Why Love Gets Uncomfortable & How That’s Not a Failure | Susan Piver [Best Of]

0:00So, love has a way of humbling us, especially the longer we're in it. What once felt effortless, it can start to feel uncomfortable, confusing, even painful. And when that happens, a lot of us just assume that, you know, something's gone wrong. But what if that discomfort isn't love walking out the door or even failure in any way? What if it's actually pointing us towards deeper intimacy, deeper love? Today, I'm sharing a powerful conversation with Susan Piver. Susan is a longtime Buddhist practitioner, meditation teacher, and the author of The Four Noble Truths of Love. She's also a dear friend and someone I turn to for guidance, really about anything involving the heart.

0:38And what she offers here, it's both deeply wise and radically practical. We explore why relationships never really stabilize, even decades into them, and how that's actually okay. Why closeness can actually amplify irritation and what to do about it, and how the way we treat ourselves individually quietly shapes how we show up with the people that we love the most. And Susan also introduces a really refreshing alternative to blame and explains how meeting discomfort together can strengthen connection over time. This isn't about fixing your partner or yourself. It's about learning how to stay open and kind and present when love feels hardest.

1:18So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

1:28One of the things that I've always loved about our conversations and about the stuff that you create is you tow this really interesting line between deep wisdom, deep ancient traditional wisdom, and practical on the ground. Okay, so how does this work if you don't want to live in a monastery? And how is this going to actually help me? Is that intentional for you? Is that translation part of what you feel your work is? Well, I kind of want to say yes, because it would make me sound really smart. Well, yes, it is. Absolutely. It's been my plan all along. But no, it's, you know, I've been a Buddhist for a long time.

2:09And one of the things that I just love about being a Buddhist practitioner, not that anyone has to become a Buddhist. And the thing that surprised me is how practical it is. It's not just like, how do you transcend to another realm to become like a godlike human being, which obviously you don't need. It's how do you live your life on planet Earth as a human being with a completely open heart, a totally sharp mind, and a great and vast willingness to be of benefit to others. I mean, who doesn't want that? Yeah, I want that. Me too. So you've written, what book is this? Seven? It's like nine. Nine?

2:49Yeah, if you count the three, I edit it, but otherwise it's six. So you've written a lot of books and touched on a lot of different areas of life. And you have a book now which focuses on love. And you've spent years sort of thinking about this and deconstructing it. I know we've talked about like bits and pieces and snippets of this over the years. Why this conversation and why now? Yeah. Well, as a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a longtime wife, I will have been a Buddhist for like 22 years and a wife for like 20 years, basically, as of right now. But as a longtime Buddhist practitioner, where there are millions of teachings on wisdom and loving kindness and how to be a good person, I just noticed in many people, including myself, it all sort of falls apart when you go home and look into the eyes of the person you're in a relationship with.

3:40Like, we're Buddhists except for right now. Exactly. Exactly. Except for when you drop all your crap all over the floor, then I'm really, you know, it's weird how your big mind sort of devolves into little petty hissy fits. And, you know, why is that? Why is it actually the hardest to love the person that you love is a question that I've always been interested in. And also, I wanted to be happy in my own relationship. I want to be a good partner and I want to be happy in my own relationship. So, but, you know, we go through phases, you probably have no idea what this is like, where we just don't like each other.

4:19Where it's like, who are you again? And why am I sitting here talking to you? Because everything you do irritates me and nothing you say makes any sense. It's like suddenly you find yourself in this place where you're very distant from each other. And one time, Duncan, my husband and I were in one of those places for a long time. like, months. I mean, I think I wrote in the book, we fought about everything. And once we even fought about what time it was. Yeah, I remember reading that. I'm like, how do you do that? How low do you have to go to make that a point of contention? So I was really upset, and I didn't know what to do.

5:02Nothing that we tried worked. And one day I was literally sitting at my desk crying, thinking, I don't even know how to begin fixing this. And it sounded like also the way you describe sort of like that window, that it wasn't where you could point to something and say, oh, this is what it's about. This is what it's about. It's almost like it's this nonspecific, sustained thing. That is so right. That is so right. There's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. There's these little slights, little slights. You blow by that one. You put that one under the rug. You forget about this one.

