A Religious Life vs. A Love Life
By: Sara Knick
Tags: Love, Religion, Relationships Love Dating, Buddhism, Relationship Advice

Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash.

A Buddhist monk had messaged me this past week. He was in a tricky situation. He is not allowed to have a relationship with any women. If he starts a relationship with a woman, he must leave the monk life. There was a woman that had fallen in love with him. He didn’t know what to do. He was worried that if he rejected her love that she would experience pain. He didn’t know what the solution was. He also recognized that he was not a rich man and the Buddhist life is what he had known over the past 20 years.

He doesn’t want to cause this woman to be in any more pain than what she has already experienced in her life, but the Buddhist life is all that he knows and he doesn’t want to leave what feels natural to him. He feels extreme guilt over the thought of having to reject this woman’s love.

There are certain religious duties, practices, rules and obligations that this Buddhist monk has committed to. Would it really be worth it to leave all that he has committed his life to in pursuit of love in a relationship? It’s unknown. He does not have familiarity with the lifestyle of the common people (laypeople). There are many unknowns that make the outcome seem uncertain.

Desire is hard to escape. In my short time speaking with this monk, I felt that the desire here was to escape pain or to use love as a pacifier for pain. This woman that he spoke of was in a relationship with another man before meeting him and when the other man left her, she fell into a serious depression to the point of suicide. She said that the Buddhist monk had motivated her and she fell in love with him. If the relationship formed only out of a need to escape pain, I would not condone the relationship because it would not be founded on a strong foundation. The woman would be attached to the man out of her need to escape pain. The pain for this woman would need to fully be worked through in order to accept whatever relationship status she may have.

Photo by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash.

If you are moving out of your authenticity and who you are to fix someone or something, I would say that this is the wrong move. Let’s say that the woman had developed feelings for you and made you feel guilty in not being with her. This is her own instability that she needs to deal with. If you really love someone, you allow the other person to freely make their decisions out of their judgment on what is best for them. This may mean that the monk decides to continue to live his life within Buddhism.

If the Buddhist monk leaves his religious life and invests his time into this relationship in love, he may not be happy and fulfilled and the relationship as a whole will fail because he was brought further from his authentic self.

The existence of a relationship in love should add to the feeling of who our authentic self is. We need to gauge our desire and where it is coming from. Are you willing to make changes and adapt to a completely new way of living and start a new relationship? It may be overwhelming, but is that something that feels good and worthwhile to you? Changing our life path is a big deal and it is up to us to gauge our emotions and intuition in relation to those choices.

When we realize that we have a problem, the answer is to always respond in a way that is in alignment with our authentic selves. Feeling guilty and being scared of another person’s responses confuses the matter at hand because we are questioning our reactions and responses. The more natural and organic we can feel in being ourselves in relation to ourselves and others, the better we can place ourselves in feeling successful moving into the future. The Buddhist monk’s future is essentially his own to determine, but I would ask these two questions in moving ahead: Would you be moving away from your authentic self in moving away from being a Buddhist monk? Does this relationship in love mean more to you than continuing on the path of a Buddhist monk?