Eri & Jay
To listen to this episode:
Jay: So now we’re trying to have a baby, and, it felt so beautiful and so meaningful, that, now there’s no contraception; we’re just going to make love. And by making this love with intention, a child would come through. And so we had, what I would consider the most beautiful lovemaking experience of my whole life. And, at the end of it, I just fell on top of Eri crying and just being so moved by this experience that we were, you know, gonna be making a child, and it was just super powerful, and it was super sweet, and then I was like, “Cool, there it is. The baby’s done,” and she’s like, “Uhhh.”
Hello my dear patrons!
This is the final installment of my four-episode arc with Eri Kardos Patel and Jaymin Patel, recorded in February 2020.
Eri & Jay are world travelers, long-time digital nomads, co-parents of two young children, and American expats in Bali. Eri is the author of the book Relationship Agreements, Jaymin the creator of The Integrated Father.
In part one, episode 104. good kids gone wild, Jay and I told our origin stories, and Eri began hers.
In part two, episode 105. mom-ogamish, we picked up with Eri’s sexy Seattle life, BDSM as a highway to vulnerability, the aftermath of a fight or regrettable incident tool, the necessity of being seen, heard, & loved, open relating vs. open relationships, and how the longtime nomad couple finally settled here in Bali.
In part three, episode 106. a bollywood ultimatum, we reconvene to discuss Jaymin’s years of proud abstinence, Eri’s parents as Christian role-models, arranged marriages & bio-data, proposals number one, two, & three, meeting the siblings, parenting as a calling, weddings number one, two, three, & four, and Jaymin’s mom with the Bollywood ultimatum.
In this, part four, we conclude with three stories:
- the boom-there-it-is conception story
- the trying to make a baby across state lines / teenaged hoarder bedroom story
- and the story of Zion’s birth
We also talk about the only thing that makes their relationship problems different than other couples…
In next week’s episode of horizontal, I lie down with Kai Mata, Indonesia’s openly queer, rainbow-toting singer-songwriter. It’s still very dangerous to be queer in Indonesia. Let’s celebrate her bravery with the next couple of episodes.
Until then, may you love people.
May you love people and let them know.
May you fight the good fight and, in the words of Cornel West, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private.”
Thank you for my subsistence. Thank you for being the lifeblood of horizontal.
Come lie down with us again, in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.
Links to Things:
Eri’s website, EriKardos.com
Jaymin’s website, JayminSpeaks.com
The Integrated Father, Jaymin’s newest venture
Beyond Mom-Mode, Eri’s most recent venture, designed to nourish the nurturer
Marie Kondo’s website, where you can learn about the life-changing art of tidying up, the technique which Jay employed when cleaning out his childhood palace (I’ve done this with my clothes and found it extremely powerful!)
Eri’s handout about Gottman’s Aftermath of a Fight or Regrettable Incident protocol (downloadable)
Eri & Jay’s Erotic Blueprint™ coach Genevieve
The Erotic Blueprint™ quiz, created by Jaiya, which was a game-changer for their erotic relationship
Eri’s book Relationship Agreements
Show Notes:
(if you share excerpts, please link to this page or the horizontal Patreon!)
[2:41] What Lila admires most about their relationship style (going their own way together).
[3:45] The boom-there-it-is conception story.
[4:25]
Jay: So now we’re trying to have a baby, and, it felt so beautiful and so meaningful, that, now there’s no contraception; we’re just going to make love. And by making this love with intention, a child would come through. And so we had, what I would consider the most beautiful lovemaking experience of my whole life. And, at the end of it, I just fell on top of Eri crying and just being so moved by this experience that we were, you know, gonna be making a child, and it was just super powerful, and it was super sweet, and then I was like, “Cool, there it is. The baby’s done,” and she’s like, “Uhhh.”
[6:10]
I had such a naive understanding of how children are made. I was like, “Boom! There it is!” And she’s like, “Actually, we need to do this like, every day for the next four days, three to four times a day.”
[7:00]
Lila: It feels like we are trying — most of us — so hard not to get pregnant, for so long, that it might be very confusing to the body, right, to be like, “Alright! Now here we go! Like, now, go! Make a baby!”
[7:36] How sexing to make a baby can take the fun out of sex
[7:49] Lila asks if putting your legs up after sex is really a thing. She saw it on Handmaid’s Tale.
