Florian Weps:
Hey thanks it's great to be here
Florian Weps:
That's a common understanding of buddhist practice which you allude to. Let me point out that skillfully participating in the "mundane drama" *is* training in morality; and that insight training, when done at all, will encompass all of experience, and not just some secluded meditation experience. This leaves concentration training which is all about cultivating mind states and thus closest to the common picture of "internally directed" buddhist practitioners.
Fair enough.. with all the talk about concentration it's easy to overlook the little old morality and insight trainings which as you rightly point out have an infinitely broad scope.
Although it's a common understanding the "internally directed buddhist practitioner" is a meme with it's roots planted squarely in the early suttas. From what I understand the Buddha pretty much recommended that the skillful thing to do is to avoid seeking satisfaction from worldly pursuits in favor of the less blameworthy satisfaction that comes from cultivating skillful mind states. The main idea being that people who are only attached to skillful mind states will be in a much better position to make certain insight realizations than those people who are attached to myriad worldly desires.
Florian Weps:
So how do relationships figure in this picture?
First of all, the idea that a romantic relationship consists of repeatedly asserting mutual dependency is junk psychology. If that were so, I'd be in a romantic relationship with my boss because I need him to pay my wages (without which I'd be rather un-fulfilled, even emotionally), while he keeps telling me he needs me to do this or that. While he's a nice guy, I wouldn't want to swap my relationship with my wife for a relationship with him.
Now if you go back and read what I actually wrote I didn't say "mutual dependency" I said "mutual emotional dependency" which is a phrase I made up that implies something completely different.

Mutual emotional dependency means Alice depends on Bob in order to feel certain emotions which she has a strong craving for, and Bob depends on Alice to feel certain emotions for which he has a strong craving. Your boss would not fit into this picture because he's not feeding you these particular emotions. Your wife for example might be. She might be constantly flattering you for example, or doing any number of other things to stroke your ego, reenforce certain aspects of your self image, and make you feel certain emotions which you can't get any other way. I'm describing a specific type of mutual codependency centered around a particular type of emotional exchange not something as generic as your interactions with your coworkers.
Florian Weps:
It kind of comes naturally, in a romantic relationship, to express appreciation for the other party, and saying "I need you in order to be happy and fulfilled" may be appropriate but there are certaily many more ways to express this.
Yes but if "I need you in order to be happy and fulfilled" is the core message that you transmit to your partner regardless of how you express it then you had better be damn sure you mean it aye ? Otherwise your core communication is bullshit. If the truth is that you know for a fact that you are going to be happy and fulfilled (although disappointed) if she leaves you for another guy then you damn sure better be able to find a way to hide or avoid bringing up that particular truth or she's going to feel hurt, and if asked about it you better lie. This is just common sense though.. every man knows this.
None of this applies to me personally because I do get helplessly emotionally attached to girlfriends despite all the stress it sometimes brings. I don't really bring any concepts or ideas from Buddhism into her world either because who knows how her cultural immune system will react and there are too many pandora's boxes to worry about. You guys don't have to worry that I'm going to let this stuff blow any relationships ;) thanks for the concern though.
Florian Weps:
With that little rant over, there *is* something to what you say. Often, when someone discovers meditation and starts to practice in earnest, this will introduce a new, unknown factor into the relationship, something only one of them is doing. This alone can be a strain on a relationship, but this also happens with other, newly discovered interests such as starting to play a musical instrument and spending time to practice in seclusion, or doing some kind of evening school, or whatever. But meditation also tends to dislodge a lot of psychological "stuff", and in this it's different from learning to play the guitar, for example. This can give rise to "I want the old you back" sentiments, and yes, this can be a major strain on a relationship.
I want the neurotic you back he was more fun.
Florian Weps:
There are some very good threads in the archive on this very topic.
So there is slightly more to it than "buddhist navel-gazing harmful to romantic relationships". I'm not theoretizing, btw: I'm married, I meditate a lot, and together with my wife we've dealt with many challenges to our relationship, not just this meditation thing.
Finally, yes, the male geek percentage is pretty high around here, for various reasons. I don't think it boils down to "women want to be fulfilled, men want to be free" just like that, however.
I think it's more like "women want to be desired". It's a universal thing with women for real. If you were to survey a large group of people and ask them if they would rather be universally free or universally desired a much greater percentage of women would choose the latter than men. I know it is true actually this test has been conducted across many cultures, age groups, and geographic areas with similar results.
For women being desired is serious serious business. When they stop playing around and start looking for the partner who is going to be "the one" they must be sure that they have a deep inner psychlogical foothold in the guy's mind at a core level. This is basic stuff that evolved from the caveman time period. The woman needed to be able to tell if the man is going to come back to the cave with food for her and the baby instead of just going off to some other village and forgetting about the cave. Her whole emotional system is designed to be able to discern the guy who would forget about the cave from the guy who wont. How deeply rooted is the desire he feels for me ? At how many different levels do I effect him ? There are the subconscious questions that I think women ask themselves about their potential mates.
I suspect that if a guy is doing certain kinds of concentration/insight practice it can throw off a woman's built in instrumentation in this area. She wants to be able to understand what is making him feel good at all times because she wants for that to be her domain and she wants to understand his complete psychology BUT if there is some mysterious force injecting "feel good" into his system out of thin air then things are not going to add up, he is going to seem too difficult to understand. There will be certain things that don't make sense. A woman might rather have an emotionally predictable mate who is sometimes violent because at least she understands what makes him tick at all times. I'm not saying that guys who meditate are out of luck, I'm just saying we have to be sensitive to this kind of thing and try to compensate for it. I'm glad to hear you're both happily married. I hope I haven't pissed off too many women readers too as it would be nice to have some estrogen around here.
Thanks for the feedback.
n1kaya