53. Your dating relationship doesn't have to end in anger and disgust

We’d like to think that as we’ve gotten older we’ve also gotten wiser, more loving and compassionate. Many people feel they have a “lot of love to give” to a relationship, as some women have expressed it to me. We’d like to have compansionship and love, so we can share those feelings of warmth, nurturing and care. But when a relationship ends or has some sour outcomes we might be surprised to find our feelings of love and compassion disappear, replaced with feelings of anger and vengeance.

How can that happen so suddenly? Someone you say you care about so much is suddenly a hateful character in your eyes. It happens because we’ve been programmed to think that things are supposed to go a certain way in relationships. We think there’s supposed to be honesty and integrity and good will. There’s not supposed to be cheating and deceit and unkindness, for instance.

But the world is made up of both of these elements isn’t it? To know there is honesty there must also be dishonesty. Knowing happiness only comes from having felt unhappiness. We live in a dualistic world – pleasure/pain, good/bad, right/wrong, inner/outer. Nature is a reminder of that with its calm and stormy weather, the ebb and flow of the tides, the blossoming and dying of flowers. We’re a part of that nature – human nature. So we can expect life will have its opposites, and it happens in personalities just as it happens in nature.

When we see that life is just what it is we don’t have to hurt with intense feelings of dislike for what someone says or does. It’s how life is; some are kind, some are unkind. But even these distinctions are not real, because to Life what someone does is just a happening. We’re the ones who put the labels “good” and “bad” on situations. We think we want only the good. But that’s like wanting only happiness. Without unhappiness we wouldn’t even know we were happy would we?

So when we’re dating we can either expect life to always be pleasant and never disappointing, or we can just see life as it is and move on. After a horrendous flood or a devastating hurricane nature just calmly takes up where it left off, without judgment, without opinion. We can do the same when we see the reality of life rather than trying to live by our fairy tale dreams.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer