Where do we get our ideas about relationships? Children model behavior. We learn from watching. We learned from watching what our parents did, whether or not they were together. How did they try to find happiness? Were they successful or not? What were their concerns, their beliefs? Did they fight? Were they mean? When/if it went wrong, did they blame each other or did they blame themselves?

There are as many ways into and through relationships as there are people having them, so there is no one way to discuss the topic that will fit all people. Of course there are people who have good, loving, successful relationships, and a lot of what we discuss here will not fit their cases. But for simplicity's sake, let's look from one point of view at one generation. Baby boomers. From the point of view of some of us still don't have the faintest clue.

Many of the people from my generation came from homes that were somewhat less than happy. Couples who stayed together 'for the children' or because it wasn't right to divorce or the church didn't support divorce or the women had been housewives and mothers and didn't know anything else. Then the there were the men and women who stayed in their marriages by having affairs, or drinking too much, or taking prescription drugs on a daily basis, and then the women and men who stayed in marriages by ignoring their partner's affairs, or drinking, or drug use. People who didn't think they deserved happiness, so let themselves be abused--physically, sexually, emotionally. People who blamed each other for the shortcomings and unhappiness in their own lives, and then committed themselves to making their partner's life a living hell. Martyrs, victims, all the many, many ways we learn to be unhappy.

In the end what we had were examples of what not to do, that the main thing was not to do it the way they did it so show me something, anything, else, and so we turned to the experts: the makers of popular culture. Music and film and TV. And what did we learn there?

We could talk about Ozzie and Harriet, but that was just an idealized version of our parents and had no bearing on our lives. Reality, in the 50's and 60's and 70's, was not television's strong suit. So...

From pop songs we learned: that there is only one Mr. Right/Ms. Right. We have one chance for happiness with one person, so don't screw it up. You'll probably lose him/her anyway to a motorcycle accident, Dead Man's Curve, another woman, another man, a war, the sheriff, so you'll end up with only the memory of happiness, rather than the thing itself. And I'll have to cry me a river, and fall to pieces, out walking after midnight, and Father McKenzie will wipe the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave, I can't stop loving you. It's almost as if the perfect love in the American psyche is the one that gets away. I had it, but I lost it. Ah, me. It's almost like another version of, 'And they lived happily ever after.' Both of them take a moment in time--the breaking of a heart, for the cynics among us, or the culmination of a courtship, for the innocent--and hold onto it as if it now is to define the rest of life. Of course if evolution is all that is going on, the rest of life cannot possibly be defined by a moment, so they both are equally doomed as workable world views.

Again, to narrow the scope of investigation, let's look at one song. This one about falling in love with someone who will not fall in love with us, dooming us to a lifetime of pining for the one that got away or the one who would have worked out 'if only, or...'

The song, To Love Somebody, has been recorded by 38 different acts since the Bee Gees released it in 1967, including Lulu, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Janis Joplin, Tom Jones, Nina Simone, and more recently, Dusty Springfield, Michael Bolton and Billy Corgan. This song perfectly expresses the feelings of sorrow, loss and lost possibilities so many in our culture carry. Whether or not we've had the experience of the Brothers Gibb, we identify with the feeling that we're missing something that others get to have, and try as we might, we can't figure out why. Where is it? Where's mine? What did I do wrong?

There's a light

A certain kind of light

That never shone on me...

...I live and breathe for you

But what good does it do

If I ain't got you, ain't got?

And the chorus, separating ourselves further away from life and into the category of 'have not':

You don't know what it's like,

Baby you don't know what it's like,

To love somebody,

To love somebody,

The way I love you.

I'm different. There's something wrong with me. Or perhaps, if I can't be happy, then I'll be the most heartbroken person you've ever seen. I'll get your pity, if not your love. I'll get some attention. 

But really, the point is that to hear someone sing this brokenheartedly is to have someone who just might understand the pain I have. When we hear Barry Gibb wailing his pain, we know he knows, and we're a little less lonely in our own suffering.

This of course is just one example of the gazillions that are available to us (and came up for me simply because I happened to see a video of Janis Joplin singing it on the Dick Cavett Show and said, wait... what?). 

Let's look at one more song, skip to the top of the charts to see what is 'the most recorded song of all time.' 

Coming in at Number 1 in The Guinness Book of World Records with over 1600 cover versions is Yesterday. Lennon/McCartney. Is it #1 because it's light and uplifting? Because it speaks of the possibilities of the future? Not really.

The lyrics tell us that yesterday is when troubles were somewhere else. Now they're here to stay. They say I'm only half the man I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me.

Why did all this happen? I don't really know. She wouldn't say. But I said something wrong, and now I live in a state of longing for something that is absolutely unavailable to me. Yesterday. For there is no power on God's earth that will bring yesterday to me again.

What we have here is the worship of longing. Turning loss and despair into a holy shrine. Making suffering a virtue because as a culture we have no idea what to do with it. And further, our mind, which has the job of explaining to us why we're feeling the way we're feeling, tells us that what we are longing for, what we need, what would take away this horrible weight of pain we carry, is a loving relationship. Then our mind proceeds to tell us why we don't get to have that loving relationship, hence why we are doomed to suffer. And pop culture is born.

So as meditators, what do we do with this knowledge? 

First we have to know that there is no love that is going to save us. There is no one who is going to complete us. Only in a movie. Only for a moment. What we long for in love, in relationship, is God. Is the feeling of oneness we have when we know ourselves as the truth of our being, as nature itself. What we long for is that experience of connectedness. This is what will heal us of our need to suffer. So we must have a way of finding our salvation on our own, not through a potential partner. If we give them the job of saving us, they will fail. Without exception.

So we meditate. We insist on seeking a vision of the world, and of relationship, that allows us room and support to evolve. To grow in our experience and understanding of the spiritual life. We insist on taking our salvation into our own hands.

Second, we begin to come to terms with the fact that a relationship is not a place we go to get for ourselves. A relationship is a place we go to give of ourselves. There is nothing to get from relationship. If I am unhappy, then my relationship will be a showcase for my unhappiness. If I am fulfilled, my relationship will be a showcase for my fulfillment. So again, we must find this fulfillment we seek on our own, not go looking for it over there.

Third, one of the assignments each of us has here on this plane is to learn how to love. Having this as a concept really doesn't help us know how to do it. What does help us is to have a receiver for our love. A direction for it. But he's not lovable when he (fill in the blank)! Exactly. He's not. And yet it's our job to learn how to love him even when he (fill in the blank). How do I do that? By knowing that a) what I am loving in him is not him, but God. Nature as it is being expressed over there; and b) that what is loving him is not me, but God. Nature as it is being expressed over here. 

Today I will insist on loving someone in spite of themselves, in spite of their insistence that we fight instead, in spite of the voice in my head that says 'where's mine?'