llllllllll RULE 2 lllllllllll
Don’t Ignore Your Karma
Do not be led by others, awaken your own mind, amass your own experience, and decide for yourself your own path. —ATHARVA VEDA
When Jonny and Emmett met at an industry retreat, Emmett sensed an instant connection.
“It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” he said.
“After a few dates we were spending every weekend together. He told me he loved me.”
But after three months together, Jonny broke up with him.
“This is the third time someone has told me he can’t ‘give me what I want.’ But all I want is a serious relationship! I just have bad relationship karma,” Emmett told me.
He was right, in a sense, but karma doesn’t mean what Emmett or most people think.
Karma is the law of cause and effect.
Every action produces a reaction. In other words, your current decisions, good and bad, determine your future experience.
People think karma means that if you do something bad, bad things will happen to you, like someone breaks up with you because you broke up with someone else.
But that’s not how it works.
Karma is more about the mindset in which we make a decision.
If we make a choice or take action with or without proper understanding, we receive a reaction based on that choice.
If you hide that you’re going to a party from your partner, and then you run into their best friend at the party, and that person tells your partner they saw you, and your partner is upset—that’s karma in action.
You made a choice, and you have to live with the consequences of that choice.
Punishment and reward are not karma’s purpose.
Rather, karma is trying to teach you—in this case transparency and honesty.
I don’t want you to attribute every good or bad thing in your life or the world to karma.
That’s not productive. (36 of 286)
Karma is more useful as a tool than as an explanation.
It enables you to use your past experiences to make the best choices now.
The Karma Cycle
Karma begins with an impression.
From the time we are born, choices are made for us.
We’re surrounded by information and experiences that shape us: our environment, our parents, our friends, our schooling and religious instruction.
We don’t pick these influences, but we observe and absorb their messages.
Samskara is the Sanskrit word for impression, and when we are young, we collect samskaras.
The impressions that we carry from these experiences influence our thinking, behaviors, and responses.
As an impression grows stronger, it starts to shape our decisions.
If you grew up putting milk in your cereal bowl, then adding the cereal, that becomes your norm.
Then you move out and get a roommate who tells you you’re doing it wrong, that it makes much more sense to put the cereal in before you add the milk.
Now you have a choice.
Will you stick with the impression that you absorbed as a child, or will you try a new way?
As we get older, we gain the intelligence to curate our impressions by choosing what we watch and who we listen to.
We also have the opportunity to revisit, edit, and unlearn past impressions.
In youth, choices are made for you.
These become impressions.
As an adult, you use these impressions to make your own choices.
Those choices generate an effect, a consequence, or a reaction.
If you’re happy with the consequence, you probably won’t change your impression.
But if you don’t like the consequence, you can revisit the impression and decide whether it steered you wrong.
If it did, you can break the cycle by forming a new impression, which then steers you to a new choice, from which you get a new reaction.(37 of 286)
GOD SAYS
I AM
LOVED (Jeremiah 31:3)
CHOSEN [John 15:16]
PROTECTED (Psalm 121:3)
A CHILD OF GOD [Romans 8:17]
SPECIAL (Ephesians 2:10)
STRONG [Isaiah 40:31]
A NEW CREATION (2 Corinthians 5:17)
REDEEMED [Galatians 3:13]
IMPORTANT (1 Peter 2:9)
CREATED FOR A PURPOSE
[Jeremiah 29:11]
ACCEPTED (Romans 15:7)
FORGIVEN [1 John 1:9]
PRECIOUS (Isaiah 43:4)
LOVED (The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with loving devotion.)
CHOSEN [You did not choose Me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will remain--so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you.]
PROTECTED (He will not allow your foot to slip; your Protector will not slumber.)
A CHILD OF GOD [Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.]
SPECIAL (For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago)
STRONG [But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.]
A NEW CREATION (Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!)
REDEEMED (Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.")
IMPORTANT [But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.]
CREATED FOR A PURPOSE (For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future)
ACCEPTED (Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring glory to God.)
FORGIVEN [ If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.]
PRECIOUS (Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you, I will give people in exchange for you, nations in exchange for your life.)
THE KARMIC CYCLE
Impression : Make a choice ➡ An effect is generated :
➡ Happy — you keep going;
➡ Unhappy —
A new effect Is generated
form a new impression
This is the cycle of karma.
We are meant to learn from our karma, to use it to inform our decision ⁷making, but that isn’t easy.
Life is busy and we think that what we learned is just the way things are.
But when it comes to love and cereal, our samskaras can lead us astray.
Karma and Relationships
I had a client whose ex-boyfriend left an impression on her.
He was extremely ambitious, trying to get a foothold in a new career.
She liked his drive but was unhappy that he was never available.
Then she met a man who was extremely attentive.
At the end of their first date, he asked her out again, and from then on, he couldn’t have been more available—texting her, making plans, and checking in to see how her day was going.
This was exactly what she'd been looking for!
Within a few weeks, they started spending almost all their time together.
But after a few months, she realized what was really going on.
He wasn’t just attentive, he was obsessive.
The attention he was giving her was based on insecurity, not love.
He was possessive and scared that she would leave him.
My client had made a choice based on an impression, but her focus was too narrow.
Her karma taught her that her impression was too reactive.
She didn’t need or want to be someone’s entire focus.
She just wanted him to be present when he was with her.
In the course of these two relationships, my client used her karma to refine what she was looking for in a mate. (38 of 286)
The impressions we form in our youth tell us what love should look like and feel like.
They suggest what’s attractive and what’s dorky, how we should treat others and be treated, what profession they should have, and who should pay for dinner.
But if we don’t understand how our impressions were formed and how we make choices, then we keep repeating the same karma.
The same impressions lead to the same choices.
We love others in response to the way we’ve been loved by others.
But if we can put our impressions in context, so we see and understand their origins, then we have the perspective and opportunity to form a new impression.
For instance, if I understand that I guilt-trip my partner because my mother guilt-tripped me, then that recognition inspires me to break the cycle.
Understanding our impressions is the first step to freeing ourselves from the samskaras planted by a childhood over which we had no control.
The choices that we make based on a new impression are conscious.
We can see if we like the results better.
If our parents had a volatile, passionate relationship, we might form an impression that this is what love is supposed to look like.
But if—and sometimes we realize this when we’re young—we are quite clear that we don’t like the outcome of that volatility, then we create a new impression and decide that the love we seek is exactly not what our parents modeled.
Then we might make it a priority to avoid drama.
This new impression may create its own challenges—we may play it too safe, or we may be so focused on what we don’t want that we forget to think about what we do want.
But we have opened our minds and freed ourselves from our first samskara, and now we have the opportunity to create new impressions through trial and error.
Karma is a mirror, showing us where our choices have led us.
We pick the wrong people and repeat mistakes in relationships because of the samskaras we bring with us from the past.
Instead of unconsciously allowing the past to guide us, I want us to learn from our past to make decisions.
We need to identify these samskaras in order to manage their influence.
We do this for two reasons:
First, when we learn from the past, we heal it.
And second, this process helps us stop making the same mistakes.(39 of 286)
Unearthing Our Samskaras
Our expectations anud desires around relationships are shaped by our earliest experiences of love.
Think about where you first absorbed ideas of what love should look and feel like.
The strongest influences are most likely the love you witnessed between your parents or guardians; the love you did and didn’t receive from them; the first romance movies you watched; and the first serious relationships you had.
In our search for love, we subconsciously try to repeat or repair our past experiences.
We imitate or reject.
But we often give these early influences undue weight.
They affect our choices, for better and worse.
They interfere with our judgment more than we realize.
Let’s begin with a visualization.
We are trying to let go of who we are and to reconnect with a subconscious part of our selves, and visualization is the best way I know to travel to another time and place.
TRY THIS:
Try to unearth the impressions left by your past and understand how they are influencing your idea of love.
This isn’t about finding fault in others or putting them on a pedestal.
It’s simply about isolating the emotional patterns that influenced you in your early years.
You can think of this meditation as an archaeological dig.
There are artifacts to be found—some buried treasures, some half-exposed, some worthless.
They show the richness and damage of years past and have much to teach us about life.
Tap into unresolved, unfulfilled desires by visiting yourself at age thirteen or fourteen.
Give your younger self all the words, wisdom, and hugs they need.
Embrace your younger self.
What did your younger self need to hear that you were never told?
You're beautiful.
You’re courageous.
Believe in yourself.
You'll be okay.
You’re not stupid.(40 of 286)
What would your younger self say in response?
Thank you for coming back to tell me this.
Don’t be so stressed.
You should take up singing again.
After you have had this conversation with your younger self, give that version of you an embrace, and thank them for this insight.
When I guide people through this meditation, most of them find that they had some sort of insecurity in their youth, and that child is still within them, still struggling with that self-doubt.
However, one man told me after the meditation that his younger self looked at him and said, “Come on, man. Get over it. Just pick yourself up and move on.”
It felt to me like his younger self was saying, “Tough it out. We’re strong. We can handle anything.”
His ego was protecting his vulnerability.
Even if we feel there’s nothing to heal, sometimes the wounds are so deep, we can’t see them anymore.
We take a stoic approach, we tell ourselves we’re fine, but we don’t recognize that we must take stock.
Cut to a year later, when this man messaged me out of the blue to say, “I realize I need to become more compassionate with the people I love and myself.
It’s just not how I’m wired.
I don’t feel like I have time to dwell on other people’s thoughts and emotions.”
I answered, “You don’t take the time to dwell on your own emotions.”
It had taken him a year, but he was finally ready.
The younger-self meditation helps us identify the gifts and gaps that have clung to us since childhood, but this is only the first step toward letting go of bad impressions and taking control of the choices we make in relationships.
To go deeper we'll examine three influences on our samskaras: our parents, the media, and our first experiences of love.
Parental Gifts and Gaps
In the New York Times “Modern Love” column, writer Coco Mellors describes falling for a neighbor who makes it clear to her that he doesn’t want to be in a relationship.
She knows she is lying to him when she says she doesn’t want anything serious either and admits that “though I didn’t know it at the time, I was repeating a familiar pattern.
I grew up chasing my father’s love, a man who, like my neighbor, could be affectionate or absent depending on the day.”(40 of 286)
Matha Pitha Guru Deivam is a Sanskrit phrase much repeated in Hinduism.
It means “mother, father, teacher, God.”
Your mother is your first guru.
She teaches you about love.
She teaches you about care not through instruction but through her interactions with you.
And father is right there next to her, of course.
It’s a basic Freudian principle that the early relationships we have with our parents and caregivers establish relationship dynamics that, like Mellors, we're compelled to replicate as adults.
When we’re young, we completely rely on our parents, and we figure out ways to attract their attention, to inspire their affection, and to feel their love.
The love they give us shapes how we engage in love.
Matha Pitha Guru Deivam is a simple concept with far-reaching implications.
In their book, A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, who were all all professors of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, write, “We play out our unconscious knowledge in every unthinking move we make in the dance of loving.
If a child has the right parents, he learns the right principles—that love means protection, caretaking, loyalty, sacrifice.
He comes to know it not because he is told, but because his brain automatically narrows crowded confusion into a few regular prototypes.
If he has emotionally unhealthy parents, a child unwittingly memorizes the lesson of their troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million other crippling variations.”
But I believe that even the child with the “right” parents faces their own challenges when it comes to finding love.
If a child grows up seeing love as protection, caretaking, loyalty, and sacrifice, that’s what they identify as love.
Unless our childhood experiences were traumatic, and often even if they were, we tend to view them as normal.
Then, when we are loved by someone who shows it differently—for example, through joy, time, and abundance—it may take us longer to notice and appreciate those qualities as genuine expressions of love.
If your parents loved you, you might become a good and kind person. (42 of 286)
Or you might hold those you meet to an impossible standard of love.
Unless we do this work of examining our samskaras, we’re often unaware of these impressions.
We just assume the way we think and feel is the reasonable response.
In this way, the gifts our parents give us can create as many pitfalls as the gaps.
If there is a gap in how our parents raised us, we look to others to fill it.
And if there is a gift in how our parents raised us, we look to others to give us the same.
My mother’s love for me was a gift—it enabled me to give love to others.
But my parents never went to my rugby matches.
Because of that gap, I first looked for validation from my peers.
I wanted my friends at school to think I was strong and tough because I was eager for some kind of support that I didn’t get at home.
By the time I became a monk, I still hadn’t found a way to satisfy my longing for validation.
But during my studies at the ashram, I looked in the karma mirror and realized that even when I did get the validation I yearned for, I was never satisfied.
