5 Principles to Build a Happy and Successful Marriage

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Big Leap podcast. I'm Gay Hendrick, along with my good buddy Mike Koenigs. Today we've got something really unusual. We're going to dive into the flow of love between people. I'm going to be talking a lot about what I do to maintain the flow of love and what Katie does to maintain that flow of love. Then we'll also look at what kind of messes up that flow and how to get back into it again. So a deep dive into the mechanics of love today.

And one of things that you're going to walk away with is Gay and Katie. When they first got together, within months of meeting, they sat down at a fireplace and made a commitment to five big concepts, big ideas that they held true to. And these non negotiables have given them immense intimacy, power and love to create that flow we're talking about. And so you're going to learn a lot in this episode.

Foreign.

So Gay. We were just brainstorming about what our next episode should be because while we do these in batches and you said what you're most interested in right now is the flow of loving energy between you and Katie. And my response was, I think that's a great episode. So we're going to talk about, first of all, what is the flow of loving energy between you and Katie? You've been married 42 years.

We've been together 42. We just had our 40th wedding anniversary.

There we go. So that's by all standards, a long time. I'm about halfway there with you. We're celebrating our 21st anniversary this year. And I know from my point of view, things have changed dramatically. Some things have gotten so much easier. And I can only imagine with all the work that you two have done, how much easier and smoother things are. But I'd like, first of all, why don't you just talk about. What specifically do you mean when you say the flow of loving energy between couples?

Yes. Well, for me, it's a feeling of ease in my body and an actual physical feeling of a flow. You know, I can actually feel the kind of the bounce back of love and positive energy between me and Katie. I can feel that in my body. And it's something we started a long time ago, but it took us probably 20 years to perfect it. We got together in 1980 and we wanted to do something different from any relationship we'd ever been in before. And we wanted to create a relationship that ran on positive energy, that didn't Go through these big fluctuations of feeling good for a while and creating a hassle and taking three weeks to get out from under that or, you know. And I'd been in previous relationships where I'd done things like had an outside affair or something like that, that I didn't want to repeat those kind of mistakes in this new relationship with Katie, because it seemed like it had great possibility to it, and I didn't want to mess it up. Up until I met her, I always described my relationships as having the trajectory of the Titanic. They would always start with great fanfare, but they kept hitting the same iceberg every six months or so. And it took me a few years to realize who the iceberg was. And it was not who I thought it was.

But Katie, when I got together, we actually sat down in front of the fireplace and laid out some principles that we wanted to follow. And one of them was always telling the truth to each other and always listening to what the other person had to say, rather than rebutting it or arguing with it or something like that. And we wanted to eliminate criticism from our relationship. We'd both grown up in very critical families, and we'd kind of stumbled into doing a lot of bickering in relationships. And I was just tired of that. I didn't want to do that anymore. So we actually decided to eliminate blame and criticism, and we also decided to eliminate racing for the victim position when arguments came up. All couples arguments are raced to occupy the victim position, where one of them says, you're doing. And the other one says, well, wait a minute, you're doing. That's not my fault. And then it can go around and around for several days or several decades. We've had people in that have been going through that drama for 20 or 30 years. Same every week. And so we decided we wanted to get out from under that. And so we made these deep commitments to each other about speaking honestly and getting out of the victim and taking responsibility and also living in thankfulness and appreciation rather than living in expectation and entitlement.

We'd actually never seen a relationship that was like we wanted. And so we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants. This was. It would take us 10 years before we wrote our book Conscious Loving and get on Oprah and all that. So the decade of the 80s was spent with us working on ourselves and working with small groups of couples in our living room. And we pretty much literally went overnight from working with 10 couples in our living room one night to getting on an airplane the Next day and going to Chicago and working on Oprah's stage in front of 10 million people. So, you know, it looked like an overnight thing, but we'd been working on it for 10 years. And so it was easy for us to make that transition because we had so many experiences of working with real life people in our living room. Suddenly, when Oprah plopped us on our stage and gave us a couple of people to work with, we kind of knew exactly what to do. So from that point on, we really escalated in our work on ourselves. During the 90s, I think the first time we were on Oprah was something like 91, something like that. And so during the 90s, we did tremendous number of relationship workshops all over the world. And that whole time we were working on ourselves. Because working with your partner, standing up on stage on Oprah, or standing up in front of a conference of 1500 psychologists, that's not an easy thing to do. As a matter of fact, at one point, about two thirds of our practice were other relationship experts who had had various glitches on trying to present with their partner. There's one famous case, I can't mention the name, but one famous relationship expert couple got into such an argument on stage. I believe it was up in Sacramento, that they had to mobilize therapists from the audience to break them up and get them back. So they were communicating to each other. So that kind of thing can happen when you're working with your partner.

