Claimed. A Journey from Poor Rapunzel to Devotional Queen

You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs to Meet you King

Alphachanneling, Expanding Universe

After I left my ex fiance, one of the first (situation)ships I got into was with a man who was cheating on his girlfriend with me. I could feel in my bones that something shady was up, but I wasn’t willing to face the horror (shame) until he took us both out to lunch and pretended we weren’t fucking! 

omg. 

To highlight how willing I was to overlook my gut feeling, on our first date, as my ass was just about in my chair, he nearly pulled my arm out of its socket switcherooing me to the other side of the table. Presumably because there was someone there he didn’t want to see him. Red flag much? Yeah. I ignored it. He was hot. And I hadn’t been fucked well in 8 years.

The next was a tall, dark, and handsome man who lived in a nice loft with gigantic windows paired with a knack for leaving the country and calling me coked out of his mind at 3 am. Once, he sent me a string of nonsensical text messages from a houseboat in Amsterdam thinking I was some other woman. 

He made me feel like some other woman, too. One who wasn’t me. I guess that’s what I liked about him. We smoked cigarettes after sex and drank too much wine and in the morning he brought me coffee in bed before jetting off to work. He always told me to stay as long as I wanted, but after the coffee I didn’t know what to do. I guess I could’ve snooped. 

The next man, after five or so smooth as butter dates galavanting around the charming old neighborhoods of Baltimore and tucking into dark corners at only the most indie of bars, stood me up for a night out dancing. A week later, I texted him to ask what was up and he responded “I had the flu.”

Right. As if his thumbs had stopped working.

I went through a (way too long) string of men like this, and then, I discovered the world of polarity and the sacred feminine and started to go about things differently. 

Just before my discovery, I started dating a guy who was very nice, but was also (surprise surprise) high all the time, and was operating far too much from his feminine for my liking. I was furious that 90% of what he did was whine about how he couldn’t do what he really wanted to do, and the other 10% was get high about it. Plus I basically had to beg him to fuck me. Are you kidding? But I stayed with him because I was still in my “fixing” phase. You know what I’m talking about? I lied to myself to have a man at the expense of my actual desires.

Eventually, I found my way back to my desire; my feminine practice did what my teachers had promised it would — it evolved my consciousness. I couldn’t deny that the sinking feeling in my gut stemmed from the truth that our relationship just wasn’t working. So I womaned up and broke his heart. It only took two years. How’s that for an initiation?

Next came… we’ll just call him “spiritual” guy, except he was all mind games and astral planes and I was all water and earth. And when we fucked… it was like my pleasure wasn’t even a concern for him. I told him. “It felt like you didn’t even notice I was there, like I was just something for you to get your dick wet in” 

He didn’t like that very much. 

There is a photo he took of me sitting in a bathtub half smirking half laughing while flicking him off. I think it was the most honest moment we had together. I just wanted him out of my face. He didn’t much like that, either. He especially didn’t like when I asked him to leave so I could make my art the way I wanted to. 

Oh, did I mention I uprooted my life and flew across the country to be with him?

I woke up one morning, less than a month after arriving, knowing I was about to break his heart. too. I give him credit, though. This guy wanted to love me, but he really loved the idea of me.. He wrote poetry purporting to love me but when it came to actually loving me in all my non-obedient, creatively-independent woman-with-needs  glory… I guess he just couldn’t handle not being my daddy. 

Now back on the east coast, I dated a very mean man who was both a father (oh, his poor child) and who clearly had daddy issues. He was, I’m quite sure, a diagnosable narcissist who called me a fuck toy and had a truly evil snarl that still makes me recoil. We only lasted a couple months (which was a couple months too long), and when I called to break up with him, he hung up on me. 

The polarity between us seemed, at first, strong. But I’ve come to realize it was much more like a sinkhole than a force of attraction… I just collapsed, all my boundaries, all my desires, all my self worth… and fell into his control. 

That does not a loving relationship make. A hard learned lesson. 

Actually, I hadn’t learned quite yet. 

