The 9 RED FLAGS When Dating You Should NEVER IGNORE!
Lewis AI, Devon Franklin, Esther Perel, Matthew Hussey, and Sifon identify red flags in dating: disrespectful arguing erodes trust, misaligned values signal incompatibility, and unhealed wounds sabotage relationships. They teach letter-writing exercises to process past hurt and explain how genuine healing and positive self-talk attract healthier partnerships.
Chapters
Too often we spend so much energy trying to get someone to behave and live in the way that we want.
Instead of... Indifference and contempt and neglect and violence are probably the four most...
People know like there's potential here or there's not or this one could be the one or they're not but we...
When you're frustrated in a relationship when you're fighting, you're arguing, you're not seeing eye to eye.
Oh, great.
You think they're the problem.
Oh.
They're not understanding you. What should we ask?
Well, first of all, what am I actually frustrated about? Right. Let's start there. What am I frustrated about? What are the problems that I am having? Because so often we don't even communicate with our, like we're not even clear. Right, what the problems are. What are the areas of frustration? What are the problems? And then before you go and try to solve it, you then have to ask, what is my contribution? Because everyone is making a contribution to the very problems that they can't stand in their relationship.
What is my contribution to this problem?
Correct. What is my contribution to the problem? Because once we, because it's so easy. It's easy to point the finger.
Yeah.
But it's really hard to point the finger back at ourselves. It's really hard. And so before you start doing, hey, before you start doing this and you're not doing right and you're wrong and you're pointing the finger at whoever in the relationship with, you start to do this assessment and say, okay, what's really the problem? What's really, have I not been communicative enough? Have I not set my expectations? Have I been too harsh? You've got to really start doing the assessment of yourself and then bring that conversation.
I think also to go even deeper is like, why is this triggering me?
Exactly.
Why is this a problem for me?
Yes. Yes.
Maybe it's not the other person's doing something to me, but the trigger of it is something I haven't healed or addressed from the past.
Yes.
And that's why I'm triggered. Yes. But they're just being them, and you know, depending on the situation, but it's like, what's the root of this frustration for me?
Dude, this is so true, and this is why I talk about this in the book. I talk about how expectations are the secret software that run our life.
Yeah.
And what I mean by that is that we don't actually sometimes react to life events. we react to our expectations of events. So, if situations or people exceed our expectation, we're happy. If situations or people don't, we're devastated.
So, what should we do? Have no expectations?
No, you can't do that because expectations are like blood pressure. You know, too high is not good, too low is not good. Because expectation, we need motivation. Expectations are our hope, right? So, we do have to have hope but we've got to set it properly.
Right.
Because so often when our expectation is not set to your point that you made we end up reacting based upon an unset expectation. And so, it's not that what the person is doing is wrong. It's that we have not set expectations for ourselves. We haven't identified what those triggers are. We haven't identified oh, wait a minute, wait a second. They're not the problem. It's how I'm looking at it is the problem. So, in order to set expectations I have every person that reads the book ask these two questions. One, is it realistic or unrealistic? How do you know? It comes down to one word. This is how you determine if your expectation is realistic or unrealistic. Control.
What do you mean? Are you trying to be in control.
Or if it's within your control to do it, you can expect it. It's a realistic expectation. If it's out of your control, you cannot expect it. So I'll give two examples. You know, your podcast is amazing. It's incredible. One of the most dynamic podcasts in the world.
Thank you.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot force somebody to go listen to it.
No, can't. I can hope.
Hope?
I can have a range of what I think people will listen to.
Yes, I can have a target, I can have a goal. But if I put, if you put an expectation of like, hey, it's gotta be a million by next month.
Right.
I would argue that's unrealistic because it's out of your control. What's in your control? I want to produce the best podcast with the best conversations and the best guests with the best marketing and the best publicity. All in your control, realistic to expect. Now, let's apply that to people. You're in a relationship. I want this person to love me in a certain way. I want this person to have this amount of sex. I want this person to go work out. I want this person to go eat. I want this person.
Can't control that.
You can't control it.
You can communicate it. Which is set up the structure for it.
But you can't control it.
Yeah.
And so often, our expectations with others are unset. Why? Because we're trying to control what we don't. You and I only control ourselves and the remote. Wherever the remote, that's it.
Yeah.
I can't control anybody else.
Ever.
And too often we spend so much energy trying to get someone to behave and live in the way that we want instead of behaving in the way that we want, right? Living the way that we want. And if we live the way that we want then whoever we're in the relationship with either that is going to compel them to say hey, hey, you know what I like what you're doing and then you say hey, I like what you're doing so let's do that together. or it won't. But when we try to get somebody to be what we want them to be and do what we want them to do, that's called manipulation.
What happens when we are in a relation, when we are trying to control or manipulate someone else in an intimate relationship, or they're doing that to us? What happens?
What happens is love goes down. Fear rises. Here's what I mean by that. the fear of if I don't do this, they're gonna leave. So, that person, you know, everyone has different degrees of self-determination. And so, in a relationship, when you've fallen in love and you really care about somebody and they're asking you to do something or be something, that could be a very compelling thing to do even when it's not who you are. And so, the fear of if I don't, will they leave? Okay, so then it becomes a performance-based relationship.
It's not good.
It's not good. I'm doing this because I don't want them to go, but I know it doesn't bring me joy. So, it no longer is love leading the way. It's fear. It's fear. Okay, you know what? I'm going to do this because this is what they want and I'm going to become this, but every moment that I do it and it's not in my heart, is a moment that my soul gets crushed.
Ooh.
Every single moment.
This is my life. This is my life up until now where, you know, not all the time, but I could see a pattern in my past relationships where I would just do things to make the other person happy, even though I didn't want to do them because they were angry or upset or frustrated or whatever, they had some expectation. and I would sense like, man, the love is going down a little bit, a little bit. But when I took responsibility and accountability, I was like, but it's not their fault. I'm the one choosing to do these things because I'm afraid that they're gonna be angry at me or that they're gonna leave or they're not gonna love me. So it's my responsibility to stand in my truth in those tough, challenging moments when someone's like, you don't support me, you're not doing whatever they're saying. It's tough to do that. Oh, we're triggered. It's challenging. But I think if someone's gonna leave you by you standing in your truth and being frustrated by you constantly, then that's maybe not the right fit for you.
Well, not only is it potentially not the right fit, you gotta think about something. You gotta put yourself at the end of your life. And you gotta say.
You posted a quote on Instagram recently about this.
Yes.
I saw it. That's a good quote. One of the regrets of the dying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I really, I use that as a prompt. to get people to think about in your life. But if you do that, so let's say in that dynamic, you become what they want you to be even though it's not who you really are. You get to the end of your life and can you live with doing what was expected but never what was destined? Can you live with doing what was expected But never what was destined. And if the answer to that question is no, then you gotta make some changes.
That's so tough.
It is.
Why does love trap us?
Because...
I'm speaking for myself.
Yeah.
Because I don't want to say the world does this, but I sense that a lot of other people do this. When we feel the sense of chemistry and connection and intimacy and vulnerability and love, Whether it's real or not, we sense that feeling of intimacy with someone. Why does that trap us? And we stay in these things in general, I'm not speaking for everyone, but we tend to stay in these things much longer than we should. Like you'll hear people say, I knew I should have gotten a divorce seven years ago. It's like they break up with the divorce. I always ask them, when did you know that you weren't supposed to be with this person? five years ago, ten years ago, the day I got married.
Right?
You hear these things and you're like, why do we stay? Right. Why is it so hard for us, this trap of love?
Right.
Why don't we get out of it sooner?
Right. I mean, there's so many, there's so many reasons. The reason that comes to mind is worth, self-worth.
We don't believe we're worth it or we're afraid we won't find something as good or what do you call it?
What I mean is that It can take a while for you to come into a revelation of what you're worth and that you are worthy to be happy and pursue happiness on your terms and come to the revelation that this dynamic is no longer making that contribution to my life.
Not that they're bad and wrong.
There you go, right, right.
Not that it's all their fault.
There you go.
It just wasn't the right fit.
And for me, when you're in that situation, it can take a long time for you to get to the place where you feel enough worth, where you're ready to say, you know what? I'm going to endure the fear. I'm going to endure the challenges to make that kind of move. So, when you talk about love, love cuts to the core of our worth because we all need it. And when I say love, we all need love. I don't mean just romantic love. I'm just saying we all need to love and be loved. I think it's just part of our humanity. It's just part of how we were created. It's part of our divinity, right? God is love. We are, God is in us. We love, right? And we and so part of that love is, oh man, I want so much of it is focused on giving. Because think about it again, think about how we're socialized, right? Oh, you do the right thing. Oh, mommy daddy loves you. Oh, you know, oh, I want to, but it's not like, you know, do you love you? Do you know you're worthy? Do you know that you are worth it? Do you love who looks back at you in the mirror? Do you love who looks back at you when you take the selfie? Because at the end of the day, love becomes complicated because we never actually get there with our worth and who we really are. And so we go into the relationship and we haven't really done the work, we kind of feel worthy, we don't quite feel loved, and we bring all of that. That's a recipe for this, you know? And here's the thing, it's okay, right? Love is like a rocky sea, right?
You know what I mean?
You're on, hey, we're on the boat, man, it's gonna be rocky.
That's okay.
Because we all have our stuff. So, it's not about finding somebody who don't have stuff. You want to find somebody who can help you with your stuff. Who's willing to help you with your stuff. So, that as you bring things that are difficult, they're like, hey, it's cool. Let's work this through. But you both find a healthy way to do it. But one of the reasons why I think people stay in things is because of worth. And you need time to get to a place and some people never get there where you realize what you're worth. Because at the end of the day, I go back to happiness. It's like, and peace and joy. You know, we only live this life once. You know, I'm a Christian, I believe in heaven, I believe in that. But I've also believed that this earth, this life, this particular existence, we only get it once. So when you really put that in the broad scheme of things, you think, okay, am I living right now according to my choice?
Yes.
Am I doing the things that bring me joy, bring me peace? Or am I allowing things in my life that are working against it, no matter what they are. It could be a relationship, it could be a job, it could be a living environment. Whatever it is, I have to take control and do this assessment and then make the decision, okay, from a relationship standpoint, if my relationship isn't everything I wanted, okay, what do I need to do to fix it? But first, I gotta fix me.
Yeah.
And I gotta work on me. And I gotta love me. And as I love me, it will then help me learn how to love others and make the assessment. Okay, you know what? Maybe this person is going to be able to walk with me and I walk with them. Great. Maybe not. But let me not just point the finger and do the work. The other thing I want to hit is when you talk about setting expectations, that second part of setting expectations is communication, right? Is it spoken or unspoken? We talked about this earlier. You've got to actually ask the question. So, even in this situation, when you talk about difficult relationship, this scenario, instead of making the assumption, whatever your area of frustration is, sit down and frame it as a question. You know what? I was expecting that in this relationship that we would sit down and eat every night at 7 o'clock.
Right, because this is what we did with my family. So, I just assumed.
That's why I just assumed.
You would do the same thing.
Is that your expectation? Is that something I can expect from you? And let them say yes or no. Oh, okay. So for you, you don't ever expect to be home at seven. You're going out to dinner.
You're going out to dinner.
Oh, okay. Got it.
Okay. Okay. All right. Okay, great.
Wow.
Now we're actually having a real adult conversation, right? We're having an adult conversation because we're taking accountability and we're communicating. And so when it comes to setting expectations in any area of life, you got to know is it realistic or unrealistic viS-A-Vis control. And you got to ask is it spoken or unspoken viS-A-Vis communication. And when we start to do these tools, it does free us up. Because the reason why I wanted to write Live Free is because so often we're not. And when I say live free, what I mean is that when you and I live free, when anyone lives free, it means they are not under the mental, physical or emotional control of anyone or anything. That's what living free is. Living free means, so when we get into a situation and we start to feel like, oh, this person is starting to feel like this person is making me mad or contributing to my discontent, then I would say to that person, okay, pause for a minute. Pause for a second. It's super easy just to turn all your attention to what they're not doing.
Right?
No, no, no, no. How do you want to feel in the situation? What will give you more power in the situation? What will give you more peace?
Okay.
You know what? I'm identifying that there are some things in my relationship that are incompatible.
Yes.
I am going to spend some time observing what those things are and identifying if there are certain things I can live with and what I can't. Right.
And communicating about that.
Communicating those areas that I can't. To see if it's possible we can set our expectations together.
The biggest challenge you'll find is when you communicate those things out of expectation or anger or frustration, the other person is probably not gonna be able to receive it. If you're already making someone wrong for what they're doing or not doing, it's very challenging to have an adult conversation. Bro. And this is something I've been there before. I've done that and I've received it. Yes. And it's challenging to do, but when you come from a place of 100% responsibility, accountability, and figuring why is this triggering me? Why is this really affecting me?
Dude.
Then you can come from a calmer place of like, okay, I didn't like this, but I don't need to make you wrong for this in this moment, because we can talk about it, come up with an agreement that then moving forward, we can either live up to or not, and then we can make a decision if this frustrates me.
Correct. I mean, it's challenging, but it's good work and for me, you know, that's when you talk about flaws, like that's an area that I have been, you know, outside of identifying what my needs are and being okay to admit those needs. One of the flaws, man, is that, you know, I have a really strong sense of right and wrong.
And if someone's not doing that, according.
To me, that's wrong. Right, right, right. So if something ain't right, dude, I'm like, that's wrong. you know, so when Megan and I have had moments of disagreement, you know, I have at times mishandled it completely. Because I have in my mind made the decision that on that particular thing that she may have done that I didn't like, she's wrong.
Yeah.
For you.
For me. But no, no, no. I didn't, for me came as I evolved and as I grew. Initially it was like, no, that's wrong.
Yeah.
Period.
Wrong in the world.
Not just wrong for the world.
Wrong in the world. So here's the problem with that. The problem is when I make the decision and judge her action as wrong, the moment I bring it up, I bring it up in a way of attack. And anyone when they feel attacked, they're gonna get defensive.
Defensive. You can't do that in a relationship.
You can't do it. You can't do it, but it happens all the time.
It does, man.
And dude, what would happen is I would get on my self-righteous soapbox.
I can't believe we did this.
There you go.
There you go.
What were you thinking?
There you go. Judgment, you know.
What she gonna say? Oh, you're right, Devon. I'm a bad person. Everything you say is truth.
Right.
No, dude, listen. I learned the hard way. What that did was it pushed her further away. It doesn't mean that the point of what I was bringing up, whatever we were dealing with, didn't have merit. Didn't mean that. It just meant that the way I went about it was wrong. And my intent was not being realized because I came at it from judgment and I'm right and you're wrong and da, da, da, da. So as I bump my head, I realize, oh, got it. The way I see the world is the way I see the world. It's not exactly how the world may be. So when I use how I see the world as the way that she has to see the world, I am the one with the problem. Because I've got to understand and take into account the two different perspectives.
Right.
So what I had to learn to do is express it from here. My love. When this happened, here's how it made me feel. Here's was my takeaway. Is that the right way to think about it? So instead of doing like this, I had to do like this. Oh yeah, when you said that, I felt this way about that. You know, man, how can we, you know, and that approach, bro, that approach is what then brings the communication.
Right.
Then she wants to be contributing in.
A more supportive way. And also just talk it through, right?
Because it's not a pointing the finger. I'm not pointing the finger at her. You know, she's not pointing the finger at me. We're actually talking about it. So she'll say, hey, you know, there are certain things that you do that make me feel this way. I was like, oh, okay.
Now, here's another hard truth.
There's some situations I'm like, I'm not.
Responsible for those feelings. Right. Doesn't mean you have to change who you are.
No, I love you.
I understand what you're saying and you know I love you.
Period.
I understand you feel a certain way about certain things. That's not my responsibility. Right. So the same way that I feel about certain things, you're like, Hey, that's not my responsibility, right? Yeah. I still got to go do my work. I still have to go on my journey and I still have to continue to get to that place of peace and healing and contentment inside the journey.
If that makes sense. On a scale of 1 to 10.
Yeah.
Of jealousy. 10 being extremely jealous human being. One being not jealous at all. Where would you say you lie?
In life or like relationship?
In relationship.
Oh man, I'm not joking. I'm lying. It's like a one for me.
Did you ever used to be jealous in relationships?
Never. And I'll tell you why. Because I love me.
Okay?
So I'm like, yo, listen. I ain't jealous of no other dude. I ain't, I'm not. And the reality is, if any woman that I was with found, you know, for whatever, more comfort or, you know, it was like, hey, I want to go over there and experience that person, God bless you. God bless you. Not the right fit then. Not the right fit. And if I was a jealous person, I couldn't be married to my wife. You know, my wife is one of the most successful. I mean, first of all, she's beautiful, but she's also one of the most successful you know, women, you know, actors in Hollywood, you know, she's an icon, she's known around the world, you know, I mean, She's got man, she's got men, you know, I mean, literally, you know, and men all around the world, you know, desire her and would probably do anything for her. And that's who she was before we got married. So if I was the jealous type, oh, I couldn't, I'd be miserable. Miserable. Miserable, 'cause right now she's in, you know, New York, on a TV show, I'm here in LA.
You gotta have trust.
And you gotta have trust, right? So if I'm a jealous man, oh man, I.
What is jealousy saying about us?
Insecurity, massive insecurity. I don't feel safe with me, so I don't feel safe with you.
I mean, what do you mean I don't feel safe with me?
Meaning, if I am secure with who I am and I feel good being alone, right? I feel safe in my isolation. I feel safe in my loneliness or periods of time when I'm by myself. then I trust that you're going to feel safe and you're going to honor whatever needs to happen. But if I don't feel safe, like I don't really like being alone much and I don't really like being by myself, then you don't feel. What are you doing? What's the problem?
What's happening?
So that insecurity and not feeling safe with self, you transfer on to the other person. Because if you're content with your personal time, you tend to be more content when others have personal time independent of you. You're not worried. you're not worried, you know. And then also one of the things that could happen is that you got burned in the past. You know, someone did you wrong, they violated your trust and so fear has crept in and so that fear is driving your jealousy. Yes. You know, I'm afraid that what happened before is going to happen again. And so as a result, I'm transferring that previous pain onto my present situation. And that's always a recipe for disaster, right? Because the person you're dating is not.
The person you dated. You can't expect them to repeat the same thing.
Exactly. Now, but here's the other thing. Because life is a mirror, right? And whatever we put out, we get back. If you keep putting that out, if you put it out on the last situation, this person you're dating may not be a cheater at all. But if you don't trust them and you keep getting mad at them.
You're gonna push them away, they're gonna wanna cheat.
It's like, you know, again, everyone still has to be the keeper.
I'm saying it's okay, yeah.
Right, but, that energy that you're putting out is sometimes the energy you get back even from somebody who may not be predisposed to do those sort of things.
Not saying it's your fault that someone breaks up their integrity.
Correct.
But you might have influenced it in a way.
Correct. And so, the person that's jealous has to one, get control of that security and two, get control of that fear. And also, say you know what? Listen, if that person I'm dating is foolish enough to step out on me.
That's on them.
That is on them.
That's on them.
'Cause they don't even realize what they just did. They don't even realize who they're missing out on. Right.
Period. What are the core reasons or the core things you see over and over.
That.
Either end or make a relationship challenging to be in the longer end? What are the ones that, what are the challenges that come up over and over that you see?
There's always three questions, right? What's a thriving relationship?
A thriving one.
Yeah. What can go wrong?
-Huh.
And how do you fix it?
Okay.
So you started with the middle question.
What goes wrong?
I think there's a number of things in a relationship that become the the kind of cornerstones of the demise. Okay? And I'm not going to list them in order, but they all are part of each other. Indifference and contempt and neglect and violence are probably the four most important.
Okay?
I'm not talking about big violence. Microaggressions are plenty. Indifference. When you start to feel like the other person fundamentally is not really caring about you anymore, or you don't care about them. what they feel, what they think, who they are, what they're about.
You don't care, you've lost interest.
But it's more than losing of interest. It's also when you are doing different, you degrade the other person, they're less important to you, they don't matter. And ultimately what we feel in relationships is that we matter. That is the essential reason for connecting to people, is that we are creatures of meaning. I matter to you, I'm someone, you care about me, you want my well-being, you're proud of me, you want good for me. you're benevolent, all of that. When you are indifferent, the whole thing goes. And then you start to, there's that coldness that creeps in, that sense of estrangement, that complete disconnect. That. The second one is neglect. Neglect, when people just basically take each other for granted. You know, they take more care of their car than of their partner. Their dog or their dog, anybody, their yard, anything, anything gets attendance.
They're business.
Their business for sure. They're business for sure. You know, everything gets priority, everything gets reviewed, evaluated, attended to, 360s, you name it, you know, new input. My God, it's like people have this idea that they put it all in when they were dating, and then once they seal the knot, it's like as if they tied the knot, it's like now they don't have to do squat anymore, and they go into this kind of complete sense of complacency and laziness. It's an amazing thing. They think this thing is just gonna live on its own.
Right.
Like a cactus.
Right.
Violence. Violence. The abuse, the level of disrespect. I mean, most people talk nicer to anybody else than their partner when a relationship is deteriorating.
Why is that?
Because you can't get away with it. Because you can't get away with it. Because if you talk like this at work, you're gone. Because if you talk like this with the police, you're gone. Because if you talk like this on the street, you're being punched. But with your partner, you have that sense that they're going to be there anyway. They're just going to take it because it's family. And family is this kind of thing that doesn't dissolve so easily. So you can just lash out at them and talk to them with a tone and a dismissal that is phenomenal. So that kind of violence, I'm not talking physical violence and all the other big things.
You're talking about aggression or resentment or- All of that. all of that, you know, passive aggressiveness, all those things.
Yeah, all of that. And then, and then contempt, I think, is the top one. The contempt is the killer of them all. Because in, in the contempt, there is a real, there's the degradation of the, is that, that complete this, you're nothing. You're nothing. I can kill you with that one gaze, that one eyebrow that goes up that, you know, do you, who do you think you are? What are, and that's it. You you're done. You're done.
So how do we even get to this place of these places?
After having been so in love and so romantic, right?
Is desire reflect that or if we're not desiring the person anymore, then we start to feel one of those categories? Or does that not play into-- Look.
The truth is this. There's only two relationships that resemble each other. The one you have with your parents or the people who raise you, and the one you have with the people you fall in love with. People can sit in my office all the time and say, I have this with no one else. I don't have this with anybody at work. Nobody among my friends ever thinks like that. You're the only one who speaks like this or thinks this about me or with whom I do this. No, you're the only one. And now we go back in history. And I'm sorry to be the psychologist, but that's really. It is the place where we often learned. about closeness, trust, loyalty, commitment, sharing, taking, receiving, asking, all these essential verbs of relationships. We learned that at home.
We also learned jealousy and all that.
Possessiveness, vengeance, you name them. The beauty and the not beauty.
Yeah, we saw it all as children, right? We saw the fights, we saw the love, we saw the... We saw the coldness, the lack of intimacy.
Yes.
And we bring that with us. and we often promise ourselves, I'll never be this one. I'll never be this way. I'll never talk like this. And we find ourselves often much closer to the apple.
And then resenting ourselves.
To the tree.
We resent ourselves. We're like, how do we do that? Why do we get to this place?
And then we feel ashamed about it. And since we don't like to feel ashamed about it, we hide it. And one of the way we hide it is we blame the partner. That's just one of the ways, there's a load. We are very resourceful in not owning our shit.
Right, exactly. Exactly. Wow, okay. And where does sex play in all this and desire?
So, I mean, one of the fascinating things for me in looking at sexuality is that it's probably one of the dimensions of relationship that has changed the most in a very, very short amount of time. for most of history and in still the majority of the world. Sex is for procreation. Sex is a marital duty on the part of the woman. Nobody cares particularly if she likes it and how she feels and if she wants it. And men have the privilege to go and find sex elsewhere. In a very short amount of time, we're talking 60 years, we have contraception, which is the liberation of women for the first time to free sex from reproduction, from mortality, from death in pregnancy and in childbirth, sorry, all of that. And for the first time, sexuality moves from just biology and a condition to a part of our identity and a lifestyle.
In 60 years.
In 60 years. The women's movement, which goes after the abuses of power, the gay movement, which introduces the concept of identity to sexuality, the fact that sex is for connection and pleasure, The fact that for the first time we have sex before marriage and many times a lot. We used to marry and have sex for the first time. Now we marry and we stopped having sex with others. Monogamy used to be one person for life. Now monogamy is one person at a time. And people go around telling you, I'm monogamous in all my relationships. And it makes perfect sense to me. Okay, all of that in a very short amount of time. The fact that I choose you to marry or to live together doesn't matter. Commitment, because I'm attracted to you, because you give me butterflies in my stomach, and the fact that I think that if I don't have these butterflies anymore, maybe I don't love you anymore. And the fact that sexuality in long-term relationships is rooted in wanting only desire. I feel like it. I want to. Not I have to. Not we want many kids. After two kids, the only reason to continue doing it with you is because we feel like it.
It's pleasurable.
It's pleasurable.
It's pleasurable. We connect, it feels good, it rounds our relationship.
Deepens our relationship.
The whole thing. That's it. And hopefully it's at the same time and for each other. Because plenty of desire continues, but it's not always at home.
Right, exactly.
So this is an amazing revolution.
It's confusing all of us.
And how do we sustain it? So that's why I became fascinated in the nature of erotic desire and how do we sustain desire because it is the first time ever that we have a grand experiment of the humankind where we want sex with one person in the long haul that is fun and connected and intimate and playful and we live twice as long. Go figure.
Right, exactly. 60 years you're gonna be with them or whatever it is.
It's an amazing ideal.
So how do we navigate this? If we're gonna choose one partner and be with them until, you know, we're both gone, how do we navigate the challenge of keeping the desire continuously?
I think the first...
Both men and women. Because the woman probably sees other men who are attracted to her and, you know, vice versa. So it's like how do both parties do this?
Look, we know that women get bored with monogamy much sooner than men.
Wow. Is this a factor?
That's research.
Okay.
That's not just fact. That's. That is. Men's desire in long-term relationship goes down gradually. He actually is much more able to remain interested. And maybe just because he's interested in the experience itself. And he has a partner there. Women's Desire post-marriage really.
Wow.
And it's always been translated as. Well, that's because women care less about sex rather than it's because women care less about the sex that they can have in their committed relationships, which is often not interesting enough for them. And it often has to do with the fact that the story, the character, the plot is not seductive. The romance, which is an essential ingredient of turn-on for the woman, often disappears in the long-term relationship. It's like people look at each other at the end of the day and you want to fool around? You want to do it? You're up for it tonight? Now this is really not, this is not very much of a turn on for most women. And the idea that foreplay often starts at the end of the previous orgasm, you know, and not five minutes before the real thing. Which for her is not the real thing. The whole real thing is everything else.
So it's essentially the game.
Yes.
It's creating a game.
Seduction. It's a plot, it's a coming close, it's a tease. Mystery. It's what animals call pacing. It's that I come to you, but I don't overwhelm you. I come just a little bit so that you can come a little bit toward me, and then I don't immediately answer. I actually go back a little bit too. Have you ever seen animals? They do this kind of pacing, and it is an essential playful ingredient of seduction and excitement. So women's desire plummets. But we interpret it as women are less interested in sex rather than women are interested in probably just about the same kind of things that many men are. But women have always known what to choose above what turns them on, which was what gives them stability and security.
Safety, security, family, someone to protect, be there, right?
So what people do, look, this is, we want one partner today to give us everything that involves stability and security and everything that involves playfulness and mystery. Okay, that's the grand ideal. Okay? I want to be cozy with you and I want to have an edge and I want you to surprise me and I want you to be familiar and I want you to give me continuity and I want you to give me novelty. That's it. As if it's a...
Right?
And no Victoria's Secret is going to solve that. Yeah. All right. So then there becomes... What is desire? Desire is to own the wanting. If you ask people a question that goes like this, I turn myself off when, I turn myself off by, not you turn me off when and what turns me off is. You're gonna hear I turn myself off when I do emails, when I spend too much time on the phone, when I overeat, when I don't exercise, when I have bad days at work, when I don't feel confident, when I numb myself, when I feel dead, when I don't feel thriving, when I'm not alive, you will really hear that it has very little to do with sex. And when you ask people, I turn myself on when or by, I awaken my desires. Not you turn me on when and what turns me on is, which is, i.e., you're responsible for my wanting. What people will talk to you about is when I'm in nature, when I'm connected with my friends, when I get to do my sports, when I play music, when I listen to music, It's stuff that gives me pleasure, that is alive, that is vibrant, that is vital, that is erotic in the full sense of the word as a life force. And from that place, people remain interested in having sex with somebody else for the long haul. It's not because they've scratched their arms for two seconds. It's, I feel good about myself. The biggest turn on is confidence. Confidence. You ask people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Every description has to do with when they're in their element, when they're on stage, when they're doing their sport, when they are radiant, when they are in their studio, on the piano, on the horse, you name it. It's when they are in their element, i.e. they don't need me to take care of them.
They're not depressed and down and needy and sad.
They're not needy. They don't need me. me because desire is about wanting you. Love is also about needing you. Caretaking is a very powerful experience in love and it is a very powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
So how do you experience love and desire at the same time?
You calibrate it.
So sometimes you're...
It's the same as when you walk. You have to move from one foot to the other. A balance is not about staying on one side. A balance is the ability to see Right now we don't need caretaking. We can be mischievous, we can be naughty, we can be playful, we can break our own rules, we can stay home and not go to work at eight o'clock. And now we are in a playful zone. Now we are feeling that we are bringing our own little transgressions home. We are alive. We're not just being dutiful, responsible, good citizens. It's that, it's very small. I always think When I go and I see people at lunch and you see them talking and they're well dressed and they're awake and all that, I see, who is here with their partner? Because you can see them, they're engaged, they're giving the best of themselves. That's erotic. No, the majority are not there with their partner. They're there with their friends, with their colleagues. Their partner is going to get the leftover when they come home at night. Sorry, you know what? Forget the night date. Meet at lunch when you actually have energy. You know, when you and in the middle of the day like that, when you're awake, when you have something to offer, it's a very small thing, but they don't do it. They don't do it and you say, why not? Why not? Why don't you stay an hour extra at home in the morning and not just because when you have a headache and just say, this matters to me. All in all, you know, committed sex is premeditated sex. It's not just gonna happen. Because whatever is gonna just happen already has. So, you're gonna make it happen. Because you say, We matter. We're important. Let's do this. Let's spend. It doesn't mean if you're gonna make love or have sex, it just means we're gonna take this hour and there's nothing else that matters in this moment. But just you and I to be together, to check in. And then we'll see what unfolds. That's the erotic space in which sex may happen. Probably will. Doesn't have to. But it is the place from which it is much more likely to emerge. But people don't do that. They do the responsibility, that's the love, right? The citizen, the commitment, the care taking, the burdens, the safe. And then they say, I'm bored. I would be too.
Oh, exactly. There's no mystery, there's no risk taking, right? Exactly.
There's no risk taking, that's the word. If you want desire, it's risk. And the risk is an emotional risk. It's not about sexy risks. It's really a risk on the emotional front is that I bring something else to you differently from the way I typically present myself. What can I do today that will be different from the ways that I've done it until now? How can I do something that I think would actually improve our relationship? Me, right? Not something that I want or that you want, but that I think would be actually good for us, that third entity, the us.
Right?
And you check every time, you know, how often do you just go on the tried and trodden, as in, you know, it works. Sex that just works for most people is really not interesting enough.
Right.
So why does it mean it works generally?
Right. What about the people listening who are saying, man, that sounds like a lot of work that every day you have to change, do something different and unique.
Can be... Not every day. Not every day, not every day, but what you can do every day is just a quick check with yourself. You know, is there something that I should notice? Is there something that I can be thankful for? Is there a little note that I could write? Is there, you know, just a way that I can show up? It's small, it's really small. Here's the thing. There is work and then there is the creative work. you know, I'm talking about a level that is creative and that elevates you and that actually gives you. You feel. You feel taller. You just feel like you're engaged. You feel awake rather than this. This is the other seated position. It's comfortable. It's great. But nothing happens here.
Sure.
This.
This is alert. Here is the essential word is curiosity. When you're curious, you lean forward and you watch, you're open to the mysteries of life. This is, please don't bother me with anything, because I don't want any stimulation. I've had my share, you know. And this is the position that most people have at home. So when people say it's too much.
Work.
I basically say, look, you If I was to say this in your business, would you say this is too much work? Right. Or you would say, that's very good advice. This is high rate consulting fees. It's like, Excuse me. But you don't think for a minute that your business would thrive if you let it languish like that. Never. You have a reward system. You have incentives.
Bonuses.
You have bonuses. But there is no incentivized system is in the private domain. So people just think, why bother?
Right.
And that's the difference is that the ones who have good relationships are the ones who created their own internal incentive is incentivized system.
What are some of those incentive systems that you've seen over time that really work or are effective for long-term relationships?
I would say the first thing is almost one of the first things that our parents teach you, please and thank you. Do you know how many people stop thanking their partners? Thank you. Thank you for doing this for me. Thank you for picking up the shirts. Thank you for, you know, making you feel appreciated. Yes, appreciation. Appreciation is huge. Gratitude, acknowledgement of the presence of the other in your life. Not, Did you do this? Did you call? Did you pick up? Do this? half the time.
Expectations.
Expectations. Of course, you know, expectations is often a resentment in the make. But the expectation comes the fear of it's not gonna... Tank person, first of all. And because it also makes it feel like this is not a given. Nobody owes you squat. You're not owed anything. You're not that important. You're actually quite replaceable.
Right.
And with the divorce rate that we.
Have, What's the rate at right now?
About 50 on first and 65 on second.
65 on second, wow.
It's not good.
Right.
It's really, you know, it costs a lot of money. It's not good for the health. I mean, it's just like, you know, it's not good for the jobs. It's just, it's like, okay, now you could say maybe people shouldn't marry, but it doesn't matter if it's marriage legally or the idea is that Then we can do better. We can do better in general. I really think that the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our relationships. I mean, nobody is gonna write, you.
Know.
