Neil Strauss's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"
THE TRUTH, the Long-Awaited Sequel to The Game Releases on October 13, 2015
View the trailer in the Videos section on this page, or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg0sJ...
A confession: I’ve been holding out on you.
For the last few years, I've been deeply immersed in several underground communities and I didn’t share where I was, or everything I learned, with you.
Why?
For one thing, I couldn’t give it away yet to anyone, since it’s all part of the new book.
Two, it was all so wild and intense that . . . I didn't know where to begin.
So what have I been up to?
- Snuck into a free-love cult and got kicked out for the most ridiculous reason you’ve ever heard of.
- Went to an orgy run by a Hollywood celebrity, got slipped drugs, and passed out in the middle of a sex pile.
- Moved in with three girlfriends to form a quad relationship, and learned among other things that “who gets to sit in the front seat of the car” can actually be a serious issue in polyamorous relationships.
- Checked into sex addiction rehab and then escaped against medical advice.
- Opened up a relationship, and soon had an experience I don’t wish on anyone: sitting at home while the woman I loved went to a topless resort in Mexico with two other men.
- Started a commune based on principals of peace, freedom, and non-violent communication—and six days into it, someone in the house tried to kill me.
(So much for non-violent communication.)
- And met with some of the greatest geneticists, psychologists, neurologists, historians, sex gurus, and relationship healers of our time.
Why did I put myself through all this?
Because I wanted to answer a question that’s not only been central in my mind and life since The Game, but that so many of you have been asking me:
What happens if you are in love with someone, but you desire someone else?
Is that wrong?
Does this mean that you don’t actually love your partner?
When is it okay to act on it, whether physically, emotionally, or in your imagination?
Or is this just a normal evolutionary human behavior that we shouldn't be trying to repress?
And, most importantly, in relationships, is there a way to keep the romance, sex, love, and excitement hot over time instead of cooling down, bickering,
and growing apart?
So I set off to build a better type of relationship than the ones in our culture now—which have a statistically high chance of leading to unhappiness,
separation, or infidelity.
Here’s a surprising thing that happened, however:
I thought I was writing a book solely about relationships, but along the way it turned into a book about deep psychology.
Wait, you may be wondering: What do relationships have to do with deep psychology?
The answer: Everything!
It controls who you choose, why you choose them, whether you're happy, whether the sex stays hot, whether you have conflict, whether you end up in a "parallel relationship" (alone together), whether you break up with them, whether they break up with you, how hurt you are about it, whether you avoid relationships altogether . . . and so much more.
In fact, take any single person, and you can actually predict who they're going to fall in love with before they even know.
The process described in the book turned out to be the most transformative experience I’ve ever had.
In a way, The Game was a small shift that set me up for the really massive shift of The Truth—and gave me the key to a bigger happiness I didn’t even know was possible.
A confession: I’ve been holding out on you.
For the last few years, I've been deeply immersed in several underground communities and I didn’t share where I was, or everything I learned, with you.
Why?
For one thing, I couldn’t give it away yet to anyone, since it’s all part of the new book.
Two, it was all so wild and intense that . . . I didn't know where to begin.
So what have I been up to?
- Snuck into a free-love cult and got kicked out for the most ridiculous reason you’ve ever heard of.
- Went to an orgy run by a Hollywood celebrity, got slipped drugs, and passed out in the middle of a sex pile.
- Moved in with three girlfriends to form a quad relationship, and learned among other things that “who gets to sit in the front seat of the car” can actually be a serious issue in polyamorous relationships.
- Checked into sex addiction rehab and then escaped against medical advice.
- Opened up a relationship, and soon had an experience I don’t wish on anyone: sitting at home while the woman I loved went to a topless resort in Mexico with two other men.
- Started a commune based on principals of peace, freedom, and non-violent communication—and six days into it, someone in the house tried to kill me.
(So much for non-violent communication.)
- And met with some of the greatest geneticists, psychologists, neurologists, historians, sex gurus, and relationship healers of our time.
Why did I put myself through all this?
Because I wanted to answer a question that’s not only been central in my mind and life since The Game, but that so many of you have been asking me:
What happens if you are in love with someone, but you desire someone else?
Is that wrong?
Does this mean that you don’t actually love your partner?
When is it okay to act on it, whether physically, emotionally, or in your imagination?
Or is this just a normal evolutionary human behavior that we shouldn't be trying to repress?
And, most importantly, in relationships, is there a way to keep the romance, sex, love, and excitement hot over time instead of cooling down, bickering,
and growing apart?
So I set off to build a better type of relationship than the ones in our culture now—which have a statistically high chance of leading to unhappiness,
separation, or infidelity.
Here’s a surprising thing that happened, however:
I thought I was writing a book solely about relationships, but along the way it turned into a book about deep psychology.
Wait, you may be wondering: What do relationships have to do with deep psychology?
The answer: Everything!
It controls who you choose, why you choose them, whether you're happy, whether the sex stays hot, whether you have conflict, whether you end up in a "parallel relationship" (alone together), whether you break up with them, whether they break up with you, how hurt you are about it, whether you avoid relationships altogether . . . and so much more.
In fact, take any single person, and you can actually predict who they're going to fall in love with before they even know.
The process described in the book turned out to be the most transformative experience I’ve ever had.
In a way, The Game was a small shift that set me up for the really massive shift of The Truth—and gave me the key to a bigger happiness I didn’t even know was possible.
