H.H. the Dali Lama has alot of insightful things to say about marriage. Check this out:Dalai Lama, Gazing West
"It is fascinating," he says, speaking in slightly stilted English. "In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences --yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours; you have more food than you could possibly eat, yet that makes women like Heidi miserable."
The West's big problem, he believes, is that people have become too self-absorbed. "I don't think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice--which brings no real freedom."
He has lived as a monk since childhood, but the Dalai Lama views marriage as one of the chief ways of finding happiness. "Too many people in the West have given up on marriage. They don't understand that it is about developing a mutual admiration of someone, a deep respect and trust and awareness of another human's needs," he says. "The new easy-come, easy-go relationships give us more freedom--but less contentment."
He laughs when I change the subject and talk about the West's attempts to become more spiritual through yoga, massage and acupuncture. "These are just physical activities," he says. "To be happier, you must spend less time plotting your life and be more accepting."
"I see women who have had abortions because they thought a child would ruin their lives. A baby seemed unbearable--yet now they are older, they are unable to conceive. I feel so sorry for them."
They need to discover an inner strength, he tells them. "The West is now quite weak--it can't cope with adversity and it has little compassion for others. People are like plants--they can develop ways of countering negative forces. If people took more responsibility for their own problems, they would become more self-confident."
--excerpted from "Westerners are too self-absorbed," The Daily Telegraph
Buddha just wants people to be happy regardless, but the Buddha also knows that true happiness is not dependent on any external factors. If you think you're going to be happy because you're in a relationship, you're wrong; if you think you're going to be happy because you got out of a relationship, you're wrong.If you go around looking for other people and events to make you happy, you will always be miserable. Not because love and human connection isn't of utmost importance, but because as long as we believe it is the source of our contentment, we will be acting from what Chogyam Trungpa described as a "poverty mentality," the mentality of hungry ghosts, always looking for something outside of ourselves for happiness, but never able to enjoy anything we encounter, because the lasting satisfaction we seek cannot be found in any of these external things.
Diane Rizzetto, Dharma heir of Charlotte Joko Beck, has this to say:
"There really is no one and nothing that we can completely trust - if trust is defined as the expectation that things will go our way. This false trust is a futile attempt to, in Bodhidharma's words, "contrive reality" according to our ideals. It doesn't work. Life just goes on, regardless of how we think it should be. Now, we begin to shed a little light on our koan: "Trust no one; love everyone." The question is, is a false trust based on expectation itself the basis for love? Unconditional love, a love that accepts us no matter what we do, is what we all want. Conditional love, however, is all we will give. We give love to people only so far as we can trust them to treat us well.
"A love based on false trust is a false love. If we distrust someone, does this mean that we can't love them? What happens when we think that people are going to do us harm, based on past experiences or common sense? If we love them unconditionally - does that mean that we let them harm us? No, not at all. We can know that people are not safe, that they might hurt us. Do we keep giving them the same opportunity to do it again? Do we lend them money, or the favorite shirt that we never see again, or whatever? Do we stay in a relationship when someone is constantly unfaithful or hurtful to us? Not necessarily. But we don't have to distrust a person to do leave that relationship. We can say, "I love you, but I can't live with you." We fully acknowledge the reality - they act in a hurtful way - but we also love them. In this love, there is no expectation of benevolent behavior on their part. Unconditional love is really an absence of something, an absence of judgment.
"The important point is that love doesn't mean that we bring ourselves to the altar of sacrifice. It doesn't mean that we are not alert to possible dangers. There is a great difference between leaving a situation because it seems like the sensible thing to do and leaving because an ideal of trust is broken. In the first case, we act out of the truth of the situation; in the other, we act out of an ideal...
"A relationship grows by our willingness to let it be self-revealing. When we shackle a relationship with an idea about how a person should act toward us, then the relationship loses its dynamic nature. It's no longer a union where change is allowed to take place; rather, it becomes a static holding on. So we don't grow. The relationship doesn't grow. The true measure of a relationship is not how much our expectations are met but how much we are able to let the other person be. People change, situations change. Our expectations fool us into thinking otherwise...
"If we want to experience true enduring love, we must be willing to be vulnerable. Being vulnerable means being open to our experience. It does not mean putting our head on the block and allowing someone to abuse us. If we are open to our experience, then we are far less likely to allow people to hurt us. I'll say it again. If we are truly open to our experience, the likelihood of putting ourselves in a situation where we allow other people to hurt us is far less likely to happen."