You worked 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week and, you know, no, they're gonna say he was there for people when they needed to. He was there at every game. He was there at the party. He's the guy who, when you were in his presence, he had charisma. not because he could stand in front of a huge crowd, but he had charisma because when I was in his presence, he made me feel special. It's a different charisma. So appreciation, gratitude, thank you. Little things to go out of your way rather than just to do the minimum. A lot of people start to do the bare minimum just so that they can't be scolded. Go an extra thing. On occasion, just do something for the other person just because it matters to even if you couldn't care less. Rather than, it's not important to me, I don't need this or I don't care about this. Give each other a lot of individual space. Not everything needs to be shared. People have different passions, different interests, different friends, and they need those separate spaces to exist. Admiration, I think, is huge. Because admiration is also that you can really see the otherness of the other person. Don't try to make you partner into one person for everything. There is no such a person. Find multiple sources of connection, of intimacy, of friendship, so that you can have a group of people support you and don't have one person who has to be there for you for everything, especially when you're in the dumpster.
We used to have a village of people to do that. Now we just expect one person to be the village.
Yes, yes, one person for the whole village. That is a unique, and then we're upset when they don't fulfill the mandate. And that's the more important, like, I can't talk to you, you're not supportive of me, you're not excited for me, excuse me, find other people. Right.
I can't be everything for you.
No, exactly. No. We've all been through stuff. we've all been damaged, we've all been disappointed and hurt, but we have not properly processed those things. And then we take those negative experiences and we project them onto people, we project them onto our future, we project them onto our self-esteem and self-worth, and we throw everything out of whack. And now, we can't even embrace or set ourselves up for that great relationship because we're still holding on to the bad one that we experienced before. So, it completely gets in the way of people seeing progress in their life. So, to me it's like okay, we can give you all these tools and tips on how to date and how to navigate through this relationship.
Online dating stuff.
Exactly, and it's all useful. But if you don't heal, you're going to end up in a bad spot. There's no way around that it's inevitable. And people who think they can ignore a lack of healing and still have a great relationship are being naive.
Yeah, it sounds like if heal, you're going to keep hurting yourself and hurting the person you're in a relationship with.
Yes, and or hurting people that you could have been in a relationship with because so many people have run away or pushed away that real love because it was scary. It made them feel too vulnerable. And again, that stems from you've been hurt. And so, you don't want to go back to that hurt again. So, when somebody you feel deeply for pulls out all this and this vulnerability out of you, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too much.
That's interesting. You know, many years ago, I was dating someone and it was like, you know, we were very connected very quickly. I felt like, wow, there's something different about this person. And after months, she started sabotaging things. Like, we would be having like the most incredible nights. Like everything was going great and then all of a sudden she would just get mad at me over nothing, right? Which seemed like nothing. I was like, what did I say or didn't say? Like, I thought we were having fun here. And then the whole night, the next 24 hours would be ruined because she would be upset about something. But wouldn't tell me. And I was like, what is going on? She was not the right fit for me in the long run and we broke up eventually. But at one point she said to me, she goes, I didn't think I'd find you. Like, I didn't think I'd find you now at this age of my life. I thought I'd find you like in my 30s, she was like in her young 20s. I thought I'd like have my fun in my 20s and then the version of you, the idea of you would come at like 30 or something when she was ready. And she was holding on to so much baggage and like hurt from previous relationships, but she wasn't healing from it at the time.
Exactly.
She was just kind of like sabotaging and like pushing away like the vulnerability that we were creating. Like, we were having so much connection and vulnerability but she was just like, I'm scared, you know?
Exactly. It's crazy. Because she lost emotional control with you and that's a scary place to be in. And so, the only thing she can do at that point is look for something to be wrong to validate walking away. Because if she can't find something wrong how can she say I can't do this, I don't want to be here anymore? So, now it starts to nitpick, create issues. But it all stems from yes, she has not healed it. I would argue that the vast majority of people are married to someone they don't even have the deepest feelings for.
Really?
Yes.
What's the percentage you think in your mind?
If I had to throw out a number I'm going to say 60%. 60% I'm just going to throw out there. And it could be a lot higher.
I feel like 60% of people don't love... What did you say?
They're not married to the person they have the deepest feelings for, all right. The person they have the deepest feelings for that situation somehow went left, people run. Like in your situation in her mind you were too good to be true. This was not real and she could not believe that she was experiencing this at this time of her life. And to be honest with you she wouldn't have been ready at 30 either. Because at 30 she still wouldn't have healed. You would have came along and she'd been like, what is going on here? And so, it's a very common thing. It happens a lot more than people think. Like, I'm willing to bet there are men who are going to hear this and they're going to say oh, my gosh, that happened to me.
Wow.
All right. And people don't hear about it as much because now when that woman tells her story to someone else she doesn't say oh, he was too good I was scared I ran away.
He did this and he had this fault and I had this red flag and all these challenges came up and he looked at me, I don't know, something.
Exactly, 'cause again, she has to validate her decision and she has to make herself feel more comfortable about the fact that she ran away from you. But I'm gonna tell you right now, it's gonna hit her. It's gonna hit her hard one day. And don't be surprised if one day, I mean, I don't know if she's.
Gonna- oh, it's already happened many times. It's happened many times. Don't worry. No, we weren't the right fit. It was, you know, it's all good. And I wish her the best. But yeah, she's tried to come back many times.
They always, always.
It's all good. Who do you think runs away more from vulnerability and a relationship that has the potential to be great, men or women?
People gonna be shocked with women, hands down.
Why is that?
Okay, one, I think that because women are more emotionally in tune, and they give more emotionally so become a lot more emotionally invested in situations. It's quicker for themselves to feel like they're losing themselves when they feel this amazing connection with somebody. Because again, it pulls you into an area that you're not used to being in.
They lose control.
Yes, because it's like if you're with a guy that you really like, all right, and you're really into him but he doesn't call you today it'll bother you. But it's not going to drive you crazy like the guy who you're madly into, all right. When he doesn't call you, you might be thinking oh, my gosh, what is he doing? What's happening? Am I good enough? Women will start to question and analyze everything that will drive them insane. Also, the reality is that women are hearing so much from other women or from what they've only experienced good men don't exist. There are no good men here. This is a fairy tale to believe you can meet this guy who's so great and So amazing. So, when they meet that guy it's something has to be wrong.
It's too good to be true.
Exactly, I cannot believe this is what it is.
Let me check his like background record.
He went to jail. He must have secret kids somewhere. Something is going on. On the flip side, when men come across that situation they think oh, my gosh, I've hit the jackpot. Like, I found a woman who separates herself from everyone else. They latch onto it. the problem though with men is we don't typically handle those situations well in regards to one, how that woman is reacting. So, if she's feeling insecure or she's feeling uneasy we get frustrated because it's almost like well, we had this amazing connection I'm doing my best to love you why are you acting like this? So, now we may react in a way that fuels her fear. That fear, yeah, exactly. And creates more problems. So, we do contribute to the issue but we're not quicker to run away. We're quicker to latch on and say oh, my gosh, I want this. This is an opportunity I can't let pass me by. Where she's thinking this is not a real this can't be true. I'm fooling myself let me run now before I get hurt even worse later.
Before I get too deep in and then it's hard for me to get out.
Exactly.
Wow, man.
Yeah.
Who messes up relationships more? If women tend to run away more If a man knows how to like manage the running this away, who ends up messing up relationships more men or women in your experience?
That one's hard to say. I'm going to lean towards men and only because I feel like men aren't as in tune into what we're doing wrong in the moment. So, for example, the other day I had a client came to me his fiance broke up with him, all right. And he has said that back in earlier this year they had this argument and it was over the fact that there weren't towels prepared for her when they were staying at some family's house. Now, she's saying to him in this argument you don't appreciate me, you don't make me a priority essentially. And he's saying why are we arguing about a towel? And I had to explain to him like listen, it's not about the towel, listen to her words. She said you never appreciate me, let's explore that. So, I think that there's a disconnect a lot of times with guys not understanding what they're overlooking, what they're missing, not truly hearing what the woman is saying because she's not always very clear and transparent about what's going on. Which yes, is an issue which does contribute to the problems. But I do think that men knowingly and unknowingly sometimes make a lot of mistakes that cause damage to the relationship. I don't want to say put more blame on them, but I do put some blame on them.
In general, you're saying that.
Yeah, it happens more on that side.
And when did you start to learn about relationships so well? Because right now you're not married, you're not in a relationship. So, what gives you this experience of relationship expertise and understanding?
So, it's a combination of things. One, it was ever since I was a kid, people came to me and told me their life story.
Really?
I remember being 13, I met a woman for the first time at a party. At the party, she's telling me how she's been raped, how all these horrific things have happened to her that she's never told anyone else. And I could see this was a one-time thing, but this was a reoccurring theme. People, I remember at the bus stop one time someone sitting next to me and then opening up. And I never understood why, but what that did was it allowed me to see into to people's lives more than the average person does. Therefore, gain a better more clear understanding of what's really going on. But what really I think bust the doors wide open was when I went abstinent. Because I feel like as men when we still have sex on the brain and sex as the focus we don't see straight, all right. And we don't process things properly.
You were in a relationship at the time you mean?
No, I was single and you know, I thought God was telling me to step away from women and just be abstinent. And this also coincidentally was when the business really took another step and went to a higher level. And so, it allowed me to refocus but it not just refocusing purpose and business wise. I was able to really see things for what they were. I was able to step away from situations and really evaluate, understand because so much is happening and so much it's not that we don't know. But sometimes we don't know how to articulate it, we don't know how to process and break it down. Now, that I do believe is a natural gift that I've been given. I just know how to express things in a way that people can understand it and I know how to process things and see beyond what you're showing me. Because a lot of people will act like I'm happy, I'm good, nothing wrong with me and I can see right through that, all right. So, that combination of natural gift, letting God lead me as far as my purpose is concerned. But I do think that being abstinent and really taking my selfish desires out of it.
Wow. When did this happen? How old were you?
This was, I was what, 27?
You've been abstinent since 27?
There's been some on and off. I haven't been perfect with it.
Sure, sure.
But I did go a stretch of five years. Wow. And I really think that helped open my eyes to another level and really allow me to see things more clearly and not just see things more clearly but also fine tune how I express things because I was the person when I was younger who was very blunt, very bold, just said how I felt, didn't care how you felt about it. And I learned, you know, it's not what you say it's how you say it. And learning how to convey the message in a way that people can actually receive it was something I had to work on as well. especially as I found myself in this position. I never knew I was gonna be doing this. I never saw this as my future, but once I kind of got to that place of accepting it, I realized I had things I had to improve upon and make better so that I can truly help people the way they need to be helped.
What's the greatest lesson you learned in a partnership or intimate relationship of yours that you've had?
Don't internalize things personally. And what I mean is a lot of times we react to what they're doing or how they're talking to us or their behavior towards us in that moment not realizing it's deeper than us in that moment. It's not about us, it's about them. Exactly, and if we internalize it and we react to that we will now make things worse and we will pile on more negative energy into the situation and it starts to make things harder to overcome or it can just break apart the whole relationship. So, learning to kind of take a step back and really again, hearing them, not just listening to what they're saying or not just hearing them more so listening as far as listen to the key words, listen to what's really going on with them. Take your own emotions out of it don't react emotionally to things. I think that's a lesson for not just romantic relationships that's for any relationship. Business, family, whatever. Don't be so quick to react emotionally. Allow yourself to process. I always tell you how to say think before you speak, pray before you speak, pray before you react. Allow yourself to just calm your spirit, listen, process, then speak. Because too many times that emotional reaction it's just adding more fire to the flame.
What should be the key things people are looking for and any partner to thrive and maintain a relationship long term in today's society.
The first thing that came to mind is connection, all right? I am a firm believer that you can't have an amazing relationship at least long term without connection. A lot of people get by on that initial hype, all right? That initial excitement, oh, they're so wonderful, their resume is so great, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's cool. cool, but that's not going to sustain you. Is there something deeper there? Can you two truly be each other, be yourselves with each other? Open up, share your inner thoughts, you know, be emotionally naked with this person. If you can and you still enjoy their presence, enjoy speaking to them, you feel good when they're around you, okay, we got something we can work with here. Even if everything's not in perfect alignment, we have the foundation. to now grow the relationship. But without that, it's just fluff.
Is connection something that's created or is it just, does it only happen between certain people?
It only happens between certain people. Really? It's either there or it's not.
You can't- and you should know it in the first few minutes or is it maybe it takes...
I won't say you'll know it in the first few minutes. I think it can vary. I think it depends on how spiritually in tune you are. or how emotionally grounded you are. If you're in a very emotionally healthy place, I do think you're going to recognize it very quickly, all right. But a lot of times you pick up on it, but you're scared to embrace it. You're still rationalizing what's going on here. And we've been programmed to believe it all takes time. So, when we see this experience where two people are, it's like this they click and they're feeling these tense feelings right away everyone else is saying slow down, this can't be real or you know, you're jumping the gun. In reality, no, because in most situations let's just say if not in a few minutes the first date people know. People know like there's potential here or there's not or this one could be the one or they're not. But we rationalize why we should entertain this and move further give it a chance waste our time and then we find ourselves stuck in situations we don't belong in. And now we try to make it work because we've invested so much and we don't want to now admit that we were wrong or we wasted our time, we're lonely. Various reasons cause us to hang on to situations we don't belong in. But we knew from the beginning like when I speak to people who are divorced and I ask them, When did you know? When did you know yet?
A lot of people like my wedding day or like it's like when I was walking down the aisle youe're like, why did you get married? Exactly. I hate when people answer that way.
I'm like, why would you get married? And even way before then. Forget the marriage day might have been when reality truly hit but they allowed themselves to see it. But then at that point what are.
You going to do? Yeah, you got to fall through.
Your family's there and you don't want to be embarrassed. Exactly. But again, the reality is that person saw it way before. But again, they rationalized past it then. And now they found themselves in this more difficult position and they can't do anything about it.
And then they get a divorce a year or two later.
25 years later. I know, listen, I know one couple who were married for 25 years. After they got divorced everyone was against it because on the outside looking in they looked like this great couple, all right. But they were miserable, all right, behind closed doors. Well, the wife let me read a letter that the husband wrote her Before they got married, I read this letter and the first thing I say is why did you ever get married? It was clear as day in this letter that you guys should not have taken that step.
What did it say generally?
It was just in general calling out all these different issues and problems. It was a clear disconnect between the two. And once I started to learn the real story you saw that they did not have that deep connection. They were two people who did not fit together and what they lacked is what the other thing I was going to bring up as far as what people need is balance, all right. I think too many times we're fixated on equality and not enough on balance. The difference is this equality is almost like all right, LeBron and Dwyane Wade joined together. They both are alpha males of their team they're both superstars, they're both shoot. There's some level of equality there. But you know what? They could not win a championship until one decided who's going to be the main person here. It wasn't about equality. It was about balance. It was about complimenting each other, learning how to work together. D-Wade or the rest of the team being able to do the things that LeBron can't do everything on his team. He needs the right players around him. So it's the same thing in relationships. It's not about they have to be able to do everything we do. We got to be able to do everything they do. do? It's about can we compliment each other? Can we balance each other? Can I fit in or can I have the strengths where you have the weaknesses, all right. And in a way that doesn't conflict and I believe the conflict part is when you don't have a connection they will conflict. When there is a connection that's when you're going to find balance. Because now when there's a connection we embrace our differences.
Communicate better you can say this is what you're really good at why don't you more of these things and let me do these things.
Exactly. And we can find a way to make it a whole unit.
Wow.
That's how we create amazing relationships. Balance to me is the greatest key. Balance and connection, you have those two things, you win. Wow. You know, and if you look at most failed relationships, they lack those two things.
Two things, connection and balance. It might be some forced connection or they've lost the connection because because it wasn't really a...
They never had the connection.
It was never true. It was like the hype of the connection.
Exactly.
The sexual connection or the resume of this person or the idea of this person.
Well, it was more so chemistry. Chemistry is not connection. Chemistry can be created. And again, so using the whole basketball analogy, a team comes together, you can build chemistry. We can learn how to work together. We can learn how to coexist. exist so to speak. But that doesn't mean we really like each other at its core, all right.
Yeah.
There's the difference. So, you can have a team where the players learn to play together but they still hate each other, all right.
So, they had chemistry.
But no connection.
But not connection.
Exactly. When you have a connection in relationship that is way more important than chemistry because the connection will bring the chemistry. We don't got to worry about the chemistry part. When two people have a connection they learn. Exactly. And it's a rare thing again, we don't experience that with everybody. It's something that happens... It's rare to find someone who can say they've had that deep genuine connection more than two times in their life. If even twice, all right. It's usually once to be honest with you. Wow. But I'm going to give it two times and yes, there are going to be some people out there that say well, there's billions of people in this world why could... It's not about yes, is it technically possible, maybe so. But you're not going to come across billions of people in the world. You're only going to come across a certain amount of individuals and in that group of people, yes, you're only going to find that connection maybe once or twice. And once you get there like once somebody sets the bar that high in your life, it is very hard.
Yeah, you have to refine that.
Exactly, you're not going to feel comfortable anymore going beneath that. If you you're going to find yourself not at peace and very miserable in your relationship.
-Wow. Connection, balance. Is there anything else or is those the really the main two things and then everything else is figure out?
-The last thing I'm going to throw in is attraction. And the reason I throw it in is because I feel like in this world we try to shame people for putting a focus on attraction. And to me, it's not about looks. Looks is about specifically saying you have to to look like this, you have to be this tall, you have to have this body shape. I'm not saying looks, I'm saying attraction. We have to be physically drawn to each other. That's the last ingredient that takes a relationship from platonic to romantic. And that's the ingredient that if you remove it will make a romantic relationship.
Exactly, friends, roommates.
You got people living together. No sexual chemistry. Exactly, because why the attraction is gone. But if you bring it back into that relationship see how quickly things change. That is the ingredient so, we have to be willing to embrace the fact of yes, attraction is necessary one when we first meet each other and we need that to be more drawn to each other. But then to maintain and sustain that great relationship we can't make excuses for letting ourselves go and understand there's a difference between aging and letting yourself go. A lot of people are letting themselves go. making excuses for it. I understand life hits us it's tougher as we get older yes, but you got to work to maintain attraction in your relationship. You let that go to the wayside.
And friends, why do you think that is and how can we decrease the number of failed relationships or is that the wrong question to ask?
No, I think it's a good question. I think one we have to understand marriage is not the issue it's marrying the wrong person and marrying for the wrong reasons, all right. And then underlying to those things are the lack of healing. Because it's the lack of healing that leads us into these wrong relationships and allows us to entertain situations we should not entertain. Because again, for example, if you're a guy or a woman, if you've been through some things and now you think you don't deserve that great person, that great relationship because your perception of yourself low. Now, you're going to just latch on to whoever comes around who says I want to be with you and willing to give you what you want at that moment. And you're thinking okay, this is safe, this will work. Let me go ahead and go with it but you're never truly into them like that it's never going to be the relationship it needs to be, all right. But that all stemmed from your lack of self-worth because you didn't heal from.
Whatever traumatized you emotionally before.
So, how do we heal first? What's that process look like? So, it's a long process and I do plan on... I have a book I'm working on right now called called Finding Love After Heartbreak and it's going to lay out the entire process. But so, I'll give a little bit right now and I'll save the rest for later. So, one thing is first we got to get the hurt out. And so, I have this exercise I do at all my events called the who Hurt Me List? And so, you get a piece of paper.
It could be like 100 people like.
Oh, motherfucker, ask yourself the question who hurt me? And now, every person who comes to mind write them on that paper. Doesn't matter if you think you move past it, doesn't matter if you think it's small and insignificant. If they came to mind when you.
Asked yourself that question, put them on the paper. Anyone in your life? Anyone.
From a childhood friend to your parents to a lover. Anyone, anyone, anything. If they come to mind, put them on that list. Because that's how we start to recognize the pain points in your life. Now, we see, okay, this is where it's coming from. A lot of people have suppressed what has happened to them. And so, you can't address and resolve something that you're not willing to accept existing your life. And the reality is that just because it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's still lingering within you and it's causing a lot of problems and it causes a lot of emotional stress which then turns into physical ailments and it just snowballs tension, anxiety, fear, depression, all right. A lot of these things that we go in mental health stems from things that we have not resolved from our past, all right. And it's just all contributing to the issues that we're experiencing in the now. And some of us we may not be experiencing the issues right now but we will. It's coming. It's just festering in you and it's.
Going to come out at some point. So, write a list and think about.
Those moments and reflect on them or what's... Well, no. So, at that point once you get the list now we can see the first person and I won't go too too much further. But let's just say you're going to have to go through a process of getting things off your chest. We have not released these things from our spirit, from our system and we need to essentially emotionally detox. And to do that you've got to get it out.
When you're in a relationship 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 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. When you're in a situation, the premise of the book as it relates to love is really we got to 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 want to hurt someone. You don't want to hurt someone. You may have feelings or thoughts. You may have things. And also, 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 are 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 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 in a relationship, you're more truthful with people outside.
The relationship than you are with the person in the relationship. Tell me, the other people outside. Everything is happening.
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, it's peace.
You know, our peace. You feel peace. That's right. Our peace is the strongest bond it's our compass. 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. It's really about peace. That's where I get, 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 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.
As soon, no, don't wait six months.
Don't wait. Why? Because here's what happens. As a man, the moment you start to know, mmm, this ain't it. 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're going to be one of two men, men that heal pain or inflict pain. 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. Part of telling the truth is to say, listen, I love you. When I operate in love, I put someone else's needs over my needs. I'm thinking about someone else's thoughts, even sometimes 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 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, 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 there when I was single, you wait for something to happen then to use that as the excuse.
Of course. Yeah.
You say, 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 in love? How do you date in mastery? It doesn't mean you can't explore. It 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 all find that journey. 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, 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 one 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 choose not to wait until marriage and have sex with that person, 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, or I want to wait or 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. 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? 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 those 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 it, 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 man. Who do I want to be? Am I inadvertently living in a way where I may meet the same fate 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.
That's a watch, right?
Because all of us have the same struggle. All of us struggle between love and lust. And the issue is getting control, getting discipline, getting mastery to the to a 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 how faithful you are, no matter how spiritual you are, it's there. 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. A couple of things I want to ask from this.
Yeah.
You are a successful man in Hollywood. You've been married for how long now?
Seven years.
Seven years. Two part question. The first part is, do you know any successful men in Hollywood who are 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 would live, are living according to what you just outlined that are, that have the peace.
They might have the funds.
They have the funds, they have the money, the position, all of that. But I would not say that the men that 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 does the opposite.
More chaos. More chaos. Think about it. It's like, it's a man at the end of our life, when you think about how much time you spend with women, chasing women, spending money on all those things, you gotta ask yourself, what do we have to show for it? You know, and so for me, prior to getting married, I had to ask the same question, what do I have to show for all this? And I wasn't like when Megan and I started dating, then 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. Commit it.
The unknown. Because you were dating other girls before then.
Yeah.
You were having fun. Yeah. You know, yeah, but I was dating with intention. I was dating saying, Hey, yo, here's.
Where I am in life.
Here's what I'm looking to do so that there was no lack of clarity with anyone that was dating me where I was. And I talk about this in the book. It's so important. I'll talk about it for the male side and 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. 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 your pleasure is. Not 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 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 with happens in the world. Success is, to me, peace. The inner world. It's the inner world. Success is, who is the person that looks back at you in the the mirror. And there is where success starts and where it stops. We see a lot of men who have public success, but no personal success. And there used to be a time where that was okay. But now real success starts 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's sake, why? Ask yourself, 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 could 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 honesty and transparency looks like. 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.
And 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 and 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 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.
Or he's thinking about the commitment.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
And so for a woman in that situation, she's in a gray area. And I encourage her in the book, you got to get out of the gray. 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 dating anyone else? Are we committed? Are we exclusive? What are your 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 them these questions? Did he leaves? Well, he was gonna leave anyway. That's good.
That's great. That's great. I mean, here's the thing. 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 now. But then there's other women who are that honest where you're like, wow, I'm actually really interested in you. 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 the more honest you are in the beginning, maybe you don't have to say in five minutes, I want to have five drinks. But I think almost the more truthful you can be earlier on, the better, because you can start to eliminate eliminate those people or know exactly where they're going to be at.
Well, yeah, you get a better sense of what's what. And I also encourage women. I, you know, I say, listen.
Have.
An observation period and dating.
What's that mean?
Meaning don't just rush into 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, no. Observe. See if this man is even worthy of knowing what you think. See if this man is even worthy of knowing your plans and 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 Let's hear it.
I'm gonna say it.
This is why it's so important. I say in this book, 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, I'm like, listen, if I was a woman and I was dating, oh, you ain't getting nothing from me. Why? Because I don't know you. I was at Facebook on the book tour, and this woman asked me a question 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 him the code to your phone?
The code to 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?
90%. I mean, so, if you don't trust him enough to give him the code to your phone, how would you give him your body? So, this is when you don't give a man your body, 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 where he's going. And I believe that women have a lot more power in dating than they realize. But a lot of times they give it away.
So much 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 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 for sex.
What if the woman just wants to have fun and they're not looking for a committed relationship either?
You know what? 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. And that just is what it is. And at a certain point, when she's doing the same thing and wants a different result, it'll require looking at what she's doing to get the result. Same for any man. 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. I might be having fun, but I feel soulless inside. I'm not having true intimacy or-- yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Lacking the partnership that I really want.
Totally.
Totally. By having this fun. Exactly. Now, are there any men in Hollywood-- again, I don't want you to say names or anything, but are there any men in Hollywood that you know who've been married for a long period of time that are just so happy. They've been married for 10, 15, 20 years.
Yes.
And they're just like so happy that they feel zero desire for other women. Do you know any of that?
Well now hold on. I see again, I'm gonna say something that's probably crazy that most women don't want to hear. I don't believe there's any man on this planet in a marriage that has zero desire for another woman. I don't believe that. It just becomes a question of managing that desire. Yeah, totally. And saying, yeah, there's a desire here, but whatever, you know, it is what it is, it'll pass, I love my wife, I'm not gonna do that. Boom. But in terms of Hollywood, I think that there's no exception there, but I do know men, yes, that are married, that are happy, that are happily married, love their wives, love being married, even with all the challenges that there are and the temptations, that is not, there are a lot of men that I know that fit that description where they have not fallen to no matter what desires they may have because they love their wife and they love their life so much.
And from your point of view, you think that these men who've been married for 10 plus years, who've been faithful and committed, or maybe they've had some slip ups or whatever, but they're in the marriage, they're happy, they're committed, you believe that those men are going to be more successful in life than men who are not married or not committed in relationship because the people that are not committed are lacking the inner peace as much?
Here's what I feel. I feel like that going back to that battle between love and lust, right? And love being selfless. And I believe as men, one of our biggest challenges is we don't know how to love. We don't know how to love ourselves. We don't really know how to love the women in our lives. We don't know because we don't know how to give love. We don't know how to receive love. And this is an area where most men struggle. And it's actually the area, no matter how successful in the world or publicly a man may be, without love, I do feel that that man is deficient. Because love is the name of the game. Love is what this is all about. It really is. It's what life's about. It's not about the money, it's not about the power, it's not about the fame, it's not about the success. It's about love, period. Because at the end of the day, you could you can pass on to your children or pass on to the next generation money, you can pass on influence. But if you don't pass on love, those children will be deficient, right? Those children will become dysfunctional. It's love. And so as a man, when I decide I'm not going to open myself up to love, I don't believe I can ever reach my fullest potential as a human being. So, it's not so much that the institution of marriage makes men better in and of itself, It's that institution which fosters that love and vulnerability. Because I believe our vulnerability leads to our victory, not the opposite way. And so as men, we have to really work against the training that we get, which is like, oh, growing up, love makes us weak. Oh, you're soft, right? The whole box that we're taught as men to live in, and we don't live in that box. We're either met with violence or put downs and whatnot. So most men grow if we don't fit the box, if every man is strong and every man has the answers and every man has women and every man has power, if we don't fit that box, most of the time growing up, we're told, Stop crying. Stop being a woman. You know, so the box breaks us. So what do we as men do? Anything that does not contribute to our survival, we suppress. So we may want to say, Yo, what's up, bro man? Love you, man. You're good. But we don't do that. Because we're taught growing up, yo, you don't say, I love you. Are you crazy? so we hold it in, right. And then we just try to do everything we can to survive. So, we try to subscribe to everything in the box but secretly we know there's something off. So, to me, when you have a man that is choosing not to open himself up to love I would argue because that's happening because that man has had a deep hurt in his life that he is not yet willing to process and face and get healing over, right. okay, either it's something with the parent or previous relationship. You know, I think that's also one of the truths about men is we're more sensitive than most people realize. Yeah, very. You know, and there's a lot of times men have gotten their heart broken so bad at one point in time. It was so painful, they have no desire to ever go do that again. But I believe we are naturally disposed, predisposed to love. But as men, we have to work against the cultural and societal conditioning in order to do that. And I believe when we do it, we are happy. we live longer, we are more peaceful. So I do think a man certainly can adjust to life without a woman, without love, but do I think the fullest life is when we find the right person that we can walk through life with?
I do.
Because I think love is what it's all about.
That's true. I do, too. It's interesting you said that men can go through extreme heartbreak. And I think, I'm going to generalize this, but I feel like men in general have not learned how to deal with their emotions. And so when an extreme emotional attack is against us, it's like a bomb explodes.
Totally.
Where it can be horrible for women too. I mean, it can be heartbreaking. It can take a year or two to recover in a breakup. It could hurt really bad. But I feel like in general, women are able to express their emotions with other girlfriends more, their family members, and at least talk about their feelings. Whereas men, when you get heartbroken, it could break you physically.
-Because we don't talk about it. -It's it. We hold it in. We suppress it. -It's it. -Oh man, I talk about this in the book. You know, anything we suppress, we empower. We empower it to destroy us. -Really? -Seriously. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote this book. We got to start talking. We got to start being honest. We got to start communicating. We got to start... I have a whole chapter in this book called Create a Safe Space where we have at least one other person that we can talk to. talk to, that we can tell what's really going on, and we can do it without fear of judgment. Because as men, you know, I remember my early 20s, you know, I got my heart broke, man.
Oh, man.
It's like life was over. It was over.
Forget about it. I'm done.
Okay? And a lot of it, but then you don't want to go to anybody and tell them that, you know, you're all messed up because people are gonna judge you.
Suck it up. Suck it up and all that stuff. Get back out there.
That's right. Oh, it's like, you're playing the fish in the sea?
Well, no, I wanted that bit.
I didn't get her. And so I talk about in the book, it's important for us to no longer suppress because that suppression, it builds that pressure within us. And why do we feed lust? Because then lust becomes an outlet. Lust becomes a relief to the pressure that we're not acknowledging and the stress that we're really feeling internally. We find a vice. There's a whole chapter in the book called the One youe Feed. So either you're feeding love, or you're feeding lust. And vices feed the lust. Virtue feeds the love. And so as men, think about how much this world is designed to feed vice, to feed men vice.
Everything.
Everything.
Every time you turn your phone on.
Oh my goodness. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. And so as men, we then have to practice mastery, which is the practice of love, where we become smarter, we become to realize oh, got it. This world is actually not predisposed for me to become as successful as I can be. So, I have to look at things through a different lens. So, I have to say, oh, got it. There are traps set up every day for me to fall in device. Every day, every man. I'm not pointing the finger. I'm saying every man. Just open up Instagram. -So, to you, yeah, yeah. -You know what I mean? It's like, yo, okay, man, listen. If I don't manage Instagram, Instagram is going to manage me, all right? So, I got to get control, all right? Because there's vice everywhere and we have to make the decision about, okay, I have to consistently seek out virtue. So things like this podcast, you know, self-help books, reading the word, you know, going to church if you're spiritual, listening to the right music, putting things in our spirit that remind us of who we are, that remind us of whose we are, that remind us of where we're going. Because if we don't consistently nurture and feed ourselves virtue, that vice, I mean seriously, it's like junk food, man. It's gonna attack your body. It's gonna attack our body, it's gonna attack our spirit, it's gonna take us to a place we don't wanna be.
When does someone know it's connection and not chemistry? Because I feel like you might be tricked. We have this incredible connection, we understand each other, we get each other, I can't explain it, but I feel something. That feeling might be also chemistry at the same time, right?
Yes.
It might be masking.
Yes.
If it's really connection or chemistry. How do you know if it's true connection over man, this is desire, connection, attraction, all these things happening at once.
One, can you truly be yourself with this person?
Ooh, that's big, all right.
Because again, a lot of people they go on these dates, they're bringing their representative and the chemistry happens on a surface level with the representatives that both sides are bringing. But when you actually show your true self now what happens? And a lot of people have not done that with their partner or the person that they're getting to know. So, again, you're falling into the hype of the chemistry or the compatibility but you're not discovering true connection being there. So, you've got to be able to be yourself because real connection loves you at the core, all right. You can show me all the parts of you, I still want you, all right. Number two is can we enjoy each other with no distractions, all right. Again, what people fail to understand and this can happen with chemistry is that we're bonding based off of the activity or the things in our environment. Meaning, all right, we love going out together and we do all these fun stuff and we're doing all these things and that's great, all right. We know how to have fun together. But can we be alone in a room, no TV, no distraction, no phone, just us and still love being with each other. A lot of people can't say that. A lot of people are only able to be in their relationship and tolerate their partner and I use that word strongly tolerate their partner because they have enough distractions in life. They have kids, they have work, they have all these other things that they do.
TV, video games, man caves, whatever.
Exactly, all these things that pull them away from their partner. That does not allow them to face the fact that no, you really don't like each other at the core.
Man.
And so, that is a huge sign of connection. That's why like one thing I suggested in one of my books was go on a road trip. And it's just a random suggestion but go on a road trip for at least six hours, no phone, no distraction just you and them talking. will you still be happy after those six hours? A lot of people can't make it that far in a car ride with their partner, all right. A lot of people cannot be in a room alone with their partner and nothing else to take their attention. So, you've got to really push those boundaries to see what do we really have here if this is really going to be called a connection.
Right, and your fear is are you able to grow together after 10, 15 years? Is that one of the main things?
So, it's you know, it's hard to... You know, you never can look that far ahead, you know. And we don't know what's in store.
May not be here tomorrow.
Exactly, it's a concern of can we still give that same energy? And it's both sides because again, I'm not saying I'm not perfect. So, even though I'm confident that I could do it what if there's something that throws me off, you know? It's just that yes, as time goes on there's that test of really putting your best foot and bringing that same energy that you brought in the beginning. Now, again, I think I'm holding myself to a higher standard that I think most people do because I think that a lot of people's mentality is well, things change, things are going to be different, it's okay. So, what? You don't go out as much anymore. People think like this but they don't realize that's why your relationship is deteriorating. I don't want a deteriorated relationship. So, when I think about Yes, can I be with someone past 10-15 years if I accept a level of mediocrity? Of course, but we don't want that. Exactly, I'm saying can we maintain excellence after these 10-15 years?
