The Hard and Soft Sides of Love
Relationship Design, Sex and Intimacy
Perhaps you haven’t thought of love as having two sides to it – but I believe it does. Actually there are likely more than two sides, at least our world has referred to the multiple facets of love in many ways.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at love through the lens of hard and soft.
So what does this mean? Glad you asked.
To create relationships that are both loving and healthy we need two things, which I call the soft side and the hard side.
The hard side means being able to
• set clear boundaries
• protect our personal space
• take responsibility for ourselves and not for others
• respond in a self-centered way
• say no
• make our own choices regardless of what others think
• defend ourselves
• maintain our personal integrity
• go our own path in life
The soft side is about
• opening up to others
• feeling and expressing love
• allowing ourselves to be vulnerable
• healing past pain
• releasing fears
• surrendering and stepping into uncertainty
• accepting what is
• letting go of control and detaching from outcomes
• feeling connection and oneness
The soft side is about trust, openness, unity and flow. It is a warm, fuzzy, peaceful, all-encompassing energy. The hard side is what enables us to delimit, separate, identify, define and choose. This is me, and this is you. Here is how far you can go. This is what I will not tolerate. This I want. That I don’t want. Here is my territory, and there is yours. This here is none of your business, and that over there is none of mine.
We need both the soft and the hard facet of ourselves in order to maintain healthy and loving relationships. Both are important.
If you have the hard side and lack the softness, you will be great at delimiting yourself from others, at setting boundaries, saying no and doing your own thing, but you will also be emotionally closed off, out of touch with your heart, prone to trying to control external life circumstances and other people, stuck in fearful stiffness and feeling lonely.
If you have the softness but lack the hard side, you will be a wonderfully loving, caring, giving, lovely person, very open and warm, but you will also be a doormat who can’t say no, who gets hurt, takes on too much responsibility for others, feels guilty, permanently gives energy away, gets treated like crap and ends up totally depleted.
The hard and the soft side are no opposites.
Being the one doesn’t mean you aren’t the other. You can be both really hard and really soft, or neither particularly hard nor particularly soft. Some people are neither very good at delimiting themselves and setting boundaries nor very good at opening up, expressing love or surrendering. So they end up both feeling fearful and disconnected, and having a hard time asserting themselves.
So it is not one scale with two extremes, but rather a two-dimensional model, with hardness and softness values being independent from each other. I suspect our hardness is what makes us impressive in other people’s eyes, and our softness determines how comfortable they feel around us.
This is only an intellectual model of course. Maybe it is artificial to express such complex things with a pair of numbers, but I find it quite useful. … I think the optimal place to be in is the point where we are both totally hard and totally soft.
Being both hard and soft is not a contradiction. Actually, I think that being the one helps us to be the other.
When we are able to set up a strong structure and know that we will always stand up for ourselves and make sure that our personal integrity is respected, then we feel safe, and can safely expose our soft underbelly and be gently loving inside of that structure.
The other way around, when we are able to open our heart, trust ourselves, others and the Universe, surrender to uncertainty and vulnerability, let go of control, and feel infinite love and connection to the whole world deeply inside ourselves, then it is easier to risk pissing people off, because we know deep down that nothing truly bad can ever result out of it.
In a way, both is about feeling safe – but in two completely different ways.
~ Originally posted by Rosine Caplot
愛的堅硬麵和柔軟面
人際關係設計，性和親密關係
也許你沒有想過愛是有兩面性的--但我相信它是有的。其實很可能不止兩面，至少我們的世界已經用很多方式來提及愛的多面性。
為了簡單起見，我們從堅硬和柔軟的角度來看待愛。
要創造既愛又健康的關係，我們需要兩樣東西，我稱之為軟面和硬麵。
硬的一面是指能夠
- 建立清晰的界限感
- 保護我們的個人空間
- 對自己負責而不是他人
- 以自我為中心的迴應
- 拒絕
- 自己做決定而不介意其他人是怎麼想的
- 自衛
- 愛惜自己的羽毛
- 走自己的路
軟的一面大約是
- 敞開心扉
- 感受並表達愛意
- 允許自己脆弱
- 治癒之前的傷痛
- 釋放自己的恐懼
- 妥協並直面未知的前途
- 接受事實
- 放任並不以結果為導向
- 感受溝通和獨立
柔和的一面是關於信任、開放、團結和流動。它是一種溫暖、模糊、和平、包羅永珍的能量。硬的一面是使我們能夠劃分、分離、識別、定義和選擇。這就是我，這就是你。這是你能走多遠的地方。這是我所不能容忍的。這是我想要的。這是我不想要的。這裡是我的地盤，那裡是你的。這裡不關你的事，那邊也不關我的事。
我們既需要自己的軟面，也需要自己的硬麵，才能維持健康和愛的關係。兩者都很重要。
如果你有硬的一面而缺乏軟的一面，你會很擅長與他人劃清界限，很擅長設定界限，說不，做自己的事情，但你也會在情感上封閉，與自己的內心脫節，容易試圖控制外在的生活環境和他人，陷於恐懼的僵硬中，感到孤獨。
如果你有柔軟的一面，但缺乏堅硬的一面，你會是一個美好的愛、關懷、付出、可愛的人，非常開放和溫暖，但你也會是一個無法拒絕的門客，會受到傷害，為別人承擔太多責任，會感到內疚，永久地付出精力，被人當成垃圾，最後完全耗盡。
硬的一面和軟的一面並不是對立的。
做一個人並不意味著你不是另一個人。你可以既是真的硬又是真的軟，也可以既不是特別硬也不是特別軟。有些人既不善於給自己劃定界限、設定界限，也不善於敞開心扉、表達愛和投降。所以他們最後既感到恐懼和隔閡，又很難堅持自己。
所以這並不是一個尺度的兩個極端，而是一個二維模型，硬度值和軟度值是相互獨立的。我猜測我們的硬度是讓我們在別人眼裡印象深刻，而我們的柔軟度則決定了他們在我們身邊的舒適度。
當然，這只是一個知識模型。也許用一對數字來表達這麼複雜的東西是人為的，但我覺得很有用。......我認為最佳的位置是我們既完全堅硬又完全柔軟的點。
既硬又軟不是矛盾的。事實上，我認為，成為其中之一有助於我們成為另一個。
當我們能夠建立一個強大的結構，並且知道我們會永遠站在自己的立場上，並確保我們的個人誠信得到尊重，那麼我們就會感到安全，並且可以安全地暴露我們的軟肋，並在這個結構裡面溫柔地愛。
反之，當我們能夠敞開心扉，信任自己、他人和宇宙，向不確定性和脆弱性投降，放手控制，在自己內心深處感受到無限的愛和與整個世界的聯絡，那麼就更容易冒著惹怒別人的風險，因為我們深知，沒有什麼真正的壞事會因此而產生。
在某種程度上，兩者都是關於安全感--但卻是以兩種完全不同的方式。
~翻譯：Lilly Li