“Do I matter to you?”

Mattering to one another — and reliably demonstrating that — is a bare minimum. A deeply erotic, deeply loving marriage — one that is both highly combustible and highly stable, consistently hot and sustainably sweet — requires something more. Something a lot of people don’t know how to do but, I believe, want more than simply mattering to their partner. We want to be their joy. We want to feel that the one we love takes pleasure in our be-ing. This is the original relational wound so many of us are trying to get repaired in our high-stakes relationship: being no one’s pride and joy. This is what a woman means when she says she wants to feel cherished. And what a man means when he says he wants to feel valued and appreciated. It’s more than simply mattering. It’s being wholly embraced in our unique lovability. And here’s the thing: A lot of us feel conflicted about wanting this kind of love. Feelings and thoughts of undeserved-ness and unworthiness crowd our body-mind, making little space for the true desire. Distorting it, even. But if we didn’t feel, at SOME level, that we were lovable — uniquely, adorably quirkily cherish-able — we wouldn’t crave this kind of love… …or go to such great lengths to get our partner to see the error of their ways when they don’t offer this kind of love. Their emotional stinginess agitates us so much because it mirrors the very fears we taunt ourselves with: Perhaps we ARE too much AND not enough to simply be cherished as we are. Because somewhere along the way, we got the message from less-than-attuned parent(s) that we were difficult to love. We didn’t have the rightful experience of being someone’s joy. What happens, though, when this kind of unmitigated taking-pleasure in one another becomes the tone of adult love? It is deeply reparative. At once profoundly erotic and innocent. And it makes for a relational field that is effortlessly generous and generative. This kind of relationship becomes a place where both people get to move beyond their childhood wounds, relinquishIng the ways those wounds shaped their self-concept, and growing into a deeper sense of self. Couples who reach this point are rare. Not because they’re special. But because they are more devoted to loving well than to being right. More devoted to what they can create with one another in the relationship than what they can get out of it. The paradox is that what we each can get out of it is limitless. Truly, there is no end to what is possible for two who know how to take unreserved delight in one another.