At this point (as with much of life) there are:

Three choices — two pop­u­lar ones, and one that’s all about courage.

1) Blame your­self — this one is not as pop­u­lar as the next, but chiefly is this:

• “I’m no good. I can’t find a decent part­ner because I was brought up wrong, am weird, am stu­pid. I’ll never be happy.”

2) Blame your part­ner — This one is an epi­demic — point­ing the fin­ger at some­thing “out there.”

Many are the dis­guises for “other blam­ing.” Here are a few:

1. Plain blame: “You make me so unhappy. You’re a ter­ri­ble person.”
2. Manip­u­la­tive blame: “If you loved me, you’d do this one thing for me / put me first.“
   Real mes­sage: “Your job is to end­lessly serve me. When you fail, I have some­one to blame.”
3. Edu­cat­ing Rita: “It’s not your fault. You just don’t know any bet­ter. Thank god I am here to teach you all you need to know, to be a bet­ter per­son, to talk right, to bal­ance your cheque­book…”
   Real mes­sage: “If only you weren’t so stu­pid and inept, I’d be happy.”
4. The lead anchor tech­nique: “You are keep­ing me from my poten­tial.” “You’re dis­turb­ing my spir­i­tual path.” “Your con­stant inter­fer­ence keeps me from med­i­tat­ing.”
   Real mes­sage: “If only you weren’t so unde­vel­oped and ‘mate­r­ial,’ I’d be a guru by now.”
5. Com­par­isons: “There’s some­thing wrong with you. Every other per­son I’ve been with has been delighted with me.”
   Real mes­sage: “No one has ever stayed around, but maybe if I com­pare you to what I want, you’ll change and also stay.”

I could run this list on and on. Many are the vari­a­tions. How­ever, here’s the key.

Blame is this: mak­ing another per­son respon­si­ble for your feel­ings, inten­tions, thoughts, and actions.

The third choice is courage.

It plays out as:

Accep­tance: Fully and com­pletely being with the per­son you are with. (if you can’t, or won’t, you leave.)

• accept­ing per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity for every­thing about you. Your thoughts, feel­ings, inter­pre­ta­tions, and actions are yours, and yours alone. Major courage required to own this.
• accept­ing that your part­ner is your part­ner, warts and all (just like you…) Your job is to be there, with a real per­son, despite your burn­ing desire to turn your part­ner into some­one else.

Curios­ity: Admit­ting that you do not and can­not know any­thing about your part­ner, and there­fore ask­ing instead of ana­lyz­ing, guess­ing, or psy­cho­an­a­lyz­ing.

• Most peo­ple think they should (if it’s ‘real love’) know what their part­ner is think­ing, feel­ing, and inter­pret­ing. Hint: you can’t. All you can do is lis­ten and ask for clar­i­fi­ca­tion. Your job is to learn about your­self, and to reveal your­self — courage is watch­ing and lis­ten­ing as oth­ers do the same, with­out interfering.
• Last night Dar­bella and I were com­ing home from Yoga, and got into a dis­cus­sion about the emo­tional pain of unmet expec­ta­tions, (in this case, not hav­ing the Fam­ily of Ori­gin you might have wanted.) I was talk­ing the­ory, and Dar was talk­ing from per­sonal expe­ri­ence, and we kept bump­ing against each other.
  As we got home, Dar said, “I was mak­ing the point that the pain of dis­ap­point­ment comes up for me occa­sion­ally. That’s all I was say­ing.” I real­ized we were talk­ing about the same thing from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.
  I said, “OK.” There was noth­ing else to say, no agree­ment nec­es­sary. Just two per­spec­tives, danc­ing.
  Once I got over try­ing to shift what Dar was talk­ing about, the con­ver­sa­tion actu­ally made sense.

Part­ner­ship: you’d be sur­prised how many rela­tion­ships tank over ‘stuff that stands for other stuff.’

• I mean: “You are a slob. Clean the kitchen,” is short­hand for, “I’m not sure I want to be in rela­tion­ship with you, and espe­cially if you won’t do it my way.”
• There is no ‘one way’ to do things. There are, how­ever, effec­tive ways. Dar’s never been much inter­ested in house­hold finances, whereas my obses­sive nature makes me per­fect for them. It would be silly for Dar to do them, even though she ‘could.’
• Because cou­ples are caught in the trap of blam­ing, things get divided up oddly. I see a lot of “her money, his money,” and lots of con­vo­luted games for (not) pay­ing bills. A human part­ner­ship is also a busi­ness. Money is often spent to ‘buy hap­pi­ness’ because the rela­tion­ship itself is bank­rupt. If you can’t be your partner’s part­ner, grow up, move on, and get over yourself.

Choos­ing to be happy: Hap­pi­ness is not a right, nor is it a given. Hap­pi­ness is not some­thing we work toward.

You are either happy, or you are not.

• Many peo­ple spend their lives going, “When this, this, and this hap­pens, then I will be happy.” And the ship never gets into that port. Hap­pi­ness is an inter­nal state of bliss­ful con­tent­ment, and it hap­pens (as does every­thing else) in the here and now.
• 2) Here and now is not a goal. It is not gained, (nor is con­tent­ment, peace, med­i­ta­tive states, any­thing) in the future, through cur­rent actions.
  In Zen, this is seen as a mind trap. Med­i­ta­tion does not lead to being in the here and now.

Still­ing the mind lets us see that we are ONLY in the here and now, all the time, whether we are aware of this or not.

• Choos­ing hap­pi­ness, then, is sim­ply notic­ing, right now, who and where I am. As I do that, I can choose grat­i­tude or I can make myself miserable.

Courage: not much of this these days.

Most peo­ple are wimps, caught in feel­ing sorry for them­selves, whin­ing, and blaming.

• True courage comes from total self respon­si­bil­ity, no excuses.
• True courage means total accep­tance of what is, no whin­ing, no blam­ing. From total accep­tance of “The way it is, is the way it is,” comes the abil­ity, in the next breath, to act to change my rela­tion­ship with the moment.
• True courage comes from ‘no com­plain­ing.” Seems like every­one on the web is point­ing read­ers to the web­site: “A Complaint-Free World“
  I just bought the book, and agree with a blog post by Tim Fer­riss.

  The real goal is not sim­ply to stop com­plain­ing, but to state the com­plaint this way: “Here is what I notice, and here is my inter­pre­ta­tion (in this case, “Here’s what I judge to be ‘wrong’”) AND here is what I pro­pose to change things for the better.”

  Com­plaints, on the other hand, do noth­ing more than point the fin­ger at ‘out­side stuff.’

• True courage is look­ing in the mir­ror and not blink­ing: the source of every­thing is hid­ing in your mir­ror. Go have a look. Who you are, where you are, where you are stuck, what the solu­tion is… it’s all there, star­ing you in the face.

Go look. Be of good courage.