Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam.
—THE IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN
Marriage is two people asking each other what they want for dinner until one of them dies.
—INTERNET MEME
The real Buttercup’s name is Marissa. She has eyes like the sea after a storm.
In 2013, after those five years of dating and many more sojourns back and forth through the Kale Belt, I met my wife. The Real Buttercup is an ironic title, so ironic that its utterance resides on the same oxymoronic precipice that relationship expert inhabits. Eventually, though, enough irony can bend you back into reality, just as enough repetitions of dropping the story line can make you flexible enough to open up to the present moment. Sometimes when you stay open, something auspicious occurs, and you stumble across what works. Hence, beyond hope and fear, a Real Buttercup or Real Studmuffin may appear, and you may be wise enough to notice their arrival.
I didn’t see her coming. Of course, we never see reality coming. That’s how reality works, and how the relationship between ideas and direct experience works. When I met my wife in 2013, all the qualities from my earlier Buttercup list were still present, now appearing in a form unforeseen, an actuality beyond concept. She was not what my map had dictated, yet she was clearly what my desires had pointed me toward.
For millennia, Buddhist teachings on cognition have investigated the relationship between concepts and direct events. What is the link between an idea and an experience, between a map and a physical place? We attempt to prepare for reality by investing energy in concepts, images, and ideological lists. We have to do this in order to find our way in this world. These concepts can be helpful when they aren’t stuck on a loop of obsession or perseveration. When we take the time to check our concepts against what we actually experience, they become great maps for navigating experience. Let’s say you have a job interview coming up. Your preparation for the interview is an entirely conceptual act, necessarily so. If the interview is tomorrow (tomorrow is always a concept), it’s good to have a résumé (concepts, hopefully not outright lies) and some image (concept) of what to wear, where to go (concept), who will be interviewing you (concept), what questions they might ask (concepts), and how you might craft your responses so they come across as perfectly spontaneous (spontaneity is often a concept pretending not to be one). But the moment you walk into the interview, even if you are well prepared and relaxed, you realize that your concepts had little to do with reality. The room, the person, the movements of your own body—suddenly all feel unanticipated. Preparing for life in the real world requires a conceptual map of the terrain ahead, just as the Buttercup list was my flawed, evolving map of what a good relationship might be. It’s better to have clear concepts than flawed concepts. If you are spending the day in Chicago, it’s better to follow a street map of Chicago rather than one of Toronto. But you can’t spend the whole day looking at the map. Here’s the most gorgeous feature of reality: it’s always a surprise, even when experience dovetails with expectation. My wife was just that: a surprise.
The Real Buttercup and I had both been around the romantic block before, each of us seeing the annihilation of many personal story lines. Yet, when we met, we both experienced a moment of renewed innocence, a moment of who are you? as we tumbled down a steep hill together, once again very quickly. I am not sure who pushed whom. “Carpe Nowness,” whispered the invisible forces of the universe, those energetic influences of which a skeptic will say, “I don’t think they exist.”
Meeting Marissa felt like a return to a native land. We did meet in the East Village. Yet something was fresh and new, familiar but undiscovered. Three qualities were different from my earlier Buttercup list.
First, kindness was much higher among our shared priorities, right below initial attraction. Kindness was the key to trusting each other so quickly. She was reliable, thoughtful, and diplomatic. Her friends, who were also kind (which is always an underestimated sign of someone you want to be around), told me you could set your watch to her, and I found out this was true. She sent thank-you cards; she contacted my friends and family on their birthdays. She kept people in mind, and she always followed through. These are not just social graces; these are mindfulness practices in and of themselves.
Second on the list was a sense of humor. I realized that if I was going to pursue a down-to-earth, spiritual path in this world of extreme beliefs, I needed someone who could bring humor to the journey. We deconstructed the cosmic jokes of our culture together, we cooked together, made fun of movies together, poked at the quirky ticks and odd vocabulary used in modern Buddhist lectures, especially mine. (Always beware the Buddhist who takes himself too seriously. The Real Buttercup consistently helps me avoid falling into that trap.)
Third, and most important, how we communicated in difficult times was brand-new. In the early days of our relationship, we had several significant arguments. Misunderstandings came strongly to the surface. We had arguments that reminded me of the pain of previous Fire Swamps, even the fires of my parents’ relationship. We definitely didn’t have the same expectations about how to communicate. We spoke different languages. We both spoke English, yes, but our signals and gestures were not composed in the same idiom. I would love to say that there is some algebraic formula for loving communication. Indeed, there are many Buddhist tools for skillful listening and helpful speech in both peaceful and rough times.1 Yet the crucial element was our coming back after arguments, each with a desire to learn from the other. That willingness to return, the same return that mindfulness is based on, was the part that felt new. It doesn’t matter if you get off track, because you always will; coming back is the key to any successful practice.
After Marissa and I lived together for a year, before Christmas 2014, I composed and recited a mediocre poem for her on a public beach in Santa Monica, at sunset. Although many great poets have been meditators, sadly, mindfulness practice does nothing to increase the quality of your poetry. It only helps you stay present while you recite whatever poetry you happen to bring. Thankfully, the Real Buttercup was no tough crowd. I asked the question. She said yes.
The Power of a Vow
WE WERE MARRIED IN JUNE 2016. Our impressive clergywoman was Sharon Salzberg. She led us through an interactive ceremony in which we were invited to view ourselves as entering a commitment to practice together in relationship. Sharon kept mispronouncing “mawidge,” but I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
Are vows necessary? It’s interesting to consider the purpose of marriage vows in modern times, beyond the cynical view that it’s just about monetizing nostalgia. As a Buddhist teacher, I often get asked about the importance of taking vows. If the purpose of practice is to let go of story lines, then why would a Buddhist take a vow that leads to such a solid identification of husband and wife, or husband and husband, or wife and wife, or spouse and spouse? Why not just try to love each other the best you can without ruining the whole thing by proclaiming some bureaucratic identity? Why must the relationship be set in stone with ceremony and certificate? This is a similar question to one that I get asked regarding why we take a formal ceremonial vow to identify as Buddhist, or why we might eventually take a vow to follow a certain teacher, such as the vow I have taken with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. After all, you can live your life by whatever principles you choose, and you can commit to meditation without meeting some predetermined spiritual marker, a categorical signifier of membership to some club. In the same way, you could live with a partner for a long time, know you love each other, and never take any vow.
The ceremony of marriage, as best I can tell, continues to be such a cherished, and resented, aspect of our culture because it represents a witnessed celebration of two beings’ commitment to practicing together. This committed practice includes all the practices of friendship, but also involves something more intimate, something more vulnerable, something more collaborative. The ritual of taking any vow involves overcoming our early mammalian need to run when things get the least bit sticky or claustrophobic. A vow of marriage, just like a formal vow of commitment to a spiritual path, is a way to tell your sweet little amygdala, “I see you, old friend, you terrified baby salamander, you timid little squirrel. I know you want to run and hide sometimes, I know you often need to be reactive in order to feel safe, but you’ve taken this vow now, and this vow is a reminder to just come back. You are learning to stay or, more realistically, to come back whenever you begin to run. You vow to come back, to work with all the tenderness and discomfort and uncertainty. You got dressed up, even wore a pocket square and boutonniere, and all your friends cleaned up so nice for the occasion. Why not practice leaning in and staying when times are tough?” Leaning in is the only way awakening occurs.
Sharon spoke of the practice of kindness, and then our friends and family took turns with the practice of marriage based on a series of relational practices called the paramitas, or ways of transcending confusion when working with others. Like everything else, marriage is a practice. If you lose sight of seeing it as a practice, you will suffer. If you keep this view in sight, you will probably still suffer, but at least you will use the opportunity of your joint suffering to open up rather than shut down.
The Practice of Partnership
A COMMITTED PARTNERSHIP IS WHAT happens after the credits roll in The Princess Bride (and in most rom-coms in history). Day-by-day commitment is the hardest part of any story to convey, because most of what we live through in relationships is mundane, repetitive, and without climax.2 First, every practice that applies to friendship applies to marriage. If you don’t establish a basis of friendship first, you’re probably not going to last as a couple. Marriage is a constant practice of trust, inspiration, and letting go—and of conquering inner villains. But marriage is something more than friendship, because it is a practice that leads back to the very roots of working with the dance of desire, over a much longer arc of time than just a few dates or a casual relationship. To work with wisdom over a long period of time, you might make use of the following principles and practices.
Cool Boredom:
Realizing That Nothing Really Happens
ONE OF THE GREATEST BENEFITS of meditation is also one of its most unmarketable. In my tradition, this profound experience has an unprofound name: cool boredom. Your relationship with boredom, with the irritation you feel when not much new or noteworthy is happening, is one of the most important aspects of developing emotional maturity. Boredom is also one of the most important practices we can have if our planet is going to survive the consumerism that is currently decimating the environment. Life is full of many wonders, yet each moment of adult life is fairly familiar and routine. In a sense, meditation reveals to you a very discomforting truth: most of the time, nothing is happening, at least not anything newsworthy. If you want some wow factor, you usually have to construct a derivative “wow” out of the scraps of previous experiences. The taste of coffee is nothing new. The accelerating pace of each news cycle tends toward a recycling of previously reported dramas. The blockbuster movies you look forward to seeing you’ve already seen when they were called something else. The music we listen to samples or covers the hits of the past. The very book you are reading right now is just a new take on old material, which is itself a new take on old material. And in meditation, you realize that the thoughts you think seem to be pointing to the cyclical sameness of adult life, that redundancy, a boring recurrence called “me.”
Cool boredom is preceded by something more irritating, more destabilizing, more anxiety-producing—something called hot boredom. Our inability to rest our minds when not much is happening is one of our greatest weaknesses. Our whole world seems caught in FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” the pretense that something crucial might be happening someplace else and we just didn’t get the secret invite. We often get bored in meditation because we believe that the technique of mindfulness is not in itself profound enough. Maybe mindfulness is causing us to miss another “now” elsewhere, a now that is somehow more refined, riper, bursting with more flavor and profundity.
In meditation, discipline is about staying with the irritation of hot boredom. Eventually, when you trust the redundancy of the technique, your fight-or-flight response settles down. Subsequently, you become less reactive. In the space where reactions used to take charge, appreciation now grows. You start to consider what is already happening, like discovering a treasure hidden right under your nose. When you slow down, the exact same coffee tastes better, the brick and trees and grass and graffiti look more interesting. As your boredom cools off, there is even a tiny bit of space in between your thoughts. This is the space of mobility that allows creative insight to occur. And when you slow down further into cool boredom, you realize that you neither need to consume nor construct experiences in order to be happy. In the space of cool boredom, the ordinary becomes magical, the redundant becomes refreshed, and longevity becomes sustainable.
A committed relationship is a practice of boredom, mixed with the dance of desire. It includes tremendous familiarity and mundane repetition. It is a practice with the same person day in and day out. Cool boredom is a great phrase to describe how you have to practice after the curtain falls on your courtship, so to speak. Relationships can also be viewed as a shared meditation practice. If you don’t have the ability to appreciate each other when there isn’t a huge plot moment, you probably aren’t going to last long. In meditation, you get to practice cool boredom with yourself. In a relationship, you get to practice it even more powerfully with another person. The only way to discover cool boredom is to stay present, through the gauntlet of fight or flight, holding your mind through the irritation that always accompanies repetition, the simple rituals of relating. Finding freshness in the repetitive perceptions of daily life is the key to uncovering wisdom.
I admit, I really like getting bored with the Real Marissa.
