INTRODUCTION
How Cannabis Enhances Intimacy
By openly sharing your intimate feelings and sudden intuitions, you transform the mundane into vast realms of newness.
By surrendering to emotional authenticity, you can embrace each other unconditionally and express your compassion spontaneously.
By balancing your emotions while keeping your heart open, you can generously give comfort and provide your loved one with nurturing support.
All human cultures are built on the foundation of deep emotional bonding between two loving people. This intimate level of relating has always been the bedrock of our survival, economic success, and emotional fulfillment. But . . . what happens when we introduce the powerful and mostly untested ingredient of cannabis into the complex and intimate couple’s experience?
Just two generations ago, only the far fringe of our culture was using cannabis. Now over half of America’s adult population openly admits in surveys that they’ve tried marijuana. According to a 2017 Yahoo poll, thirty-five million Americans enjoy cannabis regularly, and another twenty million use it occasionally. More than twelve million American couples say that they use cannabis to enhance their intimate experiences, with ten million more expected to do the same in the next few years. In fact, more than seven thousand people try marijuana for the first time every day.
So we certainly need to ask: how does cannabis impact a loving relationship – and how can couples approach cannabis to maximize benefits while minimizing potential downsides?
Depending on several variables, pot can make us feel stoned and relatively unconscious or high and acutely conscious. Can we mindfully use this natural herb to expand consciousness, rather than collapse it, when we’re with our loved one? Specifically, can we get high together in ways that actively and predictably enhance our relationship?
There are hundreds of new books teaching us how to raise, market, cook, and ingest this powerful herb. But thus far very few books offer couples professional guidance, information, insight, and advice for integrating cannabis into their intimate relating. It’s time for full in-print transparency regarding the ways in which grass can influence our love life.
Whether you already use it with your loved one, you’ve been seriously considering it, or you’re just beginning to look into it, I’m writing this book to, I hope, answer the questions you might have concerning cannabis as an aid to your relationships.
In this book we aim to unveil the mysteries regarding the use of cannabis by couples. We’ll definitely look closely at situations where using marijuana unwisely might hinder romance and deep heart-to-heart bonding – because cannabis is a powerful and sometimes unpredictable force to insert into our lives. But mostly we’ll be looking at how the mindful use of cannabis can elicit a truly wonderful shared sense of inner release, well-being, pleasure, communion, and awakening. Even though our government has mostly inhibited research into this herb, we do, in fact, already know a great deal about the predictable impact of marijuana on a couple’s intimate relating.
THE CANNABIS REVOLUTION
In the late 1960s, even before I was out of college, I received a sociology grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct a detailed survey of marijuana usage on the Princeton University campus, and also a parallel survey in New York City. The results shocked the Princeton administration because we discovered that over half of the students regularly using grass were on the dean’s list for academic excellence – which was the exact opposite of what had been anticipated.
Back then, academic research on cannabis was mostly forbidden under penalty of very harsh laws. A small minority of us happened to stumble on the positive psychological power of marijuana, but we also ran headlong into remarkably repressive, fear-based, societal judgments, plus long prison sentences if we were caught with even a pipeful of the forbidden herb. Nevertheless, for three decades after graduate school, working as a couples therapist, first with the Presbyterian Church and then independently, I joined a number of therapists quietly recommending marijuana as a safe and helpful ingredient to resolve personal conflicts and nurture a couple’s intimate life.
Only recently has science caught up with what therapists have known for decades – cannabis usually helps people feel less anxious and more open to exploring otherwise uncharted realms of intimate relating.
We’re currently living through a long-awaited cannabis-stimulated cultural revolution – one that many of us had given up hope would ever happen in America, at least during our lifetime. Over the last decade, the long-standing societal and government repression has begun to dissipate, and average Americans are finally able to explore the quite remarkable powers awaiting us within the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) molecule – one of the main psychoactive constituents. Almost overnight, we’ve seen both medical and social experts reverse course to praise the potential of cannabis to improve our lives.1 Even conservative corporations, such as Molson Coors Brewing Company (which recently announced its intention to produce a line of beer infused with cannabis extracts), are looking for ways to make marijuana a mainstream product.2
We’ve now reached the historic point where many millions of American couples are welcoming the marijuana muse into their relationships, and millions more are ready to jump in and explore the impact of cannabis in their personal lives, without the fear of societal retribution.
The media continues to present us with general headlines about the positive power that marijuana packs for enhancing such things as self-confidence, creative expression, and erotic pleasure. Recent studies at Stanford and elsewhere have documented that over two-thirds of the American couples using pot say that it definitely boosts their sexual engagement.3 Furthermore, new research indicates that couples who use cannabis are more likely to stay happily together, compared to couples who do not use it.4
Now that marijuana has been proven to help reduce social anxiety, boost empathy, relieve depression, heighten sensory pleasure, and increase libido, a great many couples are saying, well, why not try it? If they already use it, they’re considering ways to explore added intimate dimensions stimulated by its effects. You yourself have picked up this book almost certainly because you’re curious about how the muse of marijuana might benefit your current relationship, or perhaps your next intimate involvement.
Cannabis for Couples will provide you with trustworthy and practical information, guidance, and insights, gathered from actual hands-on experience with couples exploring the power of the marijuana muse.
SEVEN HIGH DIMENSIONS
Beyond popular media articles and still-incomplete scientific reports, exactly what happens when two people get high together? Are there hidden dangers you should learn to avoid? Does cannabis stimulate predictable types of experience and behavior? Most importantly, how can these experiences be approached creatively in order to positively impact your relationship?
To begin answering these questions, let’s first take a look at the seven primary dimensions of the cannabis experience, each of which can impact intimate relating. Regardless of whether you’re new to grass or have a long history with the herb, you’ll find that each of these core dimensions, when approached wisely, can enhance your desire for shared adventure, bonding, and fulfillment.
It doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay, liberal or conservative, young or old, rich or not so rich. When you explore these seven dimensions of cannabis with your partner, you’ll discover new meaningful opportunities opening up.
You may find that you naturally flow through these seven different dimensions in order, so that they seem more like phases of the cannabis experience. Or you may not – you may move through them in a different order, or you may experience some but not all of them.
I was originally introduced to this way of viewing the marijuana experience by professor Charles Tart, and I remain deeply thankful to him for all his great research.5 Throughout this book, we’ll be delving deeper into these seven dimensions, one by one.
Most couples I’ve worked with say that when they are high together, they experience these seven stages in their relating. However, please don’t expect your experience to necessarily follow any set order each time you get high with your partner. Probably the best thing about getting high is that it’s always new – you never know what’s going to happen because it’s always a unique moment-to-moment experience. Why? Because cannabis ingestion temporarily turns off most of your future projections and likewise shuts off the lights on recent past experiences.
With all that shut off, and all your senses temporarily boosted, you’re naturally just right here in the present moment, rather than constantly comparing your present experience with associations from the past and projections into the future. This cannabis mind-set is liberating for most people – it’s the “Ahhh” moment when suddenly you realize that you’re fully alive in the now – and what’s more, it feels very good. If pot is at all psychologically addictive, it’s because this “newness” dimension is always a relief, an open window into freshness, an opportunity to discover untapped insights. The trick is to enter into this flow of unique experience mindfully and, in my opinion, thankfully.
By the way, this progression of the cannabis experience for couples applies equally well to platonic friendships without any sexual dimensions. Six of the seven dimensions of a shared marijuana adventure are important in both platonic friendships and romantic involvements, which means that you can apply most of the suggestions in this book to whatever friendship you choose. By having a shared understanding and general intent when you get high with a friend, you’ll be able to delve more deeply into new shared insights.
LETTING GO . . . AND TRUSTING
Although most of these seven dimensions of the “couples high” will make an appearance one way or another almost every time you use cannabis with your loved one, it’s not really possible to predict and manipulate the high experience. Instead, as I learned from my early mentor Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of psychedelics research, with whom I conducted several research projects at the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, there’s an elusive and ephemeral pervading influence that seems to guide and inform each new cannabis adventure. Humphry called this guiding influence “the marijuana muse” and recommended that everyone using marijuana trust and flow with this inner intuitive guidance.6
Cannabis strongly impacts consciousness with a unique, ephemeral, impish, and often delightful swirl of new experience and insight.
Because your usually authoritarian ego can’t dominate and control the marijuana muse, a certain special quality of inner trust is required in order for you to let go and flow freely with the cannabis high. Put bluntly: getting high means temporarily surrendering ego control of your inner focus and intent and just relaxing enjoyably into whatever naturally transpires between you and your partner.
Everyone who gets high is, in fact, asking for this invisible muse to come and tap them with its magic wand and stimulate a transcendent inner experience. Perhaps this is the main lure and payoff of using cannabis – it sets us free from our habitual ego-control patterns so that we can once again (like we did as little kids) experience each moment as qualitatively new and intriguing.
We all know that mundane reality is often repetitive and uneventful and sometimes downright boring or upsetting. Even when we’re with someone we really like and resonate with, we can stay stuck in habitual thoughts, constricted feelings, and defensive behaviors. All of us are often victims of our own routines and inhibitions. This is the reason that we seek periodic moments of transcendence, when the dominance of the thinking, plotting, worrying mind drops temporarily away and we’re suddenly free to expand our consciousness in fun and rewarding directions.
Tapping into such magical transcendent moods can happen spontaneously, of course, when we suddenly, for no reason at all, feel really good inside our own skin. Sometimes yoga or jogging or dancing, or encountering beauty in any form, can make our heart leap and sing for joy. As you perhaps already know, alcohol also can shift some of us into a short transcendent state, although usually with negative side effects. A business breakthrough, creative realization, or sexual rush can also transport us into temporary bliss.
The marijuana muse offers yet another way in which we can actively transcend the humdrum and self-inflicted emotional suffering that we find in everyday existence.
BEYOND OLD PROGRAMMINGS
In our society, especially in religious circles, many of us grew up in communities that seriously frowned on seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The traditional Protestant work ethic made people feel guilty for just kicking back and enjoying the beauty and bliss found in the present moment. We were supposed to stay continually busy and productive – “an idle mind is the devil’s playground,” we heard.
A lot of the 1960s counterculture youth revolution was a reaction to too much seriousness and not enough freedom and fun. Back then, the very idea of using a chemical helpmate like cannabis to induce a temporary sense of transcendence was judged as a crutch or even a sin and rejected. But is this, in fact, a fair judgment?
After observing for decades how the use of weed impacts average lives in divergent ways, I’m personally not an advocate of indiscriminate overindulgence in cannabis. Quite the contrary, actually, because I’ve seen firsthand a great deal of suffering, loss, delusion, confusion, and downright disaster caused by overmuch dependence on marijuana.7 Like any other powerful force, cannabis has the potential to encourage growth and pleasure and also to hamper or even damage a person’s life.
However, over forty years and counting, my observation is that marijuana’s mental and emotional impacts are about 90 percent positive and 10 percent negative. I admit that I’m a die-hard optimist by both temperament and choice – and therefore I’m quite hopeful that increased use of cannabis in our world culture, when approached mindfully and responsibly, will help human beings everywhere on the planet to be more patient, compassionate, understanding, and open-minded toward each other and our ecological future.
Encouraging this positive inner mental, emotional, and spiritual shift by whatever means seems to be humankind’s final hope. Either we consciously do something to let go of our programmed greed, hostility, anxiety, delusion, and depression, or we’re going to be sunk quite soon. And here’s the thing – true revolution always begins in the heart and mind of one person, and then two, and then more, spreading outward into positive group action.
So . . . let’s now put our focus on you as an individual, and you as a couple, and see how cannabis might expand and enlighten your relationship and also radiate outward to positively touch your circle of family, friends, and community.