Pretty sure I know who that is.

Yeah.

And so we.

We wanted to prevent that if at all possible. So we worked on ourselves constantly. And I set the intention of having.

Only working in my genius zone by the end of the century. And so by the end of the century, I had pretty much quit doing anything that I didn't love to do. And so for the past 21 years, Katie and I have been only doing things that we love to do. And that's also very healthy for a couple, too, because, you know, if one partner is expressing himself or herself and the other partner isn't, that sets up a rattle, a dissonance in the relationship. And we've seen many, many, many people come in that, you know, have it set up so that only one person can really flourish and flower. The other person has to kind of be a subservient role. So the flow for us is an actual physical feeling where I can feel it as a connection going back and forth between me and Katie. I can feel it this moment, and I can feel it if she's in Germany, teaching a class like she was in Germany last year for a couple of weeks. And it didn't matter. You know, the flow was there the whole time. And that's what I've worked for. And that's what's number one for me because I have priorities in my life and that's number one, because if that goes well, then everything else goes well. But I can tell you from a couple of thousand couples sessions that if that's not going well, if the basic flow of love and honoring each other isn't there, then nothing goes well. You know, I've had people in here who won Oscars, but they are the flow of love.

So when they came home with their Oscar, they immediately, as soon as the party was over, they got in a knockdown, drag out fight with their partner over it. And so it doesn't matter what level of the game you're at, whether you're winning Oscars or making a good meal or whatever. We've all got these upper limit problems built into ourselves, particularly in relationships. So Katie and I, you know, how we got there is if we noticed one little thing wasn't feeling. We just didn't overlook that. We would sit down and focus on that. Usually it'd only take us five or 10 minutes. But if we overlooked it, then it would stack up and become a problem that would manifest later and take us longer to fix it. In the beginning, we would get into hassles and it would take us three days to get out of it, you know, but eventually we'd hit a glitch and it would take us 10 seconds to get out of it. So that's a good thing. Once you've learned to kind of make the healing move in a compressed period of time, that's really very useful. And it comes through practice. That's the only way to do it. Nobody can wave a magic wand over your head or anything like that. It just takes a lot of gutting it out.

Right.

And maybe for someone just to put this together. At the time when you met, how old were each of you and what were you doing for a living? Because you were.

You know, you were a trained clinical psychologist. And at the time were you teaching?

Yes.

And you had gone to Stanford?

I got my doctorate at Stanford in 74. And then I went to the University of Colorado to become an assistant professor in the counseling department. And I was there. I went to Colorado when I was.

See, 29 years old and took my first professoring job. And then.

When I was 34 is when I Met Katie. So I was there in Colorado for several years, and I was working my way up the university ladder, you know, becoming an associate professor and then a full professor. And so I was very much into the academic world at that time. And then I got very disenchanted with it and saw that I didn't want to work with 500 graduate students a year. I wanted to work with 5 million people at a time. But there wasn't any such thing as Oprah or anything like that in the beginning. There was one show on pbs. There was a show by a guy named Leo Buscaglia, who was. They called himself the Love Doctor, and he's passed on now. And then there was another one named John Bradshaw, who was. They're teaching a lot of recovery skills, but those were both on pbs. So there was nothing on mainstream television like Oprah or anything like that. But I had this kind of dream that there was some way of getting this stuff out big time. And so when Katie and I got together, I was 34 and she was 31. She was in private practice as a dance movement therapist. And she was also just finishing up her PhD as a matter of fact, that's how I met her, because I came to give a talk at her graduate school where she was finishing her PhD and she was also the movement therapy professor there at the school. And so that's where we got together. As soon as I saw her, I was head over heels in love with her and still am 42 years later. But she and I started working together almost as soon as we got together. That was one of our dreams, to look at a bigger picture. Mike I had when I started writing books and things like that, you know, I realized that our culture is set up for male heroes. And sometimes female heroes, you know, they'll write a book or read something, but nobody had ever made relationship itself the hero. And so when people started first paying attention to me and reading my books and, you know, treating me as a famous person, I never felt comfortable with that because I felt like I was perpetuating an old stereotype that goes back to Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed, which is that the key people in the culture are supposed to be men. And I thought that was a ripoff. You know, I grew up in a single parent family where my mother was always getting.

