Will YOUR Relationship Fail? 3 Questions to Find Out | Rewind

They are incredibly selfish, but they're also really charismatic. So, you know, all you're saying is I'm using their charisma as an excuse to ignore their selfishness. There are three questions I want you to ask yourself to help determine whether you should stay or go in the situation you're in. And you might be in a situation where that means, should I keep dating someone? It's in the early phases and I don't know whether to continue knowing what I know about this person and their behavior. Or you might be in the position of finding it very difficult to let someone go and fully make a break from someone that you've been in a relationship with and you're trying to use this video to decide whether to go back or not. Number one, is there big flaw? offset by a truly redeemable quality. Something negative we may bring to the table can be offset by a beautiful quality or trait. So for example, there are some universal redeemable traits. Humility is a really important one. If someone has self-awareness, then they are aware of the thing that needs to be worked on. if someone has real empathy, then they're able to see how this part of them affects you negatively and feel that and use that as inspiration and motivation to change. If someone values teamwork, then they have the desire to be a great partner to you and see healing themselves as part of being a great partner. If they're growth minded, It means they have the fuel, the impetus to actually do the work that's necessary to heal this part of themselves. And there are more, of course, kindness, compassion. These are traits that can do an awful lot to offset the negative effects of that flaw. If somebody doesn't have the neutralizing counterbalance to that negative quality or that demon, let's call it, it becomes what I think of or call a dark pairing. If you've followed my work for a long time, you know I use the phrase a lot, unique pairings in a positive sense. Unique pairings are the pairings of qualities in a person that make them irresistible, that make them someone we never want to let go of. So it could be that someone is both funny and Sexy. That's a unique pairing. Dark pairing is when you have two qualities that together make for a very dangerous cocktail. So, for example, if someone is anxious, if they're an anxious person, but they are also defensive, that makes for a difficult pairing, because now when you get anxious, you're unlikely to own it, to take responsibility for the fact that your anxiety is taking over here. So you're going to now defend yourself and make it my fault. You may even go on the attack, especially if your anxiety is paired with a tendency towards aggression. If you feel afraid, if you feel threatened, you might say something really spiteful. You might try to make me insecure in order to put me on the back foot. but so that you can feel good again, because you'll feel safe if you can knock me down a peg. But if someone is anxious, but you combine that with a true kindness, a self-awareness, a humility, then someone is able to acknowledge their own anxiety and say to you, I know I need to work on this. I'm feeling scared right now, and I don't wanna feel this way, but something that just happened It flared me up, and I want to work on it, but I could use some love right now. Now you have a great antidote to anxiety. It doesn't make this anxiety an easy quality to deal with all of the time, but it does counterbalance that quality in a way that helps to neutralize it. And this is an important point. I don't mean, do they have an awesome quality at the same time as having this really difficult quality? That's a very different thing. If you said to me, they are incredibly selfish, but they're also really charismatic. So, you know, difficult quality, great quality. I'd say, yeah, but the great quality does nothing to neutralize this difficult quality. All you're saying is I'm using their charisma as an excuse to ignore their selfishness. Question number two in this Should I Stay or Should I Go? debate. Is it getting easier? I have heard from many different people that if a relationship is right, it should be easy. Now, I understand the sentiment of that. What concerns me about the nature of that phrase is that it seems very broad. In other words, if you have two people who have done an incredible amount of work on themselves and come to each other having done a lot of healing and growth, then it may well be smooth sailing from the beginning in their relationship. But that's often not the case. We meet each other at different stages of development. We still have healing to do. Not everyone who meets and gets married is fully formed as a human being. To an extent, none of us are. We're all a work in progress. And if we're a work in progress, there will be times in a relationship or in dating that are hard. And of course there are versions of hard that we have to be careful of.

Right?

I'm not talking about abuse here. I'm not talking about something that is so radically in the wrong direction from the beginning that why would you bother trying to fix it or fix this person? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about there will be people that come to you who are awesome, but they have things they need to work on, as do you. And in those situations, we have to say to ourselves, okay, I am comfortable being with this person while they work on this, which means communicating to this person that it's something that you want to work on with them, that you expect to try to heal together. But The question always is, is there progress? If the relationship remains just as difficult, if it gets worse, that's a problem. So I think that there's a pairing we have to have, which is compassion for the way that someone is, but a standard that says if something's not optimal about our relationship, and it's something that genuinely affects my happiness, then this needs to get better. I need to see progress with this. I'm compassionate towards this part of you, and I'm here to provide space for this to improve. But it has to improve. So this is compassion allied with a standard, which is a beautiful, unique pairing, actually. It becomes a dark pairing if Our compassion is allied with a lack of standards around what we will accept. Compassion without standards is a recipe for masochism. So number one, are there red flags offset by a redeeming quality? Number two, is it getting easier? And number three, what decision do I feel drawn to in my wisest moments? Now, I don't want this to sound too lofty, like you need to have this enlightened moment where everything makes sense to you. But there are moments where things just make more sense. When I say wise, I mean the part of you that's really connected to what's important in life, to the right things as I think of them. I believe that our life gets easier when we drive towards the right things. Our life gets predictably worse when we seek the wrong things. The wrong things can be someone making us feel better about ourselves because they're super attractive and we want to get them for that reason so that we can prove something to ourself and other people. The wrong things can be driving after a relationship that has giddy highs and terrible lows because we're addicted to the emotional roller coaster of it and we're constantly chasing that high. We can spend our lives chasing the wrong things. and it will never make us happy. There is, I believe, a wise part of us that is grounded, that is connected, that in certain moments finds a moment of quiet and is able to go, this isn't right. This isn't what I should be looking for in life. A part of you that connects to the values that are really important to you. the culture that you want to create in your relationship, the things that you expect from someone that you can build that kind of culture with, what they need to value, not just what you value. Notice I'm not using the word strongest moment because strongest can easily lead us down the path of the moments we feel the cockiest, the moments we feel so self-assured, like I should be getting someone like that. I shouldn't be putting up with this. That's ego. and notice I also didn't say the most compassionate moment you have, because if you're not careful, focusing just on your compassionate moments might have you martyring yourself in service of making somebody else happy. When I say wisest, I mean wisest because it's the part of you that is really connected to what energy you want to create in your life, both for somebody else and for yourself. Notice I also didn't say the most in love part of you. Because if you trust the most in love part of you, then you're just trusting the part of you that is at its giddiest and saying, what does this part of me want to do? Well, that part of you is always going to go, be with this person forever, even though that has terrible lows with it potentially. And it's a kind of drunken state when you're centered. and when you feel really connected to what's important in your life, what does that person want? And what does that person want to be driving towards in the long term? And the conclusion of that, by the way, might mean short-term pain, but the answer is incredibly significant because it comes from a place of groundedness. It comes from a place of connection. Now, accessing that voice is not always easy. In fact, a lot of people find it incredibly difficult because it's always lost in the fog of fear, not knowing what I would do if I lost this person, being afraid of never meeting anyone else again, feeling like I'm not good enough or I'm not worthy of those really important right things you speak of. Or it can just be that it's lost in the fog of addiction. being addicted to somebody, being addicted to the highs of this situation that I'm in, being addicted to the lovey feeling that I get when I'm around this person, even though I'm deeply unsatisfied in this relationship. If I'm honest with myself, my needs aren't being met. It can be very, very difficult to access that voice. But I believe in my bones a peaceful and happy life. I don't mean a pleasurable life. Pleasure comes and goes. To a certain extent, happiness comes and goes. Peace is a truly profound and, I think, underrated emotion when it comes to our lives. Jamison, there was this really good quote I think Eckhart Tolle said, Joy is vibrantly alive peace, which is so different from the pleasure that we seek by trying to get someone and trying to feel love all the time. Vibrantly alive peace. Isn't that what we all want? Well, that's something that is my hidden mission to help you get to. by tapping into that voice in you that knows what the right things are and then has the strength to drive after them instead of continuing to feel this gravitational pull towards things that may feel known to you but make you deeply unhappy and dissatisfied and rob you of your peace. Thank you so much for listening to the episode.

I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this today. I promise you every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I am sending a private email to a group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the Three Relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve one of the three relationships that I believe determine the quality of your life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with life itself. It's a super valuable email. People really look forward to it. This is not the kind of email that you don't open. It's the kind of email you can't wait to see in your inbox every Friday. Go over to thethreerelationships.com to sign up for that email for free, and I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thanks for listening, everyone.

I'll see you in the next episode.

Be well and love life.