Quotes About Vulnerability

Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don't just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence.

Often, when one partner insists that they don't yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused.

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies.

The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unselfconsciousness that fuels erotic pleasure.

While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. It is inherently vulnerable. We tend to assuage our anxieties through control. We feel safer if we can contract the distance between us, maximize the certainty, minimize the threats, and contain the unknown.

trust is also a leap of faith—"a risk masquerading as a promise,"7 as Adam Phillips writes.

Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel intrusive. What was initially a secure enclosure becomes confining. While our need for closeness is almost as basic as our need for food, it carries with it anxieties and threats that can inhibit desire. We want closeness, but not so much that we feel trapped by it.

With the revelation of an affair, suddenly the scoreboard of a marriage is lit up: the giving and the taking, the concessions and the demands, the allocation of money, sex, time, in-laws, children, chores. All the things we never really wanted to do but did in the name of love are now stripped of the context that gave them meaning.

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Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal—a direct attack in the most vulnerable place. However, looking through the lens of the damage it caused the aggrieved partner, we see only one side of the story. Cheating is what they did to their partner, but what were they doing for themselves? And why?

Rather than inhibiting a couple's sexuality, recognizing the third has a tendency to add spice, not least because it reminds us that we do not own our partners. We

Intimacy is "into-me-see." I am going to talk to you, my beloved, and I am going to share with you my most prized possessions, which are no longer my dowry and the fruit of my womb but my hopes, my aspirations, my fears, my longings, my feelings—in other words, my inner life. And you, my beloved, will give me eye contact. No scrolling while I bare my soul. I need to feel your empathy and validation. My significance depends on it.

No woman should ever give one man all the power to shatter her romantic ideals. There is a big difference between saying, "That one person let me down and I'm hurt," and saying, "I'll never love again." But these two women are not ready to make that distinction. They see the world as offering two options—hurt or be hurt. As Lailani puts it, "I should've stayed the bitch. Nobody hurts the bitch.

When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.

Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused. —Adam Phillips, Monogamy

Betrayal in the digital age is death by a thousand cuts.

Before, I trusted too much and was naive. Now I realize that even the best people can't always get it right and end up acting out. We are all human and anyone is capable of doing what Anais did, even me.

In fact, dependence is an essential ingredient of connection. But it's a producer of terrific anxiety, because it implies that the one we love wields power over us. This is the power to love us, but also to abandon us.

What draws people outside the lines they worked so hard to establish? Why does sexual betrayal hurt so much? Is an affair always selfish and weak, or can it in some cases be understandable, acceptable, even an act of boldness and courage?

In my decades of working with couples, I've observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst.

Only when the betrayed partner feels emotionally met will he or she be able to listen to explanations without hearing them as justifications.