Love Dharma. Geri Larkin
showing up with her favorite cup of coffee when you spontaneously stop by where she works. Maybe it’s running an errand for him because he doesn’t have time to get to the ATM machine, the accountant’s, and then home at a decent hour for dinner together. Feeding each other’s essence is as much about surprise acts of kindness as it is about abiding to the negotiated parameters of the relationship. It is your turn to make dinner and your partner just happens to show up with a ready-made meal of your favorite foods. It works, right?
The Buddha taught, over and over and over, that generosity is the first door we walk through if we are serious about our spiritual work. Without generosity enlightenment is flat-out impossible. We’re too self-centered. Unless our relationships are bathed in generosity they don’t have a chance. At the other extreme, generosity can buttress a faltering relationship, giving the other paramitas time to work their magic. It fuels the little extras, the surprise moments that keep us fresh and interesting. And it demonstrates our regard for each other, whatever we’re going through together.
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, one of the tasks I committed to doing was walking door-to-door in an inner-city neighborhood to do random interviews with the families that lived there. It was pretty scary to a twenty-six-year-old. I had spent many of my formative years in Australia, where strangers simply do not knock on your door—ever.
Here I was breaking my own rules of etiquette. Plus, I didn’t have any idea who lived behind the doors. Maybe Jack the Ripper was still alive. Who could say?
On the other hand, it was obvious that doing the interviews would provide the “primary data” (i.e., “from the horse’s mouth” information) I needed to make my point that a particular federal loan program was helping families to remain in a fast-gentrifying neighborhood. One of the most generous things anyone has ever done for me was my husband getting out of bed with me early each morning before I left. He’d give me the pep talk I needed. On some days, without saying anything, he’d get dressed and get in the car and drive me into the neighborhood, waiting outside through each interview even though he had his own full day of work ahead of him. While we never talked about it, his wide-open generosity told me more about how much he loved me than any bouquet of flowers ever did.
He was so generous and helpful, that man. It was magic for our marriage and got us through more relationship samsara than I care to remember.
May I Be Pure and Virtuous
Trust matters. In partnerships between independent people, trust matters because we are each living self-contained lives in the middle of a shared future. If I can’t trust you in an intimate relationship, particularly one that incorporates spirituality into its ether, then the relationship is doomed. Period. And until courtesans come back into vogue, monogamy matters.
I don’t care what anyone else says. In my experience, adultery or any other behavior that betrays the concepts of “pure and virtuous” destroys relationships, even those in which the partners agree that monogamy is unnecessary. Buddha was a broken record on this:
Indulging in transient pleasures
While failing to do the real work of our lives
leads us to envy the ones who have
spent time and energy on their spiritual work . . . 6
There is something about betrayal that destroys a relationship in its heart. I’ve seen, been with, and lived through forgiving people who’ve crossed that boundary. To this day I remain convinced that things are never quite the same afterward, even when the couple agrees to move through a healing process for the sake of the marriage or relationship. If I am in a relationship that is a partnership, my partner and I need to openly, publicly, and loudly commit to virtue and act accordingly. If we can’t, then we have to stop pretending we’re in a committed, intimate relationship, because we aren’t.
Virtue is tough. Loyalty can suck. Attractive people are everywhere. Sex and sensual pleasures are in the air. When we feel ourselves drawn away from our partner it is critical to ask ourselves, just as the ancient women did: What really matters? If we discover we can’t stay steady, then commit to getting out of the partnership or reframing it as friendship. At least stop pretending that we are being “pure and virtuous” when we aren’t. I hate to think of the karmic consequences of that particular dance.
May I Be Patient. May I Bear and Forbear the Wrongs of Others
One of the great surprises of partnerships like Ambapali’s is that we can be more patient with our partners. Back in the days when I only knew complete dependency as a marriage model, every wrong move on the part of my husband made me impatient. He wasn’t perfect. I was concerned. Concern morphed into irritation pretty quickly. On days when all I had to look forward to was watching the four toddlers I baby-sat, even small irritations grew into marriage-threatening themes. That’s what dependency does.
With independence we can shrug off irritations, because they are only one part of this parade we call life. We don’t have hours to dwell on nuances of meaning, because our days are filled with other people, places, and things. I watch my friend Deborah with her partner, Drew. They have been in love for about three years now. Their public displays of affection continue unabated. Deborah is, by nature, not a patient woman. She makes decisions quickly and doesn’t take any flak from the contractors who share her world. She isn’t a woman you would expect to be patient with a partner. And yet she is.
Dinners he’s late for, forgotten phone calls, miscues about rendezvous are shrugged off without much more than a grimace. She has plenty to keep her busy, and every surprise loss in their plans to be together becomes an opportunity for her to fill that time slot with a different activity she enjoys—reading, gardening, cooking.
For their first year together I wondered about her flexibility and willingness to keep pretty much all irritations on an “it’s no big deal” plane. Over time I’ve noticed that her patience and willingness to bear and forbear both of their mistakes has somehow transformed Drew’s behavior. He is late less often and calls when he says he will. Surprise bouquets of flowers and garden tools appear. After three years he remains head over heels in love with this independent woman, cowgirl boots, pickup, and all.
Patience. One of my best friends in the whole world, Alice, has been married to the same man for almost thirty years, I think. She had heard about him before they met—he was the wild man of their overlapping friendship circle. Finally, at a toga party, they were introduced. That he wasn’t wearing anything under the toga was an added bonus, she says. At the time, Alice was a Victorian beauty with porcelain skin, fathomless eyes, and waist-long hair. In the years they have been together they have been through just about everything two people can go through. What has struck me the entire time has been their patience with each other, and with the relationship. Even at her most frustrated, Alice only has kind things to say about her husband. To this day, he would lie down and die for her. I’m sure of it.
When I ask Alice how they’ve made it this far, her answer is always “patience,” even when she doesn’t actually say the word. She talks about waiting out the tough times because, in the end, they are both good people who love each other. Hearing her, I think of all the times I’ve shrugged off relationships because of impatience. Times got a little rough—or worse, boring. (This is all pre-Zen, of course!) Patience would have helped me through my Cinderella reactions to imperfect partners. It would have helped me to stay put long enough to see what someone was really like behind the crisis of the moment.
At the same time, patience protects us when we let go of relationships that just plain don’t work. When my Aussie husband made it clear that he couldn’t live in the United States—for valid reasons—and I had the courage to say I couldn’t immigrate with my then preteen daughter, we both knew our marriage wasn’t going to make it. Because he is patient and because I love him, we were able to unweave the marriage, annul it actually, in a way that protected our friendship. To this day, if I ever make it to Queensland, his is the phone number I’ll call for suggestions for places to stay, eat, and surf.
May I Be Energetic and Persevering
When I was at Deloitte