171. Do you “throw good money after bad” when a relationship clearly isn’t working?

Why don’t we quit when we see it isn’t working in a relationship? We’ve all heard numerous stories of women physically beaten in a relationship, who go back time and again. Each time her guy apologizes on bended knee and each time she accepts him back, only to be beat up again. Sometimes this violence ends in death.

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of TIME online about the psychology behind not cutting your losses and losing even more. It was written in response to the president’s recent announcement that he wants to throw another 20,000 troops into the Iraq war.

Psychologists quoted in the article say that it’s very hard for us to give up once we’ve invested so much into some situation, whether it’s a losing business, a losing war or a losing relationship. Psychologist Eric Stone calls the pattern a “sunk cost”. In some way we know a resource that’s already been spent can’t be reclaimed but somehow we don’t recognize it. Instead we feel if we just throw more into it we’ll somehow recover what we’ve lost.

Of course you probably recognize that that’s really the ego wanting to be right or not wanting to lose. It could cause a George W. Bush to throw more money and lives into the sink hole of Iraq and it could cause any of us to throw more time and suffering into a relationship that simply isn’t working.

Psychologists speak of this as almost a given. The human species, they say, grew up in the same world as all other species – a world of limited resources. Apparently once we spend our precious hoarded capital – emotions, time, or money – it bothers us not to get a return. Somewhere in our primal wiring, we thus developed a defensive tendency to do precisely what we shouldn't do when faced with the risk of serious waste: throw more into the hole. They also say that eventually we all finally realize we’ve given enough and we just give up the ship. But sometimes we give up so late that the price we’ve paid is astronomical.

There’s another way of looking at life, however, that doesn’t involve the ego-me and all its wants. That way of seeing deals with reality, not hopes, desires and dreams. It means simply seeing life as it is, not as we wish it were. After all, it's our judgments that something should be different that cause us to see life in a skewed way and suffer.

Seeing reality as it really is is always more kind than suffering from the prolonged pain of wishing, hoping and wanting what isn’t. When we see clearly that the Life Force is the energy behind all life we’re much less likely to get trapped in thinking there’s a “me” that knows what’s best. We can let go of the “damned the losses I’m going to win yet” thinking that only could come from self-centered thinking.

In practical terms how is this clear seeing done? It’s really just a matter of seeing “what is” without our interpretation or resistance. In clear seeing there’s not a “person” there who wants something. It’s seeing without a judgment, just seeing.

A helpful way to see clearly is to start with any belief you have and question it, openly and honestly. A woman I know of in her early 60s is in turmoil over whether to stay in her 40+-year marriage or not. Her husband has had affairs and isn’t willing to pursue counseling.

Let’s say, hypothetically, her belief might be that this time it’s going to change. Here’s where the simple question, “Is that true?” can be very effective? Does she know he won’t change? No, she couldn’t know that. Does she know he will change? She couldn’t know that either. But without trying to interpret or second-guess the matter, what’s the reality? The reality is that he’s had a number of affairs. Another reality is that he appears not willing to look deeply into himself through counseling or other means. So what would be your best guess that he’ll behave differently in the future? Unless he sees his apparent need to be admired by other women will his behavior likely change?

If this woman sees this clearly she may be more able to recognize that it’s time to stop the marriage. On the other hand she keeps talking of the family not being together any longer, the grandkids not being able to come to the same house and visit Grandma and Grandpa, etc. The dream can carry us a long way, but it never carries us to truth. Instead, it carries us through months or years of suffering, only to end in finally giving up after all, with greater losses. In an earlier time of my life I lived this pattern more than once. Maybe you have too.

Seeing clearly and being honest with ourselves doesn’t always appear easy. My experience is that it’s the shortest way to peace and happiness though. Continuing to “throw good money after bad”, can put us in a large, deep hole.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

170. Asking someone to make us happy is asking them to give what isn’t give-able

I’ve recently heard of a woman in her 60s who’s had 40 years of an unhappy marriage. Her husband has had several affairs and now he’s retiring and tells her she’s just not the woman who can make him happy. He wants to find the woman who will. This woman also says, “If I knew I could find someone who would love me for just who I am, I’d get a divorce.” No one knows what the outcome will be but one thing is guaranteed: if either of these unhappy people is expecting another person to make them happy they’re seeking the impossible. Why? Because no one can give what they don’t have to give. No one can impart happiness to another. Happiness is an attitude, not a commodity you can hand over.

