To journey to the highest states of arousal, to surrender fully into pleasure, you must feel safe and secure.

To feel secure you must be able to trust your lover.

We trust gravity, we trust the water out of our taps, we trust our paycheck will come at the end of the month. If we couldn’t rely on these things, our daily anxiety level would spike.

To what degree do you trust your lover? Do trust your lover emotionally? What about physically? Does your body feel safe under your lover’s touch?

How do you cultivate deeper levels of trust in your relationship, so you can feel safe to experience high levels of arousal and surrender?

I missed a few days of writing last week because I was sick. A terrible sinus infection took over my body and rendered me useless. My lovely partner Charlotte took good care of me for a few days, and just as we were marveling that she hadn’t caught the bug, she got sick. Quite convenient, actually, staggering our sickest days so we could take turns tending to one another.

Last night we were both feeling better so we went out to celebrate. After leaving North Carolina for New York State, I crave barbecue once in awhile, so we crossed the river to try out the local BBQ joint. We ordered a full rack of ribs and rolled up our sleeves, ready to savor the meat fest.

Our table was in a small side dining room, about six tables tucked into cozy proximity to one another. Ribs are a pretty all-encompassing eating feat, so Charlotte and I were pretty quiet, focusing instead on sucking the tender meat off the bones. I allowed myself to listen in on the tables around me. I love to eavesdrop, especially in restaurants. I am endlessly fascinated by people and love to gather juicy bits of dialogue, engaging in casual research for my work as a writer. In the dining room with us last night there were three other tables, all male/female couples dining together. As I listened in on their conversation and watched them interact, I noticed a pattern that I have noticed many times before. All three couples spent the entire meal complaining to one another, bitching about this and that, ranting about their bosses, babysitters and bills. After awhile I stopped listening as they were starting to diminish my own pork-fueled pleasure.

I notice this pattern all the time. Couples go out to eat, spend hard earned money and find the time to be alone in the world together, and then proceed to fill that space talking about negative things. Some people would justify it as “venting” or “getting emotional support around hard issues” but I call foul. What I see is endless commiseration. I love the word commiserate because it is such a clear and obvious reference to what we are really doing when we complain to one another: getting more miserable together. It seems like it is easier to stay stressed out and bitch about life together than to take the time to flip the switch and enjoy positive conversation about topics that are uplifting, inspiring and invigorating. It seems like our default conversation strategy is finding things to complain about.

Do a quick inventory of your closest relationships: your lover, your best friends, your family. How much time do you spend talking about life’s struggles vs. your dreams, visions and victories? How often do you go out to a meal and spend the majority of the time commiserating? What if you insisted on celebrating instead? What if we filled our meals together, our phone calls, our quality time with those we love with celebratory conversation about what we found most positive and exciting about life?

Personally, I come from a family culture of commiserating. My family loves to talk about what is broken in the world, the idiots around us and the stupidity of pop culture. It wasn’t until I got together with Charlotte that I started transforming this attitude.  Charlotte is a chronic celebrator – she is persistently positive about the world and always sees the best in people. From our earliest dates on, and even now six years on, she insists on filling our date time with conversation about the beautiful, the inspiring, the awe-inspiring parts of the world. It is much more fun and makes everything taste more delicious.

Clearly, there must be room for sharing life’s difficulties and our challenges. But even those conversations can be solution-oriented, transformed into seeking the lessons that are offered during our hardest moments. We must seek to have relationships that support our full range of emotions, but we also get to choose what we focus on, especially when we are out on dates and spending intimate time together. We can interrupt the tendency to complain and commiserate and instead shift conversation to topics that bring us joy and excitement. This choice can make all the difference in the culture of your relationship.

So what is it going to be? Do you want to Commiserate or Celebrate? You choose.

This morning I woke up to a sad email from a friend who is going through a sudden break-up. I called her right away to give her my support, and in our conversation it became clear that what hurt most was not that the relationship was ending or changing, but that her lover was doing the break-up so poorly, without the maturity, respect and dignity that they both deserve.

I am reminded by this how seldom we bring the best of ourselves to all stages of intimate relationships. From flirtation and seduction to negotiations and break-ups, we often revert to selfish children when it comes to intense moments of intimacy. Why is that? Why are break-ups and other forms of relationship conflict often marked by immature and disrespectful behavior? Where does our self-respect and confidence go when we are trying to ask someone out on a date? It seems that as soon as we are dealing with love,sex and intimacy we all lose a bit of dignity and intelligence.

After reflecting on this today, I think that it must be related to the fact that as a culture we are still purging our sex-negative history. We still have a legacy of sexual relationships being more about dominance and ownership rather than love and mutual pleasure. We still have so much shame and fear around sexuality. And so when we are negotiating these relationships we all become the weakest versions of ourselves. We wither, rather than thrive. Most of us are much more powerful and clear when it comes to our career than our desires in the bedroom. We are more willing to stand up for ourselves in relationships where we haven’t been seen naked. We show up at our worst during break-ups, and any relationship that doesn’t last forever is deemed a failure rather than simply a phase that has ended. Our cultural dialogue about relationships, especially when they are ending, does not encourage us to bring the best of ourselves to one another.

The cure for this, of course, is to continue healing our sex culture and create a future where sexuality is a respected, dignified and celebrated part of our lives. We must strive to give ourselves and our lovers more respect and bring the best parts of ourselves to creating healthy and mature erotic relationships. We need to challenge ourselves to communicate clearly about our desires, step fully into our power as erotic beings and own our responsibility to one another. Being reckless with one another’s feelings is just a sign of erotic immaturity, as individuals and as a culture. We can do better. I pray for a future where more adults have the capacity to bring the best of ourselves to our most intimate relationships, where we can begin and end romances with more clarity and dignity. We can do better at this little piece of life called love, don’t you think?