Intensity

In endurance sports such as triathlon, the objective is to go as fast as possible for as long as possible.  This means learning what your limits are and racing just enough below those limits to be able to sustain your effort for the duration of the event.  The longer the period of performance, the lower should be the intensity of your output in order to go the distance. 

I spend most of my time in training doing workouts that are endurance based with relatively low intensity.  However, every week my coach also has me do some intensity efforts in order to keep me sharp, to prepare for any short bursts of speed necessary in a race, and to add a little spice to my training regimen. I have been considering intensity as it relates to relationships as well, and I think there are some analogies that can be drawn between endurance efforts and long term relationships.

My most recent relationship lasted about 4 years and it started out very magically.  This woman and I connected immediately on many levels, and those connections were intense, from our first date where we talked for a long time and started to get to know each other, to the first time I touched the skin of her back at Shelburne Beach where our first picnic together under a cool and cloudy sky somehow drew us toward each other, to our first kiss that caused my heart to stop beating and left me wanting more, to the first time we made love after an evening of food, wine, and jazz............a combination that became one of the major motifs in our lives.  Over time we became good friends and eventually partners living together. 

I took my time falling in love with her and for me it was a sustained free fall, like going over a huge waterfall, plunging downward with your stomach rising inside you, or akin to jumping out of an airplane and soaring until you reach terminal velocity, then continuing to fall, aware that you are plummeting toward earth because of the wind and the ground rising toward you, and being totally in that moment relishing that long, mesmerizing fall into love. 

It was an intense and amazing time in my life and I wanted it to last forever.  Of course, the honeymoon phase never lasts forever, but I do think we can learn a lot about shared intensity during that time in the relationship and we can draw on that knowledge to cultivate sustainable intimacy as the relationship matures. In this case however, our connection was perhaps too intense to be sustained.   I got a visceral reminder of those intense feeling when I ran into this woman at the grocery store last night.  I hadn't seen or spoken to her in a while, but there she was, putting fruit in her basket.  She said hey, I said hi, and then I went about my shopping.  As I reached for some romaine lettuce I put all my weight on one leg and realized it was shaking, I was breaking out in a cold sweat, and my heart was pounding.  Just that simple encounter with her in the produce section of our local grocers was, well, intense. 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, high intensity cannot be sustained over the long haul.....not in endurance racing and also not in relationships.  As in an Ironman Triathlon, the intensity in a relationship needs to be managed to go the distance.......if you want a partner for the rest of your life, the physical, emotional, and psychological intensity between you needs to be sustainable.  It's fine if there are dramatic spikes, but just like with my interval training sessions, there needs to be reduced levels for rest and recovery before the next rise.  Overall I think it is better to have steady day-in and day-out connection with lower intensity than big spikes and dips, which can be leave both people excited but also let down. Sometimes the dips can be so low that they are effectively negative intensity.  The greater the highs and lows, the more likely couples are to burn-out in my opinion.

My relationship with that woman ended when she stopped feeling in love. She admitted that she still cared about me, that she loved me, but she didn't feel that intense in-love way any more.  For her that meant the relationship was over.  Obviously I may be over-simplifying as I'm certain there were other factors at play, but for reasons known only to her, she couldn't feel the intensity anymore, and didn't know how, or wasn't willing, to figure out how to recreate it in a manner and at a level that was sustainable for us.  So she gave up on us and on the life we had built together.

I have a friend who does business in India.  He works with some people there who are highly educated, many of them in our universities, and recently they were discussing the topic of falling in love.  India remains a caste society and these folks were from the more well-to-do part of that culture.  Despite their affluence and western education, they nevertheless are very traditional in some ways, which is to say that they still submit to arranged marriages.  That's right, these modern Indian men and women trust their parents to pick partners that are good matches for them and then they get married.  The husband and wife usually don't know each other, and they most certainly are not in love, but they enter into marriage trusting that their mate is right for them and are open to developing respect for each other, becoming friends, starting a family, and ultimately moving toward love and intimacy that will hopefully sustain them for the rest of their lives.  To these Indians our notion of falling in love and then getting married is backwards, making us a slave to emotion and biology in our selection process.

Now I am not advocating arranged marriage and I certainly would not have been willing to trust my parents to find a suitable mate for me.  I don't know the statistics, if there are any, on how these marriages survive, relative happiness levels, divorce rates, abuse rates, frequency of affairs, or any other measures.

However, I am intrigued by the idea of turning away from the intoxicating immediate attraction, the intense connection that we feel when we say we're falling in love, and moving instead toward being friends with safe, emotionally aware, interesting women where biology and psychology are not driving the development of the relationship.  For me it would be a paradigm shift from intensity and attraction to something that moves along more slowly, at a pace, if you will, that can be sustained through the years, where the relationship can progress, as both people mature, to ever deeper levels of connection and intimacy.

I don't claim that I know how to do this, or that it feels natural. But therein may lie clues for my personal growth and lessons for me about how to better select a mate capable of a more permanent and satisfying connection to one another.  I had to learn lessons as a triathlete about building durability and managing my output in order to go longer and get faster; maybe it's time for me to make the same commitment to setting aside my weakness for physical attraction and my sprinters tendencies with regard to emotional involvement, to focus instead on sustainable relationships, and begin pacing my heart and soul for love that can last a lifetime.