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I want to offer you three practices that will deepen
your capacity for intimacy.
Practice #1:
"The Second Date"
The first practice is what I call the “second date”
practice. There are a lot of us who only can do first dates. Here’s
the second date. You don’t have to promise anything – you could be
honest – you could say: I’m not sure I’m going on a third date, but
I’ll go on a second date and here’s what I want you to do. You
don’t have to love the person, you don’t [even] have to like the
person. This is what you have to do. When something annoys you on
the second date, ask yourself this question: Why does it annoy me?
Does it annoy me because it’s a trait that I lack or does it annoy
me because it’s a trait I need to develop empathy for? You don’t
have to have a third date.
Practice #2:
What's New with You
The second practice is for people who are already
intimate. You have to learn something new about the person every
week for four weeks.
Practice #3:
Bless Your Nurturers
And the third practice is once a week, with the
person with whom you are in a relationship, whether romantic love or
intimacy, bless the person for something that he or she did for you
to help you grow.
Now, if you do those three practices and you keep in
mind [or clarify] the confusions between romantic love and intimacy,
then I promise you not that necessarily you’ll be in an intimate
relationship, but that you’ll understand better what intimacy is
about and that the wonder of intimacy is not that things are
perfect. The wonder of intimacy is that you create an environment
in which two people are ever growing and ever changing, and that’s
the greatest act of faith of all because when you’re changing and
growing, that’s exactly when you can grow apart. If you do that
[create that environment], you may well lose paradise but you’ll
gain a world. And that’s “Simple Wisdom.”
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