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Infinite Devotion

How Love and Desire Grow Together for a Lifetime

This is how the book opens: Before We Begin, and Chapter 1. Read them right here, all the way through.

The whole book comes out November 10 in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.

Infinite Devotion

Before We Begin

This book asks one question and refuses to let go of it until we find the truth.

How do two people have deep intimacy and intense, burning desire for each other, in the same relationship, over an entire lifetime, in a way that grows instead of fading?

Asked differently: How can the intensity and desire of a new relationship grow and expand into something even MORE intense over a period of decades as love and familiarity deepen, rather than fading into comfort, or tolerance, or just plain bitterness?

I want you to notice what just happened in you when you read those questions. Some part of you, quiet and fast, said: they don’t. It doesn’t work like that. You may not have heard it. It may have moved through you as a feeling rather than a sentence, a small heaviness, a reflex of doubt.

That voice was installed in you by every couple you have ever observed, every joke you have ever laughed at about married people, and most likely by the home you grew up in. And probably, by your own experience. It speaks with the authority of overwhelming evidence.

This book exists because that voice is wrong. And because I can prove it. Not with an argument, but with a life.

My wife Dawn and I have been together for more than seventeen years. We started like most new couples do. Intense connection. Tons of passion and sexual desire. We couldn’t get enough of each other.

And over the first five years, we went all the way down. Years of infrequent and uninspiring sex. Years of polite coexistence. Two good people lying in the same bed. One of us feeling profoundly alone. The other feeling genuinely comfortable with the reality that “this is just how this works.” In our experience, we were not two people lying awake aching for the same lost thing. I was aching. Dawn was at peace. Not pretending to be at peace. Actually at peace, as far as she could tell, because the part of her that would have known better had been shut down for so long that she had no signal left to read.

To her, the fading was simply what relationships do. The fire at the beginning had been, in her words, “the infatuation stage.” A transient piece of the early days of a relationship. One that was never meant to last. She assumed she had a naturally low libido, that the infatuation stage had overwhelmed this for a short period of time. And as soon as that infatuation stage faded away, who she thought she was is who she became again.

I could not accept that. And so the second five years of our relationship became mine. Years of working on myself, of digging into my own part in everything that had gone dead between us, before Dawn ever joined me on the path. It has been that refusal, my insistence on finding the real answer to the question this book asks, that led us to everything I am about to show you.

Because we came all the way back. Further back than the beginning, into a love and a desire that keep deepening past every point where they were supposed to plateau. The fire in our relationship right now, seventeen years in, makes our honeymoon look like a pilot light.

People ask us constantly what the secret is. They expect something small. A practice, a habit, a technique, something they can add to what they’re already doing.

The honest answer takes a whole book, because the answer dismantles almost everything you currently believe about relationships, about men and women, and about who you think you are. The question of sexual desire turns out to be a trapdoor. You step on it expecting to learn about your marriage or some little trick to “spice things up,” and you fall through into the deepest questions a human being can ask.

So I will tell you now, plainly, where this book is going, and you can decide whether to come.

The reason intimacy and desire die in long relationships is that the two people in the relationship are, in a sense I will make precise and undeniable, not actually there. The reason they are not there is something that happened to each of them as children. The same thing, the single trade that every human being makes before the age of ten.

And the reason a devoted relationship can resurrect sexual desire, when nothing else can, is that it is the only force on earth that reaches all the way down to where that trade was made.

Which means this is a book about love and sex that is secretly a book about waking up. The two subjects were never separate. The marriage bed and the monastery have always been working on the same problem. The marriage bed is harder, because it goes deeper.

And if you are not in a relationship at all, stay. Maybe you left one, or several. Maybe you have a string of endings behind you that all sound suspiciously alike. Maybe you watched enough quiet dying in other people’s houses that you decided the whole arrangement was a trap, and you have been protecting yourself from it ever since. This book is still about you, because the thing it excavates does not live in relationships. It lives in people. It ended the loves you had, or it kept you out of love entirely, and it is in you right now, waiting for whatever you do next. The couple in the bed is simply where the evidence showed up in our lives.

I am not a guru. I have no robes and no lineage. I am a man who got pinned to the floor of his own life and had to dig his way out, with a woman beside him who eventually began doing her own digging, and what we found down there turned out to be true for every human being we have shared it with since. The truths in this book were not learned in my head. Every one of them has a scar, some blood, and plenty of tears attached.

One last thing before we begin. This book will hurt in places. I have made no effort to soften it, because the softened version of these truths is already everywhere and it has helped no one. If you want comfort, there are a thousand books that will tell you that what you have is normal and that you should make peace with it.

This book is for the part of you that never made peace with it.

Chapter 1

The Bed

There is a bed I want you to look at.

