Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuHbJbuUZE
some of the studies I was looking at shows that if you get married after 30 each additional year of age increases your chance of Divorce by 5% I couldn't figure out why oh I think there are several reasons for this so first of all Lor goly renowned psychotherapist bestselling author coup's counselor who's helped thousands of people find or save their relationships people use the first date as I'm supposed to feel this one thing or else forget it and people will come into therapy and say I didn't feel like butterflies so I'm not going to go out with him again people said they wouldn't go on a second date with somebody because he ordered tap water he must be really cheap there was one where somebody said oh he did this impression from Austin Powers Yeah Baby he just nervous he was trying to make you laugh what about he asks to split the bill would that be an ick if he doesn't pay that would be a huge ick for me really but it's really important to understand why which is interesting now your partner has to be your best friend have the same interest he has to Rock My World in better someone who's really ambitious but also really family oriented no one human could possibly do that if you look at what are the most important things that would predict whether a relationship is going to last is really important are very important and then emotional is really important what does that mean it means you went to therapy because of heartbreak yes how do we navigate through that dark cloud one strategy that might be helpful is it's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show um and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show we now have five million subscribers on YouTube which is a number that I just can't comprehend and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had we started the dire of a CO just over three years ago now and in my wildest expectations we might have had 100,000 subscribers by now so you can imagine how shocked I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations every week um and spend some time with us so thank you and I made a deal with you I made a deal
that if you subscribe to the show that we would continue to raise the bar and in 2024 we're going to raise the bar like never before I've been working for the last N9 months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to the show and I'm very excited to deliver that for you the production's going to change we're going to go even further with our guests and we're going to tell even more Global stories so as always if you appreciate what we're doing here the simple free favor I'll ask from you is to hit the Subscribe button let's get on with the [Music] episode Lori if you had to summarize what it is you have done for people over the last couple of decades how would you summarize that I would say that I help people to learn what gets in their way from living the life that they want to live and what department of their life do you tend to focus on all of them they're all so important but I think it's really about people's relationships and I mean relationship to self what is going on with the way that I talk to myself the way that I make decisions and choices the way that I hold myself back relationships with friends with romantic partners with family members with um professional colleagues all of it and of all of those subcategories what are the categories within there that people come to you advice for most often through your podcast through your articles through your therapy work well it's interesting because it's usually somebody coming in and saying I really want something in my life to change and what they want to change is someone else right and so I think what they're surprised to find is that yes there are difficult people in their lives you know we like to say that before diagnosing someone with depression make sure they aren't surrounded by so um you know there are really difficult people out there but the question is where's your agency what are the choices that you're making um are you setting boundaries with these people are you adding to the tension between the two of you because you're kind of in a dance and you're doing some old pattern that you're in with this person so I think it's really important to become self-aware and say what am I doing in
the world that gets me closer to the way that I want to live and what am I doing in the world that keeps me from getting there and since you got into this line of work and since your sort of Education in this area began what TR changes have you seen in the types of questions and the types of issues that are being presented to you in a sort of clinical setting or online or through your DMs Etc I think most people are really seeking connection of some sort that they don't have in their lives and there's a sense of being alone whether it's I'm the only person who feels this way I'm so ashamed I don't know why I'm so anxious or I'm so depressed or it's a feeling of I feel like I'm I have all these sort of friends you know kind of peripherally or friends in the world if you look at their social media but they don't really have someone that they could call and say I really need to talk to you about this who's this person you can confide in you know there are these studies that have been done where they they looked at you know several decades ago how many people said I have someone close that I can call and most people had at least some one usually a few people now most people have zero people they have said zero I have nobody that I can call and confide in in that deep way does that mean that there's a greater pressure Now put on our romantic Partners to meet more of our needs yes absolutely and that's one of the things that I think you see in dating especially with younger Generations because it used to be that your community was there to meet all different kinds of needs so now it's you know people like to say well my partner is my best friend well but you also have a best friend most people also have a best friend right so so what happened or maybe they don't anymore because of what we've been talking about so the question is now your partner has to be your best friend where they are there to meet all of your emotional needs whereas before you had you know I could talk to this friend about this and I had this friend that my partner doesn't like this hobby but I get to go my partner doesn't like move these kinds of movies but I could go to these kinds of movies with this person or you know whatever it is and now it's like we have to kind of have the same interests and
we have to be able to talk about all the same things and we have to you know he has to Rock My World in bed or she has to Rock My World in bed or they have to um read my mind right and so no one human could possibly do that there is no human who can do that and so what happens is we think something's wrong with this relationship if I'm not getting that from this person and what are the other sort of big picture items that are making it harder for us to be satisfied romantically these days I think again the sort of expectations of what it means to be loved I think that when people really put everything into this other person they aren't getting the the kind of emotional nourishment that they would be getting from the larger community so whether it's extended family that used to be around most people a lot of people don't even live where their F where they grew up anymore so they're kind of putting down Roots somewhere else um they are kind of you know they have to form like a whole new group of people there's something to be said for the people who knew you when you were young there's something about that about really being known because I think in relationship people really want to know and be known I remember I had a couple come in and this was so striking to me where um she said to her husband you know what three words I really want to hear and he said I love you and she said no I understand you and that was so profound that how deep a yearning we all have to want to be understood and I think that that comes from you know you have history with people and you have shared experiences with people but we're moving around so much nowadays that we don't have that history or those shared experiences and people didn't know us at different times in our lives when you're truly known oh you went through this transformation or you went through this difficult time or I remember that fun time we had when we were 16 years old and so a lot of people just don't have those kind of deeper connections anymore what is it about being understood that we want like what is it what is the fundamental there is it does it make us feel psychologically safer or what what is it oh it makes us less lonely okay if you feel like you're the only one who understands what's going on for you you're all alone and that's why it's so
interesting you know having the dear therapist podcast or having the column where where most people write in and think that they are alone and yet I have thousands of people writing in the same exact thing so they're not alone but they think that they're alone they feel no one understands or no one would understand and I see this more with men also than with women although both I get that but it it's interesting because I think that with with men you know often they'll come into therapy men get into therapy sort of one of two ways they either come in because they're in a couple and there's a problem in the relationship so they come into therapy or they come in kind of secretively like you know no one knows I'm here and they'll say I've never told anyone this before and the thing that they tell you is something that women will talk about quite easily and it's not that men are less deep than women it's that women feel more comfortable to over lunch with a friend say something like that and when women come in and they say I've never told anyone this before they'll say except for my mother my sister sister my best friend so they've told a few people maybe one person maybe two maybe three and so I think it's interesting because I think that um you know men can be particularly lonely because they really don't have the place to kind of connect in the way that women are more culturally acceptable to do so women sometimes have an expectation that their partner will open up in the same way that their best friends will open up yeah and many men fall short of that expectation I you know I think there's often a narrative that women want a man to kind of sit down and talk about his problems and open up and listen and all those kinds of things that a woman might do with her best friends but men for some reasons tend to struggle with that yeah well they they women want that and they don't want that so women say they want that and they think that they truly mean it when they say they want that but in coup's therapy I I'll see something like a woman will come in and and you know she'll say that exact thing to her partner you know I really want you to open up I feel like we're not connecting I want you to be more vulnerable with me I want you to tell me what's going on
inside and if he does and let's say he starts crying tears up or really starts crying she inevitably will have this reaction of I don't feel safe when he doesn't open up to me because I don't feel connected to him but I don't feel safe when he's that vulnerable with me either because there's something just some cultural programming in her around what it's like to be with a man who's crying or a man who is vulnerable and so I think that that's really problematic and I think that makes it you know kind of harder for men to feel like well I have a safe space to open up like it takes a lot for a man to really feel like oh this is something that I want to share whereas I think women just feel a lot more free to do that with their Partners I saw a video yesterday that I'm actually going to play to you cuz I saved it ahead of this conversation it caused a lot of discussion online on Twitter okay so this is the video okay yeah I just want somebody who's so obsessed with the Bible and so obsessed with Jesus and who understands and like he said like who can teach us things yeah like I want my dude to speak in tongues and have tattoos I just want a good man like a nice classic man I want somebody who will literally protect me and beat someone's butt if they need to but also will sit there with compassion and just like a good hearted man that's what a true man is there has to be that dichotomy it's the same thing with feminine women too there's always a dichotomy there's a softness and a strength and for men being masculine is being able to beat someone's butt you know maybe not physically but like being a protector and like doing what he needs to do to protect his family but then also being soft enough to like be able to tend to his wife's feelings and like to be a that's hilarious but that that's that's you know people would say well I'm not like that but yet when you actually talk to people about when you when they're dating and you're talking to them about what's going on and why they're not going out on another date with somebody or you know why they won't even go on a first date with somebody um those are the kinds of things that's an exaggerated version of the kinds of things that you will hear which is what kind of things like the they're they're
not 6'4 they're not strong and soft at the same time yeah yeah you know they have to be this and this these two you know they want someone who's you know I want someone who's really really ambitious but also really family oriented I want someone right the these kinds of things that are hard to find both of those in equal measure in the same person someone who's extremely ambitious he probably going to spend a lot of time at work you know I want some you know someone so I'm 5'2 and it would be you know someone like me saying you know and and he has to be over 6 feet really you know just all all of these kinds of things I so in in my book marry him I I wrote a whole book about this because I was looking at how do we date today and what are the expectations that we have and you know the the publisher called it marry him the case for settling for Mr good enough it's not about settling at all it's actually about having higher standards not lower standards but having higher standards about the things that actually matter so I looked at all of the data and I talked to uh behavioral economists and sociologists and historians and I talked to um you know people therapists who specialize in divorce who specialize in couples therapy and it was really interesting to hear um to see like how expectations have changed over time and then also to see what it is that actually matters to have a happy fulfilling long lasting relationship and how when we're dating we're not even looking at those qualities and so for example the character qualities if you look at what are the most important things that would predict whether a relationship is going to last what qualities do you want in a partner flexibility is really important what does that mean so flexibility meaning you're not a really rigid person people who are really rigid has to be this way I need it this way um I expect this of you right you know on social media we might call that uh boundaries right now and boundaries are really important don't get me wrong healthy boundaries are very important but rigidity is when you say that well I'm just very boundaried but you're actually really rigid so we have to have flexibility we have to have room for the person to also be them and that you are a separate
person from the person that you're with and often times it's hard for people to see that because they're so focused on what I need without thinking about what does this relationship need and what does the other person need too emotional generosity is really important that you give someone the benefit of the doubt that you're not bringing your your Old Wounds into the relationship and projecting them onto your partner um so I would call emotional maturity or emotional stability so many times people Overlook that when they're dating so that looks like you know someone comes into therapy and they say I don't understand why you know I I I love him so much and I don't understand why he didn't call when he said he would or I don't understand why he cancelled and I will say what do you love exactly do is this how you want your life to go to always be on edge to always wonder to be with someone who's unreliable who doesn't do what they say they were going to do what what part of this do you love oh but he's so funny and attractive and you know um he's so smart you like qualities about him but you don't like the way he is with you in relationship and so people need to have higher standards about the character qualities things that are important to them like loyalty reliability emotional stability um again emotional generosity can they be supportive of you when things are going well for you on that point of expectations and how expectations are evolving I found some stats I think some of them are very much inspired by your first book um marry him one of them is that 80% of women want to date a man over 6 foot tall when only 15% of men are over six foot tall yes that's that's in the book um I found some other studies uh an e-harmony study found that 40% of sing people have deal breakers that are associated with physical appearance and 50% of singles expect their partner to be their best friend soulmate and to fulfill all of their emotional needs that was a study done by match.com um and then the other ones that I found quite interesting were you talk about in the book how this sort of generational shift in expectations and where that's come from but in like my my granddad's generation or even my dad's generation I would assume they wouldn't
have had the same set of impossible expectations I would assume is that is that what you found in your research I think everybody wants to feel that really deep connection with their partner and so I think that the way that Society has improved is that we are not just marrying for sort of practicality but we are also marrying because we genuinely enjoy being with this person and want to go through life with this person but I think what we're losing a little bit is do our values align like the Practical part matters so I think the pendulum swung in the other direction went from almost pretty much all practical MH to now it's all like is this person my soulmate and do they move me and I think you have to have both I'm really attracted to this person's Essence and what I mean by Essence is you're you know most people will say this is I I I I don't know where the study came from but I remember reading this study that most people will say that the person that they are that they chose to spend their lives with is not the most attractive person they ever dated and I think that a lot of people say well I wouldn't want my partner to think that but you're you're more attractive to your partner holistically that's why they chose you that's why you chose them that's why you're together so it's not just about is this the person who was the most you know the hottest person you've ever dated and so I think we really have to think about holistically who do we want to be with and that's what kind of trips us up because the Practical side matters do you have similar ideas about the kind of life you want to live do you have similar ideas about um how if you want to have kids or if you don't want to have kids and how many you might want to have where you want to live um what kinds of What kinds of things you want to do in your lives um what matters to you who you are in the world um political beliefs often people say well that doesn't matter as much um I think when you have very different views not necessarily about like what politic iCal party you're with but more about how you see the world if you see the world very very differently that can cause a lot of problems in the relationship later on not because you're fighting about the world but because those differences will
show up in the way you treat each other I I hear you're saying all of that and I have to say I agree and I think everyone would really agree because it makes perfect sense but in reality I was thinking about if I turn to some of my friends that are really struggling with dating right now and I said all of that to them um I don't think any of it would work because they are so hardwired to to be in search of this like perfect person you know when I when I speak to some of my friends who are single and they're say they're over 35 they've really like never been in a relationship before this the things that they say as reasons for why they're not giving this person a chance are so unbelievably Petty like I have one friend and she knows who she is she's a very good friend of mine she's been a good friend of mine for more than a decade shout out to your friend yeah but I was I was on her profile once and she told me that the reason she wasn't going to give this guy a chance on this dating app was because in the back of the picture that he his display picture he had boxes on top of his cupboard and she was like oh God he's he puts boxes on top of his cupboard like she so that's why she didn't give him a chance so here's here's the thing what happens is people look at dating profiles and going through the apps and I think you know men and women tend to do this a little bit differently men are like am I attracted to this person Swip which also doesn't necessarily work out for them like they're not really looking for who do I want to be with and women do the opposite they look at it at you know they look at all the pictures they'll read everything that the person wrote as if do I want to marry this person potentially or not as opposed to do I want to spend 45 minutes having coffee with this person that's really different and also on a first date it's the same mentality where a lot of people think oh you know like people will come in to therapy or even friends will say you know I went on this date I had a good time it was fun I just I don't know I didn't feel chemistry I didn't feel like butterflies I didn't I wasn't didn't feel that that what I feel like I should feel so I'm not going to go out with him again and I'll say well why don't you just go spend you know another
hour with this person and get to know this person and see if something develops no no no no no right and so but it's like you had a good time you did think they you know they said I did think he was attractive but I didn't feel chemistry so it's interesting because there's a study in marry him where it was a longitudinal study and it followed people from the time that they met their partner like that first date all the way through they checked in with them every five years for I think 20 years and what happened was they found that the people who were very happy together had kind of revisionist history about what it was like on their first date so people who were really happily married said oh yeah I knew immediately I felt immediate chemistry with this person I knew this person was the one but if you go back to what they reported at the time often they reported at the time yeah nice person not sure okay so so but they've changed the story they really truly believe that they felt something different but we have data saying no you didn't on the other hand if people did not last if people are divorced that kind of thing um they will say oh I was never attracted to the person or I knew there were red flags in the beginning but that's not what they reported at the time at the time they reported wow this person's amazing so it's really interesting that people use the first date as as like I'm supposed to feel this one thing or else forget it when people who were very very happy together totally in love totally attracted to each other often didn't feel those Sparks on the first one two three dates you know maybe they were even even friends for a while but people don't give each other the chance to get to know the other person or to let the other person get to know you and I think that because the apps give this illusion of um so many people are juggling multiple people at a time so someone will'll go on a date with someone and then they'll say yeah that was fine H not you know maybe it was like a seven so n and then they they're like I have another date tomorrow or they just they're leaving the date and they're walking to their car they're swiping on the apps already because they have the illusion there's so many people out
there but if you just keep juggling people you're never going to get to know anybody and to know if that person is someone that you want to be with so what would you say to a Serial data then you would say to go on the second date even if the person is a seven or is there CU I know so I know people that have gone go on hundreds of dates a year and I think statistically they must have met someone that they would have been happy with by now yeah maybe it depends if they're making good choices about who they go on dates with so some people will just go on dates to go on dates other people if they're being really you know if if they're saying hey this person seems like someone I would want to be with and that's who they choose to go on a first date with then yes but I would say the question you ask yourself at the end of a first date is did I have a good time the answer is yes I would go on a second date doesn't have to be I had a lifechanging transformative you know I was Cupid's arrow shot me no it just did I have a good time with this person yeah go on a second date see what happens the second time who has higher expectations typically men or women and who is most likely or most willing to adjust their expectations um I think it really depends on the person and I think that the expectations are higher in different areas I think for men um the expectations are very high around physical appearance and and I think for the younger generation especially because they're growing up on all of these thirst traps that are posted on social media and they're seeing all of these girls just posting you know all of these really provocative pictures that have been filtered that have been you know it took them 30 shots to get that one shot that they put up and so when they see people in real life and what they really are like on a day-to-day basis they have these very unrealistic expectations and I think that's different from in the past when you saw many more people in real life than you do now where you're seeing more people online most of the time and I think for women the expectations are you know I think it's confused with feminism so feminism is great I'm a feminist um but I think that feminism is not this person has to meet
