Still absorbing and processing....... all that great sex and feeling closer to you and knowing you better. Still thinking about all the complexity or seeming complexity of having such an amazingly physically intimate relationship and having that be such a good friendship that sometimes seems to pose possibilities of morphing, because how could it not, given all our conditioning and instincts. Yet, I know that we are where we should be, you and I.

What I still wrestle with is the clear duality in my Home Life. Home Life is wife and family and dog and house and friends and all that I love about my environs. Home Life is also my love relationship that I see more clearly is distorted to the point of dysfunction and about which I know not what to do. We have talked about compartmentalizing one's life and I have always thought about that as my relationship with you vs. my at home self. Now I realize that it is my at home self that is compartmentalized as much as anything; maybe the only significant compartmenting, in fact. I am more congruent with you and who I am with you feels more like who I am at home, except for my relationship to my wife. My relationship with her is compartmented into my wife as a part of the whole Home Life and to my wife as Home Life partner/spouse. When I think of how I behave and think and feel about former compartment, I have this honesty and ease and give and take that I have with you. When I think about how I behave and think and feel with the latter (my wife) compartment, it is always a "work around", a compensating, a bridging of the gap.

Yet, there she is, part of the whole Home Life compartment and I am so fond of that experience of her. How do I deal with the brokenness of the other spouse compartment when it involves the same woman?

This is the insight of this trip. And this is the conundrum I am left with and for which I have no clear notion of the path forward nor the time required to resolve the incongruity.

You know, I honestly think that the 2 hours of straight coupling actually helped bring this out. I was driven to a place of pure instinct and stripped to primality. It was as if the physical grounding in such a basic way made the over-reaching compensation of my mental/emotional constructs about my Home life compartments, more visible as anomalous instead of as normal.

Emyn, I took a big risk taking you on this journey of reflection with me, as I said yesterday, because it could be so hard to be this close to me, looking at the possible changes in my life, and to not wonder how the possibilities might affect you. I know you will try very hard to stay in an objective and mental space on all this, yet I also know that the emotions will take their own journey. That is not to say that you can't trust yourself to know what you want and make good choices, nor does it say that I don't trust you. This is to say that I know that I put a burden on you, increasing your psychological workload, if you will. Please make sure to keep me posted on how you are feeling and what you need from me so that you will be assured that I am being authentic and honest, too.

I will be back on ______, late at night. I will be wrapping up with my client on ______. I hope we can spend some time together. I promise to hold my issues in the background so that I can be really present to you regarding your reactions to Carl's visit, and so we can give ourselves a good, clean-fun workout again, as long as that won't feel like too much on top of Carl's visit.

In the meantime, I hope your thighs recover. I hope your new commitment to physical fitness got a boost from our athletics. I hope your time with Carl works out well and that you come out of it with a good and clear sense of what that relationship means to you.

Here's a hug,

Cliff