The 9 SIGNS You've Found Your SOULMATE | Lewis Howes

there's this saying we marry our unfinished business we actually do marry our unfinished business so that is why it is so important as an adult do you know a single relationship where you haven't been disappointed okay disappointment is which can lead to suffering it's part of a relationship i believe that you know if we date better uh we marry better if we marry better we family better if we family better repair better we parent better we community better right so it all goes back to how we date choosing the right partner in your life is one of the biggest decisions you'll ever make that's why in this video i'm bringing together the world's greatest relationship experts to teach you how to know if you found your soulmate people are struggling in relationships in general i feel like i think a lot of people are stressed out more than ever today of first finding a partner dating is just stressful for people then when you're in a relationship okay what about marriage and then when you're married how do you stay happily married then when you get divorced you say well i'm a failure right last 10 20 years i've been a failure this was all for nothing what's wrong with me and i have to repeat the cycle how do i find the right person yeah and i think it's stressful because there's so many options in today's world with social media there's so many options everything looks yummy everything looks tasty yeah everything looks exciting fresh and new and interesting so this is what i loved about this you've got these questions on the back i just want to read some of them okay um some are from women and some are from men and i think i want to talk about men first because if you say these questions men have you ever asked yourself um why does one woman not seem to be enough why does one woman not seem to be enough why can't i ever be satisfied and will i ever find peace these last three questions i feel like resonates with a lot of men yes and i've asked myself those questions in previous relationships and previous relationships yeah and and also being single at different times and i'm curious uh you know why does it seem like a struggle for so many men to to be okay with one relationship yeah you know i mean listen this is real especially today totally i mean today is uh like you said it makes it even harder because really because of just the popularity of social media i mean honestly i mean i would say that that's what's kind of amplified the challenge the challenge has always been there but i think with social media i mean it really takes that challenge to another level for any man and so one of the reasons why i wrote the book is to help articulate and hopefully answer some of these questions and so why i believe that it's really hard for one man to be comfortable sometimes with just one woman it comes down to me to what the book is really about which is love you know and i believe that love is selfless you know love is sacrificial and it's not it's not just love of self it's love of the woman in our life love a family love of our call and love of our destiny so as men we're never really taught to feed or cultivate love what are we taught to feed or cultivate lust sex yeah so so to me the two things that war within a man are love and lust and i i define lust as a selfish impulse for personal professional financial or sexual fulfillment by any means necessary even if those means are detrimental we live in a culture that almost feeds on the lust and men and and also encourages us as men to feed on that so what does that look like with the media promoting just half-naked women everywhere everywhere everywhere sex everywhere and it's okay as as boys will be boys right yeah that's what that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to date you know one don't even worry about one have multiple that's what we're taught as men growing up that the more the better so in a dating sense what happens is if our appetite grows to such a place where we're not feeding the love we're feeding the lust what is lust lust is selfish it wants what it wants whatever it wants and however it wants it so as men especially as single men when you're in a situation where that's what you feed constantly that's what's going to be the strongest and so when it comes to a world where things are not on your terms that almost feels like a foreign experience right because you've cultivated an appetite where the more women the better and guess what if this woman doesn't suit my what i want i just get rid of her i move on to the next and so what happens is as men we we sometimes consciously and subconsciously allow that lust to run and potentially ruin our life and so when a man decides you know what i want to uh you know i want to get married i want to get serious i want to get committed saying i do is not a magic wand so if you go from having no discipline in your dating life no discipline in your sex life you've had as much as you could possibly stomach you've had as much many women as you could possibly have and then you meet the one that really captures your heart she taps into the love inside but be prior to her and even sometimes with her you have not practiced discipline as a man when you say i do there's nothing magical that happens on the other side of it so if you have an appetite and you have no discipline marriage doesn't just automatically give discipline so why does it become hard for men to just commit to one because they never had much practice with it and i believe that you know if we date better uh we marry better if we marry better we family better if we family better repair better if we parent better we community better right so it all goes back to how we date and if there's no discipline there as a man we're setting ourselves up for a massive challenge it doesn't mean we cannot be successful we can't but sometimes as a man we think why is one not enough because we've been conditioned to more and so the idea of just one becomes foreign how do you know what's the right way to date someone let me ask this question first when when you're in a relationship yeah and you say you know what i'm going to be disciplined i'm going to work hard at this even when you know it's not the right fit you've put in time you know six months a year two years and you're like you know what i'm just gonna keep going and make it better i'm gonna try my best to to cultivate the love but for some reason that relationship you know deep down isn't the one and you say goodbye to that relationship is that you just saying well on to the next there's another option out there how do you know when it is the right one well that's a good question i think a couple things one when you're in a situation uh the one the premise of the book as it relates to love is really we gotta start telling the truth and a lot of times especially in a relationship sense it becomes a place where we tell the least truth you hide the truth you hide the truth because you don't wanna hurt someone you wanna hurt someone you may have feelings or thoughts you may have things and also you sometimes in a relationship you can be afraid if i tell this person the truth it doesn't even mean the truth that i'm not into them it could be like i'm really into you or it could be like here's some things i'm thinking about the question sometimes is where the fear comes in is judgment if i tell this person my truth will they judge me will they still like me will they still love me will they still you know be there for me and so a lot of times whether you're a man or a woman in a relationship you bring that fear into it and so as a result sometimes that fear works against being truthful so a lot of times uh in a relationship you're more truthful with people outside the relationship than you are with the person in the relationship other people outside everything everything is you know and you're not telling your partner and this is why as men and women we've got to start communicating with one another instead of at one another and so i really wanted to write this book to help foster more truth so the point you're bringing up if you're in a situation where you're with somebody and you're not sure it's the right fit here is the number one way to begin to identify if it is operating in lust or if you're operating in love is peace you know you're our peace you feel peace that's right our peace is the strongest barometer it's our compass so it tells us we're going in the right direction we're going with the right person in the right direction or you know what i'm going in the right direction but something about doesn't feel like this is the person that's supposed to go with me right it's really about peace that's where i i can and everyone has the opportunity to define what that means for them but to me that's a great way to identify is this the right person i'm dealing with so then let's just say let's say you don't have peace the truth is i need to tell that person as soon as possible here's what's here's what i'm really going through here's why especially as a man soon no don't wait don't wait six months why because here's what happens as a man the moment you start to know this ain't it i don't i don't this ain't it here's what happens the more you do not tell her the truth about how you're feeling either she's going to cry now she's going to cry later and when she cries later she's you've inflicted more pain i believe as a man we we're going to be one of two men men that heal pain or inflict pain wow and that truth as hard as it may be and as much as she may not want to hear it it's better for her to hear it early on before she can have more emotional investment than to hear it later and you knew six months ago you were out of there yeah part of telling the truth is to say listen i love you i when i cooperate in love i put someone else's needs over my needs i'm thinking about someone else's thoughts even some time before my thoughts someone else's well-being so in a dating sense as a man you're like hey i need you to know what i'm really feeling here um so that we can just have an honest conversation like i don't want to feel this way i don't know why i'm feeling this way but you know some i don't know if this is just the right fit and i don't you know and and do your best to articulate that it's better to put it all out on the table then there you go six months later seven months later something happens and then we and then sometimes i've been there when i was single you wait for something to happen then to use that as an excuse oh well it's because this happened well no that's not because that because if there was really love and there was a long-term plan there you could work through that right but too often i feel like as men we hold on to what we think and i think women do that too because they're afraid so i think when you go into this idea of like okay well how do you date love how do you date mastery it doesn't mean you can't explore doesn't mean you can't find the right fit this is all about a journey so love when you're trying to find the compatibility you're searching right we're all we all find that journal however it's dating with more intent it's dating with more intent so what does that look like it looks like you know and again this is just what i believe will help us as men especially in a dating sense um think beyond sex think beyond sex how do you teach men to do that when that's all they've been conditioned to think well here's how because again instead of looking at that woman as an object for your pleasure look at her as an individual look at her as someone's sister someone's mother someone's daughter someone's friend humanize her in your mind it doesn't mean listen if you you know choose not to wait until marriage have sex with that person that's that's your business but so often men look at women first as a sexual object not as an individual and as a result when a woman most of the time says hey you know what i don't want to have sex you know or i want to wait whatever a lot of men say all right well i'm moving on to the next if a woman does not want to have sex or share her body with you because she does not trust you she does not know you she does not love you that's a sign of a great woman not a woman that should be discarded wow and so as a man when you're single and you're discarding women because they don't want to share their body that's a warning sign to me hey about you that's right what's going on with you bro why are you on such a path for personal selfish lustful fulfillment that you are discarding potential women that could help make the difference in a positive way in your life wow so for any man it's about hey let me look in the mirror for a minute and just stop why because look at what's going on in the world there's so much news about you know the challenges that men are facing and why are so many men facing all these challenges because i believe most men have given themselves over to lust they've given themselves over to this selfish fulfillment where they want what they want whenever they want however they want it and as a result they become the sum total of what that lust makes them so as a man no man can turn a blind eye towards what's going on with men in the world so if anything allow what we're seeing in the world to then be a motivator for every individual who do i want to be am am i inadvertently living in a way where i may meet the same fate of some of the some of some of the same men that i'm seeing in the world right because it's not like oh point the finger oh look at them oh i would never become that wait a minute the moment any of us as men say oh i would never you might except that that's the way i feel because all of us have the same struggle all of us struggle between love and lust and the in the issue is getting control getting discipline getting mastery to the degree where i don't believe we could ever eradicate lust i don't believe that and that's the truth most women don't want to hear right but i believe that is the truth lust is in every man no matter who that man is no matter what faith will you no matter how faith it's it's not even a reflection of the woman in his life at all however as men when we learn to get control of it when we learn to put love in control of lust that's when we position ourselves to not allow that lust to destroy us a couple of things i want to ask from this yeah um you are a successful man in hollywood you've been married for how long now seven years old seven years two part question the first part is do you know any successful men in hollywood who are um not married and who have multiple partners do you see any of them that are successful in their career but also have that inner peace that you talked about a few minutes ago i don't see many successful men that that would live are living according to what you how you just outline that are uh that have the peace they might have the funds they have they have the fun they have the money the position all of that but i would not say that the men that uh fit the description that i've been privy have that peace where there's just a sense of of like okay you know what i'm cool i'm competent i'm here this is what it is a lot of times and i believe that if any man is really honest with themselves i don't believe the more women you have the more peace you get i think it actually more chaos more chaos think about it you know it's like it's a man at the end of our life when you think about how much time you spend you know with with women chasing women spending money on all those things you got to ask yourself what what do we have to show for it yeah you know and so for me prior to getting married i had asked the same question what would i have to show for all this and i wasn't like when i uh megan and i started dating that i was like all of a sudden ready to get married i wasn't but what i did was a friend of mine encouraged me don't be afraid don't allow your fear to mess this up afraid of what commitment marriage marriage all of it committed the unknown you know you were dating other girls before then you were having fun you were you know yeah but i was dating with intention you know i was dating saying hey yo here's where i am in life here's what i'm i'm looking to do so that there was no uh lack of clarity with anyone that was dating me where i was you know when i talk about this in the book it's so important i'll talk about for the the male side the female side for men it's important because what happens is lust makes us a part-time manipulator in a single sense what does that mean what does that mean it means that you're dating multiple women mo those women don't really know that there's as many other women as there are and they don't even know that you're not as serious as you seem to be when you're with them because your intention is for sexual desire sexual desire companionship in that moment whatever you're playing for long term there's no long term and at the same time there's no regard for their real feelings it's like this is a woman that i may date on tuesday here's someone i may date on thursday here's there's one a woman i may date on saturday night and none of them really know the other one exists so that's what i mean about not dating with intention so when you're dating with intention you're letting everybody know listen here's where i am here's what i'm doing very very important as a man i encourage any single man to if you really want to get become successful in life and success to me is nothing to do what happens in the world success is to me peace the inner world it's the inner world successes who is the person that looks back at you in the mirror and and there is where success starts and where it stops we see a lot of men who have uh public success but no personal success yeah and there used to be a time where that was okay but now real success starts you know with who's looking back in the mirror so i would ask any man if you are finding yourself dating multiple women from both women saying why i asked you to stop to ask questions why are you doing it and what is the real value that you're getting out of it do you find yourself with this unsatiable appetite that no one person can ever quench and as a result there's no peace within your spirit super important the second part of that is that if you find yourself saying hey you know what i am going to get more discipline here but i still want to explore okay explore with intention let the woman know what your intentions are so then they as an adult can make the decision if they want to engage with you that to me is what real uh honesty and transparency looks like right now for a woman if you're dating a man you've got to get out of the gray area you've got to get out of the gray area what does this mean that's right but that gray area is the area where you are most liable because in a relationship sense the one who has the knowledge the most knowledge has the most power and a lot of times men have more power because they know what they're really serious about what they're not and the woman that they're dealing with does not know that's a gray area he may text you all the time he may talk to you all the time you may go out on a date you may have met his parents but never has he told you we're together right well he's thinking about the commitment that's right yeah and so for a woman in that situation she's in a gray area and i encourage her in the book you've got to get out of the grave you got to ask clear direct questions wait for clear direct answers so that the man that you're dealing with you get a sense of are you are you dating anyone else are we committed are we exclusive what are your plans where are you going don't be afraid to ask the questions because so often when women come to me for advice they're afraid well what if i ask him these questions that he leaves well he's going to leave anyway that's good that's great right that's great i mean here's the thing i've i've dated women in the past who they're almost so honest in the beginning it's like oh my gosh you're like pushing me away because i'm like this is not where i'm at in my life like you're talking about kids in the first five minutes i'm like i just want to have fun right yeah yeah but then there's other women who are that honest where you're like wow i'm actually really interested in you i'm this is kind of scary that you're so honest yeah but i'm gonna like keep exploring because i like you and i'm that interested in you and i want to learn more yeah no i think i think the more honest you are in the beginning maybe you don't have to stay in five minutes five minutes i don't have five kids but i think almost the more truthful you can be earlier on the better because you can start to eliminate those people or know exactly where they're gonna be at well yeah you get a better sense of what's what and i also encourage women i i you know i say listen um have an observation period in dating what's that mean meaning don't just rush in to when you're dating somebody telling this particular man all the stuff you want all that like you don't even know if you're going to like this person right and sometimes it's like just on that like you said on that first date they're like telling oh here's what i want to do no no no observe yeah see if this man is even worthy of knowing what you think see if this man is even worthy of knowing your plans and what you how you see your future how will you know if he's worthy of knowing because you're going to spend time you're going to evaluate you're going to see who he is and this is why listen i know in this modern world what i'm getting ready to say is just uncommon but i don't care i'm going to say it this is why this is why it's so important as long i'd say in this book like i believe it's important to wait until marriage for sex but most people aren't gonna do that i say in this book at least wait until you're in a trusted committing loving relationship before you have sex why because when you have sex with someone and you do not know them and you do not trust them it becomes hard to really get clear on who they are and what they're about so important so as a woman the i'm like listen if i was a woman and i was dating oh you ain't getting none for me why because i don't know you i was i was at a facebook um uh on the book tour and uh this woman asked me a question and during our q a and so i said this to her man and she said she was asking me a question about sex and whatnot and i said okay i said so let me just give you an analogy let me okay how many women in the audience after a month of dating a guy would you give them the code to your phone um the code your passcode yeah and most of them said oh no there's no way are you kidding me i said okay now listen i'm not trying to get in your business i'm not going to judge you i said but in that same period of time in previous relationships how many of you in that same period of time have already given him your body hmm 90 i mean so if you don't trust him enough to give him the code to your phone why would you give him your body wow so this is when you know when you don't give a man your body right it gives you a better opportunity to observe and evaluate what does he really want is he even really interested potentially in who i am what i think or is he just interested in what my body can give him that's what i say about an observation period so that you can really see who this man is what he's about and really where he's going and i believe that women have a lot more power in dating uh than they realize but a lot of times they give it away power but they give it away they give it away to men you know like oh yo it's like no no hold on to that power evaluate make decisions even don't even if you want to be in a relationship super bad don't allow your flesh and your desire to then make you so desperate that you lower your standard to the degree where you're allowing men entry into your life that really are not qualified what if uh the woman just wants to have fun and they're not looking for a committed relationship either then you know what listen listen i'm not going to judge what consenting adults want to do if that's her point of view that's her point of view yeah you know and that just is what it is um and it's at a certain point you know when she's doing the same thing and want and wants a different result it'll require looking at what she's doing to get the result same pretty man you know when any man gets to a place where he's like you know i keep doing the same thing i get a different result maybe i have to change what i'm doing yeah i might be having fun but i feel soulless inside i feel like i'm not having true intimacy or exactly lacking the partnership that i really want totally totally having this fun [Music] what happens when we never deal with our emotions or feelings well you first of all get sick emotionally breathing everything right so we have just like we have a physical immune system we have a psychological immune system and we have to take care of our psychological immune system so it's just like you know what do you do to keep healthy with your body like you're going to eat right you're going to exercise you know you're going to do all the things that you want to do to take care of yourself you're going to get enough sleep those things also help your psychological immune system they're not totally separate the mind-body connection is profound but at the same time you know are you going to be around people who don't nourish you that's that that's going to hurt your psychological immune system that's going to make you sick are you going to stuff down your feelings that's going to make you sick and so how do we take care of ourselves and part of it is instead of trying to numb out your feelings because numbness isn't the absence of feelings numbness is a state of being overwhelmed by too many feelings wow and then not only do you not experience the feelings that you don't want to experience but you don't experience the other feelings you mute one feeling you mute the others you mute the pain you mute the joy so you're living in this state where you don't actually get to feel the range of feelings that make us human what is that state called i would say sick i was gonna say dead i mean i i feel like you can be alive but not living and that's what happens to people is that they're alive they're going through the motions they wake up every day but they're not really living their lives what's an assessment we could take for ourselves if someone's listening or watching to ask themselves how alive or how dead they are and if the people in their life closest are actually good for them or are hurting their psychological states right is there a questionnaire we could take like just off the cuff is there an assessment is there a few things we could ask ourselves yeah i mean i think that it has to do with a sense of vitality right which of course like vitality the word like life is right in there um when you wake up in the morning are you excited about what you're doing is there meaning in what you're doing do you feel connected to how you're spending your days because at the end of your life are you going to look back and say what did i do that was meaningful you know in maybe you should talk to someone in my book i there's a woman that i treat she's this young woman who goes on her honeymoon she's newly married she comes back and she has cancer and she says to me at one point she says why do we need a terminal diagnosis have a wake-up call right why do we need a terminal diagnosis to live our lives with intention why do we need why do we need that to really pay attention and i think that if we can keep the awareness of death on sitting on one shoulder and i don't mean in a morbid way or in a creepy way um it's it's not depressing it's actually again going back to vitality it helps us feel alive because life has 100 mortality rate and that's not for other people we like to believe that right and so the thing is that if we know that we have a limited time here i think we would pay more attention to what we're actually doing every day why is it so hard for people to pay attention fear and but they're they're like they feel like they're stuck sometimes for years right it's like i stay stuck in a relationship that's i know it's not right for me for years i stay in a depressed state for years i you know i stay in a job that i hate for years it's all based on fear well i think it is fear um you know i think it's fear of uncertainty this is going to sound strange but change is really hard because we cling to something that's familiar to us so even though we may know oh this would help me this would be a good change for me we don't do it because it's unfamiliar and so if you grew up with a lot of chaos if you grew up feeling sad all the time or anxious all the time that feels like home to you even if it's unpleasant or even miserable and she'll keep finding chaotic right recreating it yeah and so and so you know it was funny because my own therapist gave me this great analogy he said to me he said you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out but on the right and the left it's open right no bar so basically the prisoner is not in jail and that's what so many of us are like we feel like you're trapped we're not in jail we can change we can just walk around the bars but why don't we because with freedom the freedom to walk around the bars comes responsibility and if we're responsible for our own lives that scares us we feel like oh i don't know if i can do that i don't know if i'm competent enough to do that or now i'm to blame if things don't go right i can't blame it on everything else is this one of the reasons why inmates after a long time being in prison who get out go back into prison because they feel like they need to be back in that environment are there other reasons i think there are other reasons i think we don't give people the support when they come out um you know they the mental health issues that they needed to be treated for were whenever you know they never got that support then they come out and and they're back in the same situation where they don't have that community support why is it so hard for us to take responsibility for our own happiness i think that if you grew up in a household where you were seen and heard and understood those are the people who do take responsibility for their own happiness i think for people who felt like they were ripped off in their childhoods there's a part of them that's still in a fight there's a part of them that still wants that redo and so it's kind of like they're not aware of this but what they're saying is basically i will not change mom and dad until you give me the things that i did not get in childhood so they'll go find a partner that emulates their environment from mom and dad and try to change them so they well well right this is this is the irony of relationship right for those people who have not sort of worked through it um this is so common and i think all of us have this piece in us right because nobody had a perfect childhood so you what happens is people say okay when i'm an adult i'm going to pick a partner who really makes me feel nourished who really gives me all those things that i did not get growing up but what they don't realize is unconsciously they have this radar for the people who are who look very different from their parents on the surface but then once they get into that relationship it's kind of like uh oh this feels familiar right and so what they did was they're unconscious said when they were picking their partner hey you look familiar come closer even though in consciously they thought oh you're totally different from my parents i'm gonna this is gonna work out great but no they have radar for that if they haven't worked out the stuff that sort of their unfinished business there's this saying we marry our unfinished business we actually do marry our unfinished business so that is why it is so important as an adult to take responsibility and say you know what i am going to have to grieve this loss of what i didn't get and i'm going to have to work through this and assess where i am as an adult so that i pick people and surround myself with people who are healthy for me what if you've chosen someone that you love deeply but it's unconsciously your unfinished business is that the wrong person for you once you realize oh they're never going to change or is that a point for us to reflect back and say actually i need to heal the past accept this person who they are and be willing to flow within this relationship well what happens is so you married your unfinished business but so did they and so if you can both recognize that if you realize hey wait we have a lot of conflict in our relationship or we're really avoidant in our relationship or we don't feel connected in the way we want to feel connected that's a great opportunity for both of you to work out your unfinished business to heal together right and so that relationship could thrive if you both are willing to look in the mirror at yourselves and do the work yes that could be a really beautiful relationship and it can be very healing for both of you in fact it could potentially be the strongest bond ever if you both were able to go through that yeah but if you're unwilling to go through that then what you're going to be both people have right well both people have to be willing i mean that's the thing so it's like you may wake up one day and say oh wait a minute i have all this unfinished business and then your partner says yeah it's all you you're the problem in the relationship you know it's kind of like in couples therapy so often i'll see something like someone will say like you never listen to me and i will say how well do you listen to that right right it's always like if you're just yelling at someone all day are they gonna want to listen to you right right so you know there's this dance that we do in relationship and what happens is people are doing these dance steps and people become very they become very ingrained it's like oh here we go you can you can script out people's arguments you know exactly what they're going to start with one thing and then it goes back into many different things you're like and you know exactly how it's going to go and who's going to feel what and who's going to accuse the other person of what um and that's the dance and so if one person changes their dance steps the other person either is going to fall flat on the dance floor or they're going to have to change their steps too if they want to keep dancing and usually so we always say you can't change another person but you can influence another person how by changing your dance steps so so for example we like to say insight is the booby prize of therapy meaning you can people come and they'll be like oh now i understand why i keep getting into that argument with my partner and so then they go home and they come back the next week and i'll say well did you do something different when you got in that argument well no but i understand why i did so you have to be both vulnerable and accountable when you come to therapy how do we fight better when we are in constant review pattern every month or or every week it becomes an argument around something for whatever reason yeah it's a pattern yeah couples start to notice it how does one person or both people recognize and say okay i'm gonna change my dance steps and i'm gonna fight or dance better yeah the first thing is to notice sort of what what do you own in this what is your reaction so we have a choice every time someone presents us with something there's a there's a great quote in the book the viktor frankl quote where he says between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space lies our freedom to choose between stimulus and response so between an action happening and your response to the action so your partner says something it's a window of opportunity yes there's that space usually that space for us will look like a breath the breath is everything the breath really like don't breathe you're screwed if you need to take the breath or you will just respond it's sort of like we have this these neural pathways that are wired right and someone says something and you react not just to what that person in front of you is saying but it goes back to something that reminds you of something from a long time ago people who aren't even in the room are in that moment with you and so that's that neural pathway and so what you need to do is you need to take a breath it's like a big stop sign on that on that road that that's your neural pathway so hold up the stop sign you can even picture a stop sign in your mind stop breathe now you get to choose how do i want to respond to this do i want to respond in the way i responded the last gazillion times which has not worked out well or do i want to try something different so that's part one part two is perspective taking a lot of people who are in really highly conflictual relationships have trouble with perspective taking they can't imagine that the other person has a valid perspective now you might not agree with every piece of how they view this but there's some overlap between how this person views it and how you view it but you are not willing to see that mm-hmm and so i have this new podcast called dear therapist and on the podcast so much of what we do is we help people to take the perspective of the other person there's something that that you are not seeing right now why is that so hard for people to see someone else's perspective well two things one is because um you know that that unreliable narrator thing that we think that that we are right and we don't want to be told and so we what we hear when we say there's another perspective we're not saying you're wrong we're saying there's more to the story so there's a difference between their their perspective is valid as well is not saying your version is wrong we're saying there's more so people hear it though as you are wrong and the other part of it is that there's a lot of shame that people are sticking to a certain story because if they allow that other part of the story to come in the part that they're responsible for will probably come up and they feel a lot of shame so when i see individuals in therapy they come in and they tell me a story and they leave out the parts that they are embarrassed about the parts that they feel like that was not my finest moment like what give me an example like oh i screamed back or right yeah yeah like you know here's what happened or here's here's this is this is the situation and my my partner did this or my mother did this or my child did this or my boss did this whatever and they don't tell you these other details and they sort of trickle out later on yeah and they're very relevant to the story right but that's shame right and so you know that's why the therapeutic relationship is so important because you get to a point where you really trust the therapist and you're able to be really honest um about what happened how much does shame shape our stories oh so much i think that you know as humans we want to belong and what shame is about is i'm not going to belong i'm not going to be loved the greatest human need is you know how can we love and be loved and when you feel like there's something i did that people will look upon badly they might not like me if i tell them this that's just you know wired into us it's like the ego death to us it's like the emotional death if like if someone knew this about us they would not love me and i would emotionally die and i will be alone i'll be alone yeah yeah and we need other people i felt like this way for many years where i opened up about sexual abuse about seven years ago and for 25 years no one knew because i was so ashamed and i felt like if anyone knew how could they possibly love me yeah or accept me or how would anyone want to date me or my family how would they not disown me these were the stories that i was writing i was a bad editor yeah how does someone who's done something that they're not proud of in the past who's had something done to them that they're not proud of whatever they've been in a situation that they feel shame around how does someone start to process that shame to heal so that doesn't continue to run their life and keep them imprisoned yeah well i think they do what you did which is you started talking about it and i think you have to choose your audience yeah which is really important especially as you're just starting out so you want to make sure that don't tell your abuser who's the toxic relationship well you know i think you have to really choose someone who's safe and and and if you don't have those people you know i think a therapist is a really good place to start but i i do think that it's harder for men to talk about anything whether it's sexual abuse or even you know just sort of like the anything they feel vulnerable about and so men will come into my office and they will say to me at some point you know i've never told anyone this before and then women say that yes so so here's the thing women will say that they'll say i've never told anyone this before except for my mother my sister and my best friend right you're the only one you're the only one right right i told my book club you know whatever it is they've told like a few people but they feel like because women it's acceptable for women to talk about these things and so they feel like they haven't told anyone because they still feel like there's some degree of privacy around it men literally have told no one no one and they might even if they have like a great partner and they have close friends you know they have a great family whatever it is they feel like i cannot tell anyone because vulnerability for men in our culture is not okay even though we say that so this is you know women say i wish he would open up i wish he would right so i wish he would cry and be more sensitive but then when they are they're like i i need to be strong right now right so this is exactly what happens in couples therapy so i'll have two people sitting on the couch and i have a couple and say it's a heterosexual couple and the woman says to the man like i really want to get to know you i feel like we would connect so much more if you would just open up to me i want to know what's going on inside there right and he does and let's say he tears up let's say he actually starts crying in a way where like his body is convulsing right she looks at me like deer in headlights she's so profoundly uncomfortable and this is the thing that she was asking for so so what she'll say is i don't feel safe when you don't open up to me and i don't feel safe when you're vulnerable with me like there's a there's like it's a goldilocks it's like not too much not not too little but right in the middle that's how vulnerable you can be with me i've been saying this for a long time that i feel like this is one of the main things that hurts all intimate relationships yes when a person doesn't feel safe to share their emotions to the person that says they love them the most and actually makes them wrong for it or makes them less than or retracts their love when they're vulnerable so i don't know the solution for this besides saying this all the time and by besides saying ladies like if you want a vulnerable man who's emotional you have to accept him when he's emotional well not just accept but embrace i mean not that courage encouragement because it's so much harder for man in general in our society to be vulnerable based on what we've grown up with based on what we see that if you're not encouraging it consistently and and celebrating it almost why would you expect them to keep opening up when they have something they want to share if you're going to make them wrong for it well right so that's exactly what happens there's a there's somebody i write about in the book who um you know there's this tragedy that happens in the family and he feels like he has to be the rock for the family always right my wife she can cry about this she can be sad about this but if i break down i'm the thing holding everything up and that was just not true actually that was the thing that was making their marriage not work that was making him feel anxious and not sleep and and not function well right and that was the thing that got his wife to at a certain point saying like i can't be in this marriage if we can't connect but he thought he had to be the rock for the whole family he could not feel his feelings and instead what happened was when he finally said no actually this is tearing me apart too that's when they started healing that's when they started getting close to each other again what's the biggest mistake people find today when trying to find their love or find someone that they you know their soulmate what's the biggest mistake is it being yourself it's i i i think there's something of a sense of entitlement that most of us have uh or that most people have when they're going out to date where they somehow feel like they're just owed the love of their life that it shouldn't be difficult that um that they don't have to do anything that it's enough that they are just them you know it's that you know that there's i don't know if you've ever seen bridget jones but there's a there's a line in bridget jones where he'd uh forget his name colin firth i think it is he's he's looking at bridget and he's i think he says i love exactly how you are i love you like no changes nothing i i love you exactly how you are and it sometimes we feel like we're owed that and it kind of becomes an excuse again not lazy to grow not to you know i don't frankly i it doesn't really matter what you think you're owed in love no one cares i think it's the same thing with work and you know so many people are entitled and they think they're just getting a job yeah and so the biggest criticism i get all the time which i'm happy with as a criticism of my advice is well why do you need to do all of this stuff why can't you just you know go through life and and you know when the time is right you'll know but why do you have to do all of these techniques i'm happy with that criticism if you if you if that's what you think you're not my audience because my audience are the same people that go to a business seminar to make more money they're the same people that say you know what um if i want to start a business i might actually need to know what the hell i'm doing it's not enough to have confidence in life you have to have competence yeah you have to actually know what you're doing and and that's what a lot of people don't know in their love lives if you for example there's there's something i come i came to understand i was i remember once having a breakup it was the most painful breakup i've ever had i was really really in uh a bad way over it and a while later i spoke to this to this woman on the phone and i had said to her on the in a brave moment on the phone i said why did why did you want to break up because by the way you talked to the one you're dating yeah the the one that had later on the phone later like a year or two later it was less raw i was feeling a little more how long was the relationship for a couple of years okay wow and um uh and i was i was pretty caught up about it now the funny thing was uh to make a long story short she had actually done something i didn't like and that i thought was inappropriate and disrespectful and i remember going to her the next day and saying i think we need to break up during the relationship she did this year yeah and uh she then said to me okay that was when i knew she was breaking up with me it wasn't it wasn't you know when yeah you think you're breaking up with them no she was already doing it she was breaking up with me uh and it was what was so painful about it is that she was she didn't mind uh i was i thought she might get upset i thought no she didn't mind and that was the most painful part about it and i you shouldn't even fake it you know most women would think that they might i can't believe this but they're really i know no she looked like she was okay this is a good decision so i so i i remember a while later we were on the phone and we we became we're friends today we're very good friends in fact and uh i had said to her on the phone um why did we break up i said what what was it for you that i wasn't doing and i braced myself for the answer she said do you really want to know honest feedback and i said i literally thought to myself wait do i really want to know and i said i gritted my teeth and i went yeah i want to know she said um you were boring and wow it was so much worse than i thought it would be do you know what i mean like not not just like oh well you know it was just i was young and i was then you know wanted to be free no you were boring it was really cutting and i i remember resisting the urge to bite back and i said that wasn't boring right exactly i said no you're shut up idiot just you asked the question so now listen so i said why was i boring she said you she said when i first met you you were the most ambitious uh person i'd ever met and she said i never met someone with such an ability to decide they want something and then get it and she said it was so sexy she said but as we went into our relationship the more time went on the more that was all you were you were super ambitious you knew how to get what you want but it you were so one-dimensional you know it was all you did even in our free time you were just you're on the phone you're on your laptop you would talk about your business you were always talking shop there was never anything else you had to talk about we didn't do anything spontaneous we never went and had adventures it was just all one track and she said it got boring yeah i said wow she was right she was right there was nothing i could argue with and i realized something in that moment the thing that makes that one quality can make you really attractive right but it won't keep someone can make you get the person right it can make you sexy it can make you uh intriguing um mysterious right but it can even for a time make someone worship or idolize you one quality but one quality will not hold someone because the reality was there was a flip side to ambition which would have made it eminently more attractive and there are a few right if you pair ambition say with an ability to enjoy life now that person is really super sexy you you combine ambition with a sense of spontaneity for example adventure very very sexy yes ambition on its own is when you look at it from afar very very attractive you go women will say i want an ambitious man i like that but when they get up close if it's only one side to a coin it quickly becomes unattractive the uh someone i'm a big fan of or unfortunately has passed but christopher hitchens he um he once said about love the the challenges in not allowing your strengths to negate themselves wow and that's very powerful statement because my ambition was my greatest strength that also had the ability to be the thing that crippled me because what happens is when you get good at something and you get validation from it you want to keep doing it and it becomes if you're not careful a muscle that you that you train to the point of mutation and then every other part of you is is is not working is it has atrophied yeah so now uh you have a complete imbalance uh it's like a you know i remember working out at the gym once in my trainer i was doing pull-ups and was trying to work out my back my back was fine i could keep going and then all of a sudden my my forearms gave up while i was trying to pull myself up and i said this is so annoying we're trying to work my back but my four and my back's fine but my forearms have given up right he said you're only as strong as your weakest link if you're if your forearms aren't aren't there you're not going to be able to train your back as well as you could yeah so so here's the the point about this which i find very interesting about dating to your point of what's the biggest mistake people make apart from of course the entitlement it's over reliance on a key strength that they have come to uh rely on as their source of validation success uh confidence right over reliance on that i had come to over rely on essentially being ahead of the curve for my age yeah that was like the thing that i was always based my confidence on was i am way ahead of the curve for people my age my business is going great correct the people i grew up with in my age group are not where i am just still living at home guess what that loan is boring yeah it's boring and it doesn't make an interesting rounded sexy person the um but when you combine it with something else it becomes what i call unique pairing it's a bit like if i if i wanted to really get a woman attracted tonight not me but like send a guy out to get a woman attracted i could literally if he went in and he was a little cocky and teasing but in the right way not an arrogant obnoxious but just he knew how to rotate he knew how to play with her and then a couple of hours in later you know maybe it's getting late he comes out of the restroom and after being teasing and playful and silly he says you know what it's getting late um i called you a car um i don't want you walking outside and he says i have to go as well i have to get up early he takes her outside um he gives her a little kiss he says all jokes aside i've had the best night with you tonight i'll call you later this week puts her in the car car drives away that woman will be going oh crap i like this guy now the reason wasn't because he was a gentleman and it wasn't because he was cocky and teasing it was because he was both yeah it's the and if he does just one thing it's not interesting enough because you can replace the cocky guy like that women know that yes they can go out tonight and meet a cocky guy in hollywood any night of the week they can go out the next they don't even have to go out the next night they can turn to their left and meet another one straight away by the way they even though people complain about chivalry is dead you can go out and meet a gentleman you can go and meet lots of nice guys that's all they are right incredibly boring women were never too lazy they don't hold a woman right so but now you find like what seems to be a good man but with an edge that's a unique pairing and that's someone that becomes not an attraction but an addiction oh and there's a and there's a big big difference so i i believe that we will actually i believe these pairings already exist within us but we've over trained certain muscles we've over trained certain qualities that we've gotten used to as habit yeah for some people it's being funny for other people is being intellectual and they're always they're the person that knows everything about everything they've read every book they can always quote so and so uh for others it's uh uh being seductive that's the thing they got really good at so they're really good at you know getting someone into bed or or getting someone sexually attracted but they're never the person you want to eat pizza with the next day you know so it's like it's finding those combinations that make you go oh my god the person i was with last night they were this and they were this it's the and the and is where i wonder what else they could do exactly and by the way that's what makes it so hard i i say this to everybody if you want to know why you found it so hard to get over a certain x look for the unique pairing because it had multiple things there was there was some unique pairing that made you feel addicted like they were difficult to replace oh and and that's what scares us the more unique pairings you have the more you become a rare bird in the dating marketplace right right and and when you become rare people get really terrified of of losing you and that's always the case whenever you think of someone you've lost and you think like your heart aches for having lost them like months and months yeah you it's because you go it's not because you go they were good in bed it's because you go they were good in bed and they made me laugh like like i never find that nice to my parents and i took them home and she was a sweetheart to my like there's those moments where you go god i can't find this person again and that terrifies you so again to be more positive about it be the person that has the unique pairings that other people are terrified of losing yeah you know i like this because i feel like well i don't feel like but the statistics show that the divorce rate is up higher than ever right now right isn't it something like 50 percent i don't know i hear these no i i hear 50 banded around how accurate it is but it seems like people are getting married multiple times uh and they're easy to get out of relationships they're you know and i'll speak for myself you know i am a lot of fears about long-term commitment you know most of my relationships are a year um maybe longer but usually about a year and then i'm like either bored or i get scared because i have my own walls and i still get to grow and learn for sure i'm curious why do you think so many people bail in relationships and why do you think so many people are getting divorced more than ever now oh man that's a big question i um well there are i think there are a number of things i can have a stab at this i i think firstly there is less of a stigma now than there has ever been about divorce it's okay now right right no you know and it is certainly there are parts of the world where it's not and there are certain religions and cultures where it's not but but certainly less than ever let's speak in america at least right there's less of a stigma yeah about divorce we don't feel like complete failures in the same way that we might once have or we wouldn't there would have been a time when we would have been outcast from society yes for it so there's that um i think there's also a great sense of entitlement these days where people feel like they're owed and you know marriage is you've met the right person so it's supposed to all feel great and when it doesn't feel great and when it's not all working there must be something wrong with this person not with me not with the amount of effort i'm investing into this relationship there must be something wrong with this person ah it turns out they're not the one after all i thought they were but they're not the search continues so so the entitlement has people believing that it it shouldn't be effort and and that's a very dangerous way to think of relationships it's very if you really want to see who someone is in their relationship um talk to them about sex and and passion and and desire in their long-term relationship and you'll get some very heated answers because some people will will uh will say it's absolutely paramount we you know you have to maintain that passion you have to find new ways to excite each other with me and my partner we're always searching we're always exploring each other we're always trying to figure out like what's going to turn you on tomorrow what's the like how do i how do i do something that's that you didn't predict or how do i get you to know me a little less so that you get desire again you know whatever it is other people and i've had hosts on tv get very very uptight and and upset over this issue and it's usually they're over playing their hand when they do they'll say well matt it's different when you're in a marriage when you're when you have kids when you're in those situations it's different right you you don't you you can't just think of it like that you don't did matt you think other things become more important and and i always know who they are in their relationship when those things happen because it people i think don't go into relationships with a healthy view of what is required over the long term and what is required uh well there's a there's a woman who is a great authority on this called esther perel and she talks about the difference between love and desire and i'm a big fan of her work and i think she articulates it very very well that in relationships you have to have both love and desire love isn't enough love is the the thing that makes me want to get close to you when i when i when i feel things for you i want to know your mind i want to know everything there is to know about you i want to know what you're thinking i want to know what you're doing tonight i want to know who your friends are i want to become friends with them i want to get close to your mama like all these things that's love the desire to almost become merged but desire exists in the space between two people so you feel desire when there's a void and when there's some mystery and when you're still getting to know someone so desire ironically is the thing that ends up creating love because desire is like i want to get close to you because i don't have you and then when i get close we feel feelings of love but not desire now right so how do you keep it it's like a year and that's a great question and it's it's a it's a big one um i think there are many answers and i think they change depending on the couple so you've got to so what you're saying at first before you answer is you've got to have both love and desire throughout the relationship in order for it to be a successful one yeah in order to maintain in order to satisfy your needs along the way because the the i think many people get divorced because not because there's a lack of love i mean sometimes that's true you know sometimes it's true that two people don't don't give each other enough love they don't act as a team um and and there are problems with that right like people spend too much time with a lack of love a lot of people is because of lack of desire interesting um that lead that create you know these weird um moments in relationships where sometimes people cheat uh or they maybe it's not going as far as cheating but they realize that they're having all of these thoughts that they're not proud of um maybe they just have to leave because they think there's something wrong with them because they're bored um you know i got a question on the today show recently i mean i mean it was on the today show recently and me and kathy lee you know got heated over this issue because you know there was a guy on there whose question was my kids have just gone off to university um how do you know when we're now basically what he was saying is the kids have all left so now it's just me and my wife so how do me and my wife now keep keep it fresh and there's a great quote by uh proust when he says i think it's the journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes it's very interesting when applied to a relationship because you're not seeing a new landscape you're seeing the same landscape over and over and over and over every month so you better get good at seeing with new eyes right now the landscape of course can the landscape can change because that person their job is to be to make themselves less predictable um and you don't do that by like playing hard to get with your partner necessarily but what you do is you you grow you develop new skills you learn new things and you develop yourself in ways that keep your partner guessing about you because they're like oh my god i have to keep up yeah i have to keep up with this because they keep evolving yes and that in itself you can start to desire your partner more because you feel like you know them a little less not because they're now hiding things from you but because they're developing and when someone develops and grows you're like oh my god i don't know this side of you i need to learn it and it sparks attraction again so there's there's that whole thing but i said to this guy you know i said i know everyone's gonna tell you now your kids have gone off to university now you have all this time to spend together i said but the problem is you're gonna have nothing to talk about because you've said it all you've said it all and you've been together this whole time so it's nothing new right i said i'm gonna give you a kind of strange piece of advice i think you should use this time to spend some time apart wow like go like she go on holiday and you go on holiday and then come back and tell each other about it you know do have have that some space so that when you come back together there's a little mystery to it you know that this won't it will be scary and this is this is why people get very emotional about this and they get upset because they're like what do you mean get to know my husband less what do you mean like spend time apart we we're supposed to be like this the whole time but what they don't realize is a you never know your partner as well as you think you do so the idea that you're like this and you know everything about them is a complete illusion um and secondly you doing that is death to the relationship so if you really care and if you really are a team you'll be able to trust each other but you'll be able to give each other space to create that desire again otherwise you're suffocating each other you're yeah absolutely so again i think that's another another thing that people don't anticipate when they're in the feelings of love and desire all mixed together early on and they decide to get married um they they don't anticipate that over the long term and i think many of us are out there making promises that we cannot keep 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 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 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 marriage we are such high speculation we 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 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 the 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 talked 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 see everything 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 disregulate 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 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 um 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 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 intense 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 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 have 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 gonna go through the pains the sufferings the challenges the you know the all of that so can 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 how many values in common do you need to have with your partner life partner because the important ones it's not how many but there are a few of them that are really that are really important which ones would you say make your break based on your experience i think i'm not going to say them in order of importance but one of them that really matters is your relationship to others if you are a person that values relationships that sees the presence of others in your life as central and you are with somebody who does not want community or does not know how i mean i'm talking not about what they would like to learn through you but their value is you do things alone you live alone you rely on yourself you you know you don't bring people over to the house i have a couple i just spoke with yesterday you know and he loves to have people over and she just nobody should come over to the house her space the whole thing and i'm thinking wow this is a tough one it's not just about the how it's his whole life is about being with people and her whole life is about not being with people necessarily that's not how she experiences it now the question is is she drawn to more of what he has to offer and is he drawn to more of what she if these are totally more yeah then then okay different values come together and they they mix and match but if you have these two separations like that so that's one one of the beautiful questions i ask in how is work is were you raised for autonomy or were you raised for loyalty were you raised for self-reliance or were you raised for interdependence which one would you say for me was that self-reliance mean what you have nobody will ever help you as well as you can help yourself you only have yourself to count on don't trust people you're on your own buddy or raised for interdependence loyalty you're never alone there's people around you you owe others others are there for you relationships is what makes you i think i was both based on like circumstances correct the circumstances made you reliable because you were alone with mom but the messaging was you have me yeah yeah of course okay so i think both i think that question is a fundamentally interesting question okay that people can ask themselves when they partner in business and in love raised for self-reliance or loyalty yeah okay interdependence are you part do you see yourself as connected to others and it's your connections that give you a sense of anchoring meaning relevance importance it all of that or do you see yourself as fundamentally on your own i think travel curiosity you often will have a complementarity between one person who is curious and eager to discover and goes on you know and then another person your question about to be alone or doesn't want to travel once doesn't want but it's also likes comfort likes repetition likes the familiar i think the religious values if you have a person who you know those those matter a great deal um children do you want family or do you not want family if you you know if you want a family then make sure that you find someone who wants a family what do you what are you doing what are you gonna do try to convince some you know now i don't think you have to have the same values on everything i think you have to have a similar outlook on life which is a vision like exactly the same as when you a vision do you you know do you want to own a home do you think that economic achievement is important do you want to live in an extended family you think that living intergenerationally really is important and you have somebody else who says you know i don't want your parents over you know do you do you want to live in more than one place you know i think these are essential you know money feelings or emotions religious beliefs attitude toward life it's not a specific value about something it's a value is a cluster of things it's a cluster of importance of systems of meanings that's a value it's and you may not find someone with everything that's the same but someone with a similar mindset is what you're saying a husband of mine with whom i am for more than three decades who had never left the u.s when i met him really i never knew such a person existed coming from europe that was unheard no i lived in the states he was american i came from europe in europe you travel everywhere all the time even if you have nothing you work one month you get the money and then you go to the next country which is two hours away and so i traveled outside he had never been outside of the us yeah he will always tell me he'd been to the virgin islands but you know for the right and i thought oh my god how does one you know who is such a person but i knew it was because of the circumstances of his life and that if he could he would and he was intensely curious if you just said oh he's never traveled then you misinterpret you don't want to just look at the manifest thing of you know you want to say and behind this is there someone who would actually like that who just hasn't had the opportunity and he's curious and just says let's go so don't get fooled just by what you see find out what is the belief behind it the aspiration the longing the interest and then you get a sense of what is the value do you think it's uh let me go back to expectation do you feel like we should lower or should diversify expectations or what did you say the word was calibrated calibrate expectations or should we be finding someone that can reach that expectation that we want no i think it's just impossible i think you need to calibrate calibrate always calibrate you calibrate you constantly will be disappointed do you know a single relationship where you haven't been disappointed yeah okay i mean disappointment is which can lead to suffering it's part of a relationship the minute you have a relationship you have an expectation that expectation means that you want something love closeness intimacy partnership you know business affiliation you name it it creates dependence the moment you have an attachment you have dependence that dependence means that you have power or i have power if i expect something from you i confer power on you you have power over me i have power over you by definition there will be moments when that power doesn't go in the direction that i want and i'll be disappointed i'll be disappointed is there a single child that didn't have a disappointment from their parents it doesn't exist this this idyllic thing you're talking about it doesn't exist the next thing is what do you do with that disappointment hey can i come tell you i'm really disappointed you let me down i thought we were in this together i trusted you and you say i see your point or do you say what the hell are you talking about you're just inventing this you're delusional none of the you know and everything in between that's how you do a relationship it's really based on the repair it's not based on the it's how we heal the disappointment yes it's how you repair all these breaches moment by moment you come back you know and the repair is not i am so sorry you prepare me sometimes be hey do you want a glass of water or hey did you see this article in the newspaper john gottman is this very interesting thing about that he says the repair is not that you come and you do a mayakulpa is that you do what he calls bids for connection you show the other that they still matter i brought the newspaper in at the time when we still had newspapers that was one of these examples you know i brought the paper in like i think of you i'm pissed at you you just annoyed me we just had a spat but i but you still don't care about you i still care you're still in my life yeah i respect you so it's how we repair disappointment on a daily or weekly or monthly basis minutes sometimes the is the success of the relationship and that means also how you come and you say you take responsibility yes i think i actually think that taking responsibility is the ultimate freedom i've i messed up i shouldn't have done this you know can i do that you know it really is being accountable mm-hmm what if you're instead of blaming the other whatever what if it actually in that moment wasn't it doesn't matter it wasn't you don't have to agree with anything i didn't mean to it wasn't my intention yeah so you know we are going to sleep a lot but it's about just saying it and for that you have to it's about saying it and for that you have to be able to see that you're a flawed person can be accountable without that becoming a major source of shame and i'm terrible it's a different thing between saying i messed up and i messed up so you've been married for seven years yeah together for eight nine years yeah yeah yeah yeah about yeah a little over eight eight plus years you know there i there's always those people who say gosh these perfect couples online they always have perfect videos they're always like amazing together there's never any challenges you know it's the person who's not in a relationship or went through a bad divorce there's like uh they just hate watching people who look perfectly you're like how could they be so perfect they've got to have some challenges yeah yeah yeah yeah could you share maybe the biggest challenge you face while being married yeah that you're open to sharing sure sure yeah i think either as yourself or as a coach sure sure you know i think the biggest challenge of being married is you know you're taking these two individual entities yeah different people different people different thoughts different expectations different experiences different realities and you're consistently constantly trying to merge the two into one and that is one of the hardest experiences in life period you know even in physics when two atoms come together there's there's fusion there's there's tension there's heat there's friction pressure there's pressure there's conflict and it's the same thing when two people are coming together so in marriage you know it's that same thing of that consistent negotiation of like okay my thoughts versus sometimes her thoughts versus our thoughts and what's good for us what's good for the marriage what's just good for me what's good for her so there's this consistent dialogue and debate and dance around trying to find the sweet spot and i think that's one of the beauties of marriage is that it's constantly challenging uh us to become our best self and to expand who we think we are right you know marriage is really about compromise and and okay how do we find the common ground here and where is that and also as a man leading in love you know one of the challenges sometimes in leading in love is like man okay i want to say this but you know what uh that's not i shouldn't say that right okay how do i how do i get my attention across in love and that is hard so i would say one of the hardest things in marriage is just the coexisting you know and and living together living together and and and and also it's like finding that common ground of the things that she wants to do the things that i want to do and the things that we then commit to do together and uh there's no rule book on how to do it right um but this is where the love comes in and so like even when people see us on social media you're like oh man i think what you're seeing is even in the midst of the challenges you're seeing the reality of what's really there which is oh these are two people that genuinely love each other even if you're going through adversity or challenges oh yeah yeah yeah totally totally i mean i think that that what you see or anyone that sees us in on social media some moments i think what's coming through is that is the truth the truth is that that love is really there um but even in the midst of that love you know we still cultivate still coexisting and negotiating and what's right and what's not and all those things happen all the time really all the time oh yeah but because you know you love you know i know i love her and she loves me and we are in love it's what allows us the environment to still work through so many different things on any given day you know what's the thing that you believe you can improve to get to the next level individually for the marriage to thrive even more yeah you know i think where i can improve you know i think it's the area where all men struggle communication really yeah you're this excellent communicator speaker executive movie producer author writer i don't know freaking pastor you know you are the communicator yeah so if if there's a struggle for you it's like what are the rest of men we're screwed you know it's like you're the best communicator there is the rest of men have no chance but there's but there's a difference between communicating publicly and then communicating personally you know so the public communication is actually the easier communication it's easy for you to write the books oh yeah that's that's i mean it's not don't get me wrong it's there are still difficulties but in terms of the interpersonal communication that's an area where i absolutely want to get better for sure for sure and what i'll tell you is writing this book has really helped a lot it has helped me tremendously um work on that you know and not being afraid to be honest and not being afraid to speak my truth and not being afraid to say what i'm thinking and doing it in love and and it's been hugely cathartic and and very liberating because as i was saying we first sat down you know so it it astonishes me how how little we really operate in truth wow it astonishes me how little real communication there is in a relationship or or even a marriage for that matter or to yourself or to yourself because a lot of times we feel things but we suppress i don't want to think that about myself not to think about it well guess what any suppressed thought does not go away and persist the only way to get a suppressed thought to go away is to acknowledge that it's there hey you know what i'm feeling this i don't want to feel it but it's here so now that i'm acknowledging it i have a question what am i going to do about it but if i don't acknowledge that it's there guess what it's only going to get bigger it's only going to get worse so what i've been learning is the more i communicate and the more i'm honest and the more i'm um truthful and the more i work on those things the better i become as a person and i think that also lends itself to the marriage and the healthy the marriage becomes do you believe that you can over communicate in a relationship yes i i this is and i'll answer it this way without a doubt you can so um when i'm making a movie so like my new movie is called breakthrough it's a true story of a mother who prays her son back to life after he dies falling through a frozen lake and chrissy mess from this is uh stars as the mother and so every and i do a lot of true stories you know one of the last two stories i did was miracles from heaven with jennifer garner and so whenever i'm developing a true story and i sit down with the real person or the family that the movie is based on i say this very thing i say listen i'm excited to tell your movie i'm excited to bring it to the world i said i want to be really clear about something there's a difference between the truth and the facts i said the the facts are for the documentary the truth is for the movie so i'm going to help develop a script and produce a movie that will tell the truth of your story but if you want every fact to be told that's where you can write a book or go get a document a documentary mate because the movie is to try to articulate the truth so when it comes to communication i think it's important to articulate truth but sometimes when you're dictating every fact that can feel like over communicating people want to know the essence of what you're feeling but you know it's not like okay so at five o'clock i did this and then you know that's when it's like wait it's just too much information yeah just tell me the truth the truth the truth is like you know what i'm really happy right now you know and the reason why i'm happy i had a great day or you know what i'm really sad right now and the reason why i'm sad i had a bad day that's the truth over communicating can sometimes be over communicating so many different facts and so that's how i articulate that and i think that anybody wants to know the truth but not everybody always wants to know every uh every detail when someone feels like they found the one and i've heard this a lot like i know this is the one i or i thought they were the one and then it didn't end up working out and they want to get married they've decided marriage is for them they want to be life partners what are a few of the conversations that they should have to not know for certain but know for better certain that this is the right decision this partnership is the right decision to move forward in a long-term committed relationship as opposed to just maybe the infatuation behind it or the initial connection or the attraction what are a few questions they should be asking each other that maybe they haven't asked yet to know whether or not they're setting themselves up for that successful long-term relationship okay number one how do you envision your role in marriage all right people don't go in finding out what the expectations are before they get married they have this assumption that we're just going to transition from how we are in a relationship to being that way in america no no no no because a lot of times things change and and the level of expectation raises now in marriage you also have some people who may think for example you may have a man out there who thinks okay my job is to court you when we're boyfriend and girlfriend when we're married when we're married i'm gonna do all that work anymore now i'm your husband i've given you the ring satisfy me make me happy you gotta find that out because you're setting yourself up for failure if you don't realize he thinks he gets to take time off now that he's married you or he may think as long as i'm paying these bills don't ask me for anything else you got to find out so we need to ask what do you should be asking that yeah both of them should be asking what how do you perceive your role in marriage what are your expectations from me in marriage let's find out what we need what we're expecting from each other number two making sure our values are aligned all right so whether that be spiritual whether that be even financial values whatever those things are let's make sure we're on the same page about it and if we're not in the same page are these things we can balance out and work out all right so for example if let's look at it from a financial perspective if i'm a very frugal man yes and this woman is a spender i have friends in this situation and it's not good exactly and i'm sure they need to talk about it in advance you want to talk about these things and say okay how do we view this what are your what are your expectations as a spender are you someone who thinks well i gotta be able to spend some free money every month i gotta go shopping every month what is it let's come to an agreement beforehand that we're both comfortable with but let's understand what we're walking into here all right again we don't talk about these things we just assume oh because she's not asking for money now she won't ask for money later that's not necessarily true let's find out what are we expecting do our values align in marriage um i definitely think number three sexual expectations i think that needs to be discussed and understood um and again it's all about compromise if a compromise can't be found so it's not saying okay well i expect it four times a week right you know he or she says two times a week and now we're just going at it no well then maybe we go with three times a week yeah but we make sure the compromise is something that we can both be happy with don't when you compromise on something that you're not going to be happy about you're not compromising you're sacrificing and those sacrifices can be good in some instances not when it's very important to you or is going to be important enough that it would cause you to wander if you're not getting it never sacrifice something that's going to make you want to look at someone else in your marriage all right so if you need three times a week to be happy and satisfied make that very clear don't agree to two yeah and now you're entertaining other people because you never set that expectation another expectation as we talked about earlier with attraction is how we keep ourselves up physically i do think what if i just gained 60 pounds in seven years and is that okay since we're married now listen people need to be honest so like i tell some men if you can say you know what if my wife gained 60 pounds i don't care i'm cool with it and you're going to love her with the same energy and desire that you did 60 other pounds ago great but if you can't maintain that desire that passion 60 pounds left you need to make that known now you can't be afraid to say well that sounds too shallow oh so would we rather be shallow now or have a disastrous relationship later have you cheating on your partner because you weren't willing to be honest in the beginning all right same and women too because the epidemic that's happening is women are less honest about their attraction needs so to speak all right really so whenever we talk about attraction letting yourself go i think people automatically think of the woman letting themselves go but a lot of men have let themselves go and have fallen far from what he looked like when they first got married but she's not always being as honest and straightforward about that one reason may be because she doesn't want the pressure on her so that's that's one issue right there or she may be afraid of his ego and and think it's too fragile exactly and doesn't want to say anything but again if you can't maintain the same passion and desire with that fall off you got to be honest about that so he understands because what happens is this so let's just use this example he lets himself go he lets himself go the sex falls off all right and the sexes fall out because she's not as attracted to him anymore but she's not being honest about it now when she does say anything about whether it's his weight or whatever the case may be he's gonna think you're just making excuses you're just trying to give a reason not to have sex rather than embracing it as this is the reality of what's holding us back however if we had this conversation from the jump and you were honest about this then i always knew this would be an issue not when you bring it back up it's gonna be like yeah you did tell me wow it just happened so now it's gonna be easier for me to embrace that and actually do something about it and have the recognition and awareness about it because you've already talked about it exactly you do a lot of these events and workshops for you know hundreds of women at a time are women opening up in these experiences when you're connecting with them and saying yes i do lose the attraction like appearances are important to me or or is it not as important and you're from the events that you've done with the women you've talked to what is the feedback on appearance and looks so i will say this when it comes to appearance looks and sex women aren't as vocal and transparent in a group of people really yeah but one-on-one with you one-on-one different story so same thing like using the sex example if i ask a group of women are you getting orgasms regularly there's gonna be women in there who lie because they don't wanna feel inadequate they don't wanna be the woman who doesn't raise their hand and say yes i'm giving it good so they're going to be hesitant or not know how to answer it but if i ask in private now i'm going to get miserable real true yes and now she's going to be very clear about loss of attraction lack of sexual satisfaction and all these things so that's why people have to be careful because i think sometimes we're assuming these issues don't really exist because we're not hearing it in that group setting don't be fooled some women just they feel more comfortable privately expressing those things and i've heard it enough times to know this is real and again you just have to even if you haven't heard it enough times pay attention there's a reason why we're seeing people fall off in marriage there's a reason why we're seeing this disconnect and even when it comes to infidelity there's a great focus on men who've cheated but there's a lot of women who've cheated a lot of women and it's not always for emotional reasons it's for sexual ones too so again my my thing is not to sit here and say well it's about who does work it's about okay how do we fix this how do we make this better and we have to accept that yes there are contributing factors to why we see failed marriages why we see infidelity why we see disconnects in our relationships let's address the underlying issues and be honest about it so we can get this on the right track wow are there any um relationships that you're aware of that uh have open relationships that are successful or do you think it's very hard because more and more with the burning man scene and all these people exploring these things what's your thoughts on you know open relationships or you know being together but also having multiple partners so i'm gonna be honest um i i'm very skeptical of open relationships now i don't want to sit here and say it's impossible for it to be successful because i haven't met everybody and i haven't studied it enough but i have studied it to a certain extent and from what i have found is again a lot of open relationships stem from one the perception that one person can't fulfill me and since one person can't fulfill me why not have more than one all right and to me find the person who's experienced that deep and genuine connection they don't have that perception because they had a moment in their life where they met someone that they thought this could be it i could put my all into this and i would be happy with this one person if you have an experience that connection of course there's a natural progression to thinking well maybe it's not going to work with just one can i entertain multiple if i can even handle multiple the other thing is i do think it also stems from a lack of successful monogamy and when i say a lack of successful monogamy i don't necessarily mean that they weren't able to maintain monogamy it's like okay if i get in this monogamous relationship and now i get cheated on or i've had multiple relations where i've been cheated on i may start to think what's the point of trying to be monogamous i'm gonna work anyways exactly why not just get an open relationship which one allows me to not be so vulnerable to one person i now have more emotional control and what you'll find in a lot of situations is there's still somebody running that show and what i mean by that is one of the people are running the show exactly and they're running it in a way that it's protecting them all right so i met a woman one time she was into polyamory and she said well her ideal polyamorous relationship was a man and a woman but they're not allowed to have other people all right so it's like you're trying to control this environment for your sake all right for your protection so that means there's something deeper going on here so to me i i just tell people when it comes to open relationships if you really believe that's your thing fine i'm not here to tell people that they can't live their life that way but i just want you to make sure you've healed from everything first if you heal from everything and you still feel like this is for you do your thing do your thing but you might be surprised what's going to happen when you uncover it and address some of these past traumas and issues you may not be so so inclined to want to be in this open relationship anymore and again i would still argue that if you meet that person you have that amazing connection with it changes the game right and it will it can completely throw you for a loop because i've seen people who were once into over relationships and completely shipped to monogamy because they met that person it was like i never thought this could happen but it's here and i want it i'm going for it wow that's powerful insight what about in a relationship that's you've been together for a long time we've been married together for a long time and it just feels like it's not working and you're talking about divorce and both of you aren't happy you've got the kids you've got the home you've got the lives together and both of you aren't happy right and you've like addressed this and talked about it you've tried different things they haven't worked maybe is there a way to rekindle those three things and find that connection again maybe maybe you've lost that attraction and that balance uh is that even possible in these times or is divorce the only way to try to then go find true happiness or connection somewhere else if a true connection ever existed in that relationship then it can be fixed but that's the key did it ever really exist and we've got to examine that because again yeah many people have been living off the fantasy of their perception of things what they wanted to believe it was and and wanted to hold on to this feeling of being in love but in reality they were involved in an unhealthy attachment to this individual so we have to go deeper and find out is that there so if the connection was there yes we can work on everything else we can get things on track it's going to cause it's going to create a lot of uh deeper emotional discovery so to speak as far as finding out okay why is there a disconnect now how do we fall off of track how can we now correct these specific things because there's very specific things that need to change are we both willing to put in that work all right and if if both sides are willing to do that then it absolutely can work now if there was no connection you had divorce you get a divorce yeah the vote sooner than later i'm a man of god and i would love for everyone to be able to stay married right but even when people have been convinced that you get married you stay married forever this even if it's a religious thing or you feel like the pressure of society like here's why despite those things you don't stay married especially when you have kids so so many people stay married because of the kids right but if you can't create a positive environment at home you are damaging the kids worse than you would in divorce divorce isn't in my opinion the greatest struggle for the child it's the it's lacking the understanding of what just happened here so if you've been feeding your kids all these years that mommy and daddy love each other and everything's all good despite our this month why are we gonna divorce exactly so now one day you wake up we're getting divorced the child is confused and the thing is we're not honest with the kids about why this happened what went wrong we're not saying yeah you know what we knew a long time ago we weren't best for each other we're not giving them the honest truth for them to learn and not make the same mistakes exactly what the child now thinks is you can't trust love wow you can't trust marriage because you can love each other and one day now it's over and now they become dysfunctional or they now have dysfunctional relationships because their skewed perception of things because they lack clarity in understanding what just happened here but going back to divorce versus staying together again what a child needs more than anything is a positive loving environment if you can achieve that together great if you can't you are better off apart wow because when you speak to adults now adults who are struggling today grew up in dysfunctional households and it didn't matter if it was a one parent or two parent household i felt advanced exactly dysfunction is dysfunction yeah and we pick up on these things no one is that great of an actor that they're hiding it from their child the child sees the problem feels it feels it exactly and then you don't even realize you neglect the child in certain ways because you're dwelling in your own issues your own uh struggle there are women right now who have mommy issues or they have what i call i don't want to be my mother syndrome where they saw their mother allow herself to be treated poorly abused suffered through a horrible marriage and the woman is like i don't want to ever be that and now because she's holding on to that she either becomes her mother or creates other issues not trying to be her all right so it still creates a negative cycle of dysfunctional relationships all stemming from we stayed longer than we should have we try to hold on to something that we can't work my thing is this even for those who are spiritual if you're gonna say we're not supposed to get divorced because of god well god didn't say act of fooling the marriage at the same time like what's the point together exactly how are you glorifying god or your spiritual beliefs by staying in a negative marriage for the sake of staying you're defeating the purpose the purpose is to have a healthy happy union to raise healthy happy children if we can't achieve that together it's time to go i mean i wish it could be different but that's just the reality of the world we live in because too many of us have made the wrong decision in who we married and we have to accept that i rather you accept that now go through your healing process and both you can find your happiness and learn how to coexist as our co-parents and again creating a positive environment in that co-parenting relationship because i don't want you to be co-parents and still be dysfunctional exactly again defeating the purpose all right i want you to get away from each other so you can find happiness not be more negative yeah heal move forward yeah exactly be happy be happy for them if they found someone else i know that's tough for a lot of people but be happy if they're at peace you find your peace let the children see happy healthy relationships not just with other people within yourself stop showing them a miserable father or mother they see it and they hold on to resentment i can't tell you how many oh i won't say every but i want to say 90 of clients that i've seen and i would argue that if you spoke to any therapist or coach out there the majority of people have issues stemming from their parents growing up in that household yeah or their environment exactly their parents or their environments yeah exactly and it's just always a dysfunctional relationship relationships is the backbone of society when we allow that to be as dysfunctional as it is right now that's the reason why we have all these problems yeah we fix that man this world becomes a hundred times better place to live easily more loving more peaceful more enjoyable happy people around doing horrible negative things all right exactly when do you when should people uh you know when do they know that okay we just need to work on things in our marriage our relationship like not every marriage is going to be perfect all the time and happy like there's going to be some dysfunction or challenges or issues that arise hopefully you've addressed all those things but let's say you've set expectations early you both understand these things before you got married like you communicated everything and you're aligned to a certain vision for your marriage five years goes down the line and it seems like things are getting worse and worse maybe expectations change maybe values change who knows what it is when do you know like okay it's getting too far or we should stay in this relationship when should we get divorced or should we should keep trying to me the first sign that we have problems is that when whatever is going on in our marriage is affecting me in a way that i can't be the best husband or wife i need to be we got a problem that's step number one i think what's happened is we've normalized this function too much we've normalized this idea that we're going to all have problems yeah but we all have problems because we don't learn how to work through that interesting because we have dysfunction in individual dysfunction that we have not processed and resolved that's the reason why this function is so common it's not healthy though like i've heard some people say well arguing is healthy in a relationship no it's not no no disagreement is acceptable but one yeah each other is not good exactly i just watched the will smith and uh jada the red table talk of will smith like opening up about their marriage i don't know if you've watched this yet i haven't watched the i think i watched it last night it's actually really powerful what he said uh jada i guess when they first started like dating or whatever at one point she like raised her voice at him and like swear to him or did something where she made him look foolish in front of other people and he took her into the other room and said can i speak with you for a minute privately took me to the room and said i can't be with someone who's going to raise their voice yell at me or swear at me it just doesn't work for me and it's going to put me into a shell like i'm not going to be the best version of myself and if that's you then i love you but we can't be together anymore but i need us to be able to have complete peace if we're if we don't agree on something then we have to set ground rules where we step away we take care of our anger on our own not in front of the other person then we come back and communicate from a peaceful loving place about what we're upset with or frustrated with and so we never put that on the other person when i heard that i was like wow that's so powerful because most of us uh are most people it seems like in relationships will allow themselves to yell once and swear once and then it's just like once you've said you son of a bee once it's like you can say whatever you want exactly and then that respect is gone that you know that love is gone or it seems to be gone and and the other problem is we expect our partners to to be our emotional punching bags all right we think well because you love us you should deal with our crazy moment our dysfunction our disrespect all these things because okay but we show you love in other moments so don't don't blame me for this one no like focus on giving your partner the best of you not the worst of you yes they should help you through your struggle but struggle is not an excuse to blatantly disrespect stress out negativity as your partner yeah you know that's you can't do that so i think we have to all hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of how we behave in our relationships and yes stop giving this excuse that we're all gonna have our dysfunction no listen it can happen granted but we should be focused on as will laid out for jada in that talk we have to discuss things peacefully yes we have to come to the table calmly maturely and see how we can resolve it and not just lash out that's not healthy because screaming is not communicating no it's not creating a connection there's not an attraction there and there's no balance exactly you don't have those three things it destroys all of it and you know whenever i have gotten in arguments in the past in in my relationships all i want to do is go be alone afterwards i'm like i don't want to be around you i just want to be alone like i need space to like heal and recover now because it's very traumatic at least it has been for me and that's just been my personal experience and i think that's why it is so important to learn how to communicate in a peaceful way and sure you might get frustrated and tension might come up but you got to create ground rules i think for yourself and your partner what are we going to do when that happens exactly maybe we just quiet until we can breathe and like communicate calmly but i don't think there's anything good that comes from screaming no not at all i i witnessed that with my parents screaming and escalating and it was just like it never felt good in the house there was nothing that ever came from that that was good they always had to like apologize to each other in ways and then it was like passive aggressive for a week and there's a psych like why can't we just be you know more peaceful about these things so i think it's really important it doesn't just affect your relationship it affects the people that are in your relationship family friends it affects those people yeah it even affects your co-workers because absolutely you know i'm a firm believer that people take a lot of their relationship issues into the office and it affects their attitude their energy their focus and they don't realize how they're hurting their efficiency and hurting their ability to do so much more and do so much better whether they're an entrepreneur they work for somebody because their relationship is dysfunctional and so like i'm a firm believer in if we can help uh people who work in corporate or whatever have stronger better relationships their careers will thrive their companies will thrive like it pours into everything so we have to create that positivity in our lives so that we can reach our true potential i think it affects everything in business i mean when you're having a bad relationship intimately it affects the way you show up in your career for sure what's what's uh one thing you wish men understood more about women in general and one thing you wish women knew about men in general all right every man and everyone's different you know everyone human's different but in general based on all the work you've done and the the things you hear over and over again one thing you wish men knew about women and women who above men this may sound bad but what's coming i always just say what comes to mind all right i never practice any of these things is learn to look past her words and what i mean by that is a lot of times again women don't always fully express themselves as much as women will say men are horrible communicators women are actually horrible conditions and it's because yes they talk but they're not always clear and part of it is because women can see past our words all right sometimes to the point where they overanalyze and over rationalize things and it causes them to look at things the wrong way but they know how to pay attention to all the small details they they understand if our moods are different even if we say we're okay they're very in tune with that so they kind of have that expectation with us yeah and though i want women to be more clear and transparent i want men to be more aware and be more in tune with your partner it's not just about her saying i'm okay look at her pay attention does she show you she's okay does she really look like there's no nothing going on right now and if you can see past that i'm not saying badger her because yeah she might not want to be badgered but at least one show of true concern for her feelings and show that you are going to be there for her when she is ready to let you know and have that talk you want to create a very secure environment with your partner a very safe environment where she can open up to you she can be herself and again i do believe that starts with look past the words and even in understanding how to keep her satisfied and happy it's like the woman who says to you you know i need to buy me anything for my birthday all right all right exactly don't listen to her exactly look past that and even if you think she's telling the truth you know what there's nothing wrong with doing still doing a little special something for her it just shows that again you're more in tune with what's really going on with her emotionally and that was not just what she's speaking but i do believe that as you do that more often and you show a willingness to hear her out we have to consider our partners feelings i think too many men don't consider their partner's feelings when you do that she will become more transparent when she knows that she can be open and honest and you're not going to reject how she feels or what she says or call it crazy she'll be more willing to speak up about it so i do think women i mean men need to be more in tune look past the words as far as what i wish women would know with men so it's kind of the flip side of that he can't read your mind yeah he can't read your mind and a lot of times men generally just don't know there's a difference between the man who does loves you but does not know how you want to be loved and the man who doesn't care about what you want and how you want to be loved all right don't confuse the two some guys uh some guys not doing the right thing is simply a lack of knowledge and simply lack of caring exactly so it's like i tell women you got to be more specific if you say i need you to spend more time with me what does that mean how much life exactly exactly i have this example where i was counseling this couple and the wife was like he doesn't spend any time with me i just wanted to watch some tv with me you know whatever so i said okay cool i'm gonna speak to your husband we're gonna get this worked out so i spoke to him he's alright deal i'll do it i say let's do it for a week let's see what happens so a week passes i said what's the progress report he says man i did everything he told me i watched tv over here every single day i was there you know i showed interest i asked her i said what happened oh he didn't do anything i said what do you mean he said he watched tv with you she said yeah he watched tv with me but he was on one side of the couch and i was on the other side of the couch so you see in his mind if you asked me to watch tv with you i did that in her mind i was going to cuddle you and caress exactly she wanted intimacy she wanted desire to be shown she wanted a closeness or non-sexual intimacy is what i call it and that's what she was really looking for so on one end i can go back to the man and say listen look past the words if she says i want time with you it usually means she wants a closeness to you she wants to feel there with you so be mindful of that but on her end be more clear be more specific it's not fair to hold it against him or to claim he doesn't care when you didn't explain to him what you need i tell women all the time one of the greatest tests to seeing if a man is serious about you is not seeing what he does on his own or what he already knows it's seeing how he handles your desires and your feelings if when you express those things to him he makes the corrections you're good yeah but you got to be specific you got to make it clear let's see if he actually does what you ask him to do because a man who's very much into you he'll do it right i know plenty of husbands or men who are like if she would just tell me what she wants i'd give it to her he has no clue what she wants yeah so communicate very clearly yes don't just expect them to read your mind exactly [Music] what do you think of the three or five components to a foundation of a relationship that has the potential to really thrive long term committed for decades what are like it needs to have these three or these five things otherwise it's gonna be really challenging to be to sustain this type of love and joy and happiness i mean a couple of simple ones i guess are i need to i need to show up for my partner in ways that they need me to not just ways that are comfortable to me we in other words pay attention to what your partner actually needs because it's really easy to say you know i'm going to bring them lunch every day that's that's like i i'm a really good cook and i'm really you know i want to slave away every morning to bring them lunch every day because you know that's me giving maybe they don't they don't care bring lunch every day like maybe they don't care maybe what would mean the most to them is you them getting home and you really being interested in their day do you think love languages is an important part of this where it's like understanding someone's love language and giving them their top priorities i think i think it's i think that it's an interesting framework and it's been for a lot of people a very successful framework um i think any framework that just allows you to kind of you know create a little a structure for things that gives you some simplicity around it is can be valuable sure you know and it doesn't mean it's the only framework you can apply but it's a valuable model to work from so it's showing up in ways yeah not what do i want to give but what do they actually need i think that's a lot of money that's a lot of conflict in relationships because and i think you need to understand do i want to do something that's uncomfortable every day that's not foreign to me or that's foreign to me or do i want to find a partner that enjoys the things that i like to give well that's that's that's an interesting question i you know any relationship is going to be a bit of both but sometimes it works even without like that's a kind of compatibility issue but i think it even works outside of that in day-to-day stuff because you might say the thing i want to give to my partner is an awesome you know night together but maybe what they need is an awesome night with their friends and the maybe the most loving thing you can do is say hey i know you haven't seen this person in a while you should go and see them i know that relationship is important to you you should go and hang out with your mum tonight or you know recognizing not what's easy for me to give but what might be less comfortable for me to give but is actually what would mean the world to them yeah and and i think if you really want to make yourself irreplaceable to someone it's recognizing that because no one else is going to do that for them i mean you know what i mean like it's they some maybe but it's really rare to find someone who who's willing to do that for you okay so that's number one thing is to work on yourself yep and to say i'm responsible for me my partner isn't responsible for me i need to do the work to be the most loving confident person i can be in this world one of us fulfilled has their own purpose has things that drive them that to me is very very important if what's the first thing people should do to do work on themselves because you you throw a few things out there but what's like i mean firstly do you have maybe here's an interesting question you can ask yourself if i had 10 hours free right now what would i do with them interesting if you can't give a good answer to that question you might already be describing one of the weaknesses of your relationship and binge watching a series is not the best use of your time it's you know that if if the answer is oh my god well i have my purpose the thing i love getting stuck into or it doesn't even have to be some grand purpose not everyone has found like their life's calling but it could be i really want to learn this language or i really want to see this friend i really want to go and you know whatever it is read this book or learn this thing take care of my health yeah i want to i can't wait to get to the gym if you should be able to answer the question of my partner cancelled on me today what would i do with that day now and if you can't that then you you begin to describe the person who's sitting there waiting for their partner to text them waiting for their partner to make them feel good enough that's not attractive it's not and it's not fair to our partners it's a lot of pressure it's a lot of pressure and and by the way people put a lot of pressure on their partners by expecting their partner to put a band-aid on all sorts of things for them you know if they're feeling like there's a lot of rhetoric about vulnerability right now now i think vulnerability is huge i think the work that people like brene brown are doing and so on is huge it's massively important vulnerability is absolutely an act of courage and we should encourage it more both sexes all the time but his vulnerability is something's making me insecure and i'm going to share it with you because you're my partner and i love you and i tell you things right if an hour from now i tell you i'm feeling insecure again and then an hour from now that thing's affecting me again and this tonight because now in a way what we're doing is instead of sharing we're dumping i'm asking you now to fix it for me to put a band-aid on it for me not feel better yeah of course it's part of our part a loving partner will support you and will do everything in their power to make you feel loved and to make you feel safe and to make you feel secure and it's absolutely true that sometimes what we're feeling is insecurity is because our partner isn't doing their job in those things they're not building they're not building they're doing things that are proactively making us feel insecure there's minor betrayals minor neglects uh all of that but sometimes we have to say okay what part of my what part of this am i responsible for and it's my it's my partner's responsibility is our responsibility in life together to share to share the load to work towards things together but it's not your job to carry the load for me to carry my problems to put the band-aid on every day i need to maybe once in a blue moon yeah of course of course we i mean we're all going to do that we're going to have like we're going to have days weeks times where we're going through something really serious and our partner's job is to show up yeah you know but a friend of mine who's kind of blunt said to me some days or weeks you get to be needy and difficult and high maintenance and boring and you know insecure and then you don't and i thought yeah like we get to be those things for a time until we don't until it gets too much for somebody else because we need to be at the very least we need to show our partner we're committed to our own growth yeah so the you know the first one what do we have uh show up in ways they need not just ways you want to show up the second one's uh work on yourself yep um i think i guess the third one it to me teamwork is everything like being a genuine team is huge really looking at each other as teammates as opposed to you're there to meet my needs or i'm competing with you in some way man i've done that before like we're an actual team and i saw you know one of the things i loved most about chris rock's recent stand up tambourine i haven't seen it yet such a genius name the whole concept is you know about the idea that he couldn't in his last marriage play the tambourine he couldn't play the backup instrument right right and and i thought it was such a great great uh metaphor because in a in a good relationship in a really genuinely mutually supportive relationship some days you play tambourine some days you're their teammate you you can't he you know the way he says it her success is your success and vice versa you're in this together you and and some days that person's the the lead and you're you're on tambourine and a lot of people have never learned how to play tambourine you know there's the other thing i don't remember where it comes from but every relationship has a flower and a gardener right well i don't most people don't want to be in a relationship where they're always the gardener and they want to be never the flower right blooming all the time yes and sometimes you have to be the gardener no matter how long you've played the flower right right you and i have played flowers a lot in our lives right we've been used to being a certain you know having a leader role and having these kind of big lives and big worlds and whatever and then you go to a relationship and the relationship doesn't give a [ __ ] you know what i mean no yeah i don't care if you're the lea you know that you're the flower out there in the world sometimes in our relationship you have to be the gardener sometimes you've got to play tambourine even if to everyone else you are the the constant flower yeah right the movie reference constant gardener well you can't you can't be the constant flower right you can't you might be in your business in some way but that relationship is different you can't now you're coming as two equals and so it's so much of it's checking your own damn ego and being like i'm in this to be with you as a teammate not this or this this when you know you've found your match for life or your potential match for life but you think this could be the match by the way these are much harder questions than the first interview you know is it when you see these three things after a period of time and you feel convinced that the the the bricks are being laid equally in a certain way yeah when you say i'm ready to be committed all in i i think there are four four stages to a relationship okay stage one stage one is admiration that's when you don't have a relationship with this person you admire like i like you and i look at you and i'm like this person is hot they have something about them i like their qualities i like their energy they have a good potential yeah okay and by the way that doesn't even mean they have good potential for you right now it just means this is a person of high potential in some way you admire them yeah the second stage is connection and you could i think in that in a sense connection and chemistry are both relevant to this stage because you have this person where there's a mutual like i like things about you you like things about me i think you're attractive you think i'm attractive we share some common ideas common grounds in life our outlook whatever beliefs yeah yeah that could be found on a great date right it doesn't really mean much still this is the plot of land yeah you can have great sex there'll be chemistry you can make out all night none of this means you're going to have a great relationship okay the third stage is commitment that says i want to do this with you i am committed to building with you and you are committed to building with me hmm right that's a really great stage to be at it's very important right it's you can't have a relationship without that any relationship without that or whether that's one-sided is unrequited love by definition and there are a ton of people out there right now who say i'm just you know i created a program recently called attraction to commitment which literally dealt with why people keep getting stuck in limbo yeah why they keep getting stuck in the casual phases and it never gets to a relationship one of the things that fascinates me is how long we stay with something that's just casual that isn't a real relationship on the hope that it will change um unrequited love you know certainly unrequited commitment yeah it's a nice time when you're like 23 right right that's stage three stage four is compatibility man and the hard thing i think for a lot of people is i used to question this one myself like if you know the idea love conquers all right it doesn't it does not a wish i like it i like that phrase it's an amazing i love the phrase i love the sentiment of it amazing bumper sticker you know and there's nothing you know what is more powerful in the world than than love and all you need is love yeah apparently apparently not we need a little more it you can have love without commitment right and you can have you can have commitment without compatibility and this is where things get i i used to think well maybe commitment is enough and maybe issues with compatibility can be overcome as long as two people are truly committed to each other i don't i don't believe that anymore i i think that it goes beyond commitment to truly last you have to have two people who are really comparable like okay let's say we got commitment two people want to be together they admire each other they have chemistry right they're they say i'm committed to you but one person's sex drive is here and the other ones is here not compatible this is going to be difficult right one person likes to spend a lot of money another person wants to save all the money right one person believes in a certain religion another person doesn't believe in that one person you know wants to spend five days a week together the other person is happy with one night a week together one person wants their family to move in the other person wants their space right these are serious serious issues that often end relationships and so to me you want to say what how do you know when you found your match all four four stages i admire this person we have connection and chemistry we have genuine mutual commitment and we're compatible should we expect um you know moving forward in relationships with our time uh that monogamy is something that we're gonna be able to do or with the there's always something better option and that it's more available now than ever especially with social media online dating there's a distractions constantly uh yeah you don't have to leave your house anymore exactly you can pretty much cheat on your partner while lying next to them in bed exactly but we are by definition already doing serial non-monogamy you know most of us don't come to marriage monogamous we've gone to marriage after years of nomadism sexual nomadism so monogamy is a concept that has already been redefined throughout you asked me before about how has marriage changed but monogamy had nothing to do with love for most of history monogamy became about love with romanticism it's the sacred ideal of the romantic ideal because the sacred cow because monogamy means i'm everything i'm it i'm the one i'm chosen i'm unique i'm iris and if you are interested in someone else it means i'm not enough versus monogamy which was basically for patrimony and for children you know so so how should we navigate this moving forward i think look if i had talked to you 70 years ago about premarital sex and virginity was a precondition you would have looked at me like this is a taboo this is a impossible today premarital sex in the west it's like nobody blinks an eye okay it would have been inconceivable okay if i had talked up to you about going to from families of eight-tailed children to families of one child you would have looked at me inconceivable if i had told you that we were going to be conceiving so many children through assisted reproduction inconceivable so today when you say open relationships or non-monogamous relationships or periodically non-monogamous or monogamy shall i dance savage or you know or polyamorous it all people will say can't work impossible you know the fact is monogamy is the new frontier but you can have it as negotiated through divorce or through what most people have always done which is proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery or you can do it through a model of transparency in which people have consensual non-monogamy this is it this is the options right what do you think is gonna be working the most it's going to be a little bit of everything there are some people who really need stable committed monogamous relationships they don't want open doors and there are other people for which open doors probably should be the model from the start that's kind of who they are that's their curiosity that's the way they live their life and it's not because they're less committed or less loving it's because their sexuality is organized in a certain way and it lives together with a certain arrangement and all of that is going to be redefined as we go along it's the fact of what's going to happen it will be the next frontier but if you see it on the level of marriage people say you know if you say okay let's look under you know you have to look at it from the place of before marriage you know a swedish philosopher said today monogamy only exists in reality it doesn't exist in your memories and it doesn't exist in your fantasies so this is not because i advocate it it's just first of all there's nothing to advocate it's very simple that by definition we have multiple sex partners before marriage we are not monogamous anymore in the traditional sense of the word the word has been in flux and we don't really know where it's going we don't what we know is that people still seek to connect people want to love people want somebody who loves them and how that will play itself out is the mysteries of life but the fundamental human need for love for connection for passion for transcendence will never change the expressions the forms the institutions in which we will seek those fundamental human aspirations will continuously transform that's really how i see the the evolution taking place sure what do you think of what i'm saying oh man it's just so you know it's confusing because you hear so many different options that work that don't work you see people that love each other that go through breakup and divorce you see and then you see the pain and the struggle and the emotional toll that it takes on some people then you see people who are in you know committed monogamous relationships who feel guilty because they want to be able to explore but they they can't because they've made this choice and they've committed to it monogamy is a practice we are not by nature biologically evolutionary monogamous it's a practice it's a choice and it's not our makeup no yeah and it's a choice then and it and monogamy is a continuum uh human you know you have mind you have fantasy you have memory you have a lot of things at what point do we become non-monogamous where does non-monogamy start and all of these concepts are fluid concepts today there is just no way to define it like that so we make good choices and we make compromises and we sometimes don't just do what we want and we often need to think about the consequences of our actions and we need to think about the larger picture and something that may be perfectly desirable for tonight may not be worth it right for the next two weeks and the next year exactly and i think that in the era of self-fulfillment and the right to happiness we don't have more desires today than the previous generations we just feel more entitled to fulfill our desires and we feel that we have a right to be happy my personal happiness the switch the greatest switch is from a social organization in which i think about the well-being of others collectivist thinking thinks about the well-being of others and i sacrifice my own individual needs for the well-being of others to the other side of the continuum is i have a right to pursue my individual needs and the others will have to adapt to it and i think that we are a little bit on the extreme end of the other side at this point we really take ourselves a little very seriously and sometimes at the detriment of other people to whom we do have an obligation and and and a commitment to not just our partners the world the world so where should we be somewhere in the middle you think or what's in an examined state i don't know that it's always in the middle but in an examined state in a state that doesn't just say what i like what i feel the fact that i have options doesn't mean i have to exercise all these options the problem of consumer life is that we don't know anymore to make choices same with the cereals in the supermarket why would it be better with love so i could get better i could get better i'm like you know i'm a victim of fomo you know how do i know this is the best no you don't yeah when do i find the best no you don't you don't find your partner you choose your partner it's very different you know if you think you're going to find somebody who is the person who's going to make you stop looking it doesn't work this way because no it doesn't because at some points your inner rumblings will start up again and then you will say oh probably stop looking you know it's like you just said this is it this is where i decide to put my my roots in this moment you know and i'm gonna and i'm gonna try to deepen them i think we are all living with paradoxes of choice yes you know from on from which phone i get but we cannot commodify a partner and just kind of beta test the partner and beta test the relationship and check out to see is it good enough or can i find better l yes you can the fact is you could find other i'm not sure it would be better but you definitely can find other and there are lots of people you can love and there's only a few you can make a life with and they're not always the same a lot of people you can have love stories with right and have beauty but they're not the person you would make a life how do you know when it's the person you can make a life with i think values enter into there a lot more i mean you can have magnificent love stories with people you would never live with right they're just too different from you they have not the same values as you they have not you they they one wants child one does not one wants to travel the other does not one wants career the other very major different classes different different veltan showing as they used to say in german you know visions of the world but you can love them you can have a beautiful love story with that person and be transported in your experience with them but you know that that's not the person with whom you're going to build a home a future a trajectory maybe a family if you want that um that that's not the person with whom and for that you need more of shared vision shared mission shared values stuff that is not just in the domain of feelings but also in the domain of beliefs it's different wow views about money views about independence and separateness versus connection views about um emotional expressiveness views about power wouldn't you say that those differences that we have also attract us to other people that we have some of those differences maybe we don't share the same values or beliefs but it's also different unique interesting and so it also brings us together or do you think it's not enough i think that what attracts you originally is often what becomes the source of conflict later the very thing that is so attractive because it's different is also the very thing that becomes difficult because it's different interesting so of course it's a mix and match you know but what makes thriving relationships is not only feelings it's a mix of feelings actions beliefs touches physicality it's a it's a a more all-encompassing thing a beautiful love story can be just about feelings and you can love more people than those that you can make a life with that doesn't mean you make a life with people you don't love but it means that there is a whole other set of ingredients right that enter into the making of a life which is the creation of a world it's a little different and in that world you often can be on the side of you know there's a lot of sentences today that i never heard 20 years ago in couples therapy this is a raw deal i'm not getting my needs met where is my return on investment excuse me excuse me somebody owes you it's like wow it's it's i am in a relationship for what it's going to give me um that is an important piece i don't misunderstand me but i'm also in a relationship for why for what i'm going to give to this person for what i'm going to give if i want children to these children not just for what they're going to bring to me it's like the level of narcissism has to be shrunken a tiny bit on occasion right exactly it's just like you know i mean i'm part of that same you know landscape but on occasion i think it's like you calibrate it on occasion some some of us need to really learn to think more about ourselves and some of us really need to think more about others some of us live with the fear that we're going to be abandoned and some of us live more with the fear that we're going to lose ourselves some of us are better takers and need to learn to give and some of us are consummate givers and we need to learn to take and often we find a partner who is exactly the missing link and that can be beautiful complementarity if we actually get to use the other person to become more whole and to learn from them and it's it's and we need both you need to be able to think about yourself and to know what you want and all of that but you also need to be able to remember that others exist near you your family your friends you you know you be your loved ones sure and that that's what will make the difference the day you die and who will show up at your funeral before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day [Music] so what's the difference between connection chemistry and compatibility so let's start with compatibility compatibility are traits that typically fit together all right so we're identifying well okay she's a go-getter she likes being outdoors um she's very spiritual and he's he likes the same things so we're identifying traits that make them compatible some people may use the zodiac to determine who is compatible but again zodiac is really dependent on the traits that they have defined for that sign and as long as those things are consistent or they are accurate in those cases then they can say there's going to be some level of compatibility there so there's going to be some level of fit there all right chemistry is when two people know how to get along and flow with each other work with each other so chemistry doesn't necessarily require compatibility all right because again think about at work we can go through uh team building exercises and build chemistry with our work associates all right but we don't have to like them we don't have to have the same interests as them they have to nothing else has to be in alignment but we can learn how to work together and build and create something and make progress and be successful so chemistry is very independent of that but again it's more so learning how