262. This one, primary desire is the heart of all suffering – in dating and in life

When you’re seeking a mate, and dating, you know before you start that there’s a risk involved. The risk is that you could wind up with a broken heart. We want not to be hurt. But the primary desire everyone has – the desire that causes all the psychological suffering there ever was or could be – is the desire to have the world be the way we want it to be rather than simply seeing it the way it is.

You don’t need to ponder this idea and wonder if you could believe it or not. All you have to do is look at your own direct experience. Isn’t it true that every time you hurt emotionally it’s because you think something or someone should be different? Judgment is another word for it. We judge – this is wrong, this is bad, this shouldn’t be. Without judging where can suffering exist? It can’t.

So the question is how you get rid of that primary desire to have the world be the way you want it rather than the way it is. If we narrow our focus down to mature dating we’ve all been around long enough to see that what was a broken heart often turned out to be a blessing in disguise. What we knew with certainty at that time, we later realized we didn’t know at all. Wiping out emotional suffering is always a matter of questioning: Do we really know it shouldn’t be the way it is? Could we just allow ourselves to watch life rather than think we should run it?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer