Blog
Coherent
I imagine that most of us have experienced the “need” to explain ourselves to someone we love, whether that person is kin, spouse, lover, or friend. We think that we must be clear or that the other person requires that. Often, such a need happens during or after a fight, and the source of the need is defensiveness. We have something to prove or we have to be right. Often, the other person is demanding that we explain ourselves, a demand that may be verbal or that may be aggressively implicit.
I don’t remember what my lover and I were talking about when he said, “You don’t have to be coherent,” but we certainly weren’t fighting. I do remember that the subject was deeply personal and that I was wanting to be clear about something I was feeling.
Hearing an intimate say, “You don’t have to be coherent,” astonished me! I may have wondered out loud if I was making sense. What surprise I felt that it didn’t matter. What a pleasure to feel no pressure or expectation. His sensitivity to letting me, indeed helping me, feel what I was feeling allowed more feeling to arise, and whatever sense is to be made comes most essentially from that–feeling–in terms of silent self-awareness or words shared in conversation.
Coherence is essential sometimes. We must do our best to define and describe our feelings (not explain them), because telepathy is rare and love is served when our intimates know what we’re thinking and where we stand. Coherence, in contrast to the incoherence of confusion or unintelligibility, can be a mode of loving. Forming a whole–that’s one meaning of coherence. Nothing is more whole than love.
- February 4, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 1
Telepathy is rare indeed. Is there a word that means something more than rare? Ha-ha!
Why is that not more widely known?