We shared the “Blue Eyed Moment”. A snippet carved from her past and reborn in our present with an intimate tether that foretold a more bonded future. It was at the culmination of a couple’s workshop and it held the magic of harmony as we held each other’s hearts.

That tender event was magical. It rocked me softly at my core and the music of it touched me with its depth. I caught a quiet glimpse into my lover’s soul through her open and inviting eyes. Finding there within her an intimacy. It lingered right beside her trust in me. I recall, as if I bore the scar, how that moment seared itself into me. It was an amazing thing! An ethereal immersion intimately shared. It felt pivotal and precious and profound. Also, as all of that recollection has been written in the past-tense, it was fleeting.

I ran amok with the gift of our searing intimacy shared. I could not wait to tell the tale of it. That moment was the gold star on the corner of my weekend. I wanted it known by my family and dearest friends. I shared “our moment shared “ and in doing so, it shattered. It lay in pieces unable to be repaired. Now even the memory of it is vague, although the shards of the shattering are sharp and leave raw punctures in my feet as I walk the pathway near where it lies broken. Disrespected.

A 1990’s book tried to explain to us in metaphorical, galactic imagery that “Men are from Mars” and “Women are from Venus”. I get the imagery and I have repeatedly felt the separating void. I know the feeling of ‘obscurity via self-induced distance’ and the sensation of being adrift in the nebulous gap. A gap made poignant by my clear reflections upon my companion’s contribution to the joy of me – contraposed by the hollow echo of the listless spasm that the chasm of her absence is.

But this separation is not about gender it is about the value of intimacy. It is about the “private” being washed away as it becomes public. It is about respecting the gift that a moment can be and the partner with whom they are entrusted.

I have come to realize that “rapture found” only lasted until the telling of it. The demise of that delight lingers. I feel as if I must learn from that moment and grow from it or repeat it – while wandering in a labyrinth of guilt-fueled memories. Perhaps wandering it alone.

How do I hold the sanctity of a shared experience and revel in what I must not share with others? When may I tell? Why must I not?  Who owns a moment?

Each of those questions is valid. Each of those questions are fair. However, each of those questions is not the lesson at hand here. The point is in the learning of my partner and the balance of intimacies. It is also about respect. It is a respect for the divinity of moments of intimacy. And yes. I think they are divine, but also mutually contrived. That does not keep them from being real and precious and worthy of protecting. Because unless intimacy is by mutual consent and the boundaries of it savored by both, it is doomed by its innate fragility.

I become confused when I am in the emotional vortex of a moment. But if I want to savor future moments of union, I better work it out. Because in choosing to share, almost anything, there is inherent in it a diminishing. The delighted dances, in the private places of love, become cheapened outside the alter of their existence. They retract if I chose the path of distribution. If I tell the world, or just some segment of it, I change the moment in a far more dynamic way then I could ever change the world. Again, I think it is respect.

I wrote a poem once about silence: “Silence although nothing still exists / It persists by mutual consent / It sits content to linger on what it will not place its finger on…” is a portion of that poem.

I am learning that intimate moments are also like Silence, from my poem. The ‘Monumental Moment’, birthed immaculately, came from nowhere. Its magic spawned of cosmic grace as it burst fully into my and my partner’s life. It lingered there by mutual consent – each of us required to respect the holiness of it. That moment can shine and offer divine healing in a way that transcends understanding. But, only as long as I respect it as holy.

I have every ability to speak the breadth of my experience to whomever I choose. But I am now aware that: it is a choosing. A choosing that is not without consequence. That stone thrown into the quiet pool of precious moments will sow ripples. Ripples will grow into waves and they will erode the island where I once sat holding love’s hand. Later, standing on life’s shifting sand, I will remain a lonely man and hand-in-hand I’ll stand all by yourself. Not for the telling of a treasured moment but for the failure to learn what to respect about my relationship. A failure to see the divine and to protect it. To protect the union that is the very core of a coupled journey.

I must learn what is divine to my partner. The sacred moments are not so frequent that I can treat them lightly. There is a swelling within me when she and I touch at the level of our souls. Perhaps too, the desire to tell the world that I have been caressed. But I must beware – once I mass distribute the sacred, I diminish it. At any moment I am potentially needing another gift of grace, the squandering of the special times and the disrespectful way it may feel to my partner pays me no dividends. I will be adrift somewhere between Venus and Mars and without an earthly (and heavenly) partners caress.

Love is a place that is created in intimacy. Love can brush the hem of divinity. Moments gifted from sacred intimacies are precious and few. I must treat the preciousness of shared intimacies with the respect due them. To choose instead to revel in faint gloating, even from those I most want to share them with, will hurt my companion and leave shards strewn where holiness once floated. I must respect not just the moments but more so my lover who is entwined in them with me… until she is not.