Difficulty is the very ground on which love deepens.

Learn when to stop trying to fix your partner and when real feedback helps.

Who better to mirror you than your beloved life partner who is there with you day in and day out?

Devon and Nico Hase are an extraordinary couple whose work combines ancient Buddhist wisdom with psychological practices in an irreverent, no-nonsense style that sets them apart on the mindfulness scene. As life partners and meditation teachers, they're the authors of two books, How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life, and another to be published this month, This Messy Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership. Nico, who has a PhD in counseling psychology and has studied extensively in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Devon is a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society's Teacher Training Program, has practiced meditation rigorously for the past 25 years, and teaches internationally. I wanted to speak to them about their new book and how mindfulness impacts coupling and love, a topic they are deeply familiar with.

Mark Matousek: Why did you write this book about love, at this particular time in the world? Devon Hase: We wrote it because we kept seeing the same thing everywhere we taught. People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty — and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles. What if the difficulty isn't a sign that something's wrong, but the very ground on which love deepens? We're both longtime Buddhist teachers, and Buddhist wisdom — especially the principle of dukkha, the inevitable stress woven into all experience — turns out to be one of the most liberating lenses available for understanding why relationships are hard, and what to do about it.MM: Why is this such a liberating lens? How will readers find........

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