The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  I had recently read in the New York Times that 40 percent of the US population is single, up from 28 percent in 1970. And an increasing percentage of those singles are forty years and older. Many of the profiles I read, like mine, have ghosts hovering in the margins: ex-lovers, ex-spouses, shared children. Sifting through them, I envision us all bobbing around in the ocean after a great cultural shipwreck. We tighten our life preservers, clutch our bits of driftwood, and wave at one another across the water.

  As Tahini, I begin exchanging dharmaMatch messages with the people who have contacted me. The jazz musician sends flirtatious messages at midnight, signing his name with a sprinkling of kiss emoticons. The poet sends poems he has written and photos of his cabin and sailboat on a silver lake. The getting-to-know-you questions pelt me through the ether. “What’s the most fun thing you’ve done this week?” “What spiritual teacher has influenced you the most?” “What do you think true freedom is?” A resident of a Tibetan retreat center in Canada writes, “I smiled at you, but I have no idea what a smile means. Does this mean we’re engaged?”

  As a writer, I already spend a good portion of my days staring at my computer screen; I quickly discover that I don’t want to conduct my social life there. The dharma-dating emails drown in the flood of messages from my real-world life: requests for article submissions, work appointments, family sagas, baby announcements, friends inviting me to potluck suppers. Untethered to the world of blood and bones, the candidates for my affection drift out of my mind like balloons on a windy day. I forget what I’ve said to the Zen priest, to the jazz musician. I forget whether the photographer in Massachusetts has grown-up kids, or whether that’s the software designer in Palo Alto. I repeatedly forget my dating-site password. I’m tempted to copy and paste from one of my answers into another, just to save time—but surely that’s tacky? Increasingly, I don’t get around to returning the emails.

  This, of course, has its own pitfalls. When I inadvertently fail to return a smile, I receive my first “flame”: “Is this the way enlightened people behave? Well, if it is I might just as well go to the local bar and become an alcoholic. Smoke cigarettes and associate with big furry women who grunt when they talk. And what do you think might be the karmic consequences of being responsible for my demise?”

  I decide to perform some geographical triage. I will politely decline correspondence with anyone who doesn’t live within easy driving distance of me. Those who live nearby I will steer as quickly as possible toward face-to-face meetings.

  WEEKS 4–5

  I consult Online Dating for Dummies, which recommends that the first meetings be brief, for coffee or tea, and that they be held in a busy public place. So I meet my first date at a bookstore café that’s bustling enough that I won’t feel conspicuous. I wonder how many of the couples I see at the tables around me are meeting for the first time, exchanging chitchat while surreptitiously checking each other out to see if they can imagine spending the rest of their lives together.

  My date, whose screen name refers to a legendary Scottish warrior, is a small, serious man with a British accent and a longtime vipassana practice. We look at each other awkwardly, clutching our mugs of herbal tea. I break the ice with what seems like an innocuous question: “So what do you do?” He gazes at me as if this were the weirdest question anyone had ever asked him and repeats, incredulously, “Do???”

  I decide to do more prescreening next time. After a few intriguing email exchanges, I chat on the phone with a yoga practitioner who teaches world religions at a prep school near San Jose. We converse easily about our children (he has two preschool-age sons), our spiritual practice (we’ve studied with some of the same teachers), our academic interests.

  Having children, I’m discovering, makes dating more complicated. I’m not just interviewing for a potential mate—I’m interviewing for the stepfather of my child. And his kids are part of his package as well. The fantasy can’t just be about us entwined in bed on Sunday morning while our kids are at the homes of our respective exes. It has to also include us driving each other’s kids to preschool or staying home with them when they have the flu, holding their heads while they puke into a bucket.

  When I arrive at the bookstore café, my yoga date is not there yet. I browse through the paperbacks, discreetly eyeing each arriving customer. Across the aisle, a stocky, dark-haired man is doing the same thing. We exchange glances, then look away—clearly we are not the people we’re waiting for. It takes a good ten minutes before we approach each other and discover that we are.

  We order tea and begin to talk, trying to get used to each other’s nonvirtual presence. Although I hadn’t been aware of having any clear expectations, I feel slightly let down. This guy is every bit as thoughtful and pleasant as our conversation had led me to believe. But the man I had imagined was taller, with a commanding physical presence due to his twenty years of intensive Iyengar yoga. I find myself glancing toward the door, still waiting for that man to show up. I imagine that my date is probably waiting for a different version of me as well—perhaps one in retouched black-and-white, like my publicity photo.

  Stirring my tea, I realize that this is one of the many strange things about online dating. Normally, when you meet someone, you encounter them first in the flesh, so whatever story you begin to spin in your mind centers around a character who vaguely resembles who they actually are. But when you meet someone online, the mind—in a textbook illustration of what Buddhism calls papancha, or “proliferation of thoughts”—fleshes out an entire image based on a tiny photo and a few lines of text, and then begins generating plots in which this imaginary figure plays a leading role. When you actually meet the person, they bear no resemblance to the person you’d imagined—how could they?—so you feel a wave of disappointment. It’s like seeing a movie based on a favorite novel: That’s not Rhett Butler! (Although, in that case, at least, Rhett is played by Clark Gable.)

  WEEKS 6–10

  I don’t take the prep school teacher up on his offer to meet again—I’m moving to a new home, which will be a three-hour drive from where he lives. Distracted by the details of packing, I take a break from the dating assignment. My Internet connection goes down for a couple of weeks; I get back online to find a backlog of dharma-date emails in my inbox, along with a pile of tasks that need attending to. Dharma-dating feels like just one more assignment on which I’m falling behind.

  I begin declining correspondence more often, saying truthfully that I’m just too busy right now. But I keep glancing at the profiles with idle curiosity, the way I sometimes stop in at garage sales. I’m fascinated to observe how quickly my mind rules people out—and on how little evidence. “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences,” writes Seng-ts’an, the Third Chinese Patriarch. The same might be said for dharma dating. Free of the counterbalancing weight of actual human contact, I eliminate suitors for random, insignificant reasons: too short, too tall, too old, too young, too little hair, too much hair, spelling vipassana with the wrong number of p’s or s’s or n’s, claiming to be enlightened.

  WEEKS 11–13

  With another nudge from my editor, I decide to plunge back into the dating sea again. I meet up for dinner with a former devotee of the tantric guru Osho who now runs a car-rental business. I have tea with a music producer and vipassana student from Los Angeles, who regularly visits the Bay Area to record with a local musician. A professor of East Asian philosophy invites me to an “ecstatic trance dance” held at a Middle Eastern belly-dancing restaurant. A psychologist and mountain climber offer me a tour of his co-housing community.

  What is the spark—chemistry, karma, neurosis?—that leads us to want to spend time with one person more than with another? Whatever it is, I don’t feel it with any of my dates, although they are all likeable people. The very activity of dating feels fluffy and insubstantial compared with the weight and texture of my daily life, filled as it is
with the countless domestic details of child-rearing, work, and friendships. Romance seemed easier to stumble into in the old days, when I didn’t have so many…appendages. But, of course, these appendages are what make my life worth living.

  I tell myself that I should probably persist past a first date. After all, haven’t some of my best connections been with people I didn’t immediately feel attracted to? But my life is already full of friends I don’t have enough time to see. I resist the idea of carving out time for relative strangers. At the end of a long day, after I tuck my son into bed, I’m happier curling up with a good book than exchanging dharmaMatch emails with a sexy ex-monk.

  Driving home from my co-housing tour, I reflect that this whole experience can perhaps be viewed as a kind of meditation practice. When you sit down to meditate, you never know what’s going to come up. Some days you’re hammered by relentless trivia; other days you’re caught in storms of anger or grief or fear. What’s important is just to keep coming back to the cushion, to keep opening the door to the possibility of peace and insight.

  Perhaps dating is just a way to practice keeping the door of my heart open to intimacy—without attachment to results. In the process, I can notice the habits of contraction that keep me feeling separate from other people: judgments, expectations, fears, busyness, guilt, chronic feelings of insecurity or superiority.

  Or is this theory just an attempt to spiritualize an essentially absurd activity, one riddled with consumerism and steeped in the double delusion that love is out there somewhere and that with persistence and a fast Internet connection we can track it down?

  WEEKS 14–15

  I go out to dinner with a computer programmer who used to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. Over Thai food, we talk for three hours, although I’d told the babysitter I’d be home in two. He tells me about the Tibetan teachers he’s studied with and about the tantric sex workshops he used to attend.

  Over the next two weeks he floods me with long, chatty emails. He tells me about books he’s read, movies he’s seen. He muses on artificial intelligence, the history of Supreme Court justices, his relationship with his nieces and nephew and sisters. I tell him that, as a writer, I don’t enjoy socializing by email. He responds with a five-paragraph essay about a recent interview with Terry Gross on NPR.

  I lose patience and send him a plea: “Ack! No! Stop! Send smoke signals! Beat on a talking drum! Skywrite messages in the blue! Throw tomatoes at my window! But no more emails!” I don’t hear from him again.

  I’m not cut out for cyber-dating, I decide.

  It seems I am an anachronism. I’m just not interested in “getting to know someone” by typing words into a box on a screen. For me, connections unfold slowly, through repeated encounters in natural settings. I like to observe animals in the wild, not in the zoo—even if there seem to be fewer of them. Instead of exchanging pleasantries with strangers online, I’d rather go deeper into my life as it already is and celebrate the intimacy—with friends, family, and community—that is already nourishing me.

  I’ve never been someone who spots love instantly. Overcoming my innate reserve usually takes days, weeks, even months spent sweating side by side on yoga mats or scrambling eggs in the kitchen of a shared house. At this stage of my life, I’m starting to believe that nothing will break through my busyness and melt my defenses but the rhythm of a project or activity shared over time, and that activity must be more meaningful than the shared project of looking for a date.

  I don’t want my Tricycle article to be one long advertisement for a mate. So I invent a tidy ending, in which I get back together with my most recent lover. Just so I won’t be misleading my readers, I have one last fling with him.

  We do love each other dearly, and we have great chemistry. And when we end our relationship again, at least it’s not via email.

  SEVERAL YEARS LATER

  It’s another four years before I find my mate. And I have to go through a few more failed attempts.

  There’s the single dad eight years younger than me and a two-hour drive north, who I’d met over a decade earlier on a Thich Nhat Hanh retreat and who looks me up after he reads my Tricycle story (undeterred, it seems, by the happy, coupled ending I’d invented—or perhaps understanding that such endings are often temporary). His son is kindergarten age, just one year younger than Forest.

  After a couple of great dates, he comes to spend the weekend at my house with his boy. We tell our kids we are old friends and carefully censor any romantic vibes when we’re in their presence. Despite a few awkward moments—such as when his son asks me, incredulously, “Aren’t you too old to be a mom?”—we have a fabulous weekend of domestic bliss. We make pancakes together in the morning; go to the Scoop for ice cream cones in the hot afternoon; sit in the hot tub in our bathing suits while the boys bring us strawberries and mint they picked in my garden; tell a bedtime story together as we tuck the boys into side-by-side beds at night. At the end of the weekend our kids suggest we all move in together. But when I drive up the coast to Mendocino for a solo visit, our chemistry fizzles out. Apparently, what we were ready to launch a romance for was our fantasy of a blended family. Alone together, we can’t make it off the launch pad.

  Then there’s the perpetual grad student of Sanskrit I meet at a yoga workshop, who spends nine months of every year in India working on an interminable dissertation. I find his unpublished translations of obscure yogic texts irresistible. From Varanasi, he writes me emails so funny and flirtatious that I’m convinced they are even better than being able to, say, meet for dinner on a regular basis. Over Skype, we talk for hours about meditation, yoga, and creativity until I’m buzzing with lust. He sends me compilation CDs of his favorite jazz. But when the conversation turns to a potential visit, he tells me that he is a renunciate at heart and committed to celibacy. He kindly lets me know that he has moved past the point, in his spiritual practice, where he needs a special connection with just one person—he wants to send metta to all beings equally.

  Then there’s the Italian filmmaker with four ex-wives on three continents, who I meet at a dance jam…You get the picture.

  I take a long, long break from dating.

  When people ask me, years later, how I met the man who became my life partner, I will often tell them that I met him in my hot tub.

  The truth is that I had been hearing Teja’s name for years and had even met him briefly one time when we were both eating lunch at a group picnic table under the oaks at the meditation center where he taught qigong and I taught yoga. Across the table, my eyes kept being drawn to his hands—long-fingered, both delicate and powerful, and somehow seeming more fully inhabited than any hands I’d ever seen. When I got home that night I’d immediately googled him and discovered two different online footprints, which at first I assumed must be two different people—one a professional guitarist who ran a recording studio called Samurai Sound, the other a Zen priest in the Hollow Bones order who was a sixth-degree black belt in aikido and a qigong master. But even after I discovered that these were the same guy, I didn’t reach out to him. Musicians, I reminded myself, were terrible relationship bets—as were Zen priests, for that matter.

  But a few months later, a dharma teacher friend called me and asked if she could bring a group of her fellow teachers over to my house for a hot tub after they finished the dharma talk at the retreat they were leading. (Yes, that is what your retreat teachers are doing after they chant about impermanence with you and send you off in silence to mindfully prepare for bed.) I didn’t know that the Zen guitarist was on the teaching team, so I didn’t have time to get nervous. As the group of us sat in the tub together under the branches of a live oak, listening to the coyotes howl in the hills, I was struck again by Teja’s presence—his solidity, calm, and palpable quality of groundedness—as if his end of the hot tub were somehow heavier than the rest of it. Afterward, as we all lounged in my living room eat
ing ice cream, he picked up my now eight-year-old son’s guitar and began to play a Spanish classical piece. “You have extraordinary hands,” I told him, watching them move across the strings.

  “The left hand is very different from the right, because they’re used differently,” he told me. He held them out, fanned the fingers wide, and I placed my palms on his.

  Later that night, after he’d left, I texted my dear friend Linda, a fellow writer. A decade earlier we used to carpool together to our jobs at Yoga Journal, talking about food and sex the whole way. I told her, “I’ve met the next guy I’m going to fall in love with.”

  After decades of tangled and turbulent romantic connections, I was astonished by the ease with which our lives came together over the weeks and months that followed.

  It wasn’t just the ease and intensity of our chemistry—it was the way I felt calmer whenever he put his hand on me, as if he were a grounding pole for the electricity that jangled my nervous system. When I got anxious, I’d lean against him and feel my breath release and slow down. His touch seemed to reach below my skin, melting the core of my bones, thawing something frozen deep in my belly.

  Over the first months, every time we lay in bed together, I cried, as something deep inside me that had been longing to connect began to unwind. He never asked me to explain in words what was wrong. He just held me as long as it took for the tears to stop.

  We were both refugees from shipwrecked marriages, finding late in life the kind of relationship we had always dreamed of being in. I knew that part of what had finally shifted for me was my ability to recognize something good when it came knocking. When I was a young woman, I would have pushed him away for any number of reasons: he put too much whipped cream on his pie, too much soy sauce on his rice, too much maple syrup on his pancakes. On the meals I prepared, I began leaving him notes about what was allowable: on a Mexican rice bowl, “This is not a soy sauce meal!” Amazingly, he did not break up with me over that. On one of our first dates, he showed up at the sushi restaurant straight from an afternoon of gardening, wearing a bandana wrapped around his head. “A bandana!!” I told my therapist, incredulous. “Like Willie Nelson! Can you believe it?” She’s been married thirty years. She told me that her husband likes to wear a bandana too.