Can You Plan Passion?

by Kristen Magnacca, July 7, 2010

Have you asked yourself how your passion to become parents brought you to such an unexpected place in your life? Or perhaps are you wondering have you lost your passion to this experience?

When I think about passion I like to define it as the unbridled desire that ignites our actions, which is similar to the real definition: a strong and barely controllable emotion.

In the heat, pun intended, of fertility treatments the act of creation can feel like work. The requirements of performance on demand, abstaining and waiting seem to have a way of putting passionate intimacy on the back burner.

What I know now that I wished I knew then is that people grow into parenthood differently.

For our life lesson we have found ourselves knee deep in the fertility challenges and perhaps feeling as though we were withering. When Mark and I were in the middle of treatments, it dawned on me that I hadn’t painted my toes, put on a sexy dress or googled my husband, and I was saddened.

I missed that side of my feminine energy. The rush of emotions that came when Mark opened the front door or the sound of his voice on the phone or the flutter when he reached for my hand, I longed to long for passion, but the efforts in creation seemed to suck the energy of passion out of our existence.

Then we did something that sounds abnormal. We scheduled passion.

We worked at igniting our passion for each other, thought about passion and drew passion in. Giving up the romantic, movie passion to the talking, negotiating and scheduled passion. As crazy as that sounds, it made all the difference, because it became a habit; all things in our lives need our attention to grow and be sustained. A passionate relationship doesn’t happen by accident —it takes work, and working at something isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping ... waiting ... and though unwanted ... unbidden ... it will sti r... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us ... guides us ... passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love ... the clarity of hatred ... and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace ... but we would be hollow ... Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we'd be truly dead.”

Joss Whedon quotes (American Screenwriter, Producer and Creator of the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Also known for Toy Story, Alien Resurrection, and Angel, b.1964)

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Author, consultant, and coach Kristen Magnacca has been featured on the Today Show and in publications including Woman’s World, the Boston Globe, WebMD.com, About.com, and Pregnancy.org. Kristen and her husband Mark live on Cape Cod with their children, Grace and Cole. Kristen invites readers to contact her through her website at www.kristenmagnacca.com.