Every love story is a ghost story.
—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
We all have to say goodbye to Buttercup. At least, we have to let go of the false salvation embedded in the myth that there is one. I said goodbye to the woman I thought was my Buttercup when I was just about to turn thirty, in the spring of 2008. We didn’t part ways on a bucolic green in Florin, like Westley and his love. Instead, it was a quiet but sad spring evening in New York City’s “bucolic” Tompkins Square Park. I began the evening deeply afraid of how damaged our connection had grown since we moved in together almost a year before. I felt as if I were clutching a child’s clumsy art project made of papier-mâché, a project whose structural integrity was coming undone before my eyes, on the way to being graded by the proverbial teacher.
What had been falling apart for a year was now about to dissolve completely; we just were not going to work out as a couple. If we wanted to hunt for blame, there were lots of possible causes: my busy schedule and the stress of starting a nonprofit organization while publishing my first book, which led to inattention; or her panic attacks, which had become intense, invasive, and nightly; or our growing inability to communicate in any way in which we each felt heard and understood by the other. On this particular evening, we circled the park again and again, discussing what we wanted out of life, what we each wanted for ourselves, what we had both wanted together a year ago, and whether those desires were compatible now. By the end of the evening, I knew that we lived in misaligned universes. In difficult times, we didn’t communicate with each other in anything close to sustainable ways. I was also realizing, perhaps selfishly, that I didn’t want the duty of caretaking all at once a new organization, students, and a partner struggling with clinical anxiety. After a period together that had begun torridly and idyllically before twisting into a nightmare, it was time for me to let go of “us,” to set out on the high seas of single life once again. I felt the ambivalence that accompanies the end of an unworkable commitment. Loneliness came in waves, but I also felt the excitement of freedom’s onset. A few weeks later, when my olfactory memory was overwhelmed by smelling shampoo that reminded me of her, I was revisited by an old thought, a thought I’d always found both profound and profoundly unsettling: freedom and loneliness come from the same place.
The Farmboy’s story, of course, is different from mine, far more fairy tale. Westley gets to return to the same Buttercup he left behind years earlier. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if, after all our spiritual and psychological transformations out there on the high seas, we each got to return to our O.G. Buttercups, our first loves, our most seminal romances? Not many of us have such luxury. Whether we learn from experience or not, most of the time we simply have to move on and get ready for the next connection, a new now.
The Farmboy realizes his true love for Buttercup, and she eventually returns his epiphany, but he is too poor to marry her. So he sets out across the sea to find the resources necessary to earn the fortune he’ll need so they can begin their life together.1 Like the Farmboy, I realized on that night in 2008 that I had found someone “spiritual,” someone smart, someone creative, someone beautiful, but not someone with whom I could communicate genuinely and deeply during confusing or hard times. Without that huge missing piece, I didn’t have the resources for a partnership. Just like the Farmboy, I was sentenced by my karma to exactly five more years adrift on the rocky seas of modern dating before finding my partner. To find her, I had to leave my romantic idols behind, and renounce my membership in the Church of Soul Mates.
Overcoming the Theism of Romance
THE PRINCESS BRIDE UNDERMINES THE cheesy ideals of classic fairy tales while still fully celebrating true love. Mindfulness, as both cognitive technique and more general worldview, is about relinquishing ideals and embracing the felt truth of the present moment. Buddhism, as a paradigm, is about awakening the compassion and awareness that naturally arise after the deconstruction of false views. This all sounds quite nice in theory. But in practice, repeatedly seeing your ideals collapse and finding the strength to return again and again to the way things are, not the way you want them to be, is usually a painful challenge. This challenge is exacerbated by life in an era when momentarily escaping from the present moment is becoming exponentially easier. When we remember all the difficult feelings involved in sex, romance, communication, and partnership—well, let’s just say it makes sense that many practitioners throughout history have chosen the path of celibacy.
In creating The Princess Bride, the author and screenwriter William Goldman seemed intent, every step of the way, on poking fun at the standards that classic fairy tales offer up. Goldman works with humor by deconstructing archetypes. Each of his characters deviates hilariously from fairy-tale norms, which is what makes them each so memorable. His evil geniuses are not very smart at all, his master swordsmen are also sloppy drunks, his giants are tender poets, and his unbeatable pirate warrior becomes crippled with despair and only gets by with a lot of help from his friends. Even Goldman’s miracle-producing wizard is dejected and insecure about his own wizardry, like a clinically depressed Gandalf!
Humor is the most loving method of deconstruction, and it is essential for any spiritual path. Chögyam Trungpa used to refer to the attempt to find solidity within our existence as a “cosmic joke,” a sort of irresolvable dilemma that, once we give up trying to solve it, could potentially open us up to both wonder and appreciation. When we try to hold reality together under a unifying and inflexible belief system, we usually end up taking everything way too seriously. Laughter is the physical response to seriousness cracking under its own pressure. As one of his central instructions for enlightenment, an ancient Tibetan master named Longchenpa had this to say:
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good and bad, acceptance or rejection,
You might as well burst out laughing!