Even when I received authentic, positive feedback from others, I was never satisfied.
And I think this is often true—that it’s hard for others to truly understand what we go through to get a good result.
We first seek validation from those closest to us.
Then, unsatisfied, we look for it from everyone.
And finally, we find it in ourselves.
It was the gap that my parents created that eventually taught me this lesson.
I had to be happy with myself.
PARENTAL GIFTS & GAPS
Gift : We seek partners who give the same gifts we were given as children.🎁 💝 🧧
We seek partners who fill in gaps in how our parents raised us : Gap. υひชυひಋⅤឋซឋ
Parental gifts and gaps play out in various ways in our relationships.
My parents always gave me gifts that made me feel special on my birthday, whereas Radhi’s family’s gift to her was quality time. (43 of 286)
These are cherished aspects of each of our childhoods, but on my birthday, Radhi might give me quality time when I am expecting a gift.
The more aware we are of our expectations and where they came from, the more we can communicate our needs and adapt to our partners.
We all respond differently to the gifts and gaps we faced.
If you saw your parents argue, you might grow up to be argumentative or defensive.
Or you might heal yourself from it and make a conscious effort not to treat others that way.
Or you might help others work through their conflicts.
If your parents create a volatile household, you might try to keep the peace at all times and hide your true feelings.
Karma lets us choose how to respond, and the options can be subtle and varied.
This isn’t about being right or wrong.
We are looking for where we have used our karma in ways that have benefited our relationships and where we are still making unconscious choices.
If your father was a jerk, you might date a bunch of jerks until you finally wise up and settle down with a nice guy.
This is learning the lesson of karma.
Many of us feel like we didn’t get the right upbringing.
This could be anything from not having our basic needs taken care of to not having opportunities that would have helped us get a better footing in life.
Even if our parents believe in us, encourage our strengths, assure us that our disappointments aren’t the end of the world, and consistently scaffold our confidence in other ways, they can’t hand us a perfectly developed psyche in a neatly wrapped package.
And many parents themselves struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, self-improvement, self-love, self-care.
It’s hard for them to pass these qualities on to their kids when they have their own challenges.
It might sound like we’re doomed, but I promise you we are not.
We’re just focusing too much on what our parents should have done or wishing they'd behaved differently rather than figuring out what we ourselves can do.
No matter how imperfect a situation we were born into, we can learn from our karma and use it to guide us into and through the relationship we want.(44 of 286)
========
TRY THIS:
MEMORIES
Write down three of your best memories from your childhood.
Write down three of your worst memories from your childhood.
Identify a challenging time in your childhood.
Did your parents help you through it?
How?
How did it affect you?
Your answers may not be black or white.
A loving response might have soothed you or it might have fostered a dependent relationship.
A harsh response might have damaged your self-esteem or built your resilience.
What matters isn’t whether your parents were the best parents in the world, its a question of how their treatment of you played out in your development.
EXPECTATIONS
What expectations did your parents have of you?
Did these expectations motivate you?
Put pressure on you?
How do they affect your relationships?
If your parents expected you to achieve a certain level of success or to be in a relationship with a certain kind of person, you might either be unnecessarily attached to that outcome, or you may have reacted against it.
How are those forces still at play in your life?
I had a friend whose parents drilled it into her that she should marry someone ambitious, but her last boyfriend broke up with her because, as he put it, “l don’t want to be your business partner. l want to be your boyfriend.”
She had to let go of what her parents wanted for her and rethink her ideas of what a true partner should be.
MODELING
What elements of a relationship did your parents model that you liked/disliked?
So often in relationships we reject or repeat what our parents did.
If they argued, you may avoid conflict.
If they had a certain power dynamic, you may expect the same in your relationship or avoid it at all costs.
EMOTIONAL SUPPORT
What kind of love and emotional support do you wish your parents had given you? What did you miss out on?
Once you become aware of a gift or gap that you're bringing to relationships, you can start to address it. (45 of 286)
1. Recognize.
The first step is to recognize where and when that impression steers you wrong.
Does it come up on social media?
With a particular group of people?
When you try to celebrate with your partner?
When you travel?
2. Remind yourself.
The reminder is a note to yourself about how you want to be or don’t want to be.
Set a reminder that will catch you in the moment when you're at risk for acting in a way you'd rather not.
