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Dear Kat,

I want to expand on your post about joint experience.

After making love, we often talk about the experience, and every time, we are in complete agreement on what we have just experienced.  When I talk, you always concur with my descriptions, and furthermore, this is not at all surprising; in fact, the surprise would be if there were any significant differences.  This is true the other way, too;  you describe how it was for you, and I go “Uh-huh, uh-huh” in concurrence.

For events like watching a movie or going to a play, we have also “experienced the same thing”, but in those cases, we often differ in interpretation or meaning; our experience of the event has been mediated by our history and viewpoint.

That’s not what is happening here.  It is as if you and I actually touch, and I don’t just mean physically, but in some other dimensions as well, to use a hackneyed metaphor, and our descriptions of the shape of the surface of contact must necessarily correspond.  (One shape would be the inverse of the other, but that’s a simple mapping.)

That’s rather abstract, mathematical, scientific, but that’s my language, I guess, and as you say, we are engaged in finding a language for this experience.

Kit

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Dear Kat,

I’ve been thinking about our posts on being suited to each other.  There are two aspects to this very necessary prerequisite:

1. You have to know what to look for in the other, and also, what to avoid (I know you don’t like negatives, but I think they’re important here).
2. You have to be that same desirability for the other person.

I’ll tackle the latter first.  I don’t (at this stage, anyway) want a laundry list of behaviors.  I would rather just say “Do as you would be done by”, and point out that this embodies the concept of empathy, of being able imagine oneself in the place of the other, and furthermore, that this is the first step in merging, or union.

So that’s a requirement for the other person’s behavior, too.  There must be much more to work out here – what about preferences, kinks, hobbies, interests, goals, politics?  They may be necessary, too, but I don’t need to go there now.  By the way, I fail miserably at this assessment, or I would never have spent so much time with A____.

Kit

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Dear Kat,

I agree about needing to be suited to the other.  I don’t want to make a list of areas, as it’s probably different for everyone.  But once those are met, that’s the time to leave well enough alone, to let the other person be who they are, and we do that so well!  I am amazed again and again at how we do that.

Recognising this suitability and giving it priority is a difficult thing to do early in life because there is also sexual attraction that is so powerful, yet seems completely independent of other elements.  I have seen people drawn again and again to a completely unsuitable relationship, though in several cases I’m thinking of, I can’t say how much it was sex and how much a working through of some childhood relationship.

So yes, we’re very suited, though I haven’t got a list in my head of what those reasons might be.  Like many things between us, I seem to have made decisions at some subconscious level.  In fact, both of us seem able to trust our subconscious/intuition/whatever name you wish to use.  The first trip to Europe is a good example of that.  This intuitive element is very important, and maybe other people ignore it and instead focus on things like similar interests.  They’re important, though it doesn’t have to be a complete match, but interests alone don’t cut it.  There has to be some – gee, I’m inclined to get cosmic here and say energy or harmony or something that decribes a resonance of some sort between people.  And there also needs to be a similarity of world view – people, politics, religion – or at least, no radical differences.

Kit

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