That's not on the same level.
Exactly, happiness, all these things because to me what is the point of being here if we don't have it, if we're not operating at our highest level?
What about the, saying that I hear whether this is a meme or this is women saying this online, maybe you know the line better than me. If he can't accept me at my worst, he doesn't deserve me at my best.
I hate that line. I absolutely hate it. And I hate it because it has turned into validation for not addressing your flaws and issues, all right? I agree with it from the standpoint of you've got to be able to handle your partner's worst moments, all right. Because we're going to all have moments, we're going to all fall, we're all going to make a mistake, it's going to happen. Over time, that's just the way it is. But when you are essentially trying to say I have a horrible flaw and you should accept it even when I want to consistently make you deal with it, no. That's not going to work for me. I can't accept that. That's not okay. And so, a lot of people that's.
What they're turning it into. That's you not taking accountability and responsibility for growth. Exactly. Going back to okay, this is where I'm at, I don't want to address it. You just have to accept it or.
Don'T be with me. Exactly, you know it reminds me of like once upon a... I don't know they still say it but I know at one time people would say arguing is healthy for a relationship. All right. I disagree.
I don't know if I agree. I understand that... Yeah, I just don't like that.
No, at all.
Can you communicate with... We don't agree on this, but do you have to argue?
Exactly, that's my thing. Disagreement is acceptable. Disrespect is not. All right, so... Say it one more time. Disagreement is acceptable, disrespect is not. All right, so my thing is yes, It's okay and even healthy to have disagreements because we have different perspectives, we can bounce ideas off each other, we simply have to know how to navigate that and come to an official decision on things when we have those moments. But arguing, arguing says we are being disrespectful, whether our tone is negative, the words that we're using, you know, we're getting loud, we're getting angry, we're basically throwing negative energy at our partner. That's not healthy. There's nothing healthy about that. But a lot of people will say that because they want to validate the unhealthiness in their relationship. They don't want to face the issue of I need to learn how to talk to my partner better. I don't want to have to fix my tone. Why do I have to watch what I say? Because that's what an adult does.
Wow.
All right, grow up.
You know, I'm sorry to anyone listening to this but that's the It's real. We can't just think it's okay especially with our partners to speak however we want, to throw all kinds of insults, to be disrespectful and think this is okay. Because what people are not realizing is all it takes is that one really bad argument to plant a seed of negativity that now grows into something worse in the relationship. A lot of people's issues are not the issue that they're facing in that current moment, it's the culmination of all kinds of things before then. It's the build up from that last time you disrespected me or made me feel some kind of way and ever since then I've resented you. And now in this resentment, I've given you an attitude. You didn't know what the attitude was about because I didn't communicate clearly. Now, you're giving me attitude and now you see how it turns into other things. Now, that attitude turns into not having sex with each other. That attitude turns into okay, the way that we talk to each other in general. Maybe becoming secretive because now we don't feel like dealing with each other anymore. And what you don't realize is it started from disrespectful arguing.
Wow, all right.
It can also start from some other stuff, all right. But arguing is a huge problem for a lot of people and we can't just keep sweeping under the rug. So, going back to your point about the whole take me at my worst. Yes, worst moment. You can have a moment.
I'm always like this. once in a while a good attitude.
Exactly, consistent negative behavior has to be addressed and corrected.
So arguments are disrespect, but disagreements is okay.
Is that what you said? Yes. Disagreement is acceptable, disrespect is not.
Yes. So you can always disagree and you can agree to disagree. Yeah. Or you can, is that right? Agree to disagree.
Yeah, agree to disagree.
But what I'm hearing you say is that arguing saying what's on your mind in an angry, aggressive way, tearing down a partner is never gonna do anything good for someone.
Exactly. People have to understand, whenever someone feels attacked, they will defend themselves. Even if they know they're wrong, even if the point you're making is actually solid, the way you're coming at them negates their ability to receive it. That's why even me as a speaker, my focus has been do I want to be heard or do I want people to receive my message, all right. If I want to be heard I can speak however I want, I can be blatant with the insults, I can cut people down, I can just make jokes of everybody's situation because it's just entertainment. I just want to be heard. But no, I want people to receive it. And if I want people to receive it I have to be more considerate, more compassionate, I have to check my tone, I have to be careful with my words. And that's why if people watch my videos they'll see I try to be very careful with my words because I want you to receive what I'm saying. So, if we're in a relationship we have to take that approach. If you want them to hear you be mindful of how you're talking to them.
Why is it so hard for people?
Because again, they don't want to face the or they don't want to do the work of correction, all right. And the work of correction can entail the healing and again, facing those issues. It's also conditioning if people have been brought up in households and environments where this is how they talk to each other it's very... It's hard to change that, yeah. It's foreign to now speak in a more loving and positive way. It's foreign to sit and be quiet and listen, all right. So, now they have to reprogram themselves and that's a lot of work. And I think also the acceptance of the way you're communicating is wrong. People don't like to face that they were wrong. They don't want to have to accept that so it's no, I have to dig an even deeper hole and stick with this whole negative approach of how I do things because no, there's nothing wrong with this or I see other people do it, you know, they're fine. No, they're not fine. They're not okay, you know. So, I think those reasons they just overall they don't want to have to do the work. And so they rather make excuses for it.
So it sounds like again, we go back to step one, healing. If you can learn to heal, you can start to improve the quality of your choices, dating someone in a relationship or getting out quicker. You can be a more effective communicator in relationships, whether you're dating or in a long term community relationship. You can have a better relationship overall with yourself when you heal and with someone else. So can you give me a breakdown, a bootcamp 101 on how to recognize what you need to heal and then how to start healing that? What does that look like for someone? Okay, I need to heal, Sifon. What do you mean by that? How do I do it? How do I get started? How long does it take to get healed?
Okay.
Is this a lifelong journey? Is this overnight? What does it look like?
All right. So first thing, how long does it take to heal? it's going to take as long as you're willing to put into work. Healing is not a time thing, it's a work thing. So, when you hear people say time heals all wounds, no, it doesn't. Time alone doesn't heal a damn thing, all right. It can help it does aid in the process but by itself it is no good. You have to take certain steps. So, when people think well, I'm going to take a year off from relationships to heal why a year? And if you're not doing the work in that year that year means nothing and that's what happens to a lot of people they took a year off but what they did was they hid from the world, they hid from relationships. They went in their corner, all right, and distracted themselves but they never healed. Now, they come back out of that year and they're still the same person.
Or maybe they're not the same... Maybe the first few months of dating they're a little different but then they fall back into the same.
Exactly, because they never resolve things at its core. Now, in terms of recognizing what to heal my first step is called the who Hurt Me list, all right. So, you get a piece of paper, you write down a piece of paper who hurt me. And now, every person who comes to mind you write them down on the piece of paper. It doesn't matter how long ago it happened, doesn't matter if you think you've moved past it, if you think it's not relevant, if they come to mind then there's some level of relevance there. Put them on the paper and about a sentence or two of what they did to hurt you, all right. This is how we're going to start to locate what you've been holding on to. But you really got to go into this exercise very genuine. You can't be trying to control the narrative. You just got to let yourself feel. Just ask yourself the question, close your eyes, let it come out.
What's the question they should ask?
Who hurt me?
That's it. Who hurt me? That's it. And what if they're like, I can only think of like three people that really hurt me. Should they be thinking of like every instant they can think of from childhood of that one comment or should this be this person punched me in the face.
Anybody who comes to mind. So, I don't want them to force it but I don't want them to undermind it in any kind of way either. Just whoever comes to mind put them on the paper. Because even if there's a situation where you forgot somebody, if we tackle the big one you're not going to be able to escape the big ones. The big ones are going to come out, they're going to come to mind. If we can tackle those then that might set the stage where everything else gets taken care of naturally. Sure, sure, sure. All right, because now your awareness is going to be there and your level.
Of healing will allow you to see things differently. Because really the big ones might be the ones that cause the most pain and if you heal that, the other ones are just a pattern of the pain.
Exactly. And you will also start to perceive those situations differently once you heal from the bigger ones.
Okay, that's step one. Take a piece of paper, write it out. How long should this take?
A few minutes, a few hours, depending. Depending on the person, because you know, for some people it's going to get heavy. It's going to get heavy and that might cause them to want to pause and take a step back. But I would encourage them do not like walk away from it completely, stick to it. But it can be as quick as a few minutes maybe it takes an hour because they may get emotional in the process but just don't run from it. But just do it don't even worry about the time just do it.
Okay, step one, step two.
Step two, so step two I'm going to lay this out. I usually don't lay it out but you know what, I feel like I got to do it today. Bring it. I got to do it today. So, step two is we got to get things off our chest, all right. Okay. And this is where we do the letter writing process. So, there's two parts of letter or two drafts. The first draft is the most important. This is where we're going to have essentially an emotional detox. We got to get everything out. So, let's say on the list is your mother. I always bring up mothers because so many people have mommy issues but the world only wants to talk about daddy issues, all right. And society has made it to where it's almost wrong for you to tell a woman she was a bad mother or to criticize your mother. So, we suppress that a lot more than we do our fathers.
That's interesting.
You know, so let's say it's your mother and you're going to do the first draft and in that first draft you're just going to let all your raw emotion out. I don't care if you curse her out, I don't care if you wish death on her, I don't care what nasty evil thing you say. However you feel, let it come out. You've got to let the anger, the hurt all pour out of you into this letter. If you don't know how to start the letter, start it with the most damning thing you could say, all right. I hate you because boom, and then just go from there. It's going to start coming out. Once you uncork that screw, that's it. Exactly, and this is where it gets heavier. A lot of people may take a lot more pauses in this process, all right. Because again, so many people have been suppressing this for so long. And again, it's like any other detox when you start to detox the bad stuff has to come out first, all right. And you can't get to a healed place unless you flush out all the negative energy. So, this is why it's important. This is not the draft to be politically correct, to try to frame things in the right way. I don't want you to be considerate. I don't want you to think about well, I did some wrong things too. Forget all that. This first draft is let it rip. Let it rip, let it out. And I guarantee you by just doing that first draft you're going to feel better. You're going to feel a weight come off your shoulders you're going to feel more peace to you.
Right, that's the draft one. Draft two, draft two.
So, draft two is Essentially, now I always tell people all right, you finished draft one, pray, meditate, whatever you got to do just get to a kind of level place mentally, calm. And now read the letter to yourself as if you were them. Oh, okay. And now, so put yourself in their shoes and anything that now comes off as attacking, condescending, blatantly insulting, you're going to change it. You're not changing the message you're just changing your delivery of the message, all right. And the importance behind this is twofold. One, we talked about it earlier. People don't know how to communicate without being negative. Their tone, their delivery is horrible. So, this letter is going to help you learn how to take your negative emotions and thoughts and now turn it and reword it into a much more loving positive message. Now, loving positive does not mean you won't say some things that aren't hurtful to them or a hard pill for them to swallow. There's just a difference between lashing out and expressing how you feel. Saying this is how you impacted my life. This is how I perceive things rather than you're this, you're that, you're this. That's the first draft. But the second draft is just you're just changing your delivery of the message. So, by the end of it, you have fully expressed yourself, but in a more calm loving manner. This is going to allow one, it's going to teach you how to be better in your communication.
Interesting.
But also, and this is the part people aren't going to like. And I won't go too deep into this part. For those who may have to send it and I would just suggest getting the book to see if they got to send it or not, all right. Because it breaks all of this down. But for those who do have to send it, it's going to give you a much greater chance of great things to come from that letter. not that that's the focus of the letter. The focus of the letter is for your healing. So, I don't care if you did send it and they never responded. I don't care if you sent it and they rejected everything you said in it. Because the purpose is your release of all those emotions, all right. And you've got to embrace forgiveness and forgiveness is another piece of this healing puzzle. Forgiving them and forgiving yourself as well. That's the real focus but I have seen amazing things happen because of these letters.
Really? People receiving them.
Yes.
I've seen-- so these are not letters that you send out that say, you,'re horrible, you ruined my life. That's not draft one. You're sending out draft two, which is more of a place of, this is how this scenario impacted me. Yeah, this is how you're taking me. It's more of a responsibility as well.
How it made me feel. Is that I'm hearing you say? Absolutely, yeah.
Because it's very different to accuse someone.
And attack someone versus saying, but this is how I received it.
Right.
Whether you're right or wrong. Exactly, because also understand this, hurt people hurt people. And some people might reject that because they say well, I'm hurt and I never hurt nobody that's a lie. Whether you realize it or not you have hurt people. One example I'll give that comes to mind let's say you're a woman or a man and you were hurt in your last relationship and now you've become guarded. Now, to you you're still operating as a loving human being but what you don't realize is your guardedness is still hurting either the potential partner or someone that you do get with. Because you're unwilling to give them your whole heart. Wow, all right. So, you're still holding back.
You're not attacking them, maybe you're not punching them or cheating on them, but you're holding back.
Exactly, and you're still undermining the relationship. So, you're still hurting them and you're hurting yourself because you're not allowing yourself to experience the full greatness of it because you won't fully dive in because you're scared and you're guarded and that has to be fixed. But going back to the original point I want to make is in that same mold, the hurt person does not always realize how much they're hurting you. We have to understand that damaged individuals are operating from a very selfish mindset. It's I'm protecting myself. Think about the person a person who is overly critical of everyone else. They're always criticizing, criticizing, criticizing. They're not doing it because their intention is to hurt others. They're doing it because they want to keep the spotlight off of them and to protect themselves from criticism. So, I'm going to hit you before you hit me, all right. So, again, a lot of our parents the things that they did they did not understand. And even if they had some semblance of an idea they're so caught up in their own feelings they're blinded by it. So, a lot of times this letter basically takes the blinders off when you do it in that loving manner. Because like I said earlier, do you want to be heard or do you want them to receive the message? The yelling, the screaming, the lashing out they heard that because you may have done that with them in the past. But it never received you in that moment. Now, expressing yourself in a calm loving manner they can't help but receive and even those who reject what you're saying trust me, it has hit them in a way nothing else has. And I've seen situations where the offender has broken down in tears after realizing how bad they were being. But they never connected with that previously because their emotions, their feelings blinded them from that. It's a lot, man.
First two steps sound like a pretty deep work.
It is, it is absolutely deep work but it's necessary work. I mean, listen, no one says healing is easy but it's necessary and it's absolutely worth it. And it's a game changer like I just don't think people understand how much better your life will be. And you know what, let's take a moment to say this isn't even about your emotional relationship life. It's about your overall quality of life. A lot of people's illnesses are from a lack of emotional health, all right.
That's true.
And what we have to understand is a suppression of feelings, a lack of healing creates emotional stress. Stress is now the number... It's not now, it's always been the number one inducer of disease. It is the number one trigger that sets everything else wrong in your body, all right. If you cure stress you cure the body. A lot of things it changes after that. So, your overall health, your overall quality of life is dependent on you healing and releasing that negative energy. So, it's so much bigger than just a relationship.
How many values in common do you need to have with your partner, life partner? Because...
The important ones. There's not how many, but there are a few of them that are really important.
Which ones? Would you say that make or break based on your experience?
I think, I'm not gonna 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 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 ever to the house.
She wants her space.
Her space, the whole thing. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a tough one. It's not just about the house, 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 him. 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 than that.
Yeah.
Then, okay, different values come together and they mix and match. But if you have these two separations like that, So that's 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, it was self-reliance meaning what?
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 loyalty.
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.
Raise 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, 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- wants to be.
Alone or doesn't wanna travel once it's settled.
But it also likes comfort, likes repetition, likes the familiar. I think the religious values, if you have a person who, you know, those matter a great deal. Children, do you want family or do you not want family? If you want a family, then make sure that you find someone who wants a family. What are you going to do, try to convince them? 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 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. A value is a cluster of things. It's a cluster of importance of systems of meanings. That's a value.
And you may not find someone with everything is the same, but someone with a similar mindset, as we're saying.
I met a husband of mine, whom I am for more than three decades, who had never left the US when I met him.
Really?
I never knew such a person existed. Coming from Europe, that was unheard of for us. No, I lived in the States.
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.
Yeah. I traveled outside of Europe.
He had never been outside of the US. Yeah, he will always tell me he'd been to the Virgin Islands. Okay. But, you know, for the rest, and I thought, oh my God, 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. 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, I'm gonna go back to expectation. Do you feel like we should lower or should diversify expectations or what did you say the word was?
Calibrate.
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? 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, 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.
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 idyllic thing you're talking about, it doesn't exist. The next thing is, what do you do with that disappointment? A, 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. The repair may sometimes be, Hey, do you want a glass of water?
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 mea culpa, it's that you do what he calls bids for connection. You show the other that they still matter. I brought a newspaper in at a time when we still had newspapers. That was one of his 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 still care about you. I still care. You're still in my life.
I still respect you. So it's how we repair disappointment on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.
Minute sometimes.
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 messed up. I shouldn't have done this. Can I do that? really is being accountable.
What if you were, instead of blaming the other? What if it actually, in that moment.
It wasn't your fault? It doesn't matter. 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. who can be accountable without that becoming a major source of shame and I'm terrible, is a different thing between saying I messed up and I messed up.