Most important, William Goldman brings his comedic deconstruction of a fairy tale into the realm of romance. His immaculate beauty, the model object of all heterosexual male fantasies, the title character in The Princess Bride is named … Buttercup.
I still remember the moment, at age nine, when I first heard the name Buttercup. That’s a really weird name for a girl, I thought. Why would William Goldman name the most idealized object of sexual affection in his piece something so ridiculous? Because he understands, and we also understand, at least intellectually, that our romantic ideals are often that ridiculous. Clinging to our ideals usually takes us away from, not toward, happiness.
Let’s be honest: on its surface, The Princess Bride is a story with some very sexist elements. The characters reinforce the gendered narrative of a patriarchal society: the intelligent yet powerless damsel-in-distress who must be rescued from her captor by her male love interest and his very male friends.2 Yet the story also attempts to undercut such stereotypes. Obviously it’s impossible to uncouple gender from power in our society, but to the extent that they can be distinguished, the spiritual significance of Buttercup is not so much about gender. It’s about the objectification of romance. It’s about walking the fine line between admiration and idealization, finding that razor’s edge between true love and rom-coms.
From this perspective, Buttercup is a commentary on objectification, and a calling-out of the rom-com myth. Her name doesn’t need to represent a woman (despite Robin Wright’s feminine … um, radiance in the role). Your ideal prince or princess could identify as female, male, or without gender. If you are attracted to men, you could just as easily call this impossible archetype “Prince Studmuffin.” The Buttercup myth (which could be called less humorously the soul mate myth) embodied in most contemporary rom-com scripts is about a trap of belief that’s hard to recognize and even harder to escape. At one time or another, you fall victim to the myth that the perfect person might just come along and save you. Save you from what? What do you need to be saved from? The only thing any human being has ever really wanted to be saved from: dealing with your own mind.
In Buddhism, we emphasize the danger of fixating upon saviors. Chögyam Trungpa called Buddhism a “nontheistic” tradition. Nontheism was a conscious word choice on his part, and is not the same thing as atheism (as in the concrete, perhaps arrogant statement “I am certain that there is no god”). When Chögyam Trungpa illuminated his use of the word nontheism, he did not discard the idea of sacredness or divinity, which is crucial to awakening, at least in the Tantric Buddhist tradition he practiced and taught. There are many definitions of god and divinity that do not propose an external savior, a conscious actor separate from the creation they established. I am convinced that when my more religious friends speak of God, they are talking of the inherent sacredness of this world, not some dude sitting on a cloud who can solve our problems for us. This vision of divinity as an inherent sacredness is entirely in line with Buddhist thought.
Nontheism refers to something more psychological, something more practical. When he spoke of “theism,” Chögyam Trungpa was calling our attention to the way we look for external saviors to take ourselves away from the tedious, uncomfortable, and lonely work of being with ourselves. For him, this painful grasping after idols was a distancing mistake, the tragedy of many forms of worship. Pursuing these escapist detours, which he also called spiritual materialism, can take on many different relational and cultural forms.
Blind faith in a separate creator god is one classic form of theism. However, in the twenty-first century, we need to pay attention to a wider collection of theistic traps. When wanting false salvation from your own mind, or wanting to numb yourself from the awkwardness and fears inherent in participating in human relationships, you might invest in a whole array of false prophets. Most of our false prophets are now found outside of churches or temples. Many of our most popular forms of salvation would now be categorized as secular, not religious.
Clarifying this subtle and more personal definition of theism becomes more important now, especially for the growing number of us who don’t subscribe to any belief in an omnipotent creator, who don’t want to identify with any traditionally regarded “spiritual” group. We live in an age when fewer people believe in a creator god than ever, with more agnostics and atheists than ever before.3 However, this does not exempt any of us from the trap of theism. An atheist can be just another kind of believer, worshipping false cures, taking solace in beliefs that simply cannot be proven in experience, all the while escaping from their own heart and mind. Buddhists often fall into the trap of theism as well. Even though there is no creator god in classic Buddhism, a Buddhist who believes they might be saved by finding the right guru’s blessing, or the right meditation technique, or the right material for the beads in their mala bracelet, is just another kind of theist. This tragic idea that there is some way to avoid dealing with who you are forms the basis for all theistic confusion, whether that confusion turns you into a religious fundamentalist or a shopaholic. Whatever your poison, theism involves the tragic externalization of your own worthiness as a human.
Theistic confusion doesn’t just happen once. It recurs, moment by moment, and while you’re on your path, your quest for a savior can take many different forms. Because it is one of the most valued cultural centers in modern society, our chosen temple of worship might be a movie theater. More specifically, there’s the myth embedded in the romantic comedy, the wish that the right partner might grant you the right status, saving you from a lonely life struggling against your own mind. Many of us worship Prince Studmuffin or Princess Buttercup, even if we call them by less satirical names. Most of us would never admit that we are seeking a Buttercup, of course. Are you kidding? Not me. The worst kind of fairy tale is a fantasy that can’t admit it is one. Most rom-coms are modern fairy tales that don’t admit they’re peddling fantasies. The Princess Bride is a great reminder of the need for humor in the age of romantic theism, the era of Buttercups and Studmuffins who don’t exist.
Whatever your gender identity or sexual orientation, let’s try this. You and I are the Farmboy, the Farmgirl, or the Farmkid. The Farmkid must train as a pirate warrior of love in a harsh world, seeking middle ground in a culture driven by extreme beliefs about romance on all sides: blind soul mate seekers on your right and bitter cynics on your left. Buttercup represents that perpetual and idealized “other,” whatever romantic object you chase. Even if you aren’t seeking a life partner, you still might chase the “other” anytime desire takes hold of your body and mind. If you are human, desire is inescapable.
Labeling the “other” as Buttercup is compelling because we can name this myth in our own minds, and then laugh at ourselves a bit, without losing faith in love. If we are going to awaken, we must recover our sense of humor. We also can’t lose sight of love’s ability to guide us toward genuine admiration and an integration of the positive qualities we find in other humans. The road you learn to walk, the journey of true love, is the middle path. The “Middle Way” is an ancient Buddhist philosophical system that calls awareness to a general tendency of the confused mind.4 We tend to careen back and forth between extreme approaches, neither of which leads us to satisfaction. Walking the middle path doesn’t mean you never stumble or get lost. All it requires is that you become a curious student of your own extreme beliefs and slowly learn how not to get caught in either pole. When it comes to romance, the two extremes I have spotted again and again are (1) belief in salvation and (2) cynicism about the whole damn thing. On the middle path of romance, you will need to bring your heart along with you. It’s even okay to be a bleeding-heart, love-stricken Buddhist romantic just like me. In fact, you might find it to be essential.
The Buttercup Checklist
IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, AS we entered the new millennium, I was somewhere around my twelfth or fourteenth viewing of the movie. In my postcollegiate years, I was also carrying a checklist around in the back pocket of my mind. I don’t know if you’ve ever made a list of the qualities your ideal partner would have. I know some people who have kept actual lists, clearly documented and crisply bullet-pointed, out of deep hopefulness of finding a partner; or, more humbly, a list hewn together out of deep frustration at missing meaningful signs the last time they opened their hearts to someone. Most often, our ideal lists are crafted from a blend of past frustration and hopefulness for the future. I know of a few people who, after disappointments overwhelmed them, literally set their lists on fire, a ceremonial catharsis that was one part Wiccan ritual, one part quasi-Buddhist purification of karma, one part made-up New Age spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
Whether we formally bullet-point the qualities we seek in another person or merely keep them at the back of our minds, we each track what we’re looking for, chasing admirable qualities loosely defined somewhere in the realm of anxious thoughts and urgent impulses. Of course, you might keep multiple lists for different life situations, lists of expectations that may have little or no overlap with one another: the One-Night Stand list, the Casual Commitment list, the Father of My Child list, the Person I Want to Grow Old With list, and the Screw It, Let’s Be Self-Destructive Again Tonight list. We all make notes about our perceived needs as we check people out, scouring the human terrain, or the virtual terrain of some app, like a Terminator scanning for its target. On top of the stress of maintaining internal checklists, there are the outcomes our friends and family want for us, outcomes imposed or amplified by culture, social networks, and peer pressure. Friends tell you (after you’ve already gotten hurt) to watch for the “red flags” that they saw so clearly, those signs that, if only you’d been thinking straight, would have let you know that the person you wanted was a zero instead of a hero, a situation too problematic to be anything other than a step in the wrong direction.
In my early twenties I had a list going, a list of those qualities that might constitute my Buttercup. You would never get me to admit such a list existed, not even to myself. Some people keep a journal, but that wasn’t my style. Our views and beliefs are not always so explicit as to be written down somewhere. Most of the time, our actions inferentially reveal to us the views that dominate our consciousness. Our views lay the groundwork for our actions, but our actions reveal our views after the fact. The Buttercup list was there, qualifications and qualities wallpapering my skull, rib cage, and groin.
