Love #1: Freeing Myself From the Mangling Claws of Romantic Love

"Whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind." (The Buddha, MN 19, subjects and pronouns changed by me)

Around this time last year, I was in love.

Well, at least I think I was.

At least, love as best I understood it at the time...

Let's start over. Around this time last year, just as the coronavirus was about to put the whole world on lockdown, I was growing extremely infatuated with a guy I had just met. I had recently started meditating and had about 3 months of practice under my belt, which I noticed initially was helping me cope with my usual obsessive infatuation patterns.

But as my feelings grew stronger, so too did the pull of my neural pathways, and the old patterns began reasserting themselves with stronger and stronger force. I found it hard to let go of thoughts of my love interest and found myself constantly checking my phone to see if he had responded to a text, rehearsing things I was going to say to him the next time we met, daydreaming about what it would be like if he liked me back and we were actually dating.

It was all very exhausting, and there was more than one time when I almost wished I weren't in love so I could just have my peaceful, un-fraught life back.

One day, while I was on a walk, obsessively thinking about my love interest as usual, I suddenly had the thought, "Why do I enjoy ruminating and thinking about romantic love so much more than friendly or familial love? Why does it feel so much more immediate?" There was no denying that I felt the two very differently in my body and mind: one thought of my love interest and my stomach would be churning, my heart fluttering, my face flushed, my mind inclining farther and farther forward like a child straining to reach a toy high on a shelf, burning with excitement, anticipation, desire. One vision of our future life together and I was on a mountaintop, could hear the orchestra swell - well, you get the picture.

My mind reaching desperately for romantic love (not calling Leo a child, but this was the funniest pic I could find 😉)

My mind, alone on the mountaintop, in rapturous daydreams about romantic love

On the contrary, when I thought of friends or family, I had to work to eke out even a small feeling - forget children straining for toys or orchestras on mountaintops! I knew intellectually that they cared about me, and of course I still showed up for them and showed my love and support in many ways, but I couldn't really feel that anywhere in my body. Sometimes, under just the right circumstances, I could be hit overwhelmingly with a profound feeling of these relationships. But on an average day, the best I could do was maybe, after a lot of reflection and internally talking up how much that person meant to me, get a glimmer like a small candle struggling to stay lit in a damp cave. But that was about it.

What the f***?!?!? I thought frustratedly as I walked. This was extremely inconvenient. I had tons of familial and friendly love surrounding and enveloping me, but had never been in a romantic relationship. Why could I feel the imaginary, wished-for love I didn't have so much more strongly than the very real love I already possessed?

For the longest time, trained in Western ways of intellectually analyzing the sh** out of everything, I thought the answer lay within romantic love itself - that if I could contemplate, analyze, penetrate the nature, the history, the biological-evolutionary significance, the sociopolitical context of romantic love, I would understand what about it was so mysterious and magical, or conversely discover that it was not as great as I had thought, and then its spell would be broken.

But try as I might to crack the code - and boy, did I try; I still have a million and one intellectual explanations for why and how we've been socialized to experience romantic love the way we do - none of them succeeded in shifting the way I experienced the different types of love in my body.

For no apparent reason, as I was ruminating on these things during my walk, I suddenly realized that Buddhism and meditation offer another possible path. Another voice arose responding to my first query, the familiar voice of my inner Sassy Gay Buddhist: "Bitch, you're not obsessing over romantic love because it's somehow intrinsically better than friendly love! The opposite is true - you perceive romantic love as more significant because your mental patterns and society have trained you to think and feel that way. Just look at what you're doing now - obsessively thinking about a guy. How often do you go for a walk and obsessively think about your friends and family? If you did more of that, eventually you could probably turn the tide and train your mind-body to feel those relationships as more significant." (You'll notice that my Sassy Gay Buddhist, while sassy, is no more concise than my Earnest Gay Buddhist 😛)

Essentially, the wisdom he was offering is drawn from the Buddhist teaching that opened this piece, which I will quote here again because it's just so damn powerful:

"Whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind."

Although this is something I knew intellectually from having read the Buddha's teachings, and even knew that this was one of the goals of awareness and loving-kindness meditation - retraining your mental patterns to default to love, and training your mind-body to feel love for all beings equally - it was far more profound when I realized it in this embodied way. Seeing in action the way my learned and ingrained mental patterns were affecting my view of romantic love, and realizing that romantic love's hold on me was NOT based on some mysterious quality in romantic love itself, was a profound and deeply exciting revelation.

