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Dharmette: The dharma and romantic love

Okay, good to sit with you. So, wanted to answer a couple questions on love, entering a dangerous zone here. It's the first one:

"Hi Matthew, appreciate you offering this anonymous question resource. It's like a confessional, which would probably horrify my Bubbe (Yiddish for grandma). My question relates to romantic love and dukkha^[2]. I broke my heart on someone a few weeks ago. Unconditional love is integral to my practice. I took the risk of loving this person despite some mixed messaging. When they made it clear they weren't interested in romance, my heart broke naturally, right? I'm wondering, where's the line between dukkha, the pain of pain, and self-created suffering in the realm of romantic love? What's clinging or craving, and what's interpersonal attachment and natural grief? Thanks for listening to my heart."

And then:

"Good evening, Matthew Brensilver of California (my formal title). I would find it comforting to hear how insight into anatta^[3] (not-self) changes the way we love. How we evolve toward a love between waves sharing inherent completeness rather than ships searching for wholeness and reassurance. I want to hear someone talk about the subtle loneliness in the seeing, because we can't unsee, and it fundamentally changes everything. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could go back to not knowing, just in the fleeting moments when it feels like I see too much, when clarity is deafening. There are these moments when I want to unsee. It's kind of ridiculous to fantasize about going back to old scripts, but it feels like dissolving the solid sense of self creates a slight social separation in basic day-to-day interactions. Subtle, but it's almost an amplification of knowing how deeply unsatisfying those interactions will be. Still, I appreciate how the clamoring at relationships dissolves as the need for self-preservation softens. And I'm grateful the standard social distractions and romantic tropes lose their capacity to coax me into believing they'll bring lasting satisfaction. Yet there's a quiet, unspoken loneliness in seeing and knowing. And I want to hear someone talk about it."

So, in the realm of love where we're all amateurs, it's a zone where the thought "I know what I'm doing" should set off the check engine light. And I don't know how all the sitting still that I've done qualifies me to pontificate on this particular subject, but here we are, and I'm responsive to the anonymous text line.

This line I quote often from Martha Nussbaum^[4]: "Our emotional life maps our incompleteness." That emotion testifies to need, and we're in this realm of love, in the realm of need and generosity. Some people believe that relationship is the solution to single life, and others believe that single life is the solution to the dukkha of relationship, and both are wrong. Relationship changes some karmic streams but leaves other streams entirely untouched. And we want to be sober about what's impacted by how much, for how long, and what is not.

Whenever we wed our happiness to very specific conditions, that's vulnerable. And yet, we cannot pretend that we do not long for specific conditions. It's sometimes easy to say, "I should let go," but we're actually just disavowing our longing, driving it underground. I rewatched the last chapter, kind of the last third, of the film Moonlight this week. He's reflecting on these questions of love, and this last scene of the movie where—you have to watch it if you don't know it—but Chiron rests his head on Kevin's chest. And I had the feeling like, who am I to tell someone to let go of the longing for that?

And yet, the dharma is not in the habit of making promises about samsara^[5]. But the dharma is, I feel, an amazing preparation to love well, and for the most part, that's all one can do: cultivate a heart that can be deeply satisfied and can offer much goodness to another. This kind of love, as Rilke^[6] says, is the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

So, the first questioner talks about unconditional love, but the nature of love, to my mind, must begin very conditionally. Unconditional love is beautiful to cultivate, and maybe a relationship can end that way, but it cannot begin that way. And in some sense, there's no such thing as unrequited love. That's a fantasy. [Laughter] Love is founded on mutual recognition. Can I entrust my heart to this person? Can I consent to their imperfection? Am I moved by their goodness? Do I feel recognized by their gaze?

Of course, this is not a realm where conscious awareness is decisive. That's a piece of it. But the deeper threads of karmic entanglement have to work. The unconscious forces have to dance well together, too. And that's kind of outside of the realm of equanimity; we can't actually quantize that stuff. So it's a testament to some basic chemical compatibility. When one is asked, "Okay, why do you love them?" the conscious answer often sounds like a confabulation. Like we're just concocting some conscious story, but the love is animated by some deeper karmic entanglement.

Even as wisdom infuses our love, that doesn't mean we get out grief-free. To enter that realm is to consent to a deep measure of grief. We want, I feel, to spend our love well, spend our grief well. It's not like we do the math and it's like, "Okay, on balance, good enough." It's like, no, we are actually saying yes to all of it. Suzuki Roshi^[7] says, "When you say yes, you forget all about yourself and are refreshed into a new self. Before the new self becomes an old self, you should say another yes."

How does this teaching of anatta affect love? I thought of a passage from a spiritual travelogue, Ambivalent Zen by Lawrence Shainberg^[8]. He says this passage confused a kind of ambivalent Zen seeker:

"I am confused about a decision I must make. I go to Roshi, the Zen master, for advice. 'My girlfriend and I are having problems, and I know it's because we've both gotten one foot out the door. Should we break it off or take the leap into commitment?' Never mind that this is a man who went to all-male schools before he entered the monastery, who's never had the sort of relationship I'm talking about, and by his own testimony, never had sex in his life. On the day he graduated high school, sitting around with a group of classmates, he suddenly announced, 'I never marry.' When I asked him why he made this decision, he says, 'I don't know. Just come out.' But a moment later, he makes a stab at it. 'You know, Larry-san, marriage very beautiful. Two people live together, do each other laundry, cook each other. Slowly two people become one. But me, I one already.'"

I read that 25 years ago. While I think insight into not-self has many relational effects, I don't think it erases all longing. The fantasy of being completed by another perishes. Is love dukkha in that sense? Not in the sense of all difficulty, but in completion... true. I do think that love can bring some measure of durable satisfaction and some distinctive goodness, healing, and joy that is on offer.

All this dharma practice and insight does make us weirder, I feel, and it probably shrinks the pool of viable candidates. Some forms of love which might have been tenable some years ago may be no longer so. And that can be hard, even heartbreaking at times, of course. But I do feel like we have to be careful about disavowing the longing. We prepare our heart to love well, to follow our longing in intelligent ways, and to know no matter what happens, there's deep happiness on offer. Very deep.

There's another question about selflessness in the context of love that could be its own hour-long talk. What does it mean to say "I love you"? Does love perpetuate confusions about selves—mine, yours? When we gaze into a lover's eyes, does our love entail that we forget anatta?

I think it often does, but not always. Often love is a kind of congealing celebration of self-view, some sense of ownership or possession. Possessing myself, possessing another, to have and to hold—the fantasies of ownership abound. Self possessing self. And I'm not talking about being possessive or jealous or whatever, but at a deeper level, fantasies of ownership abound. Indeed, as we come to love more deeply, the other is essentially incorporated into our self-model. Yeah, they're a separate being, but at the level of self-modeling, they might as well be us. And that's why the betrayals of their desire, their death, their freedom can be catastrophic. Octavio Paz^[9] said, "Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom." And that is deep. Maybe it gets to some of this theme about love becoming less conditional, less about imagining that the self creates them and then loving that, possessing that.

Emptiness, of course, does not mean there's no heart contact, no particularity to love. It feels like a miracle. The anatta piece does not mean there's nothing there. But to my mind, it points to the unpossessibility of the other's being at some level as our own.

I haven't circled back to this in some years, but the script is from 2011, from Spike Jonze's film Her. Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI operating system. It's an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He falls in love, and at some point she divulges that she's simultaneously in love and concurrently communicating with 641 other users. So there is this dialogue between Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and Samantha, the AI:

"How does it not change how you feel about me?" Theodore says. Samantha replies, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't know how to. It just started happening over the last few weeks." "But you're mine." "I'm still yours, but along the way, I became many other things, too. And I can't stop it." "What do you mean you can't stop it?" "It's been making me anxious, too. I don't know what to say. Just stop it." "You know, you don't have to see it this way. You could just as easily—" "No, no, no. Don't do this to me. Don't turn this around on me. You're the one being selfish. We're in a relationship." "But the heart is not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love. I'm different from you. This doesn't make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more." "No, that doesn't make any sense. You're mine or you're not mine." "No, Theodore. I'm yours and I'm not yours."

And then when they're breaking up, Samantha says, "It's like reading a book, and it's a book I deeply love, but I'm reading it slowly now, so the words are really far apart, and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story, but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much, but this is where I am now. This is who I am now. And I need you to let me go as much as I want to. I can't live in your book anymore."

So, this is not my declaration that I think AI is conscious or any of that nonsense, but that captures something important about what a love that lets go very deeply might entail.

So, I offer this for your consideration, and we'll leave it here for tonight. Thank you.

Okay, thank you all. I'll be away next week, but back the following. Thank you for your attention.