How To Fix Your RELATIONSHIPS In Order To Fix Your HEALTH! | Mia Lux

Not only were we not taught about what good love is and how to create it, we often had bad role models. So most of us, whether we mean to or not, are unconsciously replicating that normal dysfunction.

As a doctor, I can tell you relationships play a huge role in people's health. Good relationships actually help people be healthy and bad relationships can make people sick. Whatever the relationship is, I mean, I had a patient once who was a 53-year-old woman who had all these chronic issues, and she lived with her mother who was like 80 something who was still abusing her emotionally. And I said, you need a motherectomy, you know? And so whatever the relationships are we have, they influence us hugely. And, and, and they're a big part of our health. And we now know through the science of, for example, sociogenomics, how your relationships, good or bad, influence your gene expression for good or bad. If you have a healthy relationship, it can activate all your healing systems. If you have a toxic relationship, it can activate all your disease pathways. So this is real deep science now, but most of us don't know how to get to having good love. And that's what you've been focused on for the last two years building this company, Lovett. So tell us, why does healthy love matter? What's the cost of bad relationships on society on individuals and even generations?

I mean, you nailed it with that connection between, you know, relationships being such a contributor to our overall health and not just physical health, but of course, our mental health and just our happiness. And I was like, I think it was Warren Buffett who said that the most important decision you'll ever make is who you choose to marry. And if you look at the breakdown, I think, I think Business Insider did a good breakdown on how who you marry is the most important financial decision of your life. And I think we have for so long underplayed the impact of the relationships around us. And, you know, and so because of that, we haven't put as much intelligence or thought into the relationships we create or how we choose those relationships. And before we even look at what healthy love looks like, I always laugh when I think when you think about how we approach every other area of our life, whether it's looking for a job or whether you're going to buy a car, the amount of research we do, the amount of effort we put into it. If you're building a business, you create plans, you're intentional. But when it comes to choosing a romantic relationship, our approach is like, oh, we'll just like, we'll just like leave it up to luck, right? Like, I'll just trial and error. I'll just kind of go out there and see what happens. And so we have this, you know, this extremely important area of our life, which affects our every, every single piece of our happiness. And we apply so little of our intelligence and intentionality to finding it and creating it. So I think that that has been kind of, I think, for the, for the most part of romantic human history, the Baseline. But you can see there is a massive shift now because people are looking around at what is considered Normal, you're looking at normal relationships and going, this is dysfunctional.

Oh, wait, wait, that's just funny. So normal, normal is like means the sort of a, a statistical number means what's the average, right? It's like the, the, the, if you go to America, it's normal to be overweight.

That doesn't mean it's optimal, right? Absolutely. And it's normal to be like unhappy in a marriage. It's normal to stop having sex and in your long-term relationship, it's normal to bicker, it's normal to undermine each other. All these kinds of weird, toxic baselines that we have normalized because, listen, like our parents were doing the best they could, their parents were doing the best they could, and these were the role models and examples of love we saw. I think it was interesting recently, you know, obviously the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial was very, very publicized and really brought up, I think, you know, a very clear example of the type of toxicity that can exist in relationships. But what's interesting is like that, that sort of kind of publicizing of toxicity was that everyone around was like, yeah, I've been in a relationship like that, or I've experienced behavior like that, or I've exhibited behavior like that. And I think this is amazing. movement now to be like, hey, just because dysfunction is normal doesn't mean we want to create it anymore. There's a massive shift towards how do we create healthy love? And I love it. There's Hinge did a study recently of its users, and they found that 91% of people want to date someone who goes to therapy. 97% want to date someone. No. And just by the way, therapy, let's talk about therapy as kind of like, as you and I know, there's many roads up the mountain, but therapy is being a symbol for someone who's self-reflective working on themselves, you know, dealing with their own nonsense. and you can see there's a shift between prioritizing mental health and the kind of qualities that make a partner, I'd say, healthy and connective and able to be in a more sustaining relationship. So I do think we've had a really rubbish baseline. We're moving towards, I think, far more intentional and healthy love. But like you said, I mean, none of us really had a roadmap, right? And to start with, like, you know, I would say, like, I'm absolutely not what I call an expert on relationships, but building Levette, which, like you'd mentioned, Levette is this, what I call a conscious response to the dysfunctional world of dating. Like, we've built every feature to essentially counteract the bad behavior that goes on. And I've spoken to so many incredible experts, and we've been working with their tried and true psychologies and coaching techniques. And what I realized was that there are roadmaps out there. And I know you've seen this too. You've spoken to so many amazing experts. There really are sound roadmaps of what creates predictable love, but we have not combined that into the systems we use to find love. I see myself as a translator. No, I've gone out there and I'm like, tell me how to do this. And I've gone and found incredible insights and like I said, these roadmaps. And my job with Building Levette has been to translate that awesome functional romantic psychology into a technological platform that sets us up for success versus the gross.

Systems we have now. Yeah, I mean it's true. We never learn the things that are most important to have a happy life. How to have healthy relationships, how to manage our money, how to deal with our health. And I remember when we were together and married, you said something to me once that was shocking. And I just realized that it wasn't even something that I thought was possible. But you said, I want to have an exceptional love. And I was like, wow. Even to have that aspiration or belief, because in my experience, all I saw in my family were really dysfunctional relationships. My parents, my mother, my stepfather, my father and his wife, my stepmother. I mean, it was just disaster. And then I saw my sister with her three husbands and me with my, you know, marriages and relationships. It's just like I never thought, wow, maybe there is a roadmap to having exceptional love. And you, really helped me open my eyes to that. And I think we really did, even though we're not together, we really did have an exceptional love. We weren't quite awake in the ways we needed to and we had to learn what we had to learn. But that's part of what you're teaching everybody, is how do we build the roadmap? And not just have another dating app where you swipe and you like and it's all kind of weird and fabricated, but have an authentic experience of somebody else. in a way that brings out their authentic personality, their beliefs, their values, you know, where you actually kind of look under the hood before you buy the car. I mean, that doesn't even exist out there now in terms of a dating app or a dating platform. So this is so powerful, it's so revolutionary. And just full disclosure, you know, me as my wife, I'm her was been, but I believe so much in this that I invested in Levette. So I want to just have full financial disclosure, but I think it's such an important thing because healthy relationships are so key to health. And we have no freaking clue how to do that.

Yeah. And if you think about it, I'm sure most of the people who are listening to this podcast are self-reflective, self-aware. They care about living a good life. They care about being happy and healthy and connected. And the joke about the more you work on yourself and the better you become as a person, the harder dating on the apps feels because suddenly you're experiencing this massive disconnect between cultivating real integrity and vulnerability in your life, in your relationships, but then you're thrown out into this world. And I agree. I think you and I had such a beautiful marriage. Like, we both showed up with such intentionality. And I hope you don't mind me sharing this, but I remember when we first met, you know, you had been working with my co-founder Lauren Handel Zander on, like, love and relationships. And as part of that, she had taken you through what we call the three H's, the head, the heart, the hoo-ha, the three voices you can kind of use to guide what you want. And you shared with me the beautiful list and vision you had created for a relationship. You had been working on this idea of, like, getting super clear and super intentional. And, you know, that even just beginning with something as simple as that is really key. Because again, when people are falling into relationships unconsciously, when they don't know, they can't recognize their own patterns and behaviors of what they've created in the past that didn't work. They don't really know what's important, what they're looking for. We end up in like accidental relationships. Yeah. And then we wonder why it didn't work out, right? And so this whole thing of intentional dating, like one of the things I've really learned working with different coaches and psychologists around this area is that I think when it comes to healthy love and relationships, there's two parts to it which are really useful to look at. The first part is, I think, the personal exploration. Part of creating healthy love and looking for healthy love when you're dating, if you're with somebody, is understanding your role in it, right? And you touched on this in terms of, you know, not only were we not taught about what good love is and how to create it, we often had bad role models. So most of us, whether we mean to or not, are unconsciously replicating that normal dysfunction. And no matter what we try, if we don't get curious and take on our own nonsense, we will bring that into our relationships. And so it's like one of the jokes is that we say with Levette, part of finding love is really finding yourself first.

That's true. I mean, for me, after so many failed relationships, I work with Lauren, and I literally went through a process of identifying all my traits, all my patterns. What was my operating love operating system? What was my love software? And it was corrupted like it had like viruses in it. And it was guiding me in the wrong ways. It was is leading me to act in ways that weren't in integrity with myself. And I and I didn't really understand how that software was programming me to pick the wrong people or do the wrong things for the wrong reasons. And and I think we're all like that. And and there's this weird thing that happens where we end up in relationships that are are not like based on our true authentic healed self, but based on dysfunctional patterns that we learned as kids and that we're raised in. And what I think Lovett does is it helps take people through a process. So it's not really just a dating app. I think it's kind of a ninja.

Stealth like, I call it like a bait and switch. No, it's a total bait and switch because, no, because here's the thing. If you're single, you want to meet people. But what we're seeing is that, I mean, A, the functionality in the apps is boring. It's swiping, it's matching, it's far more a model of social media where you're being driven by dopamine hits. If you look at the economic sort of structure of those companies, they're not really interested in having you leave the platform and find somebody. They're far more interested in you staying on. And essentially they've kind of gamified this feeling of like, oh, maybe it's the next person. Oh, maybe it's the next person. Oh, if I pay for a boost, I just need. And so they've kind of, they work on that system. whereas with Levette, I think part of what we were building is this idea that as you're looking for love, people in that moment are so open to working on themselves. They're so open to learning new skills. And in this first part of what it takes to create a healthy relationship, which is looking at the personal, giving people the correct tools to look at their lives and be like, oh, what is the pattern I've had in my past relationships? What is my accountability for what I've created or what didn't work? How can I heal that? How can I get better? How can I bring more awareness to it? and I know you and I, you know, when we were married, one of the things I so loved about our relationship was that we would often bump up against this together. Like one of us would have some kind of trigger or pain and instead of falling into a cycle of like blame and this and that, we would often both step back and go, huh, I go, I wonder what it is in me that's having me respond like this. And listen, you and I would go work with people. One of the people we worked with was Shelly LeFevre, where we would find like, what's the belief underpinning this? I remember one of the beliefs I used to have when we were married was if we spend time apart, it means that something's wrong. And so every time you and I would be apart and we traveled a lot, I would kind of catastrophize and fall into a spiral and conflict and just create drama because I had this belief because I saw with my parents every time they took space, it was because something was wrong, right? And so like taking accountability for those parts of ourselves that can sabotage relationships or pick the wrong person really is the first step. And we, with Levette again, we build it in with the workshops we run, the coaching we provide, the different sort of incredible virtual resources. Because as people are learning, we're like, Hey, listen, what a great time to do a software refresh, right? Yeah.

Lauren often said, you have a broken picker. And I didn't really know what that meant, but a lot of us have a broken picker. And part of the process of Levette is really to help fix the broken picker. How does it work like that?

