Can Mindfulness Meditation Therapy Cure Love Lust?
Six years ago, a good friend of mine, who had gone for decades without any loving girlfriends, sought relief from his chronic loneliness and pent up love lust. Since at that time, he felt that he would probably never meet a soul mate, he hunted for ways to rid himself of this thirst for love without actually obtaining love. So he toyed with mindfulness meditation therapy in an attempt to quell his lustful yearnings for love, that being without love usually triggers. We debated the question whether mindful meditation therapy can indeed cure love lust, and I voiced how I view the issue in the letter included below.
Dear [Mentat],
Your belief that mindfulness meditation therapy can cure love lust and thus, eliminate a person’s love needs is a bit optimistic. While you may find temporary relief from the loneliness of life without a partner, this approach is tantamount to repressing your love desires. As you know, repression of desires is rarely a good thing since it rarely ever completely removes a lust from us. So by putting this belief into practice, you risk spending the rest of your life unfulfilled.
No matter how hard you meditate, your love lust will probably remain due to your human genetics and socialization. We’ve evolved, and are socialized to love. So with such strong biological and societal forces to fight, mindful meditation therapy will likely not win out over them. So it likely will not permanently rid you of your love longings. Your best bet therefore, would be to focus on actually finding a girlfriend, rather than trying to convince yourself that you don’t really need a girlfriend.
Now I don’t read about mindfulness meditation therapy regularly. So I admit that I may be lacking much knowledge that the article you provided assumes a reader has, that supports your position against love lust. However, from [my] layman’s perspective, there are problems with this article’s underlying premises. It relies on the existence of a set point for mood that remains essentially constant throughout life. It substantiates this by comparing the moods of people who win the lottery and those paralyzed by accidents, immediately before such a life-altering event and one year afterwards. I grew immediately skeptical when I read it however, because the supporting circumstances seem unrealistically contrived and impractical for the following reasons:
- How would you know to study a particular person before such an event befell them, unless you had foreknowledge of its occurrence?
- Since such life-changing events are quite rare, you’d have to study quite a few people for quite a long time just to find a few who experience such qualifying trauma — who would meet all the pre and post-event conditions of the study. This seems like it would be prohibitively costly because most people never encounter life-altering events of this magnitude. So that would mean that you’d be conducting costly testing on people who’d never become qualified – impractical.
- Assuming you had the money, you could study everyone, or at least, several million people, collecting data on their mood levels prior to these random life-changing events. This would mean giving all of them magnetic resonance imaging scans periodically, as you’d never know when a life-altering event would happen. And they wouldn’t be a useful candidate without closely preceding mood measurements to the event.
- It wouldn’t be as meaningful for example, to know someone’s mood levels five years prior to an accident as it would three or six months beforehand, because in that time the normal wear and tear of life can (and often does) drastically change a person’s average mood. They might have been happy five years before, but six months ahead, been sad due to job loss, death in the family, or other cumulative losses. If we thought someone was chronically happy prior to an accident, but was actually a chronically sad person, this would seem to impact the quality of whatever conclusions we might draw, once they recovered from the life-altering event. Again, highly impractical.
- But let’s say you managed all that, and had an efficient means to collect pre life-changing event data for enough people as often as you needed to collect it. It nonetheless would appear to be error-prone because the data themselves would be so vast. This would make them more ambiguous and thus difficult to interpret.
But let’s ignore these difficulties in squarely establishing this set point as a valid phenomenon, and accept as a given that the moods of said people one year later are roughly the same as they were before good or bad fortunes befell them.
Though the article you cite only haphazardly establishes the mood set point in people on a large scale, I can buy it nonetheless for most life-altering events. After all, its contention merely adds more weight to the notion that many philosophers have suspected for centuries; that seeking gratification is a vane effort, as humans don’t stay satisfied for very long. Gratify one desire, and another takes its place. The implication: We’re no better off after gratification than before. While this may be true of many of our desires, it is certainly not true for them all. Some desires, like the love lust, offer permanent benefit in exchange for keeping them gratified.
It’s quite a stretch, as indicated, to think that one’s mood a year after finding true love would be identical to that before he found it, especially given the myriad studies that show clearly greater health and longevity among people with lovers as compared to loners. People in happy, healthy unions say they reap continual benefits of being in love long after the first year, and their average moods would seem to improve markedly throughout the life of the union.
So you’d have to do a lot of eloquent empirical arguing to convince me that the benefits to the mood of finding true love would disappear entirely within the first year. This article invites us believe that the mood set point over all is generally not influenced by a life-altering event after a year since the event has [occurred]. However, to its credit, it does not specifically make this claim about the sad moods that result from love deprivation. It would have been nice to read the author’s thoughts on how meditation would specifically impact melancholy, born of lacking love.
Thus, I do not believe that that mindfulness meditation therapy would permanently cure one’s love lust completely or for very long.
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Tags: Love Needs
May 7th, 2011 at 8:59 am
Even Dr. Phil, though he often advises clients not to actively seek ultimate happiness in love, writes in the acknowledgement section of his Self Matters book, “To my wife Robin, without whom I would not be living my best life.” The bulk of Dr. Phil’s accomplishments occurred long after his first year with Robin, and he obviously feels that he accomplished better things with her around, than he would have if he had been alone all those years.