Are You the Visionary in Your Relationship?

Are you too much? Is this vision that you have, Is the desire that you have to have love that nourishes your heart, that awakens your body, that gives you the strength of thousands, that allows you to do the work in the world that you really came here to do. Because the way that your relationship shines in your heart and the way that you and your partner work together makes you feel so intense, empowered, and believed in and enlivened that it sends you out into your day with all of your strength and capacity about you. Is that ridiculous? No, it's not. I really believe that that's possible for everybody, that it's the way we're designed and that it's worth pursuing. Hi. Welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure, and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. One of the big turning points in our relationship happened in a therapist's office here in Seattle about 2003. We'd walked in, and, as usual, I had this list of things I wanted to talk about. I always know what I want to deal with, what I want to reach for, what I want to create in my relationship with Kurt. And he would often just walk in and be like, yeah, what do you got? And I was so annoyed. And I said to the therapist, like, why is it that I always have to be the one who brings these things up? These things affect both of us. Why am I the list maker, the holder of the relationship? And she just sat with me for a moment, and she said, what if that's the way it's always going to be? And at first. And by at first, I mean for a couple of weeks, I was so angry. She made me sit with the truth that this may well be who I am and who he is. And some of my initial reactions were like, well, then I can't live with him. He can't be my person, because I need somebody who can meet me. And we're going to talk about that later in this episode. That. That's a question. I get From a lot of people, it was like, well, if I'm such a visionary about relationship, and I want so much for my life in every aspect, including in intimacy and eroticism and closeness and partnership, and my partner doesn't think that way. Isn't that a problem? But what I came to see over a couple of weeks of really meditating on that, on what if it is always going to be me, I came to honor this role of being what I called the visionary in. In our relationship. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you what I've learned about being a visionary in love. I'm going to answer some of those key questions that visionaries often ask me, and I'm going to call you up, I'm going to invite you into courage and into action in the role of the visionary. Sound good? Let's jump in. So this notion of being the visionary in the relationship developed for me from that time in about 2003. And what I came to see is that I am someone who has been gifted with the opportunity to hold vision. And that opportunity is definitely a responsibility. It can be a burden, it can be carried as a burden. But it's also, in some ways, you're going to have a calling in life. You're going to have a job that's yours to do. And this is how I see many of the people of color, the indigenous people, the people who are transgender or in other ways, queer, who are leading so much of the invitation for our whole culture to step into more inclusivity, more sensitivity to one another and our identities and our lived experiences, and to dismantle systems of oppression that don't work for anybody. And it's hard living under a system of oppression and trying to change it when the power structures are set against that kind of change and against, in many cases, against your very existence. So what I'm learning from those potent leaders, those amazing wisdom holders and change agents, is that if there's a place in my pretty privileged life where I have to be the vision holder, where I have to swim against the direction that the tide has been going in the past, then there's lots of models for how I can call up that courage. And that's one of the ways that I can put a shoulder to the same wheel. And I try to take action, give money, give time in support of, for instance, the people who. Whose land I live and work on and people who my privilege oppresses. But I believe that we also forward the cause of liberation when we take responsibility in whatever way is in front of us to create change, to hold vision, and to speak truth into our own lives. So if you see it, it's yours to do something about. And if someone else doesn't see it, then, you know, I certainly don't want to speak to anybody who's dealing with me as an oppressor or other people's oppressors. So let's just take this in relationship. If you see something for your marriage, for your partnership, and your partner doesn't see it yet, then it's quite possible, and this is what I operate by, for myself. It's quite possible that I've been invited by the universe to be the vision holder for this time and that bringing my partner forward is my job, and that that's okay, that there are other places where I don't get it, I don't see it. And he's bringing me forward. And by the very nature of that opacity, of course I won't see it. So I'll only be aware of the places where I'm ahead in the game of leapfrog. And I'll never know it when he's ahead. Right? Isn't that funny? You know, so we can be really aware of where we're wise or visionary, or we know more or we're more invested and we just have no idea about the places where it's the opposite. So the humility to recognize that is also really helpful for me in being the visionary that I am. I can also see where he's the visionary or he's way ahead of me, and I could see that that's the case even though I can't actually see where it is. He's ahead of me because I'm ignorant in those places. So if you've got your hands on a part of the vision, own it, hold it. I think of people like Joan of ARC, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. People who had a dream, people who saw something for themselves and for others and called other people forward. And I'm not comparing myself or you to those people. But what I'm saying is that that quality of being willing to be the one who turns the tide is a beautiful quality to develop in oneself. And that's what I'm endeavoring to develop in myself by taking on this role of visionary in my relationship. So being the visionary means that we take 100% responsibility for becoming and living from the qualities within ourselves that will bring about that vision. It doesn't mean that we are our partner's keeper, that we are the leader in some authoritarian or hierarchical kind of way that they're supposed to follow us. It means that we will tend the flame of what we see as possible for the relationship and we will show up in ways that are consonant with the manifestation of that vision. So I'm going to show up if I know that we could be closer, more tender, more passionate. I'm going to show up in ways that match us being more tender, closer, more passionate. It means that I'm not going to go into either complacency about our tenderness and our passion and our closeness on one hand, nor on the other hand am I going to go into bitching about it and complaining about the lack of it and trying to prod my husband into showing up for it on the other hand, because neither of those is consonant with the vision that I hold. The vision calls me up long before it calls him up. But in a moment, I'm going to answer some of the questions that I get about being the visionary, and certainly one of them is, how do I call my partner up? So we'll get there. First, I want to talk about this double sided coin. There's two core questions that people often ask me when they're the visionary and they really are two sides of the same coin. The first question is, shouldn't I be with somebody who can really meet me in this, in what I see for our relationship? Shouldn't I be with somebody who's as ambitious and visionary as I am and who shares my values? The other question is, instead of questioning whether partner's wrong for not being the visionary, sometimes people will question, am I wrong for being the visionary? So I sure love that temptation myself. It's like, either you're broken or I am, but somebody's wrong here, right? We're so trained to make somebody wrong, wrong, and to not hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time. But that capacity to hold paradox and to be inside the complexity that's real, expands our humanity and gives us a lot more access to peace. So I encourage you to recognize, yeah, you can be the visionary and they can be not the visionary and you can both be right and okay in that. So when people ask this second question, the way it often comes out is like, am I too much? Am I demanding too much? Am I over ambitious? Is this really reasonable to expect of any partner today, as busy as we both are? So I'm going to back up now that I've shown you both sides of the same coin and given you that little tip of my hand that I really think these are in some ways the same question, because they're asking, who's wrong here? I want to address the first one first. So should I be with someone who shares my values? We'll talk about that part of it. First. You and your partner need to share core values. What your life is about in a general sense probably should be fairly aligned such that your core values aren't contradicting one another. If one of you is so much about power and wealth that you kill puppies and children in order to get that, and the other one is about nonviolence and love, then you're probably going to be miserable a lot of the time. But you can really share deep down values in a big way and not necessarily share these values of. You know, for me, perpetual growth has been something that I saw as a value, and so I was always holding the vision and going for more. And my husband's process of growth is no less robust than mine, but the way that he goes about it is very, very different and much more organic and introverted, you know, reflective more than the seeking and talking about it a lot that I do. So whenever somebody says, I just don't know if we have the same values in this kind of context, I look to dig a little bit deeper with them on that because I think often that's fallacious that you really don't share the same values. What you're saying is that you don't have the same approach to creating more in your relationship. Now, are they as ambitious and visionary as you are? Probably not. It's almost never the case that two people who are really going for it in the relationship, who have a shelf full of books about relationship, who are perpetually thinking about and their ears perk up for podcasts like this, who are always seeking ways to go deeper, both of you aren't going to be like that. You would actually probably be driven crazy by a partner who was as visionary as you are. They would push your buttons in lots of ways. And likewise your partner, if they're less visionary than you, would probably not pick someone who didn't hold that visionary pole the way you do. So there's often a perfection in the way that we pair up, and it's really right and good that one of us would be more into it than the other. There's also the bottom line truth that somebody is the low desire partner and somebody is the higher desire partner for everything under the sun simply because we're not identical. So one of you has. My husband went and caught Us crab, I guess just yesterday, no, Saturday. It's crabbing season here in Puget Sound and he likes to go out on our little boat and put down crab pots or this is the first time that he's actually done it and caught big enough crabs to bring home. But he got five Dungeness crab and brought them home. And so he's definitely the higher desire partner for December boating. He likes being out there in the elements and I am a little tiny person and I get really cold. I do not want to be out there in the cold. So that's one example of where he's the higher desire partner. And you know, when it comes to self reflection and relationship workshops and all that stuff, wouldn't you guess that the relationship coach in our marriage is the one who's more into that? That's just how it is. He's also the high desire partner for he built us a firewood holder that's, you know, like designed it in his software program and made this beautiful little cedar shingled thing. And I sure have a high desire for fires on a winter night. But he's a higher desire partner for designing and building something to hold the wood and keep it dry. So tap into that recognition that somebody's going to want everything a little bit more. And it really took me some work to come to peace with that. Like, okay, we're not going to be twins. I just wanted the affirmation of my husband being as into it as I was. I made that mean, you know, if he would be as into it as I was, then that meant that he really loved me enough. And if he didn't, then it meant that he didn't love me enough. And none of those things are true. So let's look at the other side. Are you too much? Is this vision that you have is the desire that you have to have love that nourishes your heart, that awakens your body, that gives you the strength of thousands, that allows you to do the work in the world that you really came here to do. Because the way that your relationship shines in your heart and the way that you and your partner work together makes you feel so empowered and believed in and enlivened that it sends you out into your day with all of your strength and capacity about you. Is that ridiculous? No, it's not. I really believe that that's possible for everybody, that it's the way we're designed and that it's worth pursuing. And I've been married for 21 years and with my partner for 24. And what I just said sounds a little bit grandiose to me. And it also sounds exactly the way that I feel today inside my marriage. And I wouldn't say that I've felt that whole way for very long at all, just the last couple of years at that level. But that process of continuous improvement, that process of going deeper, holding a long term vision, and building it out year over year, day by day, one habit at a time, is absolutely a worthwhile use of your life and a productive process if you go about it in the way that I'm describing. Where you take your vision as marching orders, not for your partner, but for you. Where you show up every day in a way that matches what it is you're wanting to create and you look for, how can I be that in the world with myself and with my partner? And that brings us to the third question. If you are showing up in that way and you're cultivating in yourself the qualities that you would love to bring to the kind of relationship you would most love to have, and the things you'd most likely most like to do and be and have and build inside that relationship, then how do you get your partner on board? How do you call them forward? How do you invite them to let go of the habits that detract from that vision and to embrace new practices and new skills and capacities that will forward the vision? People ask me all the time, how do I get my partner to vision and dream and plan with me, and how do I get them to grow inside our relationship? And that how do I get them to? Is both a question that I have dedicated a lot of time to in my life and kind of a lousy question, I gotta admit, because we seldom get other people to do anything. So if what you're about is making your partner do stuff, you're really setting yourself up for a bit of misery. I speak from experience here and it's unlikely to draw them to it. That said, I have built my business around helping couples, starting by helping one person. So building on what has helped me move forward and helped me invite my husband into experiences, experience after experience that has grown us sexually as parents, emotionally as partners, in healing our childhoods, in growing our capacity for self regulation, in building a beautiful home and rhythm of travel, adventures and life, I'm always looking out there and saying, what's next? And planting a new flag for us and bringing him into those pieces. And the more I've done that, the more he has begun to plant flags for us as well. And also be a leader and a visionary in that. So I believe and have experienced that it's possible and I've guided at this point hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of couples. I don't want to say thousands because I might be exaggerating, but I don't think so many, many couples in being right where they are as an individual, being the visionary that you are or the not visionary that you are, and calling your partner forward. So if you're listening to this podcast, you may have been following along with us over the last dozen years as we have released a new Couples Planning Guide updated for the year each November or December. And this may be the first time you've heard of the Couples Planning Guide, but it is the starting place. Supporting couples to be right where each of them is individually is something that I have many tools for, but this is the first one. This is always free and it is a full guide that I kept expanding and expanding and expanding. I've simplified it now, but it gives the two of you a powerful set of exercises that you can do separately or together to create a vision for your lives and for your shared life and to plan the little actions that will make this coming year your best year yet. So if you sign up to download the guide@couplesvision.com I will also let you know about the free live online events that I'm going to be conducting around the new year so that individuals and couples can tap into their vision for the year and so that you can create truly life changing action commitments that bring your visions to life. I would so love to see you at one of those events. And as for the end of this episode of the podcast, I hope you're walking away with a new vision of yourself as the honored visionary in your relationship. My wish for you is that you see yourself as that visionary, that change agent who's blessed with a vision that others might not yet see, but a vision that will serve you in the world very well if you nourish yourself well enough to hold the vision and devote yourself to it with self love and perseverance. My wish for you is that you'll nourish the vision in yourself rather than either losing sight of your desire or slipping into complacency about your relationship, or on the other hand, doggedly pursuing your vision with resentment or any other energy that doesn't really match the outcome of the vision itself. I encourage you to begin as you mean to go on, and then to go on as you began, and I cannot wait to hear how it goes I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious Couples Circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in the show notes for you. You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, with just a few words about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're going to want to so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Isenberry Christensen and this is been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.