What in The World is Aesthetic Intimacy? - podcast episode cover

What in The World is Aesthetic Intimacy?

Nov 07, 202431 minEp. 249
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Episode description

In this episode of The Relaxed Male, we delve into the concept of aesthetic intimacy, exploring how aesthetics and intimacy intertwine in our lives. As part of a series on different types of intimacy, We discuss the importance of sharing beautiful experiences with loved ones, particularly spouses, to strengthen relationships. Aesthetic intimacy is about appreciating the beauty around us, whether it's a sunset, a piece of art, or a simple walk with a partner, and how these shared moments can enhance our connections.

Bryan shares personal anecdotes, such as visiting Sunset Cliffs with his family and dog, to illustrate how aesthetic experiences can bond people together. He emphasizes the significance of being intentional in recognizing beauty in everyday life and how this can prevent relationships from becoming mundane.

The episode also touches on the broader spectrum of intimacy, including physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual, and how aesthetic intimacy fits into this framework. Bryan argues that aesthetic intimacy is a subset of experiential intimacy, highlighting the need for both beauty and ugliness to appreciate life fully.

Listeners are encouraged to engage in aesthetic experiences with their partners, to "stop and smell the roses," and to embrace both the beautiful and challenging aspects of life. Bryan also introduces a 4-week challenge starting January 1st, aimed at helping men calm their inner disturbances and improve their relationships.

Transcript

Alright. This is a continuing series that we're up to. We're up to aesthetic intimacy. What in the world is the aesthetic intimacy? How do aesthetics and intimacy, you know, mesh together? And we're gonna be talking about that this week on episode 250 of the relaxed male. This is the relaxed male, a show that comes to you each week helping men to remove the nice guy from their life so they can actually live their life on their terms.

Join the host of certified coach, Brian Goodwin, as he helps men step out of their heads and become free from the thoughts that bind them. Hey, man. Hello, and welcome to the Relax Mile. I'm your host, Brian, and thank you so much for taking the time to come in. Listen. If you're live, we're live today over on YouTube, trying YouTube out, seeing if I can get, some things going. Got, at least one view. I think that was actually me so far, but still either way.

It has been a, been a a great and wonderful week. I hope you all had a wonderful one. Also, did want to kinda start bringing around a little bit of an a quick announcement, though. I am going to be putting together a 1 month challenge. And it is one that helps us guys to calm the the disturbance and the disease that we have within us. And it's not a it's not exactly what you're saying. It's not a the addiction. The addiction is a symptom of what this disease is. That disease is just

our thought. Now we and what we think of different circumstances, and so we're changing this up. We're seeing if we can get see how many men we can get to kinda sit back and start to relax within about a about a month period. 4 week challenge. Can we do this? And we're gonna be firing this up off on the 1st of the year. This would be January 1st that we're gonna be doing this. And so if you're interested in going to going to do this this challenge with me, we're gonna be doing,

you can sign up. It's just a quick little Google form. I'm not doing anything fancy on this thing. It is just a Google form that has your name, your email address. That way, I can get send out an email and let you know, hey. This is where where we're all gonna meet and all that. So with that, I'm going to you can go over. You can sign up if you like. It's gonna be over at relaxmail.comforward/ storm master. We're gonna be mastering the storm that is within us. And so

if you wanna join us there, that's where you can go. Just go to relax mail dot com forward slash storm master, all one word. So alright. Now with all that out of the way, let's go ahead and let's get our happy tales all started and moving because, heck, we've got a little good bit to talk about because we're talking about aesthetic intimacy. This is a continuation of a article that I came across on choose therapy as that

talks about 10 different types of intimacy. And there's a few in there that are kind of, alright. That it's a bit of a stretch. It might you could probably take that and shoehorn it into another one. Most of them are kinda shoehorned offshoots of of experiential intimacy. And I and this here is one that I don't know. I'm kind of up in the air about this one still. And this isn't a deep dive. This isn't a means of this is, you know, all the education that you absolutely need type of,

of of message here. This is me. I'm actually learning about the different types of intimacy. I knew about physical. I knew about emotional. And, and then after that, there's the intellectual, spiritual, experiential, social, creative conflict, and now we're up to aesthetic and then work. And so, I mean, we all know about physical intimacy. We all have a pretty good idea of what emotional intimacy is about. But this is about sharing the beauty that is around us

with other peep and that is a kind of a big deal for a lot of folks. That's something that really surprises the heck out of a lot of people when you start looking at beauty, things that are beautiful, things that are, just eye catching with this with the woman that you've married. And this makes life so much more

fascinating when you're able to do that. And so just wanna be able to to help folks to see, comprehend, and and gather the differences between what in the world is aesthetic intimacy as opposed to experiential yada yada yada. So what is aesthetic intimacy? Well, start off with and to boil it down to its bare essence is you sharing a beautiful experience

with your spouse or with somebody else. It it doesn't actually have to be your spouse. I'm yeah. We talk to our about our spouses a lot here. We are married. Most of the primary folks are married men wanting to have a better relationship with their wife. So a lot of men want to have a better relationship, and part of that relationship is building the intimacy. We you'll hear you hear guys believe it or not, you'll hear a lot of guys talk about,

I just wanna have more intimacy with my wife. And, yeah, when we hear the intimacy, we actually think, you know, the horizontal mambo, hide the hide the baloney sex type of, type of intimacy. And, yes, that is a very, very intimate physical intimacy that that we want. We men us men, when we have sex, we feel more loved. We feel accepted by our wife. And when we are rejected or denied, the the ability to have that physical contact with our wife, we often feel

shunned. We feel shut out. We are often ashamed of the fact that, yeah, our wives don't wanna have sex with us. What's wrong with us? And that is a big problem that these guys struggle with. And so that's one of the reasons why we're talking about the different types of intimacy and getting to aesthetics. What is the aesthetic intimacy about?

And that is when do you come across say, remember back when you were maybe on your honeymoon or maybe you were having a, you were out just out at the beach or something like that, and y'all were just having the time together and you saw something that was just awe inspiring. It's just absolutely beautiful. The sun's setting. Me and my wife and my son used to when I was in San Diego, used to go to, to a place called, that we called the dog park. It was over at Sunset Cliffs.

If you're from there, you know what I'm talking about. And we would it was just one of those times. We would take our great Dane Dante out there, and he would run around and have good time, socializing with the, with the other dogs, and we would get to socialize with all the dog owners. And, eventually, somewhere along the way, the sun hit just a particular area, and everybody just kinda stopped and took in the awe and the wonder of what we were seeing.

And I think a lot of that actually helped us bond together as a group, as a group of dog owners who loved each other's dogs. It was fun. We everybody was all excited when Dante would come around, and

we would all cheer when there was a basset hound that would come bounded through there. And I I'll I'm gonna call them flash, but I know it wouldn't flash. It was like Duke or something like that. But it was, you know, there was all these different types of dogs, and they were just they were good get along type of dogs, and we had a great time. The dogs ran wild, and the people stood around, and we had a great time.

That, intimacy of the watching the sunset, the intimacy of us going down to the down to the dog beach and having a good time there or just going to any beach with my with my family. Seeing the beauty there, going to, you know, Colorado and seeing the majestic mountains there are all just instances of where we can see aesthetic intimacy.

That's not the only place, though. You might be a you can actually bring up aesthetic intimacy by just going to a museum, walking down the street, and seeing a beautiful interaction between an elderly couple. Anything that you come across as beauty and y'all you and your wife are actually able to share that together, that makes your life just a little bit stronger. A lit your that connection that you're so desperately wanting gets just that just take fingers. Just that more far apart.

That much closer. And it may not seem like I said, well, why would I wanna put that much work into something that just barely makes a a blip on the radar? Because like with all things compounding, it gets it grows. Every little bitty aesthetic intimacy that happens, it becomes bigger. And what happens is, sadly, a lot of times, we allow life to take over. We stop being intentional with what we're wanting to do with our lives. And so we start just hanging out at house.