all of these criteria that are not really human and I go through them in the book you know the kinds of things that people say and I have all these surveys in the book about the kinds of things people say they're looking for and they're not finding the right person and I talk about this study that Barry Schwarz did he wrote the Paradox of choice and he looked at the difference between maximizers and satisficers and this applies to dating as much as anything else but you know the way it doesn't apply the way that you can look at it the way he did in his study was he said look if you go into a store and you want to get some jam and they have 30 different varieties most people just leave because they can't choose they're just they get they get anxious they don't know what to pick it's not like more is better if you have two different choices it's easy you say oh I like this one and you're really happy with it the people who did choose from the 30 they're less happy because they they're trying to maximize and then when they taste it and they go home with it they think oh I wonder what that other one would have tasted like you know because there was so many choices the person who picked from one of the two is very happy with their choice so if you look at the kind of dating analogy it's like I I like to use in the book I talk about a sweater say you want a sweater and you know exactly what you want it needs to be this material so it's not itchy this color looks good on you this is the right size this is the right price this is the style you're looking for you go into a store and you find it the satisficer will buy it be really happy that they found it and really enjoy it for a very long time the maximizer will say oh I found this but while I'm at the mall I might as well just put this one you know back on the on the shelf and I will go look at a few other stores to see if I can find something that's maybe a little like the color is a little bit better or the the price is maybe there's something on sale or maybe there's something that's a slightly different material and they keep looking and then they find something that's maybe slightly better in their mind and they buy it they're less happy with it because then it took them all this anxiety and energy to find
it and then they find it and they're always looking over their shoulder well maybe there's another one maybe there's a better one maybe there's a different one and the next time they're walking and they pass a store window they think I should have gotten that one so maximizers think that they're putting in all the research to find the thing that's going to make them happiest but going through that process makes them unhappy not only by going through that process but when they get the thing that they decide on so with dating we want to be satisficers which means we have very high standard it's not like oh I'm satisfied that's enough it's like you're satisfied because your standards are very high but you're not always looking over your shoulder to wonder what you're missing out on you're not always in this state of fomo do you see a gender difference between satisficers and maximizers at all again it depends on the person it really does I mean I think that when you when when you look at the surveys in marry him women do tend to be maximizers more than men but I think that I think that men do have very high standards but I think that men are also like after they get over the oh I need to be with a supermodel and then they come back down to earth and they say oh I need to be with someone that I'm really attracted to which is a different thing they're much more holistic like who do they ask the right questions who do I enjoy being with and I think for women it's there's so many different things there you know in marryam I talk about the things that people said they wouldn't go on a second date with somebody over and it was like he ordered tap water instead of sparkling water he must be really cheap you know these assumptions that people make like when they came by and said which which kind of water do you want and maybe he's just accommodating maybe he just said tap water's fine um or you know he wore this he wore those kinds of uh shoes with that kind of belt he doesn't have any fashion sense there was one where somebody said oh he did this impression from Austin Powers this movie he did this impression and it was really embarrassing and I I I was so cringey it was like he was just nervous he was on a first date and he was was trying to make you laugh why
don't you go on a second date and if he does something cringey on the second date okay then you know but a lot of times on a first date people are just really nervous so they did one thing but the rest of the date was great go on another date with them do you think it's really that like in the case of the a like the Austin Powers impression or whatever it was is that really the truth is it was it really that or is there something else going on in their psychology where that they've got commitment issues or you know the cuz I I just think surely it it can't be that yeah yeah I I think you're right I think when you really get down to it you see that you know there are reasons that people will find something wrong with a partner if they are avoidant of intimacy so you do see that but also I I write about in maybe you should talk to someone one of the patients that I write about is this young woman uh who I call Charlotte in the book and Charlotte is somebody who is in her 20s she's attractive and professional successful and um you know like a lovely person but she keeps going after men who replicate her childhood and she's not alone in that most of us if we haven't really worked through whatever it was that that we didn't get growing up or that we got too much of or not enough of what happens is we end up seeking out the familiar we end up our unconscious has our subconscious has radar for people who are like the person that hurt us in childhood because it's our experience of Love even if it wasn't a positive experience it's the only experience that we have had of love and so the imprint that we have is oh that's love so what happened for Charlotte was she would meet somebody and he would seem very different from her parents her mother was very depressed her father was very kind of either very present for her or than abandoning her and um he also so drank too much and had alcohol issues so she would find somebody she would think oh this person's so different from either of my parents then she'd get to know him and realize oh wow he drinks a lot too didn't realize that um except her subconscious did like she somehow had radar for that person or this person yells a lot too or this person is really inconsistent with me they're either love
bombing me or they're disappearing and I never know where I stand with them that was her experience of her father so if once she really kind of processed what happened with her family she started going out with different kinds of people meaning she started being attracted to different kinds of people in that transition period She was like oh I'm going out with this person but I'm not he seems really good for me but I'm not really attracted to him that was because she was still attracted to sort of the father and the mother the different qualities the vicy mom and the and the unavailable mom and then the dad who was kind of inconsistent with his availability and also his temper and his drinking so it's interesting to see that she would date people just like that without realizing it at first that she was choosing them so I think that one thing that therapy can really do for people is to help you see why is it that you're having trouble meeting someone why is it that you're having trouble once you're in relationship with someone if you get that far maintaining that relationship or finding someone who's good for you if you sat down with someone who had repeatedly made the choice to date and have one night stands with people that were clearly going to hurt them or were clearly not going to call them back the next day but they had this pattern of continually going for people that were clearly either not interested in them or saw them as like a one night stand Transaction what would your assumption be about that individual's backstory you know I hate to make assumptions but I would say in general what I would probably find would be that this person um is terrified of intimacy this person doesn't feel that any body will love them they feel unlovable they feel like nobody would would want to be in a relationship with them so it's you can't fire me I quit right so it's I'm not even going to put myself in that position I know this is going to be a one night stand I don't have any expectations I'm empowered right this is the story they tell themselves is I'm so empowered that I don't have to feel I don't have to get attached look at me I I am above my feelings but the thing is they're really terrified of their feelings they're
terrified of being attached they're terrified of seeing whether somebody can love them because they're worried that they're going to get what's confirmed uh by somebody else which would be the confirmation would be oh look I tried I got attached this person and they didn't reciprocate it or we dated for a month and then they broke up with me so see that proves that I am unlovable and that doesn't prove anything it just proves that this person was not the right person for you where would you start with trying to help somebody that was in that situation I would go straight to the the question of lovability I would go straight to the question of you know what would it be like to feel your feelings and how terrifying is that for you to feel attached to someone how scary is that to feel like they are the Arbiter of your worth and how can we switch that so when you go on a date it's not will they love me but am I interested in them do I want to spend time with them so it's not about am I going to be chosen but I get to be the Chooser what is that like because that person has never been able to be the Chooser and yes sometimes you will choose someone who doesn't reciprocate that but you also get to choose someone sometimes you will choose some uh you someone will choose you but you don't reciprocate that so you just you know so it's not this person is not saying whoever you go out with they are not determining your worth that you know what your worth is no matter what happens and I think you really have to work on the self worth part and where the story came from because we all come into therapy with narratives about ourselves and there's stories that someone told us about ourselves either verbally they told us like you're not good enough you're not this enough you're not that enough or they told us with their actions like they they weren't nurturing to you they didn't love you in the way that you you saw other kids being loved and so you took in this story of I must not be lovable jumping back to something you said earlier because I was thinking about this the the dis the general disc amongst men and women these days you used the word feminism earlier there's been a lot of changes in society's expectations and um views of
the role of a man and a woman in a relationship but more broadly in the workplace in society and this has caused a lot of interesting dynamics that I think might be having an impact on um people's expectations and their amount of satisfaction in dates some of the St studies I was looking at ahead of your arrival today was one study that shows that 71% of people say it's very important for a man to be able to support family financially to be a good husband or partner but by comparison only 32% say it's very important for a woman to do the same thing and that's Pew research survey um but also another study that said this is on Sage journals that men showed less attraction towards women who outsmarted them and when you look at the changes in income and intellect in 1980 women earned about 60% of what men did but by 2020 that had risen to 83% and there's obviously still issues with uh gender pay gaps and and such but what we're seeing here is the kind of macro trend is that women are more educated and have more money the expectation that a man is going to be the provider in the household still persists and men don't want to date again speaking generally According to some studies that show attraction references women that outsmart them right so the the interesting thing is that when people say you know I want I want to have flexibility meaning a lot of women will say this I want to have they'll say I absolutely expect that I'm going to have a career but I also don't want to be the sole provider for the family um and if they're really honest a lot of women will say I would like my husband to earn more than me at the same time more women are getting college degrees more women are getting graduate degrees more women are getting ahead of men in those areas and so women will also say and I want someone who's as educated as I am but there aren't as many men just number-wise so if there are more women who are educated meaning college graduate school than men but those women want men who have those degrees they're not the there's low inventory of men who have that and so there's a there's sort of a problem with that um and so what I really want to encourage people to do is when they're dating and this is not about lowering
your standards it's about saying to women there are lots of kinds of intelligence so you yes you want to be with someone who is equally intelligent but that doesn't mean that they have the same degrees that you have who do you want to talk to who do you have interesting conversations with is this causing an issue for successful women that are that are over 30 I was reading an article I think it was on the Washington Post where um a lady was interviewing another lady who had written a book called I think it's called like the gender gap or something and they concluded that much of the reason why successful women above the age of 30 were struggling in dating is because of this issue that men don't want to be with a woman that is like better than them and it's somewhat emasculating to a man and so I I've had lots of private conversations with very successful women I know a lot of successful women that are very exceptional relationships but I've also got got a small cohort of women that tell me that they're struggling in dating because they're too successful and men don't like it and are emasculated is that true I think there's this narrative in our culture that women are women who are successful are not finding men because they're focused too much on their career and I think that's absolutely false I think that when you are out there in the work environment you are meeting men and that's where you're and you're meeting other people you're meeting other women who maybe are married their husbands have friends you're out there in the world and people are seeing you so I think and also you have meaning and purpose in your life and you're doing something you enjoy and I think that that's very attractive I think that there are you know I think that people are wanting someone who can not live their work which is different from being successful and because you want a partner who's also available to you but I don't think that it's because women are too focused on their careers that that's what's happening I think it's because of this Gap app that the women who are maybe achieving certain things in the world are not finding men who are achieving at the same level and so they're not there just aren't enough men
for those women the numbers just don't work out and so then there's this question of as a woman who is a very high achieving do you have to be with somebody who is high achieving in the same way and that's a very hard cultural shift for a lot of women to make and the other problem is that when high achieving women want to be with high achieving men a lot of those High achieving men are not great partners and that's the thing that so so they might be dating a lot of high achieving men and they maybe they are finding them but then they find that this person doesn't have time for me or this person isn't really nurturing or this person is um you know married to his job and I don't like that I think it's hard when you have two people who are extremely focused on their professional lives and neither one of them has time for the relationship so I'm not saying you know there are a lot of relationships where that works really well where both people are very focused on their careers but they also understand each other in a way that helps them and then there are the relationships where you have two very high achieving people and they both expect that the other person is going to be more involved in the relationship to help them support their own career and they can't because they're supporting the their career so you can't you can't do both yeah just with this stat in mind that 71% of people say it's very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner if we get to the point a point which is kind of the the trajectory we're on where women and men are earning the same women already have more sort of college degrees than men by about I think it's roughly about 10% at the moment roughly we're going to find ourselves where yeah expectations for what a man can offer are really really high but reality is really low and then you that it feels like that the amount of women that are not finding what they want is going to continue to increase and the amount of men that don't feel like they are good enough for a woman because they're not smart enough they don't have enough money they can't contribute in the same way is also going to increase but then
also with General working Dynamics we're seeing that people are getting married later and later they're having less and less kids so are you at all concerned about this trajectory yes very um because I think it leaves a lot of people who really want to partner and and could really enjoy having a partner who maybe is different from what this cultural norm is they don't go after that so A woman will say oh I'm not going to even go on a date with this guy because he's not successful enough um you know we're too different and a man on the other hand might say I'm not going to even go on a date with her because she's so focused on her career or you know or I'm not good enough for her so they they don't even get a chance to even see if they might be a good match and and sometimes it's it's a great match because you don't necessarily want two people who are exactly the same and I see this all the time with couples who come in for couples therapy where they thought that what was so good about their relationship when they first got together was we're so the same and then they find that wait a minute but there's no one here to be more of the nurturer or there's no one here to spend more time with the household or there's no one here to do more of kind of logistical things in the house because we're both doing exactly the same job I was say isn't that sort of central to the equality narrative that you should share the responsibilities right so equality doesn't mean that you have exactly the same responsibilities it means that you feel that there's not a power Dynamic so equality means one person doesn't have more power than the other person but that doesn't mean that you know I do laundry 2.5 days of the week or 3.5 days of the week and you do laundry 3.5 days of the week maybe someone only does their their responsibility is the laundry that doesn't mean that there's a power Dynamic it means the other person maybe they're always doing the dishes or whatever it is it doesn't have to be split up in this way so I think that when people think about having an egalitarian marriage we're talking about that there's not a power differential but you still get to choose like a woman might say and I'm being stereotypical
here it might be the man but often it's the woman who says you know what I want to do I want to switch to part-time with my work so that doesn't mean she has less power in the marriage because he makes more now because he's working full-time it means they've divided up things differently because that was their choice that was that was something that was chosen it wasn't like you can't work it was I would like to do less do you tend to see issues unique to relationships when a woman is earning more than a man yeah I do I still think this is something that um is is very Primal for us around um you know what it means I think that women women sometimes feel resentful that's why they want to be with someone it's funny because a woman can be making a lot of money and she won't even go out with someone who makes the same amount she has to go out with someone who makes more which is interesting because she won't necessarily say that I think it's hard to acknowledge the contradictions and I think for men the same thing that a man will say you know I want a woman who has her own life I want somebody who is doing something in the world that is important to her but I don't want her to make more money than me it's hard to say that out loud this comes out in couple therapy where people start talking about wow there is this difference and maybe it didn't even start out that way maybe it started out where he was making more and then things shifted and then she started making more and it changed something in their Dynamic and so they start fighting a lot but they're not fighting about that they're fighting about all different kinds of things and so it comes out in different behaviors and they come to coup's therapy saying we're having we're fighting all the time or we're not having sex or here's what's happening and it turns out it was really about this issue of who has power now but they didn't realize it was about that or they weren't willing to kind of look at that do you think it's getting increasingly harder to know what the role of a man and a woman are cuz I think you know I've had so many conversations on and off this podcast with people who are have sons or daughters it's often the ones that have sons I'm thinking about a lady that I
know and she says she's so confused by what to tell her son a man is these days and you know when I think about suicidality and how how much of a a big killer it is especially in the UK I know it's sort of Western Trend but I think it's the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 is themselves I'm thinking you know there's often a narrative that that's because masculinity is changing they're not being masculine enough and then there's another narrative that says no it's because they're not being feminine enough what's typically associated with sort of feminine traits yeah well it's true that more men die by Suicide than women do and some people say well that's because the method that men choose is we lethal but I also think think that that's only part of the story because when men do come into therapy they they truly truly feel that conflicted about exactly what you said that I don't know how to be a man in today's world it used to be much more clear now I'm not saying that was a good thing that it used to be much more clear because there were all kinds of power dynamics that that weren't so healthy for men and women but I think now what men are saying is um you know I maybe don't want to be the person solely responsible for you know like I would like my partner to also bring in some income but you know that creates all kinds of problems or I want to be able to again open up to and and talk to my partner in this way but I'm afraid that it makes her feel unsafe so so what do we do what what does it mean and and I'm raised so I could say I'm raising a boy who is now 18 years old and even things like you know does he still pay he always wants to pay on his a date and then some people don't like that and he thinks well I'm just being I'm just being sort of shivil RIS or you know but but there are all these ways in which you don't know sort of like what is expected of you so it's like if he pays then some people take offense if he doesn't pay then some people take offense and he just doesn't know what to do you know like how much of these things that I feel are being sort of the role of a man in a nice way like protecting taking care of um will be offensive to some people because they see it as kind of a power Dynamic so what is the role of of a man it's really
unclear I mean that's the thing and I think that that it really needs to be discussed and that's where I think there's hope is that when people can actually say hey I'd really like to pay on this date and you know if she says well I don't feel comfortable with that I think a question is okay that's fine you we can split it but I want to let's talk about why and to be able to talk about you know what are what does this mean that I pay what does that mean to you um you know I think a lot of people would say oh well it means like you know that that you expect something back from me you expect you know that that we're going to have sex or you expect you know whatever these old ideas are yeah yeah um and and I think that we need to be having these conversations that's my point is that it's not so important that we that we know what it means it's more important that we know what it means to the person that we are interested in what does it mean to them it's going to mean something different to everybody so if we can't talk to this person that we're interested in about what it means then we're just going to both people are going to be mired in confusion yeah I'm a bit of a old school romantic as they say my my partner she has a great job she has her own money but I just absolutely feel the need to open up every door for her pay for every bill for her I would absolutely not have it any other way maybe that's cuz I'm insecure or something I don't know but I just I watch my dad do it for my mom and it's like hard wide into my DNA that my role is to protect take care of do everything I can to support and if she I yeah God I I'd really struggle with her paying for me and she's got her own money she's she's got her own business her own job but have you talked about it or it just worked out that way she never said she never said can I pay this once or can I yeah yeah yeah yeah she pays she pays you know she's she it's like a bit of a competition she'll like sneak off to the bath anday and stuff but generally I I think it's I've always wanted to do that on dates and I I think you know if you sat people down and ask them the question you go on a first date with a guy and he asks to split the bill or he ask or you know he doesn't immediately pay would that be an ick for you would
that turn you off them that would be a huge ick for me yes so even for you it would be yes yes if you went on a first date with a guy and he didn't pay yes would you absolutely why it's hard to articulate because and this is what people you know will say all women will say of all ages um I think for my age we grew up with that was the expectation I think for younger Generations maybe it's not the expectation but I think a lot of people still like it or want it um there's something there's something about it that that says I really uh I really valued our time together I care I'm interested it's a way of signaling interest but I think even if the person isn't interested and you're going to see each other again it's just a nice gesture mhm but I don't have any any rational way of explaining why and if and if I were to get rational about it I would talk myself out of it yes I think that's a very honest answer and then the counter sort of rebuttal to that means okay so if men are expected to pay then we're going to need more money yes yes and it gets very expensive to date yeah it does I mean you know people will say oh you can go on a hike it doesn't doesn't cost anything you can do a picnic you can um you know watch a movie there are all kinds of things you can do but the reality is you it's kind of like I remember that that old Chris Rock joke in the first three months of a relationship you're not you you're the ambassador of you so you know you want to impress somebody you're you're trying to show interest in somebody um but I do think there's that that really Primal need for safety that is gender based that we don't like to talk about or acknowledge but that I think women really I think if if somebody doesn't pay on a first date if a guy doesn't pay on a first date I think a lot of women don't feel safe that's what it comes down to it's a it's a tricky world and it's getting increasingly trickier it feels you know it it feels like an insult almost that the person doesn't pay not many people some people would but no one would really publicly say that though because it's like not socially acceptable to say you expect but in private conversation of course everyone knows that if they went on a date with with a man so in a
heterosexual relationship and the man either asked to split the bill or to or suggested that you might pay this person's not going to get a second date of course not no no unless it was the woman who said um oh no let me split that with you but if it was his decision and he said oh let's let's split this s put it in the middle no no I I I in therapies the young woman came to me and she said she went out with this guy and they went to a cafe and they got uh coffees and he uh asked her to split it coffee and she said and she was having so much fun on the date until the bill came and she was shocked and she thought okay well she made it it was very personal to her first she thought I must he must really really have had a horrible time with me to have wanted to not pay for my $5 coffee and then he asked her out again and she said to me I don't understand this at all so he was interested in me and he didn't pay for my coffee and she did not go out with him again so these are the kinds of signals that it it very much is emblematic of something who pays on that first date do you agree with that decision that she made 100% And I mean I didn't say that as her therapist it's really about understanding it for her but but I I do agree with that decision and I and I think it's because there's something there's something like a half note off about a person who doesn't even see that it's a $5 coffee and you're interested in this person and she wasn't making any moves to pay she was just sitting there for a very long time and the the she said the way she told the story was that the person came around and couple times and said are you you ready and the guy said oh no we're not ready yet and then at a certain point he said to her oh do you want to put your credit card down right to her and so she just said I could never go out with somebody like that even though they had a really good time before that so if we Zoom back out then MH so is are you saying that that is a Telltale sign of a broader character issue that this individual has because earlier you said that we really should be focusing on like character traits is that a red flag of some kind of other character trait I think that when things are hard in the beginning that's not a good sign so I think that
when there's like a big disconnect in the beginning that you should pay attention to that so a big disconnect is not he you know the example I gave earlier of you know he said yes to the top water that's different from he didn't pay for my coffee that's that's different the top water might be oh I don't know is is is he cheap I don't know let's see let me get to know him better this is this is about generosity they're different things and so you know I I feel like relationships I always say to people when they when they Overlook things in the beginning I think there are two camps on this there's the people who think everything is a red flag that's not like the tap water not a red flag but there are people who um don't pay enough attention to the red flags in the beginning so they say yes this person they kind of disappeared for a couple days and I didn't like that and you know but but or they they were they're late all the time or you know whatever it is that doesn't necessarily mean it's a deal breaker but it's kind of a a flag that you want to discuss early on so what what happens is if you don't discuss it is a person will say you know after they're now they're in a relationship and they've been dating for several months and and and they're moving along and the person says I can't stand it when you're late every time and he says why is this a pro I've always been late why is this a problem now right so if you bring it up early before the cement so you know I always say relationships are like cement that there's room for things to move in the beginning before things kind of really get hard and difficult to change but once the cetri it's much harder to change those habits or those interactions or the dance that you're doing with the other person so if you don't like something in the beginning you might want to bring it up to see how much wiggle room is there here can this person be more aware of being on time because I don't like sitting there for half an hour every time we make plans we're getting married a lot less and we're getting married um later later yes so there was a stat that I I found that said for the first time ever people over the age of 30 have been haven't been married in higher numbers than ever before so yeah marriage is getting later
and later in people's lives but I also found this really interesting graph which I printed out which shows that there seems to be an optimal time to get married yes I was just going to mention that there's a window so I'll put it up on the screen for anyone that's looking and I'll put it in the description below but it essentially shows that if you get married after 30 MH you're more likely to get divorced than if you got married between 25 and 30 right so there's a sweet spot so if you get married too young you're more likely to get divorced meaning if you get married sort of under 20 I think it's 22 or 23 um but if you get married over I think it's 28 you have more likelihood of getting divorced so the study which I have in front of me by The Institute for family studies says there is an Optimum age to get married if you want to statistically avoid a chance of divorce and it seems to be around ages 25 to 30ish someone who marries at 25 is over 50% less likely to get divorced than someone who Weds at age 20 before the age of 32 or so each additional year of agent marriage reduces the odds of Divorce by 11% however after 32 years old um every year increases your chance of Divorce by 5% and I couldn't figure out why oh I think there are several reasons for this so first of all I think it's sort of obvious about marrying to Young that you you don't necessarily have the skills you aren't really um established in your own life and uh you don't necessarily have the maturity to do what you need to do to be in that kind of relationship for the long term you also don't really know who you are yet and so you might think that you want a certain kind of life and you find out your partner wants something very different but once you get into your mid 20s and even sort of later 20s it's an optimal time because you have a better sense of who you are um you know more of what you want and you can grow together as a couple and I think that's really important you're going to have more shared experiences you're going to know more of each other's families your parents are probably still alive on each side um you're going to get to know each other's siblings if you have siblings you're going to be more integrated into each other's lives as you get older first of all you're more sort of set in your ways
you're we talked about rigidity earlier you're more rigid um you have different expectations I think when you're younger you're more flexible in terms of uh just being more openminded we get less open-minded generally as we get older um around relationship around the things that we expect and we also have a history as we get older so we have more negative experiences of maybe heartbreak being broken up with breaking up with people um relationships that didn't work out that then inform the way we behave in our relationships and I like to say it's almost like we're we're punishing our current partner for a crime they didn't commit so if you were in a relationship before where maybe you were cheated on or someone didn't treat you well then you are less trusting of the partner that you're with or you're more on guard or more closed off because you're worried you're not going to get treated well so it's almost like the the more dating experiences that you have some people would think counterintuitively they would think um you know if I have more dating experience then I'm going to be a better partner later on but often because those were not great dating experiences sure you might have learn something in them but if you have too many of them it's good to maybe have a relationship or two before you get married but to have five um it's harder right because you have all this baggage that you're bringing in and the other person who's also your age has all this baggage that they're bringing in and there might also be something it's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to maybe it's you that maybe you are doing something in relationship and that is why it's not that you haven't been able to meet someone it's that you've been pairing up with people in a way that is not really healthy so and you haven't spent the the time to really figure it out so you're just going to keep repeating and repeating those not great relationships even if you marry the person it might not last because something has not been working in those last five relationships and you haven't figured that out yet in your Ted Talk you talk about part of getting to know yourself is getting to unknow yourself why do we have to get to unknow
ourselves well I think that so many people think I'm going to come into therapy and I'm going to learn so much about myself and you do but part of learning about yourself is learning what the faulty narratives are that you've been carrying around whether it's I'm unlovable or I can't trust anyone or I'm no good at this or this thing is wrong with me these again are stories that you picked up about yourself from a long time ago and it might not even have been your parents it might have been at school maybe you were bullied in school or maybe you were in an envir environment that maybe you had ADHD and you were told you weren't smart because people didn't realize that you learned differently and you actually are quite intelligent so you have these stories so it's to unknow people will come in and say well I'm not that I'm not really smart well you have to unknow that because that might not be true let's find out so it's really you know it's interesting because I was a writer long before I was a therapist and I still em a writer but I Ed so much of of writing and narrative in the therapy to kind of help people edit their stories let's look at you know is the protagonist going in circles or is the protagonist moving forward who are the supporting characters and and do the major characters need to be more minor characters in your life and do some of the minor characters need to be more major characters and and what is going to be the next chapter how do we look at where this story is going so a lot of this is unknowing stuff about the character which is you you know if you come up with a character as a writer and you say well this person's not very smart they're kind of weird and they're unlovable well you're going to write the story a certain way thinking the character has those traits but if you say actually this person's quite smart and they're quite lovable and they're quite attractive well you're going to write a different next chapter for them I've always on that point about sort of narratives we've written I've always considered myself to be very productive maybe the more honest answer is a bit of a workaholic to some degree I think that my work is fundamentally attached and associated with my own
self-esteem so I think when I'm working really really hard and I feel really productive I think at some deep level I think I'm worth more or I'm like I fit in and kind of it goes back to when I was younger and I felt like I didn't fit in it feels like I'm more valuable now the problem you have as an adult when you're trying to achieve a different set of goals like have a a healthy relationship is this kind of gets in your way and I I think I found that in myself that I still have this urge to be really successful and work really hard because at some level it's making it's doing something for my image of myself but as I get older I kind of need to figure out a way to drop that down a little bit or else I'm going to miss out on something that's going to make me happy which is relationships and a lot of people that I speak to a lot of people that listen to this podcast are in a similar situation where they just can't get off the train in terms of their work yeah yeah so we were talking about defense mechanisms and so one of the defense mechanisms is where you take something that comes from an unhealthy place and you put it into something that looks on the surface healthier so I don't feel worthy or as worthy as I would like to so I'm going to succeed in this incredible way so on the surface it looks great it looks like you're doing something really healthy but actually you're not really working on that self-worth piece another example might be um somebody who has a lot of anger and they take up um boxing right um or they become a surgeon because they cut into people you see this a lot um where somebody takes their anger so they put it into something that looks healthy but they're not really dealing with the underlying issue which is the anger you see that a lot that people that have anger issues sometimes take up roles like surgeons sure yeah really yeah anything where you where you can do again boxing it could be anything where you where you're putting it into a socially acceptable container as opposed to dealing with the issue so there's nothing wrong with being a great surgeon there's nothing wrong with being somebody who succeeds in work that they love but then what happens is when you're not doing the thing that gets the