Do you have a challenge ahead where you'll expect a kind of support that your partner doesn’t usually give?
Are you jealous when you see your partner interacting in groups?
Does a certain kind of behavior always trigger your anger?
Before the moment happens, find a way to remind yourself that you want to change in that moment, time, and space.
It might be as simple as putting a Post-it Note on your bathroom mirror or writing a note to yourself in your journal or asking your partner to remind you of what you're working on.
3. Repeat.
Make your reminder into a mantra, a phrase that you repeat to yourself over and over.
When you do this, it’s more likely to come to your mind in the moment when you need it.
It might be “Love is free of guilt” or “Anger is not the answer” or “Ask before you assume.”
4. Reduce.
Before a reaction or expectation goes away, you'll find yourself indulging it less.
Make your partner aware so they know that you're working on reducing it.
5. Remove.
Finally, over time, with attention and repetition, you'll break the habit of the expectation.
=======
Whether our parents neglected or fulfilled us in ways large and small, when we first leave the nest, we are hardwired to look outward, to others, for validation and satisfaction instead of inward, to ourselves.
We gravitate toward partners who may fill our voids, but we may also fail to open our minds and hearts to people who might suit us better.
Looking in the karma mirror helps us stop chasing others who might fulfill emotional needs from our childhoods and start fulfilling them ourselves.
At the same time, the more you become aware of these influences in your own life, the more you'll be able to see how a partner’s parents impact them.
This gives you greater understanding and patience with yourself and your partner.(46 of 286)
Movie Magic
Our parents aren’t the only samskaras in our approach to love.
From the time were children, movies, TV, music, and other media sell us a romanticized ideal of love.
Snow White sings “Someday my prince will come,” and we are promised that the person of our dreams will show up, we’ll quickly recognize them as our destiny, and they will sweep us off our feet and carry us into the sunset.
In Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks as the titular character walks onto a bus for his first day of school, and when Jenny invites him to sit next to her, he narrates, “I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. She was like an angel.”
The love story takes off from there.
Romances want us to believe in love at first sight.
But in his book Face Value, professor Alexander Todorov shows that first impressions are likely to be wrong.
“We think that people who look happy are more trustworthy, and we think that people who look tired are less intelligent, though these impressions have no link to reality. We assign positive qualities to faces that we consider ‘typical, ” and “although there is no ‘average’ human face, [we] like faces that are closer to [our] own definition of a typical face.”
In spite of the unreliability of first impressions, a group of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania combed through data from more than ten thousand people who had tried speed dating and found that most of them decided whether they were attracted to someone within just three seconds.
Studies show that first impressions like this are easily influenced by factors we may not even register.
In one study, psychologists from Yale University had participants briefly hold either a cup of warm or iced coffee.
They were then given a packet containing information about a person they didn’t know and were asked to assess that person.
The people who had held the warm coffee described the individuals they read about as being substantially warmer in personality than those who had held the iced coffee.
(So the next time you arrange a first date, you might want to take them for a nice hot cocoa instead of an ice cream sundae.)
When it comes to meeting people, the context effect refers to how the atmosphere in which we encounter them can impact our impression of them.
Think of running into someone in the lobby of a theater after you’ve just watched a romantic comedy—you’re cued to think of their potential as a love match more than if you ran into them after watching the documentary Slugs:
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Jay Shetty 8 Rules Of LoveBookreader Item Preview
Our parents aren’t the only samskaras in our approach to love. From the time were children, movies, TV, music, and other media sell us a romanticized ideal of love. Snow White sings “Someday my prince will come,” and we are promised that the person of our dreams will show up, we’ll quickly recognize them as our destiny, and they will sweep us off our feet and carry us into the sunset.
In Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks as the titular character walks onto a bus for his first day of school, and when Jenny invites him to sit next to her, he narrates, “I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. She was like an angel.” The love story takes off from there. Romances want us to believe in love at first sight. But in his book Face Value, professor Alexander Todorov shows that first impressions are likely to be wrong. “We think that people who look happy are more trustworthy, and we think that people who look tired are less intelligent, though these impressions have no link to reality. We assign positive qualities to faces that we consider ‘typical, ” and “although there is no ‘average’ human face, [we] like faces that are closer to [our] own definition of a typical face.” In spite of the unreliability of first impressions, a group of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania combed through data from more than ten thousand people who had tried speed dating and found that most of them decided whether they were attracted to someone within just three seconds.
