This episode explores romantic love through the lens of Buddhist philosophy and neurobiology, arguing that the place we cling most desperately—romantic relationships—is where we most need to practice non-attachment.

The podcast begins with the Buddha's teaching: I teach one thing only—suffering, its cause, and its end. The Four Noble Truths frame life as inherently containing friction (dukkha), with clinging as its root cause. Nowhere do we cling more tightly than in love.

Modern neuroscience illuminates why. Brain imaging studies show that people in early passionate love display neural patterns strikingly similar to cocaine addicts and those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Dopamine spikes while serotonin plummets by 40%, triggering ruminative thought loops and surveillance behaviors—the classic experience of being "shot by Cupid's arrow." This wild state eventually shifts into companionate love, characterized by oxytocin rather than dopamine's roller coaster, and research consistently points here for sustainable well-being.

The paradox presented here: non-attachment from a Buddhist perspective may actually enable secure attachment in the psychological sense. When people enter dating with heavy agendas—shopping for a spouse on the first date, trying to fix a partner, manipulating someone into becoming the right companion—they see potential partners through the lens of who they want them to be rather than who they are. This attachment to outcome creates insecure attachment and endless suffering.

Radical acceptance of the other person, releasing the agenda, being present to whatever unfolds—this allows genuine intimacy. Finally, we are reminded that to open yourself to love is to simultaneously open yourself to profound grief. The practice is developing resilience to ride those waves without trying to control the outcome, trusting that reality has its own trajectory.

Oh, hi there. My name is Brent. I have a degree in marriage and family therapy. I'm a Buddhist teacher in the mindfulness or insight tradition, and I work as a somatic experiencing organic intelligence nervous system coach. Today I want to give you another educational video on these topics that I'm qualified to speak about—or pretend to be, at least.

Today's topic is Zen and the Art of Dating and Romantic Love. Since it is that time of year here in the northern hemisphere where spring is sprouting, people are coming out of their introverted winter shells. Here in the Seattle area, the winters are notoriously dark and somewhat insulating, and the springs are equally as effervescent and Eros-rich. People are starting to entertain these foolish notions of romance and dating, so I thought I'd give a talk on that topic with insights from the Buddhist tradition, the neurobiology of love—which is very interesting—and various schools of psychology, including attachment theory.

So let's dive in.

A Buddhist Frame

I want to start with a story from early Buddhism that I really like. The story goes that one seeker goes to the Buddha and starts asking all of these metaphysical, esoteric questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of existence? What happens when you die? Questions about various gods and goddesses and deities. The Buddha very patiently listens and finally says to this guy, "Sorry, bro, that's not what I teach. I don't mess with all that stuff. I teach one thing, and that thing is suffering, its cause, and its end. That's my shtick. That's what I stick to. So good luck with that stuff. If you're interested in suffering and not suffering, I'm your guy."

I really like that framework because, for my personality type, I'm not so drawn to that airy-fairy, fluffy stuff. I want pragmatic, down-to-earth techniques for how to live my life in a way that—because I've had a lot of suffering, and I'm not so interested in suffering these days—leads to less suffering. And how to do that?

In the Buddhist tradition, you might say the core of every Buddhist school is the teaching known as the Four Noble Truths.

The First Noble Truth is that life has innate suffering embedded within it. That's part of the deal. Suffering is not the best translation of the word dukkha. Dukkha comes from the metaphor of an axle and a wheel. If you ever travel in more developing parts of Southeast Asia—say Myanmar or Burma—you can still see ox carts. People drive the ox and have these wooden-wheeled carts with an axle that goes into the wheel. There's friction that happens there. It causes heat and friction and wears over time. That is the literal translation of dukkha: where the axle meets the wheel.

So a better translation than suffering is that life has inherent friction to it. There's a rub to life. The big rubs of life, the Buddha laid them out: not getting what you want, getting what you don't want, losing what you love, old age, sickness, and death. Those are the big frictions of life. No one gets out of that. In the words of Jim Morrison, no one here gets out alive. That's the First Noble Truth in a nutshell: life has friction to it.

The Second Noble Truth is that there is an actual psychological cause of that suffering. That psychological cause is what is known as clinging or attachment—wanting, holding on. Tanha is the thirst, the Buddhist word for that. Clinging is the actual cause of suffering: attachment to the ego's agenda for reality being a certain way other than what it is.

