some other ambivalent push-away pattern, many times over the years?

In entrepreneurial coaching they say you rise to the level of your talent, but you fall to the level of your systems.

In romance coaching, you rise to the level of your permeability, but you fall to the depth of your practice.

What does that mean?

Well, many of us can open and have a ‘peak experience’. Many of us have. For many years it’d happen on my very last night of vacation. All of the fireworks, none of the drama!

(An aside: if you struggle to be caught up by a woman to the point of infatuation, most often it has to do with vulnerability: you need to let down your walls, your busy-ness, your secret cynicism, and fully let her in.)

Let’s say you met someone, the chemistry’s intense, and you want an enduring relationship: I believe you’ll need both a peak experience and an experience of landing the plane. That is, you will want to withstand the intensity of the love and the polarity and the attraction… without cracking under the pressure of it all. And then, you will need the foresight to build a sustainable structure of trust, communication, complicity… even ritual and routine…

… importantly, while avoiding your personal red flags along the way.

Yes, many of us learn to take off. Fewer on board know how to land the plane.

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Making Sense of Withstanding Love

So what does this mean, practically speaking?

Well, at the rush of love, can you watch insecure thoughts about the future of your love-affair float through your mind, without turning to over-analysis and story-making? Can you sit in the torturous physical sensations of anxiety — that sensation of dread and its elevated heart-rate — without jumping out of your skin and trying to manage an outcome (the very definition of needy-seeming behaviour)? To what extent can you revel in genuine uncertainty about the future of you and her… sagely knowing that most good romances have uncertainty not just as a by-product, but as a core principle of their being erotic in the first place? How good are you at scrapping plans you were becoming attached to, and making more suitable ones on the fly?

Do you know your standards, what you’re willing to sacrifice for love, and on what you will compromise and what not? Where do you stand on certain life issues, and can you maintain your integrity without being rigid, but not be swayed in some co-dependent shape-shift for love? Can you lay out a plan for a relationship: agreements, accords, a shared vision she can relax into? And are you aware of where you’re vulnerable to ruptures of the shadow: outbursts of rage, frustration, control or pity-seeking, which might just escape from under you one vacant Thursday night, and light the paper which detonates the whole affair?

If you manage to survive love’s Hiroshima bomb in the first few weeks, a sleuth of barbed wire, unmarked trenches and carpet bombs litter the terrain of the next six months! They call it the shift from ‘infatuation’ to the ‘power struggle’ phase. I don’t think anyone lands the plane unbruised.

Question is, can you come through the assault course not only intact, but with a smile?!

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The Need for the Peak

If I’m a stand for anything, I’m a stand for falling to the peak of love. That moment you become available enough, vulnerable enough, naked enough, to be touched by a woman so that she comes all the way in, and strokes her knowing finger upon your undefended heart. I’m not talking about imagining this in some later fantasy: this tender vulnerability happens real-time, the two of you together, face-to-face and eye-to-eye. “I’m falling in love with you my dear,” you say out loud, “and it’s happening right now.” The admiration you feel for each other is mutual, equal, spiralling upwards through each other in some sensuous vortex, and this virtuous, ecstatic updraught must be savoured in crystal awareness for every erotic morsel of flavour, rhythm, and scent. Never must such love be harboured, undisclosed, in secret.

If a man has never experienced this depth of love at the onset of his relationship, I’ll tell him right now to watch out. Without such benchmark moment of two higher-selves meeting, you will have no North Star which you can remember, which you can hold each other accountable to later on. If you’ve never tasted the grandeur that the two of you can bring to relationship, you will never know what is worth fighting for when it’s hard. Without direct knowledge of some requited sublime, why stay in relationship at all? To avoid loneliness?

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Tectonic Plates

As a relationship meanders deeper, the couple slips beneath the cracks and comes upon the plates each is grounded on. Many of your cherished values — some conscious, some you discover along the way — get put up on the wall and taken aim at. You want to travel. She wants children. You earn more money. She hates you talking to that nasty brunette who always gives you the eyes. You stumble into impenetrable moments in the woods which threaten your entire joint future. Sure, there are random conflicts, recurring scuffles, period drama… and there are long-standing tensions which might take a year or more to resolve: tensions which stretch the very fabric of who you are. The courageous, little-mentioned gift of staying in a relationship is this: you may one day be changed by your woman’s convictions, and come to realise that she held a more glorious prospect for your grandeur than you were able to see for yourself.

Such tectonic conflicts transfigure the very foundation of who you are, and the ego, of course, kicks in with retaliation and resistance. When your future turns to face extinction, if you cannot return with your woman to some sublime, well-remembered height of love, and clear the clutter out of the system as you sit higher-self to higher-self once more, it will be hard to find why the relationship is worth fighting for. And in such a moment your love will likely again be let go of, under the same self-centered argument that “it wasn’t serving me”.

A good relationship should change both of us for the better. This is far more than the trite leave her better than when you found her. This kind of love is about taking aim at the sacred cows of each other’s psyche, being stripped down and dismantled in all the places you’re turgid and ungenerous, and realising a kind of love that cuts much deeper than the initial heart-rush you dreamed of before the whole thing began.

Yes, this kind of relating is a path toward becoming a great man.

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I Will Guide You into This Kind of Courage

Preparing yourself for the big wave, so you can rise to highest heights love will ever grace you with in life, is our central focus throughout our Mastery course. If you are here, and if you’re reading along with fascination, this programme is definitely for you.

In Mastery, you will explore both the vulnerability, openness and dignity needed for you to enter the “mystical highs” of love in the first place… and you will get comprehensive guidelines (and personal coaching) to help you contain the saboteurs and land the plane when love does show up.

Join the waitlist and request your application, to join the next group of this exclusive programme.

Mastery is a year-long apprenticeship, only for the most hungry. We will have your back when it comes to love, for life.

~ Jordan

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