OUR FIVE SENSES IN LOVE

My purpose in this BLOG is to examine how our traditional five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell interact, influence and in some cases, cancel out or override each other in actual or potential relationships.

I’m inviting you to read my story of how my sense of hearing cancelled out my other senses and the consequences of that ‘cancel out.’

Again; I emphasise that I’m telling a story. My own story - complemented by my reflections, my own opinion and views on the trials and tribulations and the joy of wholeness and completeness that marriage can bring when all our senses interact. I express my story as a participant, as a passenger, as a prisoner and as an observer of working marriages and failed marriages because I’ve lived it, contributed to it and paid the price for it - and a story which I hope will resonate with a few readers as they too give time to reflection.

My story starts with my first response to my first husband which was experienced through sound: a sound I heard. A voice, the timbre of a voice, a captivating voice which I followed until I found the source. On finding the source, my sense of hearing reigned supreme during the interaction and that was all that mattered. I fell “hormonally in love” with a voice. My other senses were cancelled out or forcefully short-circuited. Believing it being In Love, when in reality it was “in lust,” but got pregnant and rushed into marriage with the hormone-filled belief that this was a love meant to last forever. But lust was the smoke and mirrors that made me believe I was in love because a voice sent shivers down my spine.

However, I learnt, and now believe that suppressing one’s other senses leads to denial of all who we are: a whole being needing all our senses to talk to our instinct and give guidance to our responses, e.g. acceptance, or non-acceptance, of another person.

When my other senses - which I unwittingly suppressed because I blithely chose to concentrate only on my first receptor, hearing - began to rebel as the relationship developed, then the criticism count-down-tick-box of fault-finding began:
Criticism of behaviour, I’m seeing now (my sense of sight awakening):
* I notice you enjoy speaking and smiling mainly to my female/male friends
* Why do you have to put your hand on his/her shoulder when talking
* You’ve gained so much weight
* Do you have to laugh so loud at his/her jokes as if you’re the paid chairperson of that fan club?
* You always want to be centre stage dominating conversations.
Oh, dear me! That’s what I’m seeing now.

Then sense of touch reared its head:
* Stop grabbing me and pulling me when you want my attention. I don’t like it
* Please don’t just throw your arms around me when you can see I’m busy with something
* Stop putting your hands on my thigh when we’re sitting in company.

Then in the bedroom when the lights were turned off and sense of touch dominated, crying out,
“Please don’t touch me I have to get up extra early for a meeting.”
It seems so cruel on reflection.

Sense of taste when intimacy starts:
* I’m not in the mood for kissing
* Did you brush your teeth before you came to bed?
* I’m not kissing you with that garlic breath
* And of course, casualty number one – when the kissing has totally stopped.

Then we move to sense of smell:
* You’re stinking of alcohol
* What were you doing to be smelling of sweat the way you are?
* Your hands still smell of dog so please don’t touch me if you’re smelling of dog

Remember, all these behavioural mannerisms which are being criticised now were present all along when the sense of hearing dominated; that sound I fell for soothed, so I only listened to that one sense. But, sadly, and much too late when the lust was sated and the rose-coloured glasses fell off; when the sound that once captivated began to grate on nerves, admitting that my dominant sense which led me to what I chose to see - a fantasy vision really - began to tarnish I wanted out. Unfortunately, two people were involved in this “can’t-be-harnessed-hormone-hopping, lust-driven union” and there was hurt when my other senses became activated and reality spotlighted my fantasy as mist.

Now in my later years with plenty of time for reflection, I look back on my first marriage – which lasted all of two years - and sadly recognise the hollowness that it was. Yes. I did regret the failure of it. Yes. I felt that I should have done more to give it a go bearing in mind that old saying that says it takes two to tango.
Now years and years later I ask Why? Why did my first marriage fail? Perhaps youth played a part in this failure (maybe the impulsiveness of youth considering that I was just nineteen) but the answer I recognised as being closest to the truth was this:

I IGNORED MY OTHER SENSES; MY FIVE GOD-GIVEN SENSES THAT TALK TO MY INSTINCT AND IGNITE MY INTELLECT. I TRAMPLED AND SHUT DOWN THE ONES THAT WERE GOING TO OPEN MY EYES TO THE FACT THAT WHAT I WAS DOING WAS IMPULSIVE AND AGAINST MY INSTINCT, THAT I OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN MORE RECEPTIVE TO OTHER ASPECTS OF THE OTHER PERSON’S PERSONALITY.

This is my story, I really speak for myself because I know couples who met at high school, 15 – 18 years old, who are still loving each other and living the words “in sickness and in health.” This commitment is so moving and so beautiful to see. One of these couples even look more like brother and sister than husband and wife the way they’ve melded into each other.

Our senses help us to interact with our environment, with other people and trigger responses; some being temporary responses that are soon appeased, satisfied, forgotten.

Generally, LOVE is the key reason for marriage. However, there are agenda marriages or show/revenge marriages or get out of jail marriages, but better still is to be able to enter a relationship with a love that has been ignited by all five senses with instincts and intellect fully engaged.

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