Practicing Radical Responsibility in Love
Some thoughts for couples who want to stop pointing fingers, quit keeping score and forge a relationship that lasts.
A couple years ago when R. and I were in a bit of a messy patch following our extremely spontaneous move to Thailand, several months separation abroad (him in India, me in Thailand) during COVID and eventual reunion where we decided to travel about our home country in a converted camper van, I decided that we needed a reset.
My proposed method for getting us back on the same page (now that we were firmly in the same place) was for us to take a couple’s course called Coming Together. Yes, it’s a pun. No, it was not particularly hilarious. Not that I’d know for sure given that we didn’t get more than a couple weeks into the content because R. didn’t like the voice of the woman who created the course and, as a result, starred in every single one of the video recordings. Her name is Kim Anami, and I have probably mentioned her before because prior to Coming Together, I took her Vaginal Kung Fu course and loooved it. I was not bothered by her voice.
R.’s inability to consume content where Kim talked was just the tip of the iceberg-sized problem. He also found her videos extremely uncomfortable to watch. She does, among other things, extensive instruction on genital massage for both men (lingam massage) and women (yoni massage). R. found these to be downright unwatchable. Our homework was to massage each other’s privates for like an hour each without trying to prompt an orgasm, and he was out. It was all a little too weird for him.
Which was totally fine. We didn’t need her training to help us reconnect. We eventually found our way back to one another in our own way and on our own time. We didn’t even need to have this baby to save our marriage. We had her because it felt right without realizing that she would have a shall we say interesting impact on our marriage. We’re working on it.
The one thing our girl Kim did help with though was the idea of radical responsibility. I’m not sure if this is her phrase or mine, but she got me thinking about this concept when she posed a question—one that I’m paraphrasing here—in one of the early videos: What would it look like if you took 110 percent of the responsibility for the problems in your relationship?
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