If you’re dating now in these mature years of life believing you’ll be happy if you just find the right man or woman your belief is a sham. Only our perception of the world can bring us happiness. If a partner is needed for happiness everyone who’s single would be unhappy. Yet real life shows us this isn’t true. It can be wonderful to share life with a compatible partner. But unless we bring our own happiness to that relationship we’ll never have it, simply because happiness is never “out there,” it’s always “in here.”

It’s our attitude to let life deliver what it’s going to deliver anyway that frees us from struggle and brings real joy. We’re no longer expecting anything. Instead, we’re just witnessing life and taking it as it comes. That kind of happiness is what I like to call contentment. It’s not some ecstatic experience nor a tremendous “high”. Highs always disappear. They have to. Our emotional systems would burn out if we tried to live in ecstasy forever. Even if we could handle full-time ecstasy it soon wouldn’t be ecstasy any more because we’d get used to it, just like we’re used to the effects of gravity. We don’t think it’s a special miracle that we can let go of something in mid-air and it immediately moves downward, all by itself.

There is one period in everyone’s day when they’re unmistakably happy and content. That’s during deep, dreamless sleep. Everyone loves a good sleep. We’re contented because there’s no thought about how life should be different than it is. In sleep we give up the world, we give up the bed; we give up our body and we give up any sense of “me”. What’s left? Happiness. Peace. Contentment. Ease. No problems.

When we make ourselves happy by dropping judgments and accepting the world as it is, we can also stop wanting someone else to do our job. From that space of peace without craving we’re much more likely to find a relationship that will be fulfilling. We’re no longer pressuring our date or partner to be the source of our joy. When we realize that life has always lived itself without our input we relax and settle back. Then maybe for the first time we savor the fulfillment and simple joy of just being. It’s our nature state.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

169. Is senior dating always supposed to go the way we want?

Do you remember that little song we probably all learned in grade school? In my school we learned to start it section by section in the classroom so you had to concentrate on your own words and not listen to the section next to you because they were on a different verse. By now I’ll bet you know what song I’m talking about. It went like this: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream.” Remember?

Well, what the heck does that have to do with dating you’re probably asking. Just this: I don’t know who the author of that little ditty was or what his or her view of life was, but in a simple, almost uncanny way, those words say what spiritual teachers say, that life is a dream and we can flow with it and be merrily happy.

As you can see, this applies to all areas of life. But it may apply to dating even more, for one reason: dating often smacks you in the face with your emotions. You might be able to hide your fears or insecurities or poor self-image from yourself in many areas of your life. But in dating you often come painfully face to face with them.

But can we really just set aside our emotions and painful struggles in dating and simply flow gently down the stream? It takes real honesty but yes, we can. The honesty has to do with seeing life as it actually is, not the way we think it should be. In our happy-go-lucky, made-up world people are honest and true, for instance. In real life people are sometimes deceitful. We can deal with that reality if we don’t kid ourselves into thinking it shouldn’t be the way it is.

I had lunch the other day with a woman who, a few years ago, had been in a committed relationship and learned that her guy was having an affair. She’d had the same experience in her marriage some years earlier and she suffered a great deal.

Had she known about seeing life as it is, however, the pain may have been much less. We’re used to holding onto our beliefs and myths about life in the perfect world. The funny thing is that this is a perfect world, we just don’t think so because of our little opinions and desires. In our dream world lovers don’t have affairs. But is that true? The reality is they do.

That’s life, and dealing with it as it is, is so much less painful than trying to prop up our myths and push things around to make them fit. In fact, when we look we probably can also see that not only is there dishonesty and deceit in the world but that we’ve been a part of it. For example, maybe you didn’t have an affair but did you deceive someone? Maybe your deceit was just not honestly telling someone that you didn’t want to continue dating so you made up excuses why you weren’t available instead. In most cases we’ve all had the experience of doing, in some form, what we’re accusing someone else of doing.

So what do you do to get out of your pain in dating, whatever the cause may be? You simply look at life and see if what happened to you is the way life really is. Does life always play by what we think are “the rules”? No, life is the way it is. One East Indian teacher puts it this way, “When you agree to be guided from within life becomes a journey into the unknown.”

The unknown can be scary. Or it can be an adventure. Again, be honest with yourself. Is there really security in the known? Can we really know anything about a future that we want to be secure? Are we sure that having been deceived wasn’t the best thing for us? Maybe we were lucky to find out early. We just don’t know.

