The Real Reason You Haven’t Found Love (Yet)
Sam Selburg and Lewis Howes discuss why people sabotage good relationships. Lewis shares how he nearly ruined his own marriage and describes a woman who felt excluded from her boyfriend's barbecue, showing how past wounds trigger self-defeating reactions. The fix: recognize these trauma responses and replace them with compassion.
Chapters
Why do you think I'm going to speak for women? Because this is. A lot of. You coach a lot of women. Why do you think when there's a very reasonable or available man that meets the standards of a woman in front of them that they're on a date with or they're dating? Why is it sometimes that women sabotage that potential really good relationship that is right in front of them?
If they meet a good guy, they.
Meet a good guy. They've gone on some date, there's no red flags. There's no ick. And there's like, here's a guy, he's got a job, he's kind. He's like, he's groomed, he's healthy, he's, you know, he can have some funny. He's got, you know, maybe he's not Superman, but he's got a good package. Right? Why do. Literally and spiritually, why do women sabotage when there's a good man in front of them?
The question can be applied equally across the genders, and we all. I know I've sabotaged potentially wonderful relationships before. Almost did it with the relationship that turned out to be my marriage. I almost screwed that up. And we have to look at what's.
Why do you think you almost screwed it up?
We get into these patterns where we chase the wrong things. I can't take credit for that phrase. My wife, Audrey, loves that phrase, and I got addicted to it, too, because it's so.
It's such a great phrase, this idea.
That if you chase the wrong things, it might be fun sometimes, but until you start chasing the right things, that chasing the wrong things will always loop you back to where you started. We chase these things that feel off because it's what we know and it feels familiar. And it's. You know, you're texting me back. This person's not texting me back. I feel like this is a little more interesting.
She's laughing at everything that's wrong because she's been through it all, right? She's like, I know all this too well.
There's a. You know, some of that is trauma. Some of it is our brain making this false calculation that if something is rare, it must be more valuable. Non sequitur. When it comes to relationships, someone being more rare makes them more valuable. We. You know, it's like when you walk past a nightclub, if they just let you in. I haven't been a night to a nightclub in many years. I'm saying this, but, you know, like when you used to walk past A nightclub. If they like, yeah, you could come in. You were like, but the one you walk by and there's a guy with a list and he looks at you and he's like, what's your name?
You go, oh, we're not on it.
He goes, well, I'm sorry, we got a line here. You go, we need to be in there. Some going on in there. Nothing's going on in there. There's a bunch of people sitting at boring VIP tables, paying too much for drinks. Like nothing. There's no great bacchanalian love fest going on there that you must be part of. It's a nightclub. But the way they get you into that nightclub is to make it seem like it's really, really hard to get in. And we take that, that, those. That those economic dynamics into our love life and someone stops texting us, or someone feels like they're drifting and all of a sudden our brain says they must be important. You like me. What's wrong with you? You're treating me like crap and you're in and out of my life and you text me and then you go cold and then I don't hear from you. You might be onto something.
You're the one for me. Yeah. Yeah.
This is what happens for so many of us. And we have to. So much of it is retraining our instincts. Our instincts are not. We have to be very careful with.
The idea that we like.
Trust your instincts. Your instincts will get you killed.
Very rarely does something become a part of my life in a way that I genuinely think I now can't live without this. And one of those things is the Big Ass Calendar. I know the name. It's great. The Big Ass Calendar is basically a calendar where you can see your entire year at a glance. And Audrey and I now have multiple versions of this across our hut home because we don't make a decision without consulting this calendar where we can see our entire year. I've always been good at planning my days. I've always been good at planning my weeks, but not great at being able to visualize my entire year. And as someone who likes to do a lot of things, I both have a lot of goals, of things I want to achieve in a year. But I'm also prone to over planning my year and double booking and leaving myself feeling burnt out at the end of it. This changes all of that. And it comes with colored stickies that you can use to plan trips and experiences and days you're going to have. It's like scrapbooking for grownups because you're planning out your whole year. Visually, it looks really pretty. You have pens that you can use for stuff that isn't permanent yet you can rub it out before you're ready to put it in stone in those stickers. It is an amazing experience to use, and it is something that we literally couldn't live without. I've gifted this to like 9 people in my life already. Go get yourself one of these. We have a discount code. If you use the coupon code Love life at checkout at the Big Ass Calendar. So go over to the bigarsecalendar.com, order yourself the big Ass calendar and use the code Love life at checkout. It'll also give you 10 off of everything in store. If you don't have space for a big one, they have smaller ones too. Go grab it. You will thank me later. You will love it.
In a boxing match with an inexperienced person getting in the ring, do you know what the instinct is when a punch is thrown at their head? Duck. It's not duck. You blink. If you're not used to punches coming at you and a punch comes your way, people blink. People go blind in the exact moment they need to see. Because the appropriate response for a trained fighter is to slip the punch or parry. What are our bad instincts in our love lives? We all have them. You pull away from me, I chase, I get scared. I shut down. I had a woman that I work with, you know, she was. It was all going great with this person. And then one day he had a. This is like a few dates in a few weeks, in maybe he had a barbecue with his friends on a Saturday, didn't invite her, and she was like, so hurt. And it brought up everything for her. All of her deepest fears of abandonment and not being good enough. And he wasn't proud of her and so on.
But it was very early.
And she said to him in the middle at firstly, she was like, I'm ignoring it. I'm ignoring the fact that you didn't invite me. I'm just ignoring it. I'm ignoring it. I'm ignoring it because that was her first pattern. Now her instinct is, something's bothering me. Go quiet. Don't dare say it. Then in the middle of the day, when he was at this barbecue, it ate her up so much that she could not say something. So then her other instinct came out, which was a kind of like barbed way of speaking. So she went, why didn't you invite me to your barbecue? She texted that in the middle of the barbecue. Why didn't you invite me? And he said, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. These are old friends. I haven't seen them in a while. I was just getting together with them. Can I call you afterwards? Now she's ashamed. She feels vulnerable.
She feels like she's let her guard down.
She's shown him how much she likes him by asking, like. She played her hand the same way I did when I said that that thing made me jealous. She played her hand.
Why didn't you invite me?
The subtext is, I like you and I wanted to be invited. I've now played that card. And now I hate you for making me play that card. So when he said, can I call you later? She said, don't bother. Three days later, she was talking to me and saying, what should I do? He hasn't called.
He said, don't bother.
But we can all look at that and see what that was. We none of us know why she didn't get invited to the barbecue. We don't know. Neither did she. But her instinct in that moment sabotaged the situation before anything could ever really take root. And we all have our version of that.
Yeah. I don't even know if that's instinct or if that's just wounds.
Yeah, but our wounds create our instincts, right?
So if you.
If you got hurt at some stage in your life, a survival instinct was created. If you do something today, we all do these things, right? Something. Something will upset you, it will make you anxious, it'll make you depressed.
Or you'll.
You'll. You'll have a reaction to something going.
On in your life that will.
That you'll kind of hate yourself for, because you'll be like, why am I like this? Why am I like this? And that? And that becomes fuel for hating ourselves. Why can't I just be like everybody else? Why can't I just handle life as.
Well as Lewis Howes?
Why don't I deal with this? Well, why did I sabotage it? And then we beat ourselves up. The truth is, what we're doing right now is normal for someone like us to do. We are not broken. Something happened. We went through something. We've had a certain kind of a life. We have a certain kind of a brain. There is some cocktail of things that mean that you are the kind of person that in this situation, reacts like this, that doesn't deserve your hatred, that deserves your compassion.
So many of you write to me all the time to tell me that no matter what happens in your life, you still don't feel worthy. You still struggle with anxiety, you still struggle with chronic overwhelm or with depression or with simply not being in control of your emotions or having a bad relationship with yourself. And when that happens, we can have a sense of hopelessness, that things are never going to get better, when we're never going to be happy, and because of our issues, we're never going to be able to really get what we want in life. I have designed a program to deal with exactly these issues by doing the deepest work with you, and it is my weekend retreat that is coming up this October, the 18th and the 19th in Miami, Florida. We have both live tickets available where you can come and join me in the room in person, which is the greatest experience and you have to come if you can possibly make it. But if you can't make it in person, we also have virtual tickets available so that you can stream it from wherever you are in the world, live in real time while I'm on stage. We have some deep discounts available on tickets right now only until this coming Friday, the 25th of July. And for anyone who is coming to the in person who secures their ticket before Friday, I am gifting you one of my most popular programs of all time, my Impact program, which is perfect for anyone who wants to work on their ability to speak with confidence and clarity, whether it's in love or in the workplace or just in your life in general because you want to make a bigger impact. I'm gifting that program to anyone who gets a live ticket to be with me in Miami. Go to the page, it's retreataccess.com to get your ticket and make sure you do it before Friday because it is the best deal you're going to get between now and the event. I'll see you there.
Sam.
