On long-term relationships: Love, lust, and samājivina

In ancient Greek (and, subsequently, most western) culture, the word "love" can have many meanings: brotherly love, familial love, romantic love, etc. In Greek, these phrases are not multiple words, but individual words referring to qualitatively different things, and more than a 100 such words exist. However, for Buddhists, there is only really one kind of love, namely good-will, loving-kindness, love-without-clinging (mettā). The closest Greek concept is probably αγάπη (agāpé; divine, unconditional love). For Buddhists, all kinds of love, other than mettā, inevitably involve something worldly, some condition -- such as admiring a person/thing's qualities or actions, or wanting a beautiful person/thing for oneself. Greed (lobha) is a desire for worldly possessions, and lust is greed for a human being (i.e., wanting to possess someone, because of the "way they make you feel"). Monastics are supposed to try to have a deep unconditional love for every being (human, animal, plant, etc.) that they meet, and are supposed to abandon feelings of worldly affection and greed/lust.

Hence, in the Buddhist sense, neither mettā nor lust (nor both) are sufficient for maintaining a lasting householder/marital relationship, in which a long-term commitment to one person is usually required. Mettā shouldn't be confined to just one person, but should be a kind of baseline love/kindness that one shows to every being that one encounters. Lust, on the other hand, is as fickle as the cravings that prompt it. Like greed/hunger for a certain food one day, and a different food the next, the kind of people one is ever in the mood to have in one's company from moment to moment is not constant. And, while it can be good to have enough friends to accompany/counsel one through many different moods and circumstances, having many different lovers can have very hurtful and painful consequences (e.g., unwanted pregnancy, jealousy, disease, etc.). For this reason, Buddhism's third precept encourages people to "abstain from sexual misconduct." Similarly, though one should have both considerable mettā and lust for one's partner/spouse, there is nothing about the combination of mettā and lust that can sustain a long-term spousal relationship.

So, what is needed, from a Buddhist perspective? "Living in tune" (samājivina) was the Buddha's answer. In the Samājivina Sutta (AN 4.55), a pair of in-love householders asked the Buddha how they could ensure that they would remain together both in this life and the next. He replied, "...they should be in tune [with each other] in conviction, in tune in virtue, in tune in generosity, and in tune in discernment." Samā-jivina literally translates as "living in the same way." In other words, the greater the degree to which two people share each others' ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving, the greater the chance they will remain kammically bound/near to one another. Obviously, such a person is very hard to find, even at one moment in time. The translator's choice of a "tuning" metaphor is also interesting, as it implies that even a good relationship needs occasional re-tuning, after things start sounding a little sour. Perhaps some of the later hermeneutic phenomenologists (e.g., Ricoeur) were right, that life is one big hermeneutic circle.