Passion is passion. There is a reason so many battles end in a kiss; the line between love and hate is much, much thinner than the line between love and politeness.
Beyond the practical things, like helping with the chores and the budget, what does a woman want from a partner? Maybe it’s the three Fs — Fight, Fuck, Frolic.
“Make me laugh, think or come,” as an old button I had phrased it.
To be modulated is to damp down your own passions. You don’t feel safe because you have learned that other people find your passion unsafe, too much, too intense, too weird, too off putting. You know that your passion tends to trigger other people’s stuff, stuff they haven’t yet worked to own.
“You don’t learn to be fascinating; you unlearn boring,” says Sally Hogshead. Yes, but why do we learn to be boring in the first place? We are taught that our passion is just too much for the world, taught that it needs to be constrained and corseted until it can be released with one special person who is going to go on that wild, naked, intense ride with us.
One of the key gifts I gave my parents was the engagement of their passions. My father would come at me with his brilliant, crackpot theories about every new plane crash. My mother would hector me about how the world is interesting and disappointing at the same time. And I would be there, ready to push back, ready to make them stand up for their own ideas, their own passions.
One of the key ways that I gave them one more good day was to give them something to be passionate about right up to the end. I wasn’t sweet and sticky, as the staff from Hospice quickly found out, rather I was challenging and prickly, but somehow, they soon figured out, my parents took that as love.
We don’t love people to be bland and defended around them. We love people to be proud and passionate around them, ready to abandon ourselves to passion as we fight, fuck and frolic.
It is vitality that compels us, because the passion in others opens the way to revealing the passion in ourselves. When we see someone else as passionate, more passionate than we are, we know that they are a safe space to open up our passions, to unleash and free the wild forces within us.
I know that my passion creates safe space for others to get naked. They understand it’s very hard to trip my circuit breaker.
Having a place to let my own passion out, well, that’s no so easy. I suspect that passions come in the same four chakras that intimacy does; physical, emotional, intellectual and creative. We may trade physical passion for emotional passion, but getting to intellectual and creative passion takes a partner who has done that work for themselves.
To claim your voice in the world requires that you have someone who can really hear it, really respond to it. To me, sharing my voice is sharing my passion. I may know that I have a fierce poetry, raw with intense thought and deep emotion, but knowing that someone in the room is going to get the joke is a whole ‘nother thing.
My passion is poured into my writing, but it doesn’t get reflected back to me. The cycle isn’t completed, with affirmation or with challenge, with encouragement or with criticism, constructive, creative and clashing. Fight, fuck, frolic.
When your life force is habitually modulated, breaking free of the gravity of convention is very, very hard. There is a reason that many shots create escape velocity not by brute force but by using the slingshot effect to leverage the forces of others, force against force to break through to a new path, a new freedom.
I love being able to affirm and unlock the passions in others. The experience of letting out even a tiny bit of my passion and seeing others cringe, be baffled and pull back, separate from me, is highly distressing and very painful.
Knowing that I have a small potential partner pool (PPP) who can come with me when my passions are revealed is challenging indeed. Like any woman, I need to fight, fuck and frolic to feel alive, to break my shell and become new.
But here, outside of the passion loop, it feels very hard to break through and break out. Passion is the energy of life and mine has too long been stored like radioactive waste, too dangerous to be released into a fearful and boring world.
Fight, fuck, frolic. May my passion find its celebration, somehow.
Callan 