to work with each other flow with each other get along with each other coexist together so to speak um but again it's very fluid it can it can come it can go all right you can build chemistry you can destroy chemistry connection is again with connection you will have chemistry but funny enough with connection you may not have what people perceive as compatibility so you can have two individuals who you would never think are a match for each other but yet they are feeling this amazing connection with each other unexplainable they never would have thought it would be this person but it's there all right but again you will have chemistry within connection connection doesn't come or go it's either there or it's not you cannot create it you cannot destroy it you can run from it you can try to reject it you can pile a bunch of trash on top of it toxic energy but it's still there and it kind of goes back to we talked about this before where you you're the one that put me on the i forgot how you say the red string chinese yes yes the red string i still got it on exactly and so no matter where you go in the world no matter what you do you'll feel connection exactly and that's why people with connection could fall apart tomorrow meet back up 10 years later and it's like they never stop talking the connection is always there so it's that's why it's the strongest and most important of those three is it fair to say that you need all three to have the most fulfilling type of relationship and if you're missing compatibility there will always be some type of stress no i think i think you need chemistry and connection and again if you have connection you will have the chemistry the reason why i say you don't need compatibility is because again what people perceive as compatible doesn't always align with what actually allows two people to be connected and bond and all these wonderful things so because of that i would say compatibility uh due to society's perception of it is not necessary it's the least needed thing yes but to have you so you shouldn't be coming into a relationship saying wow we're very compatible people we like the same things we come from the same background we live in the same city our families live nearby this makes sense we should try this thing because look at how compatible we are what i'm hearing you say is you should make sure you have this connection that if you were gone for 10 years you think about them you dream about them you always want to come back together that that is more important than having chemistry and compatibility because with connection you will have chemistry but you may not be compatible exactly and you're 100 accurate what you just said compatibility and that's where a lot of people go wrong they choose partners based off of compatibility they choose partners based off of the logical deduction that this would make sense this is a great opportunity you know we like the same things blah blah blah but those people find themselves miserable because they get caught up in the hype initially but again the connection that they need to really enjoy each other um the glue that keeps them together the glue that helps them overcome difficult times that's not there if you don't have connection you know what i'm saying and hell it's it's tough even when you have connections so [Laughter] is connection something you can cultivate if you don't have or is it something you either have it together or you don't you have it or you don't you can't you can't make it up out of thin air you can't create it plenty of people have tried and failed miserably it just doesn't work you know and that's why yeah you hear this all the time of like gosh he looked amazing on paper like he just like had everything on p he checked every box she checked every box but there was this i then they were such a good person you're such a great person but i just couldn't connect exactly it just wasn't there and let me tell you that's one of the worst positions to be in to be with this amazing wonderful person that you don't have a connection with because now how do i justify and validate to myself my friends my family who probably love this person stop this person love them and like yo i got to tell them no it's just not there the majority of people are not able to do that they suck it up and they try to push things along or they convince themselves i'm i'm tripping i maybe i'm being too picky whatever but then inevitably that marriage or relationship still ends up ending so how do you make it work if you have very low compatibility high connection and chemistry but you are in complete different industries you like complete different things one person likes to be inside the other person loves to go on long hikes and you're just like butting heads about every activity and thing you want every movie you don't like the other person's movies like isn't that a strain in the relationship as well well i i would argue that when there's a connection you're not gonna butt heads i feel like so when people don't have a connection and they're very opposite like that you're gonna have a lot of tension a lot of butting of heads all right when there's a connection there's a desire to want to share the moment you enjoy with you there's a desire to all right you know what i may not care for these types of movies but i love seeing you happy and i want to be around you so i'm going to try to learn to deal with some of these movies we're much more willing to make sacrifices be flexible and and and find a compromise when there is a connection there and i feel like when there's a connection we don't view the differences as a negative thing we view it as wow they are they're introducing me to a different world they're showing me a different side so okay maybe i don't like going out all the time but now it's good that i have someone who likes to go out because she can pull me or he can pull me out the house more often but i can also help them slow down a little bit and enjoy peace and being at home there's a balance that's created that makes it a much more well-rounded relationship so i think that it what you'll find a lot of times in connection is that they're not the most again compatible based on society's perceptions of compatibility people they have these differences but they make this full unit it's like this ying to the yang type of deal you know is it have to be the same is it possible to find someone with extreme connection extreme chemistry and 80 compatibility where it's like wow we like so many of the same things as well or are we just more attracted to kind of the opposite of track type of mentality gaining gang type of balance i think i think it is possible to uh have a strong level of compatibility but i if i'm honest i do think there is some kind of balance that occurs within relationships with people who have connection it's not completely down the line we're just on the same page i like everything the same i think there is a difference and i think it kind of goes back to the fact that in nature there's this polarity that has to occur it's the same reason why masculine is drawn to feminine feminine drawn to masculine you don't find a masculine person wanting another masculine person all right now when it comes to connection or real serious healthy relationships we desire the opposite energy that balances us out so why is why is that is that just mother nature human nature why is that you think i and i can't say this is 100 accurate but my belief is that again we are not created to be equal we're created to balance each other out we're created to come together and have this full unit why do my strengths need to be your strengths how do we become better if i am a business and i'm going to uh acquire another company and merge with them i'm not going to pick the company does everything the same thing that i do that's good i'm going to pick the company who has a product or service that's different than mines or that that can enhance minds but and we come together and we're like voltron and we become stronger together so in having our differences we are able to create a stronger whole unit right the exact same yeah i think there was a i think a couple of years ago tyson meet the the meat company which is a big meat company chicken and beef and all stuff i think they acquired like a couple hundred million dollars worth of beyond meat which is a vegan option so it's like they are all meat consumption and they're like oh but this is something we don't have and it's growing in this space let's get on board and let's balance out in some ways so i see that as a as an interesting approach in relationships and an interesting dynamic i'm curious about sex on the first date and on the first night we got this incredible explosion of chemistry like we've known each other for years we were just we i can't believe we didn't connect sooner is sex on the first day of meeting something that can turn into a successful long-term relationship or have you just seen from your research and your experiences with the people you've coached that that's a recipe for disaster it can definitely turn into a long-term relationship merit successful relationship i just think that we have to be careful with that mindset so i remember one time uh i think it was an article i wrote somebody commented and they said you know i've heard of plenty guys and not to make this only about how guys perceive it but they had said i've seen plenty guys not want to move forward for a woman who they had sex with on the first date i've never seen a guy say i can't make her my wife because she didn't have sex with me on the first date you know i'm saying so it's like one approach is still safe it doesn't it doesn't hurt you it doesn't hurt you to wait you're not going to lose anything by being patient before jumping into bed if anything you're going to increase your chances of making sure you know what you're getting yourself into you're confirming there is a connection there we're on the same page so on and so forth but if you move too fast and god forbid you're wrong that you perceive this incorrectly now you have possibly set yourself up for other issues so again can it happen yes especially if two people have a genuine connection i do not believe that sex on the first date will derail them however why not take the better more likely approach for success or to be safe better to be safe than sorry and just wait there's no need to rush for it yeah i like that response where you said you've never what was it you've never met a yeah like i won't make up my wife because she didn't have sex with me on the first date but you've heard plenty of guys say i don't take her serious because she has sex with me on the first date yeah man it's interesting because when i met um my girlfriend jeanette we met online and we started talking you know just via messaging and then it a few weeks later it turned into a facetime and then it was a facetime every day for a few minutes then it was face time every day for longer you know hours two hours three hours and then we met about a month after we started connecting i went into the meeting of like i'm just gonna go and be open to possibilities like who knows what this person's gonna be like in person i don't know we've had an amazing connection on the phone where it seems like hours were minutes that type of whole thing you lose track of time you you can relate in certain ways with each other and we're both inspired by one another and then we literally meet and within minutes we're kissing you know eating the first time we're kissing and but i also went into it was like i'm not gonna try anything sexual like if nothing happens i'm okay you know seeing each other for this weekend and you know i just want to go and connect and i have zero intentions of trying anything further i went into without that mindset i was like if i come home from this and we don't even kiss like okay it was it was an experiment magnets to each other we started kissing within a few minutes i kissed her and she was kind of thrown back but like did it it was like she didn't want to stop and within minutes i kid you not within five minutes she she looks at me she stops she looks at me and she goes you're mine forever and i was like you are a bold boy i was like uh i just got off a plane to see her and she and i go wow you're pretty forward and she goes do you want to go back on the plane i was like no but i've never heard a woman say this within five minutes now granted we were talking for a month on the phone but i've never heard a woman say this in five minutes and if they would i'd usually run like crazy and think she was crazy but she was like i don't know i'm sorry i just feel like my heart my heart says this and i feel like i just want to say it and so i really respected her level of courage and vulnerability and honesty as well where usually girls won't say that type of thing and i was like wow this girl's got a lot of courage and she says what she feels and it was just like man the chemistry was so the connection was so strong all weekend and for the last you know over a year now yeah that it uh it made it didn't make logical sense it made emotional sense exactly and i think i just kept going with it and i was like wow okay let's see where this goes we'll take it day by day but it's just like it kept growing and i think you should have some type of feeling of like instant connection because all the women i've dated in the past i would say i've had instant connection with most of them like with all of them but it wasn't this type of connection like you said in the beginning it's like this something was different i had maybe more like sexual attraction yes then i was like uh you know we're not connecting and vibing in the same way that i love but the sexual contraction is great and they got this and this so it's like i'm justifying yeah as opposed to this is what i what i want and this is what it's like it's not even a option this is what my heart is telling me i need to do yes and i think if your heart is not saying yeah like pulling you to something then it's probably a sign that that may not be the right fit for you right now absolutely now do men and women approach early sex differently in your opinion beyond the first date beyond the one night stand type of thing do men and women approach it differently in the first months yeah i believe so i think it's more likely to find a man who is ready to go and has no no issues about when the sex occurs within that first month all right whereas they're gonna be a lot more women who are concerned and and um generally are not comfortable yet you know the problem also is that just because sex occurs doesn't mean the woman was comfortable all right a lot of women allow themselves to get intimate but they weren't truly at peace with making that or allowing that to happen and so there's a lot more that goes on on her end regarding sex then it goes on on his hand and i also believe that women are much more in their head about the situation than the man is the man is analyzing it they're analyzing oh well if i don't do this he's not gonna like me exactly exactly whereas i think the man is just excited he's enjoying the moment he's just getting it in but she's thinking yeah is this is this too soon am i is he gonna like this what am i you know whatever she's just processing so much which adds to her inability to even fully enjoy it a lot of times but yeah it's definitely different we're not wired the same when it comes to sex we're just not and do you think rebound relationships can work let's say you're in a relationship for six months a year a few years ten years and you stayed in that relationship too long you stayed in it because it became hard to get out or it was good on paper whatever the reason is you stated you had kids whatever the reason is and then you get out and within six months you find someone and you're married six months later is that something that is possible to rebound into the next relationship and that can be your connection chemistry partner for long term or is that something you know for people wait two to four years until they fully heal and all this time and energy to get into it what do you think it's absolutely possible one we have to understand that healing is is less about time and it's more about the specific work you put in if you go through the process and you do all the steps then you can achieve healing in months all right um people people take years off and still never healed so the time itself does nothing for you uh with that said the key is has this new person genuinely surpassed how you felt about anyone else see i have a golden rule that you do not get in a new relationship if they have not surpassed whoever you had the strongest feelings for they've got to pass that bar what does that mean so does that mean like the connection is so much stronger the the way you view them is higher they add more value to your life most importantly it has to be the connection is stronger that's most importantly and so if you don't feel as strong as a connection as strong as a desire strong as a draw to them as you did whatever previous person then you should not enter in that relationship because you if you do you will automatically have a void a gap because it's it's almost like you ate filet mignon and now you go have some spam there's a huge gap there all right you might be able to survive eating the spam all right because it satisfies your hunger but you know how much better meat can taste because you had to blame me you're not fully nourished exactly and you'll never be fully satisfied because you had that better thing so it's the same thing with relationships if you've already experienced this higher level of connection to go for anything beneath that you will never be fulfilled and completely happy with it you might survive for the first couple years but at some point the smoke's gonna clear you're gonna be like man what am i doing here is this applied to any previous relationships chemistry and connection or the previous one i say any they've got to surpass whoever held the highest position in your heart because i i strongly believe that the majority of people are not married to the person they have the strongest feelings for really yes and an even better test is ask yourself this if you get with this new person and that person that you've had stronger feelings for comes back into your life will you be okay a lot of people if that person came back and was like i love you i made some mistakes i want you back it's not that they will automatically leave their new relationship but they will be torn and conflicted it will impact them when you are really with the right person that wouldn't phase you anymore you'd be like uh please get out of here i'm good i'm i'm doing amazing i'm with the person i know is the one for me but when they are the person you have the strongest feelings when they come back you're gonna be rattled so i'm hearing you say that it's not as much the time in between relationships it's the work the process of acknowledgement healing letting go where you could meet someone within a couple of weeks depending on like if you were already unwinding in the previous relationship for a year or two you could find someone and be like this connection is just you can't get us apart and you could jump right in yes absolutely yeah absolutely and if you want to learn more about mastering relationships then make sure to check out this video right here the difference between the man who loves you but does not know how you want to be loved and the man who doesn't care about what you want and how you want to be loved all right don't confuse the two

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 740,835

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, signs you've found your soulmate, stephen speaks, matthew hussey, esther perel, devon franklin, lori gottlieb, relationship tips, love advice, relationship goals

Id: sMH_2oW_rSA

Length: 171min 45sec (10305 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020