On Love and the Illusions of Certainty

I recently spent time with a lover.

 It was beautiful. Deep. Connected.

 There was real feeling between us.

 One evening, after we came together intimately, something happened that took me by surprise. When we finished, he simply got up and carried on with life. No integration. No cuddles. No holding.

And I felt bereft, abandoned.

Moments earlier, we had been in each other’s arms, open and vulnerable to each other. Then suddenly, I was alone in the field we had just shared.

 It took me a day or so to feel soft and safe again in my body.

And the following conversation sent me into reflection - not just about him, but about how deeply our relationships are shaped by conditioning and culture.

What Happens After Intimacy

When two people open intimately, the nervous system shifts into vulnerability. .

After that kind of opening, the body seeks grounding: a few moments of contact, breath synchronising, skin on skin, eye contact.

Not as romance. As regulation.

When that integration doesn’t happen, the body can feel abruptly untethered. What had felt mutual becomes solitary.

That sudden aloneness is what my system interpreted as abandonment.

And here is where it becomes interesting.

The Conversation About the “Future”

A little while later, we spoke. I shared my confusion, surprise, and anger at my nervous system being refused that most basic of needs - regulation after intimacy.

His position was that when he has genuine feelings for someone, he struggles to continue as lovers if he knows there is no long-term future - no shared life plan, no children, no permanence.

He associates full emotional availability with long-term trajectory. Without that trajectory, he pulls back.

What became clear, as we spoke, was the precise shape of his dilemma. Intimacy without deep feeling - that, he could hold. A future together with deep feeling - that too. But intimacy with feeling and no promise of certainty: that particular combination was something he experienced as a door opening onto suffering.

There was a kind of integrity in that. He was not being careless. He was protecting himself from a vulnerability he didn’t yet know how to carry.

I could see that. And I could also see how it foreclosed something.

Underneath this position is a familiar cultural logic:

Depth must be tied to destiny.

Vulnerability must be justified by permanence.

We are taught that we can only relax with certainty. (Or rather, with the illusion of certainty - because is anything ever truly certain?) The promise of a shared future can create the idea of safety. And we are taught that such certainty is to be valued above all else.

For me, safety lives elsewhere.

In presence.

In attunement.

In how we close after we open.

The Hierarchy We Inherit

Once, I lived inside this hierarchy. I didn’t question it. I married, built the life that looked like success from the outside - the partnership, the shared home, the long-term commitment. I believed that structure would deliver what I was actually hungry for. Depth. Presence. Being truly known.

What I discovered, slowly and then all at once, was that the contract had delivered the form - but not the substance. Longevity and love, certainty and presence: they are not the same thing.

That reckoning changed me. It’s why I now notice - with some tenderness toward my younger self - when the old logic resurfaces. When emotional availability is rationed according to long-term potential. When depth becomes contingent on trajectory.

I know that logic intimately. And I know what it costs.

The Personal Edge

When he distinguished between “long-term” and “short-term,” I felt reduced.

As though my value was being assessed solely in terms of whether I aligned with an imagined future.

If yes, full presence.

If no, partial presence.

In that framework, I became instrumental. A character in someone else’s play.

And there is something worth pausing on here because this is not only personal. It is cultural.

As women, we are conditioned to define ourselves in relation to others. To our children. To our partners. To the roles we hold in other people’s stories. Our worth has long been organised around function: mother, wife, caretaker, anchor. 

Men are navigating their own inherited archetypes - provider, protector, the one who builds toward a future - and told that inhabiting these images is the same as inhabiting their power.

It is not.

Real power is something far more nuanced. It will look different in every person who embodies it. But it will be unmistakably true. Clutching at an archetype in the absence of that grounded sense of self produces a kind of rigidity - a need to sort experience into known categories rather than stay open to what is actually present.

I sensed this in my lover. A masculine energy still finding its ground, still reaching for the familiar scaffolding of role and trajectory when the territory became uncertain. And in that reaching, a subtle inability to hold the fullness of who I am - lover, mother, friend, woman with her own rich interior life and appetite.

The mind that needs categories cannot rest in complexity.

But I am not one thing.

And when someone attempts to fit me into a single archetype - even unconsciously - I feel it. I feel partially seen, reduced to an idea being projected onto me rather than met in my divine complexity.

That is the opposite of intimacy.

True intimacy asks us to resist the urge to pin each other down. To stay curious beyond the category. To keep looking - and to stay in devotion to who the other person actually is in this moment, knowing that truth is living and will shift, knowing that by its nature it cannot be fixed or owned or secured.

 I began to see the mirror image as well.

The hypothetical “long-term woman” risks being placed on a pedestal - for the function she fulfils in a life plan. Mother of my children. Partner in my future security. Anchor of my identity. I was this woman.

In both cases, something essential, unexpected and beautiful can be missed: the intrinsic self.

 When permanence becomes the organising principle, the exquisite reality of what is actually being embodied is ignored.

Longevity vs Depth

What if the hierarchy itself is the distortion?

What if we have been programmed to believe that what lasts longer is inherently more meaningful?

What if the obsession with securing a future prevents us from fully inhabiting the present?

A Tantra teacher of mine once said that every relationship, every intimate encounter, can be approached as an opportunity to deepen connection - with self, with another, and with the beyond.

That teaching dismantled hierarchy for me in one fell swoop.

It allowed impermanence to be sacred, intimacy to be revelatory. And it allowed connection to matter even when it did not promise forever.

I know this from the inside now - loving in a way that chooses devotion over grasping, freedom over conditions, presence over self-protection. It is difficult and glorious.

The Questions

And so I find myself sitting with different questions now.

Perhaps the real questions are not about long-term versus short-term.

Perhaps they are these:

Am I choosing this relationship from fear - or from genuine desire?

Am I seeking certainty because I trust the connection, or because I don’t yet trust myself?

Do I know the difference between loving someone for who they are, and loving them for the role they play in my story?

And when I open - truly open - can I commit to the tending that closing requires?

At this point in my life, I am no longer defining myself in relation to others.

That shift - small in words, enormous in practice - has changed my experience of life and relationships dramatically. 

Every day is an exploration of who I am as a woman. And this practice has led me to the most beautiful intimacy I have known. Connections that I could only have glimpsed before, as though through glass. Some last longer than others. Each is met with an open heart and as much authenticity as I am capable of - and each time, a little more. 

This is not a renunciation of commitment. I remain open to sharing my life with a significant other again. But if that happens, I will arrive there differently - with eyes and heart wide open. With a capacity for vulnerability, love, and devotion that I could not have offered a few years ago.

And if I ever step into that again, it will be with someone who commits, as I do, to keep choosing from desire rather than obligation - over and over, as spiritual practice and discipline.

Someone who can meet me there.