495: Why Love Is So Difficult - And How It Can Not Be with Rainier Wylde

It's almost like we've gone to this other extreme of like any form of romance or affection or desiring to merge is seen as like codependent and bad and wrong.

Oh, I'm like you and you know, I spent my 20s being a sad eyed singer of songs for lovers. And I've gotta be honest, that's still where my heart is. I'm a romantic at heart. I do think that there is something that is a larger cultural motif. And one of those things is that when all the talking points, when it's very difficult to talk to one another, that statistics or pragmatics become the law of the land. And I think that we are so. It's so difficult to actually communicate with each other because everything is a pressure cooker. Yeah. There's so much water under every communication that I think that we kind of speak in pragmatics. Love has sort of devolved into a very transactional thing. I think it's reduced love to kind of like a grocery store marketplace mentality. You know, it's like I'm craving some food. I'm going to go down to the grocery store and get some soup.

Right. Swipe on an app.

Right.

Instead of, you know, writing someone a sonnet, they just send the fire emoji. Hi, it's Sahara Rose and welcome back to the Highest Self podcast, a place where we discuss what makes you your soul's highest evolvement. I have been fascinated by love. Love is one of the most basic yet complex human emotions. And beyond an emotion, it really is a vibration, it's a consciousness, it's a lens of seeing life. It is my number one core value. And it is the thing that I think we all want most in life. You know, we all want to live as the embodiment of love and we want that love reflected back to us from another person. But why is it the most difficult thing to find and keep? And you know, it feels like this constant yearning, this constant grappling, and sometimes I question maybe that's just the way it's meant to be designed. So in my own journey of navigating divorce, of heartbreak and heart opening and questioning my. My childhood and my ancestry and how it all played a role into this. And it's also shown me the beauty and the art and the poetry that happens because with every love story is an inevitable love ending. And when you can see as two ends of the same spectrum of feeling, we get to feel, we get to be alive, we invite it all in. So I'm excited for Today's podcast guest, because it is someone that I found in my own journey through Instagram and his poetry and his words really just spoke to me and we became Instagram friends, and now he's here on the podcast. So Rainier really is a philosopher of love, and I'm excited to have this conversation today. I have some of his words and quotes that have really resonated with me. But we're going to remain open to the mystery of what love wants to speak with us here today. So let's welcome Rainier to the Highest Self podcast. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.

Yay. And the first question I would love to ask you is, what makes you your highest self?

What a great question. I think it's a lot like love, actually. Whenever I'm opening, whenever I'm expanding or deepening, widening. What did Rilke say? I live my life in widening circles. And I think whenever I sense that whenever I step into that place, the opposite of that is when I'm closing, which is like fear, which is like erecting those walls of fear. That's my least highest self. But I think that that opening, that core value of love, that really is my highest sense.

Yeah, love is really why we're here. And I love your reflections. I've written some of them down. I want to go through them. So you wrote, essentially, committing quickly in romance is also having commitment issues. For some, it may be safer to jump into a relationship than to be in the slow, ambiguous process of growing sl slowly and getting to know someone deeply over time. And that creating fantasies, sharing extensive intimate details, constantly communicating, and requiring relational labels very quickly is a symptom of insecurity. And that really resonated with me because it took me back to my early 20s when I was this person of like, oh, my God, we're in love and it's forever. And that's the way that we're trained. The Disney movies and, you know, if it's the one, you know instantly and it just feels right. So can you expand on us? Like, how can this actually be related to our insecurity? And why is it more beneficial to allow this slow and ambiguous process to happen even when, like, our hearts just want to merge?

Well, let's not look at love for a moment. Let's just look at life as a species. I think we're really, really poor at sitting with ambiguity. We crave, especially in our modern age, certainty. We need it. And in part, that reflects the chaos of the world around us. The world is so incredibly chaotic. So I think as individuals, our need for certitude is so much higher perhaps, than it's ever been. We're looking, I think, rather desperately everywhere for something like certainty. And when we become unstable or weak or wobbly, suddenly we begin to cling. We begin to reach out for anything. A rope leading up from the pit somehow inter love, right. A lot of us are love junkies. We want that next fix that will make us feel good, feel wonderful. So we keep reaching for it, we keep trying to have it. But here's the problem. The first stages of love are so damned uncertain that the very thing we're reaching for tends to make us feel even more weak and wobbly. And so we're really stuck in a dilemma there. So I think a lot, us, myself included, it's not relegated to my early 20s. I'd love to say that it was way back then, but, man, I resemble this. And when I find that lack of certainty, when I find that shakiness inside of me, the thing I want to do more than almost anything is to solidify the connection. Please make this forever, make this real, so that my ambiguity will end. Yeah. The problem is we turn a person, this other person who we're now in love with, we turn them into an object, an object to satiate our need for certitude so they cease being a real person. Yeah.

I'm laughing because in my own now single journey, I've just. It's like being awake within a dream now. I've done all this healing work and all this awareness, so I like, notice the patterns and then I'm like psychoanalyzing myself in the patterns. And it's exactly that of like, you know, for me, being single for the first time since I'm 24 years old. So it's like this desire to, like, find someone else and be in partnership, to get out of this ambiguity of not knowing. But then I see my friends in relationships and then there's the ambiguity of are we girlfriend and boyfriend? And the ambiguity of is he proposing? And then the when is the wedding? And then when are we having kids? And it's like if we stay in that state of consciousness, there's always going to be this insecurity that we're anxious about and we're always yearning for something else outside of us to take us out of this void that is life.

Yeah. There's nothing that takes away the risk of being alive. And I think that part of learning how to be good at relating is learning how to Sit with your own uncertainty, learning how to sit with that ambiguity that we're talking about. I think of I'm now married a second time for 12 years almost. And I think of this person who I've woken up next to for some thousand days. You know, I don't know the math on this, but I think of how many days we've woken up next to one another. And I've looked over and I've smelled her smelly breath and she smelled mine. And we've memorized each other. We know each other like the back of our own hands. And then something truly surprising happens. This happened to me about a year ago. I looked over and she was reading a book. She was buried, engrossed in it. And I thought, huh, well, she must think that's really interesting. And then a little bit later that day, she was carrying around a different book, and she was walking through the halls holding a book. And I said, well, that's funny. She's going to trip and fall. And then later that day, I see her walking around with a different book. And I think to myself, who is this reader? I've never seen this woman before. She doesn't read. Who is this stranger? And so suddenly now I'm having to deal with the uncertainty of not knowing who I'm in relationship with. And I think that's hilarious because that's where a lot of relationships end. I look over at the person and say, I don't know you anymore. But that's the exciting thing, too. So again, how we sit with uncertainty is what defines our ability to be.

Good at relating itself and to not wait for that person, that label anything outside of us to give us certainty. And you touched upon something else that you had a quote around, which is the projections that we have around people. So you said most of our relationships are just stories about our relationships. So how are we often just assigning people a character in our play of life versus actually getting to know who that person is?

I think we do it rather constantly. I don't so much think we have stories as much as I think stories have us. I think that stories, myths are kind of in the ether. They're like these rain clouds outside your window here. I think that we step out into them and we get wet. We think we're very unique, but really it's raining on all of us. And we make exchanges in these stories. We kind of say, okay, I'll play that part. That sounds pretty good. And so we sign up for them. And I think in my own life, How? I signed up for a few storylines. I signed up for rogue Prince. My father was a king, and I become the prince who turns his back. I'm the black sheep. Well, now that I'm that particular role, I need a counterpart. I need someone who will play opposite me. It's kind of like if I get cast in a movie as Bruce Wayne, Batman, suddenly now I have to recruit for Alfred the butler. We get so good at the roles we assign our that we now have to recruit others to play opposite of us. And here's the thing, it doesn't mean that we find people who are. That we'll draft someone for fit and train them how to be that part on the moment, right there, right on the job. Training happens all the time in relationship. We reinforce or punish people to behave in certain ways. I think that there comes a moment when you start to realize you've been replaying the same stories over and over, and it becomes profoundly disinteresting. What's disinteresting isn't the person you're playing across from. It's disinteresting the role you've become. And you start to say, ah, I've been playing the same part over and over.

It's fascinating. You know, I wonder sometimes if we're choosing these people to play out these roles or if we're just playing them out and the person just has to become the counterpart as a result.

We cast them literally. And I think not so much in terms of like a script or a casting call. I think in terms of like a broken arm that gets casted and then it reforms, it becomes a new shape. And I think we kind of create these external feedback loops with the people we're in relationship with. So they know not to say this or they get praised for saying that. And pretty soon they learn. They learn how to behave in relationship to us. So, you know, I think the question, you know, how often are we in relationship with stories? I think it's the majority of our relationships.

When do you think in a relationship we drop the stories and roles and actually get to know each other?

Usually at the point when most people call it quits.

Yeah.

I tend to find that when the fantasy fades is when real love is possible. It's also when most people hang up the towel. I know I certainly have in a lot of relationships. And I think that what it has taught me, inevitably, is that we are so addicted to our masks. I mean, we fall in love with each other's masks and we collude in Fact, I would say that so much of our relationships are simply collusion projects where we both kind of agree that I'll pretend and you'll pretend, and I'll pretend that you're not pretending. And if you get out of line a little, I'm going to punish you. And if I get out of line, I want you to remind me who I really am, which is the mask that I've shown you. You know, we get very interesting like that. And I think when it all comes crashing down, we suddenly have a choice. So collusion becomes disillusionment. And maybe that's just like we're fed up, they don't do the dishes, you know, it's like, God, they're a horrible roommate. Can you believe this pig? Or whatever. For me, it was the case of infidelity. I think that there was a moment in my life when the character I had been suddenly was revealed. We go through life and we have these flip sides. Light and shadows, right? And as high as the skyscraper of our ego is the light side of us. The basement goes equally low into the ground, the shadows. And I think that for me, that other side was right there. And it was largely in the form of acting out with other people. I had not been faithful to a single partner. I had had since I was, I think, 16 years old. Later, I would realize that I didn't know how to keep agreements. I didn't know how to keep agreements with myself. I didn't know how to keep agreements with others. And what I didn't know was that I was doing an immense amount of damage. So I would run damage control, thinking that if they didn't know, it didn't affect them. And of course, this isn't true. All the feelings are in the field. They know. And one day the illusions came crashing down. Circumstances congealed in such a way where I suddenly had a choice to make. Either I was going to tell my partner that I had been unfaithful, or I was going to keep lying. That's always a great option. I think most of us are like, ah, minimize the damage. Fantastic. In that moment, I recognized that my choice was to become a real self. I was so tired of being pretend, a half life. And I knew that if there was a chance, if there was a chance to do what Maslow calls actualizing, to become actual, not just a possibility, not just a potential, but to become actual, it would be through authenticity, it would be through honesty. And so I ended up telling my partner that I had been unfaithful. And the fallout of that was tremendous. But it also was a tremendous gift. I think today we would say to both of us, we had both been pretending. And so what happened in the aftermath isn't a guarantee for anybody. Obviously, her decisions that she made within that were her decisions based upon her own criteria. But we decided to look at one another as the real selves that we were. And in those moments, it gave us the gift of truly being in connection with a real person.

And it's often when the relationship ends and there's nothing left to lose that you're finally honest because you're not trying to uphold this fantasy or even relationship. It's like there's just nothing at stake. So let me just be real. And I've noticed that even in my own, you know, after the divorce, or even just after deciding that we're gonna have a divorce, it was like we were the most honest we've ever been taking walk, just really speaking our hearts to each other. And we were just like, wow, imagine if we had started the relationship like this, you know, and for us, it was just we. We weren't on the same page anymore. But it's like, I think the reason why we don't start relationships like that is because we're so afraid of losing the other. That if I let it all hang out, will you still choose me? So instead, let me try to be the version of me that I think you are starting to fall in love with and keep that going, but it always comes crashing down at the end.

Yeah. You know, it's like I get invited to a party on Friday night, I put on my mask. You get invited to the same party, you put on your mask. Two masks meet, right? And what we're profoundly committed to is making sure the other person doesn't see under the mask. And so, you know, it's like we meet each other in our sleep, we get married in our sleep, and then one day we wake up and we go, who the hell is this? Right? And that's the opportunity, and it is a gift. I think that for so many of us, the consequences of those moments, the fallout, the damage is so intense and so deeply traumatic that it's almost unimaginable to go on with that. We also have a lot of ego involved. I used to be a real estate agent, and I was a really miserable real estate agent. I was not very good at selling houses, as it turns out. But I remember this one moment where I told a potential seller how much her house was worth. Let's just Say I told her it was worth $300,000, and she was offended. She said, no, absolutely not. My house is worth, we'll say, $400,000. I say, well, let's try it. Let's try it your way. And she says, great, thank you. Finally, I'll hire you. So we market it. $400,000. Guess what? No calls, no bids, no offers. So I say to her, hey, why don't we mark it down a little bit? She says, oh, I don't like that idea at all. And she throws a tantrum. And eventually to lower it 20,000. Well, this goes back and forth, and she's way overpriced. And finally we get to 350,000. And she says, no more, no more. And we've argued back and forth, and finally we get to 350,000. She says, you're to blame. You're a bad realtor. I'm cutting it. Goodbye. And that's great. Couple months later, I see her house has sold. You know what it sold for $300,000. Somebody else came in after me and did the thing I had been talking about the whole time. Why? What prevented her from. With that idea. She had ego involved. She had to protect being right. Yeah. And I think that's how it works. We get so determined to be right, to hold our position that this other person who has hurt us or who has done something we don't approve of or whatever those things are, we can't imagine going down that road with them. We'll do it with someone else. Yeah, but not them.

Yeah. And also, I think some lessons, you have to learn them through another person. It's like you planted the seed of that lesson of the house is 300. Or someone might plant the seed of. Relationships are built on honest communication or whatever the thing is. And it's like they didn't get to play that out in that relationship. But now it's like. I'm sure I'm curious for you, from your first to second marriage, what were the lessons that you learned going into it, and how did it shape you?

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting. I think that that first marriage, I was 19 years old when I got married, and I think I was on a headlong dash to become an adult, to be responsible and respectable, to earn my father's approval, my mother's approval. It's so funny, I look back, I think my mother said to me the night before my wedding, she said, and if you choose at the altar to walk away, I will support you. And I Think back that maybe she was giving me a signal there, but I wouldn't have listened anyway. I think that one of the lessons, one of the great lessons I learned was that love is actually not unconditional, that relationships, in fact require relating. If you're an adult and you're in relationship, that person you're in relationship to is not mommy or daddy, and they're not the sky, father or mother. They are a human who has needs and boundaries of self. So I think you can't behave like a character in someone's bad novel and expect that someone else is going to show up for you in an indefinite amount of time. And that was a powerful and disheartening lesson for me. And it would probably take years before that crescendoed into my life.

Because you're listening to High Self Podcast. I already know. You are someone that is committed to your spiritual growth journey. You are someone that dives deep. You are someone that asks big, meaningful questions. You are someone that doesn't want to be at the shallow end of the pool, but wants to dive all the way in. And likely you've been feeling that your career really needs to be in alignment with your whole self, that you're sick and tired of having one version of you that's at home and another version of you at your job, but you're really wanting to integrate the two. So you can be paid for your gifts. You can be paid to be you. You can be paid for your wisdom and actually be using your time creating a positive shift in humanity. Well, if I'm speaking to your soul right now, I invite you to come join us at the Dharma Coaching Institute. This is my school that is the world's first and only school that certifies soul purpose and spiritual life. Coaches. So over our six month journey together, you are going to learn everything you need to become a coach. I'm talking about how to ask people questions, how to hold space, the exact forms and contracts that you need. And then we're gonna be diving into all of the Dharma Framework tools. These are tools that I personally have designed that can help you help anyone find their soul's purpose. So I'm talking about the Dharma Blueprint, the Dharma Chakra system, Dharma Journey spiral. So many different tools that are paired with somatics and nervous system healing and heart heal, and all of these different tools that you hear about on the podcast actually practiced. And then in our last two months together, we dive into all of the business training. So how do you price your offering? How do you Structure it. How do you build a podcast grow on social media? I share with you all of these things alongside my business partners Neeta and Ajit, who are masters in their field to co create this experience that will take you from maybe not fully knowing your soul's purpose to actually having a career as a sole purpose coach, helping other people find theirs. We've graduated over 1500 students and have hundreds of coaches around the world hosting retreats, creating online programs, working with celebrities and moms and veterans and everything in between. And this really is the forefront of where coaching is heading. Because the truth is right now, people are wanting to shift. They are knowing that living the same day over and over again is not serving them and they are desiring to step step into their purpose. And that is where you come in as a purpose coach. So if you're interested, you're curious to learn more, we have plenty of free workshops coming up, different experiences. So you can actually come on a zoom call with me and feel what it's like to be in Dharma Coaching Institute. So head over to dharmacoachinginstitute.com that's D H A R M A coaching institute dot com. You can find that link in the show notes. Learn everything there and come join us in our spring class, which is, which is open right now. So we only open doors twice a year. So if you're listening to this right now, that means doors are open for enrollment. So head over to dharmacoachinginstitute.com to learn more and sign up to join us in our spring cohort. And I can't wait to see you there. Relationships take relating. Let's talk about that. I think often we think if we find the right relationship, it will all just work. The problem is I just haven't found the one or it must just not be this one. And I see this balance that's needed between freedom and relating. And I think a lot of our generation, people today, we desire a lot of freedom, right? We want to be able to travel, we want to be able to work. And then also with social media, we're seeing all these different people and these different realities and these different things. So most of us are like, I don't want to be like my parents who are just living in the same house 40 years, same job, same routine, same person. So we want freedom. But then we might go so much towards the freedom that there's not enough relating and building and that glue that really keeps the relationship going. So how do we find the balance between that?

It's a great question. And I think you're really describing the paradox of love. How to be a self in relationship to another. At the heart of that is I think, a working definition of love. Now I say working definition because if I'm a philosopher of love, one thing is I'm profoundly committed not to doing what so many other great philosophers have done before me, which is to put constructs to it. Love is, I think, the most profound of all emotions and emotional processes and it defies definition. As soon as you try to nail it to the wall, it weasels out of your grip. What I would say is that somehow or another love is the willful expansion of oneself or redefinition of oneself in the light of another. Think about it. We redefine the boundaries of self. When we meet the other, we don't ever stay so much a solitary self. Actually, that's one of the beautiful reasons why we wear masks in the first place. Or why we have these heady, oh, delightful ecstatic encounters. We have to. Otherwise we'd sit on the couch at home, right? We'd sit in our relatively comfortable isolation. We have to be motivated to get out of the bed and walk across the aisle and see someone. We're so motivated and we have to be. And in that expansion we do lose something, we do lose our solitariness, we lose a bit of that freedom. But if we lose too much, then we abandon self altogether. And so love requires a self to expand and one to expand too. It's a sender and receiver. It's a breath in and breath out. It really has to have both. Without a defined self, you won't actually have a love. You require a beloved and a lover. Yeah.

You require a beloved and a lover.

Yeah. You can't lose yourself in connection. But that is of course everything that love wants us to do. And so I think so much of the ebb and flow of love is losing oneself and finding oneself over and over and over, losing the other and finding them over and over. And maybe that is the mystery and the gift of long term partnerships. Perhaps that they do give us the ability to take a long arc.

But do you think maybe just the way love is designed is you are supposed to just lose yourself in it? At least at the beginning, until the natural separation starts. It's almost like an infant who just is one with their mother and then starts to walk and want to do its own thing. I find that in relationship that happens. It's like, like the beginning when you're really falling for Someone. So you just want to merge?

Yes.

But then after, you know, a few years, then you kind of. You kind of separate. And sometimes it's even hard to keep that merging feeling. Is that by design or. It feels counterintuitive when all parts of you want to merge, to be like, no, remain separate, set boundaries, only see them once a week, don't respond to their texts. Like that feels so counterintuitive. But I'm like, I don't know. Is that the healthy way of long term, sustainable love?

Well, probably a lot like you. I have spent most of my life trying to merge with the soul across the table from me. At times with beautiful and at times with disastrous results. I guess one of the moments I'm thinking of is I'm a six year old boy and I'm standing on the playground with Lysa. Oh God, Lisa. She was wearing a rainbow puffy vest in the 80s and it was so delightful. I can still remember that vest. And I loved her. Her and her bull haircut and her blonde hair. And she looked at me and she said, I really like your marbles. And she actually meant my marbles, my steelies, my cat's eyes, my marbles. And I said, oh, you like them, do you? And she said, I do. And I said, well, would you like one? So I gave her one. And she was very happy about this. And I was so happy that Lisa was happy. The next day I brought my bag of marbles and Lisa said, did you bring your marbles again? I did. Would you like one now? This went on for about two weeks before I reached for that bag and I didn't have any marbles left. Lysa had all of them. And I think that that is such a beautiful picture of how we give ourselves away, really. And I think of a six year old boy doing that. Yeah. And so much of our life, certainly mine, has been spent over and over giving my treasures away in the hopes that they'll love me. I think there is a difference between that natural inclination to merge and that abandonment of self. There is a separation. But I like what you're saying and I think what it hints at is a life cycle to love. That love is actually an organic thing. It's born, it goes through angry adolescence, it grows up, it matures, it takes work and effort. Enter the reality principle. It gets old, it grows sick and it even dies. The life cycle of love includes death, just like life. The only thing that love doesn't include is the lack of loving. Love will include endings, but not it.

Can include strong feelings of hate too.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we probably need to normalize hard conversations and difficult, unwanted emotions. Yeah, we tend to bow out when those come up.

I'm such a romantic person. I'm like, I live my life in a state of romance and I'm like, why is our society not valuing romance anymore? But I wonder if we have become so hurt from love that it's almost like why put in the effort and get my heart broken that we've abandoned ourselves from even this? I noticed this generation doesn't even want love. You know, it's like these friends with benefits situationships, all of these ways to have physical intimacy without any heart or emotional connection because that's too scary. And I mean, you could look at it at that perspective of there's a lot of individuation in that that people don't want to abandon themselves. I think they probably had earlier in life and they just don't want to go there. But it's almost like we've gone to this other extreme of like any form of romance or affection or desiring to merge is seen as like codependent and bad and wrong. So yeah, I'm curious your perspective on that and romance in this 21st century digital age.

Oh, I'm like you and you know, I spent my 20s being a sad eyed singer of songs for lovers. And I've gotta be honest, that's still where my heart is. I'm a romantic at heart. I do think that there is something that is a larger cultural motif. And one of those things is that when all the talking points, when it's very difficult to talk to one another, that statistics or pragmatics become the law of the land. And I think that it's so difficult to actually communicate with each other because everything is a pressure cooker. There's so much water under every communication that I think that we kind of speak in pragmatics. Love has sort of devolved into a very transactional thing. I think it's reduced love to kind of like a grocery store marketplace mentality. You know, it's like, I'm craving some food, I'm going down to the grocery store and get some soup.

Right. Swipe on an app.

Right.

Instead of writing someone a sonnet, they just send the fire emoji.

Oh my gosh, I don't even know what those emojis mean. I struggle sometimes.

Fire is the. It's going down well.

And I think that with all of these things, the thing to remember is it is a balance. We did go through this explosion of, I think mystical love, just, just heart on sleeve love. And I think the counterbalance of that is pragmatism. I like to think that everything works in cycles and will come around again. And part of my deep hope as we grow closer and closer together as a species, which is happening because the global village is getting tighter knit as more and more of us exist. I think that one of the things we're going to have to do is get real serious about talking. Henry Miller, who was an author, he said something really interesting that's kind of inspired my imagination lately. He said, what if one hour a week, everyone stopped what they were doing, everyone stopped working, stopped playing and looked at one another, really looked at one another and said, what's going on in your life? And of course, Mary Oliver says, tell me of your despair, I'll tell you of mine. That right there is the basis of all romantic love, of listening to one another. And I think in the noise of this world, we don't have time to listen. We're so busy talking. And so I think it's hard to be lovers if we're not listeners, you.

Know, and we think that that lover wants us to be perfect, us to be this, us to be that. So I notice people are spending the time just talking about themselves when really everyone just wants to be met.

That's right. Well, and part of my tribe is responsible for this problem, I think. I. Therapeuticism as an industrial complex is a bit of a blight on the world in part because I think that it demands a certain kind of navel gazing. Right. Me, mine, what's going on with me? What's going on with my inner child. I think far more important than talking about our inner children is how our inner children grow up and become willing and participatory adults in life. I think that a lot of us spend one plus hour a week sitting in chairs in a room where we can be petulant children when we really need to be thinking about how can I take responsibility in life for my decisions? That would be a far better, I think, end.

Yeah. And they say there's these. I don't know how many questions you could ask someone that makes you fall in love. Have you heard of this?

No.

It's like a certain number of questions. I'm not sure, maybe 80 or so questions, specific ones. And they've scientifically proven that any two people, if they answer these questions and listen to each other, will fall in love.

I want to say busted. Out. But I don't want to run the risk. My God.

But it's true that we really could all fall in love with each other. Because there is that same beauty, that same hope. And I've noticed with myself, with my heart open of, like, I just love everyone in these ways that before it was like, maybe they had to play a role in my life. Or is this the friend, or is this that? And then when you just open yourself to love, it's like the cashier that you just even you notice things about your friends and you're not as guarded anymore. And I think often what happens in relationship is we actually get guarded from love. Cause we're so afraid of, like, what could that mean? You know? I knew for myself when I was in relationship, I had no guy friends at all. Because it wasn't worth it to me to potentially make him jealous. It was just like, I don't really need guy friends. Friends. I'm good with my girls. And now I'm like, there's just a whole other wealth of information and contemplation that comes from just having guy friends. But I think a lot of us are afraid of. I don't know. I just don't want to cross the line. So then we close ourselves off.

That's right. Yeah. And again, I think you're pointing to that if love is opening, then the opposite of it, closing is really fear. Fear and love are on these opposite polar spectrums. And the moment we step into those places of fear, we close ourself off to love. And so I think that the mechanism for love is always opening. And I think whenever you open, the most surprising of things happen. Love can occur in the least expected of places. I'm thinking of a person who wrote to me a couple of years back, and she said, can I tell you a story? And she told me this beautiful story of her working in a jewelry shop in a large kind of box store. And she would sell jewelry every day. And sometimes there would be a theft. And she'd have to call loss prevention. And there was a voice on the other end of that line. And the voice would answer. And there was something so reassuring about the way he would ask the questions that eventually she would invent reasons. Now, she was married at the time, a marriage that was, by any accounts, love less. And she found herself discovering, in spite of herself, that she was falling in love with a voice. They never talked about anything. They never went beneath the surface. Until one day when he simply risked a question.

So he was feeling it too I think so.

Loss prevention. He interrupted the moment and said, are you happy? She said it cut her like a knife. And she knew, not that she had fallen in love with this man, but she knew that she had to end her marriage. I think that one of the gifts of listening is loving God and then creating a safe environment where those radical truths can simply become self evident. In my own life, I'm thinking about sitting across from the woman who would become my wife. And we were just friends. She sat across from me and she began to ask about my childhood. She had the advantage. She was a therapist at the time, and I was only a student struggling to figure out how to be a therapist. So she knew what she was doing. Doing. She was creating an exceptional moment for me. And she would say, oh, wow, that must have been really hard for you. She gave all those really great reflective validations. And I noticed something as she asked more and more and more about my childhood growing up. I looked across the table dimly lit room and I saw tears streaming down her face. And I wasn't so concerned about what I was sharing. I wasn't so sad about the details of the life that I was providing her. But. But in this mirrored moment, she sat there and crying. And I looked over at her, this beautiful woman with a beaming face, but now is covered in a mask of sadness. And I said, what's wrong? And she said, well, it's just really sad. And I think it hit me for the first moment that what I was describing was actually sad. I'd become so used to my own life. So the gift of love is then it mirrors back to us those things that we've kept hidden from ourselves. Yeah.

And then it makes it feel so much more real.

Yeah. Yeah. And then we get the opportunity to make changes. Right. Because we see those things before we could ignore them, before we could hide from them. But now. Oh my God, now. Yeah.

Do you think that we are in some sort of subconscious way choosing the person to play out our unhealed childhood wounds with? Or do you think they're just gonna play out regardless of who's in front of us?

So I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. Even my definition of love involves a subtle nod of the hat towards will and choice.

What is your definition of love?

Well, it's that willful expansion of oneself in the light of another. It really does boil down to a choice. It's a choosing that happens. Now, love as an emotion is a complex emotion. It's a convergence of feeling, sensation, physiological Sensation, thought, fantasies, imagination, and also a choice of what to do with it all. But there's openness. Now, your question. Say that question again.

Are we choosing the people subconsciously to play out our unhealed childhood traumas, or are they just gonna be played out regardless of who's in front of us?

Again, I've always thought of myself as very pragmatic here. But I have to admit something. I have to admit that my wife and I have the exact birthdays of my grandparents, that she has my grandfather's birthday and I have my grandmother's. And there's an oddity to that story. Not only that, but she grew up in a home and an environment that is the perfect opposite mirror of my own, that all of the emotions that I carry, she seems to hold their opposite. She's the lock to my key. Or vice versa. The more we talk about it, and sometimes we'll talk about it, and we'll go, this is creepy. This is strange how this plays out. Her ancestors were a mere two hours from mine. We're talking five generations back in the old country. How is this possible? Is it possible that generationally, over time, we sought each other out? Oh, we get very mystical. Oh, we get very, very interesting about that. But I think that what you asked is at the heart of it, that we felt something undeniable. Our nervous systems felt something. And I think what they felt was the opportunity to heal not only our wounds, but the wounds of many of those who had gone before us. And that is actually the reason why we chose to stay. We looked at one another in the. In the face of this disillusionment, and we said, what if love can be a hospital in this moment where we heal our wounds? Can we be that for each other? And I think that was the gift we decided we could give each other in that way. So I do think it's unconscious. It's an unconscious attempt to perhaps re. Traumatize each other and then heal each other. But I think it can become conscious, and that is when it becomes powerful.

Do you think then, because they have this term trauma bonding. Right. So do you think then when we become conscious and aware of our triggers, then we no longer are attracted to the person to relive these traumas? Or do you think that's actually what relationships are for? They're for healing. And it's not to have an easy relationship with no turbulence. It's to continue to meet these unmet parts of ourselves that can only come out through love.

Yeah, well, hopefully there's A balance. I've met some people who have that storyline of we were here to heal each other very early on in the relationship, and my God, their relationship is so explosive and turbulent.

I always say, do they call each other twin flames?

Exactly. And I'm like, get out now. Get out now.

We fight all the time. It's because we're twin flames. It's just so karmic.

We belong together. Yeah. And I'm always like, if it's bad now, it's going to be hell in 10 years. So I think that there has to be a balance. You know, as much as love is a hospital, I think it should be a home too. I do think that love should be easy. For all of the turbulence that my partner and I have been through. I think that one of the other things about it is we've been the center of the eye of the storm. There really has been this ease to it, which I think is unnatural, perhaps, but I think that that points to it, that love is a hospital, but I think it's a home. Love should be easy. I think to some extent also.

Yeah, I think it is. That balance of love should allow you to have more energy to be yourself, to live your dharma, your soul's purpose, to share your gifts with the world. Because, you know, some relationships I see, it's like their full time job is the relationship and they're constantly processing and healing and this. And maybe some people, that's their life path is to just be learning all life experiences through relationship. I see this a lot in the polyamorous community, you know, and then for some people, it's like, no, I want my love to be my like, easy, stable rock foundation that I don't really need to worry about so I can focus on my work or focus on my kids or something else. But what I found is in my own relationship, it was actually very easy. But it was because we weren't getting to the depths of where we could have gone, that it was like easier to just. Just keep it easy and keep it flowing that we actually really never fought. And now I'm like, oh, I actually want to get to those deeper triggers and those deeper layers because then there's deeper love that comes with that vulnerability while at the same time not making it my full time job. I still got to keep this podcast going, right? Yeah.

Well, I think that this comes close to talking about my dominant analogy for relationships. I used to define relationships as a bit like either a fortress or some relationships like a prison, you know, just depending on which side of the walls you were on. I think from a fortress standpoint, it's like trying to keep all the invaders out, trying to stay warm at night, trying to make it through life. And this is the person I'm going to hold their hand through the turbulence or, you know, when so and so came along that I could quickly. We would throw spears at them if they. Love is like a fortress for many of us, to keep us safe. Safe, Safe. Saf safe or it's like a prison. Keep me in, don't let him go out, don't let her have friends with others. Right. I think that predominantly, culturally, we define love in one of those two kind of ways. And they're usually kind of overlapping fortress and prison. But I wonder if love is more like a trampoline. My kids have this gargantuan trampoline outside our house. And I've got to be honest, every time they run towards that, I get a little nervous because one thing I things about trampolines, they're not safe. I don't care if you have the netting up and you know it's in ground, we'll find a little hole and.

Get their leg in there.

The spring will break all those things. You know, it's like. And I swear, every time my 10 year old runs out and does those triple flips, I'm thinking, oh my God, don't break an arm. The other thing about that trampoline is it brings hours of delight. It takes him higher, it takes him further. And I think relationships should exist to do that for us. That they should bring delight, that they actually should bring joy and take us higher and further. And they should be the place where we see deeper and greater insights. They should be the place where, you know, he has friends up the street and he invites them to come down and hang out. I think our relationship should be the place where we interact with the world. I also think that agreements in a trampoline are kind of like those springs. Now, in the fortress or prison model, agreements are like a brick. We build our relationship out of these giant concrete bricks. And if you pull one agreement out, the whole thing crumbles. Right? Like the agreement to have everything reciprocal or the agreement, you can't have this if I don't have that. Or fidelity is a huge one for a lot of people. You pull that out, the whole cookie crumbles. Makes sense. But on a trampoline there are these springs and when one gets rusty or breaks, you replace it and you've got a lot of other ones. That help hold that in line. And so I think that that's how relationships should be. They should be expansive and expandable and flexible. Flexible forms and gentle boundaries. That's how I want my relationship to be at least.

