By Ayize & Aiyana Ma’at

I’ve bee married to my husband for 3 years. We dated for 4 years prior to marriage and i feel like we have a solid relationship. my man is freaky in the bedroom. he has expressed a desire to watch me have sex with another man. i don’t know what to think of this. Does he want to be with another woman? Is he testing me? where is this coming from? I’m a sexual person too so I’m open to it….but worried at the same time. Please help.

By Nancy Colier

Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say. Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of relationships. We like to package our feelings as positive or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist. In approaching relationships, we use the word but to connect contradictory feelings, as if the positive should eliminate the negative and vice versa. In fact, for a relationship to succeed, “and,” NOT “but,” must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.

All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves? Unfortunately, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions.  One answer. “Is it good or bad?” “Is it true or false?” “Is it right or wrong?” We like simple, clean, straightforward answers. If it’s both, simultaneously, then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution.

We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and ambiguity. We are always trying to grasp certainty and avoid the unknown. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once. In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner. Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys and being deprived of others. This can be quite un-grounding.

People use two primary strategies to eradicate internal inconsistency in relationship. Either we make the other all good or we make him/her all bad. Both paths are attempts to right the inconsistency, to manipulate the experience in order to feel just one way.

To make our experience consistently positive, we disconnect from and deny our negative feelings, the parts of the relationship where we are not getting what we want. Having successfully removed the negative, we can remain in the relationship “pain-free.” Ironically, internal criticism can serve as a way of denying negative feelings. Telling ourselves that we are “ungrateful,” “overly demanding,” “impossible to please,” and thus somehow to blame for the deprivation that we are experiencing, is a strategy to reject our pain and thus eradicate the anxiety that contradiction arouses.

Making the experience consistently negative, on the other hand, requires rejecting the parts of the relationship that bring us joy. The “He’s a louse and I don’t know what I’m doing with him” brand of thinking. In this approach we focus only on the problems, not allowing ourselves to acknowledge or appreciate the reasons we are actually in the relationship.

The problem with denying a part of our internal experience is that it prevents us from being able to fully experience our lives, to authentically enjoy what is working in our relationship or to change what is not.

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