Peter-Vincent Schuld

Once upon a time, the world, life, love came into being. Or did love come first and then life?

If we look at love from a biological perspective, it is purely reproductive. If we look at it from a social perspective, we leave the cold and cold science and enter the unpaved path of emotions, an unpredictable road with pitfalls and low-hanging branches so that we fall as humans and the branches sometimes get the right in our face.

So much has been written about love; endless lists of lyrics and books full. But love has realities that we sometimes try to suppress. Hearts break and hearts speak, but are not always heard, not to mention ignored. Hearts that not only choose to flourish within the socio-culturally domesticated framework of monogamy. Time to dive deeper into the reality of lifestyles that give room to share love with multiple partners but still do not exclude monogamy and we respectfully enter the field of polyamory; Being able to have multiple partners with whom the love for each other and life is shared.

A warm greeting at the end of a dark drizzly afternoon on the last day of the month of October in her practice located near the railway not far from Hilversum station.

In many living rooms elsewhere, fathers, mothers and children come home around this time. Heating on, dinner will soon be served here and there or pulled out of the microwave. In many homes, the institutionality of traditional relationships takes place.

As if it were a drilled rhythm, life is lived according to known patterns. But in many people there are thoughts and hearts, paths that are a long way from the family acting that has been performed in a substantial number of cases.

Love; I unabashedly ask Leonie what the word means to her and without any hesitation, Leonie answers passionately that love for her means awareness, it feels like coming home to yourself, that love for another does not exclude love for yourself, on the contrary.

As a relationship coach, Leonie sees people with a variety of questions and problems. Not just people who are in a relational crisis.

In her own words, she had to deal with a very special request for help that was indirectly placed on her.

It was a man who was so tight with himself that it took the form of severe and unbearable psychological suffering. A man who had a death wish and thus threatened to go down the road of euthanasia and treatment by the end of life clinic. According to Leonie, intensive conversations and therapy given by Leonie have finally saved the man from the literally dead end of life path and the man now seems to have found the happiness in life again, which was also crowned by the love that gave him a girlfriend who wants to go through life with him. That’s where the word “love” comes back again.

“Love is also compassion,” says Leonie Linssen. The sublime example is the man who was on his way to his last breath, who regained his zest for life and the light of day. De facto freed from a literal cage of death, given up by traditional assistance. Taken care of by Leonie, who received from him the gift of daring to work entirely from her heart, no longer hindered by imposed or learned structures from professional associations or desired therapeutic behavior.

With compassion but without sacrificing clarity, Leonie continues her passionate words. In addition to being very clear about the fact that love is passion, Leonie argues that love is also letting go. In her practice, she gets people who pick up their relationship again after a conversation or several conversations or who can continue to live without rancour towards the ex-partner in question when the roads have come to an end together.

To cherish the beautiful, experienced and lived. With certainty she once again posits her fact that love for another should never exclude love for oneself. “Love for others starts with love for yourself,” says Leonie.

Your reporter notices a change in the face of interlocutor Leonie. Suddenly, her face changes from a loving look to a thinking face and it is clear that at that moment a series of thoughts are going through Leonie’s head. Anyone who has an eye or the feeling for it will notice that emotions, feelings and findings are criss-crossed in Leonie’s work.

What is this love? Should love be limited to 1 steady partner and yourself, or can you share love with multiple partners?

Leonie discovered at a young age, when she was 19 years old, that she could love multiple partners at the same time and she found herself feeling the jitters of falling in love with three people at the same time. It was a very natural feeling for her.

One possibility is that you can have multiple partners at the same time who can give you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach. Socially, it is not always accepted even to this day and many misunderstandings about experiencing polyamorous love are plentiful. To the question that polyamory is for the most part purely a wish of men, Leonie explicitly answers in the negative. According to Leonie, the ratio between men and women who prefer this form of relationship is at least equal. Polyamorous relationships come in all forms; From having multiple partners under a single roof to people who consciously choose to live an autonomous life but take it in their hearts to share their love with multiple partners. It occurs in the animal world, and it occurs in the human world, as much as monogamy occurs in both forms of relationship.

Love and relationships fascinate; After all, it’s about the connection that people seek and have with each other. It is and remains a remarkable biological as well as a social phenomenon. What could be better than that chemistry between partners that makes them fall into each other’s arms and gives them the feeling of recognition and coming home.

Leonie continues; “As a rule, women do have a greater need to work on relationships.” “Relationships are like the sea, you have ebb and flow”, “a relationship can be stable, but needs and feelings can change”. If we understand Leonie correctly, a relationship is not merely a static but a dynamic fact in which the forces of nature also claim their roles.

“Love makes me happy, love is what keeps me here” she says passionately, her eyes twinkling and the words dancing out of her mouth.

Again Leonie draws a comparison with the tides, she compares love to the interaction of the waves, waves that can crash on the beach, but can also retreat. “A relationship is never 100% stable”, “there is always a certain duality” referring to partners who develop differently and life insights of partners who can evolve separately in a relationship.

Hearing Leonie’s words, it can be concluded that a relationship does not have to be forever. It can, absolutely. There are people who remain connected to each other forever and forever. Leonie agrees and cites an example of a lady in her work environment who has been happy with the same partner for decades and would not have it any other way. Leonie emphasizes the freedom of choice and the freedom of development.

“For some, a polyamorous existence ends at a certain point and chooses from one and the same permanent partner, while another goes down the path of discovery of loving multiple partners.”

Leonie cares about the fate and destiny of her clients. In classical counseling and psychological assistance, an attempt is made to maintain an emotional distance and a neutrality, which is apparently ingrained as a dogma in the provision of assistance. Leonie says she experiences this differently without losing her professionalism. She uses her own experiences, the enlightenment and liberation she experiences to be able to help someone else and to be able to empathize with what the person seeking help experiences and feels.

Early on in the interview, it soon becomes clear to your reporter that Leonie Linssen has a keen sense of who she is talking to and is constantly on the lookout to learn from exchanges of questions and thoughts about the theme that is so close to her heart, that old familiar love, cast in whatever form.

The question of how she sees herself reflected in the field of love guidance is answered by her with a loving power. “Like an angel” she says, seamlessly adding that it doesn’t necessarily have to be the caring angel but also the angel with the proverbial sword to put an end to a situation in which the feeling no longer corresponds to what the heart says. But she doesn’t say this sentence emotionlessly either, and refers to her own grief as a result of a breakup, a relationship that ended after 4 years. “Relationships can last 13 years, 4 years, 1 year, for the moment that love is felt and experienced it is good,” Leonie reasons. If you don’t know any better, it seems as if Leonie is running her personal emotions through a sorting machine to organize them, but it is precisely the multicolor and diversity of the intertwining emotions and feelings that constantly bring Leonie to progressive insights to help others become happier on the path of love. She teaches others to no longer feel trapped, how to walk the road to inner freedom in connection with themselves and with each other.

After all, love has emotions of happiness, abandonment and fear, but also of coming home to your soul mate in a safe way.

In contrast to the human characteristic called “jealousy” is the inner urge for freedom and feeling free. Inextricably, the conversation takes a turn to the hippie era of freedom, happiness and free love. But even in that loving context, jealousy regularly made its appearance.

Leonie then argues powerfully with the words “Jealousy is the umbrella of emotions and fed by fear”. Relationships, closed, open or free, all have their fields of tension and tides, and again the words end up like water on the sand and after a while withdraw into the sea, the sea that gives and takes and therefore does not differ so much from love in terms of form.

When Leonie is not busy helping other people who are in difficult relational waters, she writes and paints in order to express what she feels and experiences. Leonie wants to experience what beauty is given to her in life orgasmically and in complete freedom. Whether this is writing an article or a brush stroke on the canvas. “Experiencing orgasm is letting go of ballast,” she says passionately. She can describe it so beautifully and if you put it all together and think about it, it makes sense. As humans, we have really become so conditioned by culture, religion and what is expected of us. That you are not supposed to do what your sense of freedom or your primal urges tell you at that moment. Yes, we still live in a culture of shame.

Leonie tries to find the nuance that suits the person in every issue, whether this concerns herself or them or her who enters into conversations with her. She continues her spoken thoughts with “love with surrender, surrender with love, it is also freedom, as long as it does not become submission but remains a free choice”

Again the loving sunlight burns in Leonie’s eyes, you see her eyes twinkle and notice that she wants to tell so much and keeps telling, uninhibited and taboo-free with the intensity of an ultimate orgasm.

“Times have changed, the family is no longer the cornerstone of society, relationships are changing, people remain single but want to experience the orgasmic intensity.”

The fact is that forms of relationships diversify. Emancipation of women and gay emancipation is, and to the extent that it is not, should be, embedded in the foundations of an open and free society including relationships. The freedom to be able to share love with multiple partners and to be able to experience that freedom in which those partners give each other that space is also part of the freedom that people have.

That freedom to be able to choose between having a single partner or multiple partners if desired, is a choice of the individual that is made with love and can only be reciprocated with love.