30 May 2008

The Woman Who Says Yes

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Pathos by Eric Francis from an original by Danielle Voirin.

WE MET AGAIN on the telephone that night.

“Would you tell me the story of Philippe?”

“Okay. The show ended, and we went out for coffee at Place de la Republique. He lived in the neighborhood and asked me if I wanted to come up, and I said yes.”

How simple. With these words, I recognized again that I was talking to the woman who says yes.

She was a different person than Renee; this other person was a woman within her. Renee struggled with giving herself permission to live, and she struggled with sexual guilt. We do not give this other woman a name, but in many conversations we have encountered her, and she has a feeling all her own that we could both relate to. Her voice is different, rich and mellow. She is calm, unapologetic, deeply compassionate and liberated from guilt and reluctance. I love talking with her and hearing her descriptions of life.

One thing about the woman who says yes is that, by agreement, she doesn’t have to worry about hurting me with her erotic or emotional choices. It’s not that I don’t feel pain or abandonment or left out; it’s that by conscious choice I hold the space of taking care of my own feelings and affirming her right and privilege of saying yes, and of allowing her own her experiences and feelings.

Also by agreement, I may be turned on by anything that gets her going; I am entitled to the full spectrum of my responses to her.

I met the woman who says yes shortly after another phase of our journey last autumn, which is covered in a chapter called ‘Flirtation with Aban’. The flirtation involved a friendship with a man named Aban and three different weekends where they made love; and where she encountered and enjoyed his feverishly hot desire for her. In one of these encounters, for the first time in her life, she attempted to have two lovers consciously, the other being me.

She arrived for a long weekend visit and stayed with me in my borrowed apartment in Toronto. That was in mid-August. As luck or the fates would have it, Aban was in the city at the same time. There are a lot of cities in the world, and we were all there at once. She casually mentioned where she was in an email, and he replied immediately. He wanted to see her, and assumed she wanted to see him. In fact she did; but she hadn’t quite explained to him that we were together, or that we were lovers. So he had no way to adjust his expectations.

She didn’t have the guts or the emotional strength to just tell him, particularly on the phone, so in a sense she had to go.

Our time that weekend was alive and we were attentive to one another, though her impending visit with Aban cast a shadow over us. She was nervous. I was a little scared, anticipating the piercing of jealousy, but inwardly devoted to letting go into the experience in honor of my love for. Also, I often find it hot when the women in my life have other lovers, so that helps.

She left Monday morning for where he was staying in North Toronto, working on a film. I walked her to the bus. I felt like I had two choices. I could put her on that bus and ‘give her permission’ to be free and experience her passion, and firmly expect her back; or I could let go of her, knowing that sometimes sex and passion turn to love; and see if she returned.

I was confident that we valued our love for one another, or I would not have been able to handle it. I am not the most confident person in the world but I usually recognize love when I feel it and see it in someone’s eyes. To me love is freedom, and I wanted her to be free and I wanted to appreciate the whole woman, not some extracted part of her. I knew Renee well enough to know the passions she had brewing in her; all the exploration she wanted to do that she did not get to do; I understood her conflicts and I knew that my choice to approve of her as a whole person and hold space for that whole person and all of her feelings was the most important gesture of that moment. So that is what I chose to do, and she got on that bus and I went back to my apartment. Knowing that what happened between them was totally out of my control, I went deeper into myself sexually and emotionally than I ever have.

The most painful part was that there was a total lunar eclipse that night and, weeks before, we had agreed to be together that particular Monday night. I don’t heap a lot of astrology on our relationship, but I deeply respect eclipses. I know they set patterns and as much as I supported her freedom and wanted to throw every drop of my energy behind it, the eclipse troubled me, mainly because they set patterns. And this was not a pattern that I wanted to set – of her being with someone else and not with me, when we had decided to be together and had come to a place specifically be together.

I was not thrilled about this. I also understood the necessity on some level that I could not really express, and I was curious to see what would happen. When you let go into experiences like this, there is an extent to which the whole thing is really out of your control, and that seems to be the whole point. Mostly, in that moment, I stayed with my feelings, and dove into the jealousy, passion and pathos I was feeling urgently, like diving off the top of a volcano into the pool of lava.

I wanted him to know that I was there, aware of him, aware of them, alone and soaking into myself with full awareness: and I asked for that; but that fact was never revealed to him. That particular wish was never granted.

BUT SOMETHING that I was not expecting came to me: eventually being able to see photographs of their penetration. Literally, a series of photos of him pressing his penis into her vulva as she gracefully spread her lips.

This took some months to arrive in my life, and by the time the images illuminated themselves on my monitor we were well into the discussion with the woman who says yes. I had received detailed accounts of their experience; the sight of his face, the sounds they made, what she felt as he let go into her – and how she felt having these experiences.

It was not the person who I originally met who described all of this. It was someone else, someone closer to the core.

The pictures, when they eventually became a thing we saw and talked about, gave us something to say yes to, or maybe just some tangible evidence of reality. Slowly over time, the woman who says yes explained the emotional dynamics of the relationship to me; how it felt to be wanted like that; how she felt ill from anxiety with the whole situation; how she let go and opened up into becoming the receptacle of his pleasure, with pleasure, even in the midst of her conflict.

Before the images entered our shared visual and emotional experience, I thought that only that one existed, rather than many of them. The idea of this one picture, veiled from my sight, loomed in the background of our conversations, of our exploratory emotional reaching into the unfamiliarity of who we were to one another. It stood as something occurring in a dimension apart, a dimension she controlled or at least controlled access to.

To learn what I wanted to learn from her, and to share these experiences, I had to inquire, because Renee is not a talker by nature. Certainly she was not inclined to talk about sex and all its emotions, and surely not sex with someone besides her primary partner. But I asked, and she responded; gradually the conversation became easier and more inwardly grounded; and over time, we discovered I this person who consciously indulged and owned her experiences with a clear conscience.

And as time went on, I developed a close enough relationship to the woman who says yes that she became the person I was relating with and growing with. The other aspects of her—those wracked in sexual guilt, anxiety and hesitation, became side factors, though they still have a voice in our connection. And this has become an experiment in my relating to someone sexually autonomous; and for her, an experiment in being sexually autonomous in the context of her relationship with me.

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