My second husband and I married after a period when I had been extremely happy as a single person and a nun for a very long time – almost ten years.
After we were married, I remember a day when I managed to create a deep unhappiness in myself without any proximate cause.
I was sitting on the couch, and he was going about his life, and I gradually got myself really upset, and then the pot came to a boil, and it was all the things that females can do in their minds to get worked up about their feelings.
“If he really loved me, he would ask me what’s wrong with me.”
At the end of which, I realized how vulnerable you become when you let yourself get closely involved with another person. And, having had almost a decade of total freedom, I was horrified by that level of vulnerability.
I was horrified at the prospect of spending year after year this way, in a self-created cycle of feeling badly used.
There had been absolutely no inciting cause on David’s side; I had simply done it all by myself, and I realized that the possibilities for self-created suffering are literally endless.
I tried to think of alternatives. And the first and most obvious thing that came to my mind was to build a hard shell around my heart.
As it happened, we were painting wood furniture with a clear plastic finish. We had put enough of the coating on the tables that they could resist the weather, but you could still see the wood. And I had a mental image of painting a hard plastic layer over my heart, and then when I’m old and gray I’ll look exactly the same, but there will be a thicker crust.
And then I realized it was still the early years of our relationship, and if I did this every time something hurt my feelings, for reasons real or imaginary, it would build up into the kind of happily abused feeling you can often see in older women, which is completely self-generated and self-enclosed, and not at all attractive.
I realized that reacting to my life by putting up a shield around my heart would absolutely keep me from engaging. And I like to engage, so I didn’t welcome the idea.
And then I tried to reason, “He’s a good man. I can trust him.” And I went through all of the things I could trust and admire about him, all of which were true, because I wouldn’t have gotten engaged to him otherwise.
But then I had to stop and consider that we can never predict what might happen.
You cannot know that something astonishing will not happen – some catastrophic illness, or a hopeless attraction to someone else. Not that I would leap into it, but you can never foresee the tests that are coming your way.
I thought, “I can’t be safe by pretending he’s never going to hurt my feelings.”
I don’t mean to dwell on life’s horrors, but people do have accidents, and they get brain damage, and then they become somebody else. And people suddenly discover that they have a penchant for addiction.
So, I thought, you can’t let yourself feel safe because you imagine he won’t ever hurt you. Because then you’ll feel betrayed if he accidentally does. And you don’t know what may come out of you that will disappoint or hurt him.
So I had to think of how I could reconcile this very realistic view of our life together, and go forward with a positive feeling about the relationship. And I realized that the one thing I absolutely trusted was God. I completely trusted that God would give me what I needed – not always what I wanted, but what I truly needed. And if I’m open to life with full faith that the right experiences will come my way, I know that they will lead me where I want to go. And then the next question becomes, “Where am I trying to go?”
Am I trying to spin a cocoon where I can curl up and be safe and have my own little life, and then I’ll be happy? Or am I trying to attain inner freedom?
I’m not talking about a false freedom that’s built out of a hard-shelled personal detachment from other people’s hurtful actions, but a freedom from the things in myself that keep me feeling hurt – and the freedom to soar in a consciousness where I’m unshakably happy and not suffering.
I talked earlier about yin and yang, and how we need to have access to both sides of ourselves, female and male, so that whatever comes, you can draw on the kind of energy that you need. Where you’ll be a mature, balance person who can be strong when it’s appropriate, and sensitive and caring when it’s called for.
What keeps us from finding that balance? I think it’s ourselves. I can count at least ten occasions in the past week alone when I’ve thought, “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I have the energy. I don’t know if I have the creativity. I don’t know if I have the insights.”
These feelings of limitation come, and you press on and train yourself to find the energy and courage and creativity to do it regardless. I feel that I can do many things now that I couldn’t do ten years ago, simply because I’ve had to do them, and I haven’t given up.
My life has brought challenges, many of which I’ve resented with all my heart and soul. But it’s brought me the experiences that I needed to become strong, and I’ve learned and grown through them, so that whenever those same things come now, it’s not a problem.
I trust God and I trust life, that it will bring me the experiences I need. And I want to stay open to those experiences.