For the stakes were actually quite high - higher than just the time I was losing obsessively thinking about this particular love interest. For years, I had been stuck in a vicious cycle. Rom coms, sit coms, pop songs, and really most mainstream culture had brainwashed me to believe that romantic love was the end-all be-all. I would never know joy or the true depths of human experience until I had been in love. And, more disturbingly, I would never be worthy or valid until I was loved by a romantic partner. All my eggs were in one basket, and that basket kept coming alive and beating the sh** out of me like some deranged household object in Fantasia (lol yes I know that metaphor is a stretch 😂). I kept believing that only romantic love could give me self worth, and I kept meeting excruciatingly painful rejection after excruciatingly painful rejection by potential romantic partners. So, of course, I kept believing less and less in my self worth, and thus the stakes for finding a partner, which I thought was the only possible way to validate my self worth, kept getting higher.

My expectations of romantic love beating the sh** out of me every time

If these painful and horrible internal states weren't bad enough, there were also dire exterior effects. Focusing on romantic love, which you don't have, keeps you dissatisfied, keeps you blocked from feeling the real love around you, which makes you feel more isolated and depressed, which makes you 1) want to buy things because capitalism has brainwashed you to believe that buying things will solve all your problems and 2) more susceptible to manipulation by forces like media, advertising, or fake news, which prey on these kinds of weaknesses and insecurities. The effects also extended into my relationships with those close to me and my ability to show up productively in the world. The deep feelings of unworthiness, although created by romantic love, could be activated by just about anything: a friend canceling plans, having to admit I was wrong, being told I was too privileged. When the unworthiness was awoken, like some giant dragon unfurling itself in a cave to attack an unwanted visitor, it transformed into bitterness, anger, fear, and constriction; it kept me from wanting to engage in things like politics and activism because I was terrified of saying the wrong thing and being discovered to be a fraud; it kept me from fully opening myself to those closest to me; and it made me feel deeply uncomfortable any time I had to be alone with myself.

Of course, it wasn't all black and white. During this whole time, I had many friends and family members who loved me deeply. And there were also some examples, here and there, of counter-programming that provided a lot of catharsis and relief, at the least, to know that I wasn't alone in feeling this way and that it wasn't something wrong with me personally but a broader societal trend. Esther Perel reassured me that our culture's tendency to put insane expectations on one person (our romantic partner) is out of control, unrealistic, and untenable. Björk sang that "All is full of love [...] you just ain't receiving [...] your doors are shut" and I felt, deeply in my bones, that she was right. But I didn't know how to change it. I didn't know how to tap into that love that was already all around me. I didn't know how to start dismantling the unrealistic expectations of romantic love that society had sneakily planted in my brain.

*******

A year later, with lots more mindfulness and loving-kindness practice under my belt, I can confidently and proudly say that my felt sense of familial and friendly love - not to mention general love, compassion, and kindness for others, even those I don't know - is much, much stronger. Conversely, the amount of time I spend fretting and obsessing over potential romantic partners, letting hours of my life be sapped by dating and hookup apps, has diminished by a factor so vast that it's honestly humbling and awe-inspiring when I really stop to think about it. Unlike the child burning with desire and straining after the thing he craves, these new forms of love (new to me, anyway) feel like a powerful, bright, warm light emanating from my heart. Unlike the windswept lover fantasizing alone on the mountaintop, they feel connected, integrated, belonging.

To be honest, this post is a pretty exemplary expression, in short, of the core motivation I had for starting this blog. I've come to understand over the last year how a combination of largely Western ways of analysis along with capitalist socialization have deluded me into feeling isolated, unloved, unwanted, unable to connect or engage meaningfully. The wisdom of Buddhism entered my life like a healing light, like a white-hot purifying fire of grace burning a tangled, deadened forest so a new, beautiful garden could grow out of the newly-revitalized soil; it helped dispel those illusions of separateness and remind me that I had been connected to everything around me all along.

"Whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind."

I firmly believe that we need to start divesting romantic love of the vice grip it has had on our collective thought patterns - we need to stop inclining our minds so forcefully toward this one type of love, expecting it to fulfill all our needs and desires, and begin diversifying, begin the long, slow, but unbelievably liberating practice of inclining our minds to more rejuvenating forms of love. It likely won't feel easy or natural at first (it didn't for me), but the more you practice inclining your mind, the more your body (and heart) will follow suit, and the more you will be able to reclaim your rightful position vis-à-vis the world around you.

In short, f*** romantic love. She's a stupid bitch, and I hate her. I'm sticking with Buddha love - and I hope you'll join me 🧘‍♀️❤️