There’s a choice point that creates your future in love, maybe more than anything else. In this episode, you’ll learn one of the greatest and most practical tools for finding love and keeping it alive.

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Listen For

• 00:00 What is “going back to the river” and how does it transform your love life?
• 04:09 How can choosing vulnerability over self-protection change your relationship?
• 08:26 What happens to our inner state when we fall into emotional isolation?
• 10:25 Why do we pull away from love when dating, and what are the consequences?
• 13:58 How does reclaiming inner goodness help us attract deep, lasting connection?

 

Important Links

Get a copy of Deeper Dating by Ken Page

Join the Coaching and Mentorship Intensive with Ken Page

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Watch the episode here

 

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What To Do When You Want To Pull Away From Love

The Practice Of Going Back To The River

There’s a choice point that creates your future in love, maybe more than anything else. In this episode, you’ll learn one of the greatest and most practical tools for finding love and keeping it alive. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. This is Ken Page, your host. I’m a Psychotherapist and Author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, and the creator of Deeper for Good, the new intimacy app that helps single people meet through inspiring live online events around the things they care about most. Today, I want to talk about a practice that has really changed my life and informs the basis of almost everything I teach and learn. I call it going back to the river, which is a kind of poetic name, but I’ll explain it and help you see what it could mean for you in your own intimacy journey in this episode.

But first, I just want to say if you’re interested in the Deeper Dating® path to richer intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you join my mailing list, you’ll get a free eBook of the insights that have gone viral on Psychology Today and elsewhere. It’s called The 5 Keys to Deeper Intimacy, and it’s the heart of my work in a little book. I believe it can change your entire intimacy future. If you go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, there are transcripts of all of, my about 250 episodes. If you want to learn more about Deeper for Good™, just go to DeeperForGood.com to join our waiting list. We’ve already been approved by Google. We’re still waiting for approval from Apple, but we’ll be launching fully soon.

 

Let me jump into this concept with a story. It’s a story from my past with a person that I was in a relationship with at the time. It was about 6:00 in the morning. I don’t remember what was happening, but we were in bed together and I was feeling frustrated or disconnected or maybe I was just worried about something that was going on in my own life. I really don’t remember, but I remember un-spooning from him and kind of rolling away to chew on my thoughts. Which made total sense to me at the time, but probably would not have been very helpful at all.

But something happened for me and I decided to go the other way and not roll away from him, but roll toward him and put my arms around him. It felt so much better. I thought, “I came back to the river instead of rolling away from it.” When you’re in nature, sometimes when you’re far from a river or far from a body of water, there’s this barren quality to the landscape. As you move closer to the river, things get more lush, more verdant, more alive. That’s what I experienced because I rolled not toward the barrenness of my own figuring things out, but toward the river of connectedness.

Choosing Vulnerability Over Self-Protection

I thought, “This was good.” I came back to the river. I learned something there. If I would have rolled away, it would have been a very different moment. A very different experience. Here’s another story from my complex relationship life. Another time I turned toward the river, and then later I’m going to tell a story in my dating life about when I didn’t and what happened. This was like a few months into my relationship with Greg. We were together, and I had decided that night that I wanted to talk to him about a problem that I was having in the relationship.

And it was the fact that I needed for us to go deeper in our conversations, to share more feelings. I knew what I should say. I knew when I should say it. I had prepared the whole thing. It felt really brave and really authentic and really true. I absolutely justifiably could have said all of that but instead, I decided I was going to do this thing where I was just going to put words on what was in my heart. I kind of came from the river. The words that came out of me, instead of the words that I thought I would say, shocked the hell out of me and made me cry. This is what came out.

As you move closer to the river of your feelings, things get more lush, more verdant, more alive. Share on X

I said, “I’m falling in love with you.” I did not expect those to be the words at all. That became the moment where we both told each other that we were falling in love. My prepared speech was the safe thing. It was reasonable. It was fair. It was true. I want to offer this to you. Where does this hit for you? Where have you maybe turned toward the river with someone or something when you could have turned the other way? Or, maybe where have you turned the other way just to try to take care of things by yourself through maybe willpower or white knuckling it or anger or protectiveness?

These are two very different self-states. Somehow, that self-state of turning away feels so smart. It feels so right. It feels so self-protective. It feels so independent. Ultimately, I find that it makes me dry. It makes me less magnetic. It makes me feel less alive. It also makes me more irritable. I just want to say that going back to the river does not necessarily mean going to your partner. It certainly does not mean going to a partner who is not safe. It could mean going to your own heart, your own spirituality, to nature, to your own sense of mission, to whatever it is.

