Islands of Coherence

Last month, my perspective was expanded through a talk titled “Islands of Coherence” by Zamir Dhanji and the screening of a movie called "The Village of Lovers", both hosted at Awake Uvita—a conscious community in Costa Rica. The talk explored how societal structures emerge and organize themselves, and how their level of maturity and collective consciousness can profoundly influence the wider world.

If the familiar mantra “be the change you want to see in the world” holds any real value, what happens when that inner shift is embodied not by one individual, but by many—living together in intentional, conscious communities? The impact appears not merely additive, but exponential.

From this vantage point, it becomes possible to examine the striations and patterns we consider “normal” in modern society—many of which may be nothing more than deeply ingrained conditioning.

The Structure of Modern Love

One such pattern is the way love is structured today.

The prevailing model of love is rooted in the nuclear family: two individuals, of any gender, who form a romantic partnership and raise children within a contained unit. Adults are primarily responsible for one another and for their children, and the relationship is organized as a one-to-one bond. In this model, the nuclear family becomes the foundational unit of society.

As a result, romantic love and social organization become almost indistinguishable. This helps explain the immense emphasis placed on romantic partnership—along with the pressure to find it, maintain it, and make it succeed at all costs.

It also helps explain why truly alive romance can be surprisingly rare within long-term nuclear partnerships, which are, after all, structures of organization as much as they are expressions of intimacy.

In this framework, one’s partner is expected to be everything: home (both emotional and physical), family, lover, emotional anchor, and closest friend. Life becomes organized around this central bond. Society itself is structured around the couple, its reproduction, and the family unit that follows.

Love Beyond the Nuclear Couple

What if this structure of love is developmentally limited?

What if the nuclear family was adaptive and useful at a certain stage of human evolution, yet restrictive at another? Or better, what if it does not even reflect the most natural way human beings are designed to live and relate?

Experiments in communal living—both historical and contemporary—alongside anthropological records of early human settlements, offer another lens through which to inquire.

A contemporary example is the Tamera community in Portugal, often associated with experiments in polyamory, polygamy, or free love. There, the basic unit of society is not the couple, but the individual within a tribe. Belonging is cultivated through connection to the land, shared purpose, community living, same-gender groups, friendships, and romantic relationships.

Emotional, physical, and relational needs are met through multiple channels rather than concentrated in a single partner. Romantic love remains present, but it is not required to carry the full weight of a person’s sense of safety, identity, and belonging.

When the individual-in-community becomes the foundational structure, love begins to take on a different form—not because it becomes less important—perhaps the opposite—but because it is freed from the impossible task of fulfilling every human need.

The Cost of the Nuclear Couple

By placing romantic partnership at the center of everything, we risk suffocating its truest essence—an essence rooted in freedom, creative potential, and evolution. When love is structured primarily around safety and possession, it ceases to be a free choice and becomes a condition for security.

In such cases, love is guided less by presence, desire, or authentic choice, and more by fear of loss. Exclusivity, then, is not necessarily an expression of love itself, but a requirement imposed by the structure surrounding it.

This does not suggest that love should be careless or devoid of responsibility. Rather, it invites us to reconsider where responsibility truly resides when it is shared rather than concentrated. Freedom in love does not mean the multiplication of partners, it is the experience of choosing—and being chosen—again and again, without fear as the binding force.

The essential question is not whether love should be monogamous or non-monogamous, but whether romantic love has been asked to carry more weight than it can reasonably hold.

Love and the Collective Subconscious

Why does this inquiry matter for our experience today, and for the workings of the subconscious mind?

Because once we recognize that there is not only an individual subconscious, but also a collective one—largely shaped by survival, self-protection, and historical fear—we begin to see how deeply our contemporary model of love is conditioned by societal mechanisms rather than universal truths.

Seen through this lens, modern romantic love reveals itself not as an absolute or the highest possible expression of love, but as a construct: beautiful in many ways, and deeply limiting in others.

This recognition opens the possibility of exploring love through different striations—or even without fixed structures at all—in order to encounter it more fully and move beyond the narrow boundaries of our current definitions.

A Closing Reflection

We often assume that romantic love, as it is portrayed and practiced in modern society, represents the most complete form of love available to us. But what if this belief is the result of decades of conditioning—feudalism, religion, and patriarchy first, then popular culture after?

The idea of romantic love as the basic structure of society is undeniably beautiful, and it may contain truth. Yet it is worth asking whether this structure has preserved the aesthetic of love while simultaneously constraining its lived reality.

Food for thought.