Giving tantra workshops and accompanying men on their way to a pleasurable sexuality has made me think a lot about the need for a meaningful relationship. Not necessarily a romantic love relationship, but a relationship where there is equality and there is commitment, where we trust and let each other be vulnerable.

Many people are looking for a meaningful relationship but they don’t want to lose anything along the way and what I have learned in these years of relationship with my partner and in the collectives where I have shared life, is that the question is wrong. The question is: what can I give away?

There are many problems on the way to being a person who gives away, which loves and lowers their walls. You have to trust others, negotiate your state of comfort, not go about doing things your own way, put up with behavior that touches you in sensitive places. In times of conflict such a close person can bring out the worst in everyone. To be in a meaningful relationship we have to be prepared to endure and above all, to question who we are. 

Many studies reveal that deep relationships change and blur your being with the other. When the relationship ends, the person is left with an emptiness about they are without the other – a place of crisis and at the same time a self-rebirth.

We live in a society that places so much value on individualism and personal growth while romantic love remains the primary goal in art and culture. Love is the Hollywood solution to any problem. And not only in Hollywood.

For me romantic love does not exist, it is not a solution to any of your problems but at the same time being alone does not exist either. We are social animals and the other is part of the self. What you don’t give away you lose. Growing up is just an imagination. If you don’t let yourself be ‘contaminated’ by others with their ideas, feelings, characters and behaviors, you can’t grow.
Instead of “I need to take care of myself” I believe in “by taking care of you I take care of myself”. 

I am not talking about romantic love, like a monogamous couple that creates a separate nucleus but about human love, about sharing your life. If you grow alone, it is not growth, it is gaining depth and it is beautiful and necessary, but true growth is opening your heart, the energetic center where you connect with the other. 

At Gay Love Spirit we talk a lot about community, each workshop is a laboratory of living together doing everything possible to accommodate everyone’s needs these days. Despite living far away from each other we find opportunities to sleep in a big room together, to accompany each other in difficult times, to laugh about life to share cuddles without necessarily having sexual tension and to dream together. 

Choose a person with whom you can understand and create family in the broadest possible sense. With whom you can imagine making decisions, negotiating and sharing anguish. With whom you can get angry and forgive. With whom you can grow old. Maybe nothing is forever, but for now let’s act like it’s forever. 

It is a critical time for love – many books and thinkers criticize romantic love; technological advances, job insecurity and social fragmentation generate an environment where people do not want to share and negotiate their way of life and there are many social affirmations that support this behavior. Personal work done online is growing and the positive thing is that it leaves the big cities and reaches more people, the human being is able to connect from afar and learn many things without human contact. 

All this does not take away the importance of informal relationships, human closeness, silence with another body. Feeling sexual tension or rejection. Studies talk about the fear that many people have of moving from Whatsapp to a call, of moving from a meet-up to inviting that person into your intimate life (be it to see your home, talk on the phone or meet your friends).

I am often confronted by people who talk about eternal love, love towards everything, who give love to anyone and in any situation. As a great believer in love it seems something beautiful and utopian, but at the same time it scares me. Love cannot be abstract, love towards all is a love without negotiation, without contamination, without struggle, with the mirror that makes me the other in front of me, the one that teaches me to love. Utopias always scare me because they are the end, and life goes on, they contaminate.

Let’s try to love the people around us by creating relationships, letting ourselves feel the rejection or resentment towards others, because this is also there to teach us something and understand ourselves better, and in my opinion it can be said that it is healthy and necessary to move away from people who do not help us to grow. We are not perfect and we are not always able to face any challenge. At the end of the day we want to create our community where we can grow personally, accompanied in the range of states that is called the web of life.