The Third Noble Truth is that it's possible to end the excess friction of life—not in the sense that we're going to end old age, sickness, and death, but pointing to the ability for the human psychology to not cling or not be attached to life to such an extent that the excess friction is relieved. That's the Third Noble Truth: liberation, Nirvana. It is possible to end suffering.

The Fourth Noble Truth is the path to the end of suffering: the ancient teachings of Buddhism, the well-worn path over 2,500 years of more and more non-clinging to the point of liberation from stress, from dukkha.

So there are the Four Noble Truths in a nutshell.

Where we human beings get the most attached—generally speaking, not everyone, but for the majority of us—the main place where we hold on so tightly is in the realm of love. In the realm of dating, in the realm of romance, in the realm of long-term relationship. This is one of the stickiest arenas and perhaps the most challenging arena to not cling in, or to not be attached in.

A tune from, I think, the '70s or '80s comes to mind: "Love hurts, love scars." Endless pop songs on this theme—the pain of love, the ridiculousness of love, heartbreak songs and love songs. That's pretty much pop music in a nutshell.

The Neurobiology of Love

If we switch now to a neurobiological lens—which is a very fascinating realm of research in psychology—this will shed even more light on why it's so easy to get attached and to cling in this arena of romantic love.

fMRI research from Helen Fisher studied the brains of people who were in the new stages of romantic love. In psychology, there's a differentiation between love types. There's passionate love, which is the new stages of relationship, and then there's companionate love, which is the later stages of development in a romantic relationship. There are various brain states associated with these stages of love.

For people in the throes of new love or passionate love, the brain imaging studies shed light on why that state is such a wild state. If you've ever experienced this state, you have probably done or behaved in rather foolish ways—ways that you probably later regretted. Is it just me? Foolish love.

You can think of the Greek archetype of Eros or Cupid, where Eros has a bow and he shoots people with an arrow of love. In that new love, we are literally penetrated by an arrow with a love potion on it. It's interesting symbology that the arrow—we are pierced by love. We are wounded by love. The root of the word vulnerable comes from the Latin for wound. So in new love, we are vulnerable. We are like little babies. There's a regression that happens where we regress to a childlike state. Sometimes it's ecstatic, sometimes it's full of pain and humiliation. It's a wild state.

These brain imaging studies have shown that people in those new stages of passionate love have brain imagery that looks a lot like drug addicts—like cocaine addicts. New love and cocaine addiction: very similar states if you look at the brain in the fMRI. Impulsivity, lack of future orientation, disregard for overall well-being—all of that goes out the window sometimes when one is shot by Cupid.

Another very interesting piece from the fMRI research from Helen Fisher is that the brains also mimic, or are highly related to, brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Part of the research shows that in the passionate love brain, dopamine goes very high and serotonin drops 40%—which is wild. Serotonin is—you know, low serotonin is correlated with depression, major depressive disorder, but it's also correlated with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When the brain is low in serotonin, there is much more ruminative thinking.

A classic OCD symptom is ruminative thought loops that have no resolution—intrusive thoughts that just loop in a pattern, a merry-go-round of whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You hear this from the classic romance—you've got the flower and you're obsessing about the new love. The poets are there with the flower, picking flower petals: "She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not." It's just a wheel. It's a wheel of rumination that actually makes sense from a neurobiological lens. That's low serotonin, and the brain is just looping on a theme.

This pattern also leads to what's called in psychology surveillance behaviors. This is where the ruminating brain—especially in the age of social media—is hyper-focused on the object of obsession, really. Maybe stalking them on Instagram and going through their photos from five years ago, focusing on one year and like, "Oh, she had three boyfriends during that year!" and freaking out about it. "When did she last log in? I wonder what she's doing now."

I've never done this, by the way. Never. Because I am a Buddhist teacher, so I'd never do anything like this. Never. No, not me.

Anyways, that's the state of the early stages of love. And in this, you can really hear the clinging, the attachment. If there was ever a recipe for dukkha, this would be it in a Buddhist sense. This is Dukkhaville. This is the realm of hungry ghosts in Buddhism. A hungry ghost is an archetypal being who has a pinhole mouth and a giant belly and an endless desire, an endless hunger that can never be satiated because of the pinhole mouth. Passionate love—that's the realm of dukkha there.

For the hedonists among us, there are very high highs and extremely low lows. This is the realm of passionate love: boom, boom, boom, boom. It also mimics a kind of mania—bipolar manic-depressive states can mimic those huge polarized swings.

The Arc to Companionate Love

In the arc of the neurobiology of love, part of the theory is that nature does this—creates the low serotonin, high dopamine state—to increase the odds of long-term companionship, long-term pair bonding. Over time, this neurobiological cascade of high dopamine and low serotonin evolves into a neurobiological state more informed by the neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin. That's the long-term care and love—long-term relationship with shared goals, shared understanding, shared life vision. The intensity of that early relationship gives way to more secure, long-term pair bonding, sharing a life together.

From a Buddhist frame, that state is way more associated with non-suffering than the wild roller coaster of the beginnings.

As the shift in neurobiology goes from high dopamine/low serotonin to oxytocin and vasopressin, that's the shift over to companionate love. One of the challenging pieces is that some couples go through that arc of passionate love, and when it wears off—it has a half-life to it—some people realize, "Hey, I don't really have much in common with this person other than we have great sexual chemistry." Or, you know, "I don't even like this person, but we are highly sexually compatible."

Some relationships, when that passionate love dies, so too dies the relationship. Or it dies out and people are already legally married, and then they stay together for 40 years in a passionless and friendshipless marriage—and plenty of dukkha in that as well.

A lot of the Western psychology research would agree with this Buddhist frame that if you're interested in long-term happiness or long-term well-being, the research is quite clear: it's not about jumping from passionate love to passionate love to passionate love, keeping that dopamine binge going. If you're interested in long-term happiness, the orientation is towards long-term companionate love.

Attachment Theory

Non-attachment is not to be confused with secure attachment. Attachment theory from psychology shouldn't be confused with non-attachment from a Buddhist framework.

Attachment theory—a quick sprint through it—is that our attachment to romantic objects really mimics the original relationship we had with our caregivers. A person can be either securely attached, meaning they really trust in relationship and long-term pair bonding is much easier for them. Or a person can be avoidantly attached, meaning they are afraid of losing themselves in a relationship, so they avoid intimacy. Or they can be anxiously attached, which means they fear abandonment, so they will cling to relationship in a somewhat needy way.

I'm going to propose that non-attachment from a Buddhist framework is actually very conducive to secure attachment from a Western psychological perspective.

True Self vs. False Self

To hash that out a bit, I want to go back to Winnicott—D.W. Winnicott—who's one of the early developmental psychological researchers. He worked a lot with children and developed the idea of the true self and the false self. In family systems with more narcissistic parents, a narcissistic parent will put pressure on the child to be what the parent needs them to be rather than who the child actually is. This puts a lot of pressure on the child, and the child will learn to develop a false self. The child will learn to become who that parent wants them to be rather than who they actually are.

The child will always choose to develop that false self because, to a child, maintaining that relationship is a matter of survival. If that relationship ends, the biology of the child tags that with death. For the majority of our evolution, if we lost the attachment to our caregivers, we were alone in the wilderness, and that was a death sentence. So the biology of the child will always choose false self over developing their authentic self and risking the attachment relationship.

Part of that patterning is that narcissism cannot bear a difference. It can't bear the separation or the otherness of another person, especially an intimate person.

Carl Jung said this very poignant phrase: "The greatest burden that the child faces is the unlived life of their parents." If a parent comes in with their unlived life, with that agenda, they will project that upon the child, and then the child will develop this false self to appease the parent rather than who the child actually is.

You can see this—I grew up in blue-collar-ville, and if you ever want a lesson in this, go to a Little League game. I remember in Bremerton, the Little League games—the stands would be full of these blue-collar guys drinking beer and screaming at their child to live their failed athletic dreams on the little league field. Any failure was directly symbolic of their own failure, and likewise, triumph. They were literally living vicariously through these little league games. Very intense.

Another story to hammer this point home: There's a bunch of adults that go out to dinner, and there's a young girl—say, eight years old—and she's just sitting there while all the adults are yapping. The waitress comes and takes everyone's order, and then she gets to the little girl. The waitress says, "What would you like, little girl?"

The little girl says, "Oh, I'd like a hot dog, and I'd like some french fries, and I'd like a Coca-Cola."

Then the dad chimes in: "Oh no, she doesn't want that. She wants meatloaf, and she wants mashed potatoes, and she wants a glass of milk."

The waitress turns to the little girl and says, "Would you like some ketchup with those fries?" And then leaves.

The adults sit in stunned silence.

Then the little girl says, "Wow, you know what? She thinks I'm real."

True self, false self.

How This Applies to Dating

Okay, so with that framework of true self and false self, how does that apply to the realm of dating?

Earlier on, we spoke about how if you're interested in not suffering, long-term companionate love beats out the early throes of passionate love any day of the week. From multiple perspectives, all of the psychological research points at that. So do the wisdom traditions of the East. If you're interested in less dukkha, that's the way to go.

So what happens if you bring that agenda into, say, a first date? An agenda for, "Oh, I want this person to be—" I see this pattern a lot in clients. They go on the first date and they're shopping for a husband or a wife or whatever it may be, and they're bringing in a big agenda. If one is not careful, one is going to see the other person on that first date through that lens of who I want this person to be rather than who they actually are. Which is a setup for a lot of dukkha.

In some ways, it's jumping ahead like 15 chapters.

Maybe a better orientation would be just a radical acceptance of the other person for who they are and whatever dynamic is unfolding in the here and now. Paradoxically, not being attached to early relationship dynamics is a setup for more secure attachment. Bringing this attachment into—especially the early throws of a relationship—leads to insecure attachment. Because rather than seeing that person for who they are, I am seeing them through the lens of who I want them to be. Rather than listening to them deeply, I'm maybe trying to squeeze them into an idea I have of who would make the best companion and long-term partner.

That's a recipe for dukkha. A recipe for perhaps ignoring red flags. Or maybe—you see this a lot—where people pick a project partner. It's like they're buying a house: "I'm gonna get a fixer-upper. You know, this guy's got potential, and I might just be able to fix him and maybe manipulate him into being a candidate for long-term companionate love."

That's actually a setup for insecure attachment. The attachment to the person being a certain way is just little psychological games—zero-sum games—one plays with the other to try to manipulate them. That's just a setup for insecure attachment.

It's usually the anxious attachment person that is trying to fix the avoidant person into loving them how they want. And avoidants are very sensitive to that, so the avoidant is just going to withdraw from that psychological manipulation, which is going to make the anxious person pursue them even more, which is going to make the avoidant withdraw. And then comes the anxious-avoidant death spiral—the feedback loop of trying to fix, running away, trying to fix, running away.

So paradoxically, not being attached to what happens in a relationship might be the best approach to secure attachment. That's a question I leave to you—or a koan to maybe think about.

Love and Grief

One final musing from a Buddhist and Jungian lens: From a Buddhist framework, one of the main causes of dukkha is what is known as anicca. Anicca translates as impermanence—the existential view of reality. The equivalent to Western existentialism is that everything we love is going to die because it's a finite universe. Everyone we love is going to die. Even me—who I take myself to be—in 100 years, no one's probably going to remember my name. I will be lost. Brent will be lost to the sands of time.

With that view, every time we open ourselves up to loving something or someone, we're also opening up ourselves to a profound grief.

From a Jungian framework: however much we allow ourselves to love, we are going to grieve in an equal amount.

So many people, subconsciously or consciously, will just not let themselves love at all because no love, no grief. But then life is flat.

The game, if you will, is: How much can I let myself feel grief? How much can I ride that wave of love and grief?

In Buddhism, the trick to doing that is to develop resilience—to develop an openness to life, not in the flattening of life, but a willingness to ride those big waves of love and grief.

That's another model for secure attachment—or non-attachment, rather. Rather than trying to control the other person in a narcissistic way, or rather than trying to squeeze them into who I want them to be, it's: How non-attached can I be to this dynamic and just let myself go on that ride? And who knows where that ride is going to go.

This is another huge problem people run into in the beginning of that passionate roller coaster. They have an agenda: "I want this to go a certain way." And that agenda is often at odds with reality because reality has its own trajectory. This person you are so passionately involved with—at the end of the day, there are so many factors. Maybe it's not going to work out how you want it to, and there'll be a big wave of grief. Maybe it will.

Closing

These are the final thoughts I leave to you. Please comment below if this stirred any questions. I'd love to have a conversation about that. Thanks for listening if you made it this far, and thank you for your attention.

Take care. Bye.