And I think that's where I see relationships heading in general. Because this construct of marriage is obviously not serving most people, and most of us have not. We didn't even, you know, you write your vows, but it actually is not actual vows. It's like, I promise to love you through good times and bad. And remember that day at the frat party when we fell in love? And it's like, yes, really. There's no actual, like, situations or anything in there. So I think to actually have agreements and also know that it's not until death do us part, it's until this doesn't work for either one of us.

That's right.

And that can feel very unromantic for people. Like, that's like, the part of the romance that as a society, we've really held onto of like it is forever, no matter what. And it's like, to me, it's more romantic to be like, let's continue to choose each other for however long. It feels good, because you never know how life will flow.

That is just so true. And one of the unfortunate elements here is that usually one person figures it out first. It's rare that people go dutch onto the endings of relationships. Someone's usually ponying up faster than the other. And I think that's when the fallout starts, when so and so learned. And then we do these weird things. We do these weird reverse mating rituals where we try to extract ourselves. So I start to act cold towards you so that somehow it'll make it easier to end things, or I have an affair to crowbar me out of this, or whatever. The thing is, it's like, we should probably call it when we know it. And usually we're too scared. We lack the courage. We lack the ability to make a decision based on our instinct. We need these reasonable reasons like, well, it was awful. And so we make it awful to justify the ending we know we needed. What would happen if we just started every relationship with the statement, this ends. This is going to end. And what was important was that I saw you, you. And I think that, to quote Mary Oliver, again, what was important is that we saw them as through the veil, joyfully, secretly, clearly, I would add delightedly.

I think about the difference of how we approach friendship and relationship and how bizarre dating actually is. When you think about it of here I am with this total stranger. I have these expectations in my head of what this means for me and what I'm looking for. You have a totally different set that, you know, for me, I might be looking for my future husband. You might be looking for a one night stand. We don't know because we're not honest with each other. We're all, we're both asking each other questions, trying to read between the lines of like, who are your friends and where do you work and what do you do on the weekends and all of these things. And I'm casting a role for do I want to spend the rest of my life with you? And I literally just met you. Whereas imagine if I met a friend and like the first time we hung out, I'm like, I don't know, we don't like the same movies. I don't think this friendship's gonna work out. Like, you know, this, this weird thing about how you walk is kind of bothering me. It's like, I would never. Or like, if this friendship isn't forever, I'm out. I'm a high value friend. Okay. You know, it's so bizarre. Like, that would actually scare me away if someone approached a friendship like that. So it's like, why do we do that with relationship? And I've been really sitting with that. And I'm like, I think the thing that separates friendship and relationship is sex.

I was just about to say that.

I'm like, it just keeps coming back to that, that I'm like, with a friend, I don't really care if they have other friends. I expect them to have other friends. And they're gonna have different flavors of friends and different textures. Just like I do. I have. I kind of have like 20 best friends. I'm very polyamorous in the friendship space.

Yeah.

And because every friend brings out a different part of me. So you could say that every lover would bring out a different part of you. But it's like, but I for. I think I'm more monogam biologically. If there is a biological indicator of it, that I'm like, well, I wouldn't want 20 lovers. I wouldn't want my lover to have 20 lovers. And it's like, why? And it's like, I think there's something about the energetic cord that's created through sex that like something shifts. And I do believe it's more for the woman than for the man. But I'm curious your take on it just based on like science saying that women create oxytocin when they're in having sex with someone. Whereas for a man, it takes three months of knowing them to have the oxytoxin release. So I'm like, I'm wondering if that's a part of it. So I'm just in a space of like, let me throw away everything I've ever learned from love and like, just see what is. So I'm curious what your happenings have been around this.

I gotta say, I wanna go back to your radical proposition of looking at a friend and saying, hey, if this isn't gonna last forever, I'm out.

I am worthy. Okay.

Right. I mean, can you imagine if somebody sat there and said that to us? We would. Totally, totally.

Here's my checklist. You don't meet this part. You're not tall enough to be my friend.

Well, and you know, of course we do have criteria for friendship, I hope, but my God, we have friendships.

We don't make a checklist around it and tell our friends vision boards. Exactly.

No, but I think that it's a lot more like ice cream to me. And this is the thing I've been playing with. I remember my father taking me out to ice cream. You know, it's funny how first memories were work. It's probably like I had had ice cream a lot of times before, but boy, I remember four years old, standing in line at a Baskin Robbins with my dad and he gets cherries jubilee and I get bubble gum blue with all those bubbles in it. We stand there and my ice cream is melting, melting. And he shows me how to make sure it doesn't melt quite so fast and how I can care for it and do the uptake of it. But can you imagine if I rejected the ice on the proposition that it wasn't going to last forever? Like, can you imagine if I said, no, no, no, no, this ends and so it's not worthy. I only eat things that never end. There's an endless. But the delight of the ice cream is its ending, that I'm racing with time. I'm lavishing my attention upon it. I'm focusing on it in this mad dash to gobble it all up right now. Now, I think it is a great analogy because we could simply avoid the whole thing by devouring it in one bite, but we choose not to. We choose instead to work at the pace of time. And the melting, we go along with a kind of flow there. I wish we approached love in the same way. I wish that love was a lot more like ice cream to us. In which we acknowledge its inevitability and we delight ourselves in the presencing, the being present to it, the participation with it in all of its colors, including its melting. As far as polyamory and monogamy go, these are really big and important words, and they're beyond my pay grade, I think. I don't know if the heart recognizes those boundaries. I've got to be honest. I've had some great moments in coffee shops where I've fallen in love, and it's lasted for all of 23 seconds. And my heart can include those moments. I would say that what the heart can't include so often has to do with time and schedule, time and energy, all of my attending to things, that is much more difficult because I have a limited ability to focus on things. My heart may be able to include it, but my schedule might not. I think that's probably the struggle for anyone who exists in that kind of polyamorous situation is how to simply create time for everyone.