Studies show that first impressions like this are easily influenced by factors we may not even register. In one study, psychologists from Yale University had participants briefly hold either a cup of warm or iced coffee. They were then given a packet containing information about a person they didn’t know and were asked to assess that person. The people who had held the warm coffee described the individuals they read about as being substantially warmer in personality than those who had held the iced coffee. (So the next time you arrange a first date, you might want to take them for a nice hot cocoa instead of an ice cream sundae.)
When it comes to meeting people, the context effect refers to how the atmosphere in which we encounter them can impact our impression of them. Think of running into someone in the lobby of a theater after you’ve just watched a romantic comedy—you’re cued to think of their potential as a love match more than if you ran into them after watching the documentary Slugs: Nature’s Little Scamps.
Or imagine meeting someone at a wedding—which is like having just watched a hundred romantic comedies.
You might be more likely to see that person as having marriage potential than if you met them at a bar.
Cinematic images of love set the standard for how love should occur, and often they make us feel like we’re not achieving the level of romance that we should.
In 500 Days of Summer*, Tom, who writes greeting cards, shows his boss a Valentine’s Day card and says, “If somebody gave me this card, Mr. Vance, I would eat it. (* Trailer here)
It’s these cards, and the movies and the pop songs, they’re to blame for all the lies and the heartache, everything.”
Hollywood is hardly the only culprit.
The Bollywood movies that I watched as a child did a number on me.
I dreamed of that romantic happily ever after that Bollywood always touted.
You would think that I outgrew these notions when I served as a monk, but as I described in the Introduction, when I wanted to ask Radhi to marry me, my images of engagements came from this samskara.
Hence the riverbank, a cappella, horse-drawn extravaganza.
Radhi and I worked out, thank God, but her allergic reaction to the horse reminded me that I should think about the person in front of me instead of succumbing to the media influences surrounding me.
Similarly, when I wanted to buy her an engagement ring, I asked a friend how to pick one.
He told me to get the nicest ring I could, spending about two to three months’ salary on it, so I did.
I didn’t ask him how he came up with that figure.
If I had, he probably would have said, “Oh, it’s what someone told me when I was getting engaged.”
Only years later did I find out that before World War II only 10 percent of engagement rings were set with diamonds.
Then the diamond industry contrived to make them the official jewel of marriage and love.
Almost fifty years later, having achieved that, they set out to define how much a man should spend on a ring.
In 1977, an ad for De Beers jewelers showed the silhouettes of a couple on a beach.
The shadow of a man slips a diamond ring on the shadow of the woman’s finger, and the gold-banded ring is the only color in the ad.
They kiss, and the voice-over says, “The diamond engagement ring. How else could two months’ salary last forever?”
It was jewelers who told the world exactly how much a man should spend on an engagement ring!
How’s that for a conflict of interest?
That ad was released before my friend was even born. (47 of 286)
And yet it influenced him, me, and millions of others, spreading the belief that if you love someone, you should spend a big chunk of change on a diamond.
There are fewer rom-coms being produced these days, but when we examine our ideas of love, we have to look back to the ideas that were planted when we were young, before we were watching critically, before we had any experience against which to judge them.
When Lily James played Cinderella in the 2015 movie, the Swarovski crystal-studded glass slipper didn’t actually fit on her foot.
“No maiden in the land fits the shoe,” she told the Washington Post. “So the prince is going to die alone.”
The promise of a happily ever after turns out to be an obstacle to happily ever after.
=========
TRY THIS:
MEDIA LOVE
Think of the first time you heard a love song or saw a movie that shaped or changed how you feel about love.
What characteristics of love did it present?
Do you believe in them?
Have you achieved them in your past relationships?
You had me at hello—Jerry Maguire
I wish I Knew how to quit you—Brokeback Mountain
To me, you are perfect—Love Actually
As you wish—The Princess Bride
You want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down—It’s a Wonderful Life
I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her—Notting Hill
When we understand the samskaras that media have planted about love stories, then we don't require Hollywood perfection in our own relationships.
We're willing to try a love that starts slowly or plays out differently.(49 of 286)
First Loves ( click here )
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