Two people are lying in it. The lights are off. They are perhaps six inches apart, facing away from each other, and neither one is asleep. Each is breathing carefully, in the slow, even rhythm of a person pretending to sleep, because if either of them admits to being awake, something might have to be said. Neither of them knows how to say it, or even what needs to be said. Both of them know it is there. It has been in the bed with them for years.

Six inches. You could not fit more loneliness into six inches if you engineered it.

I know that bed. I spent years in it. And I have learned, in the years since I climbed out of it, that this bed is one of the most densely populated places on earth. It is in the master bedroom of the beautiful house. It is behind the door of the couple everyone admires. It travels on the anniversary trip and checks into the nice hotel and lies there, six inches of silence, with a view of the sea.

If you are in that bed right now, I want to start by telling you what I know about you. Because I was you, and because you have probably never heard the inside of your own life described accurately.

You love each other. This confuses everything. If the love had died, the situation would be simple. Probably painful, but simple. And you would know what to do. But the love hasn’t died. You would grieve if something happened to them. You function beautifully together. You run a household, raise children, manage money, host dinners, handle crises. From the outside, you are solid. From the inside, you live with a feeling you barely have words for. A kind of homesickness that makes no sense, because you are home. A kind of isolation that also makes no sense, because the person you love is right there with you.

What’s missing has no name in your house. It used to be sex, or you tell yourself it was sex, because sex is the place where the absence became impossible to ignore. But you know it is more than that. It is the feeling of being reached. Of someone’s attention landing on you and meaning it. Of mattering to another person in a way that has heat in it. You remember the feeling. That’s the cruelty of it. This same person used to look at you and something in both of you would stand up and sparks would fly. Now their eyes pass over you like you are furniture, and yours pass over them the same way, and you both pretend not to notice the passing or how much feeling has been lost.

So you live in the gap. The gap between what you have and what you know is possible, somewhere underneath your resignation. Each of you will likely experience that gap differently, but this is only a matter of perception. You may ache. Long for the feeling that you remember feeling, and for the way you felt them feeling about you. You may numb yourself with drink or drugs or distractions of any sort. You may convince yourself that you’re fine, and that’s just the way relationships are. You may justify that this is just a stage, that you’re busy with work and the kids, and that it’ll get better someday.

In some beds, yes, two people lie awake with the same ache, each one certain they are alone in it. But in many beds, maybe most, only one person is awake like this, while the other one is experiencing the gap very differently. In our personal “six inches” I was lying there awake, lonely, and mourning what felt like a great love slipping away from me into numbness while the numbness was rationalized away by my wife any time I managed to get up the courage to bring it up. For her, the gap was different. The gap still exists, even for the person who has convinced themselves that everything is okay.

That was Dawn. She was not lying in our bed grieving what we’d lost. She was not lying there in denial, biting back some secret hunger. If you asked her, she would tell you the relationship was good. Comfortable. Solid. For her, the gap was hidden, because she was shut down so completely that, from the inside, nothing was missing. She would never have bought this book. She didn’t consider the life we now live to be a possibility, so she couldn’t long for it. You cannot ache for something your system has erased, or long for something you don’t even know could exist. The odds are that you, the one reading this, are the one who still feels it. And the question you are silently asking is whether this can work when only one of you wants it back.

If both people are shut down and neither one is invested, this book cannot help, but then neither of you would be reading it. What this work actually requires is one person who still feels the ache, and another person who is willing. Not hungry. Not convinced. Willing. Dawn never woke up one day wanting what I wanted. What she found, slowly, a piece at a time, was the willingness to look. That was enough to begin, and beginning was enough to change everything. I have also worked with plenty of couples where the roles were reversed, where the man was the one who had gone dark and the woman was the one lying awake. The pattern doesn’t care which side of the bed it sleeps on.

What if your partner is never willing? What if you do this work and they never rise to meet it? The whole truth about that possibility comes later in this book, because it deserves more than a sentence. What I can tell you now is this: the work ahead is not a strategy aimed at your partner, and it is never wasted. It is the recovery of you. Everything you dig out is yours, it goes with you into whatever happens next. I have never once seen a person do this digging and regret it, whatever became of their current circumstances.

And some of you are not in a bed at all. You are reading this single, or newly out, or years out, with those endings behind you that all ended the same way. Nothing in this book requires a partner to begin. The six inches is not a relationship condition; it is what happens when two buried people meet, and the buried person on your side is available right now. In one honest sense, you are the luckiest reader here. You get to do this work before the next love, instead of inside it.

Later in this book you will understand exactly why each person shuts down in the particular way they do, and why the shutdown was never evidence of a missing self, only one that was buried alive a long time ago.

Regardless, the gap is the space between the life and relationship that you’re living now, and what you know is possible. And that gap exists for everyone. If you can acknowledge its existence, you have taken the first step. And that is the hardest one. Once you’ve acknowledged its existence, you can start to look at what you’ve done to try to deal with it. And what you’ll find, especially inside of relationships, is that in some way, you’ve done what everyone does with it. You have pushed it under the rug. The burying looks different depending on where you are standing when you do it.