societal approval then where does you know what do you do with in one case your anger and the other case your selfworth and so I'm glad that you're looking at at the self-worth piece because that's going to be important because you're not always going to get it from your work how do you improve your selfworth what would you do with a patient like me I would you know I I think it's we we do this on the podcast where we do something very practical where we have people make a list of the things that other people would say so there's two columns there's one what would other people say are your best qualities that have nothing to do with your work okay what do they appreciate most about you and then what do you appreciate most about yourself that has nothing to do with work that you think other people don't see and when you when you start to look at those they're very quiet at first you know people don't have a long list they're of like I don't really know and and I'm looking for really tiny things like this person really appreciated that when they were sick I called them this person really appreciates that I'm funny that I make them laugh I appreciate that about myself you might say right you might say like I really appreciate about myself or I appreciate that I can be calm under really stressful circumstances um I appreciate that I um I notice my partner and I do nice things for my partner I appreci not my partner appreciates that that'll be on one column but the other column is I appreciate that about myself so looking at how can I pay more attention to some of these areas that I I don't pay enough attention to because I can only see the real shiny thing out there which is how many people you know how many millions of people follow me or how many people um you know download the podcast those kinds of things and is there a reason why Okay the reason why you separate work from that is because you're trying to find your self-esteem in other places outside of the work right so it's both and it's not to say don't get don't don't feel worthy because of what you do with your work that's a big part of what we do with our lives think of the number of hours that we spend in work we're spending most of our days doing work so of course we want to get self-worth from
that but we also want to know that we have other areas in which we are worthy and that we don't pay enough attention we don't give ourselves enough credit it's kind of like in a relationship there's a statistic about the bank of Goodwill so in a healthy relationship there are we think of deposits of how many positive interactions do you have with your partner to how many negative interactions do you have and so you want to have 20 positive interactions for every one negative interaction in a relationship and when things are not good you want to have you you know you you hope you can do five positive ones to one negative one but that's that's a lot so it's it's really noticing these are these are small little deposits that you make like I held I I took my partner's hand when we were walking down the street you know those are like small positive interactions you're not counting them it's just a way of being but what happens is when your self-worth is all in one bucket you don't notice you're not making enough deposits to yourself of into the self-worth bank so it's it really is about noticing what are the deposits that I'm making so I'm making a lot of deposits in the in the work bucket but I'm not making a lot of deposits in noticing that was really I really liked that I was really funny in at that dinner party that was really fun um I was really kind to that stranger on the street that was really nice of me do you think that some people are scared to go to therapy because they think if they are to heal from something whatever that means it will rob them of something that they value I if I go to therapy and I work through my childhood trauma then maybe I won't be as ambitious or successful or driven Etc I think the fear is I will have to change I will have to change and I will have to do something different and I might not like that and that's why people are like if I go to therapy and I take off my mask and this person sees the truth of who I am and I see the truth of who I am I might need to do something difficult and I might need to get rid of one of my defense mechanisms like I'm avoidant maybe right or I'm or I might not be able to um you know to do things that maybe I get away with that are not very healthy
because they're easier in your book you you say something your new book maybe you should talk to someone you say something that really surprised me which is that sometimes when someone changes those around them will sabotage them and basically get in the way of that change because it changes the dynamic that that relationship has with a person and I mean we see this generally when someone becomes successful for example their friends from their Hometown might be a little bit resistant because they want to keep the Dynamics the way that they are but the examples that you talk about in the book about like you know someone gets over their alcohol addiction and then a friend might sabotage them by I know giving them alcohol or taking them to a bar yeah were really really striking yeah that happened with Charlotte in the book when she realized that her drinking was a problem she was the young woman who's in her 20s and was dating and she realized that she drinks too much and it's really affecting her life and her functioning and so she decided that she was going to do something about that and then when her she was having a birthday party and her friend said oh let's do it at this bar and she said no I'd rather do it at this other place because I don't want to be in that environment and her friends are like you're no fun anymore and you don't come out with us anymore but the but the real issue is that she was holding up a mirror without realizing it to her friends because they were saying oh maybe we aren't drinking in a healthy way and they didn't want to look at that so if they could get her to go back to the old way we see this in couples a lot when one person decides they're going to get healthy in a certain way like I'm going to start exercising and the person starts exercising and the other person doesn't exercise at all and they're really unhealthy and that person says why do you get up early and go to the gym you're no fun anymore you know you're obsessed with exercise when they're not they're just going to the gym in a normal way and really they're feeling threatened they're like you know this is changing the dynamic between us cuz we used to be both unfit and now my partner is looking really healthy and hot and now it's really clear that I'm not really healthy and I don't look as
good as I could look and maybe I'm going to have to do this and they don't really want to they're resistant to doing that and the partner's not asking them to do to go to the gym they're saying I'm going to the gym you do what you want but there's this implicit pressure of I have to look at myself that's why people again don't come to therapy is because I'm going to have to look at myself and maybe make some changes that are healthier and I'm not sure I'm ready to do that yet and I write in the book about the stages of change because I think it's so important that people understand that New Year's resolutions for example don't often work because people think I just decide this thing I have this goal I'm going to do it and I either succeed or I fail and that's just not true there are these stages that people go through and it starts with precontemplation where you don't even know you're thinking of making a change and that's usually like if your partner starts exercising you didn't realize that maybe in the back of your mind that that was something you had been thinking about but weren't ready to deal with contemplation is you know you're thinking about making a change but you're not ready to do it yet that's usually when people come to therapy they're thinking about it but they don't really they're not really ready preparation is when you you start to get ready you're preparing you're you're maybe getting a gym membership or you're um taking an anger management class or whatever you're doing and then action is when you put the change and it might also be like you're preparing to break up with someone who's not good for you so you're getting thinking about how am I going to do this what are the logistics of this and then when you action is you actually do the thing you break up you go to the gym you change jobs you apply for a job that you always wanted you go back to grad school you do the thing you wanted to do but then the next stage is the most important stage which is maintenance and maintenance is it's not like you're on this upward trajectory and and if you if you you go off the trajectory then you failed it's not like that maintenance is how does this become more habitual in my life so let's use the breakup example um you broke up with this person you're having
a really bad day you're feeling really lonely you called them at midnight or you texted them at midnight because oh I don't know you know like and so now you say oh I better get back in a relation I guess I'm back in a relationship with them no no no no no you you slipped off it's okay then you say you know what I was feeling really lonely I didn't know how to cope with it I'm going to go to therapy I'm going to have an extra session I'm going to call my friend I'm going to watch a TV show that that that I like I'm going to read a book that I like it will feel different in the morning next time that's what I'm going to do and so you you have to get used to you know we talked about the familiar earlier about going toward familiar Partners making a change is really hard because we're changing something that was familiar to us it's like when I was in therapy um my therapist said you know you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out but on the right and the left it's open no no bars so that's us where we think you know I would like to make a change but I'm really afraid of going outs I'm more comfortable being in jail in this miserable situation than knowing that I have freedom but I have to change I'm going to have to take responsibility for my life if I walk around those bars and so I think with change it's really about how do I give myself self-compassion when I have trouble making the change and help myself get back on track and what kind of support do I need people think if I beat myself up if I self flatulate if I tell myself I'm awful and I'm a failure I'm going to get back on track because that's going to help me no it's not going to help you in the short term it might help you a little bit but what's really going to help you is to have self-compassion because that actually gives you more accountability you're more able to say to yourself okay let me think about what I can do differently it's kind of like if your kid comes home from school and says I did really badly I failed this test are you going to scream at them is that going to help them do better on the next test or are you going to say let's sit down and figure this out what do you think happened here and your kid might say I didn't really understand it and I
didn't get help or your kid might really be honest and say I didn't study enough so we can say okay well what can you do next time let's kind of think about can you make a schedule can you do you need to study with a study partner what do you need to do that's what helps people make long-term change is that the wise compassion that you spoke about versus the sort of idiot compassion which talk about as well idiot compassion is what we tend to do with our friends so your friend says listen to what my partner my cooworker my you know my sibling my parents did or said and we say yeah they're wrong you're right how dare they because we're just validating their perspective and like we were talking about in my TED Talk there are many different versions of a story all of which are true so you you're only getting one Nar narrow perspective when you're hearing one one person's perspective that's why couples therapy is so great because I can hear the same incident told by two different people who were there both of whom are telling the absolute truth of their experience but they're leaving out the other person's experience and that's where things get dangerous so in idiot compassion we don't consider what the other person's perspective might be when our friend is telling us something we just back up our friends but they're not learning anything from that experience it's and and when you hear them over and over you kind of get a sense that maybe they're doing something like an example would be um your friend keeps getting broken up with and we can say yes these men are jerks they're terrible you deserve better or we can say you know I think that sometimes you're a little bit too possessive early on in the relationship and I think they start to feel overwhelmed and then they break up with you but if you could just hold your anxiety a little bit more at the beginning of the relationship ship and not be so overwhelming to them that you might develop something different the next time that would be wise compassion that's what they're going to hear in therapy so in therapy we hold up a mirror to them and help them to see something about their role in the situation that maybe they haven't been willing or able to see and so we think we're being a good friend by offering
