Dear Relic:

You shared that it has taken you “a bit of courage to decide to write this post”- congratulations for doing what you were scared of doing= acting with courage.

You were raised Christian, not devoutly so. Your husband was a non-practicing Buddhist in the first few years of the marriage. In the last year, his dharma practice became “incredibly important to him”, and in the same year, he told you that (a) your conversations and communication are “shallow and surface level”, lacking a “deep level”, (b) that “he has much more to share about how he feels”, that he “never feels heard or understood” by you regarding his spiritual practices, his dharma (which to you doesn’t seem to have anything to do with emotions, but with “a lot of intellectual abstractions instead of actual emotions”), and that (c)”he is falling out of love” with you.

You wrote: “It feels as though his heightened religiosity is coinciding with him not longer expressing any emotions like ‘gratitude, fear, pain, shame'”. You addressed your original post to “Kind Buddhists” and asked if Buddhism promotes deep commitment to marriage etc., “Any help or criticism is welcome”-

My input: although I read a lot on Buddhism as it was introduced to the West, and although the psychotherapy I attended years ago included a heavy dose of Buddhist principles as introduced to the West, such as Mindfulness, I am not a Buddhist, and I am not a competent resource on Buddhism. (But there are lots of books and online resources on Buddhism that are available to you).

What your case is about, seems to me, from first impression, is a misguided husband who is substituting his real need for personal emotional healing with “a lot of intellectual abstractions”. If you accommodate this substitution by converting into Buddhism, as you suggested, and communicating with him effectively using his favored intellectual abstractions- I don’t think that you will be healing him or the marriage.

Seems to me that his dharma practice serves as a distraction for him, a distraction from those subtle emotions that he doesn’t want to become aware of, those subtle emotions that “he rarely expresses”.

Am I making sense, to you?

anita