[8:36]
Jay: It was like claiming my wife, creating my child, it was just everything about sex that you only have in certain unique times. That it’s like, okay, it can be about pleasure and connection, but now it’s like, I was claiming my wife, I was creating life, I was like— there’s these other layers that opened up and it was so powerful. And you know, in my mission to be a Dad, in life, like, this was me living my mission. So it was hugely— a huge emotional thing.
[9:20] Both Eri & Jay were certain they wanted to be parents, and certain they wanted to be bio-parents.
[9:33] The trying to conceive across state lines story.
[11:27]
Jay: And not only does she stay in a different state, but I am literally— this is what I’m doing, Lila. It’s so funny. I, I go to my old house, and I’m like—
Eri: In the hotel.
Jay: In the hotel that the house is attached to.
Lila: Ohh yahh!
Jay: And I’m in there, in the house that I grew up, and […] my mom keels out of the—
Eri: Like, is waiting in the driveway.
Jay: In the driveway—
Eri: For him to pull up.
Jay: And just like—
Eri: Peels out.
Jay: Peels out. And so, she’s not even there. So, now I’m—
Lila: But she had to make sure that you saw that.
Eri: Yes.
Jay: Saw. Exactly. She had to see me—
Lila: “I’m SO UPSET WITH YOU!”
Jay: It’s all the Bollywood movies. And so, now I I’m, I’m spending my day in my old room, going through twenty-f— and I used to be a pack rat, or a
Eri & Jay: — hoarder.
Jay: I have so many things from my childhood. Just so many notebooks and everything like, just art and, so I’m going through my old life.
Eri: Imagine a room that is like (misty voice) a shrine to Jaymin.
Lila: Mmm.
Jay: Oh yah, this is—
Eri: Every award that this perfect child has ever won (Lila laughs) is there.
Jay: This is a massive room, by the way! I mean, I had a huge room growing up.
Eri: He had his own palace for the Prince!
Lila: And your sisters had to like, share, or something. They’re like in bunk beds.
Jay: Right, no, they had their own rooms, but I definitely had the biggest room.
Eri: He had a palace.
Jay: I had a huge closet— my closet is probably the size of, like a New York bedroom. […]
Lila: My bedroom, for sure.
Jay: That’s how big my closet was. It’s humongous.
Lila: Ugh!
Jay: And then I had a room that was five times that. So, I had a lot of stuff. Okay?
Lila: Oh, my goodness.
Jay: But I’m going through my whole life and just parsing through my my past and my childhood, in this home that I lived in, and then periodically through the day, I would leave, drive across the border to like my quote unquote new life—
Lila: (guffawing) To Ohio!
Jay: To Ohio, have sex, (Lila giggling) help Eri with her feet up and to let, let my seed into her egg. (Eri & Lila giggling) And I spend time with her, come back across the border—
Lila: (still laughing) Go, continuing!
Jay: Go through my childhood, go back across the border, have sex with my future, come back and then like, like, work through my past, then go back and work through my future (Eri & Lila giggling) to go back and work through my— I mean, I just literally, four times a day I’d be driving across the border—
Lila: Woooow.
Jay: […] and have sex, so that we can have a child, while going through all of my stuff in my old house.
Lila: It’s like a Jaymin yoyo.
Jay: Yah, it was just a yoyo of like my two worlds, like where I had been and where I’m going, and just like, the juxtaposition of everything and just like, releasing all my old stuff, I, my parents have a minivan— I took two minivans worth of stuff to Goodwill. […] Not to mention stuff that I recycled in paper recycling or stuff that I had to just throw away. […] And so I’m tired, like I’m emotionally—
Lila: Yeah, what’s your emotional state?
Jay: So there’s a lot, like I’m seeing stuff from like 3rd grade or like, y’know, all of these toys that I played with, I’m like, Will one day my kids play with these toys? Do I keep them? Where do I put them? Like, I’m flying from here, so I can’t even have that much stuff, like, it was huge, it was like, What do I actually keep or not? And like, luckily, you know, um, Eri told me about the— what’s her name, babe, the joy?
Eri: Konda.
Jay: Yeah, the the—
Lila: Marie Kondo.
