You can have everything: flawless logistics, childcare handled, successful careers, and properties that confirm your status, while at the same time feeling like a tenant in your own marriage.
For years I too believed that I was supporting my partner if I sacrificed myself. That is what grandmothers, mothers, and teachers taught me; it was the base from which we grew, a generationally programmed sacrifice that we even accepted as standard through jokes with Žuži Jelinjak.
My world collapsed in two acts:
The first turning point happened when my body brutally stopped me. Six months lying in bed, afraid of the next meal, unable to run my yoga studio, taught me what reason could not: my eros was trapped in the familiar and safe. It stagnated because it lacked change and challenge.
The second turning point happened in the middle of the chaos we had created by putting work before home. I realized that I had begun projecting all the dissatisfaction with my own choices onto my partner's back.
Only when I sobered up, took responsibility for my highest good, and actively participated in creating a new home did the energy in our relationship begin to change.
The trap of functionality: From lovers to symbiotic roommates
Most couples today live in exactly this trap. You have become excellent co-owners of life, but you have forgotten how to be lovers. Erotic polarity is lost, and the person across the table stops being attractive because they have become only a partner in agreements about obligations. The problem is not a lack of love. The problem is that you have moved into the head and the rational, while your body remains silent.
In order to heal a partnership, we need to ask an important question: Who is actually sleeping in your bed?
Often it is not us who enter intimacy, but our armor, the masks that bring us success outside, while making us strangers within four walls.
The most common example I meet in my work is the dynamic of
the Good Girl and the Solid Warrior.
On the surface, this is a couple everyone envies. Successful, organized, and reliable. But inside, they are energetically empty.
The Good Girl draws power from control. She has learned that love is a reward for usefulness. She holds the logistics in her head and patches emotional holes, while her nervous system is constantly on alert.
The price: Without releasing control there is no surrender, and without surrender there is no orgasm, and sex becomes just another item on the to-do list.
The Solid Warrior is the mirror of the Good Girl. He draws his value from endurance. He is the rock that carries the financial burden and the one who must not show vulnerability. The price: He becomes emotionally numb so he can carry the load. He stops being present in his body and most often exploits his own body mercilessly. Sensibility and sensuality disappear, and the right hand becomes the only source of tension regulation, but not a place of contact with himself.
As such, as a couple you become a symbiotic survival team.
Safety is at its maximum, but excitement is zero.
You become brother and sister managing a joint-stock company called “our life”.
There is no room for Eros in this dynamic. Eros asks for play and freedom from usefulness. You no longer meet as man and woman, but as two suits of armor colliding.
Here another trap appears, the one that saddens me most as a therapist: postponing and denying.
It is most painful for me to witness a couple coming to therapy when one person already has one foot out of the relationship. Then I hear sentences that cut like a knife: “For years I have been trying to reach you, but you do not see me. I cannot do this anymore.”
Only then does the other person wake up, ready to do anything. But often it is too late.
In my soul, sadness and anger resonate then with the question:
Why did you not come while there was still fire in you, and not only ashes?
Today at least there are therapists, tools, support... why did you wait??
Everything could have been different, if only you had reached out at the moment when you noticed that eros and aliveness were no longer there.
So do not wait for the walls of your emotional home to start cracking.
Real intimacy requires responsibility and an end to asking our partner to build us a home, emotional or physical.
And one more thing: education without somatic experience is only gathering information.
You can understand why you fight, but until you locate that contraction in the body, you remain blocked.
Returning home, together
For couples who want more than average, who want to be creators of satisfied and fulfilled lives, I created a space for deep work:
Retreat Guštamo
This is not a classic weekend getaway; this is a deconstruction of armor and a somatic awakening of eros in a safe environment.
With maximum privacy (only 8 couples) and professional guidance, we return to our own skin so you can truly see again the person within yourself and the person beside you.
Find details and registration here:
https://goranaradetic.com/gustamo-brown-preview.html