All of a sudden, the beautiful things that are around us in our house just kinda become mundane and they blend into the background and we stop having the awe and the wonder of seeing beauty around us. And so, yeah, that intimacy, that that aesthetic intimacy starts to wither and dry. Now, a lot of women take a lot of pride into their into their house. They make they work hard to make sure their house is a is a sanctuary for love and harmony.

And that is a that they do that and they will often take the time to change out the decorations. I'm gonna call it decorations. The interior decorations for the house, depending on what the season, is, depending on what the, with the time of the year. So, you know, right now, everybody's taking Halloween stuff down. It's probably starting to put up a lot of lot of fall oriented thanksgiving based. A lot of yellows, oranges, browns, that type of stuff. The color scheme starts to shift and change

until thanksgiving. And then all of a sudden, she takes everything down again, does that hard work, putting stuff up for about a month, brings it all back down, and then boom. You know, all of a sudden, here's Christmas smacking you right in my face. And and we get because our wives put that we may not voice it so much, but we take so much

so much in. And the fact that our wife works so hard to beautify the house and make the house up such a pleasant place that, yeah, that helps to bring our our intimacy together, especially when you start to recognize the beauty of the work that she's done. See, just not just site based beauty. There might be, you know, auditory based beauty that you're hearing. Some beautiful songs, some some tone that is just really just kinda hitting something deep down inside.

Those are all the different parts of aesthetics. So is, aesthetic intimacy important? Well, I would have to say, yeah. It is. Because without that type of intimacy, you do start to drift apart. You become more mundane, more mediocre. It's your life star starts to lose a bit of the color, a little bit of the brightness, a bit of the excitement. When we see something absolutely beautiful, we become more excited be thanks to it.

So we want and need to have some type of beauty around us besides for our wife because, I mean, yeah, we will find our wife beautiful, unless you have a unless you're not what is the song, Loretta Lynn and, Conway Twitty? You're the reason our kids are ugly. So, you know,

and even then is that was more just out of out of, you know, out of fun. But we have so much beauty around us that if we take the time to step back and see, even on a like today, we we've had we had 2 and a half inches rain yesterday. And this today, gotten a few more drops. And so we could easily look outside here and see, this is just a dull day. It's just kinda boring. It's just a it's a day that doesn't really bring forward anything new.

And we can look at that and be absolutely dreary, or you can take the time and look for look for beauty. Like, you could look out and there's a, like, there's a place where the water collects over in the, in a school parking lot. And because of the asphalt being black, it has turned this area into just a huge mirror. And so you get to see

it's I I've always I've always, like, enjoyed light. And so it's me, the photographer in me. But I see that night, just as a beautiful little, back, backdrop to to see something interesting to look at and to and to be in awe about, to have that inspiration of awe, that awe awe inspiring moment, if you will. So how do we build our aesthetic intimacy? 1st, you have to be intentional, man. You have to be able to stop and smell the roses.

Again, there's another example of of having a an aesthetic intimacy, finding something beautiful, this beautiful smell of a rose. Stop and smell those roses. Stop and enjoy the beauty around you. Stop and beaut enjoy the beauty around you with your wife, and this allows y'all to have a better connection. And so is aesthetic in them intimacy its own intimacy? No. I think it's actually just another offset of experiential

intimacy. I think it's just one of those where it can be tied in with, like, the creative intimacy. And, actually, social, creative, and conflict. I think there's actually 5 different types of of intimacy out there. I think numbers 6 being social. Again, that's a you're sharing social experiences with each other. So that's a experiential intimacy. Social creative conflict, even conflict intimacy is a is from an experience.

The difference between conflict is that one, it's incredibly important for a relationship to have, but it also is needed so that we can secure. We have to go through the pain of being knotted

up so that we are we do have a better connection. We do have a better, stronger connection with each other. So aesthetic and and the next one, actually, I way I look at them is these next these 5, intimacies are all subsets of experiential, and we'll dive into those a little bit more come, come the actual 10th episode, which will be where we're talking about the physical, the physical

intimacy because it's the most straightforward. It's the one that just kinda blares right in your face. It's like, yeah, we want the physical intimacy, And that is a very large part. When we hear intimacy, then again, that's what we think of. So, we when it comes to the aesthetics of what is around you, when you stop and you open your eyes, you can see an old couple walking down the street, and you can look at it and see the beauty of this these 2 80 year old octogenarian folks. He still

