Why We Fall for the Wrong Person with Couples Therapist Dr. Harville Hendrix

23:49Simon Sinek:I'm trying to understand. I'm tracking. but then that doesn't help me understand why one relationship succeeds and one relationship fails it's not the nature that i'm pushing against i'm trying to understand i'm trying to understand you had me which is i fully get showing up in the relationship and expecting somebody else to meet your needs and that's why the relationship fails because that doesn't work and that what rescues the relationship is making the conversion of instead of showing up in the relationship expecting the other person to meet all your needs, we make this beautiful, beautiful, we mature and make this beautiful conversion of dedication and devotion to helping the other person meet their needs.

24:27Simon Sinek:And if both individuals are able to do that, the relationship thrives. And I'm thinking of my favorite couples, you know, that I watch the way they interact. And that seems to be the way in which they're organized, which is how do I help my partner succeed and thrive, find joy and happiness and all the rest of it, as opposed to how can they help me find joy, happiness, and thrive. That's right. The struggle is over. Where you lost me and where I need help to understand is, and because I asked about finding it, that's in the relationship, which I get wholeheartedly. But if I'm trying to set myself up for success in a relationship, wouldn't it be that I meet somebody who wants to meet my needs?

25:06Simon Sinek:I don't understand where I'm attracted to people who don't meet my needs. And I'm trying to put my own i'm trying to run it through my own filter rather than intellectualize it right so i'm trying to think about the people in my life when i was a kid and what did they not meet uh and then what am i attracted to now ah shit it works you're right ah damn it this is really interesting so i'm thinking like what i was unable to get from the people who were tasked with looking after me when I was a kid. And what the most attractive thing that I find in a partner is their ability to give me that. Yeah.

25:54Simon Sinek:Okay. So, wow. Okay. Tracking, got that part of it. But now I'm still left in the dynamic. I found the person who meets my needs, fulfilling the void that was left when I was a kid, got it. but I'm still in the mindset now of that person meeting my needs and having that child mentality because it fills this childhood void. So now then, that's what makes me attracted to the person. That's what makes me fall for the person but that's not what makes the relationship succeed. What we have to add here is the whole concept of the unconscious. You are not in charge of the selecting process. You're just in charge of the effort.

26:36Well, I did swipe right. that I was in charge of swiping right. But what you have to bring into this, and this is, once you get this, this is easy to understand, that your unconscious mind, outside of your awareness, is going to pick the person that you're going to fall for. Because your unconscious mind has inside an image, I call it an imago, it's the core word in my intellectual system, an imago, an image, of this caretaker. Right. And when somebody crosses your path that matches that picture, your brain is going to go, wow, look at that. But what it's looking at is I'm going to get my need met now.

27:21Right. Because there's mommy or daddy, whichever one was the most active in my frustration. So the expectation is you are going to meet my needs, but you never make that conscious.

27:33Simon Sinek:Right. You just say, wow, how wonderful, how beautiful. Let's go date and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll both go through the romantic stage with all kinds of things that are wonderful. Until some difference shows up in which you had an expectation. And this can come anywhere from the end of the honeymoon to 18 months later, which is about the range. it'll show up that the expectation now 18 months later still not being met now you know you're with the right person and this may sound paradoxical what so you're with the right person because you're attracted to them because they meet the need but then 18 months later they don't meet your need and that makes them right the first 18 months is all fantasy right that that i've definitely lived that it took me a lot less than 18 months there's a kind of collusion.

28:29Simon Sinek:Yeah, yeah. I projected, I projected on somebody, I handpicked the things about their personality that reinforced my narrative of what I wanted them to be. And then I projected that they were the perfect person for me, because they met all these needs that I have, only to discover that they didn't. Like, I set them up to fail. It's not fair. That's right. And I think we do this to each other generally. Absolutely. It's pretty universal. Yeah. That you do pick it up, you create this person in your mind, and then you attach an expectation to them. And when they show up, they don't meet the expectation.

29:06Simon Sinek:And then of course, that's when we break up, be like, you didn't meet any of my needs that I projected on you that you would meet all of them. The person you projected onto and the real person are very different. But you're going to live with the fantasy, but this real person cannot live in your fantasy. I think this is the distinction between lust and love, right? Like we fall in lust with, you know, and I make the distinction that one is more superficial, one is more the falling in love with the projection, and the other is actually more grounded. And I think very often we fall in lust, we fall in lust quite easily.

29:41Simon Sinek:But to fall in love, I think actually is a little deeper and a little more complex, I hope. Well, I think probably we all fall into lust and then move into something more serious, like we really need to get this need met. But the sexual attraction is one of nature's ways of getting you in bed together is one of nature's ways to getting you in a relationship to get the need met. You see, you have to have the tension of the polarity of the difference in order to activate the undeveloped part of yourself. so nature set this up but it didn't give you a handbook when you got married i guess that's why therapists were created or why books are where god invented therapists nature's trying to get it out so how does this reconcile with the fact that dating as a concept is a relatively new experience invented in america in the industrial revolution where most relationships if not all relationships and marriages were arranged by the family either for convenience or or for wealth or for what wealth exchange or power exchange when the industrial revolution happened and people were leaving the home to go live by themselves in the urban centers.

30:48Simon Sinek:And when dating first started showing up, it took about 30 years for me to normalize because it was, if you were walking down the street with a member of the opposite sex and you weren't married, it was considered disgusting and accusations of prostitution. And so it took 30 years for that concept of choosing my own mate and walking down the street with somebody I'm not married to to be acculturated. So how does this, because everything we're talking about here is a very modern conception of choice and unfulfilled needs. And yet arranged marriages have much lower divorce rates than marriages of choice.

31:26Yeah. I'm not an expert in your question, but I have thought about it, read about it, and have conclusions about it. One of the things that if you look at arranged marriages, while they look stable and are stable and they last longer, they have compensatory sidebar behaviors. Oh. That the affair—

31:48Simon Sinek:So the king had mistresses is what you're saying. The king had mistresses. The queen had mistresses. Courtiers. In other words, this dynamic of romantic love, of being attracted to somebody, has been around forever. Got it. Got it. So the romantic love was sometimes found outside the relationship. I understand. Outside the relationship. It's like Romeo and Juliet. You know, they found love outside and it was forbidden love. Yeah. The natural dynamic that finally got culturized and culturated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't come until about 150 years ago. But prior to that, nature dealt with the same thing.

32:26It just didn't have a cultural container for it. So it had to happen outside of.

32:30Simon Sinek:If we think this through, and again, these are two people with a lot of opinions who have done very little research on the subject, which is my favorite kind of conversation, which is when there's an arranged marriage, it sort of meets your standard, which is, okay, I'm going to make this work. And that means I have to invest in meeting the other person's needs. Otherwise, this is going to fail because I can't sit around going, you know, is this person going to meet my needs? because the interviews that I've seen of arranged marriages, there's a commitment to the relationship, which means there's a commitment to the other person, and it meets your standard to a T, which is I enter the relationship with a commitment to meet the other person's needs because that's my job in this arranged marriage because the interviews that I've seen with arranged marriage is very, very happy, and then love came later, but the work started immediately where I think for us in our choice of relationships, the love may come sooner, The lust may come sooner, but the work starts later, usually when problems occur.

33:31Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

33:34Simon Sinek:So we've made it more difficult for ourselves. And what an amazing concept, which is you can still have a relationship by choice, but to enter the relationship with the mindset of I'm going to commit to seeing my partner's needs. And by the way, if they won't let me meet their needs or they won't take the same commitment to me, then this is not a relationship that should survive and we should both move on. it's a re-understanding of the word commitment, right? It's not commitment like a blind loyalty, which is often how we think about commitment. You know, you have commitment issues. You know, we usually mean that you don't have the intense loyalty that you're supposed to have to the relationship, regardless of what's happening.

34:12Simon Sinek:I think that's sometimes how we use the term commitment. But here, the way we're using it is commitment to the work that needs to be done to see the other person's needs are met. And now when you say somebody has commitment issues, they are unwilling to do the work that needs to be done to see the other person's needs met and once met i think is a very nice construction yeah i would agree with that if you have commitment issues which is why when we do work with couples one of the first things we say is we call it a no exit decision and the reason i do the no exit decision is i can tell you in advance that when we start working, you will start making progress.

34:56You will get more and more anxious about the progress you're making because it's violating your survival directive because your brain has been fine with survival without the needs being met. When the needs start getting met, it changes the survival directive. So you get more and more anxious and you'll want to stop therapy. And when you want to stop therapy is when I'm going to invite you to make a non-negotiable recommitment to the therapy process. Because in about three to five weeks, the anxiety will go away because your brain will discover it's not dangerous to receive stuff that you really want and need and are getting.

35:39but if you leave when you get anxious that simply means your brain says hey i can't i don't know how to operate and be safe with this system of stuff good stuff coming in i can't count on that i can count on the bad stuff because that gives me security so the brain is kind of crazy about that

35:55Simon Sinek:i'm tracking this conversation i like it the one part where i disagree is i do think couples can do it without a therapist it makes sense that you've never met a couple that couldn't do it without a therapist because you were their therapist. Of course. That's the only couple that I meet. So that makes perfect sense to me. Helen and I did without a therapist. We became our therapist. There you go. You see, you and your own wife did it without a therapist. So you have empirical data to show that it can't be done without a therapist. You just both have to be self-aware and willing. Here's one thing that I think happens in a relationship, and I've definitely done this in mine, which is the person is meeting my needs.

36:30Simon Sinek:And I'm so afraid of losing that, that I shy away from total transparency for fear that I will somehow push them away or upset them or they won't like all of me. And then I'm going to lose this person who's meeting my needs. But in so doing, they are now either forming a relationship with somebody they don't fully know or worse, they always feel a little bit distant and like they can't get close. And that ultimately will be the undoing of the relationship. And the accusation is, it's like, I don't know you, you know, it's like your walls are up, whatever the terminology and euphemisms are. Because I think to your point about this childhood getting our needs met, it's so seductive when you find it, or at least it's even seductive when you project it.

37:20Simon Sinek:that I think very often we become afraid, so afraid of losing it, that we choose not to be our full selves, which if we take the commitment to see the other person's needs met, one of the needs they have is to know who they're dating. And so there's sort of the requirement to be honest and transparent. That doesn't mean unnecessarily on day one. You don't need to tell everybody everything on day one, but to go through the process of gently opening up and taking risks and discovering that the person still likes you, I think a lot of relationships fail because they're more open with their friends sometimes than they are with the person they're supposedly getting married to.

38:01Yeah, right. And so let me just add on to what you just said, that part of it is that if I really become vulnerable and let it in, that I might lose it.

38:12Simon Sinek:Yeah. The other side of that is that if I take it, I will violate a directive in my mind. So I have to reject what I get, which is what I want, in order to honor a directive in my mind, usually coming from some message from your caretakers early in childhood. Are you talking about sabotage? Yeah. I'll sabotage what I want in order to maintain the status quo. In other words, I like being in the state of seeking it because in some twisted way that makes me feel like, I don't know what that makes me feel. Not quite. Let me give you an example. We wrote a book called Receiving Love. I had to learn that.

38:56This couple, they were not even a neurotic couple. They were, you know, like they had really deep childhood needs to work through before they could even get to their relational needs. They owned a store. It was a, I don't know what, there's a store where they sold paper and pencils and all that sort of stuff. And it wasn't a big store, so they were the primary people in it. I think she would come to work at like 9 o 'clock, would leave at 3 to go home and make dinner. He would have one or two other staff people managing that. Then he would come home at 6 o 'clock to eat dinner. And so their pattern was, I go to work with you at 9.

39:35I leave at 3, you stay till 6 I go home at 3 to cook dinner you come home and then we have dinner and so now then the office with me, what is the complaint? and she said well you never thanked me for fixing dinner well this is not a pathological complaint, this is I work with you all day, I go home and do another job and you come home and he said to her well I don't think people should get compliments for what their job is. That's what your job is in our relationship. My job is to stay there from 9 to 6. Your job is to come home at 3 and make dinner, and then I come home, you get 3 hours from 3 to 6.

40:16Well, it's like, you know, some parents say to their kids, you know, don't complain about having to take out the trash. That's what you're supposed to do. You just do that without being complimented. That's your job in the family. So he had that, and he said, you know, I'm not going to thank you for what you're supposed to do.

40:32Simon Sinek:Right, right. So that made sense. So I said to him, Peter, would you just stop and let Mary tell you what she wants? And so she said, well, what I would like is when you come into the door, that you would come find me. I'll be in the kitchen. And you spin me around and hug me and tell me how grateful you are that I came home and fixed dinner. I said, do you think you could do that? She just said that, that he said, well, sure, I can do that. So I said, let's enact it. So you move up from thinking to enacting. So he did. First time he did it, started clumsily. So we did it about the third time.

41:19He got it down and he was having fun doing it and was appreciating it. And she said, no, no, don't, don't, don't hug me anymore. I don't want any more. You don't mean it. You just don't mean it. I was watching him. He did it perfectly. His tone of voice was warm and loving. And he was apologetic for not having done it before. He saw this could really be fun. He would really like to make that a part of their life. And the more he said, the more she said, no, no, no. I'm not going to do it. So I had this gut thing. And I said to her, Mary, would you tell me what would happen if you accepted his appreciation now?

42:01And she said, oh, my God, my mother would tell me that you don't deserve that. And if you get that, you should be ashamed of yourself for asking.

42:13Simon Sinek:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a voice from her hippocampus showed up. Yeah. And she said, my God, I didn't even know that was back there. And she just broke down and cried. Yeah. I didn't know. I can't even receive what I want because if I do, I'll disappoint my mother and my mother's dead. How crazy is this? Well, it's not crazy. It's normal human stuff that gets triggered around the critical issues. Then I said, okay, well, now that you've got this clear, would you be willing now to let, you know, Peter come over and really hug you? And she said, please do. That's delightful. So the breakthrough, see, she could not receive what she wanted.

