by Anne Ligthart

Created on: October 24, 2008   Last Updated: January 15, 2010

I don't know so much about whether a husband "should" tell his wife about his romantic past, but I would hope he was certainly free to do so. If he feels it would enrich the currenrt relationship in some way, or if it related positively to the present, then it would actually make good sense, would it not?

The true power within any relationship resides in the present tense. There is little to be gained by using the past as a means of realising the present. For example. Let's say I am now married to a man who has been married twice before. I cannot gain anything by knowing why the previous marriages ended, or by voyeuristically dragging them into the living room. Or even worse, the bedroom. These liaisons were sacred, and private, and totally irrelevant to the current marriage. What you can benefit from is knowing who your man is today. He is a culmination of his past experiences, but he is not his past experiences. Few of us are able to delineate which is which.

The complex many of us experience in our lives, is the inability to see who or what is in front of us, because we are so absorbed in everything else. It's a weird phenomenon about the human organism, that we are always dodging and weaving the present. What's that about? It's about an innate lack of trust. It's about, "I can see what the hell is in front of me, and it's just fine, so I am just going back here, or up there to make sure my tracks are all covered, or that nothing and no-one is about to do me over. That nothing is going to 'happen to me'." Meanwhile, right in front of you, life is being ignored, going on as it does, and then you get back there, momentarily, and it's moved on. The illnesses prevalent in the world today, are mostly to do with shaking you back into your body, so you might stay HERE, and notice. So, what does this have to do with your husband telling you anything about his past, let alone his romantic dallying? Well, if you use the past experiences of anyone as a means of colouring them in, and forming an idea about who they are, you are relying on something which no longer exists, and so is truly an unreliable source. It is not a source at all! It is nothing more than an influence, a memory. We cannot give it meaning, while the living person stands before us, waiting for us to notice him! (In my case, I wouldn't look anywhere else, but straight at him...he is totally gorgeous!)

I like to know about my partners past in all its forms, his travelling stories, his romances, his habits, his scary moments. And with that, I can get closer to the makings of the person who stands before me today, but it does not tell me who he is. Who he is can only be found in the present tense. And to access that, you have no option than to trust. There is no other way. We don't fall in love without risk. Life is risky. Innately risky. It is fresh, exhilerating, liberating, and risky. That's precisely why all those "extreme" sports are so popular. They make us feel ALIVE - they force us into the moment, there is nowhere else we can be when we are bungee jumping, than right there! There is nothing else to think about when we dive to 18 metres, and breathe from a cylinder...there just isn't . And there is no husband better knowing that the man who stands before you today, strong, handsome, male, and alive.

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