StevePavlina.com Podcast #022 – Loving Relationships
January 5th, 2009 by Steve Pavlina
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StevePavlina.com Personal Development for Smart People podcast #22: Loving Relationships
This is a podcast about loving, intimate relationships that Erin and I recorded together this afternoon. We discuss the inner workings of our (almost 15-year) relationship in depth and share insights, advice, and stories regarding the following topics:
- Meeting each other’s needs and desires (emotional, physical, spiritual, etc)
- Creating and maintaining a deep connection
- Common interests
- Areas of compatibility and incompatibility
- Monogamous relationships
- What is cheating?
- The ultimate goal of an intimate relationship
- Polyamory
- The 6 styles of open relationships
- Jealousy
- Compersion
- Coming out publicly as a polyamorous person/couple
- The big picture – why intimate relationships are so important for personal growth
- Raising the consciousness of your relationship
- The 3 qualities of strong, loving, intimate relationships
- Commitment – what it means to commit
- How to know whether you should break up or stay together
Our ultimate goal in creating this podcast is to help you enjoy more conscious, loving relationships in your own life.
Of course the “elephant in the room” that spawned this podcast is that Erin and I recently announced that we’re shifting from a monogamous to a polyamorous relationship style.
In this podcast we talk a lot about that decision, which wasn’t so much of a decision as it was a realization — and a major breakthrough in the way we’ve been relating to each other. We hope our love and caring for each other comes across in this recording.
We appreciate the care and concern everyone is expressing toward us. We understand that this announcement was probably a shock to most people. That was to be expected. We’ve been discussing this for quite some time, but you weren’t privy to those conversations, so it may seem like this is a snap decision that happened abruptly and that our relationship is in trouble.
The truth, however, is that because of this change, our relationship is actually stronger than ever.
In recording this podcast, we want to help you understand where we’re coming from and why we’re excited to explore polyamory. We think this will help prevent misunderstandings based on inaccurate assumptions. We also think it will be very eye-opening for you if you’re interested in learning more about polyamory or if you’re currently experiencing problems in your current monogamous relationship.
If you’re in a relationship right now, we encourage you to listen to this together with your partner, and feel free to pause and discuss the ideas that strike you as you go along. We expect this form of sharing could lead to some new breakthroughs in the way you relate to each other. Just be aware that we may challenge your pre-established notions about how your relationship is supposed to work and where it may be headed.
Erin and I explain in detail how we relate to each other and the mindset we use to maintain a very conscious, loving, intimate relationship. We also discuss problems we encountered as a couple and how we overcame them together.
When I began writing about polyamory a few days ago, there were lots of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of our motives. Many people assumed the worst. Part of the reason for those misunderstandings is that plain text is a weak medium for expressing such an emotional topic because you can’t hear our tone of voice. The words themselves don’t convey enough of the meaning we were trying to convey. We think this is one reason why our words are being interpreted in so many different ways… often not in the way they were intended. By using audio instead of text, we hope that misinterpretations will be greatly reduced.
Hopefully when you hear us communicating about this together, you’ll get a better sense of how Erin and I relate to each other and why we believe polyamory (i.e. an open relationship) is an awesome next step in our journey together.
A couple books are mentioned in this podcast: Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I highly recommend both of them.
This is our longest podcast ever (103 minutes long). It’s more like an audio program on relationships than a podcast. If you receive some genuine value from it, please consider making a donation to let us know you found it helpful. 
Enjoy the podcast…
Pavlina-022-Loving-Relationships.mp3
(Time = 1:43:23, Size = 47.3MB)
Visit the audio section to play this podcast directly through your web browser and to view the entire podcast collection.
