The bliss of the shared evening practice

Dear reader,

Most evenings around nine, after the dishes have been done and the small evening tasks have been finished, my partner and I sit down on the floor of the living room together and spend about twenty minutes doing a small shared body practice. The practice is mostly individual — each of us does our own version of what we want — but the shared setting, the shared time, the small ambient quietness of doing the practice together has, over years, become one of the most important structures of our relationship.

I am writing about this today because I have been thinking, recently, about the small specific way that shared embodied time differs from other kinds of shared time, and about the small case for couples having a regular practice of being in their bodies together without it being a sexual practice or a date or an explicit activity.

What the twenty minutes looks like

We sit on cushions on the rug in the living room, facing slightly different directions. There is a single small lamp providing the only light. There is no music. There is no conversation. For twenty minutes, we each do whatever the body is asking for — some slow stretches, some sitting still, some lying down with eyes closed. The practice is not coordinated. We are not doing the same thing. We are doing our own things in the same place at the same time.

At the end of the twenty minutes, one of us, on whatever evening it is, will start to stir, and the other will follow. There is no specific signal that the practice is over. The body, after twenty minutes, knows when it is ready to move on, and the other body, in the same room, registers the readiness and responds.

What shared embodied time does

Different things from what shared conversational time does. The conversational time is mostly about exchange — sharing information, working through small concerns, telling each other about the day. The embodied time is about co-presence in a different mode — being in the same physical space, in slow attention to the body, without any of the small ongoing negotiations of words.

The relationship, after years of these twenty-minute evening sessions, has developed a small specific quality that I am not sure I can fully articulate. There is, in some way, a deeper familiarity with each other's bodies — not in a sexual sense, but in the simple sense of knowing how each other's bodies move, breathe, settle. There is a small accumulated trust in the silent shared presence that you cannot get from any other kind of time together.

I think most long-term couples would benefit from this kind of practice. The format is not important. What matters is the small commitment to being in your bodies together, in silent shared presence, for some regular block of time each week. The cumulative effect, across years, becomes one of the small structural supports of the relationship — and one of the small reasons that the relationship feels, over time, like a relationship between bodies as well as between minds.

Until next evening,

M.