If you are single, you know your versions. The apps deleted in disgust and reinstalled at midnight. The “I’m just focusing on my career right now” that is quietly entering its sixth year. The decision, made so long ago you forgot it was a decision, that you are simply fine, that wanting more was the problem, and that peace and numbness are close enough to pass for one another.

And inside a relationship, your versions might look different. The resentments that flare up over nothing and are never really about the nothing. The conversation you stopped attempting years ago because it always went the same place. The flinch you feel when a film shows two people wanting each other, and the careful way you both look at the screen and not at each other. Those other places you go to satisfy the feeling that you just can’t convince yourself to live without. Under the rug, all of it, year after year, until walking through your own marriage requires stepping around a mound in the floor that neither of you acknowledges is there.

This is the state of most long-term relationships. So much has been buried that to even start to look at it all feels impossible. Probably even terrifying. You buried it down under that rug for a reason. Dealing with it was uncomfortable. And by putting it there, you escaped that discomfort.

But look at how much energy the burying takes. Every day, some part of you works to hold all of that down. You don’t spend that kind of effort on something that means nothing to you. Nobody carefully steps around a mound in a house they’ve already decided to abandon. The managing, the avoiding, the not-saying, all of it is labor, and the labor only makes sense if something under there still matters.

And look at the way all of this feels. Resentment is not what indifference feels like. Bitterness isn’t something you feel about someone you’ve given up on. You feel these things because there is a part of you that still cares. Every flare-up over nothing is an objection, and an objection means some part of you has not accepted the current arrangement as final. So, the flat feeling in your marriage is not the feeling of nothing being there. It is the feeling of something enormous being held down. The grief you feel in the six inches, the homesickness, the ache when you see what other people seem to have, all of it is evidence. Something in you never signed the surrender papers. Something in you still knows what this was supposed to be.

That something is the part of you I am writing to. Not the adult who manages the household. The one underneath. The one who is still here, still holding on, because you still believe there is something worth coming back for.

You have been treating the deadness as the problem. The deadness is not the problem. The deadness is a reading on a gauge, and that gauge is reading close to zero.

What that gauge is reading is desire. Most people in long-term relationships have lived without true, authentic desire for so long that they’ve forgotten the feeling entirely, and some have redefined it into something tame enough to claim they still have it. So let’s take a moment and remember what desire actually is, and what it is not.

Desire is not affection. It is not appreciation, or the warm regard you have for a good partner, or the comfortable pleasure of their company. Desire is the pull. It is watching them cross a room and feeling something in your body lean toward them before you’ve had a single thought. It is their hand landing on your lower back and a current running up your spine. It is thinking about them in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and feeling your whole chest light up. It is wanting that arrives on its own, uninvited and unreasoned. You do not decide desire. You do not schedule it or talk yourself into it. It happens to you, and you are glad it does. If you have to think about whether you feel it, you don’t.

Now picture that exact feeling being read out as a reading on that gauge. A needle on a dial, and the needle reads one thing only: how much of that involuntary wanting is alive between you and the person beside you. Not how much you love them. Not how good a partner they are. Not how grateful you should be. How much you want them, in the animal, undeniable sense of the word. How much you want to tear their clothes off and ravish them, or be ravished by them, in the way that makes you lose track of time, forget to eat, and make irrational and irresponsible life decisions.

Every other measure of a human life can be fooled. Your career can be performed. Your friendships can run for decades on pleasantness. Your church can be attended, your family visited, your image maintained. You can accumulate money and fool yourself and others into thinking you’re successful. You can fool your colleagues, your parents, your community, and, with enough practice, your own mind. The world is full of lives that look full from the outside. But on the inside they are hollow. That hollowness never shows up on any of the visible instruments.

It shows up in one place. The bed. The desire that you feel towards another person.

Desire is the one gauge that cannot be bribed, argued with, or performed for. It does not care about your vows, your efforts, your virtue, or how much you both deserve to want each other. It responds to exactly one thing. The entire first half of this book is the discovery of what that thing is. For now I will only say this: when the gauge reads empty, it is telling the truth, and it is the only thing in the house that is still being honest.

Desire is the one gauge in a life that cannot be bribed, performed for, or fooled, and when it reads empty it is telling the truth. That is The Gauge.

Most people spend their marriages tapping on that gauge, angry at it, ashamed of it, negotiating with it, taping over it. This book does the opposite. We are going to trust the gauge. We are going to follow its reading all the way down, through the relationship, through the two people in it, through their childhoods, to the place where the needle first dropped. It drops in the same place for everyone. I will show you.

But first we have to deal with the voice from the opening pages. The one that said: they don’t. Because that voice is not yours, and finding out where you got it is the first step out of the bed.