Waking up in Romantic Relationship: Romantic Attention. The Spiritual Opportunities and Pitfalls, for Individuals and at Scale.

How does the structure of your relationships shape your inner life?

The tantric traditions have much to say about desire and devotion. How we love shapes who we become. I see our relational choices are not merely lifestyle preferences but spiritual practices, whether we recognize them as such or not. As I travel in an out of many global communities, I hear many people pretty confused about the form of their intimacy. The institution of marriage, built on property law and purity anxiety, no longer commands automatic allegiance. New forms proliferate (ethical non-monogamy, relationship anarchy, polycules, solo polyamory) each with its own vocabulary, its own ethics, AND its own wounds. Many times, when people attempt to expand how they play in relationship, it’s a steep learning curve, and pain comes. Suffering comes. When that happens, there are often contractions back to the Hallmark Christmas movie sort of ideal of comfort. I’m not looking at this topic idealistically through this “you complete me” sort of lens, nor advocating for any form over the other. The essay is a more phenomenological clarity: what actually happens, spiritually and energetically, when we choose one path or another? What becomes possible? What is foreclosed?

To your complete pleasure, joy and awakening. I would love to hear from you.

Christine

Part I: The Starting Point

Human beings are not, by nature, monogamous creatures. We are capable of deep, real, and transformative love for many people, simultaneously and across time. The heart is not a finite resource that depletes with each attachment. We can fall in love at sixty with the same thunderclap intensity as at sixteen. We can hold tenderness for former lovers decades after parting. We can feel our hearts open to a stranger in a single afternoon and remain open.

This is the nature of the heart: vast, responsive, fundamentally generous.

And yet. Much of what has passed for monogamy in human history has not been a celebration of this vastness but a constriction of it. Monogamy as an institution emerged from the practical concerns of property, inheritance, and paternity. For most of history, and still now in many places on Earth, it was an arrangement between families rather than individuals, enforced through religious sanction and social shame. Women were property; fidelity meant ownership; purity was an economic concept masquerading as a spiritual principle. (Noting here that I’m not including polygamous cultures, whether polygyny or polyandry, but the dominant western form of the last 100 years that we are living in.)

This is the monogamy that contemporary critics rightly question. When someone says, “I don’t believe in monogamy,” they are often rejecting the cage of possession, the jealousy codified as virtue, the surveillance of women’s bodies in service of men’s certainty about their heirs. This rejection is healthy. IMHO, this version of monogamy deserves to die.

But there is another monogamy, one that has nothing to do with property or purity. This is monogamy as devotional choice: the free decision to concentrate one’s erotic and romantic attention on a single beloved, not because society demands it but because something in the soul calls for it. This monogamy isn’t a cage but a crucible, not a constriction of love’s vastness but a concentration of it.

One makes love small; the other reveals love’s depth.

Similarly, open relationship can be practiced unconsciously. It can be an avoidance, as distraction, as a kind of relational consumption. OR it can be practiced consciously, as a genuine honoring of love’s multiplicity, as an ethical commitment to honesty and freedom.

It all depends on what level of consciousness is within the form.

Part II: Two Kinds of Attentional Presence

As a baseline, I want distinguish between two radically different kinds of presence, each offering its own spiritual riches, as these feed directly into the conversation on relationship structures.

Complete attention in the moment is the aperture practice. The now-gate. Fully here, fully open, for this encounter, this breath, this person before you. It can happen with anyone: a stranger on a train, a beloved of thirty years, a child, a dying parent, a fleeting connection that lasts an afternoon and never recurs. This is the flash of what Martin Buber called I-Thou: the moment when another person ceases to be an object in your world and becomes a presence that addresses you, calls forth your presence in return. This form of presence is real, valuable, and available to anyone willing to show up. It is the proof that love can happen anywhere, with anyone, at any time.

Complete and sustained attention over time is something else entirely. A slow cooking. This form of presence asks something the first cannot ask: Will you still choose this when it’s boring? When it’s ugly? When you’ve seen everything and nothing is new?

The momentary presence offers revelation. The sustained presence offers transformation.

This distinction is crucial because our culture has increasingly valorized the first kind of presence while quietly abandoning the second. “Be here now” becomes the entire teaching, extracted from its original context in traditions that also valued lineage, commitment, and sustained practice. Presence-in-the-moment becomes the whole of spirituality, and conveniently, it requires nothing beyond the moment. No future. No cost. No becoming.

But the great mystical traditions knew better. In Kashmir Shaivism, the concept of ekāgratā or one-pointed attention is foundational. The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, that ancient compendium of 112 meditation techniques, is structured around dhāraṇā, which literally means “holding.” The practices don’t say, “Attend to seventeen objects simultaneously and discover their essence.” They say: take one doorway and go all the way through.

This is an architecture of depth.

Abhinavagupta, the great tenth-century master, speaks of how consciousness recognizes itself through limitation voluntarily embraced, limitation as intensification. A river carves the canyon precisely because it doesn’t spread everywhere. Light becomes laser when concentrated.

Momentary presence and sustained presence are different sādhanas (different spiritual practices) with different fruits. Neither is superior. But they are not interchangeable: The person who seeks the riches of sustained attention through a series of momentary encounters will not find them. The person who seeks the freedom of spontaneous connection through rigid commitment may strangle what they love.

Part III: The Topology of Relationship

Long Arcs and Mind-Blowing Drop-Ins

Having distinguished two kinds of presence, we can now describe a more honest topology of how love actually moves in a human life.

Long-arc morphing containers are relationships that shape-shift across years, even decades. A lover becomes a friend becomes a collaborator becomes something unnamed. The form changes but the love doesn’t end. These are the relationships you stay loyal to, tending the living thing as it asks to become something else. You don’t sever; you transmute. We dissolve the form, keep the treasure, and recast it.

This capacity to transmute rather than sever is precious. We don’t have to cling OR cut. There is the possibility of loyalty to the connection itself, not to any fixed form. The structure can evolve from lover to friend to something language doesn’t have words for. Unless there has been true cruelty or betrayal or you are truly operating from different value systems and overlapping interests, why sever at all?

Drop-ins are different. These are moments of complete presence with someone that don’t ask for arc. They’re not prelude to anything. They’re not failed long-arcs. They’re their own complete form. A single afternoon that remains whole. A connection at a retreat, a conference, a chance meeting that opens something, leaves its gift, and closes without grasping.

This is a different form, but not a lesser form. It moves through, blesses, and departs. It doesn’t scatter attention because you’re not leaving one thing for it. It’s not an exit from commitment but a visitation within a committed life.

The person who lives only in drop-ins and calls them relationships has confused intensity for intimacy. But the person who refuses all drop-ins, who insists every connection must become a long arc or be rejected, has confused form with essence.

Part IV: The Case for Devotional Monogamy

Let us make the case for choosing one:

When you choose one person completely, something becomes possible that cannot happen any other way. The noise falls away. The scanning stops. The part of the psyche that was always keeping options open, always wondering if something better might arrive, relaxes. In that relaxation, a different kind of attention becomes available.

This is what David Deida points to when he writes about polarity deepening through sustained attention. The erotic charge between two people who keep choosing each other becomes a kind of spiritual electricity that casual connection cannot generate. He speaks of worship through the body, which requires a consistency of gaze.

Esther Perel , approaching from an entirely different angle, notes that eroticism requires otherness, mystery, a gap to cross. Counter-intuitively, sustained monogamy can keep regenerating that mystery. You’re not seeking novelty externally but discovering that the person you’ve chosen is genuinely inexhaustible. The same face, seen every day, becomes stranger and more wondrous when you learn to look.

In the tantric traditions, the consort relationship isn’t about variety. It’s about finding the one who can hold the full transmission. Finding the one whose nervous system, whose capacity, whose own realization creates the circuit for something to move that couldn’t move alone. Multiple mirrors show you many faces of yourself. One doorway takes you somewhere else entirely.

There is an energy economy here. Our attention, unlike our capacity for love, is finite. Each intimate connection draws attention. There’s nothing wrong with tending multiple fields, but something different becomes possible when all the water goes to one garden.

The Kashmiri tradition would frame this as śakti having infinite potential but manifesting most powerfully through focused channels. Radiance doesn’t come from multiplying inputs. It comes from reduction, concentration, the gathering of scattered light into coherence.

Thomas Merton, from the Christian contemplative tradition, wrote about how the monk’s vow is not a denial of love’s expansiveness but a concentration of it. By removing options, something else becomes possible. A laser versus a lamp.

And there is this: the person who has chosen completely has a certain presence. They’re not leaking attention into possibility-space, not holding their partner provisionally while remaining available for better. They’re here. Fully. This presence can be felt. It creates safety. It allows depth.

Chögyam Trungpa spoke of spiritual partnership as requiring the willingness to be completely seen. This means we show beyond curation: the exposed, ugly, unfinished parts. The devoted relationship removes the exits. When one mirror shows something uncomfortable, you cannot flee to another that flatters. You must stay. And in staying, you are worked.

Presence without fidelity is consumption.

This is perhaps the crux. The consumed moment leaves no residue. It feeds but does not nourish. The appetite returns, identical, demanding novelty. That’s the signature of consumption.

Fidelity, by contrast, is the practice that actually changes the practitioner. You don’t come back to the same person the same way twice, because the sustained attention has changed both you.

Part V: The Case for Conscious Open Relationship

The Web of Many

Having made the case for one, let us make the case (and equally sincerely) for many.

For some people, the path of multiplicity is not avoidance but genuine orientation. Their souls are structured differently. They find the divine not in depth of focus but in breadth of connection. The web rather than the well.

Multiple intimate relationships offer their own spiritual gifts. Different partners reveal different facets of self. Each is a mirror that reflect back aspects you might never discover with only one witness. There’s a kind of self-knowledge that comes only from being known variously, from discovering you’re not the same person with everyone, from integrating these multiple selves into something larger, as well as a Self-knowledge in knowing how many different faces the divine has, in a more intimate way.

There is also freedom from possession and its shadows. The polyamorous person, when practicing well, has had to confront jealousy directly rather than avoiding it through ownership. They’ve had to develop a different relationship with insecurity, with the fear of abandonment, with the need to control. This is genuine spiritual work.

And there is the village model, which has the distributed care, and a web of intimacy that doesn’t depend on one person to meet all needs. This can be more resilient, more sustainable, more honest about human limitation. No one person can be everything to another. The nuclear couple, isolated from community, often buckles under that impossible expectation.

When open relationship works, each connection receives real presence, not scraps. The primary container, if there is one, is nourished first and fully—multiplicity happens from overflow rather than deficit. There is no ranking of partners against each other, no using one to escape another, no consuming people as experiences.

The conscious polyamorist has made an art of the moment. An art of arriving fully for each connection, honoring its particular essence, releasing it without grasping. They’ve often developed extraordinary communication skills, the ability to hold complexity, a generous heart that genuinely delights in a partner’s other loves.

Part VI: The Pitfalls

Where Each Path Goes Wrong

The Pitfalls of Monogamy

• Staying out of ideology rather than love. The grit-your-teeth version of fidelity—maintaining the form long after the life has left it, enduring rather than growing, using commitment as cage rather than crucible. This is its own violence. It serves no one.

• Using the other as possession rather than mystery. When monogamy becomes about ownership, control, surveillance—when jealousy is mistaken for devotion and restriction for love—the relationship deadens. Two people slowly crushing each other while calling it commitment.

• Collapsing into the couple and abandoning community. The nuclear unit that walls itself off, that meets all needs internally, that hoards resources and attention. Love privatized, removed from the commons. This is monogamy in service of isolation.

The Pitfalls of Open Relationship

• Polyamory as hobby. This is the word that emerged in my reflection: hobby. Not as dismissal but as precise description. There’s a quality of collection that can enter—a gathering of mirrors, each reflecting a different facet of self, picked up and set down according to mood. Hobbies nourish, entertain, expand. But they don’t cook you.

• The architecture of escape. When one relationship gets difficult, another is available. When one mirror shows something uncomfortable, you can turn to one that flatters. Multiplicity becomes the avoidance of depth—never staying long enough to be truly seen, truly changed.

• Mistaking intensity for intimacy. The perpetual seeker of the new-relationship-energy high, confusing the electricity of beginning with the warmth of depth. Chasing the aperture experience while never building the sustained container. A kind of relational sugar addiction.

The Shared Pitfall: The Anxiety of Wrong Choice

This afflicts both paths but shows up differently in each.

The anxiety of wrong choice is the emotional architecture of late capitalism applied to love. The same logic that keeps us refreshing feeds, convinced something better is one swipe away. FOMO as relationship structure.

It’s not really fear of choosing wrong. It’s fear of choosing at all. Because choosing means foreclosing. Means the death of other possibilities. And we’ve become a culture terrified of that small death.

Kierkegaard saw this coming. His “aesthetic stage” of existence is precisely this—the person who keeps all options open, who tastes everything, commits to nothing, and eventually discovers that infinite possibility is indistinguishable from despair. He argued you don’t escape anxiety by avoiding choice. You pass through anxiety by choosing anyway, irrevocably, without guarantee.

Renata Salecl, a contemporary philosopher, writes about the “tyranny of choice”. The proliferation of options doesn’t liberate us but paralyzes us. We become curators of our own lives rather than livers of them.

Scanning the horizon is a posture. It keeps you oriented toward what’s not here. The body leans forward, slightly dissociated from present ground. The person you’re with becomes a placeholder, held provisionally while you remain available for something better. They can feel it. That partial presence. And so the very thing you’re scanning for (the right one, the real one) cannot arrive, because arrival requires a host who has stopped scanning.

Simone Weil called attention the rarest form of generosity. The horizon-scanner cannot give it.

Here’s the counter-intuitive move: you will choose wrong. There is no “right” that exists prior to your choosing. The rightness is created by the choice itself, by the fidelity, by the continued turning-toward. You make it right by staying.

Part VII: Completion Versus Escape

How to Know the Difference

Nothing I’ve said should be taken as an argument that one must stay forever, in any form. We do outgrow people. Relationships do complete.

But can you notice the difference between leaving because you’re scanning and leaving because you’ve genuinely completed?

There’s a kind of bow in true completion, a gratitude, a release that doesn’t grasp backward or lean forward. You’re not fleeing toward the next thing. You’re simply done. The circuit fulfilled its purpose.

James Hillman wrote about how the soul doesn’t move in straight lines or keep its contracts according to the ego’s plans. Relationships can be utterly faithful, utterly deep, and still have an ending that’s organic rather than failed.

The “grit-your-teeth” and stay version is its own violence. Staying out of ideology. Staying to prove something. Staying because you’ve made fidelity into a cage rather than a choice.

So the distinction:

Scanning is leaving before you’ve arrived.

Completion is leaving after the gift is exchanged.

One is avoidance of depth. The other is depth’s own rhythm.

Part VIII: Beyond the Personal

Cultural Architectures of Love

Let us zoom out. What happens when these models scale? What do they build—and what do they cost—at the level of families, economies, and societies?

The Monogamous Model at Scale

Families:

The promise: The nuclear unit as building block seems stable, legible, portable. Clear inheritance lines, responsibility structures. Children know who belongs to whom.

The shadow: Isolation. The family as island, loss of village, unbearable pressure on the dyad to meet all needs. Two people asked to be everything to each other, and failing, and blaming each other for the failure.

Economies:

The promise: The household as consumption unit—two incomes, separate dwellings, duplicated goods. Capitalism loves the nuclear family: more houses, more appliances, more cars, more streaming subscriptions. Marriage as economic contract, risk-pooling, credit-building.

The shadow: The monetization of what community once provided freely. Loneliness as market opportunity. Therapy as purchased friendship. Dating apps as romance privatized.

Governments:

The promise: Legibility, taxation, census, property transfer. The couple as manageable citizen-unit. Marriage as civilizing institution, state-sanctioned stability.

The shadow: The state in your bedroom, defining legitimate love, excluding what it cannot categorize.

The transpersonal possibility:

The promise: Two people as alchemical vessel for something larger than themselves. The conscious couple as node of peace, modeling repair and sustained presence for the culture. Generational healing—the family as vehicle for ancestral completion.

The shadow: Insularity that serves no one beyond itself. The couple as fortress, hoarding resources and attention. Love privatized, removed from commons.

The Open/Polyamorous Model at Scale

Families:

The promise: The return of extended networks—multiple parents, chosen kin, distributed care. Children with many adults invested in their flourishing. Resilience through redundancy: if one adult falters, others hold.

The shadow: complexity, confusion, instability when done unconsciously. Children uncertain of ground, navigating adult emotions they didn’t create.

Economies:

The promise:Resource sharing, reduced duplication, cooperative housing. Challenges to property-based inheritance. Potentially subversive to consumer capitalism—less need for separate everything.

The shadow: without intention, can become consumption of people as experiences. The gig economy of intimacy.

Governments:

The promise: Harder to categorize, tax, surveil. Challenges legal structures built on the dyad—custody, hospital visitation, inheritance, immigration. Potentially liberatory; potentially chaotic.

The shadow: the state either ignores or pathologizes what it cannot administer.

The transpersonal possibility:

The promise: The village restored. Distributed love as cultural healing. Web-based resilience, collective child-raising, resource-sharing. Love as commons rather than private property.

The shadow: Diffusion without depth. Everyone connected, no one truly witnessed over time. Spiritual bypassing at civilizational scale: “we’re all one” as excuse for not showing up.

Part IX: The Deeper Pattern

Both models, at their worst, serve existing power structures. Unconscious monogamy produces isolated consumer units, alienated from community, dependent on the market for what the village once gave. Unconscious polyamory produces untethered individuals, available for exploitation, with no stable ground from which to resist, every bond provisional and negotiable.

Both models, at their best, offer genuine counterpower. Conscious monogamy creates nodes of depth that can anchor communities, model repair, raise children with secure attachment, resist the fragmentation capitalism requires. Conscious polyamory creates webs of care that redistribute resources, challenge property logic, restore collective child-raising, resist the isolation capitalism requires.

The real question isn’t monogamy versus polyamory but: What structures of love build capacity for collective liberation?

And the answer may be: it depends on the people, the intention, and what they’re building toward.

The undistracted life, whether with one or many, is life in service of something beyond personal satisfaction. The form matters less than the directionality.

The Sacred Container and the Sacred Web

There are really no opposites, just continuum.

The deep container concentrates, intensifies, goes deep into the particular, trusts that the universal lives inside the specific. It is the well. It says: Go all the way into one thing and find everything. The web distributes, connects, goes wide into multiplicity, trusts that the universal lives in the pattern of relations. It is the net. It says: Connect to many things and find the whole in the weaving.

The deepest monogamy still needs community, still needs connections beyond the dyad—friendships, colleagues, sangha. The widest polyamory still needs some sustained presence, some depth that only time creates, some relationships that endure beyond the season.

Neither is complete without some gesture toward the other.

The truly undistracted life might be one that knows its primary architecture—container or web—and consciously includes what it naturally lacks.

Attention is the substance of love, and how you spend your attention is how you spend your life. Know your containers. Stay faithful to your long-arcs. Receive the drop-ins without clutching. Don’t mistake intensity for intimacy. Let love show you its right form.

Presence without fidelity is consumption. But fidelity without presence is imprisonment. The invitation is both. The invitation is all the way in.