If a relationship comes into my life, I want to be open to its potentials, not because of the person I’m with, but because of what might happen through that person. And through all the years of my relationships, in my two marriages and with the many people I’ve been close to at Ananda, the balance that I’ve striven for is to keep those two realities, yin and yang, male and female, clearly and openly in place.
Every time a relationship has gotten a little out of whack, I found that I could look within myself and check the balance. Because a long time ago I realized that I’d gotten it into my head that my second husband needed to be a certain way, or else I would be unhappy. And, of course, he would inevitably fail to live up to my microscopic expectations.
But then I learned that if I looked at the bigger picture, I could see that he had been honorable and fair. But those feelings do insisting on creeping in – why did he say this, why didn’t he say that? Why does he want this, why doesn’t he want that? And you can rag the thing to pieces and drive yourself crazy over them.
If you’re married to an abusive alcoholic, that’s one thing. But I’m talking about high-quality human beings. And I realized that I had created a habit of deciding that when so-and-so didn’t do x, y, or z, it was a license to be unhappy, and then I would get on their case, and then they would get upset, and we would go hurtling down a spiral that might never end, once I started sending my energy in that direction.
So I began to ask myself a question that has been extremely useful to me: “If I had to live with this quality in the person I’m dealing with, or in myself, for the rest of my life, is there enough good in the relationship to make it worthwhile?”
And I started wrapping it in terms of a simple question: “Is this a relationship-buster?”
We can talk about this or that aspect of the relationship that you absolutely can’t stand. And, yes indeed, those things are true. But if you think that you can make the person change, much less make them perfect, you’re wrong.
Most of the time, when a woman hammers at a man, it’s absolutely guaranteed that he won’t change. He won’t, because generally speaking, she’s wrong. Or even if she’s right, he isn’t going to learn it from her by being angrily pounded.
He can’t, because once he allows that process to begin, there’s no end. The male yang in him says: “If I let her start nagging me, I’ll become the image of a hen-pecked husband, and that is definitely not something I want.”
An interesting thing happens between men and women when they start a relationship. The very thing you love about them is what begins to drive you crazy. The things you’re attracted to, and that cause the relationship to start, are the things that drive you nuts later on.
One of the things I loved about my second husband was that he was energetic, honorable, responsible, and determined in his work.
And then sometimes I just had to say, “can’t you stop working? Can’t you ever put me first?”
I actually said those words to him twenty years ago. I said, “I don’t think I can be married to you, because you’ve never once gone in late to the office, just to be with me.”
It just came out of my mouth, and I thought, “Where did those words come from?” It was the very thing I liked most about him, his deep impersonal sense of responsibility, that was bothering me so much.
What he always liked about me is that I’m a little bit daft, and even though I’m very grounded, I can also way out there. I remember how we were trying to make a decision, and I wasn’t up for it. I could feel his complete impatience, and I finally looked at him and said, “you used to find this charming.”
He smiled, because it was true. He used to like it about me, that I was on cloud nine a lot of the time. And then he was grounded, and really, that was what we would fight about.
Often, what women are trying to take away from the man is something that’s fundamental to the man’s nature. Men have a lot of common sense, and they may know that you aren’t right, or that it’s not the right time.
My second husband and I had a huge fight about some issue or other because I really wanted him to be different. And when I asked him if he thought it would be a good idea for him to be that way, he said, “Yes, but it’s not a priority.”
Meaning, “Right now I don’t have the inspiration that’s telling me I can deal with this. And it’s you, with your discomfort, who are trying to impose it on me against my will.”
A mother wouldn’t do that to her child. Imagine what it would do to the child’s self-esteem, if you were continually pushing him around all the time.
When we begin to get it into our head that everything would be just perfect if only he would be a little bit different in these certain ways, we make the relationship so unpleasant that it becomes utterly empty of any good feelings.
And then you have to ask yourself, if he or she remains like this the rest of our lives together, will there be anything left that’s worthwhile?
If this person wants to move to Kalamazoo and there isn’t an Ananda center there, and the Ananda church is the center of my life, then I will absolutely have to say no, because it’s a relationship-buster.
But if he’s never going to ask you about your day, in just the right tone of voice, and listen sensitively just the way you want him to, can you live with that for the rest of your life?
Can I live with the fact that I’ll always have to go and talk to my girlfriend, because my husband or partner doesn’t care?
When I first began asking these questions, the answers were often different than they are now. And so you always have to be looking at how I feel at this moment, and what I need to say.
I’m psychologically very healthy – I don’t need to learn to “speak up,” or get in touch with my feelings. There are many things I don’t need, because I’ve worked on them. So these are appropriate questions for me, but the right questions may be completely different for you. But the basic question is this: what’s your bottom line? And it may be very different from mine or someone else’s.
If I’m willing to live with a quirk in the other person’s nature, I shouldn’t indulge my personal need to hassle them about it. Because the chances of getting them to change by hassling them are absolutely non-existent.
Now, that isn’t the same as wanting to talk it over, at the right time, in the right way, when you’re ready to learn something about yourself. But if they feel you’re just trying to get them to change because you want to meddle in their aura and make it different, then it’s never going to work.
That kind of “change” isn’t worth trying to achieve, because the results are always destined to be zilch. At the same time, it’s important not to try to suppress your desire for them to change. You can’t simply suppress your discontent, because that doesn’t work, either.
With suppression, you just end up erupting later on, and at that point you’re wildly out of control. If you’re suppressing, it will come out in unhealthy ways. You’ve got seven years of irritation piled up in the secret corners of your heart, and you think you’re arguing about the soup, but you find yourself becoming enraged, and for sure you aren’t talking about the soup – you’re talking about something you probably aren’t even aware of and can’t remember.
You can’t enter a relationship to teach the other person, on either side. Swami Kriyananda said, “marriage is much too close a relationship for anybody to be the other’s teacher.”
He said, “even when the person asks for advice, treat the request very, very carefully.”
That’s been extremely helpful to me. I teach people, it’s what I do, and I suspect it wouldn’t be fun to be married to me if I slipped and let myself get into that mode in a relationship.
I tell people that they need to adopt a policy of Zero Criticism. Zero Criticism has an extraordinary power in your relationship. Notice, it doesn’t mean “zero communication.” Because communication is very different from criticism.
Communication happens when you’re emotionally balanced and calm. Communication happens when you’re talking about the way things are. And criticism is where you’re saying, “You need to be different because…”
Zero Criticism is a reliable cure for the false idea that the situation is making you unhappy, when it’s actually your attitude toward it. Change your attitude, and the unhappiness goes away, and then you can change the situation.
I’ve seen remarkable changes happen when people stop criticizing. Maybe you can’t go all the way to Zero, but you can come close.
At the start of my second marriage, I realized that I had used up a lifetime supply of criticism. My criticism credit card was maxed, and I had no margin to let myself criticize anymore.
So I had to start not criticizing. It would try to rise out of me like a gusher, and instead of letting it erupt I would leave the room. I might be very upset, but I wasn’t passing the feeling on. I threw soft objects at the wall, and I walked furiously, or I found other ways to break the cycle without making it worse and digging a chasm between us.
Women today are trained to criticize all the time, in the name of “speaking your truth” and “asking for what you want.”
And speaking your truth, and asking for what you want are fine in their context. But you have to be very, very careful to understand if it’s coming across as criticism.
The key is to know that it takes a lot to make a relationship work, and you need to have somebody who is in the right flow with you. And that’s why lots of people remain single. Because it’s just not an age anymore where it’s all going to work out by applying a set of simple rules. We’re dealing with new principles, and we can practice those principles all the time.
Everything I’ve said today applies to every single relationship you’ll ever have, even quite apart from anything intimate and romantic. So practice where you are. Be every bit as attentive to every relationship as you’ll promise to be when you meet that special person. And if you’re all-in, all the time, you’ll become what you’re trying to attract. And then you’ll inevitably attract it. Because otherwise he or she won’t be attracted to you, and you’ll keep getting people who push all the wrong buttons.
In the absolutely best relationships, it’s a hundred percent effort all the time. Because there’s no time when happiness comes without self-discipline.
And that’s one of the biggest lies our culture tries to tell us. It’s a fundamental principle for having success on every level, from the fleeting relationships we have while standing in line at the grocery store, to a lifelong partnership, to the final relationship where we merge our consciousness in God.
We think we can be happy by putting out very little effort. We think that we’ll be happy if it comes to us effortlessly, for free. But the way human beings are made is that the greatest happiness comes when we master ourselves.
That’s where real freedom and power come from, through self-mastery.
When you’ve mastered something, you can look back on the times you thought you had it easy, and you may have enjoyed it, but you had nothing afterward. But when you’ve mastered yourself in a situation, you’ve gained something of great value – you’ve gained a power to create happiness in your life. To get along with everybody in the world, not least the one you’re married to, requires a profound level of self-mastery.
People talk about “getting into the hard work of relationships.”
They say, “I’m willing to do the work.”
And generally they are, but they really aren’t. And yet life is unrelenting, and life requires it absolutely.
A woman said to me, “why don’t you people at Ananda, who have really good marriages, talk more about marriage as a spiritual path?”
I thought about it, and I said, “Well, that seems like a good idea.” So I thought about it some more, and then I had to get back to her and say, “Because there’s no such thing.”
I said, “those of us who are successful in our marriages have recognized that our marriages are absolutely the same as everything else in our lives – because exactly the same principles apply. It’s the thought that your marriage is different and requires different rules that makes it so much harder to make it work.”
Your marriage is just another condition of life where you have an opportunity to be fully conscious, to be selfless, and to be mature and self-disciplined. It’s just one more opportunity to practice the deep, overarching spiritual strengths that give us happiness in every situation.
Everything in your life is trying to offer you that same opportunity. That’s what life is – it’s a process of growing. And you can’t draw a circle around it, because growth happens everywhere. It may have a slightly different set of conditions in a relationship. But so does everything else have unique conditions.
When you learn to play the flute, it’s the same. Whenever you do something well, and you get the joy of it, it’s because you’ve mastered yourself.
There’s a weird idea in the culture today, promoted by TV, movies, romance novels, advertising, and popular songs, that there’s a mythical Big Happy that will happen to you.
The popular culture tries to beat it into us that we can have the Big Happy completely outside the laws that operate in every other area of our lives. They tell us that it’s about falling in love and having an effortless romantic relationship. And it’s a complete fiction.
Popular music very effectively tries to convince us that we can have an easy ride to happiness. Music touches our hearts directly, in sentimental, dreamy ways that turn off the filter of a higher kind of discrimination.
The music today sends a completely false message. I can’t listen to the popular music – it’s so awful. But I do watch old movies on occasion, and I watch how they suck you in. You want so much to think, “Yes, that’s so true to life, and it’s exactly what I want.” But it isn’t. It’s a terrible lie, and in our culture we’ve fallen completely for the lie.
We’ve bought a lie that’s so big and over-reaching that when you’re in a perfectly fine relationship that’s going exactly as it should, your mind will drag up these images from the culture and you’ll begin to wonder if maybe there’s something better. Because your perfectly good relationship isn’t giving you the fictional romantic heart-attack blowout ecstasy that you’ve been hearing about.
A woman told me about an awful movie that she’d watched, and she said, “That’s exactly the kind of relationship I’m looking for.”
I’m not often shocked into silence, but I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say, because the relationship in the movie wasn’t remotely attractive to me, and more, it was completely phony. Yet this poor girl, a fine girl, had bought into the idea that her life could match that fiction.
It’s a fight to live in this culture and understand what truly gives us happiness. But once you understand that life is an adventure in self-awakening, and a total challenge that will take a hundred percent of your energy and self-discipline, and that nobody is ever going to give you anything for free, you can start to have a really good time. Because you aren’t always feeling betrayed and upset that you aren’t getting something that doesn’t exist. And you aren’t always imagining that the people in your life, and the conditions in your life, are making you unhappy because they aren’t living up to your mythic expectations.
When you learn to accept reality, and to master yourself so that you can live well in that reality, you find that you can win your life’s battle and be happy.