Yeah, well, I mean, you've experienced this. So I think, you know, when it comes like we say a picker, exactly that. It's the picker, I think, is not so much the conscious part of what we're picking, it's the unconscious beliefs driving us into relationships. And listen, if anyone who's in the dating world, who's a coach or like me has been immersed in it for the last two years, you see this very quickly, which is that people say they want one thing, and then you look at their track record with who they actually pick, and you're like, huh, these things don't match up. And so even when we have like all the best conscious intentions, if you haven't done the unconscious work to heal your beliefs or bad theories about love, you will tend to end up in those situations which feel familiar. And again, familiarity is not functionality, right? Just because a type of love feels familiar doesn't mean it's functional. And in my version of this, it's like, oh, familiar love felt like a type of controlling or familiar love felt like a kind of giving up of myself. There were aspects of my childhood which I just replicated over and over again. So it's such a curious thing. And I know with you, you've been working on this a lot. So I actually love if you'd share, what are some of the key things you found helped to fix your picker?

Well, I mean, it was complicated. I think, you know, we, there were a lot of elements to it. But what I realized was that I had for many, many years a sense of something empty or a lack or a hole in me. And I never could pinpoint what exactly it was. And I went through a process with Lauren, actually, after we split up to really look at it. How, how did I get my love software? What, where, where did it come from? And I, intellectually, I knew, you know, my mother and her relationships and her story, but I really took diving really deep into the, the beliefs I had about myself and about love. And what it, what it really came to was my mother was born to deaf parents. And anybody who's seen that movie CODA won the Best Picture Oscar last year was Children of Deaf Adults. CODA means Children of Deaf Adults. She was a child of deaf adults. And as a little girl, she was their parent. And so she learned that love was taking care of people who were broken. And they were beautiful, loving, kind people. But there was something in her that, you know, was trained to find and pick people she had to fix or take care of. And that was, was what she did to me, too. Not intentionally, but she then picked my father who was broken, and then she, he, you know, that didn't work out. And then she picked my stepfather was broken, and that didn't really work out very well, but she stayed with him and was depressed and miserable and then turned me into, she called that a parentified child. So that's what I thought my job was. And, you know, it sort of helped me be who I am. I am a doctor. I'm trying to save the world. I'm still trying to do that with everything I'm doing, but. the, the truth is that it, it also had a huge cost for me, and it, and it prevented me from really feeling whole and complete myself. And even our relationship, I, I didn't really have that healed. And I often felt scared of losing you or scared of lack or not enough or, and, and that is really shifted as I've gone into that. It really helped me to let go that belief. And, and it wasn't really, and different people get their different ways. For me, it was, it was partly really digging into the story and getting it. The movie coder really helped me break open emotionally. And it was really somatic. Like I spent days on the floor just crying because I kind of finally got the whole pattern and what that emptiness was. And it's just gone now. I just don't feel it. And I'm not, I don't have that same kind of need or neediness. And that, that's really interesting. And I think we all have different attachment styles, different ways of, you know, dealing with love and relationships. Some are avoidant, some are, you know, anxious, some are secure. And, and there's a whole theory about attachment theory and love. but for me it was obviously a very anxious attachment style because I was always afraid of like losing love. And I think that that really has shifted in me dramatically by doing this work. And I think the underpinnings of the Lavette are based on a lot of the work of Lauren Hindele group and you and what you've done. And I think that really is that DNA inside is what is going to help release people into a framework of loving that is actually more whole, more integrated, more authentic to who they actually are, not operating unconsciously from all their old patterns or wounds.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I know you and I, we both, after we, you know, and just for anyone who doesn't know the story of how Mark and I kind of separated, we did a beautiful conscious uncoupling, you know, just because we realized that despite how much love we had together, you know, I wanted to have kids and a family and we just were never in the right life phase together. And, you know, that experience of having to let go of really good love, in order to, you know, like you said, try find the correct lives for each other was for me also a very confronting process. And then, you know, we both realized after the fact, like after we had gone through the conscious uncoupling process, that both of us had unprocessed trauma from childhood. Yeah. Mine was completely repressed. I had no memory of it. I had to go through, you know, very intense sort of PTSD treatments with incredible people to actually uncover those memories. And, you know, really looking back now, same thing, realizing that my childhood abuse in so many ways dictated what love was available to me. And you know, you with your version and, you know, I often say like you and I did the very best we could in terms of intentionality. You know, you and I would sit and do all the work to try and make it work with each other. But in our case, the work that needed to be done wasn't in the relationship between us. It wasn't the interpersonal stuff. It wasn't better communication. It wasn't any of that. What we actually each needed to do was to go heal our childhood trauma. We just didn't know we had any. We were like this.

We're like, I'm fine.

Like you say, Just a flesh wound. Like I'm great.

Just a flesh wound. Right.

