How To Find THE PERFECT RELATIONSHIP | Esther Perel & Lewis Howes

why are relationships seemingly so hard for so many people when it's the thing we need the most to feel alive to feel happy and feel connected this is the million-dollar question you know i'm a relationship therapist for 35 plus years i work with people in their romantic relationships family relationships friendships co-founder colleagues co-workers so love and work the two pillars of our life as freud said and um if i could just say why is the simple feeling of loving or caring not enough because the entire human drama is really complex the same way as nature is complex so is human nature complex and i i spent my whole career studying what is changing in relationships you know why are they more complicated today are they more painful today you know are have our expectations changed and there aren't there that i have answers to i don't have answers to why is it so why you know but i do is it more complicated now relationships yes fifty-year-old years ago yes absolutely why is that why for a very simple reason for a long time we live and we still in many parts of the world live in traditional societies where relationships are clearly codified there are clear rules there are roles there are obligations there's a tight structure from which you can't get out but it tells you clearly who you are where you belong where you rooted and what's expected of you and you don't have too much questions about whose career matters more and who's going to wake up to feed the baby and who has a right to demand for sex and what and everybody every husband knows exactly what they can ask from their wife and the wife knows exactly what she should not tell her husband and children know their place and adults can also interact all of this was super regulated you know exactly that on sunday you go to visit your family and that you have to call your grandma and that and nobody happened and you go to church or you go to any other religious institution where you go to pray to be with the community etc and you know what nobody needed to explain to you why it's important you just went because i said so and because that's what you do that's what we do and that's what we don't do because what will the neighbors say and there is a community that looks over you all the time and the streets are narrow like that and everybody knows what's going on in the neighbor's house right now your best friends could be breaking up and you didn't even see it coming nobody knows what goes on in the neighbor's house that's where where should we begin became i think so powerful it gave you back a sense of what actually goes on in other people's lives so that you're not alone wondering am i the only one who's going through all of this this tight structure of our society has moved into what we call today network societies network societies is not tight knots it's loose ends it's loose threats with commitment that can be revoked at any moment that's why your women are constantly writing to you i thought we had something and the next day he disappears i thought we had to develop the sense of trust you know where is the care where is the loyalty where is the continuity all these things that now are not just set fixed they all have to be negotiated everything that was a rule is now a negotiation a conversation who is going to go to work who is are we going to move you to the west coast or are you going to move with me to the east coast are we going to have children are we ready to have children how many children do we even want children you know on and on and on am i happy at work oh i could do better should i stay a few more months should i leave should i you know is this what i really want to do is this who i really am is this my passion is this my passion you know this identity quest the whole time is this who i want to be is this and all of these questions are rather new questions why because in the past or in other parts of the world today you kind of know who you are seriously you're the son of somebody even you're the son of somebody it starts with that ben you know and you probably will even do what your father has done if you are a man and maybe not too much of any of the outside the house if you are a woman or you may begin a charting course of working outside the house and all of these things are very very normative and now it's different we don't have any of that at this moment we are basically i call it the identity economy we spend our time trying to figure out who am i we have an enormous industry of self-help you know with this belief that we are self-made that we can have selfies that we do self-care it's this self-self self that is so focused such the center of everything and so fragile the freaking self has never been more fragile we are constantly making sure that it that it doesn't get overwhelmed that it doesn't get triggered that it doesn't get violated that it doesn't get shattered because it stands there alone like the little dutchman with his finger trying to hold back the dyke you know and that is the times i think we are in at this moment and there that's the waters i think you swim in sure well i think that's where suffering uh inner suffering comes from on the surface is when you obsessively think about yourself when you're you're obsessively self-centric thinking all the time trying to improve yourself and feeling not good enough right i think that's the combination comparing now i don't know that people didn't compare themselves when they all went to and stood on the steps of the church on a sunday morning i think communities people have always compared themselves but there was much there was a different type of social control the one that we have on social media today social control has always existed you know so suffering is part of life community and not being alone is what helps us with all our experiences definitely with suffering i look at the disappointments of relationships and the struggles that we have why are they so challenging what is the challenge what can you do about it when is it you who can do something and when do you have