270. Mature dating pain is gone when we watch life just be the way it is

Whenever you’re feeling the discomfort or emotional pain of wanting someone to change you can relieve that suffering by looking inside yourself. We always want someone to change because we want something for ourselves. The stress is that they don’t change the way we think they should.

Rather than focusing on getting someone to change, which results in interfering with their lives and causes us a lot of stress, we can focus instead on whether it’s realistic to argue with the way life is. Just seeing life without our self-centered desires is the end of all suffering. When we don’t want anything different we don’t suffer. It’s that simple. Facts never cause suffering. It’s always our disagreement with those facts that make us suffer.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer