Erotic Friendships.
Sometimes when working with clients they might share challenges about their current relationship structures and agreements. Folks might name they’re feeling in a bind - where the structure they have slid into (or consciously chosen) doesn’t reflect their values or where they wish to go in their own lives, or their dynamics with their partners.
Certainly I relate - the ‘pre-fab’ relationship structures we’re offered often won’t be just the right fit. While in my own questions about how to cultivate relationships that have the potential to offer both safety and stability while also being committed to erotic freedom, my colleague and friend Caffyn Jesse introduced me to some writing they’ve done on erotic friendships. I’d love to share it with you, in hopes it might offer a seed of inspiration to guide you towards more of what you want for you and your loves.
Erotic Friendship - Caffyn Jesse
Love, joy, passion, tenderness, the exchange of fluids without the assignment of roles, pleasure without possession – the concept and practice of “erotic friendship” is a way to explore love and eros that thrills me. I won’t want to dive deep with another, without a paradigm for relationship that welcomes and cherishes the great holy wild we are. Wild means undomesticated, impatient of restraint, fierce, crazy, eager with desire, free. Wildness is life energy, the intricate wisdom of natural systems, instinct, anima (breath, soul). Call it what you will, it calls us - out and away from domestic spheres and human settlements, into the forest, down to the water, up the mountain.
In finding and forging connection with lovers and others, I have invented and practiced a form of loving relationship I call “erotic friendship.” When we meet as friends, walls around us and inside us open. What matters now? I / Thou. Friends make space for each other, and it is space where we can be all we are becoming. This love that unfolds in a frame where we can listen to our wild hearts, find full voice to sing with, stretch our wings. “Family” is a word derived from the Latin famulus, meaning “servant.” The word connotes obedience. The word “friendship” evolves from the Anglo-Saxon freond, meaning “love.”
Friendship is a space of ongoing attunement. An erotic friendship can start and stay small, or it can unfold its more and more with a wild and joyful magic. There is space here to soar, dive, and journey dark and deep -- into the wildness of the world.
*Learn more about Caffyn Jesse’s work here.