And you know, so that's why this piece of it, the personal piece of healing and figuring out who you are, you know, what beliefs you have, what you're looking for, this is so key, right? And then you think about the apps, right? Where the apps, the apps go to you. Hey, choose from all of humanity, overwhelming, you know, and choose based on symmetry. Like how symmetrical is somebody's face? And I laugh because like, mine isn't very. But not just that, but like how absurd it is that we think we can, you know, make a decision this important on so little data and such poor data. And it's, you know, if you look at all the major predictors of relationship success, right? And there's, there have been enough studies on this. There was one study that was done over like 40 something years with married people. and the predictors all boil down to the same thing. It's like kindness, supporting each other, communication, a healthy active sex life, forgiveness, compassion. All the factors boil down to these kinds of, I'd say, very internal relationship skills and the ways you feel about each other. There's no relationship study that goes, ah, it boils down to how good looking the people are, what kind of a selfie they take. These are just not the things that actually create good love. but we're being asked to assess and choose based on this. And so there's actually, there's a really, quite a striking study that shows that, you know, with Tinder, like 80% of women swipe on only 20% of men. Like there's a massive skewing, there's a massive skewing mismatch in the algorithms because again, people are just being asked to assess based on looks, right? And people just go, okay, good looking, good looking, good looking, not good looking. But what's super interesting is that, you know, the other 80% of men who are not being swiped on, if you put those men in a room with women and the women get to see how they behave, how they talk, who has integrity, who has like a sense of, you know, like, you know, a mana or charisma, all these things you can't tell from a photo, then it all kind of balances out again. So, you know, even just- How does Levette fix that? Yeah, and this was one of the big things that we went back and forth and back and forth about again. I mean, trying to translate the amazing psychology that we see out there into a technological platform is a fascinating process. And in this case, we experimented and there are apps out there who completely remove visual data. There's no pictures. You have to get to know each other. Yeah, but the reason why these apps haven't taken off or don't work is because, listen, three H's, right? Head, heart, and hoo-ha. And the hoo-ha is sexual attraction, chemistry. We do want to be attracted to a person. So I realized, listen, if I remove all visual data, that's not the way. I decided the better cure to this is to give you more information. And so what we were playing with and what you can see now as well, like with video, video, even a three to five second video gives you such a better sense for somebody how they feel their energy, whether they're attractive to you than a photo. And so you can see all the apps are retrospectively scrambling to build video in, but because video is vulnerable, so if you don't have to put video up, you feel kind of like a weirdo being the one to put it up. But LAVETTE is 100% video. You will never see a photo of somebody. So even your first interaction with somebody is like a three to five second video. And so we've pushed everyone and made it a rule because just your ability to get a sense of someone's energy is so much better. Even as I think about all the people out there who are who feel excluded by the apps in the sense of what I hear over and over again is, I just don't do well on the apps. I do well in real life. I just wish they could meet me. I just wish someone would jump on the phone with me. That's the majority of people. Your chance to then convey who you are is jumped. And also the kinds of like, we have a whole structure on the kinds of questions we ask people to answer in their videos, right? So there's a cute profile video, which is very quick. But then the others, we actually ask you to share not just what's good in your life, but we ask you the question, what sucks about this area of your life? And watching people share quite vulnerably on camera, actually getting a sense of how they talk about difficult things or what's alive for them makes people vulnerable. It makes it so attractive. And so, you know, really trying to create a world where even though, yes, we are digitized, we're trying to create convenience, we want to give people the best possible opportunity to be seen and also to really get a sense of the people in front of them. It's a really interesting balance to strike for sure.

That's so huge. I mean, it's so different, right? There's no place where one, and then you can actually have engaged interactions with people that are facilitated. Because often you get on the FaceTime or whatever Zoom with somebody after you do an initial connection and it's kind of awkward.

It's so awkward.

Yeah. And what do you say and how do you do it? And it's like you kind solve a lot of that, right?

Which actually goes to part two, right? So we have the personal, we have like, how do you create good love? It's looking at yourself, being willing to take your patterns on. And then you have what I think is like the interpersonal. And there are, I mean, listen again, there are so many incredible dating coaches out there who have nailed the stuff. And I, again, feel so lucky to have spoken to matchmakers and dating experts and psychologists who've been, you know, squirreling away at this for many, many years. And again, what we're finding is that there are just some key interpersonal skills that if you learn this and you cultivate this, not only is your dating life improved, your picker improves, but your relationships improve. And one of the key things is so simple, but it's just like knowing how to ask great questions. And, you know, most people don't. And when you hear about how people say, oh, dating is boring. Dating is this. Dating is that. I'm like, well, you don't know how to have a great date. and also to be fair, especially in the pandemic, the fear now of actually going and meeting a person in real life, the stakes started to feel really, really high, right? So one of the things we do is we drive people to video first. We call it a virtual vibe check. We say, listen, if you've connected with somebody, exactly said, jump on a video call. But rather than being awkward, the way we do it is I've built a database of three, five thousand questions.

Five thousand questions.

Yeah, deep rapport building questions. I'm not across every area of life. No. I mean, because the point is, it's.

Not like those cards we had that were like the divorce cards.

Oh, so this is, so Mark and I, at some point in our marriage, I think in the pandemic, we were like, ugh, like, let's, let's get some of those relationship cards and use it as a tool. But these cards had some seriously, like, seriously confronting questions. Like, what I remember was they had the question, what do you least like about the way that I drive? and I'm like, that question is not like, that's gonna start a fight.

It should be called, how do you start a fight questions?

Absolutely. No, so I've gone through invidious, but the questions we ask are really designed to help people drop in deeper, right? And they're not confrontational. They're more about getting to the heart of somebody. Because again, there's this idea that we're looking for similarity when we date. I think that's a misconception. If you look at the data on this too, it is a misconception. Superficial similarity doesn't actually necessarily mean you're going to have a good relationship. The type of similarity you're actually looking for is a type, which is like, it's called meta values. And meta values is essentially like, how do you feel about feelings? What do you believe? How should anger be expressed? Or how do you deal with things? So this is all about your internal processing and similarity there matters. so then think about dating, asking someone like, oh, what's your favorite song? Or like, what's your favorite food? These are things people ask, but this is not going to find you someone who has a deep compatibility in resonance versus asking, how do you deal with a difficult situation? When you're triggered, how do you manage your nervous system? You know, what is the struggle that you've had that you have overcome or really proud about? What's something that's a little hard in your life right now? Like asking these much deeper questions that will shake out if there is a resonance at this kind of like meta values level, right? so that's, that's a key thing, that interpersonal dynamic.

Now, now, you, you, you've done a lot of practice with this after we split up. You went on a lot of dates. And so you weren't kind of doing, doing leaf field research.

I really was. I really was.

And, and you, you, you mentioned to me that you had these, like, five or six questions that you would ask, and they were so transformational. I wonder if you'd share what those questions are to give people a flavor. of the kinds of things that could transform a date.