It may seem somehow superficial, or “un-Buddhist,” to name qualities of romantic expectation, but if you’ve made it this far into the book, let’s agree to let someone else be the Superficiality Police, okay? I’ve grown weary of prefabricated judgments about which thoughts are profound and which are superficial, judgments rendered all too easily, carelessly indicting the full spectrum of actual feelings that a human being might actually experience while actually being human. If you are curious about life, if you practice mindfulness and compassion, you are going to come across some superficial thoughts and views, both in your own mind and in the minds of other basically good humans. Some superficial beliefs come from privilege, some come from prejudice, some come from fear and trauma, and all come from karma. Without the ability to become lovingly aware of superficial or prejudiced beliefs, or if you are immediately ashamed at their existence, you can’t work with your actual thoughts. When it comes to romantic attraction and aversion, if you aren’t curious about your turn-ons and turn-offs, then the illumination offered by mindfulness is rendered inoperative before it can begin.
The truth is, superficial qualities can lead to depth in time, because superficial thoughts can lend insight about what we admire in another person. The word superficial simply refers to a surface, and every object has a surface, even those objects called thoughts. The surface is never a problem, because the façade is simply a doorway to a deeper experience. When two people meet, they first examine each other superficially. But appearances can be misleading when there’s nothing underneath, and the bubble of artifice pops, leaving you lost, without deeper intent or values to guide you. Too often, I’ve noticed, meditators are only looking for profundity. But reality has many surfaces. We have a tendency to shame our superficial thoughts before they’ve even been observed and appreciated for what they are. Without appreciating your own superficiality, you won’t ever arrive at profundity.
In my early twenties, having that abstract list of ideals—most of them hollow and fantasy-driven, a few with depth and grounded in a connection with others—was all quite timely. Five or so years into a meditation practice that became consistent at the end of high school, I was finally discerning what kind of person I wanted to be, at least for the time being—according to modern neuroscience, my male brain was just completing its adult formation. I was also trying to figure out how a person could pay their rent in this world without feeling like a mostly dead sellout. I was practicing Buddhism and meditation seriously, and decided that, in some way, I wanted to teach those things (though I had no idea until later that it might become a career). I was also trying to be a creative and, as much as possible, politically conscious person. These decisions felt important, perhaps (like everything else in your twenties) a little too important. I was also trying to figure out dating, a quest that felt like a blindfolded scavenger hunt through a junkyard of random advice. Opinions on dating were readily offered up by pretty much everyone I knew, generated in every medium of communication the early twenty-first century could offer, and at every social forum. An assembly of voices claimed impossible expertise in locating Buttercups and Studmuffins for others, as if perfect mates were falling from trees.
My past lent me little help in figuring out romance. I had a lot of great guidance in many other aspects of my spiritual path—but dating? To be honest, both my familial and spiritual heritages offered much general wisdom regarding life, the universe, and everything, but almost nothing that could be directly applied to a successful romance. My parents are wonderful people, but their own marriage was a Fire Swamp that began with infatuation. Before they really knew each other, they’d already had a child, and their fiery union engulfed itself in conflict, leaving me without a clear memory of them together and genuinely happy before they parted ways. I had no formative stories upon which to visualize any future partnership. Many, if not most, of the people I grew up with in New York City were also children of divorce. Many of the children in the Buddhist community I grew up in also came from parents with difficult relationships. My parents’ Buddhist teacher, who died the same year The Princess Bride was released in theaters, left behind a wife and family, but Chögyam Trungpa, as brilliant as he was, was light-years from being a conventionally available husband or father. As a matter of fact, even the historical Buddha himself, good old Siddhartha Gautama, was a deadbeat dad. Perhaps that’s blasphemous, but it’s true. He left his wife and infant son, seemingly without much warning, and went off on his own. Like the rest of the spiritual world, the history of Buddhism, both ancient and modern, is full of deeply wise people who suck at romantic relationships. And that’s okay.
I like to imagine that Siddhartha, responsible for a wife and baby boy, had a panic attack and realized he no longer wanted the life that had been created for him, or the life he had co-created for himself. There is no historical basis for believing he had acute anxiety. The story of Siddartha’s departure, even when he is appropriately humanized rather than deified, is often told as a calm and collected decision in response to his spiritual calling, a grounded choice to pursue awakening in isolation from mainstream society. Some accounts claim that his wife supported his choice fully. Buddhist historians are quick to remind us that his wife and son would later heartily forgive him for leaving, and even become his disciples.5 I prefer to think that Siddhartha simply freaked out at age twenty-nine (in possibly the most famous example of “Saturn Returns” in human astrological history) and fled his father’s estate, at least in part because he couldn’t handle his marriage or the pressure his dad placed upon him. Siddhartha’s tale of awakening means more if he has real human obstacles through which to awaken. Personally, I prefer to share the stories of flawed but compassionate heroes. They’re all I’ve ever known.
So, without any clear model, I was carrying around a hidden list of my ideal Buttercup’s qualities. I took it with me to work, to parties and bars, on meditation retreats, to yoga classes, to volunteer events, to friends’ art openings, to every café I entered. My eyes and heart darted and scoured, chasing connection and mirage alike. If in the period immediately before or after September 11 you happened to see a young guy recently out of college huddling in an urban café while carrying a book by Rilke atop a text on Mahamudra meditation, atop a book on post-structuralist theory, his eyes wandering beyond the page he was pretentiously pretending to read, trying to distract himself from his own pretending, thereby layering pretension atop pretense, combing the room for Buttercups … yeah, I was that dude.
