168. Dating is a prime example of what these three situations show

In the last few days I became aware of three quite different scenarios that all involved anger and hurt, and all had the same thing in common. A friend of mine told me about a woman she knows whose husband was angry with her because she didn’t want to go headlong into golf in their retirement years the way he wanted her to.

The second example is about a man who posts daily to a blog (web log) about his adventures living full time in a motor home. He’s been spending time in a place in Mexico this winter instead of moving every day, which is his custom, and he was getting a number of angry responses from readers who thought his daily activities were boring. They wanted to read about his travels and some were quite upset and caustic in their emails to him.

The third is about a woman I know who was dealing once again with a difficult in-law and was upset because this in-law wasn’t being kind to her.

What did these different situations all have in common? For each of the angry people their suffering could be summed up in one short sentence: “I can’t be happy if you don’t change.” Each upset person felt it was someone else’s fault that they were unhappy.

This happens a lot in dating I’ve noticed, and it certainly used to be my experience. For example, the guy doesn’t call when he says he will and the woman is mad. A woman agrees to a date then changes her mind, and he’s unhappy. Someone wants a committed relationship and is devastated when the other doesn’t. Over and over again we tend to think that if we can just get our date or partner to do what we want we’ll be happy.

No wonder people who see life that way get so angry and sometimes violent, at least verbally, when they don’t get their way. They feel they’re victims and they’re out of control unless others change. The “I’m at your mercy” belief gives them a hopeless, helpless feeling. They often express it by lashing out, like a cat that’s cornered and fears for its life. It has no choice but to fight. When we believe we’re at someone’s mercy we also often feel we have no choice but to fight. “After all,” we think, “you hold the key to my happiness and maybe to my whole future!”

Most people don’t know there’s a simple and effective alternative. The alternative is to investigate and look at what’s really true. Is it really true I can only be happy if you change? Is my happiness ever really dependent on another person? It may seem so at first glance but when you go deep into it you see it’s not true. Probably all of us have had heartbreak from a relationship gone bad. At that time we felt we just had to be with the person of our dreams.

My friend Warren summarized what so many of us have also seen when he told me this story a few years ago. He had fallen in love with a woman. Then she broke it off. “I thought I’d die when she broke up with me,” he said. “I finally got over it and a few years later I happened to run into her. We talked a little bit and it was so clear to me that if we’d stayed together it would have been an absolute disaster. I walked away just feeling so damned happy I wasn’t with her any more.”

We can be so sure we know what’s best for us. Then we later find how mistaken we were. All unhappiness is based on thoughts or beliefs that life should be the way we want it to be. We live as though the whole universe revolves around us and our desires. The solution, when we’re suffering, is to question, question, question. Do I really know how it should be? Can I be so sure I’m right? Do I know more than God (the God of your understanding)? When something appears to go wrong in our dating we can still be at peace if we just give up our ideas of what should be and simply accept what is. “What is” is real. Anything else is fantasy and myth. Your own investigation and life experiences will show you the truth. That truth frees you from suffering.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer