I know - it sounds a little woo-woo (new agey, if you will), but listen for a minute. A dear friend of mine sent me a link to some audio files from the website of a couple of Buddhist teachers in New York City who did a series of teachings on this subject - and frankly, it’s fantastic.
Now I’m not a big fan of the Buddhist framing of concepts. I find karma to make a little of sense, but to be a somewhat circuitous route to arrive at concepts that could be arrived at many other ways. This is not to say that I find it invalid in any way and I suppose there is something to be said for having multiple ways to look at the same problem. This is just such an example.
If I may summarize in my own words and perspective:
The purpose of a relationship is to work together to serve the greater good or community or some similar thing. Consequently, you should be with someone who shares your goals and ideologies (what this means will vary depending upon who you are).
Happiness comes from serving others. If you devote your life to serving other people, you will be happy. In a relationship, this means that you focus completely on meeting every want or need that the other person has.
You create your own reality. While the Buddhist perspective takes this quite literally, the points that they make using it remain valid even if you back it off a bit to say that you control your perspective of reality. This becomes important in terms of creating a relationship that you are fully satisfied with.
Don’t talk to your partner. Okay, maybe they wouldn’t quite say that, but in effect they are. The point is that you can create the type of relationship that you want by working on who you are — by changing your expectations and desires and by working to fully satisfy your partner at the same time. And you can’t TELL your partner that they have to do the same thing! They have to come to it of their own volition - otherwise, they won’t be doing it for themselves, and their commitment will not be sufficient to handle all the suckiness that is involved in self-introspection.
The third party solution is fascinating. Basically (using the karmic perspective), if you are experiencing unhappiness from something your partner is doing that’s because you have caused that same type of unhappiness on others in the past. So what you have to do is satisfy the karma by bringing happiness of the same type to other people. It doesn’t have to happen within your relationship. Example: if you want your partner to be more affectionate, you should be more friendly to people at work. Talk to that guy that no one likes. Buy someone a coffee next time you pick one up, etc… In this way, you will reverse your karma and your partner will change.
Seems a little fantastical, right? Well consider this: if you spend your time doing nice things for people, you will become someone who does nice things (simple enough?). A person that does nice things draws less enmity and more niceness (aka affection) from others. In addition, this person begins to attract other people who do nice things thus moving towards a different social circle and a completely different perspective of how the world operates.
In this way, you can “create” you perfect partner by being a perfect partner and continuing to work on improving yourself. Basically, you use your partner as a mirror to see what it is that you need to work on.
Is this the one? Finally, and this is the part I haven’t fully worked out. How do you know when you meet the right person? Well, first of all, there is no right person. This seems to make sense - I mean, maybe you luck out and meet someone who is at the same place in life as you and wants all the same things on the same time scale. But come one, what are the chances that the two of you will continue to want the same things for the next 50 or 100 years? It must happen, but the odds are significantly against it. Even in this idyllic situation however, all of the above advice still functions.
The difficult part of what they say is that if you start working on you and “creating you perfect partner” (you know, in your mind), that if the one you’re with now isn’t right, that will resolve itself and you will be open and ready to meet the one that will fit into your vision. The example they used for this had to with a woman whose boyfriend was having trouble committing. They recommended that if she fully commit, not just in the relationship but in other areas of her life as well, that he would either commit to her or move on, leaving her free to meet someone who is ready to commit.
You you you. I guess that’s really the point. If you don’t know who you are or what you want, how can you be open to it. Especially in big cities today, you meet so many people every day. How you find someone to spend your life with if you’re looking for that person to make you happy? You need to bring your own happiness to the table and take the opportunities provided by a relationship to even better understand what you need to be happy. All the while, doing your best to give them everything they need so they have the opportunity to do the same.
Ah, relationships - how confusing! How simple! How natural! How complex! How terrible! How wonderful! And yet so important to life.
If you listen to the audio, let me know what you think in the comments below,
Wayne
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