The Bitterness Of Emotional Isolation

That, at that particular moment, going back to the river means for you. It’s a choice we make. In some ways, not going back to the river, turning away from it, to self-figure out, just feels so smart, so self-justified and so reasonable. For me, it hasn’t worked that well. There is a poem that I adore that captures kind of a very far extreme of that spectrum of moving away from the river. It’s what happens when we get so far from the river that there’s a kind of deep hollowness inside.

A terrible hollowness that asks to feed on itself. It becomes a vicious cycle. This is the poem by Stephen Crane. It’s called In the Desert. It’s intense. “In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and ate of it. I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’ ‘It is bitter, bitter,’ he answered; ‘But I like it ‘Because it is bitter, ‘And because it is my heart.”

 

That’s what the dry land does. It isn’t that we don’t know that the taste is bitter, but we keep eating anyway because it is ours, because it is the thing that nobody can take from us, and because it is safe. That is the seduction of this self-state. I want to ask you, what is going back to the river for you now in your life? Where is the river calling you? Where are you in a kind of maybe slightly self-righteous way, turning away from the river? What does the river mean to you? What’s calling you in that way? What is turning from the river? I invite you to think about that.

What Happens When You Pull Away From Love In Dating

Now, I want to talk about dating. Let me tell you about a date where I didn’t go back to the river at all. There was this guy that I had started seeing, and I really, really liked him a lot. We were at a moment where he was starting to realize he had feelings for me, too. My feelings kind of grew much quicker than his did. He said something honest, sweet and brave. He said, “I wasn’t sure at first, but I’m finding myself growing more and more attracted to you.” He was telling me with a lot of honesty that his feelings for me were growing.

But my insecurities at that time were such that I couldn’t take that. I heard he was saying he wasn’t really attracted to me. I took it as a hurt, as an insult. I went cold. I got distant. I got cool. He noticed and he said something about it. I stayed that way. I think in my head, I was thinking if I played it cool, it would make me more attractive. That was our last date. I really felt like I lost out, but I was taking care of myself at that moment. In that particular way of taking care of myself by turning away from the river, I lost the chance of a wonderful connection.

The river of self is a great thing to love more than our smaller self. Share on X

I invite you to take a minute and think how that might have happened for you too in some arena of your life. For me, I was so sure for decades that turning to the river was not the way to get love. It was mostly to look great and to feel and act confident. Those are things at which I failed again and again and again. I once had this really quirky hairstylist a lot of years ago. One day he told me his whole life philosophy in three beats. It was this. He said, “Keep forgiving yourself, again and again and again.” That was number one.

Number two, love yourself first. Number three, and then love something more than yourself. I love that. I think that the river is a great thing to love more than our smaller self. I just invite you to think, what brings you to your amazing river? Who are the people that let you connect to your river, who let you feel connected in that way? Because when you’re connected to the river, whether it’s in your work or in an action or in your art, there’s this almost unstated feeling of being connected to something very good, very benevolent, and very important, that’s bigger than words.

Reclaiming Inner Goodness To Attract Deep Connection

The connection is grander than words. It almost doesn’t have words, but there’s a sense of rightness. For me, in my dating life, it was when I began to go back to the river in myself, which started in therapy that I discovered qualities of goodness and tenderness that I had learned to hate in myself. This is what happened. As I began to love them and de-orphan them, I began to attract people and be attracted to people who had that goodness that I was looking for. And my whole journey in a way has been about goodness. That’s my whole app and my whole mission now, Deeper for Good™.

It’s that people get to meet each other through acts and environments and events of goodness. Where is the river calling you in your life? Where are the principles that you’ve built to tell you, “No, I’m going to do this on my own?” What would it mean to go back to the river? In your search for love or your relationship, what would it mean to come from the part of you that connects to your river again and again and again? It’s so important that we all know both of these self-states in ourselves, the moving toward the river and the turning away from the river, and what each one feels like.

 

What are the triggers, and what are the ways that we get called, and what are the ways that we get triggered into the more barren self. This is a beautiful practice for your intimacy life and our intimacy lives. For when we’re with the people we love, in our spiritual lives, in the actions we choose to take, and in our dating life, what would it mean to be brave enough to go back to the river? Maybe you have your own words for this. Maybe it’s not the river. Use your words, but let this be an invitation and a grand experiment.

What happens when I turn away from the river and just try to do it myself? What happens when I turn toward the river? How does my life play out differently? How do my behaviors change? How does my inner world shift? What happens to my love life when I do this? Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to connecting on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast. And, I would love to hear your experiences if you take on this experiment. If you don’t know how to reach me, just join my mailing list. You can respond to any of my mailings. I would love it if you share the results of your experiment with you. I can share them with the community as well. Thank you, all, so much.

 

Important Links

• Deeper Dating
• Deeper for Good
• The 5 Keys to Deeper Intimacy
• In the Desert