The Moment that Kills Many Intimate Relationships

All right, and welcome back. So on this episode, I want to talk about one of the most important threshold moments in any intimate relationship.

And it has to do with two things that build up the foundation for any type of long term relationship. On the one hand, we have polarity or erotic friction as we sometimes call it. That's what creates the juice, the attraction, the pull to be with each other, the magnetism. And on the other hand, we have intimacy or oneness or connectedness or sameness.

And this is the part of us that feels close to another, that feels like one with our partner. It's the opposite of feeling different. And every relationship needs both. We need polarity and we need intimacy. Togetherness, closeness, oneness. The thing that's really important to know is when we start a relationship, we're highly charged up with polarity.

There is mostly difference in our coupledom, right? We barely know the other person. We don't know their life history, their stories, how they spend their days. We don't know what they look like naked. We don't know what they're like sexually. It's all the unknown. So it translates to those moments early in a relationship tend to be highly charged, highly polarized. There's often a lot of attraction for each other, right?

And what's important is hormonally, we're also supported in that, right? When we first meet someone, there's all kinds of hormones racing through our bodies that charge up that connection. The other piece, sameness or oneness or intimacy or trust. There's often not as much of when we begin a relationship, right? We don't actually know who the person is. We don't know about their history, their family, the stories they'll tell.

We don't know how much we can trust them, right? We haven't been through a lot of experiences yet, so we're still feeling each other out. So when a relationship starts, it's high on polarity and often low on togetherness or trust. Right? Now what happens over time? Well, over time, polarity starts to go down, trust starts to go up, right? We start to spend more time with our partners.

We build real intimacy with them. We're connecting with each other regularly. We're not just meeting up on intentional dates. We're hanging out throughout the weekend, sleeping over at each other's houses, going on weekend trips, making, meeting each other's families. And eventually for some, we're getting committed, right? We're, we're actually saying, hey, we're not going to see other people or we're moving in with each other or we're getting married, whatever that might be. So the erotic friction, the natural polarity starts to wane, and the hormones actually shift along with that.

What that's being replaced by is a lot of trust, a lot, a lot of sameness, a lot of connection, a lot of I really know who this person is. I know what stories they're going to tell at a party. I know what it's like to wake up with them on the weekend. I know their favorite food to eat at a diner, right? We start to share a lot more sameness now. The threshold moment, One of the most important moments in every relationship is when those two cross, right?

When that highly charged polar energy, which is slowly kind of waning down, meets the sameness, the oneness, which is slowly being waning up. You can think of this as I call the relationship X. At some point, we start highly different with not much sameness. And over time, those two flip. They actually inverse. And that is the threshold moment, where our coupledom, our togetherness, it has more sameness in it than difference.

And what's so important about this moment is it's often when couples don't make can vary and range anywhere from a year to three years in really, it depends again, based on commitment, moving in with each other, different things. But know that every couple is going to hit this spot. Mainstream culture, we kind of call it the honeymoon period, right? Things are great.

We can't wait to see this person. They're the love of our life. And then something shifts. That period ends. Suddenly we're getting agitated with our partner. Sometimes we're annoyed to be around them, sometimes we're not attracted to them. When they walk through the door, we're not thinking about tearing their clothes off. We're like, I kind of don't have the energy or whatever that might be. Or we just start to feel more neutral with them on the other side of that, right? That honeymoon period is pointing to this threshold moment, this relational inflection point.

Now, what most couples get wrong is they don't know that that's a necessary step in growth as a couple. And so they start to think, well, this person I used to love, they annoy me all the time now. Or I'm Wanting to pull away and I don't know why, or I'm less attracted to them. So they can't be my forever person, right? Because my forever person I would still be in love with. I'd still feel totally magnetized to and totally pulled towards. And so they might leave and try that again in a new relationship.

But the same thing will happen. I don't care how highly charged a couple is. There will be a moment when where that X gets crossed, that threshold inflection moment will hit every couple. And it's at that moment where often our deepest attachment wounds from previous relationships and from our childhood with our caregivers will start to present itself to be healed.

And it's often in that moment we realize some part of me unconsciously chose my partner because in some way it often replicates this wounding I experienced as a kid, right? This lack of love I received often will start to present itself again in this current modern relationship. Now, what's so important about knowing about this threshold moment is it can empower you to.

To move through it. And this is where having the skills and often getting outside support through coaching or therapy or both, doing individual work helps make conscious our attachment wounding. So we can start to work with it in our relationship. And we realize, oh, actually that's the great gift of this relationship. It's to help me work through this attachment wounding, not by. For me to pretend like it doesn't exist. It's going to come up with anybody I'm in relationship with because I'm the common denominator.

So anything that's unhealed in me when it comes to relationship, I'm going to keep playing out. So I might as well give it a go in this relationship, right? And so we start to take responsibility for healing these parts of ourselves so we can show up fully in this relationship without projecting our past wounding on top of it right Now. The other thing about this inflection moment and why I think it's such a big thing in our culture these days is it's where knowing the tools to consciously generate polarity and erotic friction becomes so important.

So polarity for those that don't know, right? It's just the interaction of two of the primal energies of the universe. In the polarity and the sacred sexuality world. We often call them masculine and feminine. Some people don't like those terms. Others have coined alpha and Omega, structure and flow, go and flow, feeling and perspective, yin and yang, whatever you want to call them. There's these kind of two central energies, life and Death, right?

Stillness in movement, still seeing and being seen. These polarities, this central polarity exists throughout the world, in life. And it just gets embodied in some specific ways. In our relationships. When we meet naturally, often that polarity is buttressed by the amount of difference and unknown we have in our relationship, right? Once we cross the inflection point, that naturally charged battery starts to wane.

And we have to consciously learn to charge it back up in our relationship. And some of the ways we do that are through what we call polarity, practice, or the arts of erotic friction. Which really just means we start to intentionally, in the safety of our trusting, intimate relationship, begin to practice difference, right? So I embody a different energy than my partner embodies. Now, this doesn't really have anything to do with what sex you were at birth.

We all can embody these two different energies. What's important is to realize if we're both embodying the same one, it often comes up neutral. Or at worse, even worse. We repel each other. And it's the difference that creates the attraction. Like two magnets, you need a positive side and a negative side. And they come together. They're both the same. They push each other apart. Or in reality, they often just end up. We just end up feeling really neutral, best friendy with our partners, right?

So polarity is the intentional art of generating difference. By embodying different energies in our. In our nervous system, in our presence, in how we're showing up in the moment. Which usually means one person holds the structure of the moment. And one person holds the energy and flow of the moment. And there's so many different types of practices and ways we can cultivate this in our relationship. And the thing is, it doesn't take a tremendous amount to have to juice those batteries back up.

But you do have to have to do it. You don't have to live your life 100% polarized. A lot of life is being in relationship is about being in more that neutral space. But we have to know when to flip the lever to charge back up our relationship. To create that energy, to create that intimacy. And these tools, this capacity to understand how to generate erotic friction. It actually becomes more important as a relationship goes, right?

So the same tools we can use to generate polarity and attraction on a first date. It's even more important to have those tools on our 30th wedding anniversary. When we've just been through it with our partner. And spent often the majority of our waking days with this person. We have so much sameness. That we have to learn to differentiate through getting away from each other sometimes and through these energetic practices that are very easy to learn once you're given the right structure.

The thing about polarity is you can basically learn all the tools in a weekend, but it becomes a lifelong practice. Keeping the polarity battery charged is kind of like gardening. You can't just water it and put it in the sun one day. It needs constant attention to keep it growing and thriving. So while the tools are actually easy enough to learn in an online course, or even better in a weekend workshop of some kind, the application of it and the commitment to doing it regularly over time is what allows a relationship to really thrive.

But you got to understand, it's so important to know every relationship will cross that threshold where the balance will be from being highly polarized and low on intimacy and trust, to more intimacy and trust and sameness and less polarity. So the work as a relationship goes on is actually to generate polarity. Trust often comes along for the ride, though sometimes we actually have to do some very intentional work there too.

It can be hard to get into polarized spaces if we don't actually trust our partner. So sometimes we do need some kind of ongoing coaching or therapy or healing work on ourselves to be able to show up and fully practice in a highly charged, polarized place. This inflection point, this relationship moment, it will come, even if it hasn't hit you yet. And if it has come, no, it's never too late to turn it around.

We can always, in any moment when we have the tools, generate more difference and polarity to spark up our connection again. And not every relationship is going to be highly charged sexually and connected all the time. Relationships have seasons. There may be seasons of high polarization and low polarization. That's normal too. What's important is you as a man can learn the skills and tools.

So when it becomes really crucial to recharge that battery, you have the tools in your toolkit to do it. And you have the energy and willingness to step in and lead that in your relationship so you and your partner can get charged up and connected again. When intimate partners are charged with polarity and erotic friction, it makes so much easier in the relationship when that's met with all that trust, intimacy and balance.

If you want some help learning how to polarize your relationship, whether you're in a long term one or just out there dating, definitely check out my program, Pillars of Presence and you can apply to join at Evolutionary Men. Apply until next time. If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to evolutionary men. Apply.