You've Been Lied To: The Real Reason Most Relationships Fail

Today I want to share with you what I think is the biggest reason that good relationships turn bad. And I'm doing this because I want to help you, because I get a lot of messages and I've experienced this myself, of the pain when you are in a relationship and it is struggling, or sometimes even worse when you've just ended a relationship that you wish hadn't ended. It can be very, very devastating. And so I want to share what I've sort of seen and learned in, in order to help you, if you're in a relationship, perhaps navigate down a different path. And if you're not in a relationship in your next one, hopefully you can get it started on the right foot. Because what I'm sharing with you I see as the underlying reason that relationships go bad. Yes, there's cheating, there's distrust, there's resentment. All that stuff builds up. But I think it comes from a soil. Right? The wellspring of what I'm going to be sharing with you in this video. And to do that, I want to start with an unrelated story. At least it's seemingly unrelated. It is about a computer. I was living in Las Vegas at the time and my brother had this old MacBook. And it was ridiculous because when you opened it, the screen was. The hinges were so messed up that it would just fall flat unless it was at a 90 degree angle or otherwise supported. The speakers didn't work. And so when you had to put your headphone jack in, but most of the time the headphone jack didn't work, so you had to jiggle it around to get it to work. It would turn off. And it was only like two and a half years old, hadn't had anything horrible happen to it. So this computer exists in my brother's life. It's hilarious because we're watching him struggle with it every day. And at one point my other roommate says, hey guys, I'm thinking of getting a new computer. What kind should I get? Should I get a Mac or a PC? And before anyone could say anything, my brother chimed in and he said, dude, you gotta get a Mac. They just work. And I remember my jaw just hitting the floor. Cause I'm going, what are you talking about? And then it dawned on me. My brother, like me, had been watching television and for months. I don't know if you remember, there were these commercials that were Mac versus PC. And one of the common refrains in those commercials and in Steve Jobs keynotes, which were everywhere, was that Macs just work. And so I looked at him I said, henry, are you sure this is what you mean? Because your computer clearly doesn't work every single day. And we all laughed about it. But that left a lasting impression on me because I realized in that moment that direct experience of our lives is often overshadowed by marketing, right? Apple's the biggest or was the biggest company in the world. I don't know if they are today, but certainly their marketing budget is enough to completely transform my brother's day to day experience. So how else might that be affecting me? And so I said, okay, well, Apple's the biggest company. What are the things that we market to each other? And one of the first ones that came back was, oh, my gosh, I've experienced this travel. If you've opened up your Instagram recently, you've probably seen beautiful travel photos, right? Travel goals, these amazing places. Now, I've been very, very fortunate. I got to study abroad. I've had an opportunity to travel to many places, and I'm so grateful for it. But one of the things that I've seen is that travel does not look like those photos. And in fact, when most people travel, they spend a lot of the time miserable because they're waiting in line. They. They're at a train station and their train is gone, and they don't speak the language and they don't know where they're going. The food makes them sick and they're puking. They hate the locals because they don't fit in with their culture. They just have a hard time of it. And what I also notice is I'll meet these people, maybe connect with them briefly, find them later, talk to them about their experience, and I'll get a completely whitewashed version about the amazing things that they saw. And I'm going, wait a second. I was with you. I watched you be actually miserable. And so I realized that at least with travel, in many ways though, it can be fantastic. And I'm not saying you shouldn't travel. There's a cultural mythology that a lot of people contribute that says if you travel, it will be amazing and it's absolutely worth your time and your money. And so we buy into that. And people, unfortunately, are, I think, hurt by this. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. As I thought deeper, I realized that there was something beyond travel that is in every song. It's in all the movies. It's in all the movies, especially that you watch as a kid, that are from Disney, that permeates the way that we communicate. Friends say it to one another. You've heard it from your aunts, your uncles, your mom, your dad. It's perhaps the most marketed idea that I've seen in America today. And it's this idea that a romantic relationship is the inescapable key to happiness. That if you are not romantically involved with your better half, with the person that completes you, you cannot be happy. Or at least if you are, it's fake and it's going to be short lived. And conversely, if you are involved with the right person, that happiness is pretty much a guarantee. Sure there's going to be some trouble, some work, but really the movie ends at happily ever after and the songs end when things are good. And even the breakup songs have this mentality in them that okay, it wasn't you, but guess what, now this next person is going to appreciate me and, and things are so much better now. The point is of all of this is that someone that you are going to meet is going to come into your life and dramatically make things better. That is the most, most offered cultural thing that I've ever heard in my entire life. And if you live in America, I think this is probably true for you. It's so pervasive that it's like water. Now the second question that I had was does this match my direct experience with the MacBook? Same thing. I wanna not just check what's the marketing but I wanna see is this the way the computer works? And I don't know if this matches your experience, but mine is that relationships are not exactly that. And I don't want to quote any statistics because I don't know them, but certainly there's quite a bit of divorce. You probably know some people, maybe you or a friend has been in a relationship that seems like it should have ended far earlier, but they stuck it out, they tried to make it work against all odds. All of their friends saw that it was crumbling and maybe they lost friendships, moved cities, sacrifice in other ways to try to please get this relationship to work. And then it fell apart in the end. I think that comes from this mindset that this is the most important thing. Everything else we can forget about because if we can make this work, happiness is assured. And I am not saying this to say that relationships can't be amazing. I personally have been dramatically impacted. I've had some hard times, some wonderful times, and a tremendous amount of growth from my romantic or relationships. But what I'm saying is that when we lean as human beings on anything more than it can stand, we're going to wind up on the floor. The analogy that I think of is just kind of like leaning on a table and think of money. For instance. If you use money in a healthy way, it's amazing, right? It can pay for you to live. It can pay for you to maybe live in a nice place to eat food, to treat your friends and family to wonderful experiences. And if that's your relationship with money, money is a positive thing in your life. It doesn't matter if you have a billion or a million or a hundred thousand or less. If that's your relationship with money, that's a good relationship. And sure, you might need a little bit more, but it's not this awful thing in your life. You have other things because you're not valuing money beyond what you can. You might say that you're leaning on money in an appropriate way. But if you're someone that thinks that once they get $10 million, that they will be superior, that they will have proven it, and this is often subconscious to their dad or their mom or that person who didn't like them in high school, that they are really worthwhile, they're going to lean very heavily on money. And eventually they will get it, usually. And it will crumble beneath them because they've gotten it. They'll go, oh, my God, this didn't work. I don't feel superior. I don't feel better. I still feel unworthy. That's because they expected out of money something that money couldn't give them. They expected a feeling of worthiness. Take the same analogy with relationships. If you have perhaps a more healthy sense of relationships, you feel like a complete human being. You are capable of functioning through your life, and you don't have to have someone else. And I know that this is probably, probably a bit of a contentious idea that you could go your entire life and not have a life partner that was romantically involved with you and still have a thrilling, complete, fulfilled life. But that is how I've come. That's what I've come to believe. And whether or not you believe that the idea that you might lean a little bit too heavily on your relationship and expect some other flawed human being to enter your life and then make things dramatically better than they were before, to make you a better person, to be your everything, in my opinion, that is leaning on the relationship way too much, and you are expecting things out of it that it cannot give you. And what could have been a wonderful relationship between two human beings that were complete, that spent time together and helped each other grow, and had Amazing experiences becomes something that leaves you flat on the floor because you leaned on it too heavily. And I believe the problem is that our society conditions us all to expect this other person to come in and transform our lives for the better. Meanwhile, they have the same idea. And so we come in for a period of time, we can both sort of feel, we can be infatuated and pretend that that's going to happen, that we can be everything for them and they can be everything for us. But. And I think that the data shows this, if you look at your own life, that doesn't tend to last forever. So what I would like to encourage you to do is not to take my word for it, it's not to listen to my marketing, it's to reflect on your own experiences, to look to your own relationships and look to the relationships around you. If you have a completely different view of things based on your life, then throw this out. But ask yourself the following. What do I expect out of a romantic relationship? It's worth asking. How much time and energy compared to other things does the idea of having a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife get from me when I'm in relationships? Do I say things like, you're my everything, I don't know what I do without you. Life without you wouldn't be worth it. Are you expecting this other individual to completely be your reason for living? And if you've been in a relationship for a short period of time, whether it's a few months or maybe just one or two years, do you have the belief that this is going to last forever? Are you confident in that? And if you are, have you considered that that statistically is unlikely to be the case? And if you have deviated from the statistical norm, ask yourself what reasoning do I have for this? Are there good, valid reasons that other people would find? Yeah, that makes sense. You guys really do have a chance of having a long lasting and happy relationship. Or do you feel like everybody else does? Who has bought into this idea that this other person must complete them and therefore they have to make it work? Just some questions for you to ponder. And when I make this video, I always try to have an action guide. This one doesn't have a clear one, but step one would be this self reflect. Ask yourself what relationships have meant to you. Pay attention to the songs that you listen to. Reflect on the things that you've said while you were in relationships or to your friends about relationships and what they mean. And you might even just want to free write on this, the second thing that I would recommend is really being honest. Not just in your self reflections, but if you have someone that you are dating with them, share what your honest, unfiltered, perhaps childlike expectations are of this relationship, whether they're realistic or not. It's worth just saying I didn't necessarily know this about myself, but I realize that I've been expecting you to make me happy always, no matter what, and I don't have a solution to that. But I wanted to tell you that I have probably been putting a lot of pressure on you. Be honest and reflect on the degree of honesty that you're capable of having if you're in a relationship. And that sort of honesty makes you feel queasy, just sit with that. And the final thing which I believe is the solution to this is the way that you can have healthy, long lasting, happy relationships is to first or if you're in a relationship, start now. Developing a sense of self love. This myth is so powerful. The myth that someone can come make us happy because we start from a place of feeling, a deep lack of right that wouldn't be something that was at all able to be sold to you if you didn't feel like you were incomplete to start. And my contention and what I've heard many people who have traveled similar paths before me, many famous people who have gone down this road have seemingly experienced everything, have had the love, the adoration and the money. And they seem to come back to the sense that there is nothing outside of yourself that can bring lasting fulfillment. And if you expect it to, you're going to be depressed sometimes. Unfortunately, if you look around in the news today, sometimes at the point of taking your own life, doesn't matter how much money you have, how many fans, or how many people love you. So get back to self love and if you don't know where to start, I'm going to put a playlist in this video. This is a topic that I've talked about. I tend to like the idea of tables and chairs and supporting them for this metaphor. So you're going to hear that again. But I'm going to put a link to some videos on self love. I believe that the solution to this, to feeling like half a person and expecting someone else to come in and complete you, is to instead realize, recognize and support the notion that you are full and complete and capable of living a wonderful happy night, a life by yourself and that someone else who is full and complete could walk that path with you. And that could be amazing. So that is it for this video. If you want to see more on self love, go ahead, click the link. I'll put it up here. I'll put it in the description. Let me know what you think. I know this is somewhat controversial, somewhat not. But I'd be really curious for the people that are in relationships that think it's their everything. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. And of course I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll see you in the next one.