176. How do I stop pushing my lover away?

The other day someone posed the question, “How do I change behavior so I don’t keep pushing away the one I love?” It’s a question that could have come from a couple of possible scenarios I can think of. You might be pushing away your lover out of jealousy. Or you might be critical and judgmental.

There may be other reasons too, but fortunately the solution isn’t dependent on “why” you’re turning off your loved one. Also fortunately the answer has nothing to do with needing to change. The answer is only to see the world “as it is” rather than trying to impose on it what we think “should be”.

We cling to a partner in a cloying, sticky way because we want her to stay with us so we can be happy. We judge our lover because we want him to change, so we can be happy. The problem seems to be that we think our happiness is dependent on that person “out there”. The insecure Little Me thinks it needs the world to change so it can be happy. That’s the cause of all the stress and suffering. We’re always fighting to make our life work because our judgments tell us it isn’t working the way it should be.

The answer is as easy as starting with a simple question: Do we really know how things should be? Do they really need to be “our” way? If you’re jealous and clingy you might ask, “Do I truly need to have this person in my life and do I know that’s the best thing for me?” If you’re judging you could start with, “Am I absolutely sure this person should be different in what he says or does?”

Or, to go even deeper, you can begin to question the very source of the problem – the Little Me. Is there truly a me inside this body somewhere? What is it that breathes me, beats my heart, circulates my blood, and grows my hair? Where do “my” thoughts come from? Do I decide to think or does thinking happen? If you question like this you begin to see that without the Life Force the “me” I think I am is really just a corpse. It’s the Higher Power, or God if you want, that’s living AS me.

This Life Force seems to have been running the universe forever, so maybe, just maybe, IT knows what it’s doing. Maybe we could settle back and just take life as it comes. Without our story of how it should be, seeing life as it is means simply witnessing the world, without an opinion, without a judgment, without an interpretation, without thinking it needs to change. That world includes our loved one.

Instead of thinking we need to force life and our lover to be the way we want them to be, instead of putting them in a prison we can control, we could just flow with life naturally, like the tides of the ocean and the seasons of the year. There’s a Zen saying I like that seems to fit here: “In the spring, the grass grows by itself.” Or that other saying works here too: “Let go and let God.” Relaxed dating is happy dating. Without judging and clinging it’s also loving dating.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer