Why Are We So Bad At Love?

– Being in love is something that we all want,
so why are we so bad at it?
I don’t know about you,
but when I was a kid, I was raised on fairy tales.
Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they overcome some obstacle,
and then they live happily ever after.
That literally never happens.
What if we think everything that a relationship is
and could be is completely wrong?
What if there was so much more to it
that we could have that we’re missing out
on because we’re just missing the target?
We’re aiming at the wrong thing.
In my 20s, I knew I wanted to get married.
The way that I was dating didn’t really reflect
the type of relationship that I wanted to have when I got married.
So that led me to the question,
Who is doing this right?
Who has a great relationship that isn’t talking about it?
So I decided to quit my job,
sell everything I owned,
and spend the better part
of a year visiting 15 states and interviewing over 100 couples.
I would sit down with a couple, and I
would hear their story, and I would just think
to myself, I didn’t know that this existed, like,
I didn’t know a relationship this good was possible.
And it gave me insights into how to create
that type of love, which was really awesome.
Nobody had ever taught me how to have the type
of marriage that I wanted.
You never get a class on this kinda thing in college or in high school,
so where do you go to get answers?
You’ve got self-help books over here,
you’ve got therapy over here, and there’s nothing in the middle.
But the problem with all of those resources
is that they’re focused mainly on teaching you knowledge,
which is great, but those things don’t do you any good
unless you actually take action on them.
So I believe that one of the biggest gaps
between an ordinary couple and an extraordinary couple
is extraordinary couples are action takers,
not just insight chasers.
When you bump into your firststruggle in a relationship,
you might think, I think I’m with the wrong person.
What if I chose the wrong person?
Get rid of that mindset.
It does not serve you.
It’s not gonna help you get where you wanna go.
Being in a relationship
inherently exposes you to your deepest insecurities and your biggest flaws,
the things that make you most uncomfortable and vulnerable.
And that’s okay.
Some of the most rewarding things in life
are the things that are most difficult.
I would argue that happiness is not the right goal for a relationship.
When you pursue happiness asa goal in your relationship,
it’s all about what can I get out of it.
It’s all about making your partner responsible
for the quality of your relationship.
But you have no control over that.
You don’t have control over their feelings, their words,
their thoughts, their moods,
but you have control over all of those things for yourself.
When you pursue growth,
it’s all about what you can control personally
to contribute to the overall quality of the relationship.
There is an ideal ecosystem for your relationship to grow.
You need a clear ideal to strive for,
somebody to learn from.
You need regular nourishment.
And you need to be groundedin a good community,
the people that you spend the most time with.
The skills you learn inside of a romantic relationship
apply directly to every other relationship in your life.
If you learn great communication skills or conflict management skills
inside of your romantic relationship, it’s gonna apply to work,
it’s gonna apply to your friendships,
it’ll apply to every other aspect of your life.
Imagine what that would do for your community,
for your workplace, for yourcountry or for the world.
Can you imagine how cool, like, how much it would transform our world
if everybody was just reallygood at relationships?
This is something that you can control and
that has a huge impact on your happiness
and your quality of life, and nothing matters more.
The only way to transform your relationship
is to transform yourself.
The only way to change your relationship
is to change yourself.
The only way to improve your relationship
is to improve yourself.