Patience

Patience may be a virtue, but not one that most possess. It seems for most, learning to wait is pretty damn hard. Speeding along so quickly in our modern, faced-paced world, most of us have no real understanding of what true patience is or how to cultivate it. Not only are we not taught to wait, we’re constantly bombarded with the exact opposite energy in our day-to-day way of life. Everything we “do” centers around conveniences that keep us farther and farther from touching into patience. We don’t want to wait on line, wait for a response to an email or wait for a good time to speak to our partners about a potentially challenging topic. We want it all now, if not 10 minutes ago. 

I observe many women in relationship who struggle with patience. They exude a sense of urgency in their energy that often doesn’t know how to control its own immediate desires. This can look like needing to talk things out or clearing the air in the immediate whether or not it’s the right time for our partners and/or relationship. Sometimes it shows up when we’re trying to get whatever underdeveloped emotional needs are saying they need in the moment, even if that means completely disregarding our partners’ needs. Often, we’re pushing our agendas for planning and scheduling in order to cover up our own feelings of anxiety and lack.

Becoming patient takes growing up. Imagine children as they navigate their needs and wants. Typically, they want what they want exactly when they want it. Slowing down their need for immediacy takes conscious consistency as parent’s patiently wait for them develop the attunement of time. Adults, on the other hand, have every capability to consider what is going on around them and take action from a deeper place of knowing. Especially in our most primary day-to-day relationships, learning to pause long enough to take a deep breath is one of the most important tools we can learn to receive the gifts of patience and create much needed space in our lives.

When it comes to my relationship with my partner, Mike, patience has become one of my primary conscious commitments. Mike’s early resistances to the seriousness of our relationship was the perfect playground for embodying patience as a coat of arms. We were dancing the typical game of his avoidance triggering my urgency, and vice versa. My desires to get things “on the books” came directly from my own insecurities and desire to push the relationship along. I am part of the group of women who were socialized to chase the carrot of the next big life event or level of their romantic relationship. Friends and family subtly and directly reminded me that after dating for a while, we should be moving in together. Co-habitating then led to questions about getting married and having children. I reminded myself over and over that I loved the “here and now” of our relationship, yet I couldn’t help but imagine buying a cabin together and planning for life after the kids go to college. I convinced myself that each newly desired experience was one-off and not a part of a perfectly laid out set of dominos reliant on the former to make impact on the latter. Like many women I’ve met over the years, my mind was at the helm of my reality and had our entire lives strategically planned out, just enough to choke hold Mike, our partnership and the organic natures of relationships as they should be. 

In our current dynamic, impatience still shows up plenty. Sometimes, I’m in an emotional emergency and the sirens are loud and fast. Even with a pause to put my own oxygen mask on, the level of energetic urgency is high. I can feel my engine revving even with my tried and true conscious attempts to slow it down. Sometimes, I want answers to the not-at-all-time-sensitive questions I have about plans in our future. I can feel my own story of that it has to be now or I’ll explode with the uncomfortableness of not knowing. If the calendar remains penciled instead of penned, I imagine all the ways we might never go or the dates I’ve rigidly determined are the only ones that will work for us won’t be available or the myriad of other mindful creations I cook up in my pot of mental urgency. Other times my impatience flairs when I’m stuck in my own vigilant clock. The transitions of co-parenting schedules and multiple weekly appointments and events means I think I know when I have openings for my own alone time or intimate time with Mike. Often, I swiftly back into impatience thinking my over planning won’t lead me to the same place it usually does —urgent and wishing I’d dropped it when I had the first chance.

When I’m in emotional turmoil or need to get things sorted in my clear and organized mind, I’ve learned to take a pause that separates me from my own urgency and creates a buffer between me and my own self-centeredness before I speak to Mike about my needs. Pausing, as I’ve come to learn, doesn’t mean never. It means becoming aware of a bigger picture than merely the part of us that wants what we think we must have in that very moment. When I’m mindful of it, there are actually very few times when I am not aware of my own need for patience in any given moment or circumstance with Mike. It can see it clearly as an intentional choice that I’ve come to take seriously as an act of care for myself, Mike and our relationship. It’s a huge relief, to both our own nervous systems and that of our partners, to know that we can emotionally survive when we don’t get what we want and actually become better for learning to wait.