She did great work, but she never made as much money as the men and things like that. So I had a kind of a desire to not be the typical male, white, male hero, but have relationship, be the hero. So that's why, when we first got invited to go on Oprah, they just wanted to take me. And I said, no, wait a minute. We're teaching relationship. You guys always have single males talking about relationships. You know, why don't you have a couple? And so we had to actually do a little negotiation to get them to pop for two airplane tickets. And they had to set up the stage differently because the stage is set up for focusing on one person at a time, not to focus on two people at a time. But anyway, it was really valuable that we did that because then they started having more diverse people on there rather than just basically white male heroes. And so that was a big item for me in the very beginning. I wanted to have a kind of equality in my relationship where both of us were the speaker, you know, that we spoke with one voice or two voices in harmony with each other. And so that was our goal. And we probably did, gosh, hundreds, if not a thousand relationship seminars where we both presented the same stage and talks and conferences and things like that. So we got our point across. And now I think it's a very different world as a result of that. Because you do see more couples working together these days.

Yeah, well, I think when I listen and I think about it, and also having spent a lot of time with the two of you.

What not only do you complement each other really well, you can really tell you have an extremely intentional relationship. Very few words need to be exchanged for a lot to be passed over to one another. So there's big downloads happening, and it is fascinating. And the other comment I'd have is just to be. Whether you're pretend congruent or real congruent, which you guys are.

That is very difficult. You know, I've known a lot of celebrities and celebrity couples, and they're in constant state of challenges and entanglements and, you know, so many people around them trying to win favor and get something from them. And, you know, you guys have always seemed to me you're on a unified front.

Definitely. Yeah. And we focus on that a lot. I grew up in a family where there was a lot of conflict and.

My mother was trying to raise me and my older brother, you know, without a man in the house and working crazy hours. She was a writer and a journalist and a newspaper columnist. And, you know, she would be clacking on her typewriter when I Woke up at 6:30 in the morning to go to school, and she'd be clacking at her typewriter sometimes when I went to sleep at night. And so she was insanely busy and didn't.

Given her druthers. I'm sure my mom would have preferred to be a single woman writer without the responsibility of a husband or kids, but she found herself with kids. And then my father died suddenly at age 32, and she was kind of cast on her own, but she was quite snippy and could be provoked very quickly. And she had a lot of rage inside her. And she also was kind of delicately balanced with some of her addictions. When they would get out in front of her, she would get hard to deal with, and. And then, you know, things would go well for a while, but it was always walking on eggshells around there because of the conflict. And then my grandparents who lived next door, they'd been married for 63 years, but according to my mother, they'd been fighting for 59 of those years because she'd been around them since a kid. So, anyway, what I'm saying is the default position was conflict, criticism, and argument. And, man, it took a lot of work to get out from under all that, you know, because I would just instinctively find myself criticizing Katie for something, and she's very sensitive, and then it would, you know, take a long time to get out from under that. And, oh, man, I just wanted so much to have.

Transparency where nobody was hiding anything. I grew up in a family where secrets prevailed. You know, everybody had these secrets and was trying hard not to reveal them. And so it made for a lot of, like, if you watch the Sopranos, you know, this would be a fairly good approximation of some of my family dynamics.

Yeah, no, that's. That's scary. And I didn't have. I didn't have extremes in my family. Vivian did, you know, being the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and her father was a drug addict, alcoholic abuser, and never got his legs under him after coming to the States.

And they lived in poverty. So.

She came into the relationship very conscious. But there was a lot of healing and trust that had to occur over a long period of time. And I know when I was listening to you, some of the things I wrote down. And just, again, just so I have this clear, when you two sat down at the fireplace and created your. What are essentially non negotiables, right, Your values. So telling the truth, listening, never racing to the victim position, eliminating criticism and living in thankfulness, those are the main ones that was within. How long after you had met?

I would say, well, we first met, but then we didn't see each other much for about six months because I was on an extended tour of Europe and Asia and things like that. So we had a great time together in January and February of that year of 1980. But then I disappeared for a few months and then came back in the summer, and then we moved to Colorado. So I would say it was great. Probably close to nine months to a year after we met, where we finally got a chance to sit down and say, okay, let's design this thing. Because we were falling into some of our old habits of bickering with each other and criticizing each other and things like that. And we sat down and said, okay, we don't want to go down this path anymore. Something funny that happened when we made that decision in front of the fireplace. Katie's parents had just visited us for a few days in Colorado, and they bickered so much the entire time they were there that when they left, we said, okay.

We'Re never going down that path. Let's do whatever we can so that when we're together 50 years, we're not bickering 24 hours a day, you know, because they were married 50 years and, you know.

All the time. And.

I.

Knew going in that I didn't know as much as I needed to know about relationship. And so we made these vows to each other that were, you know, like wedding vows, to be honest with each other and to speak honestly and to take responsibility rather than claiming the victim and to live in waves of gratitude where we actually appreciated each other out loud every day. So those kind of things became our sacred path that we followed. And it was really interesting because almost as soon as we got that established and started working together, we attracted people right away who wanted to study with us. And so that's what gave us the idea of quitting the university back in the 90s and setting up our own institute. I remember the last day I was a university professor. They kind of had a celebration for me, and they made me gave us give a speech about what I was going to do next. And because I was retiring from the university at a very early age. And part of that was because I'd made a ton of money being on Oprah and selling books and things like that, so I didn't need their little $40,000 a year anymore. And so they were very good to me, though. But on the last day, they asked me to give a speech, and they said, what are you going to do? And I said, well, I'm going to create my own little university. It's going to be a university that has no Grades and has no physical building is only going to teach what people really need to know. One of my big beefs, everybody in the audience, you know, they're saying, what's that look like? What's that? And interesting enough, it wasn't the.

The Internet hadn't really gotten going yet in a big way, but that became exactly the way that I did it. You know, I had this vision of a university without buildings, where everybody was there voluntarily, no matter where in the world they were. But how do you do that? Suddenly now we have the technology for doing that. And boy, that really changed everything.

It really did, you know, that it, it goes to show. And there's a, a global metaphor here. But with that, what you did is declared a massive vision. And it'd be easy in hindsight. Hindsight to say, well, shoot, why didn't we do that so much earlier? But I was around during pre Internet days and I can remember when we went from, you know, cassette tapes to CDs and then later on to maybe making DVDs and then the web was here and suddenly it was like we went backwards 10 years because to make video work with a dial up modem was horrible. And there was so much friction. And in a way, when I listened to your declaration with Katie, you know what you've done is you've eliminated friction. That is the opposite of flow. And.

The way you trained and taught was to eliminate friction. And so how's that for the great.

Because one of the things that we learned was how important integrity is to keeping the flow of love going. Because all you got to do is have one person tell a little white lie, or one person fail to keep an agreement, or one person to suddenly go for the victim position and then it kind of wipes out the vibrations for a matter of days or even weeks sometimes. And I've literally had couples in here that have been married 20 or 30 years that have been having the same argument every week during that entire time. I don't know how the heck they do it because I can't do that for 10 minutes anymore. I just, my body won't let me.

Yes. No, I think that's, I've told you this many times, but in this context I think it's important again, that I've always admired about you is you check in when you do your. Or you just, I watch you as you close your eyes. You're clearly checking your body and then you make a decision immediately as to. It's a nope, that's the end of that. So It's a very short conversation on what you allow in or not. And I have a lot of admiration for that. And I don't know of anyone else who operates like you. It's a very unusual operating system, at least in my experience in the Western world.

Well, I take that as a great compliment. And also, I've worked my ass off to get there, you know.

No, yeah, no, this is. This is very, very true. Well, I'll give you just a quick reflection on my side, because when I listen to what your rule said is I've had completely different ones and I think that has to do probably because I didn't like, again, my parents were not horrible. I had a. My mother was very resentful of my father, though, because he didn't love her the way she wanted to be loved. And she never had the courage to. To ask for it or put her foot down. And.

You know, my dad just grew up in a very poor, very traditional German farm, you know, where it was just. It's life was black and white and it was survival or death, literally in a lot of ways. So. And it's not like he took ignorance into the home because I'd never consider him an ignorant man. It's just he was so busy and so active that.

He was just always being useful the way he knew best how to do that. So. I know when we began, one of the things I noticed and listened to with Vivian specifically.

Was that.

The bottom line is I made a commitment to never make her feel small or never make her dreams.

Not important and to enable her to be a dream enabler. And that began very early on. From the moment she started her foundation, for example, she would have a vision and I. Even if it terrified me, and I'd be asking myself, how are we gonna be able to support our lifestyle while you're off marching off to Africa or whatever and giving and like, I just couldn't comprehend it, but I just said, I think you should do that. And in. And because of that, our lives are 10 times bigger than what I could have created without that experience, exposure, you know, and she had like, you know, going to the White House a couple times and, and having like Viola Davis speak at her events or Jada Pinkett Smith, you know, big Academy Award winning act actresses. And then.

I think the other thing that we. We did that I'm proud of is we always had a unified front as parents. Like there. There really is. There's never been anything that we didn't discuss and predict ahead of time. So Zach could never go to one of us and get his way. There was no. And we trained that out of him immediately anyway. It just never happened. And now.

There'S one observation and two commitments I've made. One of them is, I've never been bored with her. She's always interesting, fascinating, and brings a different point of view, a different thinking style than I do to the table. Some of it I used to annoy me because she's such a high fact finder. She asks a million questions, and I'm. I'm a total quick start. Like, I'm just like, yep, I'm in. Let's do it. So if there's a conflict, sometimes that arises from that. But I learned to appreciate the safety behind the fact finder instead of resenting or get angry.

So my commitment to us is, I wake up every day saying, how can I create happily ever after? That is my primary couples question. And then the last one is, how can I sit inside a less than 5% aggravation experience in all aspects of life? And now you know you have your feeling into exercise. Mine is, I just, like, settle in, and I'm like, will this person or experience ever create anything more than 5% aggravation? And if it will, and I'll know it immediately, it's a hard no. And if I'm not sure, it's a hard no. And I've noticed that is eliminated.

Most of the conflict I've had in my life, not to mention inside of the relationship. Because I'll just say, yep, it's aggravating. Let's just say no to that. And I've trained her to operate inside that rule set. It's not like it took a lot of training, but to be aware of it, because drama follows when you're not being completely conscious of it. So.

That'S my short reflection on what I learned just listening.

Well, thank you. And I've appreciated how you've built your relationship with Vivian over the years and really supported her and been part of her doing some really remarkable things. That's one thing I'm so proud of with Katie, too. I've always supported everything she wanted to do, even things that didn't look on the surface like they were going to be very useful or helpful, but they always turned out to be an expression of her genius. And so that's what I'm here to support with her. We're in a relationship where both of us support our individual geniuses, and it's really delicious, and it keeps getting better and better and better. I'm 77 now, and I'll tell you at some of the greatest times, just since we both turned 70. And so in my case, seven years. I don't know what there is magic about it, but I've sure had a great time since then and great sex and, you know, we've been well off financially for a long time, so that's not so much a big thing anymore, but just to have that flow of love and ease going on all the time. To me, that's the best thing I know of.

Yeah, I think when I've told you this before, I believe. But I remember bumping into multiple studies that have said, especially for men. But I know it's men and women.

That men very consistently say in these studies that their 70s are some of their happiest and most peaceful years.

And I think there's obviously limiters there, which are, especially if you've got a happy relationship and you have the means. Right. Comfortable means. I'm sure the 70s really sucks if you're immobile.

Sure it does too. Yeah. But, you know, a lot of people are having the same.

But having said that, whatever is having.

That experience at 15, 20, 25, you don't have to wait till.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Being married to an a hole and being broke, never a good combination.

Well, I'm. I'm here for so.

Well, let's leave this on a super happy note. What's that?

I set out to create more love in my life than I had ever experienced before. And so, so far it's working just great. I've had the greatest experiences of love over the past years working in being with Katie. And, you know, we've had our ups and downs and various glitches and tragedies and stuff like that, but we always come through it just fine because we are telling the truth to each other and listening to each other and functioning as a team. And, you know, a great marriage has to be a great team, I think, because like.

The great philosopher Rocky said in the first Rocky movie about his girlfriend, he said, she got gaps, I got gaps, we fill gaps. And so Katie's great at certain things. Like, she's great organizationally. I'm hopeless organizationally. She can run our money, you know, organized and handled our money for 40 years. I can't even remember the last time I touched a checkbook or anything like that. And so I'm not interested in that. But she really likes it. And so we've each found our own ways of interlocking our genius together.

All Right. Well, this has been a lot of fun digging into all the flow of love variables, and I hope everybody learned something from this. I sure enjoyed talking about it.

Yeah, no, this is always one of my favorite things.

I feel every time we go deep into these wisdom areas with my wise friend Gay Hendricks that I get an upgraded operating system. So I hope you did, too. And I will just say, if you want to know more about how to spend more time with Gay and me in the big Leap experience, why don't you just send a text message to BL at 855-955-3958 or. Or just head on over to bigleappodcast.com There's a button right there that'll pop up and you can fill out your contact information. And Gay and I will follow up and tell you more about what you can do to join us and go on an adventure to work on your big leaps and your upper limits challenges. So with that gate, anything else you want to add?

Big leaps in love are big fun. Big leaps in general are good. But big leaps in love are really grand. Very good.

All right, see you in the next episode.

Thanks, everybody.