offers his arm to her. She still walks has her arm, holds his elbow, and, you know, they don't aren't out for a fast roll. They're taking their time, and they're a little hunched over now. But you see the delicacy, the caring, the the warmth that these two people have spent their life building. And that's one of the things that we struggle. We want our life to be that now. But how many fights? How many experiences? How many heartbreaks? How many triumphs? How much

of their life they spent together? No wonder they're clinging to each other so desperately. They're all they know. They've had their kids, and their kids have graduated high school, left, and started their own, their own families, had had great celebrations, possibly even some had divorces, and they all had kids, and those kids are probably having more kids. And so you're on probably the 4th generation now, and that is a wonderful thing to witness. Life around us is a a great

thing. Is it hard? Is it difficult? Is it painful? It's all of those. Our life is 5050, man. Your life is gonna be half of it is just that absolute mind blowing pleasure. It is going to be a wonderful, glorious time. You're going to be so filled with light, joy, and fulfillment. But, again, the other half is 50% pain. So you're going to have a bitch of a time. Your pain is going to suck, but you have to have that pain to be able to appreciate the pleasure.

And I get it. And they're like, you know, you know, you don't have to yeah. Actually, you do. If we didn't if we had nothing but pleasure all the time, it wouldn't be sweet. Wouldn't be as wonderful as the as it is unless we had the pain to go with it. If you're in a completely white room, you're not gonna know distance. You're not gonna know anything about what's going on around you because everything's white.

We have to have those chain we have to have the dark with the light for those to be able to see what's going on around us. Our brain can't comprehend nothing but white. You know, it's it's a tough one. So we have to work to have we have to to have those beautiful, wonderful experiences, to have the aesthetic pleasing. And and all reality, if you think about this, when it comes to aesthetics, to experience the ugly

and this is just kind of forming on top of my head. This is something that's just kind of brewing with what I was saying. We have to have the ugly to go with the beauty. We have to have those ugly experiences, those that ugly rotting house that is an eyesore. We have to be able to see those to be able to have to be appreciate, the beautiful house. You have to have the ugly old crone to to appreciate the young beautiful girl, And these are just our

this is how it's just how life works, really. It's life is 5050. You can see the 50 in the aesthetics. And in all reality, I see the beauty in the old rotting down houses. There is the beauty of decay, and you see the lives the items of life that were left behind. You know, the child's broken toy that was probably one time severely is severely loved, fiercely loved, and I've gone into into old how old abandoned houses that had had a ironing board still set up

in a corner. Nobody seemed to touch. It was just rotting, hanging, you know, there in the corner. It just what caused people to just suddenly leave like that? What caused people to not come home? These are sad, scary things, but at the same time, that's what makes our life incredible. And when you have wrapped in the full realm, the whole 5050 of aesthetics, you have a full 5050, which equals to a 100% life. And so, yeah, experience is important, and stop. Smell the roses as you're coming home,

and then tell your wife about it. Let her share that experience with you. Y'all go out. Go to just top of a hill. Lay out a blanket, and watch the sun go down. Enjoy your life. Enjoy who you are with your wife. Enjoy your wife for being the woman who said, yeah, you're going to be the least annoying person to me. I wanna tie onto you. And we both have these wonderful experiences because, 1, of the aesthetics. 2, we have the we're sharing the different emotions.

And when we stop and stop sharing the emotions, stop sharing the intellectuals, stop sharing the spirituals and experientials and the social, experiences and the creative experiences, we stop having conflicts with each other. When we stop sharing all these aspects, our relationship falls apart. Why do we need the pain? So we appreciate the good. To be able to appreciate the good, we have to have the pain. And, well, that was just kinda sword salady, wasn't it?

So but, yeah, we have to we have to have these incredible experiences and embrace them for being what they are, and take them in and be grateful. When we can be grateful for what we have, we have a better life. So go out, enjoy life, bring your wife along with you in a thunderstorm, you know, during the rain because who knows, there might be a beautiful rainbow that crops out. And all of a sudden, you get to experience that. You get to see the aesthetics of outside.

And when you do that, you'll have a better life. You will have a better relationship. Your relationship will grow. And if you're curious as to you know, maybe y'all don't don't like the same thing. Maybe you go and you see a a beautiful tree that's filled up with, with, say, apple blossoms or cherry blossoms, and you're like, oh, wow. That's real beautiful. And your wife goes, god. That's a freaking mess just waiting to have to be picked up.

That's a wonderful time that y'all can sit down and y'all can have discussions with each other, talk with each other, find out what it is about your your experiences that differ so that you can have the conflict. Conflict isn't necessarily you yelling at her and her yelling at you. It is more of just not agreeing. But we take that disagreement as something life threatening, and it's not. It's just an experience.

And so go out, have those experiences, share the the the spiritual experiences, Share and talk and grow intellectually with each other. Have share the emotions with each other. Have those times where your your emotions are are are bubbling over and her emotions are bubbling over, and then accept the fact that y'all have these emotions, and don't try to hide them from each other. They're not scary. Her emotions are hers, and they're beautiful.

Your emotions are yours, and they're beautiful too, man. Have these experiences, and you'll find that life is so much better, so much more fuller, so more so much more fulfilling that you're able to achieve those goals. You're able to have that relationship that your friends are are jealous of. And I hope that you go out today, go out this week, make it a point somewhere along the way that you have experiences with your wife because

she wants to have those experiences with you. She wants to go on that adventure called life with you. So take her and go have a good time, and you'll find that your your life, your relationship with your wife, your kids, and other folks become better all because of the simple aesthetics that are around you. So, guys, I wanna say thanks so much for listening. I if you are listening to this, we were actually going live on both on, like I said, YouTube, but we were also going live over on

the the podcasting 2.0 type of apps. So, like, if you are using something along the lines like Podcast Goo or Fountain, Podverse, these are different apps, new podcasting 2.0 compliant apps that are out there right now that allow you to hear my voice as you're going down the road. You don't have to sit there and see my ugly mug. And if you're on YouTube, yeah, you're going, oh my god. You're horrible.

And, yeah, I've got, I don't know. My beard's out of control these days. But it's it is a an wonderful advancement that is being done with with podcasting so that people can actually hear what's going on. And there's a lot of other really interesting features that are going on with podcasting 2 point o top of apps. We have things like Podroll, which

are I've got about 10 apps or 10 different podcast shows that I personally like to listen to that you may also enjoy listening to. You can access access those using something like True Fans, which is a, p w progressive web app. It works on any on browsers, but it also works on any any,

any platform there is. So there if you're interested in getting upgrading and getting a new type of podcasting app, you can go to relax mail.comforward/newappsaltogetheroneword, and that will take you over to a directory that is just chocked full of podcasting 2.0 apps. Also, if you are interested in getting pardon me. If you're interested in getting more, a faster return on your on your adventure of building a connection with your wife.

We have 2 different, 2 different options. I've got the, relax mail dot com forward slash lovebirds, and that is we get to sit down. We can see how can we how do we work with each other? How can we how can I help you have the life that you are wanting? Or if you would like to have a be with a group of guys who are all going through trying to better themselves all at once. We have got relax mail dot com forward slash storm master,

and I'll be letting you know when, when that goes goes live. And this is just a like I said, just simple Google form that lets me know that, hey. We've got people who are interested. So you're not gonna get spammed with a whole bunch of stuff on there. It's just me letting you know this is storm master stuff and, master we're mastering the storm of our of our life and of, and and of our head.

So, guys, with that, thank you very much for, for listening. If there's anything on here that just rang a bell that just resonated with you, share it out. Share it on to Facebook and and Instagram, Twitter, x, Mastodon, wherever it is you have a a group of guys that you like to talk to, share this out and let them know, dude, there's a podcast out there that is helping men become better men, helping men become better at their relationships.

And that's where I'm wanting to help men's men the most is help them have that relationship they are starving for. So guys, with that, say I wanna say thank you again for listening. Y'all take care. We will catch y'all later. Till then. Bye.

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