It has also created a container of trust that Mike knows I’m at the helm of my own clock and I will use it for our benefit, rather than our detriment. There are plenty of times when I wait to talk to Mike about something that has to do with his own growth. I know when he’s in certain spirits, has had a fair share of alone time or energetically is asking for my help, that he’s much more apt to hear my words of enthusiasm, inspiration and sincere reflection to his self-identified betterment. How often have I witnessed a female partner trying to shove the better version of the man he wants to be down his own throat and wonder why he’s not metabolizing it fast enough?

Just as women experience cyclical rhythms every month (and every day for that matter!), the masculine also occupies different rhythms, and have entirely different focuses. Early on, I often mistook Mike’s rhythms for disinterest or avoidance, when in reality, he wasn’t tracking the growth of our relationship in the same way that I was. His desire for and actual experience of freedom is what creates the spaciousness for him to come around to my desires on his own time. I can count on both my hands and many of yours the number of times I’ve consciously wanted to remind Mike about something and waited for a better time, only to have him bring it up willingly and enthusiastically just hours later. I usually chuckle internally at my mini victory, not only in him meeting me where I want to be met but also in my growing ability to cultivate a kind of patience that feels strong, serene and genuinely easy-going, instead of dryly tolerant, enduring and long-suffering.

All of this is pointing to the deep importance of learning attunement in relationship. I’ve come to know when and how to ask for what I want and need from my partner because I gently track his energetic state and that of our dynamic. Because I typically better hold the bird’s eye view of our day/week/month/year/decade, I use it to my advantage rather than to badger him with a constant barrage of planning and future-scaping. If he’s having a hard day or has had multiple meetings back-to-back or anything of the sort in which I know he’s not at his best to brainstorm with me or be able to be present with clarity, I wait. And I enjoy it.

When women, in particular, are in the spacious state of waiting, it evolves longing and becomes an experience that feels equally satisfying, if not better than the getting of what we thought we wanted to begin with. With patience, we learn that getting what we want is an adolescent step in our journey to adulthood. Moving in the direction of our own desires while attuning to the desires of another grows us up, little by little. Down the road, in a quaint, wooded, warm cabin lives longing and her deep maturation with patience. Longing, in my experience, is the sensual and slightly erotic aunt to patience’s practical and soft cousin. She knows in her bones and deep within her sensuality that the desires she feels don’t need to be met right now, if at all. When I lean into longing, I learn to integrate my desires into further embodiment every day and drink from them the ecstasy that life has to offer without certain physical manifestations ever touching my lips.

The push and pull, give and take, tension and release that gets created provides me with the perfect breeding ground for more longing then union, more longing then union, and more longing then union that keeps our relationship feeling dynamic and alive. There were times in our past when the longing hurt in my bones. I used to think it might kill me, as I counted the days without the type of intimacy or quality touch I wanted. I let myself yearn for his body on mine; and I turned myself on envisioning the way the coming together would feel, whether it ever went that way or not.

Patience and longing, as it turns out, is like having a love affair with imagination and hope. Rather than white-knuckling it or waiting it out with baited breath, I breath possibility in. Bum rushing Mike rarely results in what I want to experience; emotional, mental or physical. When I pause, within a conversation between us or within my own internal fantasies, I’m met with a wave of vibrancy that I wouldn’t feel if I was rushing down the road toward a fixed destination.

Many women seem to avoid this type of fully turned-on longing by chasing their wants and wishes to the point of missing the delights of desiring. Our lack of patience for how our lives turn out in the long run tragically and unnecessarily seep into the now. The moment we feel an urge for something we don’t currently have-- like our partner’s to be different, marriage or children, a material possession, or the need for a particular conversation with our partners-- we march into the proverbial kitchen of our shared spaces and pronounce our “needs.” We hit them over the head with a ton of bricks and depending on their nature, they either throw them back at us, or they settle in for the care we’ll give once they give into our emotional woes.

This, my friend, is the dark side of manipulation. When we overtly or subtly demand from our partners with emotional bribery instead of leaning into the beautiful experience of waiting for our partners to accept our invitation into our desired realities. Truth be told, even within deeply loving and growth-filled partnership, it’s natural to want things from one another that make us selfishly happy, even if it also benefits the relationship. I’m not exempt from this, nor from using my sense of attunement to get the best from Mike. Yet, like a garden newly laid with seed, my patience acts as a watering can that knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that nature is working its magic on its own time. As the seasons roll on, the flowers bloom and the fields of our relationship yield a beautiful, bountiful harvest of seeds we sometimes never knew we planted.