Jay: Marie Kondo model and it’s like, Does this bring me joy? And you know what I found is that most of the stuff brought me stress.
Lila: Mmmmmmmmmm.
Jay: It was all the old expectation, and the old lalalas and so it was beautiful— to release all that. Very emotional, but beautiful to have that release and then really step into, like, what’s new for me, which is be— you know, and, Eri and I knew that we wanted to be a traveling family, so I knew we were gonna be nomadic, like, stuff, did not matter.
Lila: Right.
Jay: And so I got rid of so much and donated so much, and went back and forth.
Eri: S— until the last time.
Jay: Yeah. […]
Eri: So the last time, I go to the house to help load up, ‘cause we’ve got our car, and we’re gonna load up all the things, and I go in for a few minutes, to help make some final decisions—
Jay: Yeah, I was like, “I need you to see this stuff, like, am I gonna use this in the future or not, I need your help.”
Eri: And while I’m there, helping him make the last decisions, guess who comes home?
Lila: Ohhhhhhhh.
Jay: Early!
Eri: Early.
Lila: Ohhhhhhhhhhh mama.
Eri: And—
Jay: Yeah. Oh my gosh.
Eri: Yeah, and so, now I’m like, Do I climb out the window? Like, what am I supposed to do?
Lila: You feel like a teenager.
Jay: Yeah so so now I’m caught. I’m caught in my teenage room, with a girl in my room— I’ve never had a girl in my room, with the woman that my mom told me specifically not to have in the house, that I had her come for half an hour, just to look at all these final things—
Lila: And right at that time—
Jay: And right at that time—
Eri: Mom comes home.
Lila: Bollywood mama.
Eri: Bum bum BUM!
Jay: Yeah! It was so dra— it was like a movie; it was so dramatic.
Eri: So he’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna go downstairs and talk to her, and you run out!” (Lila cracks up) Just run.
Jay: Yeah— yeah. I—
Lila: You ran?
Eri: So I just like snu— I like, walked very quickly out as fast as I could and tried not to like, slam the door, just like (whispering) try to get really quiet! (laughs)
Lila: Ohhhw.
Jay: And, and it was beautiful because, in that moment, Eri was like, “Babe, No, like, you need to just tell her I’m here, like, I will leave without seeing her, but she needs to know that I’m here.” Like, we need to speak the truth here of what’s going on. […] So I went down and I was talking to my mom about this and […] it was that juxtaposition of the old school of thought of the lies and the not sharing and the like, and maintaining presence, and, fronts, or whatever it’s called. And then Eri just being this like, light of truth, and just being like, This is what our authentic experience is right now. This is what we’re sharing.
Eri: Speak Truth (and I’m walking out very fast). (Lila & Eri laugh)
Lila: But you do that, because—
Jay: It was a huge rite of passage. It was a huge rite of passage to have that.
Eri: It was so powerful.
Jay: Back and forth thing happening.
Lila: Wooooow.
Jay: So I moved out of my childhood room, and, made a child.
[17:05] Eri’s dream & the naked labyrinth stone ceremony to call in their child
[21:20] Eri & Jay on declaring what they are choosing, and why they’ve never written out their own relationship agreements (even though that’s what Eri coaches people to do)!
Eri: One of the things we’ve had to do is be really, really effing intentional with our time and communication, […] and the lifestyle we’ve created, and the jobs we have created, and the family we have created, have given us the spaciousness to connect on a really deep level on the daily, which I don’t think that most people either have the luxury of, or create the luxury of.
[24:54] Eri & Jay on figuring out ways to move together physically (through dance) that feel pleasurable.
[26:02] What is Jay’s #1 value?
[26:54] Why Jay loves being Eri’s student.
[28:22] What does Eri mean when she says relationship agreements?
relationship agreements [noun] = a living document that clears up expectations or assumptions about a relationship, by declaring the ways that you will live your lives together and interact. It can include anything from “What does marriage mean to you?” to “How do we handle finances?” “What are our expectations around gender roles?” “How do we handle conflict?” “How do we parent?” “How do we connect intimately?” If in multiple relationships, it can include how you will manage those relationships at the same time. You also agree on how often to reevaluate your agreements— for instance, yearly, seasonally, or monthly.
[30:15] What is a relationship check-in made of?
Eri: It’s a clear check-in of: Who am I today, who are you today, and who are we today?
[31:20] What they do after a broken agreement, a conflict, or a trespass.
Eri: It goes back to what I was talking about with the Gottman tool of Aftermath of a Fight or Regrettable Incident of Okay well, what was the situation that occurred? How are we feeling? And then, what did it remind us of? What’s the story behind it? And […] really getting into the story aspects. Because both of us carry our own wounding and our own trauma, and most of the time when we have conflict, or or something— we trespass against one another, it’s because, we were holding totally different stories, and most of the time we were acting from a place of our wounded selves instead of acting from a place of who we are now. And so really looking at that and saying, “What happened? How did this fuckup happen?” And “What can we do differently about it?” Before we get to the action step, most of the time just understanding what was going on for the other person, just shifts everything.
Jay: And I kinda love those fuckups, ‘cause they’re so beautiful, it’s like, Okay, now here’s something for us to look at. […] I do feel this is unique because we’ve built capacity and tools to navigate those bumps, and now we kind of look forward to when bumps open up and bring something to have to work on. Because then we can get deeper in our releasing of our old stories. […] It keeps it a little bit rugged the way that I like, you know? For these things to happen, because it— we’ve created a way for that to be held.
[32:57] Annie Lalla’s concept of True Love as a Dojo.
[33:24] Lila wonders what they actually struggle with.
Jay: I’ve been put on a pedestal my whole life, and […] I’m living in a relationship beyond what I ever thought was imaginable, so, even I see it as something that’s so ideal that I would want others to emulate. But not in a way that is put up to a level where it doesn’t feel accessible because, we have the exact same struggles as everyone else, but we’ve just put a lot of time — Eri specifically, and then she taught me but — into relationship tools and approaches. And she’s a master at using them. You know, it’s harder to also use them when conflict is there. To turn towards your partner, and like, come into softness. You know, and we’re in a dojo that moves at rapid speed. I mean, there’s self-worthiness issues, there’s insecurity, there’s do you love me; am I lovable, are you feeling met, you know like, all the things that every relationship, like, what’s going on with our sex — you want this, I want that in intimacy, how do we both get met in that, how do we create time as parents for intimacy, how do we maintain dating each other and keep things exciting, like, how do we maintain attraction. We deal with the full gamut of everything any person deals with in a relationship, for sure. We just love it, because it— we have now tools that I didn’t even know existed 4 or 5 years ago, before I met Eri, to navigate them. And we also, we always work with coaches — we have at least three coaches that we can go to and say, “We want support on this. This just came up. We feel it would be better if some— if a third party was gonna hold this dialogue for us.” And so, we still, we still have tension points, and we just turn to the people in our, in our community network—
Lila: You call in the community.
Jay: This is what coaches are for. They’ve been somewhere we haven’t been. You know, and so, we help others, but we get help all the time. So it’s, I want to say like, yes, it can be viewed in an idealized way and that makes me feel good, because I think, we’re really doing the work, every day. We’re really showing up and doing the work and and showing up in a way that, we’re helping the other person be at their best, and making sure that this relationship is serving us. You know. And it is. And we love and appreciate each other so much, and we love and appreciate this relationship as its own entity, and we love and appreciate the work that we do, but, there’s still a lot of work, and it just goes deeper and deeper, I mean we have— I’m coming into this relationship with 33 years of programming and trauma and story and socialization around certain ways of doing things… and I’m not gonna unlearn that in 5 years and just be in this beautiful, everything is hunky-dory like— that’s not what we’re trying to say. There’s just deeper and deeper depths of undoing all that and processing that and releasing and learning and stepping into our higher selves, so, that’s what’s going on.
Eri: I think the big thing to call out is that, I feel like most of us were fed a bunch of lies as kids about what a relationship should be or what a marriage should be and like, Disney does a really shitty job at telling us—
Jay: Oh God, yeah.
Eri: You know, that we’re supposed to all live happily ever after, and the hard part is finding your Prince. Or finding your Princess. When looking back, that was way easier than like, What happens after you ride off into the sunset? And so now, we’re here. We’ve built our castle; we’ve started our family, you know, we’re in it. And, the messes are still the same but instead of the story that “you should already know how to handle it,” we say, You know what, we’re students! This is the first time we’ve ever done this. This is the first time we’re hitting— uhh, what it’s like to be adulting with each other, and parenting with each other, and so, instead of being like, Why don’t you know how to do that? Or, Why don’t you do it my way? It’s like, as soon as we screw up it’s, How do we go back to being students? Who can we learn from? Who can we call in to help us see how to do this better? And having that mindset, like a student mindset, is the game changer I think. Because if you think you know how to do it, or your partner should know how to do it, you’re in trouble. If you can be proactive and let your ego go away for a while, and just be like, You know what? I’m probably living from a place of my hurt inner child, and, from poor modeling, and instead let’s learn how to do this together in a way that works for us and is healthy. It changes everything! So now, you asked specifically, what are our bumps. I can tell you, every time we’ve hit a bump, we’ve gone out to seek a better way to do it. So, for us, for a while we had challenges like— once you have kids, finding time for intimacy can be really challenging. And then figuring out, what kind of an intimacy do you both like can be challenging, and so we hit this patch where it was like, Gosh, do we, do we even know how to physically connect like we used to? And so we went out and we found some INCREDIBLE COACHES around sex and relationships, and I’m a sex and relationship coach! And I found GREAT COACHES to help us!
[39:05] Eri expresses a debt of gratitude to Jaiya’s work and the Erotic Blueprint™ coach Genevieve. Eri recommends the Erotic Blueprint quiz if you’re having any challenges connecting with your partner sexually.
[39:28] Lila appreciates their relationship ethos.
Lila: I love that what you seem to be saying is, We’re not better but we’ve had, perhaps better support. We’ve been better supported. We’ve called in experts or elders or community or all of them […] to help us along, and I love that!
[39:46] Lila on bringing up relationship therapy to her ex after a few months of dating.
Lila: We were having real serious problems. And I said, “Maybe we should go see someone.” He’s like, “Isn’t it a bit early for that?” I’m like, We’re having problems NOW. Why would we wait until it’s like the last gasp on death’s door? Because I really think that that is the reason why many people think, “Oh, relationship therapists, that stuff doesn’t work.” It doesn’t work if you go when you’re terminally ill!
Eri: You have to be proactive. […]
Jay: It’s the opposite of the— the old pattern is sweep it under the rug. Right? And the new practice is let’s hold hands and find a way to get through this. […] I would be divorced by now. Like, I was so operating from my hurt inner child, I was so operating with these expectations, I was, you know, like, you had to put me on a pedestal like every other woman in my life has done, my sisters my mother my grandmother, and I’m just l— I’ve been humbled in the most beautiful way. In the most loving way. […] We use truth as our compass, and we use our community as our guides, and we just— we know that we want to choose connection, and it’s sometimes really hard, but we keep our hands held, and we move through it.
[41:34] Eri on the contrast between culturally acceptable coaches (business) and culturally unacceptable coaches (relationship or parenting).
Eri: It’s such a paradigm shift. It’s like culturally-acceptable to get a business coach, right?
Lila: (emphatically) Yes.
Eri: In fact, it’s even bragged about. “My business coach” blah blah blah, right? But if you say, “My relationship coach,” all of a sudden you’re “less than.”
Lila: You feel embarrassed.
Eri: You’re fucked up. You’re embarrassed.
Jay: Or parenting.
Eri: Yeah! Or parenting coach, right!
Jay: You’re not allowed to be able to ask about parenting, even though it was never modeled for you in a great way— or rarely, right, for for for people who are parents now like, their caregivers probably didn’t create the best models, but then you don’t know, you haven’t experienced it, it’s not on TV—
Lila: You haven’t even witnessed it!
Jay: […] And yet you’re not supposed to go out and do it—
Lila: And get help.
Jay: And a lot of parents that I talk to, they say, “I’ll Google something as it comes up,” and, “I’m doing way better than my parents did.” And that’s their marker! It’s like, “Well of course you’re doing better than your parents did — you have the Google; you have the internet, you have all this stuff!” Like, like, yeah! But imagine that you can be the best and bring an end to this ancestral trauma that’s been passed on from generation to generation, and let your kids be a completely different life from what you had. And there’s hesitancy there; it’s just crazy.
[42:47] Eri & Jay tell us the story of Zion’s birth, including an apartment in Seattle, a blue baby, and a getaway.
To listen to this episode:
