Meet David. He Will Help You To Love
I think David Daniels just raised everyone’s relationships and intimacy game
During her recent BBC Live Lounge appearance, Taylor Swift said “people think they know what unconditional love is. But would you still love somebody if they didn’t love you back? That’s unconditional love.”
Now I like Swift, and I am not averse to taking love advice from her. But her definition of unconditional love? I don’t like it. I’m not even sure it’s right.
Here’s where I would go with the definition:
Unconditional love-giving — the capacity to love without conditions — is a skill that most of us can’t, won’t, will never have.
That’s right: the experience of, and by extension the capacity for, unconditional love is just not even possible for most people. It needs to be learned (more accurately, you have to unlearn some things).
By most people, I mean you, me, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, my boyfriend, your husband, and your wife. Oh, and your mum and dad (let’s not forget the ultimate of the ultimate in conditional lovers.)
This limitation of ours is not inherent to the human condition — far from it. Awakened beings at their essence know themselves as unconditional love.
As with most challenges of a global epidemic proportion, it is an issue of consciousness. More accurately, lack thereof.
And on this particular issue, the ever-growing challenge of loving in our very modern relationships is one riddled with misconceptions. We need mentors, and we need them fast.
Enter the late David Daniels.
And David Deida. (But mostly, David Daniels.)
David Deida (a Mentor of Sorts)
61-year old David Deida is an American author who writes about the sexual and spiritual relationship between men and women. His seminal work is The Way of the Superior Man. You may have heard of it or even read it. I’ve just finished reading it, and what a hoot it was.
I bought this book for my boyfriend, after being recommended it time and time again by male friends.
There was no way I wasn’t going to read it myself. Not with a title like that.
Personally, I have been until now a little perplexed by discussions pertaining to the correct roles of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. I have found such discussions to inspire feelings of boredom, or else I get pissed off. I think this has been ever since I encountered Tony Robbins’ teachings on the subject (who, quelle surprise, appears on the back page of Deida’s book as the chief endorser.)
I adore Bobbins, as I affectionately call him. The guy is dripping with love, and he is a genius at making money. However, I do not find him helpful on the subject of men and women. I haven’t found it helpful since I was oppressed by a former boyfriend, a Bobbins’ disciple.
I acknowledge there are differences between men and women. I’m not a complete doofus!
But to my mind at least, there are more interesting, honest ways of accounting for the presence of the personal qualities that have been designated as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. Ways that don’t discriminate on gender. The Enneagram is one such accounting-for mechanism.
And (I’m just shooting at the hip now but) possibly if we raised our kids in a less gender-aware way, then we might over time witness less dogma in how each gender manifests itself. Our relationships, people in general, would be freer of ‘shoulds’, and in partnership, we could each animate our masculine and feminine energies with greater flexibility and as the situation calls.
After all, we are all born with masculine and feminine, whether you have a vagina down there or a penis. The fact that we do not exhibit the associated traits (or rather the extent to which we do not, given this is virtually a given in our development), is more of a clue to repressed or hidden psychic material than anything else.
Anyway, back to Deida. Where do I start? As the title suggests, this is a highly provocative read. With Chapter’s such as ‘Each Woman Has a ‘Temperature’ That Can Heal or Irritate You’, and ‘She Wants the ‘Killer’ in You’, David’s a pretty funny guy.
I’d go through and systematically refute nearly all of David’s points, but praise the lord, he has spared me the work by issuing a sort of disclaimer in the introduction:
“For some people who have what I call a more balanced sexual essence, sexual polarity doesn’t really matter. They don’t really want much passion or intimacy. They don’t want a loving tussle full of sexual inspiration and innuendo. They would rather have a civilized friendship full of love and human sharing without the passionate ups and downs. And for these people, this book will be irrelevant, possibly even offensive.”
Yep.
David’s central premise is that men (or women) with what he calls a highly ‘masculine essence’ need partners with highly feminine essences. Without that, your sex and your relationship are up shit creek. For men (or women) that are interested in mastering their innately masculine sexual essence, the book is a guide. Go for it.
For me, I did find the descriptions of both of the polarities ‘divine feminine and masculine’ a little problematic. Since both are concepts grounded in spirituality rather than science, definitions can vary depending on who you ask. And I just personally wouldn’t ask David. If the divine feminine is an unwieldy beast, totally ruled by her emotions, then she doesn’t evoke inspiration in me. I prefer to have the divine feminine represented through the Archetypes, for example.
Paradoxically perhaps, I did see myself in this description from Chapter titled ‘Her Complaint is Content Free’:
“Women are always wanting a divine masculine presence in a man, regardless of their specific complaint or mood. A man should hear his woman’s complaints like warning bells, and then do his best to align his life with his truth and purpose. However, if he believes in the literal content of her complaint, he will immediately go off course, for the content reflects her present mood more than careful observation of his tendencies over time. Her complaint should be valued as a reminder to “get it together”, and perhaps as an indication as to how. But more often than not, the specifics of her complaint do not describe the real, underlying action or tendency that needs to be changed.”
He seems to have captured quite well some of the counter-productive behaviors that can emerge in an intimate relationship.
This book is useful to expose your thinking to, if only to notice your own insecurities, hang-ups and triggers around its messages. In this way, it is a useful self-discovery tool.
Plus, underneath what David is communicating is a solid grasp of what is everybody's truest nature.
Love. Pure love.
David Daniels (the Main-event Mentor)
The late David Daniels MD was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medical School. More important, he was a leading developer of the Enneagram system of personality, and co-author of the bestseller, The Essential Enneagram.
If you haven’t heard of the Enneagram, you might want to stop reading this article right now and read this article. Right now. Since I discovered the Enneagram, sharing its existence has assumed a high priority in my life. It was part of the reason I wrote my book. It was the reason I decided to train as a coach, with a coaching institute which I knew incorporated the Enneagram as a lens.
As a long-time student of the Enneagram, I had consulted David’s blogs and other writings for years before I read his last book, his life’s work. His research and work with couples, as detailed in his book The Enneagram, Relationships and Intimacy, is groundbreaking. He offers a way to become aware of how we place conditions on love based on Enneagram type.
His book is a must-read. It is no light read, and definitely not a hoot like the other David’s book. However, the information in Chapter 10 (‘What Separates Us from One Another and from Ourselves’) is so important it inspired me to dust off my typing fingers to type this article.
This could really be the answer and help we are all looking for in repairing modern relationships.
Here’s David’s theory in snapshot summary.
Love is a practiced state of mind and being
I do hope you have already come to terms with this definition of love. This is, I feel, one of those areas of confusion I mentioned in the beginning.
One of the foundations of both Davids’ postulations is that love is a set of choices, a cultivated state of awareness. From the Enneagram, Relationships and Intimacy:
“Love is not an accident. It is not random. It is a practiced state of mind and the basis of all higher states of wellbeing. In its truest form, love is imbued and expressed with freewill. It is generated from within us, wilfully and conscientiously, without conditions and expectations.”
Love is not a feeling that comes and goes. It’s a state of being, that you practice.
Non-acceptance and judgment will be the death of your relationship
Question: What happens when you begin to get the sense that your partner doesn’t accept some aspect of you? How does that feel? Does it feel nice, or pretty shitty?
Unless you truly don’t care what they think (in which case, I would question why you are together!), then you will probably try to exile the unacceptable thing, downplay it, or suppress it. Worse yet, you might take that part of yourself completely offline when you are with your partner. I don’t think I need to point out the damaging effects of this.
We all judge others and place conditions on our love for them, resulting in immense suffering. We just do. Non-acceptance of others is an extension of the conditions we place around accepting ourselves. From David:
“Conditional love for ourselves winds up being conditional love for others too — our partners and our children, family members, and coworkers. Whether the unmet conditions are expressed as judgments, a lack of acceptance, or as unfulfilled expectations being placed on the unsuspecting other.”
Your type structure clues you into how you don’t accept yourself, and by extension others
“Through understanding, and growing our awareness of, how our type structure sets up conditions for love and acceptance, we can take a new journey. Whilst that journey starts with ourselves, it’s one that can lead to a fascinating and rewarding discovery with others.”
How we condition ourselves right out of a loving self-acceptance is how we’ll inevitably play out that same non-acceptance, at some point, onto in particular our partners.
How many times has your smuggest mate told you that you have to love yourself before you can hope to experience it? Well, it turns out the little blighter was right the whole time!
So now you know what to do.
Learn your type. Discover the conditions you place on lovability — your own and others. Observe yourself projecting those same conditions onto your lover. Stop it. Love.
Unconditionally.
