Pain is not Suffering

Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional. -Not2wo blog post "The Dharma of Rooster Sauce"

I posted the one of the recent best Modern Love columns on the Shut Up and Love Facebook Fan Page last week, but I didn't know what I could possibly add to it. The writer's husband tries to leave her, but she realizes that he's working through issues that have nothing to do with her and so gets out of the way until he could figure out what she'd already knew:

"When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within." -Laura A. Munson

In the end, the writer's enlightened handling of her husband's issues and understanding of the nature of peace kept her family together, but it would have served her well, too, even if they had decided to divorce. A friend once asked, "What are you supposed to do with emotions you want to express to an ex that you can't?" This sensation of suppressed emotions is a common post-break-up problem, and the answer is to do just what the wife in this article did:

"I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to 'The End of Suffering.' I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control."

This house smells of Ghosts by Chrissie White

Accept that your happiness has nothing to do with what your ex knows (i.e. your anger) or feels (i.e. remorse) or gets served (i.e. revenge, cold), because your ex is external from you. Then, you can work through the natural pain of mourning the end of a relationship even as you practice personal peace. Surely, the pain will hurt, some days worse than other, but not expecting things outside of your control (or waiting for something outside the realm of possibility) protects the heart from too much suffering.

Relationship News Roundup

Deadlines and Social Media Not Just for Work.
Neenah Pickett, 43, sets up a Web site for help in her 52-week search to find The One. She's on week 15. She only blogs about once a week (who am I to judge!), because, well, she's been busy going on dates. Featured today on CNN, the highlight of the story is a quote from Janet Page, a self-improvement professor at Emory: "Women who don't smile are perceived as hostile. Women perceive men who don't smile as being unsafe. But of course, your best smilers in the world are sociopaths."


Friendships help you live longer. Really.
The New York Times reported on several studies that correlated survival rates of older people with serious illnesses with the number of friendships the patients had. One study in particular stood out: a six-year study of 736 middle-age Swedish men found that attachment to a single person (read: spouse) didn’t appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, but having friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support. Does this mean I can keep smoking as long as my friendships are healthy?

The Craigslist Killer is Engaged!
The day after Phillip Markoff, the suspect in one robbery and one murder of victims found through Craigslist, was arrested, his fiance made the media rounds to defend him. "Philip is a beautiful person inside and out and could not hurt a fly!" she wrote in an email to ABC. If a court of law clears him, then great. I hope they get the real bad guy. But if he's really the killer, this fiance's either going to have a wedding behind bars and lose all her vendor deposits or be dealing with a broken engagement AND the fact that she was madly in love with a woman-hating, cold-hearted, two-faced killer. And we all thought our break-ups were brutal.

Teenage girls blame Rihanna
Rumor has it that RiRi is planning a North American "women empowerment" tour in the fall, this on the heels of a widely publicized domestic violence incident with Chris Brown. Guess she didn't get this memo. But you've got to give it to Rihanna, who is beautiful and a good sport, as seen in this video at 5:02:

Toughest, Most General Post Yet. Help?

"Women are ready to settle down when they meet the right guy; men meet the right girl when they're ready to settle down."

I want badly to blog about this adage, but who wants to ask a girlfriend heartbreaking or heartbroken from devotion unreciprocated to go on record about this?  Who wants to ask a guyfriend whether they mind a blog post about how he dumped a girl after several years and then got engaged to the next girlfriend in mere months (which might hurt both his ex and his beloved)?  NOT ME.  

The few times I've gathered the backbone to even utter this to a girlfriend were for the purpose of shortening already extreme and protracted suffering from a guy that would never commit, but would never have the balls to break up until he was ready to move on and find his wife.  It's agonizing to tell a teary friend that she's amazing, but that her awesomosity might not ever matter to her love.

Perhaps I am a beneficiary of this phenomenon.  I wrote in an older post that my Beloved and I "are different on all the little things, but agree on all the big things."  Would I need the diamond index in the sidebar, if we'd met before he was at a point in his life to consider the big things?  He called just now, and I asked him.  Of course, he says he doesn't know that he would have started thinking about the long term with a different person.  Basically, I couldn't even wretch a solid supporting/detracting anecdote from my own boyfriend. 

I need help writing this post!  Please comment about yours or "your friend's" experiences.  We need details (not the flat archetypes I've been citing) to explore whether this truism is actually true at all.  

How NOT to write a love letter

Speaking of love letters, I urge you to check out another blog Psychotic Letters from Men. The latest letter featured is so psychotic, it's hilarious, and I can barely even believe it's real. Thanks, Erica, for pointing this gem out to me!

Note: I'm not hatin' on men. If someone has a good blog about psychotic letters from women, holla back and I'll post that, too.

Update: Poll results: 4-3 in favor of Example 2.

Instead of Crying

Anyone who says you should just cheer up and get out there and get over it doesn’t know jack about breaking up (or any kind of mourning, for that matter). That said, I had to slap a friend over Yahoo Messenger yesterday after her ex’s Facebook flirting with someone new came up in the news feed. (She’s straight, but this totally applies to all romantic relationships.) Here’s the complete convo, abridged:

My Friend: it’s like it cheapens the entire relationship. it’s like it meant everything to me and barely anything to him
My Friend: i need someone to be a Charlotte for me and yell at him
Me: this city is your oyster but you'd rather think about what your ex doesn't know about life? really?
Me: [SLAP!] Snap out of it, woman! you're missing your whole life here and it's one a lot of girls would give a lot to have
My Friend: thanks for slapping me back out of insanity
Me: np i thought someone hacked your account! You were talking CRAZY.

There is no deadline for being “over it,” whatever the hell that means. (Don’t all our experiences become a part of us?) Still, know that time spent rehashing your ex’s past would be better spent planning your future. No one can stop you from dwelling on your ex’s faults and the things you feel you lost in the morass. Meanwhile, though, everything you do have will wither away, but then you can miss those things later, too...if you want to. (Just givin' y’all options.)

Your future and present are plenty to have on your mental plate. You've got your finances to think about, your new year's resolutions and goals, and your social life might have been a casualty of an unhealthy relationship. You’ll need time to work on that. Then, there’s your job, and learning stuff on your own time so you can school everybody that might try to compete with you for that promotion, and your health - to say nothing of laundry and trash and bills. Seriously, if you aren’t too busy to be hung up on an ex, you should be a time management counselor. Actually, you should be my time management counselor.

I’ll let Ne-Yo, the songwriter, sum it up in his lyrics to "So You Can Cry:"