In my first marriage, as I’ve mentioned, I imagined that I could sacrifice everything for the sake of the relationship. I managed to do it for several years. But when we came to Ananda, I found something that was far more important to me than the relationship. And that’s when it fell apart.
As I’ve also mentioned, you really need to decide how much you’re willing to sacrifice for a relationship. You always need to be aware of the delicate balance between what you can ask for, and what people can ask of you, and what you can realistically promise.
I’ve never liked housework. In my second marriage, I was able to avoid cleaning the house because we had a lovely family that came and cleaned, and my husband was also a wonderful housekeeper, a fact for which I blessed his mother every day. He was incredibly meticulous and neat and organized – long before it would occur to me that the house needed cleaning, he would already be doing something about it.
He was very physically energetic. Not long before we moved in together, I said, “you know, I don’t clean houses – that’s just the way it is, and I would rather do everything else.”
So we worked it out that I would take care of the food and clothes, and he would care for the physical home.
For many years, he did the housework beautifully and without complaining. Then, when we were living in a little house at Ananda Village, he very appropriately, and at just the right moment, and just the right tone of voice, asked me one day if I would wash the bathtub on a regular basis.
I guess he just didn’t like the job. I’m very myopic, and I couldn’t spot that the bathtub wasn’t crystal-clean. So I had to go in there with my glasses on and roll up my sleeves and scrub the tub.
It was a perfectly righteous request, but I hated it. And it became for me, like everything else, a metaphor for the reality of our life together, and how we’re always having to decide where to draw the line.
In my first marriage, my husband asked things of me that were inappropriate because they compromised my core ideals. And as a result I found myself making promises that I didn’t have the will to keep. So when my second husband asked me to clean the bathroom, wanting to be perfectly honest, I had to respond, “maybe.”
Perhaps I should have said, “yes, sure, of course!” But I didn’t know that I could say it and mean it.
And then, what tends to happen when you make promises “in the name of the relationship?” You find you don’t have the inner wherewithal to keep your promises, and then everybody feels betrayed. Or you end up having to tell them that it wasn’t a fair request after all.
Of course, it would be far better if you could be perfectly clear at the start: “If I do that for you, I’ll be sacrificing something that I’m not willing or generous enough to sacrifice.”
Much better to fight it out on the turf where the issue exists, rather than make a series of unrealistic promises and just end up fighting about these questions of self-betrayal later on.
I believe it all comes down to the differences between the female and male yin and yang energies.
The yin female energy is receptive, and the male yang energy is active, outward, and goal-oriented.
I realize it isn’t a perfect analogy, but football and war are defining yang activities. And in football and war, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how you feel – whether you like the way it’s going. You train yourself to do what’s needed, without regard for yourself or your feelings. And there are many situations in life, quite apart from war and football, where it’s a very, very positive thing. Because the essence of kindness and compassion and the capacity to understand a greater reality than your own is self-restraint. And women who develop their yang energy are the better off for it, when they can use it in those expansive ways.
The yang way of coping is to bite the bullet and keep moving forward. It isn’t necessarily that the male is not in touch with how he’s feeling. He may be very much in touch, but he deals with life primarily through action, according to his own best lights. And he’s very likely to subordinate yin considerations and give them lower priority: “Fine, I’m in touch, now let’s move ahead.”
I remember scheduling a reading with a Vedic astrologer for my second husband, and it was very interesting. It gave the usual advice that you might expect – “You’ll have this and that good period, and then you’ll have that bad difficult period.” But when we walked out, he smiled, and without any aspersions on the astrologer, he said, “let’s not spend money on this anymore.”
He said, “what difference does it make?” As if to say, these things will happen whether we’ve had a reading about them or not, so why spend the money?
That’s the yang point of view in a nutshell. “I’m not going to give less than a hundred percent just because I know it’s this or that phase of the planets. I get up every day and put out the best energy I can. And I don’t really care if it’s a good day or a bad day.”
I care intensely if it’s a good or bad day, because I’m very yin. But he would say, “So what?” And there’s a lot that we could learn from each other.
Of course, there are times when yang energy isn’t so helpful, because it does have its limitations.
Yang is more physiological and sexual. Also, human beings are constituted to mate for life, and yang can become impatient with that, as the inevitable issues start to arise. But when you don’t mate for life, I feel that you pay a price that comes out of every cell of your being. Every single cell gets slightly mutilated, and it has to be reconstructed with strength and determination. And yang energy is aware of that. Men can often cope with a breakup without experiencing a long healing process, because they have inner resources that are geared toward moving on.
(Question about bad choices.)
Asha: Every bad choice you’ve made was because you had a false idea of what you needed, and what you liked, and what was appropriate for you.
Self-knowledge requires tremendous humility. You have to find a way to be sufficiently dispassionate to create a space where you aren’t insisting on getting your own way, so that you can allow true wisdom to enter the discussion as a very real option.
A woman friend of mine who’s happily married, but wasn’t married for a very long time, read that if you want a mate, you should make a list of all the qualities you’d like your partner to have.
She wrote about seven pages of the qualities she wanted in a mate, and the list somehow made its way into Swami Kriyananda’s hands.
When he finished reading, he turned to her and said, gently but firmly, “My dear, you want Jesus Christ for a husband!”
He looked at her, as if to say, “I hate to be the one to break it to you, honey…” And then he said, “And Jesus would not marry you!”
He said, “you need someone who’s more on your own level.”
You need to be sufficiently grounded to be able to figure out what you consider truly important. I don’t mean that you should settle for less that the ideal, but in real life we usually get someone who reflects our own nature, regardless of our imagined image of perfection, regardless of whether we’re actually trying to attract that “lesser” mate.
When my second husband and I were preparing to be married, Swamiji made a comment about something in his nature that he felt could be more balanced. And then he said, “But, of course, that’s pretty much what you’re like, too.”
And it helped me, because it gave me a clear insight about what I was like, and what I would have to deal with in the marriage.
The point is, we’re drawn to our partners because of our failings as well as our strengths. And we need to honestly and calmly accept that this might not be the perfect mate, but Jesus Christ wouldn’t marry us, because he would want someone more on his level. And he wouldn’t be attracted to just anybody.
I don’t mean to be flippant or sacrilegious, but if you want someone who’s better than you, the best option is to become better yourself. Otherwise, you’ll get someone who’s pretty much the way you are.
I remember a woman who got into an awful relationship with an awful man. And, with all due respect, she was no prize, either, but she wanted to break off the relationship because they were tormenting each other. And she had the terrible thought, “Maybe he’s the one that God intended for me.”
She went to Swami and said, “it’s a terrible relationship. We hate each other. But is he ‘the one’?” And Swamiji said, very gently and directly, “my dear, you have so many lessons to learn, and you could learn them with quite a few different people.”
He said, “you have to be very, very advanced before you have so little karma left that ‘the right one’ is that specific.”
I don’t mean that there isn’t a single, exclusive, grand love of all the ages who’s just waiting to meet you, and that we can aspire to. I think that these powerful destinies do exist, and I believe it sometimes works out that way.
But we need to learn our lessons at the level we are living on, and we may need to learn them by being attracted to a person that we can’t stand. Or we may learn them in harmonious ways.
Many people find themselves essentially attracted to the same person over and over. Sometimes, it’s literally the same person, and maybe you’ll get a better model as you grow in yourself. Or you might get a person who’s slightly better. And sometimes you’ll go down a level for a while until it’s so bad that you wake up and start working harder on yourself.
When you find yourself in the same unbearable situation for the umpteenth time, you begin to wonder where it’s coming from. And then you’re motivated to get to work and learn your lessons and find a way to change and get away from the suffering.
Life sends us the teachers we need. Sometimes they may teach us through a relationship that ends up working beautifully. And I think that’s the best kind of teaching. But sometimes they’re serving as a mirror for qualities in us that we may find it very painful to face, and that we can only grow out of by working to change them.
Your partner exposes your nature, but he doesn’t create your nature, and that’s an important distinction, because you need to be very clear that it isn’t the person holding the mirror who needs to change. It’s you.
My first husband was very exacting, and he was very meticulous around the house, so I had that quality in my relationships twice, and I’m not sure why.
My second husband and I first lived together in an A-frame cabin with a little wood stove. Every so often, we would buy a newspaper, and we would store the old newspapers in a box under the stairs, to help us light the wood stove.
One day, I tossed the papers carelessly in the box where they landed half-in and half-out, and I could feel him notice my carelessness, but he didn’t say anything.
My first husband had been so onto me about every little thing, and it drove me crazy when I found my second husband doing it. I was on him like a wild animal. I said, “Don’t you ever do that to me!!!” And he was amazed, because it had absolutely nothing to do with him; it was all about me and my first marriage.
I said defiantly, “it’s in the box!” But I had to recognize that he hadn’t done anything worth getting so upset about. He was just exposing my extraordinary sensitivity to being picked on for the little things that didn’t matter.
That’s what he meant when he said, “everything is fine, and then you get upset.” There was hardly any energy behind his irritation that I hadn’t put the papers neatly in the box.
I used to tease him about it – how exhausted he must be, having to go shut all the kitchen drawers and cabinets – how wearing it must, year after year, because he couldn’t figure out why the heck I didn’t close the damn drawers. And it’s a fact that after I was done in the kitchen all the drawers would be sticking out a half-inch.
To his credit, he would talk about it occasionally, but he realized that it usually wasn’t worth it. And I learned that it would cost me nothing to put the newspapers neatly in the box.
There are many things that make us react even though we don’t remember the original cause. To make it worse, it may have started in a former life, so we don’t have a clue where it’s coming from. But it sets up a pattern that creates a certain fear of being dominated, or pushed around, or humiliated, or whatever it is.
There seems to be a law of life that we’re attracted to the people who are related to the fears inside us. And this is why we’re together: to learn to balance these things so that we can heal ourselves and become free.
You have a hidden memory inside that corresponds to a vibration in the other person. And then they’re standing there innocently, and they’ll do or say or think something that prods you to learn to be more balanced and self-contained.
A woman friend of mine who’s a psychologist put it very aptly. She said, “You need to learn where your pain is coming from.”
I knew a couple who had a very brief marriage, because he had had difficult experiences and was consumed by his memories. He didn’t have a clue about how to deal with them, or the courage to try to understand them. And as a result, every time she did certain trivial things, it would push his buttons, and he would think she was deliberately trying to hurt him.
He thought she wasn’t trying hard enough to understand what he needed her to be like. And everything she was doing was perfectly innocent.
Let’s face it, nobody is going to memorize the map of your psyche and be so aware and sensitive and self-controlled that they’ll never accidentally upset you. It’s unrealistic it to expect it to be otherwise.
Other people are just as messed up as we are. And we’re all stumbling along together doing the best we know how.
No matter how sincere they are, no matter how much they love you, no matter how good they are, no matter how dedicated they are, they are not perfect. They’ll do their best, but their best is going to hurt you, maybe even profoundly, because they can’t help it, any more than you can help yourself.
So we need to learn to have a certain calm expectation, without judging them. Of course, it has to be within humane boundaries, because there definitely are abusive relationships.
But I’m talking about a cycle that isn’t abusive, but where you’re working with two energies that are never going to be a single energy.
They’re always going to be two energies. And the fun of it, and the satisfaction, if you’re both committed, courageous, and willing, comes from learning to help each other, and to have the patience and detachment to let it run its course.
In India, they honor the love that a mother gives to her child as the highest and most ideal form of feminine love. In America, sexual love is the ideal. Here, it’s not the wife or mother who’s the ideal, it’s the sexy lover.
All of our images of women are about sex. And it’s telling an entirely different story. I believe that when you understand a mother’s love very deeply, it’s not only a much more realistic ideal, but also a more practical one.
Whenever I suggest this to women, I hardly ever get an enthusiastic response. And I don’t get a positive response from men.
The validity of the mother ideal struck me very profoundly during a counseling session with a couple, where the wife was being brutal to the man, criticizing him endlessly and unmercifully.
And it’s true, she had a lot of yang energy, and she was frustrated that he wasn’t more yang. And as a way to get him to be more yang, she was constantly challenging his self-esteem, to the point where she was destroying it. They were fine people, but she thought that if she just kept telling him what was wrong with him, he would change.
After the session, I took him aside and said, “you’ve got to get away from that woman as soon as you can.”
I liked the woman. She was a person I cared for. But I told him that he had to get away from her, because she was killing him, and they had children, and it was deeply affecting them to see him treated that way, and to see their mother treat him that way.
I spoke to her afterwards. She had two sons, and I said, “would you speak your sons the way you speak to him?”
She said, “no.” And I said, “why?” She said, “because it wouldn’t help him. When you have a son, your first thought is that my job is to help this person get through whatever they have to go through.”
The ideal mother and father restrain their own desires in order to give the child the love and encouragement that will help build up their energy because they love them. And the ideal result is that the child becomes strong and grateful.
You don’t do it for the child’s gratitude, but as the child gets strong, he is grateful to the mother, when he’s old enough and sufficiently wise to understand what she has done for him.
When I asked her if she would speak that way to her sons, she said, “no, I never would!”
I said, “What do you think the effect is on your husband? Do you think a man is fundamentally different than a boy? Or a woman is fundamentally different from a girl? We’re human beings.”
Mother love is not the ideal of sexless self-sacrifice. It’s the ideal of having a conscious willingness to do what’s helpful, and not just do whatever I feel like.
The mother who gives too much doesn’t help the child, either. So we need to understand that a mother’s love is not just about self-sacrifice.
In fact, the self-sacrificing mother is someone the child desperately wants to get away from. The child instinctively knows that this person isn’t doing it for the child; she’s trying to live her life through the child, and it leaves the child with a horribly suffocating feeling that they want desperately to run away from.
I frankly believe that mother love, for women and men equally, is the key to a happy relationship. Because there’s a tremendous amount of non-expectation in it. “I’m doing this because it’s right, and because it gives me joy to expand my heart in this way to serve you.”
Ask yourself, “What’s the most appropriate thing for me to do?”
My first husband and I talked about this often. At the time, submitting my will to his was very good for me, because I was so disappointed in the end, and I learned a lot from the experience.
But it was very bad for him, because it took him years to figure out that it wasn’t what he could, or should, reasonably expect from a woman.
He had gotten the idea that it was how women should be, always yielding and compliant. And it took him years to realize that I had created a false picture of reality for him, and that his happiness didn’t depend on finding a compliant partner.
If a mother spoils her child, the child will never be able to have a life of his own, because he’ll always be looking for his mother, in very wrong ways.
I believe the art of relationships is about exploring what’s going on between you, and what happened and why, and then always looking for the right balance that will enable you to be free and giving.
Our interactions are important because they help us understand what’s going on. They give us feedback so that we can talk it through and find the right balance of give-and-take that’s based on a clear understanding.
There has to be a personal willingness to take responsibility for our own happiness. And there has to be lots of involvement with each other, or else there’s no relationship at all. You may get very good at being independent and not having to depend on anyone, but then you won’t have a relationship.