My list of ideal qualities was an odd pastiche of references, a collage of images from Harold and Maude, Ngulchu Thogme’s The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, Swingers (sadly), Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” LL Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” every high school and college crush I’d ever had, my mother (as both attraction and aversion), and of course Buttercup from The Princess Bride. Through my progressive education, and my mother’s presence, I had been well schooled on the harm caused by objectifying women. But I had not learned how to stop longing for women as “other,” genuine admiration toxically mixing with the need for possessive validation. Women were a missing piece, a completion, a companionship that seemed to offer both authentic connection and artificial status in a competitive world.
I could not bring myself to believe that “longing” for someone was at all, ever, in any way problematic. However, when I read some ancient Buddhist texts, they seemed to suggest (at least in the more questionable translations) that the desire I was repeatedly feeling was exactly that which needed to be extinguished. But I was, and am, a stubborn Buddhist romantic. For better or worse, I took my Buttercup list with me, in the back pocket of awareness, every single place I went.
Ethan’s Buttercup List, circa September 11, 2001
• BEAUTIFUL: As sexy and “head-turning” as Robin Wright (or one of my other nostalgic crushes). The “beautiful” was for me; the “head-turning” was for my reputation.
• EXACTLY SMART ENOUGH: Not Jeopardy contestant smart, but able to banter and ambidextrously fence with every cultural reference I threw at her, but without being so smart that she’d make me feel stupid by throwing around lots of references I was clueless about.
• CREATIVE: She had to be.
• SPIRITUAL: Ready to join in long precoital conversations with deep “spiritual” gazes. And if she wanted to accompany me to a meditation retreat, bonus.
• KIND: Of course, of course, of course kindness mattered; kindness really kind of mattered to me when I was twenty-three.
At that period in my life, I had studied the ideas of nontheism and spiritual materialism. My intellect could repeat the idea that there was no savior from myself. I knew conceptually the problem with fixating on perfection. But anyone who has ever practiced mindfulness for two minutes can tell you that intellect and embodied experience are usually separate continents in the confused human experience.
I spent my first five to six postcollege years subtly comparing the women I met, dated, and failed to date, to the qualities in that list, oscillating between, on the one hand, deep loyalty to my ideals and, on the other, shame that I couldn’t let my ideals go once and for all. It’s amazing how fixated and aggressive a Buddhist can become when yelling at himself to just let something go, damn it! Just like aggressively shooing an uncomfortable thought in meditation, blindly hoping the thought will leave you alone for good only to watch it return, my own Buttercup fantasy kept coming back to me.
I wasn’t so naïve as to expect to get everything. I knew that nobody gets their exact fantasy. Having it all, going big or going home, was an American myth, a Humperdinckian myth. Even before the experiment called America existed, getting everything you wanted was a Samsaric myth going back eons. It wasn’t like I was Westley, the only man who possessed that Errol Flynn meets Ferris Bueller suaveness, funny and cunning enough to ride off on four horses with his perfect Buttercup and his perfectly eccentric friends.
Then, in 2006, seemingly out of nowhere, while recovering from a breakup, I met her: Buttercup of the East Village. She was a poet with a deep interest in art. She was smart and thoughtful. She cared about the world. We attended a MoveOn event together before we started dating, feeling good about contributing to communal activism and sanity during the “Dubya” era. She was even into yoga and Buddhism. And, by the way, not that it should matter—of course this shouldn’t ever matter—Buttercup of the East Village was a former model who still did print work when she needed extra money.
In my personal experience, women don’t usually make strong eye contact, at least not to express interest in a Manhattan Farmboy like me. I think it’s due to the harsh objectification prevalent in our society, the ways that men who never learned better can make women feel uncomfortable with unwanted attention, with aggression that can make social spaces difficult and often dangerous for women to navigate with hearts open and gazes up. I often wonder what it would be like to be a woman, to enter each social space without being able simply to trust the genuine intentions of everyone I met. On all sides, our culture has made the work of letting us be genuine much harder than it needs to be.
In my teens and twenties, my mindfulness practice had a surprising side effect: it taught me how to be visually perceptive in a world of evasive intimacies and lightning-quick social cues. If I was in a social setting and wanted to know if a woman was sending me signals, I had to catch her in a split-second act. Not the act of looking at me, because eye contact was dangerous for her, but in the act of quickly looking away from me when I tried to make eye contact. If I caught a girl’s eyes darting away, it meant that she may have—maybe, possibly, perchance—been checking this Farmboy out. I remember the moment I went to hear Buttercup of the East Village read her work at the Bowery Poetry Club. After she descended from the stage, I caught her eyes darting away from me, and it was on.
