On Generosity

There was an interesting, albeit tantalizing short, column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled The Generous Marriage. The social value of generosity is well known and well-documented, but a new study about the value of generosity in intimate relationships was just released, and the column touches briefly on most of the conclusions therein.

Those conclusions are exactly what you'd expect. There are no surprises here: couples that both rank highly on the generosity scale are far, far more likely to both report being very happy in their relationship.

Duh, right?

But as the researchers point out, it's hard to be generous with a romantic partner. The lead researcher for the study had this to say about the difficulty of generous romanticism:

"In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate."

And he's right: that's hard. There is so much expectation about what a partnership between two people is that you can get lost in all of that and never ever go above and beyond. And that would certainly make me feel unloved. But I would submit that generosity, true generosity, is making those extra efforts without expectation of return. Much like altruism, generosity requires a negating of the self to be genuine, real, and have the intended effect.

And I realized: my generosity is not genuine. When I do nice things for people, I want them to do nice things for me in return. Perhaps that's fair, but generosity is not about fairness. It's about the above and beyond.

I've been being a bad Buddhist. I have not been being truly generous.

I think that what I need to find true generosity in my soul is first a much, much greater sense of self-sufficiency. I need to be much more self-contained. I need to be much less of a selfish mess, in other words. I've not been doing so great at my resolution not to be selfish in my messiness. I think it's not possible not to be selfish when you're a personal mess on the inside.

So, I need to clean up. I need to not be a mess. I need to be able to satisfy all my own needs. I need to identify what those are, and which of the things I'm currently classifying as needs are actually wants, and having them satisfied would fall into someone being generous with me.

But mostly, I need to be more self-contained and self-sufficient. I need to need less. I need to make do with my own internal resources. No one owes me their time or attention or energy. It is nice to get, sometimes. It's nice to be cared about, and it's nice when people are generous with me. But it's not to be expected. It's not my due.

And I think, perhaps, this is the greatest personal breakthrough I've had in years, because it rather neatly resolves the tension I've always struggled with between being open and generous and being cold and closed off. I can be open and generous, truly generous, without needing anything, or becoming needy. In fact, the only way to truly be generous is to not be needy.

New resolution: clean up my insides. Scrub my soul. Neat, tidy, self-contained. And then, truly generous with the people I meet.