I like this distinction. How do we in our mind, because I think in the past, relationships, when I messed up in a small term, right? Like a disappointment, a small disappointment, saying like I'm sorry or taking responsibility or saying, you know, that was my fault.
It was like a humiliation.
Well, it was more like, look at when I'm like, why shall I?
No, it was more like, here's all.
The actions I'm doing right.
Right.
Today I've done this, which was an expectation, and I've done that, and I took the trash out or whatever. I'm just, and I did something kind for you, and I wrote a note, and I did this, and I took us to dinner, and I did all these things well today, but I messed.
Up on this one thing.
So for me, I used to say to myself, like, gosh, but can't you see the whole picture of all the good things I'm doing? why do I need to be in our conversation about like one small thing? That's what I used to feel like. And do you feel like we should just be saying, you know what, take responsibility anyways for those moments, even if you're doing lots of good things.
You know what I mean?
Yes, but I'm not a perfect human being. You know, it's like I might slip.
The story is told by you.
Yes.
The other person is the one that needs to tell you about all the good things that you've done. You felt, I do all of this, I do one thing wrong, and now I have to go into the dark pit.
Yes.
But that's because you had a partner who did not enough tell you about all the good things you did.
This was about me.
If you are in a relationship, you need that other person to acknowledge all of the positive stuff so that when you have to say something about the moment that you messed up, you don't feel like, you know, this is an endless chore.
Well, I think, yeah, exactly. Or I think it's more like, okay, if we're going to acknowledge one thing that I didn't do, at least acknowledge something of the things that I did do, right?
That it's not at least, it's a must.
It's a must.
It's a must.
It's not bad if I, I shouldn't be needing that, or I shouldn't be.
You should need it.
I should need it.
You should need it. You totally should need it.
Don't only acknowledge the bad, also acknowledge the good.
Not also, it's a must, it's a mandate. You know, what happens sometimes in distressed relationships, because you were in a distressed relationship at that moment, and this is true, you directly take this into the workplace. In a distressed relationship, the tendency is to highlight the negative and disregard the positive. The positive is just a given. The negative will make a big deal out of it. So the one thing you didn't do becomes the whole conversation. And then what does that person do? Of course, that person says, But you disregard all the other stuff.
Yeah.
And rightly so, because it has been disregarded. In a distressed relationship, the positive, if we get there on time, it's because there was no traffic. And if we get there late, it's because of you. The good is chance, the bad is attributed to you. Or in a different version of that is what we call negative attribution error. If I am in a bad mood, it's because I had a bad day. But if you're in a bad mood, it's because you're nasty person who is always so cantankerous. Mine is circumstantial, yours is characterological. So when you'd say, I was in a relationship in which when I did one thing bad, it was so overblown and I felt like everything else was being disregarded, that's a sign of a distressed relationship in and of itself.
Interesting.
The fact that you, because in a normal relationship somebody else says, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, then you finally you don't do something, it says, oh, I really messed up there.
I forgot.
Sorry. Right. And it's not such a big deal. Okay. Because you are seen for the whole person. If you have to make a speech about. You should see the whole person.
You're not in a good relationship.
Oh, there you go. Okay. Or you're not in. The dynamic in your relationship is not a good one.
No, that's.
That.
That in itself is a sign of a bad dynamic.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
You shouldn't have to say this. So I wasn't crazy. Okay, gotcha.
No.
Okay, gotcha.
No.
And the interesting thing about this is how much it applies at home and the same thing happens at work.
And at work. So is it a mandate to acknowledge team members at work as well in the good and not just the negative?
I absolutely think so. But I am not the best at it myself.
You don't acknowledge your team the best.
Do I do it?
It's hard. But in every show, we see a lot of the things that are slipping through, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it's like my tendency is to...
But it's different because in a relationship, you're not, it's not a paycheck, right? It's like, maybe there is, but it's.
Different in terms of like an intimate relationship versus a working relationship. How much has your team taught you? Because look, you are probably like me, we wouldn't be sitting here on some level if we were not actually more self-critical people. Of course. And very demanding of ourselves. Of course. And hence, We surround ourselves by people who we think we can be demanding from as well. And that is true. But it is also important that we learn to be sometimes a little kinder with ourselves and not just highlight the negative. While at the same time asking the girlfriend to not be like that, even though you are doing it with yourself, and to also do it with our team. I don't think you can go wrong. you know, if it's not just kind of fluff. I think that acknowledging the efforts of people is a good thing to learn. And my team teaches me.
How do we step out of that emotional feeling where we're feeling overwhelmed or disrespected or hurt or sad or like their relationship didn't meet an expectation or communication was off and we're in it and we're communicating. are both frustrated, how do you step out and look at it from a different point of view so that you just don't keep repeating that conversation over and over?
I mean, and don't hurt it further. Yeah, I think we have to have a really healthy combination of always questioning ourselves and saying, where is this coming from for me? And would it really hurt me to compromise on this standard? is, would it be the more loving thing to do to understand this about my partner? But in order to, that needs to be combined with a simultaneous respect for ourselves and what we need. And to, I think, go to a situation and say, okay, I want to be the most understanding, compassionate, loving partner I can be who doesn't inhibit or limit my partner who supports them, wants them to do great. But I also need to recognize that it's not. What was I saying? I lost my train of thought. I need to be the person that can be understanding. What was I saying? Be understanding of my partner.
You want to be the most understanding of someone else. But you also have to know your own needs.
Be understanding of someone else. But. Oh, that's right. I need to be the person that is understanding of the needs of my partner and what they want. But at the same time, love, what was it? Love's my, I need to be understanding of my partner's needs. Ah, that's it. I need to be understanding of my partner's needs, but the context of me being super compassionate and understanding needs to be that I am that this is happening in a loving environment where my partner wants to be my teammate. If we're in a situation where our partner isn't showing empathy for us and isn't like, if you feel they're not trying to, that we're always coming to that side, that's a problem.
That's tough.
That's a problem.
There should be seeing. I see where you're coming from as well. Type of energy and communication.
Exactly.
Not just I'm not getting what I want. You did this wrong.
You need to feel you have a teammate.
Yeah.
And a lot of people feel like they're constantly being understanding, but they don't have a teammate on the other side. I'm constantly trying to grow and understand your position, but I don't feel the same from your side. That then becomes a problem.
How do you have a conversation so that it switches or becomes more of a equal a whole partnership and teammate. If you feel like you're the only one being on the team, how do you get the other person?
I think we need to communicate a lot about what? About the spirit of the relationship. You know what I mean?
Like, not keeping score.
Yeah. Like, pride is a very hard thing to give up in a relationship because we become competitive often very quickly when we feel threatened when we feel vulnerable, when we feel our partner's done something to hurt us. Now I'm so, now how do I score a point or how do I? And that's, that's a just once you get into that cycle, it's like you're just, it, it spirals. It has to, one person has to be prepared to break that cycle. I'm not going to do that game. And I do believe that we have to love the way we want to be loved and we have to constantly educate our partner on what it is to love. Not from an arrogant place, but in a sense, both partners are always educating each other. By you do something I don't like and if I have a loving, compassionate response to that, I'm also showing you what I want this to be in reverse. When I do something you don't like, here's the response I want.
I'm not attacking you.
Not a game playing response, not a, you know, like if you see a partner, you're in the early stages of relationship and you feel your partner was really flirting with someone over there, having a conversation about something that made you feel uncomfortable, but from a loving place and from a kind place and from a place of that made me feel you know, it hurt me to see that and not, I'm gonna blame you and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna get angry. But that, you know, that made me feel uncomfortable bringing an energy like that. Most people aren't used to that in a relationship. We're not used to that standard of communication. We're used to doing something and then someone attacks us. Yeah, exactly. So I think it's educate. We're constantly educating.
What's it gonna. for us to not react to a situation where we feel hurt or like we, our expectation wasn't met from our partner and come from that place.
God, it's so difficult.
Because why do we react so much?
Sometimes it's just space. I need to take a moment.
To.
Process something so that I can have a more evolved response.
And not react. It's funny, the relationship I've been in, which is newer in the last five months, I want to talk about something right away and address it. She doesn't want to talk. She wants to have space so she doesn't react. And she'll say, I don't want to get angry at you. I don't want to yell at you. That's not the type of person I want to be. So I'd rather just not talk. And then I'm in limbo and I'm like, I just want to resolve this thing. Let's at least communicate and then we can move on as opposed to holding on to something for half a day or a few hours.
Yeah. Here's the thing, space is easy when you get a text you don't like, you know, or when you see something you don't like from afar and you're not gonna see that person for a few hours or till tomorrow. Now you have space to go through You know, I'm angry. You know, I'm really, really angry. I'm upset. I'm sad. I'm hurt. I feel rejected. I don't feel enough. I, you know, you can kind of cycle through those and then have a couple of sensible conversations with people whose opinions you respect. You and I have done this.
Yeah, we've been like, It's not that big a deal. Take a break.
You go, okay, this thing, I'm feeling this, and I'm I'm hurt and I'm this and I'm that and I'm that. And you have a couple of smart voices either that come from in here.
Which is hard to do, which is.
Very hard to get that objectivity and. Or that come, you know, from just one or two people whose opinions you really respect, who aren't going to tell you what you want to hear. Yeah. Who aren't going to tell you you're so right to be. To feel that way.
Get angry. Yeah.
Someone who is Brave enough and close enough to you. and smart enough sometimes to recognize, I'm concerned that you're overreacting to this. And that this reaction is not going to serve you. And I think you need to bring this energy to the conversation. That is extremely valuable. What's hard is when you get information in real time and you're with the person and you're in the same room and now you're dealing with trying to process and create that, you know, okay, I need to, I'm trying to get to a more positive place here.
Yeah.
While being asked to communicate in real time. Well, real time elicits reflex responses and reflex responses are often very harmful to a relationship. It's the reflex responses are often based on instinct. And instinct is wrong.
False instinct. Yeah.
You'Re too often told, you know, trust your instincts. And that's just not often great advice.
If you're not emotionally intelligent and if you haven't, if you're jealous all the time, then having a jealous instinct isn't necessarily the best thing.
But some of these instincts are kind of hardwired, right? What we're doing with a lot of our better nature is overcoming certain programming that we have, you know, In a riptide, you get pulled out to sea. Your instinct tells you in that moment to swim back to shore against the current. Ignore the riptide. I just need to get back to shore. Which is stronger? You or the current?
The current.
And it will drown you. You will exhaust and drown before you get back.
True. Until it washes you to shore, just like...
Right, so in that moment, fighting harder won't save you. Thinking clearer will. And thinking more clearly means I need to swim sideways. I need to swim parallel. Let it take me out, swim further, or swim parallel. Because I'm actually giving myself a longer journey. But then when I'm out of the current, then I can swim back to shore. Now that's not, instinct won't get you to do that, because that requires thinking clearly. Instinct will drown you in that moment. And in a relationship, in dating, your instincts will get you killed.
That's true.
You know, your instinct says, a woman goes on a date with a guy and has a great time and says, your instinct says, clear the calendar for the next three months. We found it. Right. We did it guys.
We had an amazing night. Clear the schedule. We were connected on every level.
He's awesome. We have a great connection. Clear the calendar. This is what we're doing now.
Wow.
Even if I'm not even saying someone who hates the rest of their life, you can like your job and still be so caught up in the chemical rush of this was amazing that this is all you want to do now?
Right?
Well, this isn't good for what you want to happen here. What do you want to happen? Well, you want to get to know this person better. Spend more time with them. Invest at an organic pace based on the level of investment that's going on. Right. Thing I've said for years, don't invest in someone based on how much you like them. Invest on that based on how much they invest in People don't do that. People invest on instinct. I really like them. And my investment is proportionate to how much I like them, not how much I'm seeing there's a mutual investment. Did I tell you about the castle?
What castle?
Alright, this is you're gonna like this. So I was thinking about this whole idea of investing.
Like buying a castle?
But that's the thing, you can't buy a castle for a relationship. See, to me, the relationship is the castle. When you meet someone and you have a connection, because I'm always, you know me, I do seminars all over the world. We have thousands of women come and join us. And the thing that there's always someone who puts their hand up and says, it starts the story with Matt, I have this incredible connection with this guy.
So they're already in a relationship?
No, no.
I'm just dating.
Often not. Now I know we have a problem when someone's justifying whatever they're about to say next with what an incredible connection they have with someone. An incredible connection is like you meet.
Someone.
You connect and you have a great plot of land. This plot of land could be great because it's in the middle of a forest, could be great because it's on the cliffs, overlooking the ocean. It's a beautiful place to build.
That's the connection.
Still just a connection, but it's still just a plot of land. All right, let's see it for what it is. It's potential.
Yeah.
Still just a plot of land. Now what you need is two builders, two people who are going to build something here. and that requires two people who show up each day and lay brick after brick after brick after brick and slowly but surely create a castle. Most people have the experience of someone who joins them on that plot of land and they both look at it and they're like, isn't this great? Look at the ocean.
This is great.
Look at the view we have here. trees. This is amazing. And they get real excited. Now, one of them might be willing to build. One of them might be a builder. The other one might just really like the potential of this plot of land. And then you have someone who's there building every day. They're doing the investment. I have the woman come to me who's building and a guy who's left the construction site. I don't know where he is. He's at home, he's binge watching his favorite show, he's out on another, he's looking at another plot of land. And then three weeks later he calls in and says, you know, he sends a text to her after three weeks of ghosting her or just disappearing or just patchy communication and says, thinking of you. That's a builder who started building, then left the building site for three weeks and called in from home and went, how's the castle going?
Wow.
Meanwhile, she's over there building the castle on her own. You can't build on your own. And the problem we have right now is there are too many people who value the connection instead of the castle. Castle is where it's at. And if you don't have a true builder who over time is going to build, that's what a relationship is. A castle. This is why love at first sight is bullshit to me.
Doesn't work.
It's just whatever.
It takes time.
It's infatuation. She's hot, he's hot. You know, there's some connection there that's based on the fact you like this.
And I like this.
Oh my god, we're supposed to be together. This is only part of the equation. A castle becomes a castle because two people work on it and it becomes unique and ornate and there are secret passageways only the two of you know about. And there's an argument that knocks down a wall and then you build it up and fortify that wall. And it makes it even stronger. And you know, the weather over time weathers the stone on the castle in a unique way that makes it your castle. There's other castles in the world, but this one is uniquely yours. It's been built by the two of you. It's been hard won, you know? That's a relationship. That's why, you know, a 20-year relationship or marriage or a 30-year relationship or marriage is special. It's because two people have had to go through shit together.
Yeah.
They've done things together. This isn't fantasy. This isn't building a castle in the sky. The idea of love, the idea of what we could be. The one-day wager, I call it the one-day wager. The one day I'm making a wager that one day you'll be what I want you to be. One day you'll invest in me the way I want you to. One day you'll change. The one day wager is the most dangerous wager you can possibly make in your love life. The real is what's going on now. Is someone trying? Do they want to be here? Are they focused on the little, not just the big? Because anyone can go and like people said, but when we're, when it's great, it's great.
Yeah.
When we go, like, oh, we've been on some amazing dates or we did that vacation. We had the best time. It was amazing.
Of course.
You're on vacation.
Yeah.
Anyone can go to Disney World and have a great time. It's Disney World, right? That's the, it's the job of the place, is to make sure you have a great time, no matter. who you're with.
Right.
Right. But you know what? When I was 13, I had a.
Like.
When I was, I think I was 12 or 13, my parents took me to America for the first time. And we came to Florida. And where do you think we went? We went to Disney World. And I was massively excited, you know? I was so excited. I was excited to be in America. I was excited to see the things I'd seen on TV. Excited to see the references to movies I'd seen. Excited for the rides. We go into Disney World and I learned something very interesting about myself there. This is gonna sound profound for a trip to Disney World, but 13, yeah. But I realized something. about myself because of course I go in there, it's magical, it's oh my god, this is crazy, it's huge.
Taking a photo with Mickey, you've got.
Space Mountain, yeah there's Mickey there, there's all these dazzling attractions. But it was something that stood out to me even more than Space Mountain, even more than the big ride. and it was the trash cans.
Oh, yeah.
On some level that maybe I couldn't fully articulate at that age, I saw the trash cans and I was moved by it. I said, Someone cared enough about this place to theme the trash cans. The trash can in Tomorrowland is a futuristic trash can. The trash can in, you know, Indiana Jones Land or whatever it's called is a tiki bamboo trash can. The trash cans were different depending on where you were.
It's amazing.
Someone cared so much about the detail of that world that they styled and themed the trash cans. It moved me.
Yeah.
I've never forgotten that.
Wow.
The trash cans in life. And I've thought about that endlessly in my business. When I do retreat, I just got back from my retreat. And, you know, someone came. I told this story on the retreat. Someone came to me at the end of the retreat because of all the little details we put on the retreat, you know, the little. It's not just a. It's not just a seminar and event. It's. We hold parties and inside experience. It's an immersive world. It's like it's it's we like to think we've created the immersive theater of the self-development world.
Mm-.
And.
Someone came up to me at the end of this retreat and said, you achieved trash can status.
Mm.
And it... That's big. The 13-year-old in me wanted to cry.
Wow, that's amazing.
Right?
And it moved me again. and I thought, that's what I want.
And.
I thought about this even today as I was coming here and I was like, you know what? This absolutely applies to relationships too. Often in a breakup, often when people are going through difficult times with their partner or whatever, the thing they go back to is we had that and amazing trip. But we had those amazing times. They go to these highlights. They go to the space mountain of their relationship. Remember when we met Mickey? It's that, right? The meeting Mickey moment of their relationship. But relationships are about the trash cans, man. It's the trash cans.
Yeah.
Because guess what? In a day at Disney, you ride Space Mountain once, maybe twice. How many times do you use the trash cans?
Every day. All the time.
Every 20 minutes, every 30 minutes. It's the trash cans. And what will define your relationship is the trash cans, not Space Mountain.
The lower moments. The messy moments.
The moments that are barely noticeable. The moments the The micro attractions. The moment where we do something sweet, where we think of our partner when we didn't need to, and we worry about the day they had or support them or even just support them silently or in private, you know, or support them by what we don't bring to them. It's that, it's the detail. It's the detail. town. And that's what's going to determine how great your life is. And my concern is, and we've all been there, my concern is the number of people out there who are staying in the wrong thing because of the space mountain of the relationship.
The few moments that were magical.
Or they're spending too much time grieving the loss of the wrong thing because all they remember is Space Mountain.
Interesting.
But they don't think of how shitty the trash cans were. And the trash cans, that's the stuff. That's the day to day. How good was it day to day? This is the difference between being in love and being happy.
What is the difference between love and happiness?
You can be in love and be really unhappy.
Be suffering inside and be in love.
You can have constant be in love and be having a relationship that's causing you constant anxiety, constant heartache, constant pain, feeling overlooked, not feeling important. You can be in love and all of those things still be true. How crazy is that? We think that love is this thing where it's like, it's rational, like, I'm gonna love, I'm gonna be in love with this person who brings me joy. Not true. And we need to start worrying more about happiness. Because if someone isn't building with you, if someone isn't committing to actually building the castle with you, that's the quality of your life. Yeah. Not how in love you are.
You might love certain things about them. You might have loved the date you went on. You might have loved them.
The Space Mountain or certain characteristics.
They have sex. Was incredible.
Charming they were, how charismatic, how whatever. It didn't, but maybe it doesn't mean that you're happy day to day. It's a big difference, right?
When do you know, I love this analogy and it made me want to ask you about when do you know you're ready for a committed intimate relationship? When do you know you're ready for it as opposed to you just feel alone and you want to have someone in your life?
I guess when you're ready to build, when you're ready to build, when it's not you're going there because the fantasy of it all is exciting to you, but when you're actually ready to build. And that doesn't mean that you're not looking, see the castle analogy is cool because when we were talking earlier about this idea of giving without expectation, well, You do expect something in a relationship, right? It's overly simplistic. We do expect things. We expect respect as loyalty defined on whatever terms loyalty means to us. Love, appreciation, all of that to be seen. We have a lot of expectations in a relationship. So it's not a relationship where we just we give without expectation. But that to me is where the building things really interesting to me because you want to work damn hard as a builder in your relationship, but you want someone else who's building too, right? That's where the expectation comes in. I'm gonna, I'm gonna work hard to build this thing and I'm gonna build it at a really high standard. I'm not gonna look at your work and go, well, if you missed out some of the grouting there, then I'm gonna, you know, like, skip it on my end. No, this is my I'm gonna build to a really high standard.
What if the person you've been with for a year isn't building to your standard?
That's a conversation. That's a real conversation. Like, here's what I need. Here's the kind of relationship I want to have.
When do you start to just say, well, it's okay if they do half the job that I do?
Is the job they're doing half fast one you really need them to do well, or is it one that can be done half fast? you know, sometimes I think there are certain things we let go in a relationship. That's where the compromise comes in. That's where the sacrifice comes in. There are certain things. I'm okay with you not doing as well as I once thought I needed someone to do them. I thought this thing was really important.
It's not.
It's not that important.
Yeah.
I love you. What are we doing? It's not that big of a deal. And we've all done that. We've all seen those things. that once were important to us and we let them, we say, you know what? This, I was at an age where I thought that was really important and it's no longer as important or significant as I made it. And then there are things that never stop being important or they become more important, you know, the ability to communicate well. I think as you get older, those things become more important.
Yeah.
The ability for someone to have genuine empathy to The ability for someone in, let's say, an argument to not jump to saying a spiteful thing that's hard to then forget. Someone who doesn't try and do damage in an argument but tries to build, tries to figure out, let's figure this out together. We may both be hurt, but let's come to this in a loving way. When you're younger, you say shit that's just mean.
Hurtful.
Because you're hurt.
Yeah. All right.
Then you realize, oh, God, three months later, they still remember that comment, even though they said they forgot it.
They hold on to it.
They still, they, they still have that in their head. I'm not doing that again. There's certain things I think as you get older, hopefully, if we mature, we start to see these are the, this is the important stuff.
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 every single day. When someone meets someone new, whether it be a moment, five minute conversation, a couple hours, or whatever it may be, when is the appropriate amount of time to know that this person could be one of the people that you spend the rest of your life with, a long time with, could be your love partner? When should we actually know in our gut, in our mind, and bring it together that, okay, this is the person? A moment instance, yes or is it once you learn after months? What do you think?
It's very instant and immediate. So, here's the thing. Society has brainwashed us to believe that love and identifying it takes time. That's a lie. In most situations when it takes months you have not fallen in love, you've learned to tolerate them. You've grown a tolerance.
Wow.
All right, you've enjoyed a part of.
The process, it's giving you connection, you're not lonely.
Exactly, and when you've invested months, you are more likely to not want to walk away from it because all the time and energy you put in. So, now you mistake attachment to the investment as love and it's not really love. When you sit down with people who can say they felt a real or they have a real connection with their partner. I think every story, I don't know if any one story that's opposite of this, they will all say it was pretty much instant. First date, you may not know 100% fact I'm going to marry this person, but you knew the potential was there. You knew like this could be the one that at least came to mind. And so, again, when we don't have that in that first conversation, that first day, it's unlikely. I'm not going to sit there and say it's impossible that it can happen days later or a week later or whatever. But typically, and even if you can't articulate it as you knew they could be the one, when people look back, they can tell you that they felt something very strong in that initial engagement with their partner that said they knew something was different. They may not even know what it was but they knew okay, this isn't normal. This isn't like the rest something's going on here and then there's a full realization of this is it.
What is that something that we can't understand that feeling? What is that called? Is that just like your magnets connected to each other? Is that your energy is so attracted because there's so much opposites or it's so much similarities? What is that force that gets people to say there was something different about this person when I met them?
I personally believe it's your spirit recognizing its match because there are, there are, if you speak to a lot of people of different religious beliefs, there's a belief that things happen in the spirit before they happen in the physical, all right. So, it's almost like the spirit is ahead of us which is why the spirit knows the truth which is why intuition, gut instinct, third eye, whatever you want to call it, it always seems to be accurate because your spirit knows before you know. So, we're feeling it within our spirit. The problem is it's getting our mind in tune with the spirit. It's allowing our heart to accept what the spirit is saying to us. But we feel it. We just don't know how to always explain it. Those who are very in tune with the spirit can recognize it much quicker and accept it for what it is much quicker because they're very in tune already.
Why is it so hard for our mind and our heart to get caught up to our gut or intuition of that initial explosion of chemistry? And also, can that explosion of connection and chemistry be harmful in a different way?
Okay, so one, fear. fear is the number one reason why we struggle to accept. So, one of the things I explain to a lot of women, you know, and I have my membership group for them. So, I've had this discussion where I say, listen, you know, the difference between intuition and fear is logical deduction. So, when you're trying to analyze and break things down, that's your mind, all right. And fear is coming into that because you're saying, well, I shouldn't do this because of that or this can't be this because of that. Intuition requires no logic. Your spirit requires no logic. It simply feels, it senses, it knows. That's it. You don't have to explain it. Again, gut instinct doesn't require things to logically add up. It just tells you this is it or something's wrong or this is right or whatever the case may be. So, fear is the number one thing and that fear stems from lack of healing from past relationships. We've been down this road of emotional investment, we've gotten hurt before we've been wrong in our lives about wanting to believe someone could be it. Even though we know this feels different, we still have the fear of disappointment that creeps back in.
How do we let go of that fear and not sabotage an amazing opportunity in a relationship?
You got to heal from your past. There's no way around it. And this is why I say people who have not healed, they can meet their connection right now. The most amazing partner and it will scare them to death. And they will either run, self-sabotage, something. It's going to be a problem because they have not healed and when you have not healed, the vulnerability that's required in connection is so unlike anything else or with anyone else that if you don't have a level of confidence and again, a foundation of healing in your life it seems way too overwhelming and scary. So, you've got to heal in order to not Find yourself sabotaging, run away and not being able to embrace that real love.
What if both parties come to something and there's this explosion of chemistry or just instant like, wow, there's something different feeling and both have not healed their past, but they stay together, they figure it out and they're together. Is there going to be a lot of problems and trauma and stress that comes up over the years if they both haven't healed before they get into a relationship? or can they heal in the relationship together?
It is possible... Let me backtrack a little bit. First, let me say that people have to understand there is a such thing as right person, wrong time, all right. People don't want to believe that there are a lot of people who reject that idea. They say oh, if it's the wrong time, it's not the right person. That's not true. You can meet that individual that you have an amazing connection with but both parties still need growth before they can come together. All right. And so, now is... What happens if.
They come together and they haven't healed?
So, here's the thing, it is possible to get through that and survive and have a healthy relationship. It is unlikely for most people to survive being with someone you have a connection with and you have not healed. Again, most people won't even allow themselves to be with that .
They'll sabotage it so much they'll dive in but then they'll cheat or they'll they won't respond to the person they'll do something, right?
Yes, and speaking of cheating, they tend to have a history of going back to an ex because the ex feels safer because it's not as vulnerable over there, all right. I can maintain more emotional control, it's familiar so it's easier. So, I've seen plenty of situations where again, the connection was so overwhelming so they ran back to their ex. No one is not... They're not for the ex is not for them and they're not for their ex. But again, it just feels safer there. So, yes, a lot can go wrong if you try to be together when you have not healed and you have this connection. It would be best to acknowledge okay, you know what? We got some work we need to do. We realize we have a connection here let's work on ourselves in the meantime before we take that next step.
Can you heal while having sex with one or multiple partners for fun on the side.
I'm not going to say it's impossible but again, highly unlikely. Sex is such a distracting thing and we have to understand that so much can come from our sexual interactions. There can be new drama, there can be hell, an unwanted pregnancy, there can be a host of things and all of that will derail you in the healing process. You also have to be honest with yourself. You may be having the sex because you're trying to distract yourself from the healing. Like, the sex is just a coping mechanism for you. Same as drugs, same as alcohol, people turn to these things because they don't want to deal with their reality in life. So, you got to be honest are you trying to just bury your head in sexual interactions or is it just... If it's happening in a natural flow of life okay, then there's a greater chance that you can survive this, but you got to be really careful. I would suggest cutting that off. Yeah. If you're trying to heal, you know, again, I don't want to say it's impossible, but you're going to make it extremely difficult and highly unlikely for sure.
I want to ask you about the best ways to meet someone these days, 2020 moving forward, the do's and don'ts for online dating. But what I'm hearing you say is that you shouldn't be trying to meet someone, you shouldn't be doing the online dating game until you've fully healed. or at least started the process of healing because healing is a journey. Sometimes things take a lot longer to heal fully, but at least acknowledging and starting that process. What would be a process to start healing your past relationships or pains before we get into the conversation of do's and don'ts of online dating?
Okay. So of course, going to a therapist or coach is the ideal thing to do. you typically need that outside party that can help you process some things, help you see new perspectives, and go through a process of healing. Now, I will be honest, not every coach and therapist is going to help someone heal. Sometimes it just turns into a venting session. So you've got to be real careful about, okay, if I've been going to this therapist or coach for many weeks or months now, what progress have I really made? Have I been resolving or have I been coping? because many are teaching you how to cope and manage and how to function within your brokenness but they're not resolving it and helping you heal. Now, of course, you know, I'm big on healing so I have my book Love After Heartbreak which gives people the exact steps to healing. So, one of the steps, I'll give you the first step is getting the hurt out in front of you. So, it's this who Hurt Me list and so, you get a piece of paper, you write down who hurt me and you ask yourself the question, who hurt me. And now, everyone who comes to mind you put them on the paper. Doesn't matter if it happened very long ago, doesn't matter if you think you move past it. If they come to mind when you ask the question then that means there's some kind of relevance there. And so, now you put them on the paper and like two senses of what they did to hurt you. This will now at least help us identify what you've been holding on to and where the hurt is and what needs to be properly addressed. And then, from there we can do the other steps of getting things off your chest and forgiveness and all these different things that's involved in healing.
I love that. I'm a big proponent of writing letters to people that you never send them, telling them how it made you feel, what you're frustrated and angry about with them, forgiving them, letting it go. And then I like to burn the letter and bury it as well in the ground to hopefully create a sense of like, okay, this was alive in me and now I'm killing this. and this feeling, this energy, and I'm putting it to bed and I'm putting it back in the world to hopefully create something new to grow something new and more loving and powerful and create that intention. But I think that's really important. When should we know that we have are healed enough? How do we know when our healing has gone far enough down its journey before we should get into meeting someone new, putting ourselves out there on social media, online dating apps and things like that?
All right, well, first thing I want to say is now there are going to be times where sending the letter to the person is actually the best thing to do.
Really?
Yes. A lot of people are scared about that and it's a very difficult hurdle to jump. But I literally got a DM today from a woman who read the book. She wrote her letter last year was to her mother. She didn't want to send it. She held on to it. She said she just finally built up the courage because I tell them in the book 99% of the time I'm going to tell you to send the letter. And so, she finally did it and she said they end up having the best conversation they've ever had in their life. Now, they're like the best of friends, like it's taking their relationship to a whole new level. And it's not... That's not the purpose of sending it. But there's so much good that can come from taking the extra step of actually sending the letter and making sure that person is aware of how you felt and what you were going through. Now, in regards to knowing when you've properly healed, number one thing is when you can embrace being fully vulnerable with somebody, all right. If vulnerability still scares you, you have not healed enough, all right. You've got to be willing to open your heart. We can't say we want love and then put walls up around our heart and be afraid to give it to someone. You're contradicting yourself. you're working against yourself. So, you've got to be willing to be vulnerable. You also have to make sure any negative perceptions that you've held on to due to past experiences, you've done away with them. So, for example, if you have been saying all men are dogs because you've been hurt by so many men. Well, you can't be out there dating and still screaming all men are dogs. That's going to work in your favor. You've got to accept that good men to exist, then you can receive a great man, that you deserve a great man. So when you have a more positive outlook and way of thinking, and listen, we're going to all have our negative thought moments that happens, but your dominant or more consistent thought pattern is positive, hopeful, and things of that nature. Now we can say you're ready to get back out there.
How important is the language or the inner thoughts, the actual physical words we use in the inner language, the inner dialogue in terms of attracting or finding the right partner.
It's extremely important. You know, we hear it all the time, words are power. And the reality is that the words you speak to yourself, the thoughts you have, they will, whether knowingly or unknowingly to you, they will dictate your energy, the energy that you give off to people or the way that your spirit comes across to individuals. And so, you can put on a happy face. But if your thought is negative, pessimistic, all right. And dwelling in this then your energy will still be negative, all right. What you do on the surface isn't going to be able to hide that which is why you have some people who swear well, I'm not a bad person. Yeah, but you're not a positive person, all right. You may be good people but no, you are miserable. And it's not even just you're miserable like you're dwelling in it in your life, but you give off miserable energy. And so, who's going to want to be around that? Who's going to want to commit to that? At the most, they might want to have sex with you, but they're not going to want to tie themselves to.
You in a committed long-term relationship or marriage. And people can feel that energy. I don't care if you're a man, woman, or in between, you can feel the energy of someone. And if you haven't healed properly yourself, you may be attracted to a wounded individual to then try to find some validation or try to find some connection there. And that's why it's important for you to heal so that you can fully see the energy around you and see who is a potential great match for you. Because if you haven't healed, you're going to keep attracting negativity and repeating certain patterns. Is that correct?
That is absolutely correct. And if you talk to any person who has healed, they can tell you how they feel energy even more now. Where they become more aware, it's so much easier to see past the facades that so many people are putting up because now healing allows us to get more in tune with our spirit. And by getting more in tune with our spirit we get more in tune with everyone's spirit. Because technically, we are all connected through the spirit, all right. And so, it's easier to be in touch with that when you get away, get rid of the blockage of trauma, past disappointments and hurts, disappointments, things of that nature.
When you experience true heartbreak, it is one of the most devastating feelings in the world.
Yeah, it is dating.
You're a zombie.
You're dead inside.
It's and it's worse than you're dead inside. You act dead to everybody else inside. You feel like you're dying.
Yeah, that's true.
On the loop all day.
You can't get out of it. Yeah.
In a breakup, and this is as true now, now is no different. People need to recognize that now is just a difficult breakup on steroids. If you're going through heartbreak right now, you're just doing it on steroids. But it's just the same emotions. So don't fret that Oh my God, why did it have to happen now when this was going on? You're giving it a big story. It's still just the same emotions of heartbreak. You're just experiencing them in a heightened way.
And you don't have the ability to rebound physically with that person or a new person.
Which we could see as a gift.
Right. Why is that a gift?
Because there are plenty of things, as my brother Stephen Huss, a wonderful writer for our website, As he says, in a breakup, there are two methods of recovery. There's the athlete recovery method and there's the hangover recovery method. You're gonna like this, Louis.
Tell me.
I love it.
You haven't heard it before, but you're gonna love it because the analogy is perfect for you.
I love it.
The hangover recovery method, you think about how do people deal with a hangover? They wake up, they eat greasy foods because they're like, oh, I just need something to make me feel better. they feel better. They watch crap TV, they lay on the sofa, they just wake up at 2:00 p.m. yeah. Cut all the blinds, don't let any light in, eat ice cream. Essentially they do all of these things that are temporary kind of pleasure and comfort, but ultimately are not nutritional and are not the things that are needed to get, you know, what's needed. Massive amounts of hydration.
Water.
Go take a walk.
Sunshine. Right. Exercise.
Yeah, get the metabolism moving again. Get that like crap out of your system. Like that's all the stuff that's needed in that moment. But it can feel harder to do the things that are actually going to get you out of it. Now look at the way an athlete recovers in an injury, right? You know better than anybody. You don't firstly, you still train whatever you can train. You don't ignore everything simply because your shoulders injured, you do what you can.
You do some abs, you do some legs, you do something else.
Right. Let me keep a hand.
Swimming, yeah.
Exactly. You eat well, you get tons of rest, as much rest as you possibly can. You do rehab where necessary, but you don't do so much that it injures what you're doing.
Yeah, you reset your vision, you visualize what you want and start mentally rehearsing the reps, the the repetition, the action steps, you mental rehearse, you, you know, all those things, right?
So now if you apply that to a breakup, the hangover recovery method is let's go and sleep with other people quickly just to get my fix, just to feel connected, just to feel like I'm worth something, just to feel like I'm still sexy. Let me go out and drink, party, let me eat ice cream, bad food, keep going to the gym, get on.
Tinder and all the apps.
Or just hide away under the covers, don't engage life, it could be either or, but they're all hangover recovery methods because they don't make you feel better long term, they're just short term pleasure. The athlete recovery method in a breakup is you do the same as an athlete. You say, okay, my heart might be injured right now, my heart's offline, so to speak, but I still have everything else. So let me make sure the rest of my life is firing on all cylinders right now. Let me do everything. Let me be kind to myself. Let's maybe like put dating aside for the moment or put that. But let me go and make platonic connections. Let me go and build my relationships with my friends and family. Let me eat well, let me sleep well, let me train, let me go and do all of these things that train every other muscle in my life so that when my heart comes back online, every other part of me is ready to go. So you've got one problem right now, you're in pain, right? But if that pain causes you to let every other part of your life go down spiral, now you've got six problems.
So.
That'S the part we want to avoid.
And only have one problem, not six.
And you know, look, all of this is easy to say, and when you're heartbroken, you just feel like, You feel so bad and so sick in your stomach and so nauseated all the time that you even hearing this sounds like a lot of work. And what I would say to people is a really manageable step is, I, you know, there's that quote, emotions are weather, let them come and go, right? And that's true. Emotions are weather. I used to think that emotions were really important. A friend of mine, Jameson Jordan, who you know, who shoots my videos, he would always tell me, whenever I would be in a real funk, a bad place, whatever, he, I would talk to him about it. He was one of the closest people to me. And I always remember he used to say to me, like, I just think you, like, think your emotions are more important than I feel like mine are.
You put more emphasis on you.
Yeah, you, you, like, think they're really important.
You think your emotions are you?
Yeah, he would be like, you, you just seem to like give more weight to your feelings than I do. And I, at the time, I didn't quite hear that. And over time, I've come to understand what that means. And of course, a lot of this is taught in mindfulness, training, meditation, and so on. But that idea that just because you have a thought, just because you have an emotion, it doesn't make it important. And in a heartbreak, just because you miss your partner, that doesn't actually make that feeling that important. Just because you feel hurt and you feel like, oh my God, I'll never find anyone like that again. That's just a thought and an emotion that's attached to that thought and it doesn't make it that important. And so when I was going through terrible times, when I've gone through heartbreak, one of the key lessons I learned was, okay, there's really cloudy skies right now. That's the weather, right? And it feels like that weather will never pass. But what I would begin to pay attention to is, I would realize that, I would realize, oh, for the last 20 minutes, I didn't think about my breakup.
Small wins.
I'd be like, yeah, and often you only notice it after the fact. Because when you're in it, it could be that you're in a flow state with your work and that's taken you out of it. It could be that you're having a funny moment with a friend. It could be that you lost yourself in a movie. It could be you just had a conversation with your brother, your mother, whoever.
A workout, yeah.
For a few minutes. Even if it's just five, for five minutes you noticed, I felt better. I felt, maybe I didn't feel amazing, but I just, for five minutes, I didn't feel like I was dying.
I didn't feel suffering.
And when that happens, here's what I would say to myself. I'd be like, Well, that's interesting. Notice those things as interesting. And this applies not just to heartbreak, but to depression, to anxiety, to all sorts of different emotions that are undesirable. When you notice that for five minutes of your day, you didn't feel that thing. Because here's what happens. We have our, like, whatever is our home, whether it's depression, heartbreak, anxiety, sadness, we have our home that we go to 90% of our day. And when we feel that, we focus on it so intensely that it becomes very difficult to get out of it because we are focused on that 90% the whole time. And what we don't acknowledge is this interesting window in the day where we didn't feel that. And that window has some clues, has some, there's some truth often in that window, that 5% of the day where you felt all right. There's some truth there that's waiting to be discovered, enlarged, held under a microscope. And what I would do is when I would feel better for five minutes, I'd go, well, okay, so what did that, if nothing else, what did that prove? It proved that it's possible for me to feel better. I had a reference point for the fact that I could feel better. and then you go, well, if I felt better for five minutes, if I even felt better for a minute, let's make more of those. What was happening? How did I do it? I might not be able to get my day to the point where I even feel good for a quarter of the day right now. That might be an unrealistic goal, but if I had one good minute or one good hour, let me make the new goal not to be great or to be happy or to get over this. Just make more of those.
Yeah. And multiply those moments, multiply those minutes into five and ten and 20 minutes.
It's a manageable task. Suddenly, getting over your heartbreak, you need to get over it, dude. You know, blah, blah, blah. It's not, this isn't, that's not practical advice for someone who's going through hell. But for someone who realizes that just for five minutes, the clouds parted. and they go, oh my God.
It's like one of my favorite movies, Swingers, where Mikey is always thinking about his ex and who he left and then now she won't come back to him six months ago or whatever and he's constantly talking about obsessing about it, suffering in pain and then he finally learns to just put his attention somewhere else.
That'S right.
For a few minutes and then put it for an hour and then he goes on a date with someone and then he thought about her for a day and he was like, wow, I didn't talk about her all today, you know?
And here's what's so important about that because there's a, what's really interesting about that movie is he begins to do these things that slowly start to create more moments of good weather in his day.
He goes salsa dancing, he does this, he does activities.
Yeah.
Right.
But what we have to be aware of, you have to respect whatever is the drug, whether it's your ex, whether it's genuinely a drug or booze or whether it's a situation that makes you feel bad or whatever. Often when we start to create more good weather, we start to take for granted that the bad weather can't appear now. It's like, oh, I'm past it.
Yeah, it could come back, a storm could come raging through over again.
Someone, your ex could text you and if you text back and start engaging, knowing, knowing what happens that you're, when you start in a conversation with that person again, you're going to spiral, you're not respecting the drug. You got, you might have been clean for months or years, but you gotta respect the drug because it's what you don't is when when you get cocky and you don't remember that there are rituals and routines and practices daily that got you to this good state, you are liable to fall back into that trap because you're blind. Don't be blind. Don't be afraid. It's not about fit. You're not fearful. You're not worried. Because, you know, if I got, if I didn't die at the height of my breakups pain, if I didn't die on day two, I'm not going to die on day 22 or day 52 or day 1002. If I could deal with this at the height of its pain, I'm not going to die now. So I'm not going to be afraid of this, but I'm also going to respect it and know that there are certain things that make me feel better in my day. And I have to consciously put them into my day because the moment I take for granted that I just feel better, that's when that thing starts creeping.
Exactly. I'm laughing so hard because we have a mutual friend that we've been helping, I won't say his name, but we've been helping navigate certain things in their relationship. And it just reminded me of that, of replying to people when they text you, when you think you're good, hey, don't go back into that. Make sure you stay true to what you want, what you're committed to by the athlete mindset of envisioning something that you want for your future and envisioning The right relationship or the better match or, you know, how you want to be feeling and all those things.
And by the way, and just remember, and this is true, not just for people going through heartbreak right now, but people going through solitude right now, because there's a lot of people who right now are just in solitude. They're not necessarily heartbroken, but they are experiencing a deep kind of existential loneliness. And when we're on our own for long periods of time, Many people, not everyone, but many people and perhaps even most have more of a tendency to go to dark places with their thoughts. And there's a lot of people that are there that are listening to us right now that certainly can't, that, you know, the I, you know, some people might be in a hell with someone in the house, but these people in solitude are looking at that guy and I'll take that right now over the hell I'm in of being constantly on my own and going out of my mind. I would say to people that, you know, the same weather rule applies that, you know, you might feel really kind of dark and lonely at points in your day, but there are other points in your day where you don't notice the good weather and pay attention to the good weather and what made you feel good. Did you just have a conversation with one of your siblings? Did you have a little group chat with a bunch of friends? Did you watch a life affirming movie? Did you read a book that made you feel connected to an author from some period in time, maybe who was also alone and writing about it. And by reading that author, you go, oh my God, I feel, you know, someone else is having the same experience as me. I think that's really important is if you're in solitude right now on your own, you connect to other people who have experienced that because some of the greatest figures of all time have spent inordinate amounts of time alone, have experienced the darkness that you're experiencing and you're in good company. You may feel you're alone and oh man, we have this solipsistic attitude that we're the only one who's alone. We know it's not rationally true, we know it's not logically true, but we feel it on an emotional level. Those are moments where you have to remind yourself, I'm in good company, not just today, but throughout time. Key figures, brilliant people, people that far more brilliant than we will ever be have experienced the deepest, darkest, existential loneliness. And in a way, there is something slightly romantic about that. I always love when I read an author and I hear that author who's brilliant and who I love. And I was just reading Bertrand Russell and then you hear about something that someone suffers with or something that they've gone through and you go, oh, thank God. This person that I love also, you know, also, you know, there's, there's that element of it that's really, really powerful. And so I, I think that you, you can adopt. Yes. Accept that it's difficult. It is difficult. Don't look at, don't look at other people and think they're handling it so well.
It is difficult.
I, I'd call my dad. times when business is hard and business was messy and like chaotic and I screwed up or I'd lost money or I'd done something, I'd call my dad and I'd be like, you know, my dad's one of my big mentors and I'd call him and say, Dad, like, I'm just so stressed, I'm so overwhelmed, this is happening, this is going wrong, I got 10 people asking me for this, whatever. And he'd say, Matt, part of the problem is you don't think that other people's businesses are just as messy. It's almost like you think that, You're struggling with all these things and other people aren't. He said, Matt, I've been in business for, you know, 40 years. Business is messy. That is the nature of it. It is messy. It is chaotic. There are always things going wrong as well as things going right. That's the nature. That's how it is supposed to be. And when he would say that to me, it didn't take my problems away. But what it made me realize is, oh, it's all right. It's not, this is normal. I'm on top of my problems. I'm beating myself up and taking it personally that I'm doing a horrible job.
Yeah, it's kind of like your dad and Jameson are saying the same thing. Your feelings are more important. Your mess is more important.
It's, yeah, A, don't give it so much power and B, and don't give your feelings and emotions so much power. Not every emotion is a cue to do something.
So that's the thing.
Yeah.
At the same time, except that this is your view that, you know, in the Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck talked about, I think one of the first line of his book is life is hard. And one of the things that makes life more difficult for us is that we expect it to be easy. Well, that's true of relationships, it's true of business, it's true of everything. And when we have someone close to us who says, you're all right, you're at home on your own right now, and you feel like, it's dark and lonely and you're having these kind of existential thoughts and you're welcome. That's normal. That's. Of course you do. You're living at home on your own in isolation right now. Of course you're feeling these things. You're not a screw up. You're not weak. You're not handling it terribly because you're having these thoughts. That is absolutely normal. And that's what makes it heroic, isn't it? you're having all these thoughts and you're having all these feelings, but you're in the company of wonderful people throughout history who have experienced this, who have had just as bad a time, who were dealing with it no better than you. But in that company, you can kind of then assume your hero's journey and go, yeah, well, my personal hell right now, I'm gonna keep going anyway.
We need these adversities to teach us things too. You know, we don't learn about how to be the best version of ourselves and grow through everything being easy and all the success coming to us. We learn through challenge, through adversity. And I'm saying you need to suffer in the adversity and challenge. It's already going to be hard. A breakup is already hard, but you don't need to add to the suffering like you said and multiply the amount of pain. I want to ask you a personal question that you probably only talk about at your retreats. So I want to give people a taste of Matthew Hussey that you probably share to only a select few women who invest and show up to your retreats where they really get to dive in and ask you the juicy questions.
I'm curious.
And I'm not, you can't, no one can come to your retreats right now, but later in the year, I think you'll have more retreats and they can you can go to MatthewHussey.com and, and learn about your retreats because I hear they're mind-blowing for women so if you want to learn how to master relationships as a woman go to these retreats.
Go to MatthewHussey.com and sign up for them. HowToGetTheGuy.com, actually, people go to MatthewHusseyRetreat.com that's the best place for people to do. Gotcha. HowToGetTheGuy.com for everything else. I'll also let people know something they.
Can do right now as well because I know people are stuck at home and they'll want something that they can do. Perfect, perfect. Okay, here's the personal question. What is the biggest challenge that Matthew Hussey faces single and the biggest challenge you face being in a relationship.
That.
You still need to, you know you need to overcome and improve or maybe you're not as, I wish I wasn't that way. I'm not proud of myself in these times when I do this. What is the personal thing that Matt Hussey has to do or needs to do to improve when single and when in relationship?
I think, look, I'm someone who has always, I've always craved real connection for as long as, you know, I've liked girls, you know, sure, 12 years old. Yeah, I've always liked it. And it's not that I don't go through the same things other people do where you wonder when you're with someone, am I with the right person? Is this the right thing? Do I need, you know, all of that? But I've always really liked connection. And sometimes that connection, you know, I know in my past that desire for connection has led me to relationships that weren't right for me, you know, weren't relationships I should have been in, but they were wonderful people. They were lovely and they were...
There were great moments and great connection.
Yeah, and they treated me wonderfully and, you know, and that led me to kind of go, well, maybe this is the thing, you know, but without necessarily seeing if it was what I needed whether it was really the relationship that I was going to continue to grow in and develop myself and whether it was truly kind of, I guess, meeting all my needs and whether I was meeting all of their needs. So I think that over time, I settled for some relationships that I shouldn't have, where I was just valuing the connection over what my long-term needs were going to be. And I knew that it worked today or this year, but if I really thought about it in 10 years or 20 years, it wasn't going to be the relationship that was right for me long term. So there was that. And that has... So within a relationship, some of the struggles I've had in the past have been too much question, too much time questioning whether it's the worst feeling, man. So exhausting.
The worst. When you think I've had this in my past relationships where every day I would think and question myself for 30 minutes, am I supposed to be in this? Is this the right thing? Should I end it? How am I going to end it? But this is good. But this is that just debate. Internal debate is exhausting, like you said.
That's right. And so that sapped a lot of energy from me. A lot of times when I would have liked to have actually had more energy to pour into, you know, either the right relationship or my business or friends or whatever, but it was being sapped by me constantly waking up every day and going, Is this the right thing? Should I be here? Should I not? And that's you're just fighting yourself. constantly. So I think there were things that I allowed to go on too long that I should have seen things sooner or rather perhaps more accurately paid attention to what I had said.
Because you saw them.
Yeah, I saw them.
They were there. You were aware. You just weren't actively paying attention and taking action on the attention.
That's right. And so much of what I've been able to to teach people and share with people has not been coming from a righteous place, but I've been experiencing things intensely. I'm a very sensitive person and I'm someone who emotionally feels a lot. The reason I can relate to a lot of people is because I feel things very intensely, for better or worse. Sometimes I wish I didn't, sometimes I see it as as a gift. It depends on the day you ask me. But that, I think, has been a big thing for me in the past. And actually, I think I'm much better now at saying, I won't allow myself to slip into something that's the wrong thing. I am much more conscious about the decisions that I make.
You won't make a long-term commitment on short-term feelings if, you know, it's not at least setting you up for the best chance.
Yeah.
And careful.
I'm trying to be more careful with what I say. I try to be more careful to have integrity in the promises that I make or to not make a promise simply because it's what someone wants to hear, you know, but to say what's true, even if that's difficult. And that's hard.
I'm not so hard to say something painful.
I don't want anyone to think that I'm on my high horse about that because I fail that test a lot and I'm doing my best always to try to be more of that man that I want to be in that respect.
Emotions are something that are powerful and they impact not just the individual and not just the people in your family, but society and culture at large. Our emotional lives better for our society than something that was considered a women's issue.
Now it becomes a human issue.
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