Relationships, Crowdsourced

The other night, I was feeding my addiction to a blog/twitter account called TinyBuddha. Now before you go think I'm all enlightened or whatever, be informed that I also gleefully follow the muscly green hilarity that is DrunkHulk.

TinyBuddha is a little gust of wind at my back on an endless journey toward being "fully present," since in most of my "presents" I often catch myself a) dwelling on the past, b) dwelling on the future, c) running late, d) frantically searching for my keys/wallet/phone, e) sucked into the internet news vortex. And on extra special days, f) all of the above at once.

Something about TinyBuddha speaks more clearly to me than other sites like it. The authors use great quotes (which I collect as obsessively as some people collect stamps) and I appreciate the accessibility of its casually Buddhist yoga-pop psychology.

From a female perspective, it's like a pseudo-spiritual Cosmo for a woman who doesn't care about fashion/sex tips/celebrities -- a one-woman, web-based Psychology Today (which at some point years ago decided to degrade itself with women's mag-style marketing), without the stretch of correlating fluffily-written articles to actual scientific studies.

(I've been given a heightened awareness of all things scientifically valid, I feel compelled to elaborately state the obvious here: TinyBuddha wisdom is experiential, not experimental. But it works for me. So yes, more placebo, please!)

So what was I saying? Oh, yes. A few days ago, this mundane gem was posted on TinyBuddha's Facebook: "Share your wisdom! What's the key to happy relationships?"

I apparently thought it would be fun to go through the 200ish comments, sloppily parse them out, and see which keywords came out on top. Enjoy, gentle reader(s?):

My favorite being compassion, and I was surprised to see it outrank patience, support, and forgiveness. Then again, this would be a heavily Buddhist-leaning sample of responses. Dudes are into hardcore compassion like whoa.

And again, nothing about this is scientific. I combined a few groups that seemed similar (support/encourage), but there's overlap in others that aren't grouped -- e.g., does appreciation belong with allowing? Trust with honesty? Should love even be included, since that's sort of a given? Doesn't happiness suffer from a conflict of interest, since it's included in the original question (and "be happy" isn't really great advice [or is it?]). And I was eluded by the ability to capture the nuances of simplistic-yet-solid advice like "focus on the good," "give and take," and "have the courage to be vulnerable."

These are the kinds of nuances that keep me up til 3am. Seriously. Damn you, detail orientation!