Absolutely. And again, this is like, the way I like to start with dates, and you're right, I came out of our marriage, I determined to really figure out, like you were, figure out my own patterns and do it better. But then also building Levette, I was like, what an amazing chance to go on every single app at every single level, go on dates and really test the psychology behind what I'm building. So one of the things I would do is, very quickly on a, well, first of all, for anyone who's single, and this is super, super, super important, if you are single and you're stuck on the apps right now, there's a very important dating flow, which is that if you connect with somebody and you're like text chatting, don't wait more than like a couple days of text chatting to say, Hey, listen, let's jump on a video call. And the line I used to use, which is, which makes it really easy and really kind of just cute and funny is, Hey, like I'd love to jump on a video call and just see if we both passed the psychopath test. Hahaha. Right? And no one says no to this. And if someone says no, run. But then you can jump on a quick video call and this quick call will give you such a sense of whether you have chemistry or not. And so on this call, you get a vibe and then when you go on a first date, you're not wondering, do they look like their pictures? Is there going to be any kind of spark? You already know that there's something there. So you can ask and dive into these deeper questions with no fear. But the questions are the best ones I found is to start really positive and say, this is from Elizabeth Gilbert. It's a question she asked every person she met for a year. It's such a great question, which is just, what are you most excited about in your life right now? And the reason this is such a great question is that anyone on a date at that point will light up and share the thing they're most excited about. And a person, a person can go from, like, really boring and two-dimensional to really interesting, attractive when they share. what they really care about. So it's a way of diving in, but it's a pretty safe question to ask, right? And then you can kind of crank up the intensity a little bit and ask somebody, you know, like, what is, like I said, what is a challenge in the last year that you have overcome? And again, give someone now someone to share a little bit more vulnerably. Another amazing question they love to ask is, what's something about you I would never guess just by looking at you? And this is what people can share. They can share their quirks. Like, whenever I ask, like, things about me are like, I was a pistol instructor. I'm famous in Sri Lanka, but only in Sri Lanka. Like, little weird things, little weird things. And I've heard some of the most amazing answers. Like, recently I asked it, and this guy said to me, he said, he was like, he was like, when I was a kid, my sister and I were part of a circus every summer. I'm like, what? Like, yeah, we were like eight and six, and we would go and juggle for the circus every summer. So you could learn the strange things and it just, it opens up these kinds of conversations, right? But then the next thing is to ask people about like what they're aligned with, what they're creating. So like, what are you, what are you working towards in your life right now? And this will give you a sense of their priorities, right? And if those priorities line up, is it about relationships? Is it about family? Is it about work? And then it can just be something as simple as like, what's something you've achieved in the last year that you're really proud of? And again, these are not confrontational questions, but you'll find that they shift the dynamic of any kind of, whether it's a romantic date or just in a friendship, it shifts the dynamic from this kind of superficial compatibility, familiarity, to a deeper level of communication. And so much of the interpersonal stuff that we teach in Levette comes down to asking great questions, but also being willing to share the truth. And I know you and I worked a lot on this. We had so much help, especially from Lauren during our marriage, about both of us are people pleasers. we would keep the truth from each other because we didn't want to upset each other. And it just creates such a, such an unhelpful cycle, right? Versus having to really learn how to say the truth up front, whether you're dating or in a relationship, and really trusting, really trusting that the truth will shake out the correct outcome.

It might just blow up the relationship because the person can't handle it or they're, they're not able to contain that, or it might actually open up to much deeper relationship.

I mean, listen, on first dates, and I know a lot of people give advice, like, don't share too much on the first date. I shared everything. You know, I'm divorced. You know, I'm dealing with my childhood trauma right now. I'm, you know, I'm having some struggles in some of my family relationships. I don't share it as like a complaint, but I own it. And I'm very clear. And I light my freak flag. I'm like, hey, listen, this is the truth of who I am. And I see, can they hold it? Because there's no point me secretly managing all my secret dark truths. and then like bringing them out one by one, six months in, 12 months. That's how relationships get weird, right? And so part of love it would be like, how do you systematize telling the truth? How do you make it fun? How do you make it sexy? How do you make it like something that people are excited to do and that they want to share? The apps right now, I mean, I don't know if you know the dating stats, but you- no. With digital, no, listen, with digital dating, I think what people are often not aware of is that that people are not just managing disappointment, right? The disappointment is like ghosting, catfishing, lying, all the stuff not working out. Most people are also managing danger, physical danger in terms of meeting a stranger on the internet. $560 million was lost to scams, dating scams, just last year in America. Do you remember there was a guy impersonating you?

Yeah. In Europe.

And when I was married to Mark, I would get these frantic, desperate messages from women on Instagram going, your husband is cheating on you. Yeah, your husband. And I would like, and they would send me screenshots of like, FaceTiming with Mark. I'm like, what is going on? And we realized that there was a doppelganger, a guy who looked just like Mark, who was going on dating websites pretending to be him and scamming women out of money. Yeah. And this is so common. So you have to understand that with dating, this is crazy. While it's meant to be one of the most It is terrible. And when you hear the stories one-to-one, like thinking about this, this is the most vulnerable part of our lives. We're trying to open our hearts. We're trying to be connected. We're hopeful. It should be one of the most exciting, juicy areas of our life. But so much of the time, because of how the systems are set up, we're managing basic safety. So we can't even ask ourselves, do I like this person? Is there chemistry? Because we're like, am I safe? Is this even a real person? Is this a bot?

I mean, especially if you're a woman, right?

Especially if you're a woman, right? Well, for women, men and women actually have it equally bad in different ways. Because for men, there's an enormous amount of catfishing, bots and scamming.

So there are- what's catfishing?