5:39You explain that one away because they're explainable, awayable. They're small. You know, you didn't look at me or, you know, I asked you how you were, but you didn't ask me how I was. I mean, these teeny tiny things that don't mean anything accrue and then suddenly shit like breaks loose and it just blows up. And then because it's so weird, you just struggle to find some, well, it's because you did this or I did that. But at least for me, I don't think that there is such an explanation. There's more like the weird irritation of trying to be close to someone else every single day creates this weird tension.

6:25And then like this, I heard myself say, I hesitate to say I heard a voice because there was nobody there but me. But something inside me said, begin at the beginning. At the beginning are four noble truths. I kid you not. And to me, as a longtime practitioner, that meant something. Because the entire Buddhist path is built around something called the four noble truths, which I'm sure you know. And I'd never thought that they had anything to do with relationships. Life is suffering. grasping creates suffering it's possible to stop suffering there's an eightfold path for doing so right view right intention and so on didn't think anything could do with my love life but then in this moment it's like those teachings like kindly reformed themselves in my mind to apply to my relationship so i wrote them down it just never occurred to me i think probably because most of the teachings whether teachings teachers are modern or ancient are from monastics You know, people that did not live in apartments and have to take the subway and go to the grocery store.

7:31They had a different kind of life. So for whatever reason, I just thought, well, they don't know what I'm going through. But incorrect. They did know what I was going through. And the teachings are profoundly illuminating. And P.S., not just to me, but also to my partner, who is not a Buddhist, not a meditator, not into any of that. But it was useful for both of us. That's what really gave me a lot of heart. I love that. I know you kind of went through really quickly the Four Noble Truths. Talk to me about each one of them a little bit more just before, because I know those became the foundation for then what you then developed, sort of like the next iteration of that specifically as it applies to this domain of love.

8:13But tell me more about just the basics of these four noble truths. Sure. Happily. So when the Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2 ,500 years ago, and he went back to his, you know, practicing posse, not sure what they called themselves, and he was apparently enlightened, they could tell. They said, what did you learn? What did you see? He said, I saw four things. Number one, life is suffering, which is really easy to interpret as life sucks or life is awful. But upon great investigation, I conclude that that is not what he meant. He meant that everything changes. There's nothing to hold on to.

8:56And everything we do to create stability or ground with this relationship or that home or this degree or this amount of money, it's all going to dissolve, and it's very painful. So that's the first noble truth. Life is suffering, aka everything changes. The second noble truth is the cause of suffering, which is called grasping, which basically means not wanting the first noble truth to be true, or pretending that it isn't. Well, okay, maybe that's true for you, but I am going to construct this fortress for myself that is, you know, inviolate and so forth. So you hold on to what you think will make you happy and try to push away the things that you think won't.

9:40And that's called grasping. And that is actually the cause of suffering, not the suffering itself, not the loss, not the dissolution. Painful though it may be, the real cause is holding on. The third noble truth is called the cessation of suffering, which means, oh, you can stop. Now you know the cause, you also know the cure, stop grasping. Of course, much easier said than done, but you know, just mathematically, that's the answer to how you stop suffering. And then the fourth noble truth is called the eightfold path, which is how you actually do that. How do you stop grasping? And I don't know if I can say them all, but right intention, right view, right speech, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right mindfulness, right wisdom.

10:26All those rites have a vast canon of knowledge around them, and you could study one for your whole life. And if you do those eight things, just like the Buddha, you got the same trick bag, you too could attain liberation from suffering. So it's the whole path right there. It's a crazy ride in all cases, but it's a crazy ride with meaning and joy if you can let go to any degree of imagining that you are permanent. The other thing that I really struggled with, with these basic truths wrapped around the same concept, is the idea, the second truth, of the notion of grasping as essentially the cause of suffering.

11:13When I start to think about the people who are closest to me, my family, my sister, my parents, my wife, my daughter, the notion of not grasping onto those relationships is almost inconceivable to me. I know. I totally understand what you're saying. and people mistake, I believe, grasping for caring or loving. It means I shouldn't love you so much or it means I shouldn't need you. I shouldn't appreciate you. I shouldn't be so attached. That makes me really mad because often when people have said to me, you shouldn't be so attached, what they really mean is you shouldn't care about something I don't give a crap about.