Buttercup and Westley fall (back) in love with each other when they tumble down a very steep hill together, a hill that Buttercup has just angrily pushed him down. There has rarely been a cinematic metaphor as direct as this one. Falling in love is a tumble both blissful and excruciating. As you tumble, your mind is focused only on the bliss; and after it’s done, on the pain of the fall. In the case of Buttercup of the East Village, I’m not sure who gave the push, but I do remember that it was just that steep a plunge. Within one week of dating, we were spending six nights a week together. I would run out in the morning to get us each a coffee before my meditation practice, and would carry them back to her studio apartment near Tompkins Square victoriously, my grin wider than the diameter of my face. I would hum the tune of the Magnetic Fields song “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” feeling exceptionally literal about the lyrics. As I brought caffeine back to Buttercup of the East Village, I was finally, at long last, headed home—at least, that’s how it seemed.
Within nine months she had moved in with me in Brooklyn. We had begun theoretical discussions of “mawidge,” but soon after moving in, she began having panic attacks with alarming frequency—soon, more or less every night. On top of the sleep deprivation we both developed, major cracks started to appear in our ability to communicate with each other clearly. Those cracks became fault lines, and the fault lines became earthquakes that shook me at a subterranean level, damaging my idea of partnership as salvation. This was an ideal that, yes, I could dismiss intellectually like any Buddhist Sherlock, but upon which my body and heart were still clearly fixated.
In the early days of our relationship, our miscommunications were invisible: we shared so much in a spiritual silence, so much that didn’t even need to be stated, as we lay together assuming we understood each other perfectly. Why go hunting for all the ways in which our subjectivities might be at war with each other? But as time progressed, as the misunderstandings mounted, I felt increasingly irrelevant in the relationship. She began to panic, grasp onto, and then lash out at me more and more aggressively. In response, I found strategies to go numb, or to dive into my work, or else isolate myself in our small apartment next to the Williamsburg Bridge, which further triggered her own feelings of invisibility. This game of emotional dodgeball was no small feat for an urban couple. (Sometimes I practice compassion meditation for every unhappy couple who must engage in evasive maneuvers while living together in a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment.) Things went from bad to worse. And then things fell apart, which is what things do.
Now, there we were, two years later in the spring of 2008, in Tompkins Square Park, and I had chosen to say goodbye to Buttercup of the East Village, goodbye to that concept called “us.” My meditation practice gave me a sense of clarity that, at the very least, helped me with not second-guessing a decision, even a painful decision, once it had been made.
Obviously, when a relationship ends, the person who breaks up is the privileged one, because they know what is coming. I have been on both sides, but in this case I took little solace in knowing I was the one who made the call. It was the most heartbreaking thing that had ever happened to me in the arena of romance, more heartbreaking than all the times I’d been dumped. The lessons I learned from Buttercup of the East Village, and the lessons I learned from the next five years of training on the high seas of dating, years that eventually led to my wife, could not have been more valuable to my spiritual path.
The Dance of Desire
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL THOUSAND years, many masters of the mind and heart have taken on the crucial, tricky subject of desire: how desire can lead to fixation, addiction, and self-destruction; how desire can be repressed; how desire can be sublimated into more socially acceptable or spiritually exalted forms. In the Tantric Buddhist tradition I inherit, many ceremonial practices are given over to the exploration of the relationship among passion, love, and awakening. We explore how the love between student and teacher can ignite a greater love for humanity and sentient beings, and also how the romantic desire of Eros can be alchemized into Agape, a 360-degree love, a form of compassion that explodes like a star, illuminating one’s deepest connection with all sentient beings. According to Tibetan Buddhism, a human being feels a wide array of emotions, yet the one that most fully defines the human realm of experience is desire.
Unfortunately, across the millennia, desire has too often been viewed as a problem, rendered sinful, presented as nothing but a destructive emotion. Sadly, this denigration of desire has happened at the hands of both spiritual and psychological thinkers. Some very poor interpretations of Buddhist thought make the mistake of claiming that Buddhism believes desire to be the cause of suffering, the second noble truth. If this were true, then the elimination of both romance and chocolate chip cookies would be a good idea for your path of awakening. Once you got rid of all those things that might be a sensual trigger of desire, discarding all objects that might provoke uneasy feelings in your lower chakras and cause the brain to release dopamine or serotonin, you’d be all set. Unfortunately, the Buddha himself, during a period of misguided self-torture, discovered that this form of aggression toward a core human emotion simply does not work—ever. There are many things I don’t know, but I do know this: the path of awakening is about the illumination of desire, not its exclusion.
It is true that in the first teaching the Buddha gave, he proclaimed the cause of suffering to be tanha, a word most literally translated as “thirst.” It may seem that desire or attachment are suitable synonyms for this word, but tanha needs to be carefully contextualized in the body of teachings from which it originates, as well as lived within your own experience, for its meaning to be revealed. Tanha, as the Buddha described it, is not just a longing for a cookie or a person. Instead, it refers to the fixated need for the present moment to change into something other than what it is. Tanha means that whatever is happening in this moment, whatever the arising sensation, we either thirst for the experience to become permanent and stable, or else we thirst for the moment to cease to exist.
Tanha, therefore, describes a misguided fixation on the impossible. As Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche puts it, tanha can be described as “always wanting there to be another now.” Obviously, because this wish is functionally impossible, our deeply engrained habit of trying to change what is already happening will cause suffering, creating recurrent friction between perception and reality. Suffering, duhkha, is not the nature of life, but a deeply engrained maladaptation to human experience. Duhkha describes the harmful friction between the actual moment and the fantasized moment. Duhkha is like the mind giving itself a rug burn, over and over again. Awakening is what happens when perception and reality become fully harmonized, when the tension between oneself and the present moment ceases.
So, what if desire is what is happening to you in the present moment? What if desire is your now? What if longing for another person, even intense and fiery longing, is simply the moment you inhabit? Is desire still suffering, then? No, not necessarily. Like any other emotion, desire is not inherently a problem, because desire occurs in the present moment, and the present moment is never inherently a problem. Needing there to be a different present moment is when we go astray. If you are naturally experiencing desire, then thirsting for desire to cease is just another form of suffering.
Of all possible emotions, desire is perhaps the most optimistic one. In its purest, energetic form, desire is a longing for connection. Something called “me” wants to join together (if only temporarily) with someone who is “other,” or some object that is “not me.” The beauty of this longing is that it naturally expands your private universe. In wanting connection, you begin to feel beyond yourself, yearning toward something vaster, more inclusive and interdependent. Within longing lives the seed of wisdom, a wisdom that wants to expand the range of lived experience beyond that which has already been experienced. That is why you long for that which is “other,” because your inherent wisdom, your basic goodness, sees that there exists a much larger universe than the one you have already witnessed from your small vantage point. Inherently, there is neither sin nor confusion in this longing. Desire is the best thing that could ever happen to any of us. Desire is what fuels our ability to empathize. Without passion, there would be no compassion. Without desire, you have no chance at true love, and no hope of awakening.
Tantric Buddhist practices focus heavily on the transformation of desire. These tools examine how desire, in its confused state of grasping and fixation, can be transmuted into a more robust experience of love. In Tantra, this exploration includes both the sexual desire for another human and the more exalted forms of admiration we might feel toward a teacher or a guru. Western theorists, such as Heinz Kohut, have similarly focused on potentially positive aspects hidden in idealization: how admiring the positive qualities in an “other” can lead to integrating those positive qualities into yourself. Tantric Buddhism developed visualization techniques for imagining the support of spiritual heroes that could lead to feeling a full union with their heroic qualities. We use these techniques in order to realize that those same positive qualities, such as confidence and compassion, already lay dormant in our own minds. In order to awaken your love and confidence, you first visualize those qualities existing in another being (often a visualized teacher or enlightened archetype), and then slowly practice uniting your awareness with theirs.
In this way, desire, supported by mindfulness, will lead to positive growth. Longing is a solution to isolation and narcissism, a dissolving of a box-size universe in which there lives only an inadequate and insecure “me.” A heart that is capable of admiring the qualities of another being is a heart that yearns to accommodate more, one that is ready to be touched by a larger world. Desire, if it manifests as connection, makes your universe bigger. But if desire leads to grasping and obsession, it can make your world very small indeed.
I always cringe when I read philosophers dissing desire or sexuality, because it always seems like they are disrespecting humanity itself. Desire is humanity’s best friend. But it’s a tricky friend, a friend you don’t want to misunderstand. Desire is a little … well, high maintenance, to say the least. We work with desire by getting to know it, slowly and carefully. It behooves each of us to contemplate, with a touch of humor, the confusion we have already caused ourselves and others by not fully understanding the power of desire. It’s a potential Fire Swamp of disappointment and addictive behaviors, and we need to know how to navigate its dangers. Desire is not a static thing. It’s an ongoing movement between longing and discovery, separation and union, rejection and acceptance, regret and gratitude. If you bring mindfulness to the arenas of dating, romance, and partnership, you are implicitly declaring a willingness to dance with desire. If you don’t understand the changing nature of this dance, you will repeatedly get burned.
Desire is a dance because desire is based upon, and always first experienced as, a state of separation. Much of the time, desire ends with outright rejection. Often, you aren’t able to join with the object you seek. Someone already ate that last cookie, or someone hands you a cookie right after you’ve started your gluten-free, sugar-free (but never desire-free) cleanse. Or you work up the courage to press send on an awkward text message asking someone out for coffee, and they never bother to text you back. Most of the time, ladies and gentlemen, as I scoured the social arenas of the early twenty-first century, I did not catch anyone’s eyes darting nervously away from me! When it comes to many desires, the universe simply responds to your earnest request with a cold “No. Sorry. Not you.”
Desire offers no guarantee that the object of our desire will be available to us in return. Making friends with rejection involves the realization that the world of objects and sentient beings cannot be controlled. Accepting rejection becomes a crucial part of the dance of desire. If you don’t accept that you can’t control the wants of another person, or even control most of the inanimate objects you encounter, desire is only going to hurt. I am not a relationship expert, but I do know this: any attempt to manipulate another person into desiring you back, any “Game” you attempt to play to control someone’s mind, is a karmic step in the wrong direction. When desire leads to an act of manipulation, it is no longer wisdom but aggression. Aggression might carry the illusion of control, but that appearance will be short-lived, and is bound to create more suffering.
Sometimes, beyond anyone’s control, the stars do end up aligning for you. Buttercups and Studmuffins may appear. This is when desire is experienced as a moment of union rather than separation. Union, or desire’s acceptance, is where the dance of desire gets tricky. In your initial state of separation—when the “cookie” was just an idea outside yourself—you were hungry and unfulfilled. You expected the anticipated union to be the resolution of the longing, the end of the path. You thought that union with the object of desire would bring satisfaction. Instead, getting what you wanted now leads you into a new phase of feeling. Union doesn’t resolve the previous moment of separation; it just creates a new moment. The way we view any object of desire from the perspective of separation is very different from how we feel after joining with it. The first time Buttercup glances at you across the room feels quite different from the moment you realize you feel claustrophobic around them.
Here’s the tricky part about separation and union: you never actually get what you wanted. Instead, you got what you now have, which is a whole new experience indeed. Joining with the object of your desire does not satisfy the experience of desire. It only creates a new experience, as your perspective of the “other” shifts. Furthermore, what you now have inevitably changes, moving desire’s dance forward into the next disorienting moment. Try this: slowly eat a cookie or other treat, and pay close attention, before, during, and after each bite, to how quickly your experience of pleasure and discomfort, union and separation, oscillates as the cookie disappears.
The confused mind, stumbling into the dance of desire blindly, often chases the “other” to alleviate the intensity of the physical feeling of desire, trying to make that overwhelming sensation cease, at least temporarily. If you’ve struggled to possess the “other,” if you’ve searched a long time, or demonstrated courage to get to your “Buttercup,” then the fact that you are now experiencing a new feeling, rather than the satisfaction of the initial desire, can be quite a disappointment, to say the least. We hope that getting what we want will be the story’s end, which is where most rom-coms leave off. Instead, every union is just a new beginning, a next step in the ongoing dance between self and other, subject and object, separation and union, rejection and acceptance. And that’s the biggest problem with rom-coms: they almost always end when the dance is just getting started.
At the point of union, you have two choices: you have to be willing either to dance with this new feeling of togetherness (a moment of “we” that comes with a slew of awkward and previously unnavigated intimacies) or to chase a new object of desire. If you are habitually caught up, tangled in cycles of tanha, always wanting there to be another now, then get used to disappointment every single time you reenter the chase. Samsara, the cycle of confusion, is based on perpetually finding another “now” to chase, and never understanding that the chase, as such, will never be complete.6
It all sounds so heavy. If we want to work with sexual and romantic desire, we need a bit of lightheartedness about the whole dance. We need language that makes the dance a little more playful. I would never have survived studying Buddhism without developing a sense of humor. Hence, Buttercup. The Buttercup myth perfectly caricatures the confusion of the romantic chase, and the disappointment that accompanies either the rejection or the fulfillment of our longings. Anyone who has ever gotten their Buttercup (or their chocolate cookie, for that matter) knows that the Buttercup you pursue is never the Buttercup you end up with, because your point of reference continually shifts as you dance with desire.
When you never learn your lesson, you enter a cycle of confusion, a samsaric state. In physics, cyclical motion happens because intentions and actions, force and velocity, are pointed in different directions from each other, and this discrepancy causes an object to spin around and around. Awakening from this cycle is not about suppressing desire, but rather about understanding that desire is a feeling that cannot, by definition, be satisfied by any chase. Mindfulness teaches us that feelings don’t exist to be satisfied; they exist to be felt. Desire can neither be destroyed nor resolved. If you are going to be a romantic, you need to stay awake to desire’s playful trickery.
When I joined with Buttercup of the East Village, I started to feel more and more misunderstood, because the stresses of intimacy changed my ability to idealize her, to fantasize about what her entry into my life represented. I’d left communication and friendship off my earlier Buttercup checklist, and now I was realizing that this absence was, simply put, not okay. Luckily for me, after parting ways with Buttercup of the East Village, over the next five years on the high seas, studying under a brutal guru called “modern dating,” I experienced tons of chances to practice befriending desire.