Marco and Sophie, v2.0

Love and Sex in the Authentic Relating space

The last post to this list was almost 6 months ago, Getting married and moving to Germany. It was sent just before I visited Sophie in Germany for the third time, when we immediately moved in together into a new place, leaving an apartment where she had been living for 7 years with her 12-year old son and some room-mates.

Some of you may be wondering what happened next. Specifically whether two “fools in love”, with little money, from different cultures, very different personalities and somewhat challenging characterologies, united only by love and a crazy sexual attraction and some high-falutin ideas derived from Authentic Relating – whether such a couple could survive for more than a week. I am here to report on that, in case you are interested.

I will tell you part of that story now. It’s not at all what I had imagined, and it took me close to what I call “psychological death” 5 times. But we are still together and very much in love and generally kicking-ass together on all fronts. Inshallah.

First, let me recap the timeline…

I arrived in Berlin for our third visit on October 22, and left January 9. There were difficulties getting married in Germany and impossible to get an appointment at the immigration office there, so we decided she would come to Boston where my sister lives, marry there, apply for a visa at the German consulate in Boston, both come back to Germany, wait for the visa to be granted and then have me do one final round-trip Berlin-Boston to pick up the visa and re-enter.

What I did not understand were the Schengen visa (tourist visa) rules. With the result that I was told in Reykjavik (the transit airport) that I had over-stayed my Schengen visa and was banned for two years from Iceland, with no possibility to re-enter Germany for another 3 months, even from another city.

That was my first “psychological death”: would we make it? The thought of being separated for 3 months occurred as unbearable. She has a 12-year old son with joint custody, meaning she can’t just pack-up and go.

Still, she came to Boston a month later. We did manage to get married and applied for the visa at the German Consulate in Boston. Then we had two beautiful celebrations, one a zoom wedding reception for our friends, and the other a zoom meeting with my family for them to meet Sophie. Her two children, ages 12 and 20, came to the reception and the older one Louis moved everybody to tears with his love speech. The four of us were hosted in Boston by my sister and her husband, who are both angels. The grand finale was a weekend trip to NYC on a vacation we could not afford but did it anyway.

They told us the visa would take 3 months. It took 2 weeks.

The cause was probably Sophie’s sob-story letter to the consulate telling how much we were in love, that it was unbearable for us to be separated, that we were poor and that paying double-rent would be quite challenging for us, etc. She felt confident that this communication would succeed. Me less so. She was right.

The impact on me of getting the visa in two weeks was profound. I had announced to all my friends and to my blog that I had found the woman-of-my-dreams and was moving to Germany. I had spoken publicly about “Transformation at the speed of light” or TSL. The idea of TSL is that if you operate out of love, and approach life with a passionate idea combined with humility and surrender, and are grateful for whatever results you get, then the universe aligns with you and you get what you want. Or perhaps, to quote Mick Jagger: “you can’t always get what you want; but if you try sometime, you get what you need”.

To be perfectly honest, I myself did not entirely believe in TSL. I mean: I WANTED to believe it, but it could easily be considered “bipolar ideation”. I have no doubt that all of my friends and family in what I call “conventional reality” consider it bipolar ideation. And sometimes I agree with them!

However, I also fundamentally think that holding ideas which may be fantastical, or not reality-based, is okay provided they make you happier and more effective. And provided you don’t take yourself too seriously, and “keep on trucking” as I say. Or learning.

But it gets even better…

Getting the visa in 2 weeks was one of the turning points of my life. But it gets even better.

So, to recap: we have two “fools in love”, at least one of them (me) with a rather unimpressive relationship history, very little money, recent spectacular successes and failures both, and mental health challenges. And we have two Authentic Relating (AR) leaders, both professionally successful, but at least one of them crazy-as-fuck. Would we be able to use AR in our relationship and “practice what we preach” (which is the way of love)? And in the midst of huge relational, logistical and financial challenges?

There is not time and space here to tell the full story of how we made it through the first 6 months. I may say some things about that in the next post here. Or maybe it’s a full-length book similar to my memoir. Or perhaps an erotic novel. The erotic novel is already started, by the way. It is perhaps bipolar ideation 😀. You have to be a little crazy (or narcissistic, or both) to be a writer. I am a writer.

I CAN say, however, that it was pretty touch-and-go. We are both quite hot-tempered, reactive, idealistic to a fault, and bossy. But the combination of our AR training and deep sexual chemistry (which I call “God’s free therapy”) seems to have worked. Inshallah.

I will continue with the story now. We only learned about the visa 3 weeks ago, by the way. All of this is emergent in what I call “rapidly changing reality”. The flow of miracles appears to be continuing. Inshallah.

Earlier this week a 3-month collaboration with the Global Eco-Village Network concluded in producing a 6 week course called Authentic Relating in Community, which Sophie and I are leading together. This is the largest AR course I have ever taught and also the most money I have ever made in AR. We have had one class and it was wonderful. It’s also a new design which we are quite excited about, combining elements of AR and Circling, and specifically targeted to people in the IC (Intentional Community) space. AR and IC are my two great passions.

Sophie is back in America again March 10-24. We booked that trip shortly after she left and before we knew about the visa, because we could not stand to be separated. We will be spending most of that time in Brattleboro, participating and offering programs at a community in formation called HERI House. I am calling this “our first real honeymoon” as our travels and experiences up to this point have always been in response to some looming crisis (as in, needing to move, needing to do my immigration, needing to figure out our complex relational dynamic, etc.). So the next two weeks are really our first time together where we will be able to entirely relax. If such a thing is possible…

Please stay tuned to this list…

I will have more news coming. All this occurs as a fundamental inflection point of my life. It’s the end-point of my 40 years of “wandering in the wilderness”, searching for my purpose and for a way of life in which I could be happy and make a difference.

Needless to say, it is quite an emotional experience, and will take me a while to fully “grok” what this means.