12:06and I don't like that. So anyway, one of the things that helped me get my mind around grasping, because me too, I love so many things and people in my life and things I feel very attached to. What helped me is to recognize that non-attachment itself is an attachment. You can be attached to non-attachment. It may sound elliptical. Very meta. Exactly. But non-attachment doesn't mean holding back, and it doesn't mean converting all phenomena into an equal tone, where you have this very narrow range of where pain doesn't hurt you and pleasure doesn't make you too happy. It doesn't mean that at all.

12:55It means the opposite, actually. non-attachment means not attached to keeping things the way they were or preventing them from becoming what they will rather to dive into what you are experiencing fully without attachment to hope or fear which is a very powerful capacity should one ever be able to do that so when you feel joy you just completely feel it without being attached to what does it mean or where will it end And when you feel utter death-defying grief, you don't fault yourself for caring so much. You just feel it completely. And it itself begins to dissolve. And when it does, you don't try to stop it.

13:41So the non-attachment means just going on the ride completely as a total human being without holding back. It's the opposite of constantly chill. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So you go from saying, okay, so I don't know which way is up with my loving partner. Somebody give me an answer. You go back to the beginning. The four noble truths come to you. But you take that and then create this additional overlay so that they become, it feels like much more relevant to the context of relationships. Yeah, it really helped me to look at them this way. So Four Noble Truths have a kind of sequencing.

14:32There's a truth, the cause of the truth, the cessation of the suffering connected to the truth, and how to do it. The truth, the cause, the cure and how so when i took those into my marriage what they looked like was the truth relationships are uncomfortable period you know if you of course we were just talking about the ordinary irritation of just living with someone you've been in a relationship for 20 plus years you're like why are you doing that thing again that you said you would never do why are we having this argument again, there's just this discomfort, this everyday and beyond everyday discomfort.

15:15But if you haven't even ever met the person, like you're going on a blind date, there's already discomfort. What if they don't like me? What if they do like me? And so on and so forth. So in every phase of relationship, there's discomfort. That's the truth. That's the first truth. Relationships are uncomfortable. Really? Relationships are uncomfortable? Well. There is something that you wrote about this, about this phase, about this first noble truth, that when I read it, I was just like, oh, wow. With your permission, I'll read a couple of lines. Here's what I read. Very few individuals are naturally convinced of their inherent worthiness.

16:03In fact, in Buddhist thought, to possess such conviction is considered a corollary of full enlightenment. It's more likely that we are caught in cycles of self-denigration and self-aggrandizement, both of which are forms of aggression. We are so hard on ourselves, so unremittingly unkind in the way we consider ourselves. the opposite, insisting that we are in fact awesome, is simply the flip side of that thought pattern. I was like, huh. And what popped into my head when I read that is we bring so much to the way that we interact with other people. And it's that old saying, if we treated ourselves the way we treat some other people, or if we treat other people the way we treat ourselves, Sometimes you would have disastrous relationships just all the time, all day, every day.

16:59But then you add to this, and this is where I kind of really like my heart went, wow. Reading again from you. When it comes to love, this unkindness to self begins to mix with the relationship. As you become emotionally intertwined, the energetic space between you begins to close up. As it tightens, your ability to see your partner as separate from your own mind stream diminishes. The closer you get, the less able you are to actually see each other. What happens at this point is that because you cannot discern who is who, you begin to treat your beloved the way you treat your own mind. The kindness or unkindness you extend towards them is a reflection of the way you treat yourself.

17:45Generosity of spirit, so powerful in the early stages of a relationship, begins to contract. Tell me more about this, because I think so many people will sort of hear that and be like, oh. Well, thank you so much for reading it. It made me feel so happy to hear you read it. It gave me great delight. Thank you so much. so and i would love to hear what it evoked in you it's always been kind of curious why does it become harder to love this other person the longer we know each other and it's this is not my i did not make this up this is a teaching of the bodhisattva path the awakened being path the bodhisattva being one who is here to be a benefit to others.

18:40This is a classical Buddhist teaching. And it also gives dimension to the cliche, which also happens to be true, that in order to love someone else, you have to love yourself, which I always thought meant, oh, I have to like myself, or I have to think I'm awesome, and my self-esteem has to be perfect, and then I'll be able, but that's not what it means. It means that your self-talk and the way you actually think of yourself could be riddled with gentleness and acceptance and spaciousness as opposed to, I'm an awesome person, which is very constricting. I'm an awesome person sometimes, and I'm also a crazy person other times, and a cruel person, and a beautiful person, and silly.

