I was a born-again virgin. Not for religious reasons. I just knew that every time I had sex with someone new, I couldn't help but give them a piece of my heart. So I decided to stop going to that wide-open place with people who weren't worthy of the gift.
When Kurt and I started dating, I told him I wasn't having sex with anyone until I was - if not married - clear that we were headed for long-term commitment.
He understood. And perhaps that's part of why he proposed to me four months later.
I coach a lot of powerful women whose sexual energy was, like mine, a potent force in their early adulthood; a wild aliveness.
It shows up as a deep connection and commitment to our desires, instincts, and passions, whether they manifest in the form of creativity, sensuality, emotional expression, or other aspects of life. Vitality, authenticity, and spontaneity are in the driver’s seat.
Many of us trade in the wild aliveness of those days for the more secure, "grown-up," and legitimized feeling of being a monogamous wife.
I help my clients deconstruct all the social conditioning that goes into the desire I had and they had to make that trade-off: from "bad" to "good." That reckoning prepares us to reclaim our aliveness INSIDE marriage.
Because like it or not, that wildness IS our aliveness. Without channels to express our divine sensuality, playfulness, emotionality, and beauty, we slowly corrode inside. We pace the cage we built thinking it would give us the lives we'd always wanted. We begin to question ourselves.
But as Glennon Doyle writes in Untamed - using the metaphor of another majestic wild beast, a great cat she met at a zoo - to address such a woman directly: "You're not crazy. You're a goddamn cheetah."
There is a harmful myth about monogamy that says you have to compromise your desires to stay together long-term. When you see through this myth you get to experience the creative tension of doing whatever it takes BOTH to stay together AND to stay in conversation with your desires.
Once, I knew I was wild, but I didn't know how to use my wild in healthy ways. So I tamed myself. But that hurt me, too. For a long time, I lived according to this myth about monogamy, dutifully quashing my desires for the sake of keeping my marriage stable.
But when I learned to say, “I’m not going ANYWHERE, nor will I live without these flavors of delight and intimacy,” I was able to use that new container to mix up some sweet new flavors of love. I have rewilded myself so I can live in domesticity without being captive to it.
What is your relationship with your erotic self? With your faithful, reliable self? Are you wild and free? Secure and stable? Both? How?