idiot compassion but we're not actually helping our friends and that's where therapy I think can be really helpful when you s with a man and a woman in a therapy session do you typically mind that the woman expresses more emotion tears than the man sometimes yes often I also think that emotions can be used as manipulation so an example is uh a pattern in a relationship might be that he brings up something that he wants to talk about she cries because of what he said and he said it nicely but it's something they need to deal with and she cries and then he gets gets terrified by her crying he thinks oh my gosh I've hurt her and so then he shuts down and so really her crying is a manipulation it's a I don't want to hear anything that I'm quote doing wrong and so I'm going to shut that down by crying and being the victim and being hurt being a victim is actually a power position because you are making it impossible for anyone to deal with whatever is going on between the two of you because now you're the victim and now they look a horrible person if they're making you cry so I will call that out in therapy and I will say you know what he's going to talk and we're going to do something different where he's going to be able to say what he wants to say she might cry but if she cries I want you to please go on she's going to be fine I'm going to be here with her and you don't have to manage her feelings you're going to tell her about your feelings I will be here to help manage her feelings interesting and you see that if you're not in therapy you'll see that pattern where it's just you know someone will play the victim in the relationship and it could go either way it could be anyone in the relationship but when someone plays the victim the other person actually becomes the victim they become so helpless in the relationship the true victim is the person who has to interact with the person who plays the victim dreams something I was quite surprised to find in your book but pleasantly surprised yes do our dreams have meaning or are they just random I think both but I I think the dreams are really helpful and in the book I do give examples of Dreams where dreams are often uh kind of a story that we tell ourselves that we aren't giving
ourselves permission to think about when we're awake so an example might be somebody who has been who is worried that they have been doing something financially that is not legal um they have a dream that they were speeding on the highway and they got caught well what is that dream really about it's this I don't really want to think about this thing that I'm doing that's not quite above board and I know I shouldn't be doing it but I'm not going to think about that um you know the dream that that I have in the book where so I come into therapy because of a breakup and um and I have a dream that I ran into my ex and uh and it's this very elaborate dream but the the point is that in my first therapy session I had said to my therapist when I was talking about the breakup I said well half my life is over and he really glommed on to that statement that that was really why I was in therapy what was this about for me it wasn't so much about the breakup the breakup got me into therapy but this whole question of what am I doing with my life and how am I living my life and this question of mortality was really what was on my mind and so in the dream I think I see that he has a new girlfriend and I see that she's older than me and I feel very self-satisfied by that in this Petty Way and then I look at myself in the mirror in the dream and I'm like this 80-year-old wrinkled person and I realiz oh this is really about this fear that I have about getting older and that half my life is over and so dreams really do inform our biggest fears and our biggest preoccupations that feel too scary to think about in our Waking Life and if we pay attention to our dreams and what I mean by that is when you wake up and you remember your dream if you write it down immediately but you write it in the present not we were here and this happened but I'm here and I see so and so and so and so says to me if you write it in the present it will bring back more of the dream for you and it will help you understand what connection it has to something that you really do need to be dealing with in your life that you're probably not dealing with dreams can be a precursor to self-confession yes that's what I say self-confession they can tell you things about yourself before you're willing to
admit the them about yourself into yourself yes and and and it's so liberating I think that there's something about the safety of a dream sometimes your dreams are really scary but you wake up and you say okay now I can deal with it now that I've acknowledged it to myself I can deal with it in the dream I just had to go with the flow of the dream but now I can actually make choices about what I want to do in my Waking Life at the beginning of each therapy session um you'll often ask your patients to describe their Liv 24 hours why is that useful to know what someone's been doing for the last 24 hours I think most of us don't realize how we spend our time we have no idea if you said to somebody you spend three hours a day scrolling on Instagram they would say no I don't we don't realize and I think that at the end of the day most of us want to live our lives with intention and what I mean by that is I think that knowing that life has 100% more mortality rate that all of us has a limited time here we're living on borrow time that's not to freak people out it's to make people say how are you actually spending this borrowed time that you have here because one day you might look back and wonder why and I always say that regret can lead us in one of two directions it can be a way of self- flatulating and living in the past or it can be an engine for change and I really think regret is the most power ful engine for change I regret that I lived my life this way so if we don't realize how we are living Our Lives we don't have the engine for change in that chapter 24 you say the opposite of depression isn't happiness but Vitality yeah that's Andrew Solomon that I'm quoting there um and I thought that that really struck me when he said that in his own book and his own Ted talk because I think that people think about well I'm either happy or I'm sad and and I think what we're there's no you can't be happy all the time there's no such thing you would never know any other emotion if that's all you were feeling so I think that that Vitality is what people are looking for in life what is Vitality it's a sense of aliveness okay and this is why people have affairs by the way often when you ask people why did you cheat when you love your partner I didn't feel Vitality
in my life I felt the sense of aliveness and awakeness when I was with this other person and it was had not much to do with the other person and it really didn't have much to do with your partner it had to do with you didn't feel Vitality in your own life and instead of looking at yourself and saying what can I do to create Vitality in my life I blamed it on my marriage I blamed it on my partner I said I was going to find it with this other person and what they find is yeah that works for a little while but not very long does menopause play a role in this in terms of I heard a a stat from um someone that was on the podcast previously where they said postmenopausal women but also women going through menopause will often divorce their partner because they um have a lot of sort of psychological doubts about themselves and they maybe they expectations I think someone said to me that their expectations go up so they end up divorcing their partner because they're clear on what they want now but I was just wondering what role menopause will play in someone's marriage and their expectations their view of themselves chance of maybe getting a divorce and if you see anything in therapy associated with this I think what menopause does is it goes back to this idea of I don't have forever here and if they weren't happy with the marriage that they were in then I think people really wake up and they really say what do I want in my life it's a it's a very there's a lot of psychological changes that come with it's not just the hormonal changes but it's what does that represent that I am done with that chap of my life and I'm now I'm I'm you know halfway through again half my life is over and what do I want to do to more intentionally because often women have been serving others so that's what they've been doing they've been taking care of other people's needs whether it's their Partners or their children or their parents um you know they tend to be the caretakers and now they're saying wait a minute I only have this much time left and I really want to find that Vitality in my life you went to therapy because of heartbreak yes I've been through heartbreak who has not it's one of the it's one of the worst feelings in the world and it's it's really hard to give someone advice when
they're going through heartbreak I had a friend reach out to me recently and said listen I'm going through a heartbreak and I just don't know what who else to turn to it's this big Dark Cloud that hangs over everything I do think and say that just won't go away what have you come to learn about heartbreak from your own experience but also from your your patience how do we navigate through that dark cloud I think what people don't understand about heartbreak is the grief and and so this is why I talk about it so much and maybe you should talk to someone because it's not just that you lost the present with that person it's that you lost the future that you had created in your mind so you're losing the dailiness there's something really profound about the person you tell all the minutia of your day the person you you know you know so much about each other and you know each other's habits and works this again being understood being truly known that's such a delicious feeling being truly known and so this person knows like what you what kind of pizza you like or or you know this quirky habit you have or what TV shows you watch or that that thing that you do with your eyes when you're excited they know all those little seemingly trivial details that are so important about being known and they know your history and they know about your family and they know who your friends are and they you've had shared experience es with this person so you have all that history together even by the way if it was only 6 months you have a lot together or a year and so in that time you started to imagine oh and then this is going to happen next year and then in five years this will happen or we're going to grow old together whatever you imagine will happen and you've become attached to their friends and they attach to your friends and then you lose the dailiness of being known you lose the bigger Circle that you had and you lose the companion ship you lose the physical connection you lose all of that but you also lose this idea of what was to come and so every day you're living in this future that is radically different from that day as it would have been if you were in that relationship so it's very hard people think well how it's been this long how come you're not over this
person it's kind of like the same thing when um you know someone has a breakup instead of a divorce people think it's not that big of a deal why why is it less of a big deal it's still loss and grief or um you know it's like when if if someone loses a child everyone surrounds them there all these rituals for how do we help people through that kind of loss someone has a miscarriage people are like well you could still get pregnant again at least you got pregnant you know or the the things there's a chapter in the book called what not to say to a dying person because one of the patients that I work with in the book is um is somebody who's a young person or 30s who is is newly married and then gets a cancer diagnosis and people say the most well-meaning but ridiculous things to her and so I think the same thing happens in heartbreak where people try to minimize it they try to cheer you up they they won't sit with you in your loss and that's what you really need is someone to sit with you in your loss and to acknowledge how profound the loss is and people don't do that they don't they either don't see how profound it is or they do but they they feel like well we don't want the person to wallow in it or if I bring it up you know they're going to be worse no what they need to be seen and actually that's going to make them better and it's going to make them heal faster what impact did it have on you the way people reacted or the Heartbreak the Heartbreak I think for me it was a big wakeup call again around this idea of half my life is over and what do I want in my life and why was I willing to overlook certain things in my relationship that were clearly there but that I didn't want to see and how did you go about recovering is that the right word moving forward how did you go about moving forward that's that's the whole Narrative of the book um I went to therapy and it's really about what I learned about myself in therapy that that helped me heal and helped me move forward I was thinking about the uh the advice that I could give to my friend and and how I could have been a better support act cuz my natural disposition is to try and fix and from what you've said that's not necessarily the best approach to take it you know because my my natural um inclination is to go tell
them the future will be better share my experience of my heartbreak and those are all good because as a therapist I want to hold hope when somebody's really really dealing with a difficult situation whether it's a breakup or something else I want to hold hope that they can't access they can't access any hope at that point so I'm going to hold the hope for them but I'm not going to try to cheer them up I'm just going to be the container for that hope so that they know that someone else is holding that hope so you did two things really well one was that you shared your experience so that this person knows this happens this person isn't alone in this that because I think when you go through a heartbreak intellectually you know other people have gone through it but you feel like yours is so much worse than anybody else's and so to know that that you went through it too and here's what helped you and it also took time and it sucked and all of those things and then I know that it will get better even if you can't see it right now to let them know that peace I know it will get better for you even if you can't see it right now and the third but so those are the two things that that went well the third thing though is to be able to sit in the grief with them to say tell me about how things are different for you tell me what you miss tell me and people think oh that's just going to stir up all the stuff they're just going to ruminate this isn't helpful you need to give them a place where they can feel understood and you can say one strategy that might be helpful is you can give yourself 30 minutes a day to go through all the things you miss everything that sucks how horrible it is you get that 30 minutes so that the rest of the day they're not ruminating because every time they catch themselves thinking about it they say wait a minute at 6:00 I get to do this non-stop for 30 minutes and so if you can hold it you're you rewire your nervous system neurologically this actually happens where that pathway gets interrupted if we can put a stop sign up between the feeling and the behavior which is the rumination I feel sad oh now I'm going to ruminate on this we put a stop sign up and say I get to go there later then later when we start having more of these feelings we have a stop sign we're used
to now now we're wired that way so we put more time between the thought and the rumination as you know whoop are a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company and last month I had the chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes she's the VP of performance at and I learned so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and things like sleep studies show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you acrew that your decision- making ability will drop by up to 10% and when you're chronically underslept you'll only be a fra fraction of the person the fraction of the boss partner friend manager that you can be that's why I'm obsessed with which not just tracks but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that you choose to do if you're not convinced you can try whoop for 30 days completely risk-free with zero commitment just by going to join. whoop.com CEO that's join. woop.com CEO and let me know how you on if you don't like it there's no commitment join whoop.com CEO on on the point of heartbreak at the deepest human level is it about you know you talked about the bigger picture the loss of the future Etc in the past is the fundamental reason we have heartbreak as a device built inside of us because we are creatures that need connection and it's a mechanism to make us stay connected and avoid becoming disconnected you literally could not survive in early societies without being part of the group you had to belong if you did not belong you couldn't survive you wouldn't get food you wouldn't get shelter you wouldn't survive so belonging is just hardwired in us it's it's something that keeps us alive and we actually do need it to stay alive um even now and what I mean by that is you take for example when they did these stud and they looked at babies who were in orphanages and they thought all they need is they need they need food they you know they need to get they need to be fed they need to be nourished they need to have their diaper changed they need those things these babies didn't develop and many of them died it's called failure to thrive because they weren't held they weren't held they needed love they literally died from lack of Love they just they
couldn't they couldn't survive no matter how much you could they just stopped eating they failed failure to thrive they wouldn't meet their developmental Milestones this happens this happens in really traumatic childhoods even um so you actually cannot live without love you need some kind of love it doesn't have to be romantic love but you need love so we need that so our main goal in life is to love and be Lov we may think it's about success and it's about appearance and all the things that we see on social media we may think that's what life is about and everything that our culture sells us but ultimately what we need is we need love we need to love and we need to be loved and so when that gets cut off we forget that we have other people who love us um we forget everything else everything just feels extremely black or white it's like I I was loved and then I wasn't loved and that's how it's going to feel for a little while it's scary it's scary because so much of your work is centered on connection I like the fundamental level and we're living in a world that feels like it's getting more and more disconnected than ever before um if you go back a couple of decades young people used to see their friends once a week or twice a week about about 80% of PE people did now it's getting down to about 30 40% which is really really crazy I did a talk on stage the other day and and there was 5 600 people in the audience and the kid sat to my far bottom left here raised his hand and his question in front of 600 people was essentially I'm lonely and how do I make friends he sat in a room with 700 people that are his exact age and he's asking me in front of all of them which I I respect he's asking me the question how do I make friends a lot of people ask that a lot of men come up to me and Whisper it to me it talks they'll say it to me so they'll they'll make because we film a lot they'll come up really close to me and basically Express that they'll say it in my DMs how do I make friends yeah I get that all the time to the podcast to the column that is one of the most frequent questions is I'm lonely how do I make connections how do I make friends from younger people people especially but older people too and I think that it's
really frightening because when I watch my son who's 18 um people think look going back to your graph that they are quote seeing their friends because they're sending pictures of themselves back and forth on Snapchat to their friends and they think that that's socializing but it's so different we learned this during Co that there's such a difference between being in a room with someone and um you know being mediated by a screen but they're not even having conversations like you would if you were with your friend things happen you have shared experiences you're doing things together conversation just more naturally flows um they're literally you know they're sending texts to each other that are just emojis or you know a picture of this they're not really learning so it's not just how do I meet friends but it's how do I be in friendship with someone and it's hard because a lot of people aren't interested in doing that like if you said at that that age you know let's hang out sometimes people will but really more people are just on their phones 247 and they think they're super social but they're not it's like the difference between vulnerability online and true vulnerability so a lot of people in fact I was just on Instagram and I saw somebody saying I'm going to be so vulnerable I see this all the time I'm going to be so vulnerable with all of you and share this thing and all their followers say you know that was so brave and and lots of Hard emojis and all of that that's not vulnerability to put that out on a public platform true vulnerability is what this kid was asking you which is when you are face Toof face with someone if you're with your partner or a close friend or a family member and you want to share something you need in the relationship or something that you feel shame about or something that is scary for you to take the mask off and and and share with somebody that's true vulnerability because the stakes are high what is this person going to think of me again going back to I need to be loved we all need to be loved what is this person going to think of me how will they love me if they know the truth of who I am this thing that I'm about to share very different from sharing it on Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever so I think that
it's really important that we as adults look at how much FaceTime do we have FaceTime in person time do we have with people are we really prioritizing that and are we modeling that for the next Generation what would you have said to him cuz what I ended up saying to him because it really took me off guard no one had asked me that obviously in front of a huge group of people I said to him um what you've just done do more of that and what I meant by that is he had been so vulnerable and open and I've come to learn that vulnerability in and of itself is a magnet not a repellent that we think it is so I I said do more more of that but I I thought maybe that's not the best possible answer I could have given him I love that answer that's a great answer I also might have said um turn to the I want everybody in this room to turn to the person on your right and introduce yourself to them and ask them about one thing that they want you to know about them because that's how you're going to start making friends we don't do that anymore yeah but we can you see they're simple things it's not like you know people say it feels so overwhelming how do I make friends and they think they're going to have to learn all these tactics and techniques when really it's just about be curious ask someone about themselves and the people who are receptive to that they might become your friends people who aren't I'm not really interested in them doesn't really matter Lori we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for oh oh this is a fantastic question if you had 60 days left on Earth what would be the first and last thing that you'd do hug my son no question it's simple for me there are so many things that I would I would like to do but I think that if you read maybe you should talk to someone you'll see that what I did was I made sure that I'm already doing the things that I want to do now instead of putting them off for later so there's nothing that that I would be doing in these 60 days that would be drastically different from what I'm doing now and I think that that's where I'm trying to get people in
therapy is to live the life that you want to be living now so that you don't when you get these questions about if you only had 60 days left you're not like I would do things entirely differently why what are you waiting for we shouldn't have to wait L thank you so much thank you for writing a book there's this quote on the front of the book which I think perfectly encapsulates how many people people will feel if they get this book which is rarely has a book challenged me to see myself in an entirely new light and was at the same time laugh out loud funny and utterly absorbing it's a quote by ktie coric on the front of the book and the remarkable thing about all of your work is that it's both so incredibly accessible but it it's so clearly built on real world experiences that I think so many people can relate to and you really tend to focus on the fundamentals of a problem not the things that just appear on the surface and an ability to get to the fundamental of the problem I think um is a really magical thing to be able to do and I just wish there was you know I would I wish you could be everyone's therapist but I think the book can be if you can't be because you only have a certain amount of time in the day it's really really remarkable the mission that you're run and how many people you're serving by your column by your podcast by the books that you've written um and everything that you continue to do thank you so much my pleasure thank you let's talk about Zoe who you may know because they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company you guys know health is my number one priority Zoe's growth story has been absolutely incredible so far they're doing science at a scale that I've never seen before because of their members and recent breakthroughs in research they can now continue to offer the most scientifically Advanced gut health test on the market previously the test allowed them to analyze 30 bacteria types in your gut but now thanks to new science they've identified a 100 bacteria types this is a huge step forward and there's nothing else that's available even close to it on the market at all so to find out more and to get started on your Zoe Journey visit zoe.com
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