19:30To make room for all of that, to hold that in a kind of gentle space with complete authenticity and accuracy is what is meant, I think, by self-love. And that when you can do that for yourself, bring this spaciousness and this courage and gentleness, then you can do it for someone else. But until then, you know, these weird neurotic, I guess you would say, mind streams just mix and wreak havoc. I think this landed so powerfully for me because the way you laid it out, it's like, okay, so you start as you and this other person. And in the beginning, you've got your own, you know, you're basically, you're diminishing and demeaning yourself.

20:18So many people have trouble with their own self-worth, as you say. So, and you think to yourself, it's okay for me to take myself down, but this other person I love and I'm going to hold them up and they're awesome and they're great and all of a sudden I'll be gentle with them. And the visual of, as you get deeper into the relationship, the space between the two of you closing and closing, closing, closing until essentially, you know, like there's no space anymore. and whatever feelings you held just and applied to you now without space between the two people becomes the feeling that you apply to the relationship and to that other person well if you're torturing yourself and demeaning diminishing yourself every day and now you've reached a depth of relationship a length of time where now you effectively there is no space between you and you start to feel that, that starts to translate into them, then how could that not be toxic?

21:18And that's where it landed for me. I was like, for the first time, I was like, okay, I get, with that description, I really better understood why doing that work yourself is so important to your ability to truly see the kindness and generosity and love in that other person. So I don't mean to be your fake therapist here, but let me ask you, how did that make you feel? How did it make you feel when you saw that? How did it make you feel towards yourself? How did it make you feel towards your wife? It made me feel good. I'm not somebody that tends to have a lot of negative self-talk for me. Maybe it's, you know, there have been times in my life where I have.

22:08I feel like I'm in a moment where I'm pretty okay with who I am and how I feel about myself. And so for me, it was a reason to continue to revisit the idea as my relationship evolves over time. You know, because 21 years in now, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, We are going to grow individually or the nature of our relationship is going to grow. The space will become lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser. So as that space continues to shrink over the next 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, God willing, you know, it gave me a reason to keep revisiting the idea of how am I speaking to and treating myself in the context of my ability to continue to cultivate a healthy, nourishing, loving relationship.

23:03That's awesome that the way you talk to yourself could actually comprise a loving gesture to her, which makes everything workable, useful, inspiring. Because when I think, well, I just have to work on myself, I just get kind of bored. You know, I find it claustrophobic and unpleasant. But when I think, oh, I'm doing this for us, for me, that creates more space. I feel more inspired to do the work. And P.S., as you were talking, I was thinking that one of the reasons this is so hard to do, I didn't write about this, but it's because the closer you get, and as you were talking, I was having the visual of just two people's lives mixing, their energy mixing, their whatever, their lives becoming one, as it were.

24:02That's terrifying. That's terrifying. For ordinary reasons like you don't want to be overwhelmed, you don't want to lose your independence and so on, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is because someday you're going to have to part. That is unthinkable. That is unthinkable. For some reason, all relationships will end. Sorry, first noble truth, we got to come back to you. but the more you love and the more you open, the more that truth becomes visceral, whether you think about it or not. And in my opinion, armchair analyst here, that's one of the reasons why many relationships don't cease to progress, is because it's easier to hold the arm's length, to think that, oh, you're not this enough or you're too that, as opposed to I'm going to love you so fully and give my heart so completely, knowing that I'm going to make myself cry, that someday this will end.

25:06That's untenable. So we throw all sorts of roadblocks in the way. That's my working theory. To avoid the deeper pain of it ending by experiencing some form of ending now, That's not quite as invested. Exactly. Okay. Second noble truth of love. Thinking that relationships should be comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable. So, of course, I hope everyone's relationship makes them happy and comfortable and so on, and I want to be comfortable and happy and all that. But I don't think that that's necessarily the job of deep, romantic, intimate love. however when most of us say we're looking for love we don't normally mean that according to my anecdotal observation we're looking for safety we're looking for someone to make us feel that everything's okay or someone with whom we can sort of turn our back on certain trials and tribulations and make a cocoon.

26:12And okay, those things are great. But if there's one thing I have learned about love and that I can say with great certainty about love is that it is not safe. There's no way to make it safe. And the minute you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love and starts to look more like some sort of a transaction. I will do this and you will do that and so forth and so on. And I don't know what that's called. I just don't think it's called love. So we think, well, if only it was comfortable, if only you didn't have this behavior, if only I could make that amount of money, or we lived in this house, or you stopped jiggling your foot every time you talked to me, or whatever crazy things, which you are not doing, by the way, whatever crazy things people do.

26:58I'm like looking down at my foot right now. I looked at it too. No jiggling here. Then we would be fine. Sure, okay, work on your problems, your foot jiggling and your money problems. Work on those things. I hope you solve them all. But thinking that when you do, everything will be cool, that's where the problem comes in. Because the weirdest thing that I ever learned about a relationship, and I'm fixing to tell you what it is right now, this drove me crazy. They never stabilize. They never stabilize. So I thought, well, we'll be in this relationship. We'll get to know each other. We'll have these kinks.

27:34We'll work them out, and then at some point it's going to be fine. And at some point it is fine until it is not. And I can't predict what weather fronts are going to blow through this now close to 25 year relationship with someone I know really well and who knows me really well. I still can't predict. I could be really nice and kind and sweet and sort of get a blank stare. I can be complete ass and just see him looking at me in the eyes with the eyes of love, there's no telling. It doesn't stabilize. It never does because it's alive. So trying to get it to stabilize, like let's make it perfect and then hold actually is what creates the discomfort.

28:20The discomfort's not the problem. Thinking it should be comfortable is. Does that make sense? Yeah. Are you buying? Are you picking up what I'm putting down? I'm picking up what you're putting down. And it makes sense also to me on a different level, which is that if you operate on the assumption that for a relationship to grow and remain healthy, the individuals in the relationship must also honor their own need to grow as individuals and remain healthy as individuals, then unless there's some freakish level of similarity in the timing and the nature of the way that each individual grows, where it is just for a really long time identical, which I don't think happens, it can't be always just, you know, lockdownable.

29:14So it makes sense to me. And yet that's what we want. And it's not, I think it's not just in, you know, like loving relationships, it's in everything in life. But this just happens to land in the context of, okay, so when will I just know that everything will be okay? You talk about something called romantic materialism. Tell me more about this concept. This is from what I recall, it's kind of under the window of the second noble truth. Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate you bringing it up. I made it up, so I'm happy to have a chance. I love made up terms. I do it all the time. The Buddha did not say this.

29:50But the great Tibetan meditation master, who you know I love, and I know that you also have great respect for, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, named something called the Three Lords of Materialism. And these are three lords, three things we try to put our attention into with the aim of being safe and steady and making the Four Noble Truths not be true, and they're tricks. The first Lord is called the Lord of form. And it's like, I'll be safe if I have this house and this amount of money and this degree and so on. Okay. The second Lord is the Lord of, I can't remember what it's called, but it's the emotional Lord.

30:34It's the Lord that says, if you can only figure out why you are the way you are and why I am the way I am, we can solve our problems and be happy. So the second Lord is saying, if you have the right theory, the right system, if you do the right studies, you can solve all these problems. And you can solve a lot of problems. There are certain problems, aka the problem of being a human being who lives and dies. You're not going to solve that one. The third Lord is called the Lord of Spiritual Materialism, which is a very, you know, insidious Lord. and that's the Lord that says, well, if you're a meditator, if you really perfect mindfulness, if you get your spiritual cred like way up there, you can be exempt from suffering and actually you'll be better than other people.

31:26That makes me want to vomit. I don't like that one. Probably because that's the one I'm most likely to fall victim to. But the Lord of spiritual materialism says, mindfulness will save you. I won't. I won't. It's an amazing tool. Powerful. The Lord of Romantic Materialism, that's the one I coined, says, if you can only find the one, in quotation marks, you will be liberated from suffering. If you can only find the person who's meant for you, maybe there's more than one, but just find one of them. If you can only make that relationship, if you can only solve all your childhood wounds so that you will attract, quote unquote, the right person into your life, your problems will be solved.

32:18That is materialistic view of relationships. I think it's, again, just using the word transactional. It's a transactional view. So, if you're sitting there making lists of the person you want to be in a relationship with, which, great, it's good to have something clear in your head. And if you're thinking, well, I attract, this makes me very mad, actually, I keep attracting the same thing into my life so that I can solve it. And until I do, I'll keep attracting bozos and losers. I really highly suggest ceasing to do that. It's useful to explore your problems and figure out who you are and why you are.

33:00Great. Super great. But to escape even the trials and tribulations of true love, which are vast and powerful and wonderful and crazy-making, it will not help you. So just love is real. Totally real. And you don't know when it's going to arise. And there's nothing you can do to make it be there. These are certain things in our world we can't game. Meaning we can't make them be there when they're not. We can't make them go away when they are. Love is one of them. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Nutrafol. So sometimes changes in our body don't arrive loudly.

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34:14And it's the number one hair growth supplement brand personally used by dermatologists with formulas designed for different life stages. So let your hair become one less thing taking up space in your head and see thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding in just three to six months with Nutrafol. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners$10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you visit Nutrafol.com and enter the promo code GOODLIFE. That's Nutrafol.com, spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com, promo code goodlife. The other thing that this sort of concept brought up for me is this kind of idea that in the beginning of a relationship, we want the fire.

34:56We want the instability. We call that passion. We call that romance. We call that, we want the breathlessness, the, oh my gosh, do they, don't they? And this is what gives it energy, what gives it fire, what gives it momentum. And then over time, we start to say, we want comfort, we want safety, we want stability. But then if we get it, there's a yearning for that breathlessness, for that edge, for that fire that we've lost. And so it's sort of like we keep telling ourselves that we want what we don't have and trying to make adjustments to get it rather than just saying, this thing is hard. It is ever-changing, and let me just be in it.

35:41Yeah. Well, that's a really good relationship strategy, by the way. This thing is really hard. It keeps changing, and let me just be in it. That's like the best relationship advice possible. Yeah, in our Western culture especially, maybe unless you're from France or something, there's this idea that I want a love affair, and then I want the love affair to be a relationship. and both of those are great things. I think that feeling of just falling madly in love and being everything heightened and just transported and I think that's totally real and I get upset when people say it's some weird illusion that you have to get past so you can get into the weird housekeeping weeds of a real relationship.

36:24BS, BS, BS. That is a real relationship too. It's great.

36:31it's a love affair love affairs yes but love affairs and relationships are two different things in our in our world for whatever reason we think that all our love affairs should somehow turn into relationships and all our relationships should remain love affairs and the truth is that's very rare. They're two different animals. And, you know, well, I won't get into too many details about my personal life, but, you know, I've had both. And I've also had like love affairs that have been super hot, super amazing. And then I'm like, but I don't really want to introduce you to my friends. Well, okay, that's a relationship part.

37:15It's really helpful, I think, to look at those two things is different. And maybe if you're really lucky, you'll find one that could be both. But in a long-term relationship, that falling in love only happens once. I mean, it keeps deepening in this funny way, and then it disappears, and then it deepens, and then you remember it. It's never with that intensity. So, you know, in my relationship, and I will not probe you to ask you. But I, yeah, that falling in love part was like, what planet is this? I'm very happy to be visiting here. It's amazing. I felt like I woke up in a different world. It was truly extraordinary experience.

38:01And now what I feel is that had sharp peaks, highs and lows that were very intense, and I happen to like that. Now what I feel is more like an ambient quality of love. It's this, I look at him and I'm like, I adore him and he drives me crazy and I find him amazing and completely strange. And somehow what I feel for him is not particularly the focal point of our relationship anymore. because our relationship has kind of become a container for love. And that's where we live. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it really doesn't. But every time we come back and sort of stretch to reconnect with each other, that container is reinforced.

38:59And so when I look around, I see, oh, love is everywhere. Sometimes it's in my heart, sometimes it's not. But it's a structure that we created. It does not arise in a love affair. It arises over time, if you're lucky. I don't know, does that sound resonant to you? Yeah, no, that totally resonates with me. Yeah, and I don't think there's a way to accelerate that either. Mm-mm. No, you're right. I think it's just, it is time invested, time in presence. Third noble truth of love. Third noble truth of love. Remember, in the Buddhist sense, it's the cure. Meeting the discomfort together is love. That's the third noble truth.

39:38So normally we look, so there's a problem. I look at you, I go, this is your fault. Or it's my fault. I'm really sorry. Let's dispel this discomfort by assigning blame. And once we assign the blame, we're like 90 % on the way to solving the problem. It's like, all right, now that we've cleared that up. Okay, problem solved. Let's have dinner. What do you want? Exactly. Next fight. Exactly. It's so hilarious. How could you possibly eat that? We have been there a billion. But if a great partner in my mind is not someone who will blame you or take blame, but one who will sort of stop looking at you and turn, my visual is you turn and you put shoulder to shoulder and you look at the problem and you meet it together.

40:27And you see, oh, now we really love each other. Or now I really love you, but you don't seem to be that interested in me. Now we don't like each other. Now we seem to be in love again. Now we just want to be apart. There's these incredible waves that roil and roll through the relationship on a daily basis, a minute-to-minute basis, certainly a yearly basis. And to ride that together, to me, that's the ultimate love. we're on this ride together and I'm feeling this way about it and you're feeling that way about it and now it's beautiful and now it's not that's to me that's that's an incredibly loving partner that's a beautiful thing to do that's a companion yeah can agree with you more and I think that's the place also where you know when you are in it long enough you will you'll go through all the the day-to-day things that we're talking about, but you will also go through major things that happen from the outside in that you have no control over, major loss to health, to people that you love, to family and stuff like this.

41:35And it's been my sense that your willingness to sort of like be in this thing together and respect and open. And when those things happen from the outside and the really big things that have the ability to either really tear apart or deepen, you know, like get you on the ride even more together. That's when I think this commitment sort of like really shows its face. At least that's been my experience. I dig your voodoo right now. And how lucky is a person to sort of stumble into such a situation where there's someone who's with you and who will continually deepen with you. It's very, very fortunate and wonderful.

42:21And I would like to throw down a caveat here, that the kinds of things we're talking about, tolerating discomfort and meeting discomfort together, does not include things like, oh, one of us is addicted to something, one of us is abusive, one of us emotionally abusive. No, those things are not included. beyond the pale. Those don't come under the, oh, tolerate it. Exactly. Yeah. Take us to the fourth. Fourth noble truth is the path. There's a way to work with it. And it's not an eightfold path, although I do apply the eightfold path stages to relationships, like what is right view and relationship and so on.

43:02But the three, there's a threefold path that to me as a meditation teacher,

43:13mirrors actually the practice of meditation, which has three particular qualities, which I will just mention briefly. The first is meditation is precise. You're a meditator. I know you know this. You place attention on the object of your meditation, which in most cases is the breath. It could be a mantra or an image. Sound of a car horn in the background. Or sound of a car horn in the background, exactly. That's my New York City mantra. Which is a beautiful thing. I'm amazed it's the first time we've ever heard one. So it's very one-pointed. You place your attention on the breath or the mantra, whatever it is, and if you stray into anything, it's considered thinking.

43:54So you come back. Foom. Super precise. One-pointed. From that, oddly, something interesting happens. you sit there being one-pointed allowing yourself to be exactly as you are you like yourself you don't like yourself you're distracted you're not distracted doesn't matter it doesn't matter because to meditate you don't have to stop thinking please if you think that stop thinking that you just sit there with yourself as you are you open and from this precision the ability to open arises magically. Meditation is famously associated with insight, sometimes called the practice of insight. So from this one-pointedness, this openness of mind happens.

44:42Insight arises. It's quite expensive. The third quality is called letting go. Because you put your attention on the breath, you let yourself be as you are, then you notice you're distracted. That's awesome. You just woke up. The instruction is let go. Letting go is very profound because then you let go and you're in space for a moment till you come back to your object breath or mantra. Letting go is the lesson of being human. Letting go, letting go, letting go. So precise, open, letting go. In a relationship, what do these things mean? so the precision is the foundation of meditation the foundation of a relationship in my mind is very simple it starts with good manners that may sound really cheesy yeah because good manners are profound it's not just do i use this fork or not it's am i actually thinking of you and what you are experiencing and how i might be kind to you am i noticing you good manners are a profound form of thoughtfulness.

45:53And you actually think about the person. It's radical. If you don't have that, it's very hard to establish the foundation of a relationship. So it's like the focused awareness in a very directed way. Exactly. Without an agenda. And also to be honest, like to say the truth when you know it, and to say it skillfully, not blurtingly. Those are the precise, that's the precise piece of this pack. Good manners, truth-telling. The second quality, openness. I'm laughing because I was quite taken aback when I realized how this came into play, which was to imagine that the person you're in a relationship with is of at least equal importance to yourself.

46:41Shocking. Oh, Oh, you're there. Yeah. I'm going to be open to you. I'm going to be open to you. And the third step, and the book has more suggestions than this, is letting go. I find this very interesting, personally, that as we were talking about, romance ends. Just us, sorry. but intimacy has no end. The letting go piece in a relationship is letting go constantly of how you think it ought to have gone to be with what is in such a way that everything you encounter, wonderful experiences, detrimental experiences, loss, boredom, confusion, everything that you encounter together can actually be used to deepen intimacy, which has no end, and that you can commit to for a lifetime.

47:40You can't commit to romance. You can't commit to any feeling, but you can commit to deepening intimacy. That made me very happy when I realized that. I could do that, honestly. I can't honestly say, yeah, I'll always love you, but I will always try to act lovingly towards you or see you or be with you or stay near you as you go through what you go through and we and I go through things that I can commit to. So that to me was very hopeful. So precise, open, let go. This all emerged out of your own seeking to try and understand which way was up in your own relationship and trying to figure out how do I understand this?

48:21How do I navigate it? How do I be in it or not be in it, but how do I at least figure out how to be okay with this person in this moment and maybe in another, another, another, another. And wow, when I go back to the beginning, this whole idea kind of jumps out at you. You start to apply it in the context of your own relationship. And like you said also, Duncan is not a Buddhist. Were you actively and openly saying, okay, I am now sort of engaging in the Four Noble Truths of Love in the relationship and sharing with him what you were doing and how you were doing it and say, come do this with me.

49:00Or was this just, huh, here's a bit of wisdom. Let me try it on for size in the relationship. And maybe he'll pick up on what's happening and not. And if he wants to engage in any of these reciprocally, awesome. And if not, that's fine too. How did this then turn around and unfold in the context of your relationship? Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. But there's actually a great benefit to being married to a non-practitioner, quote-unquote, when you are a practitioner of something, in my case, Buddhism. And the great value is that you cannot bullshit them with Dharma notions. You cannot unload some Dharma stuff on them and think that it will mean anything.

49:42You have to be those things. So I didn't say, hey, baby, I've discovered the Four Noble Truths of Love. Let me tell you what they are. Instead, I started acting like discomfort was part of the deal, and looking at it together was loving, and meeting it together could deepen our intimacy, started sort of doing those things. Luckily, he is, I'm not saying this to be humble, he is a much more loving naturally than I am. He's more relational. He's more naturally attuned to the dynamics of a relationship than I am. So I didn't have to like convince him of anything, but it was more the way I showed up.

50:32And of course, the way you show up has much more impact on the way someone else shows up than any charts and graphs that you can unroll about this is my theory of relationships, which is basically useless. It's useless, the theory. The practice is the only thing that matters. So all I had to do, which is not a small thing, I'm not trying to minimize it. All I had to do was just try to do these things. And it changed things for us. Yeah. And there's another lesson in there, which is that I know you're asked this very often, I've been asked it very often too, which is I've discovered this amazing body of knowledge or idea or practice, how do I, quote, get my significant other to do it too and to see how important and transformational it is?

51:19And the answer is what you were just saying, which is you don't. You just live it. You just be it. And the quality of you living and being in it in the context of a relationship will or will not affect that other person in a way where they want to in some ways stand in a similar energy or not. And that is all you can do. And it is the best thing you can do. But I agree. I hear that too. I want to be loving in this way. I want to think relationships shouldn't be comfortable and so on. How do I get this other person to do that? Well, just as you're saying, just show up and be that way. Yeah. I love the idea of the Four Noble Truths applied to the context of love.

51:59And I'm actually really excited to start kind of dancing with them, exploring them, sharing them. So as we kind of come full circle together, if I offer the phrase to you, to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to be unafraid to be as brilliant and luminous and ridiculous and loving as you actually really are. No shame. Thank you. Thank you. I love talking to you. Hey, before you leave, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with Lisa Moscone about women's brain health, menopause, and what it means for long-term cognitive well-being. Be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you don't miss it.

52:53This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together.

53:38Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

53:54Do that.