help!! advice please!!!!

[Bring4th_Austin]

Romantic relationships are really tough catalyst that can help us get to the bottom of our ideas of attachment, enlighten us as to cultural expectations to see if they're in alignment with our own, and teach us about what unconditional love is or can be. These lessons can be so tough because they're easy to rationalize, i.e. "we want different things so we probably shouldn't be together" or "you cannot fulfill what I want in a relationship so I cannot be with you." Seems like it should be easy to act based on such rational decisions, but the feelings always get the better. We find ourselves acting out of the strong passion we have for a person and ignoring the rational decisions. I've been in situations similar to what you are describing and I know how painful they can be, but I am honestly more grateful for them than any other catalyst I have had because they definitely helped me understand my individual self more than any other lesson I've gone through.

The tough part is trying to figure out what attachments you are hanging up on another person that aren't fair. I believe you are both young, and balancing honesty and compassion is probably hard for her. It's completely possible for a person to love someone and want the best for them, yet still follow their desires in a direction which would hurt that person, and then feel like they need to lie to protect the other person. This is a human behavior and while it may be immature, I don't think it makes someone a bad person. But your role is to figure out why you aren't able to walk away from a situation where you feel your needs are not being fulfilled. You deserve a relationship with honesty, and she's proven that she cannot offer that to you, but you are still attached to the romance.

That attachment is what I had to follow to discover my "true self," how ideas of relationships, love, trust, honesty, ethics, were all planted in my mind from culture and I had not dug deep enough to find out what I truly felt - I was feeling the attachments placed on me by society. For me, simply discovering these attachments and meditating regularly allowed them to melt away easily. For some people there is a bit more work involved with releasing attachments. And some people don't want to let go of attachments, and that's fine, but it must be recognized that the suffering you are experiencing is due to the attachments. I personally have found myself much more able to be happy and have genuine relationships, romantic and otherwise, after discovering these attachments and letting go.

So maybe that would work for you? Try to discover your internal dynamics in the situation and figure out if there are any ideas of love, relationships, or honesty which aren't truly yours, which cause attachments that might be causing you to suffer? When I was entangled with a person in a similar fashion to how you describe, once I was able to release these attachments, I was able to feel complete love for her and let her do as she desired without being upset about it, whether it was dating other people or even lying to me about it. I could still love her if she lied, but I had to set boundaries on our relationship which necessarily stopped before romance. But I wasn't upset about it, I felt free and happy, and have since gone on to be extremely happy with my beliefs about relationships, no matter my relationship status. (Not to say there aren't challenges, but I feel much more able to explore them and learn from them freely now that societal baggage is dealt with.)

I hope this might help some.