Patience:
Fighting the Basically Good Fight
IT IS NEVER FUN TO argue. Some people claim that they like fighting, but I don’t believe them. I think some people like the possibility of “winning” an argument, but in a committed relationship, nobody wins. We could say that this is true in any human relationship, that every argument is fought without a victor, given that we are tasked with increasing our ability to care about the well-being of all beings. The truth that nobody wins an argument is especially obvious in a committed partnership, because if one person ends up miserable, feeling unheard and disrespected, you can bet that it will soon end up being the other person’s problem as well. A committed relationship tends to be as happy as its least satisfied member. On the other hand, whenever I hear a couple say they never argue, I get nervous. Like everything else, there is a middle path to arguing, and the argument itself is both a practice and a manifestation of basic goodness. To assume that there is the possibility of relationship without disagreement is, once again, to misunderstand the dance of desire.
Disagreement is embedded in the truth of attraction. Again, all romantic relationships arise because something called “me” longs to connect with something that is “other.” This sounds great, expansive, magnetic. But then you realize that what initially attracted you to the other, their unique perspective and all those qualities that you don’t possess, also means that, well, they have a different perspective on things.
“Other’s” mother didn’t raise her the way “my” mother raised me. “Other” has different aesthetic preferences, and a different hierarchy of needs determines her methodology for arranging both refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. “Other” plays loud workout music while “me” tries to meditate, then “other” tries to meditate while “me” practices yoga and listens to (objectively, obviously) cooler music. “Other” gets understandably restless after she’s heard all of “me’s” jokes a few times, which weren’t that great to begin with. “Me” and “other” are primed by the nature of subjectivity to occasionally disagree. Of course, every couple has to decide which large-scale disagreements signify incompatibility and which are workable. But even “workable” differences are guaranteed to be significant, because that is, quite literally, what it means to commit to an “other” person. That’s why you were attracted to them in the first place. The practice of patience is not about quelling disagreement, but about accommodating, leaving space for the inevitable divergences in a relationship. Patience is far easier to practice if you accept the truth that you are supposed to disagree sometimes. Such is the nature of subjectivity and attraction, self and other.
Traditionally, practicing patience, also translated as forbearance, is about skillfully navigating anger and aggression, both when we are feeling anger ourselves and when we are on the receiving end of someone else’s irritation. Patience views anger as a teachable moment, and realizes that at the root of the anger is always a being who is in pain. Patience transforms the energy of hatred into a harmonizing, or at least a comprehending, of different points of view.
Of course, even to attempt to understand another person’s perspective, you need to be able to trust that they have nonmanipulative intentions, that they are arguing in good faith, which is why the rules of friendship still apply in romantic partnership. Patience, as both inherent quality and a mental muscle that strengthens with practice, is the aspect of your mind that isn’t so surprised or insulted by the inevitability of disagreement. Patience looks forward to some level of disharmony as an opportunity to get to work, rather than viewing an argument as some failure of your equanimity.
This kind of accommodation and forbearance is hard enough to practice with a stranger or casual acquaintance, a situation where there isn’t much at stake (no, please, please, you go, you were here first) but with an intimate partner, the practice is more intense. When a partnership is involved, there is much more depth of identity, as well as threats to that identity. Luckily, the vow of patience in a committed relationship allows you to argue without needing to resolve each argument perfectly. If you are committed to another person and they are committed to you, you can learn that not every trigger needs to be acted upon immediately. When you don’t feel trusted or safe, you can lose sight of this and fall back into a need for instant expression and immediate resolution. There is no better practice than arguing with your partner to see that self and other both hold valid perspectives, and to see that most of the things that piss you off are momentary irritants that, when expressed and worked with over time, can often be healed fairly easily. The point of an argument is not to adopt another person’s point of view; it’s to accept its existence and move forward from there.
Westley comes back to life with the help of a truly exemplary, and truly strange, long-term couple. Max and Valerie have clearly mastered some of the practices related to durability in a relationship. In particular, they seem to have the practice of patience down. Applauding their relationship may seem a strange thing to do. They yell at each other: he calls her a witch, she calls him a liar. They could probably learn a thing or two about Buddhist teachings on mindful listening and kind speech, for sure.
But the real miracle of Max and Valerie is that they have made their way into old age together, and they can speak difficult truths to each other at the right moment. It must have something to do with knowing how to argue, how to be direct, when to point out the other’s insecurities and self-deceptions, and how not to view the other’s insights as a threat. “Have fun storming the castle,” they are finally able to say to the posse of young crusaders, full of sudden joy, because they have already found their place, and arguing is just a part of life for them. In classic Buddhism, appropriate listening and kind speech are traditional practices that carry guidelines for avoiding harshness, divisive gossip, and speaking mistruths. Still, right speech is a practice that comes to life when a relationship develops its own cadence and language. Every relationship has its own language. I don’t talk to my best friends the same way I talk to a meditation student. What might be a hilarious joke in one relationship is an insult in another, and a basically good argument utilizes the language that has been agreed upon by its participants, as long as they have indeed agreed. Who am I to judge Max and Valerie’s way of speaking to each other? They’ve been at it a lot longer than I have, and it works for them.
Joyous Effort
I IMAGINE THAT AFTER THE film ends, Max and Valerie go on a date together, trying to discover a great MLT restaurant they haven’t checked out yet. During our marriage ceremony, as family and friends offered their modern interpretations and symbolic gifts representing various Buddhist relationship practices, our friend Eleanor gave us a Rubik’s Cube to represent committing to the relational practice of joyous effort, also called exertion. The Rubik’s Cube is something youthful, playful, colorful, engaging, and very difficult to solve. In spiritual practice, joyous effort relates to recovering your inner energy and inspiration, but not necessarily to solve a puzzle. Instead, the effort is about regaining your interest in the game all over again. Joyous effort helps you recover your prana, regroup and refresh your intent, or discover new momentum whenever you feel depleted or overwhelmed.
The effort of rediscovery is the flip side of working with cool boredom. When you truly see that you can’t make anything “new” happen, you realize that you need some re-inspired effort to recover your relation to the events of the world, and your relationship to the person you’ve formerly known as an object of attraction.
At first it may seem that joyous effort in “Buddhist” relationships is about turning “me” and “other” into a singular entity called “we,” living safely within the peacefulness of that supposed unity. In many ways, there is a trustworthy melding that happens in a committed relationship. But while harmony and deep connection might be found, “oneness” is never achievable. Interestingly, there is no such thing as oneness in Buddhism. It’s not a Buddhist term, and not the same thing as interdependence. Sometimes the mysterious expression “not one, and not two” is employed within Middle Way philosophy to describe the nuances of interdependence between two beings. Two beings are not “one” because they each have distinct minds, perspectives, and longings. But they are also not separate from each other, because they affect each other constantly, so a couple is not quite “two,” in a sense of total separation. All beings are interconnected, but we remain distinct entities within the realm of the mind.
I am never going to completely know my wife, and part of her should remain a mystery. From the standpoint of certainty, this may seem terrifying, but from the standpoint of relationship longevity and awakening, a fresh mystery is always necessary, even if you know your partner well. Thankfully, the “other” never completely joins with “me,” so the perpetual dance of desire waits to be rediscovered and reinterpreted, just like inspiration for meditation practice needs to be occasionally refreshed, especially when the practice stagnates or grows distant from you.
Just because nothing profoundly new is happening, that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other experience life from a fresh perspective. There’s an obvious need to keep investing in new hobbies, new sexuality, new voyages. We do this not to solve a Rubik’s Cube or find permanent solutions, but to feel the rewards of effort itself, the reward of the “other’s” rediscovery. In Buddhist thought, if you find the right balance of effort, mixing a relaxed attitude with the work it takes to show up, effort actually increases your energy rather than depleting it. If your efforts increase your energy, you know you are working in the right direction. (That Rubik’s Cube sits in front of me as I write this.)
I know romantic partnership is not for every human. If my personal journey or my examples appear too male-oriented, too heteronormatively bourgeois, too partner-centric, too Buddhist or Buddh-ish, then please accept my apology. When it comes to romance and desire, to each their own. I do know that the dance of desire and deep connections to other beings are both part of the path of awakening. Desire and love are universal truths, inseparable from inhabiting a human body. If you learn how to appreciate the dance in intimate relationships, you might just be prepared for the deepest battleground of any human journey: the struggle with your own lineage, the dharma of family.