It was the next one that really incinerated me. Sent me into full surrender of the power of the goddess. And clarified the radical difference between polarity and love that, if we aren’t aware of it, can fuck us into relationships that just aren’t it at best, to abusive at worst.

First of all, this guy was married. Let’s get that out of the way. Polyamory was becoming “trendy,” at least in the circle I was (and no longer am) in, and since I’d been through a monsoon of failed attempts at monogamy, I figured, why not? 

Lying on the desecrated white sheets of the king size hotel bed after the second time we fucked, he told me he was falling in love with me. Welcome to the love bomb express! I was hooked, so starved for the love of a man, I believed him just because he said it. Ha!

Meanwhile I was the one putting in the effort, sharing my heart vulnerably, and being so understanding that he didn’t have time for me when he was tending to his wife. Of course he was falling in love with me. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m a fucking catch. And I was being more accommodating than any self respecting woman would ever be. 

It felt good to not be perceived as “too much” for someone. 

It felt like shit to not be the priority. 

But that wasn’t the only issue. When the haze cleared, I felt something was way off. 

Yep, you guessed it.

In addition to the fact that I was actually so not okay with being his side bitch, he failed to tell me his wife was actually so not okay with our situation, and that he’d given her an ultimatum after they were married: “either I’m gonna cheat on you, or you give me permission to fuck whomever I want.”

I’d never experienced so much disappointment in a man in my life. Nor so much disappointment in myself for not seeing the deceit, both his deceit, and my deceit of myself, sooner.

Let’s put all the lies aside for a moment and consider Love.

It took this experience for me to know in my bone marrow that the foundation for a loving relationship is rooted in loving myself so deeply that I am willing to say no. Becoming so attuned to my inner world that I can break my own spells — and having so much self compassion that I can let a lover help. Letting my desire to be loved, seen, held be purified through the deep, dark, thick of my heart. Trusting my inner feeling, trusting it more than the story I may be telling. Letting mutual devotion grow from unconditional presence to what’s here now. 

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

— Simone Weil

Needless to say, after learning of the web of lies, I was over it. He didn’t love me, he wanted to have his wife and eat someone else's cake, too. 

The grief cracked my heart open. I finally knew, without a doubt, what I needed. Monogamy. Devotion. To be the Beloved. 

A leaky container just wasn’t gonna cut it. Not for this depth queen.

So what did I learn from all of the above?

1. Good sex for me is not about sex. At least… sex isn’t the foundation of good sex. Sex is where the magic of love comes alive if you really are in a loving relationship. And for me, if there’s no love, there’s no point.

2. I am here for deep, soul shattering penetration. I am also here to shatter illusions. On my nightstand are a dagger (yes, really) and a lamp, and I know how to use them.

3. I am here to polarize and be polarizing. I yearn for depth most people will never touch. I am willing to do the hard work of transformation most people never get to the other side of because they give up when the change isn’t instantaneous.

All of this led to the grand realization that devotional love is what I’ve always yearned for.. It’s what gets me hot and bothered. It’s also what I was terrified to clarify… until I met Luke.

Once I got through my Rapunzel complex (we’re friends now) and realized I didn’t need to be saved by a man (rather, by myself), devoting myself to love — radically, recklessly — was the most transformational, heart expanding choice I’ve ever made.

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I chilled out on men for over a year before I started seeing Luke. And let me tell you this: the moment we passed through the one-foot-in one-foot-out threshold and dove all in with each other is the moment I started losing my mind — going wild for myself, for him, for our love. Because I felt, as I never had before, safely contained within our relationship. I felt held, loved, penetrated with his presence. But I had to go first. I had to hold my desire fiercely, unconditionally. 

I had at long last claimed my soul’s desire for devotion, and I felt claimed for this grand opening of my own heart. 

Once I felt this, I bloomed like a peony. 

As always, thank you for being here and sharing space with me. I would love to know about your experiences of relationship. What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned through relationships so far? Let me know in the comments. 

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xx Faye