It's also not good for the other person either. For instance a scenario where your girlfriend may want to go to culinary school which is best for her, but if placed all your happiness in her, then you may be tempted to sabotage her attempts to follow her dreams (to varying degrees), so that she may stay with you.

These are at least the thoughts of an interesting fellow who was a jesuit who later embraced buddhism and was found to be "incompatible with the catholic faith", so you know it must be pretty good stuff: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/54195.Anthony_de_Mel...

>"Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha."

Dukkha is the word used by the Buddha to describe stressfulness, unsatisfactoriness, suffering, anguish etc., i.e that pain which is emotional; his position is that these arise from our desire to be stable, and from that desire acting upon it, to try and slow the tides of change. At least, that is my understanding.

But non-attachment to people need not mean that one stops feeling compassion for them, nor does it mean that one has to break up with one's friends. It's more about being mindful of the kind of relationships you have, and how they affect you. For example, one of the Buddha's prescribed techniques is to meditate on the theme of death, that one's body will eventually die, to visualise each process of birth, aging, sickness, death, one's decomposing body, the bones left over, those bones themselves yellowing and decomposing.

But here we have even the most important of all - detachment from one's own body. I don't mean this in a kind of "outer body experience" way. It's not that one stops caring, it's that one understands on an emotional level that things pass; it's not enough to understand this on an intellectual level. This kind of base understanding within us, acheived through meditation, is referred to as nibbana/awakening/enlightenment.

>"Just as if a great mass of fire of ten... twenty... thirty or forty cartloads of timber were burning, and into it a man would time & again throw dried grass, dried cow dung, & dried timber, so that the great mass of fire — thus nourished, thus sustained — would burn for a long, long time. In the same way, in one who keeps focusing on the allure of clingable phenomena, craving develops. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging/sustenance. From clinging/sustenance as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair come into play. Such is the origin of this entire mass of suffering & stress.

Thanks for saying this, those aren't synonymous and at one point I did read/study (cursory, survey level) about both Buddhism and Stoicism and came to understand the distinction but failed to use the correct terms in my comment.

Thanks also for the thoughtful reply. I have some reading to do now.