I'm a little bit slow. Catfishing is like when somebody puts up, well, there's different types. The worst type is when someone literally creates a profile, puts up pictures, and it's not them. They look nothing like that. And then on the kind of softer end, it's like, these days, there's so many filters and Photoshop and this that the person puts up all these amazing photos, but when you meet in real life, they actually don't look anything like their photos. It's all filtered. It's all this. It's all that. So this kind of vast misrepresentation about how we look, which is why, again, I love video because even if someone puts a little bit of a filter on, you still have an idea of what they look like and how they sound. It's a much more accurate representation, right? But you think about managing the danger of dating. This makes so much sense why people feel afraid of going out there and joining the apps and joining the sites because how do you keep an open heart when there's so much danger and there's so much, I guess, not just emotional harm, but sometimes physical financial harm.

Yeah, so let's dive deep into a little bit of a topic that takes us past the initial connection. One, you actually have an authentic experience. You get a deeper sense of somebody. It's a really unique way to actually think about dating. But then you have to figure out how do you deal with your own stuff from your past and how do you create healthy love? Because those are things we don't really know how to do. And I think that plays a role in helping you do that. So can you talk about that piece of it? Because it's not like, oh, just, you know, you make the connection. God, see you later. There's a, there's a more of an engaged process that live that provides that allows people to actually deal with all their past crap and heal it and then figure out what actually is healthy love.

I think the first thing is this. What we expect of people in Levette, and I always say, like, Levette is not for everyone. Everyone is not in Levette. That's what Tinder is. That's what Bumble is. That's what Hinge is. Like, have fun. This is a very specific community of people who are self-aware, who are, you know, building something better for themselves, looking to create whatever version of exceptional love they want. And so because we ask so much of people, I just want to explain that. the way, like there's a very intense vetting process to get in. We are the only dating system that actually backgrounds chicks people. We have a certified third party provider. So we make sure that every single person that comes in is exactly who they say they are. And we have eyes on them because of their video profile. So I don't think you can expect people to do this kind of work on healing themselves, sharing openly, unless you create a container of safety. So the very first thing we did with Lovett was to make sure that we have a process and an application onboarding process that creates that container of safety so that everyone who gets in the door is a good fit. So we start there. But then the world itself, you know, is speaking to this point of now what, how do you make this better? Is think about how you used to meet people before the internet, right? Friends are friends, colleagues, kind of like you join a running group or, you know, it was always in a socialized context. And the reason why that works so well was because if someone ends up in the same room as you somewhere, you usually have something or many things in common in the terms of like, if you end up in a yoga class together, you have similar values around health and lifestyle, right? If you end up in a workspace together, there's something that's, you know, you both care about that's driven you into the same lane. But we don't have that so much anymore in our friend groups, especially if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, most people are partnered. So kind of trying to meet through socialization has become harder and harder and harder. But the other thing is the shared experiences. If you're part of a group, you're having these shared experiences together. So we were like, okay, how do we replicate this kind of more natural model of falling in love and having chemistry? How do you replicate that digitally? And so we played around with this a lot. And what we did is we actually, we created six incredible virtual spaces. Like we have a digital speakeasy, a digital temple, a digital gym, a digital playroom. And these amazing spaces, we throw workshops and we throw these kinds of amazing group experiences where we'll bring in like you, like we'll bring you into the gym to talk about nutrition. We'll bring in a meditation expert to teach, you know, meditation in the temple. And so people have the chance to go in and actually have these kinds of shared experiences. And everyone they're interacting with in that group is a vetted, qualified, values aligned single. And so as you're actually learning the skills, like we're bringing in people to teach you about healing your trauma or how to communicate better or how to know what you want, we're bringing in all these experts that I've been so blessed to work with over the last couple years. We bring them in to teach our members. But while that's of course really helpful, as you're learning and growing and healing, you're doing it in a kind of a group of people who are also looking for the same thing. So think about that. Think about your chances of meeting someone who's compatible with you. Like values, meta values aligned compatible. And think about how easy it is to start a conversation. Wow, how did you find that workshop? What did you get out of it? And our job is to facilitate it. Like we're putting people into little groups, into this, into that. And so, in terms of, I really do think we can find love and find ourselves at the same time. And we have to have the right kinds of structures and systems to do it.

Yeah. It's amazing. And so really, it's really kind of coaching, dating, therapy, kind of all mixed in together, right?

And then put in the context of the fact that everyone in there is willing to share and be vulnerable. And I think that's super key. what we ask of you, if you remember, is what we ask of everybody. So you don't feel like a weirdo having to share because everybody's doing it. And I've learned this, I've built multiple kinds of exclusive communities and hosted many events with a point to get people connected. And again, setting the permissions is key. And I just see this, all the members that are coming into our site, they are people who are, they have options. They are they want good love, but they're stuck in a system that doesn't allow or create that. And so, you know, we're speaking very specifically to the kinds of people who are, yeah, just like sick of dealing with being stuck on the surface and sick of all the kind of antisocial behaviors that our digital dating culture has normalized and really willing to be like, okay, let's go back to like, let's go back to a healthy social baseline, learn and grow and do it with other amazing people. And then like, oh my gosh, who knows who I might meet while I'm doing it. It's so much more fun. It's so much more fun.

Yeah, it's so much more fun. And the vulnerability part is important because I think I realized that I held back a lot of things that I was afraid about or anxious about or didn't want to share because I thought it would cause love to leave or to disappear or to go away. And what I found is the more authentic I am, the more vulnerable I am, the more I tell the truth, The opposite happens. It is sort of a magic trick. It is like telling the truth is.

Kind of a magic trick.

-It is literally a magic trick. -And we are really trained how to lie in this culture. And what underpins Lovett and what you are doing, Mia, is like ending the lying part of love.

-So, can you talk about that? -Absolutely. I mean, I call it like a retraining because I think you are so bang on with that. We have been trained and socialized to lie. whether it's a belief that there's something that's in us that's unacceptable or, you know, we're managing what we think the other person wants. We're living in romantic scarcity, so we're afraid, oh gosh, this person doesn't choose me. Then, you know, there's no one for me. Or even worse, like most people have this kind of, they care what people think. And so they try to get every single date to like them, which is ridiculous, right? Because not everyone's gonna like you. And so we get stuck in these dysfunctional thinkers. So retraining people, is such a big part of what we're trying to do with Livet. And that starts at the onboarding process where we were very clear. We're like, listen, in this club, in the social club, no liars, no scams. Oh, my. Like, we're building a culture of telling the truth and, you know, and rewarding people for doing so. And I think, I think what I've seen, just like you were saying, is that most people, if given the opportunity and they know they're not gonna be punished for it, would like to actually share who they are. You know, the amount of people who go dating and don't even say they're divorced because they're afraid that if they say they're divorced, the person won't want to date them, right?

Like these are the kinds of even just base level things. I mean, I say, look, I'm divorced three times.

I'm a relationship expert now. I have a lot of experience. A lot of practice, a lot of experience. Absolutely, right? So, you know, so building a culture where it's language the whole way through. We have a series of what we call the Lavette Agreement. Everyone has to click like, I agree, I agree. And these are agreements around integrity. These are agreements around participation. These are agreements around how one shows up in the experience of the social club.

Yeah.

And I think that's the key is like, we're not a dating site. I explain it, we're not a dating site. We are a vetted virtual social club for singles. It's like being part of a really amazing high-end community. It just so happens that everyone in there is single and look it. Right? And so again, putting us back into a safe, socialized context so that we can learn as a community and set our values as a community and say, listen, in this community, in the Levette Social Club, we value honesty and integrity. And so we expect our members to be honest and open. Even with, for instance, ghosting, one of the big pain points of dating is that people just will disappear out of a conversation or they've dated you for a couple months and they just suddenly don't reply. It's a super painful process of being abandoned, right? But if you ask yourself, like, why do people ghost? And I have asked at the people, and I asked myself too, because I committed I would never ghost. And I did. I started ghosting towards the end, like a few months into dating. And it's because we're so conflict averse. And I had made a real effort to say, Hey, listen, thanks for that was a really great date, but it's not for me. But like one out of 10 times, the person would blow up at me and send me a use. listen, 30% of people on the dating apps report being verbally abused. 10% of people who are on the dating apps report threats of physical violence. Right. Wow. There's a lot of abuse on these systems because it's anonymous. There's no accountability. And so people become afraid to tell the truth because of these behaviors. And so it's easier to disappear than to have that difficult conversation. Right. So this is a big pain point for people. We solved it by automating it. Like you just click. At any point, you can click open connection, close connection, and as Lavette, we send the message to the person. We're like an intermediary to help those conversations. And we also ask if everyone makes a choice. Like if you go on a video date with somebody, you have to tell them where you stand. We say clarity is kindness. But the way you do it is by clicking interested in more, I just want to be friends, or I'm done talking. And each person gets to make their selection, and we navigate that relationship for each person. so we realize that, like, listen, we want to make sure everyone is respecting each person's time, but we also understand that navigating those difficult situations and having those writing the messages and dealing with it can be hard for people. So it's part of our retraining is like, create the habit of being clear, but we'll help you. We'll help you on the way.

I mean, kind of what's interesting about what you've created is that typical dating apps are you swipe or you click or whatever, and you meet, and then you're done. and then you kind of figure it out on your own. Like, just figure it out. Good luck. See you later. You know, that's not what you've created. It's something quite different. It's almost like holding your hand to get to the place of healthy love. So how do you help people get to healthy love with Levante?

Absolutely.

I mean, I, I mean, honestly, if I, if, if I had that, I, I think I would have sold a lot of heartache for many years. So how did you create that? What is that? What is experience like?

Well, it's by working with incredible experts. So how I see the Social Club is like we are, while we, yes, we are there as a site and we have a companion app. People come in, they want to meet each other. You get introductions to members. You can go find people in the gallery. There's all the like dating stuff that's there. But like I said, the core piece of it is that we have live virtual workshops and we have an incredible virtual date system, which are all designed to be supportive. you can come in and do, you know, like learn from some of the world's best teachers on love and healing and sex and have that learning experience, right? So the actual functionality centers around these conversations around, like, what do we need to heal? How can we heal it? Like, for instance, we're in beta right now. We have applications open, but we've been running like a beta inside. Tomorrow we have an amazing second part of a workshop around how to create safety in sex and why safety in sex is so important. And her name is Genevieve. She's amazing. She comes in, she teaches, and she's amazing. And she comes in and teaches why safety is the most important part of creating a thriving sex life. And this workshop, we have like, whatever, like 100 something betas. We have like 40 people in there. People are like, teach me. And then the fun thing is you're learning these skills, which are so foundational to how to have a good relationship or to understand yourself. But you're learning them with people who are looking for the same thing as you. Everyone you're interacting with there is single and on the same page. So it's like combining the best world. As you're dating and learning and growing, you're also being socialized in, I'd say, a values-aligned community. Which is why it's so hard to explain to people what we've built with Lovet because it is such a comprehensive platform. It's not an app. It's not like, oh, a dating app or a dating site. It is a comprehensive intentional dating platform, which is, it's a bold move, but like, you know, you and I talk about this, like, I believe in love and I know you believe in love too. I believe in exceptional love. I believe that it's possible to create exceptional love, but with the systems we have, it doesn't enable it. And I think the greatest mythology we have in modern day about romantic love is that it just happens to us. It's just luck. And if it stops working, bad luck versus, no, we know that there are predictable ways to find good love and to continue to create good love that puts the power back in our court. And so rather than just kind of waiting around hoping Prince or Princess Charming is gonna like show up, we go, huh, all right, let me work on myself and figure out what my patterns are, do some healing. Let me learn the requisite relationship skills, the communication skills, how to ask great questions, how to navigate conflict, how to have great sex. Let me learn all the interpersonal skills and really take this on like you take on up leveling your career or buying a kitchen appliance. Take it on with the intelligence and intentionality that we show every other area of our life, considering how important love is. It deserves that kind of intentionality.

Completely. And one of the things we often think about is we have to find the right love and find the right person. But the truth is we kind of have to be the right person. And that's really the first step of of, of Lavette's process is to actually help you look at yourself because you don't want to end up in the same cycle of dysfunctional relationships that most of us end up in. You want to figure out how to actually break that pattern and heal that. So just, can you talk a few minutes about that part of Lavette? Because that's not typical dating app stuff. It's basically, you know, something really more around personal growth and, and more around looking at your own patterns and healing what actually keeps you in a state of being disconnected from the possibility of even having good luck.

Absolutely. And it starts with awareness. The first thing is the awareness of, like you said, your patterns. How we integrated and systematized it in Lovett is using Lauren's, her 3H system. So every member who comes into the platform, the first thing we get them to do is to go through this 3Hs exercise. And it's such a simple thing, but it helps so much because it asks you to go back through every relationship you've ever had and kind of rate what, where did these relationships land when it comes to your head, which is everything that makes sense on paper? Are you values aligned for the future? Are you in the right, sort of like life or age bracket? Do you live in the right places? Do you care about the same things? Do you the same kind of, whatever kind of, I say, like cultural or intellectual compatibility? And then the heart is like trust and love and kindness. And the hoo-ha, of course, is like, what kind of sexual connection do you and so going back through your relationships and actually reflecting on like, huh, what were my relationships based on? And, you know, Lauren always says is there's usually one area we sell out in. Like, usually we're strong in a couple and maybe we sell out on another. And so it starts that reflective process of like, okay, where have I come from? What have I done in the past? And then we get people to create their three H's, their intention list. So they write down what are the must-haves? for each of these categories? What are the deal breakers for each of these categories? What are the nice to haves? And just that simple exercise of sitting down and getting really intentional helps people to map out, you know, what does actually work for them. And I always say to people as well, like, it's not about someone being, like the classic for women is, oh, he's got to be six foot something. Like, does he? Or do you just want to feel deeply attracted to him? Does she really have to have, like, you know, blonde hair, or do you want to feel sexually drawn to her and getting people to kind of stop looking for the superficial similarities, superficial characteristics, and dig into this idea of how do you want the relationship to feel? All the stuff they say about what makes relationships work, how do you resolve conflict? And so that exercise gets them to really dream up a relationship or whether you want one relationship or many, it's up to you. A lover, a husband, a wife, you get to choose, but the idea of they map that out. And the cool thing is, every time you go on a video date in Lovett, every time you connect with somebody and you do a little, we call it a virtual vibe check, afterwards, there's like a reflection form that pops up and you write, where did this person land on each one? And you write your notes and it populates as a self-reflective date tracker. So you have your own personal history of every date you've gone on. So you can be in this kind of like self-informed reflective practice as you're dating. And as you do that reflection, it becomes very obvious. Most people get very clear, like, ah, I'm still stuck here. I'm still stuck there. and with that awareness, then you know, like, what should I be working on? So it's like, okay, well, I have, like you said, like, maybe I have some kind of anxious attachment style. Well, I should definitely attend that workshop on, like, how to deal with attachment styles, right? So we encourage people to create their own map of where they've been, what they want, where they want to go.

And to always be in that kind of critically engaged process. Yeah, that's such a refreshing thing because, you know, getting in and out of relationships is hard. Getting to find a relationship that works is hard. We don't really have any guideposts. We don't really have any Frameworks in society.

We.

We have this romanticized notion of what love is. And it actually, when you break it down and you. You kind of deal with yourself and you deal with the. The process of figuring out what's in your way and then figure out how to actually have an authentic relationship to be an Integrity, to be vulnerable, to tell the truth, all the things that actually make a relationship great. it actually becomes quite different. And I found that for myself, like, as I started to heal those things that were in my way, it's just easy. Like, it's just. It's just easy. Now, sometimes, you know, you've got to find someone you're compatible with. That's true. But it's. It's. I mean, we had, you know, we wanted different things in life, but that's okay. Like that. And then sometimes they really should last. Whatever they do, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. It's okay. But I think the. The question is, how do you have. a relationship that is actually raising you up instead of taking you down. Because from my perspective as a doctor, and then in the functional medicine framework, there's obviously what you eat, there's stress, there's exercise, or sleep, but relationships are one of the key foundational parts of health. And I just spent a lot of time in the Blue Zones in Ikaria and Sardinia, and what was striking to me there was the power of these relationships that they formed over their lifetime with their friends, with their community, with their partners. I mean, I mean, there was one in Nicaragua, there was one couple, he was 97, she was 87, you know, and they were just so happy and in love. And I'm like, this is wild. And like, and, and it was just such, such a beautiful thing to see their connection and their depth of their love together and the way that, I mean, they still, I mean, he's 97, she's 87, they're still farming their entire Hillside Farm, which is like this, Steve. And, and, and you know, that was so inspiring to me. And I think it is part of why they live so long. And so from my perspective as a doctor, learning how to actually deal with your own stuff to heal not just your physical health, but your emotional, psychological, spiritual health is such a key foundational part of healing. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

But there is one relationship that has really undergone an extreme makeover and that is our romantic relationships. We expect more from them than we ever have. It's an unprecedented set of expectations that we bring to modern love.