Yeah, I think it's so tough, this battle between heart and mind, because I do believe there's just this natural going back to that feeling of merging, that inclination of when you find someone, it's like, well, I'm whole and you're whole, so why are you still looking for more people? And that's been my question of. I'm open to learning about all of. My question about the polyamory space is like, yeah, why does that person not feel like enough? But they would say, well, it's not that that person doesn't not feel like enough. It's just that there are other flavors of ice cream. But to me, when I find my favorite flavor of ice cream, I don't go back to the ice cream store and try every flavor. I'm like, I'm gonna get the Oreo chocolate chip cookie dough. That's my flavor. Until maybe one day I decide I'm allergic to it. I no longer wanna have it. So it's interesting because there is something so natural about you find that person and you want to do life with them. You want to do everything with them. And like, this hurt of like, oh, but you don't feel that way towards me. And I do think the mind can work through it. Of like, okay, well, these are our agreements. And, you know, I'm going to see other lovers, and so can you. And for some people, that actually stimulates the relationship. You know, for some people, whether it's literally having other relationships or having just openness in the relationship brings them closer Together. But for some people, it is just heartbreaking. And I think, yeah, you only know through being in it. And I think our generation is in this questioning space. But I find a lot of people convince themselves that they are okay with it when they're actually not.

That's certainly true. I have four kids, and what I will say is it never occurred to me that I would diminish my love for 1, 2, or 3 if I added 2, 3, or 4. I know that's a crude example, but I do think that's true to some extent. I think that polyamory, while it's used in the dating scene, seems to be an abominable excuse for avoidant strategies emotionally. But what I would say is that the definition of the word many loves I think is best understood with many kinds of love. You said that with your friends, you've got, like, 20 different kinds of friends. So maybe there's a relationship where it's like, that's my sole purpose person. This is the person. Like, this is my home. But maybe you have another relationship where they would never be described as your home, but they would certainly be described as someone who you enjoy spending time with, who is a deep love with or without sex. I think that probably at its root, that's the offering of polyamory, that it says, well, we make up our agreements as we go. We understand ourselves based upon what our needs are and the moment. The best definitions of polyamory I've always come across are ongoing conversations where the agreements don't get put in concrete. And that gets back to your statement. Oftentimes those kind of relationships are rather obsessed with the relationship itself. They're under constant redefinition. And that can be exhausting for a lot of people who just want to kick off their shoes and sit back.

Yeah, yeah. What I would definitely give the polyamorous community, as well as the kink community, is they really value communication, and they make everything really clear and defined, and they're just so good at saying what is in a way that just, like, the norm of relationships aren't. And I think there's no two polyamorous or any relationships that are the same. And it is a constant changing. And I think ultimately it's, yeah. How much time and energy do you want to devote into this thing? And how do you. You want it to make you feel? And do you want to use this as your growth journey, or do you want to use it more as just that easy home frequency? But you're going to get the growth journey Somewhere else.

Well, and I think that what you just described right there, you have to make it work for you. And I think when we put people into these rigid categories and we say, this is what I want, this is what I'm willing, this is absolute, the vision board, or whatever those things are, I do think we limit ourselves. I think it's much more interesting to say, what is the need of the moment? What is this person in front of me and how do I connect to them? And do I want to adjust myself to incorporate the goodwill of another here?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that adjusting piece is also really big in relationship and kind of circling back to where we started of. In every relationship, there's going to be an adjustment, adjustment. And there needs to be, because you're not going to be the same person. And I think that sometimes we're like, well, this is who I am and I'm fixed in this and you gotta accept me just like this. And it's like once you enter into relationship, a whole new version of you is birthed. And that means old versions of you are going to die too. And that doesn't mean that the relationship's taking away from you, but it means it's actually helping you become this next iteration that only through love you could become.

And I think that right there also contains part of people always ask, so you're saying love ends. Recently, my father passed away and I had a dream of him a couple of nights ago and I couldn't see his face. It was like he was half there. And I think that probably describes what is actually probably spiritual occurring. He's still half there, so to speak. But I think of the ways he's lived on. He lives on now in how I interact with the world. He lives on now in this conversation. He lives on now in his grandchildren and so many others who he's impacted. I don't know if love dies, not at least how we think of it. I think even when love ends in the form it ends, I think it continues in deep ways, pushing us, pulling us, prodding us. I think that that is the mystery of love.

It just continues to transmute. And I think you can have deeper levels of appreciation when there's a little bit more space as well.

Yeah. Which is why, at least for me, part of my personal work is just looking back at every lover as they were on the day that I fell in love with. With them. And that's how I know that I've. I've healed in relationship to a relationship when I can look back and see them as I did when I fell in love with them. That's such a beautiful place. Then. Every lover is a teacher, you know.

Such a beautiful practice. Well, thank you so much for sharing your words and your wisdom and your art. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and just be in this love space. So how can listeners connect with you and read your work?

You can get my book as yous Are off of Amazon or go to rainierwild.com or Instagram where I hang out and hold court.

Yay. Well, we will have those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much.

I hope you loved this conversation and you're feeling the love bubble that I feel right now. So if you love this episode, please share it on social media. Tag us. We need more love in the world. And if you loved it, please leave a review for it on the Apple Store and I will send you a free womb meditation to connect to your womb's wisdom. So simply leave a review, take a screenshot of it and email it over to me@saharaamsahara rose.com you can find that email in the show notes. Hope you love today's episode and I'll see you in the next one. Namaste.

With that.