Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
time the deckchairs get rearranged for whatever reason [Laughs].
Right now the deckchairs are feeling like they're being arranged.
I'm going through some of that now as once again the woman I'm
in love with that I cannot seem to build a fully engaged life
together, owing to circumstances seemingly beyond our control, so
there's suffering there. And when I look at it honestly, I see that
most of the suffering is over the loss of intimacy projected to be
the case as each of us presumes the other will get back into
another serially monogamist relationship. This has been our
unbroken pattern for life pretty much. After much suffering you
seemed to have stepped outside that pattern, you want to tell us
how that was possible?
BRIAN ADLER: Well it was very similar to the experience I had in
prison, showing me that happiness isn't what I thought it was,
doesn't depend on what I thought it did. I divorced from my first
wife in 2004, and was absolutely devastated, and really confronted
this belief that previous to that didn't occur to me was a belief, I
just thought it was the way that it was, that I need to be loved, or
that I need to be wanted. And it was absolute hell; it was hell
beyond really anything I'd ever experienced. And three or four
years later I met a woman, Tikva who's now my current wife. And
we met; we were actually living on an intentional community at
the time. It's an interesting place, Twin Oaks Community, because
unlike our culture at large at Twin Oaks, polyamory is really just as
common, if not more common than monogamy. And so all the
cultural norms we have that just one person would just be with
one person, aren't really the case there. It's an extraordinary
place, because it's sort of a closed community, a lot of things in the
culture at large that we just take for granted are not viewed the
same way there.
Anyway, so in the beginning of our relationship I was probably
completely conditioned to have all the same assumptions that I'd
had in my marriage. But really the only thing that we did
differently, that we continue to do differently, which has made all
of the difference, is that when we ever have the experience that
there seems to be a problem "in our relationship", we don't stop
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