Be a friend to yourself. If you are a true friend to yourself, you can be a true friend to a loved one. A romantic crush is short-lived, but friendship and loving kindness can last very long and continue to grow.

reconciliation. Remember that you are friends, you’ve known each for other a long time, and the relationship is worth keeping.

Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.

This is a good time to remember that when we harden our heart against anyone, we hurt ourselves. The fear habit, the anger habit, the self-pity habit — all are strengthened and empowered when we continue to buy into them. The most compassionate thing we can do is to interrupt these habits. Instead of always pulling back and putting up walls, we can do something unpredictable and make a compassionate aspiration. We can visualize this difficult person’s face and say his name if it helps us. Then we say the words: “May this person who irritates me be free of suffering and the roots of suffering.” By doing this, we start to dissolve our fear.

Phase 1: Compassion This phase is about feeling connected to others and feeling a sense of kinship with and kindness toward all of life, which we discussed in Chapter 10. In this phase, you express your intention of extending greater compassion and love to an ever-widening circle of humanity, starting with your family and friends and then widening all the way to encompass the planet. Compassion practices make you a better human being, and some studies have found that men and women found compassion or kindness to be one of the most attractive qualities in the opposite sex (so this might improve your love life, too).

If you approach others with the thought of compassion, that will automatically reduce fear and allow an openness with other people. It creates a positive, friendly atmosphere. With that attitude, you can approach a relationship in which you, yourself, initially create the possibility of receiving affection or a positive response from the other person. And with that attitude, even if the other person is unfriendly or doesn't respond to you in a positive way, then at least you've approached the person with a feeling of openness that gives you a certain flexibility and the freedom to change your approach as needed.

My children, it is not enough to love passionately; you must also love well. A passionate love is good doubtless, but a beautiful love is better. May you have as much strength as gentleness; may it lack nothing, not even forbearance, and let even a little compassion be mingled with it. You are young, fair and good; but you are human, and because of this capable of much suffering. If then something of compassion does not enter into the feelings you have one for the other, these feelings will not always befit all the circumstances of your life together; they will be like festive robes that will not shield you from wind and rain. We love truly only those we love even in their weakness and their poverty. To forbear, to forgive, to console, that alone is the science of love.

You can’t take the other person out of you. You can’t take yourself out of others. The suffering still continues. So the question is not whether you will stay together or not; the question is whether you can focus on trying to understand each other using compassionate speech and deep listening, no matter what the outcome.

to love someone out of compassion means not really to love

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

You can leave the relationship, in which case you realize this person doesn’t suit your priorities. You can work through the issue together and grow, in which case you realize you’re feeling positive enough about your bond to evolve together. Or you can stay together without changing anything, in which case you don’t realize anything. I advise you not to make the third choice.

Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion.

We had a lot of things in common. We had the same sense of humor, liked the same movies, enjoyed taking long walks together, both came from close-knit families. Nonetheless, there were too many things we didn’t understand about each other to be compatible. That’s why I decided to end those relationships.