Navigating Intimacy, Passion, & Commitment

Lessons learned from marriage, divorce, and love's triangle.

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Hello, hello my dear friends!

I am so excited to be here with you. Thanks for being such a special part of my circle.

Let’s get started with this week’s micro issue of my Little Black Book of hot off the press, favorite finds plus tried and true, time tested treasures.

1. Last week I attended a really interesting workshop on How to Discover Your Own Personal Meaning in the Tarot, hosted by

   Elise Loehnen
   author of Pulling The Thread on Substack. The class was taught by Mark Horn who has studied both Kabbalah and Tarot with some of the most respected teachers in each discipline. When asked what decks he likes, of those he listed, the Salvador Dalí Universal Tarot Gold Edition immediately called to me. Based on the Tarot tradition and Salvador Dalí’s profound knowledge of European art history, Dalí created a series of original gouaches only a collector could dream of. The long sold-out limited-edition printed decks were re-released by Taschen with an accompanying book, Dalí. Tarot, written by tarot expert Johannes Fiebig. I fell in love when my set arrived.

2. Along with the aforementioned deck, I am loving author Jessica Hundley’s fascinating history of Tarot as explored in Tarot. The Library of Esoterica. She dives into the symbolic meaning behind more than 500 cards and works of original art, two thirds of which have never been published outside of the decks themselves. It's the “first ever visual compendium of its kind, spanning from Medieval to modern, and artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana.”

3. Lastly, I have found the guest chairs for my office! The Nautilus swivel lounge chairs are also from Vladimir Kagan which I had no idea when I first saw and fell in love with their curves. The final fabric selection has not yet been made, so more to come on that front.

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Dear Friends,

This week marked my husband’s and my 18 year wedding anniversary. For

Lisa Quinn

this week marked the powerful reflection on the end of her marriage.

Her telling in I love my husband…which is why I am divorcing him. (a beautifully honest read I highly recommend) shared on

Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr

(a brilliant newsletter I also highly recommend) hollowed me out in a way where you pause, reflect, and look at your own situation with an eye of inquest.

Could it be a cautionary tale for me? Are parts of her story mine too? What lesson within her brave account of her journey was exactly meant for me to read today and why?

We experience so much in an intimate, committed relationship that traverses long stretches of time. Demands of career, children, extended family and the daily obligations of life require an outsized amount of time in relation to the 24 hours we have to work within. There is always an “outlier” knocking, clamoring for an acute deposit of our time, be it the holidays, a work deadline, a trying chapter in our child’s world or development. But it is never really an outlier, because once that “one-off” pressure commences, another one, just as seemingly important, fills its place.

So often those closest to us become the people we steal time away from, “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” We tell ourselves that our partner understands. And, yes, because they love us, support us, and identify with us, they do understand.

However, the risk is that the time diverted away from spending with our partner, just as one borrows from a generous and benevolent line of credit, compounds our debenture exponentially. We eventually can find that our relationship is running at a deficit. That we are in the red if we have not paid back our time away with time together. That something has been sacrificed and ‘that something’ is too often the connection that keeps a relationship healthy and strong. Alive even. The crucial lever of intimacy, that is unique to a husband and wife, strained, stretched, and perhaps even injured. Insidiously. Imperceptibly. Until it is glaringly undeniable. The declaration, “We have grown apart.” This is the risk of the daily demands of life usurping.

This same week I read a fascinating paper on Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love which has been proven universal through research across 25 countries. There are many theories on love, including those of Freud and Maslow’s, to name a few, but according to Sternberg, he found that there are three main components of love, each of them encompassing different emotions, manifesting different aspects of love.

The three components are intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Together they can be viewed as framing the vertices of a metaphorical triangle. Intimacy, the top vertex of the triangle, “refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships. It thus includes within its purview those feelings that tie us, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship.” It also deals with how trusting one feels toward another and how well they can communicate together. Passion, the left-handed vertex of the triangle, “refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships.” Lastly, decision/commitment, the right-handed vertex of the triangle, “refers, in the short-term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long-term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love.”

Although the three components are separable, they can and do interact in different ways with each other, leading to different types of love in our relationship. While “all three are important parts of loving relationships, their importance may differ from one relationship to another, or over time within a given relationship.”

The eight combinations of love, according to Sternberg are…

1. None of the three = non love

2. Intimacy = friendship

3. Passion = infatuated love

4. Commitment = empty love

5. Intimacy + passion = romantic love

6. Intimacy + commitment = companionate love

7. Passion + commitment = foolish or fatuous love

8. Intimacy + passion + commitment = complete or consummate love

Where it gets interesting to me is that Sternberg’s theory of love is both diagnostic and prescriptive. We can take a look at his eight combinations of love and evaluate the balance or imbalance of the vertexes of our unique relationship and quickly conclude which lever(s) are we rocking and which ones need more attention in order for our relationship to better thrive.

All living things ebb and flow including our relationships. It is the nature of life. We breath in and we breath out. The sun rises and it sets. The tide comes in and washes out. Our lives and our relationships experience cycles, rhythms, and seasons.

What I have personally found at the 18 year mark of marriage is that each of our love stories are a journey deeper into ourselves independently and together as a couple.

What do we value, what do we need, and importantly what matters most to us?

I believe that we choose each other as teachers and as mirrors. If we are lucky, we not only challenge, but also inspire and help each other to expand and evolve for the better.

I have also found that what we believe, and specifically what we put our attention on, grows. The stories we tell ourselves become our reality. Which interestingly falls within Sternberg’s idea of love as a story, the concept being “that we all have a set of stories of love," and these ideas we have of love tell us what we think a relationship should be and thus govern how our relationships play out.

I have the story of ‘marriage can end in divorce’ being a daughter from divorced parents. I have the story of ‘happily ever after’ from the Cinderella Disney fairy tale I grew up reading and watching. I have the story of being loved by my birth family but that love feeling conditional, therefore I constantly strive to be good enough to be loved, often falling short it seems. All of which, plus other conscious and unconscious notions, conventions, fears, and desires I bring into my relationship.

The beauty though, is that we get to write and rewrite our story. It is not set in stone. We are the authors of our lives. And so I consciously prune the stories that are saboteurs, careful to not borrow other people’s stories as if they are my own. And I do the work that is mine to do. Because everywhere I go, there I am.

Lisa Quinn wrote,

“Neither of us know what the complete end of this marriage has in store for us. But we are finally putting all the care and thought and love into ending our marriage as perhaps we should have done into keeping it going all those years ago.”

And this, I realize, is exactly what I was meant to take away from Lisa’s generous share. The cautionary tale to not get overly caught up and lost in the demands of life that result in husband and wife cheating time away from each other. The reminder to tend and nurture our relationship today with care, thought, and love, for what we do today determines our tomorrow.

xoxo,