And since we don’t know, why not go the painless way and simply accept that the Intelligence that guides everything is guiding our dating relationships too? We can stay present and be surprised at what shows up next. In my own experience this pure witnessing way of life, without attachment to “my” wants, produces amazing results. Six months down the road you might be blown away by what you see has happened.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

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

167. When you’re a victim of experiences mature dating often isn’t happy

There’s a spate of articles and books lately on how to find happiness. I just read a piece today from the New York Times online, titled Happiness 101. Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, has studied happiness for years and written a book called Stumbling on Happiness. Some researchers report that certain exercises increase happiness, such as thinking about all the good things of your day before turning in for the night. Gilbert says his studies show people aren’t nearly as happy as they thought they’d be when they eventually reach the goals they had hoped for.

What all these psychological studies focus on is experiences. Not that there’s anything wrong with experiences, especially what we’d call good experiences. But the common attribute in all experiences is that they come and they go. We all know that experiences repeat themselves endlessly without ever bringing any lasting happiness. No matter how good they may be at some time, they all fade away. When we’re tied to those experiences we feel good when we judge them to be good experiences and we feel bad when we interpret them as bad.

In this blog the articles try to point to another way of being happy – in this case being happy while dating as a mature woman or man. What I’ve tried to share is what I’ve seen clearly about how life works. It’s what ancient teachers from all cultures and all centuries have shared in different ways but pointing to the same thing. In a nutshell what they teach is that when you look at your own life you see that life has never paid any attention to what you think “should be”. I’m not asking you to replace your old beliefs with this new idea. I’m suggesting you really look carefully and honestly at how life actually works.

Life doesn’t ask your opinion and it doesn’t allow you to vote. Life simply is what it is and we – you and I – are part of that isness. It can be a big pill to swallow when you first hear it but the ultimate knowing that can finally occur when you look deep enough is that the idea of a “me” running “my” life is really false. You and I don’t beat our hearts, breathe our lungs, create our own thoughts or choose our own life.

If we really had control of “our” so-called lives we’d have a mighty problem. Would there even be time to think of anything else with the burden of remembering to beat our hearts and breathe ourselves every few seconds, not to mention circulating our lymph system and digesting our food? If we chose our own thoughts would we ever choose to think unhappy, painful thoughts? If you control your thoughts do you know where the “off” switch is when you want peace and quiet? Seeing all this you might recognize that the reason we’re not running our lives is that there’s really no “me” here. The idea of me is just that, an idea, a thought among the endless thoughts that show up from who knows where. No one has ever been able to actually find something they can point to and say, “This is me” except for that thought.

The way this all fits into dating may seem obscure but it’s simple when we realize that truly seeing life as it is, without deciding how it “should be” – according to me, of course – results in nothing but ease, happiness, and love. When we see (it would be more accurate to say “when it is seen”) that there could only be one power (call it Source, the Absolute, God or whatever you choose) then we may also see that that Power is obviously infinitely more intelligent and loving than this phantom “me” I think I am.

Whether we think so or not It (the power) seems to know what It’s doing. After all, the planets are still in place after eons, and the apparent chaos in the world, seen from a Little Me perspective with “my” wants and beliefs, seems perfectly organized and harmonious when you look at a history of centuries. Or when you see the earth, stars and planets from outer space.

If this is all starting to sound a bit too heavy and confusing let’s put it in simple language. Bottom line, what the sages have taught and are teaching today is that when we take our hands off the kiddy car steering wheel and let Life take its course, all of a sudden there’s peace and happiness. We see that dating is happening for us because that’s how we’re being lived. When the Little Me doesn’t get its way and life doesn’t go the way we think it should we’re in a world of pain. That pain is simply the result of our resisting what is. Reality is always what’s happening and has nothing to do with what we think should be happening.

How do you know it’s meant to be raining outside? It is. How do you know your date should have stood you up? She did. Stop arguing with reality and you’ll find you have a happiness that doesn’t come and go. It’s not based on experiences. It’s based on the still, silent Source that allows all experiences to be. It’s the natural beingness you see in very small children. And it’s the natural beingness you already are once you see through the “me” idea with its right/wrong opinions and judgments.

You just relax into seeing the world the way it really is. It’s a steady seeing of life that operates like a mirror, not affected in any way by what’s reflected in it. That pure awareness never comes and goes but is the background on which all experiences come and go. When we live as the mirror rather than the drama reflected in it, suddenly life has no problems. That ease and peacefulness is happiness without cause and without end. It’s our natural state. Happy dating!

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer