If I have learned anything in my years on this planet, it is that you never know what is going on behind closed doors. Nowadays, it’s easy to hide behind social media filters, and not just the ones that remove blemishes. We filter out what messages, photos, and content to put out into the world. We highly curate the image of our lives we want others to see, putting pictures up of smiling faces, beautiful landscapes, and delicious meals from fancy restaurants.
But not only is life never perfect, neither are our relationships.
The truth is, even the most loving relationships on the planet still have conflict. Even the richest person on the planet can have trouble finding and keeping love. If you think your dating life is bad, I had a client who had gone on 70 first dates over the course of 2 years (and kept a record of it all). That’s a lot of false starts. Whether you are trying to find love, barely holding onto the love you have, or looking at your partner of 20 years and failing to muster up any feelings of love for them at all, you are not alone.
Love is hard. But why is that? If human beings are born for love and wired for love, why does it have to be so hard?
Life is hard
In short, love is hard because life is hard. Life is a struggle. Not just the big struggles like stressful jobs or dealing with health problems. Sometimes getting out of bed is a struggle. Sometimes loving our children is a struggle. Just as that happy Instagram couple doesn’t post their fights, everyone is fighting their own battles. From mental health issues to career failures to spiritual crises, if you were to ask someone how they are doing, how they are really really doing deep down, you will find the same fears and insecurities that plague us all. As Glennon Doyle put it,
“If you are uncomfortable—in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused—you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”
The idea that life is hard is actually the first noble truth of Buddhism, known as dukkha. Although commonly translated to mean “life is suffering,” the word dukkha can be translated to mean stress or chronic dissatisfaction. The Buddha simply pointed out that life can sometimes be a drag, and no matter how rich or well-off one might be, nothing will prevent a chronic, pervasive unsatisfactoriness to the human condition.
One of the biggest reasons life is hard is that nothing lasts. Not your own life, not the life of your car nor your cat. Love is hard to hold onto because life is hard to hold into. It’s always changing. The love between two people changes, just as both people in that relationship are constantly changing too. Life is like a flowing river that is difficult to navigate. As soon as you think you mastered one area of the rapids, around the corner there is even more to come.
But here’s the rub. Life is supposed to be hard. Whoever told you it was supposed to be easy, that life is supposed to go your way, was sorely mistaken. If you misunderstand the suffering of life then you will certainly misunderstand the suffering in love.
It’s supposed to be hard
If you are reading this, I’m assuming you are a human being. And if you are a human being, you have probably already experienced a particular quirk of the human existence. And that is we grow through stress. Not through ease, but through meeting challenges and conquering them.
The daily pressures of life are constantly forming and shaping us. If you want to grow muscles, you have to work them. You have to lift heavy things. If you want to become more flexible, you have to stretch. You have to contort your body into stressful, sometimes painful positions. Astronauts who spend any significant portion of time in space will come back with dramatically lower bone density and muscle mass. Even the daily stress of gravity keeps our body strong.
The same goes for all of life. The Buddha did say that life is suffering, but he also said there is an end to suffering and there is a way out. We must be able to face the suffering and learn from it. Just as life is a flowing river, there is constant calibration to be made. We are constantly getting feedback about where our life is going and only if we respond to that feedback will we be able to keep it on the right course.
In a purely psychological sense, the conflict that comes up in relationships are there for a reason. It’s a signpost for exactly what you need to work. Relationships are mirrors for our own stuff. Conflict is a knock at the door that tells us to wake up and look at our own triggers and reactions to things.
Conflict asks us to look deeply at our own emotional patterning and conditioning. Why in the world are we so caught up about which color of couch to buy? Why can’t I let go of my desire to see this movie? Why am I so worried my partner is cheating on me, despite so much evidence to the contrary?
This isn’t to say that someone struggling in the dating scene needs to wallow in the shame and guilt of thinking something is wrong with them. But it would be a good idea to see if you are actually ready for partnership as much as you want partnership. We think our task is to find the right person, instead of being the right person. We think we want closeness with another person, while being completely disconnected from our own bodies. Just as someone in partnership needs to look at why they are so triggered by the dishes left in the sink, someone in the dating world needs to look at why they want a partner so bad. Is it because they are afraid of being alone? Is it because they feel incomplete and expect someone else to complete them?
This is all just to say that the struggles we experience in love are there for a reason. We can learn the reason and move beyond it, or refuse to learn, refuse to change, and have that conflict follow us around for the rest of our lives.
In a more spiritual sense, life is a series of exercises of awakening into the limitless bliss of our loving nature. Everything we meet on the path is part of our path in meeting this moment with a wide open heart. Life will be hard and love will be hard, just as hiking to the top of a mountain will be hard, until we finally do get to the top and can finally coast down the other side.
Love is hard, until it’s not
That’s right, love will be hard, until it’s not. Once you have moved onto a 100 pound weight, lifting that 50 pound weight is a piece of cake. Once you learn the lessons love has to offer, you won’t forget them. Once you have integrated your own unconscious patterning, cultivated a heart of generosity and kindness, and learned to attune to your partner without getting reactive, love will be like putting up a sail to glide along a calm lake.
As Pema Chodron put it, “nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” Fortunately, once we learn what we need to know, it goes away.