to realize the limitations that what you will do will not change another necessarily when it does and when it doesn't and how does this manifest that work and at home you ask me how relationships have changed i think we've never had more expectations of love and work than we do today i think we expect today from love and work many things that we expected before from religion and from community we want our relationships to be transformative transcendent meaningful spiritual purposeful erotic passionate and we want it at home and we want it at work we want it at work too oh because we we want work to be purposeful today we want work to you know to give me a sense of identity of meaning of self-fulfillment of development i don't just want to go to work only for the paycheck i need the paycheck but i also want the paycheck to be meaningful to me work has become um an identity economy it's not just what am i gonna do it's who am i gonna be and um and it parallels it parallels you know what do we talk about at work transparency belonging authenticity trust psychological safety i mean when did the entire emotional vocabulary enter the workplace to such a degree that soft skills what they used to be called which are emotional and social skills relational skills which used to be seen as feminine skills and feminine skills you don't you can idealize them in principle but disregard them in reality and these soft skills have very quickly become the new heart skills and that's why i'm working in the workplace it's not because i have changed and i certainly am interested in work it's because work has changed and is suddenly interested in what i have been doing for decades i love this i'm going to ask you a question that may be hard to answer maybe it's easy but you've had you've seen a lot of intimate relationships work and fail over 35 plus years right yeah how many of the relationships what's the percentage of people in your mind who are in intimate long-term relationships marriages are not married but together are actually happy most of the time thriving beautiful i'm sure there's challenges but like they're able to work through them with semi-ease how many relationships in your mind are super happy and thriving after decades of the changes of the times society work family all the dynamics that happen in life so i have two ways of answering yes the first one is cultural your definition of happy and thriving and fulfilled is probably very different than many other cultures where being healthy having enough to eat having children having grandchildren having good jobs being respected in the community he's happy and thriving he's happy and thriving it's not about you and i are talking on the couch and i'm pouring my hearts at you and you are telling me i'm the best thing that's ever happened to you in your life and all of that okay so really that's one version is you have got to look at the word happiness and thriving really in a cross-cultural context because a lot of us by the way who have the new definition have parents who think about marriage and what is a happy marriage with the with the other definition and i'm wondering you know that maybe we are so unhappy because we want so many other things that are maybe not part of high speculation marriage have super high expectations i want we want everything we want a partner to be an entire community my best friend my trusted confidant my passionate lover my intellectual equal my co-parent and on top of it i want with you to deal with all the physicists of the everyday life and all of what we need to get to all of that and then we should also be passionate great lovers fantastic travelers exactly you know and very few dancing every week yeah so eli finkel has a best answer for you on that okay he's a researcher on marriage and basically what he says is that the good relationships of today are better than the relationships of history but they're very few because the good what you call that happiness is the top of the olympus it's climbing the mountain and at the top of the mountain the view is fantastic but the air is also thinner and not everybody can climb the mountain the people who get to the top their top is probably better than the tops of the past and now what is the top it used to be that marriage was for survival then it became a romantic enterprise and it became what i call the service economy from the production economy to the service economy you want children but no longer just eight so you only want two so sexuality becomes for pleasure and connection so it becomes a service economy it's no longer a production and then from there you go into identity which is what i want to become the best version of myself and you're going to help me do so that's the identity story of marriage and that goes up the maslow ladder now if i ask the question differently i wrote i actually wanted to write that very article about 10 15 years ago i set out to write in peace what are creative couples and do you know because creative was the word i was interested in not so much happy passionate but creative meaning not stable not solid but what is this thing creativity the spark and i went and i asked almost 100 people do you know couples that inspire you do you know couples that you think have that spark still and the frightening thing was that a majority of people could sometimes come up with one maybe two and that was it you know they knew people who were very good at renovations and people who were great parents together and people who were great business partners together but that whole that you talk about there were very few and i thought that is so sad because here we are we want something i mean if i say good business partners or business leaders you would give me 10 people who you think inspire you to run a company or authors or musicians or we all have a long list who can say what's your favorite musician i mean most of us have more than one when it comes to intimate relationships people have very few models now maybe it is because what they want is so high that there is very few models actually and that's probably the challenge of intimate relationships today so how do we how do we find how do we create that in an intimate partner or is it setting a lower expectation for what we want so that we don't it's both i think sometimes if you lower your expectations you're much better off no doubt calibrate so back to eli finkle's research calibrating expectations is probably one of the most the three main things for what he calls successful relationships and calibrating doesn't mean you lower your expectations necessarily but you also diversify them you don't ask one person to give you what the whole village should actually give you right okay that was the first thing what's the second you said there's three so one is the calibration of the expectation two is the diversification and three which is the one that very much speaks to me is um doing new things with your partner that if you do the things that you enjoy that's really nice that's comfortable that's cozy that solidifies the friendship but if you want to create intensity it it demands risk taking doing new things outside of your comfort zone a little bit more on the edge how often should we be doing new things with our intimate partner i think as often i mean look the answer to this is very simple often enough but not too often that you become chaotic and you dysregulate right now you're asking me a systemic question this is true for an individual a relationship or a company if you don't change or grow you fossilize and you die if you change too much too fast there's no stability you go chaotic and you dysregulate so how often it depends on where you are at in your life are you the two of you do you have kids do you have little ones do you have aging parents are you taking care of somebody what else is going on here we'll tell you if this is a period where you need more stability or if this is a period where it's time to go and be curious and explore and discover and go into the world and launch right if you're a young 30 something female i get this all the time from a lot of women who reach out to me who are ending relationships that were really stressful for them or they've been single for years and they're trying to figure out how do they find the right person or how do they create the right relationship for them that's going to be a a long-term partner if you're a female in your young 30s what should they be thinking about like should they be focusing first on themself growing themselves or what are the things they should be looking for in the right part i just wrote my current blog which is a little bit of a critique of this taking care of yourself first okay yeah yeah so because you you learn to love yourself in the context of your relationships with others you know with this idea that you go first to work on yourself here and then you prepare this little nice little package and you bring it to relationships that's that is completely off actually it's it's it's interactive you do do you need a good amount of self-awareness but you also need to be in relationships because it's people who help you become more aware practicing it practicing it but other people let you see who you are it's by being with others that you get to know who you are and not just by sitting there alone and say who am i who am i right but this is a relational perspective on life and i will stand by that read the newsletter i really poured myself into that one because i'm tired a little bit of this no what i will say to you i'm tired of the go fix yourself first and then go be in a relationship relationships help you to become who you are that's what happens between children and their caregivers the next thing is instead of constantly thinking who's the right person i'm going to find why don't you ask yourself who do you want to be who should the other one be no maybe it's for on occasion ask who will i be as a partner who have i been till now in my relationships how have i shown up what is it that i do not just you know finding the right person that's now what does it mean to find the right person and there i will say the simplest way of looking at it is this there are many people you will love and they are not necessarily the same people that you will make a life with are you looking for a love story or are you looking for a life story that's good you understand yeah there are many people i've had love stories this is a whole different story i never thought for a minute i would live with these people take something else to have a partner in life with whom you're going to go through the pains the sufferings the challenges the you know the the all of that so you have a life partner and still have a love story of course of course you want the life partner to be a love story too but the love stories per se are not life stories it's different ingredients it's different values there's some things that you don't need in order to have a beautiful love story with someone it lives in its encapsulated version on its own you're not thinking can i do this with you can i get old with you can i take you to my parents can you know do we share similar it's about values life not just about feelings so when you're looking for the right person it's not just what attracts you it's who can you build a life with if you want to know the secrets to becoming more attractive then check out this powerful video with relationship expert stefan speaks in most situations when it takes months you have not fallen in love you've learned to tolerate them you've grown up wow all right

Channel: Greatness Clips - Lewis Howes

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Keywords: esther perel, lewis howes, relationships, the school of greatness, relationship advice, relationship problems, relationship goals, self help, love advice, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self improvement, matthew hussey, dating advice, self development, inspirational video, relationship tips, how to find love, matthew hussey interview, personal development, motivational videos, esther perel interview, inspiration, motivation, sexual desire, infidelity, romance

Id: VXMTG8prP7s

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021