43:00Simon Sinek:Yeah. Now, the reason I wrote a book on that was I had 20 couples in the same impasse. And I didn't know how to get them through it because I didn't know that they had an unconscious rejection of their wishes. Yeah. So my experience was I dated an amazing woman who her love language was acts of service. And she loved to make me dinner. Right. And which was very nice. And she's a better cook than me. and it was a wonderful thing. But she wouldn't let me do the dishes. I always wanted to do the dishes. If she cooked me dinner, which I was super grateful for, I wanted to contribute and I wanted to do the dishes.

43:34Simon Sinek:So it was egalitarian in the construction. And she always refused. She goes, no, no, no, I'm making you dinner and I'm doing the dishes. That's part of dinner. And it was very uncomfortable for me. And where I had to learn to receive love is I had to learn to put my own sort of desire aside and be like, well, this is how this person wants to express her love for me. I have to learn to receive it. And I did. I always was uncomfortable with it, but I learned to accept the love rather than being secure about that I wasn't contributing. The relationship didn't survive. And we took a long break where we didn't talk for a long time.

44:11Simon Sinek:And then when we got together again, we sort of reconnected. And she said to me, I owe you an apology. And I said, what happened? she goes in this time that I've had to think about our relationship she said I was so hell-bent on taking care of you and giving you my love that I didn't give you the space to show me love back because you wanted to do the dishes as your expression of love your act of service and I denied you that opportunity and it goes to the original theory of helping the other person have their needs met it was such a beautiful genuine place of wanting to love me and I'm sure it's fulfilling some unmet need as you know whatever it was going back to your point I was so struck by it it was so meaningful for her to recognize that she was allowed to receive love as well and she was somehow denying herself like maybe that she felt unworthy of receiving love and recognize that it bummed me out you know and it was this beautiful beautiful reconciliation.

45:15Simon Sinek:And it's to your point of wanting to do the thing that made the other person have their needs met, which is to give love, to give service. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. That's the perfect example of something in her unconscious prevented her from receiving. So she had to, in a sense, then deprive you of what you wanted to do, which was to give so that the reciprocity, which is beautiful in a relationship, couldn't happen. It raises a nice, interesting point. You know, successful relationships are not equal. They're egalitarian. And I think people sort of, it's really important to make the distinction because equal is I cook, you cook, I clean, you clean, I take out the garbage, you take out the garbage.

45:59Simon Sinek:That's equal. egalitarian is i'll cook you do the dishes egalitarian is i'll put the kids to bed you take the garbage out where both parties they both feel whole because they feel like the other person is contributing even though the the acts of contribution aren't exactly the same which is nice because you get to do the things that sometimes you want to do that you actually prefer doing and the other person feels that you're doing the thing i don't want to do boy this is a great relationship but healthy relationships are egalitarian they're not equal I like that distinction. I hadn't thought about that.

46:31I use the word equality a lot, but I can see how egalitarian makes it a kind of teamship rather than a transaction.

46:40Simon Sinek:You've been doing this for a long time. Only about 50 years. Only about 50 years. You said something early in our conversation, which really, I think, was so accurate and so right. I can't remember the exact words, but that dating is constructed around the norms of the day or the culture of the day. Yeah. And so it does change and it changes from city to city, country to country. It changes with time because it is a construction of its time. It is not some deep biological normal thing, this thing called dating. Right. I'm very curious, over the course of 50 years, how have you seen dating change for better?

47:18Simon Sinek:And how have you seen dating change for worse? So I don't think I have a terribly sophisticated answer to that. So let me just qualify what I'm going to say with it. I think dating, paradoxically, was better when people met physically face-to-face long ago, sort of like I did. You can't meet on the telephone, but you can meet on a Zoom or you can meet on a dating site. There were no dating sites as I grew up. We all are noticing of the separation of the personal as the rise of technology has increasingly contributed to more and more indirect attempts to meet people through some technological encounter, rather than through a personal experience.

48:12Right.

48:12Simon Sinek:I think that's a fair statement. And I think it'd be great to have dating sites in which after you scour the field, but to move once there is a connection of some kind, to move into the personal immediately rather than spend some time getting acquainted with or even going to Zoom or doing all that sort of stuff. The more impersonal, the fewer cues you have. I know the technology is really not the problem. It's our use of technology. That's the problem. There are things you can't pick up. Yeah. Except face to face. You're just advocating IRL in real life. Advocating what? In real life. Telephones, you know, FaceTimes, they're perfectly valid ways of meeting somebody.

49:00Simon Sinek:They're perfectly valid ways of fostering relationships you're already in. But what you're saying is nothing can ever replace the magic of face-to-face in courtship and getting to know someone. Because so much is revealed that is subconscious when we are with someone that eventually will show up if we find ourselves in a relationship. You're in an energy field. Right now, you're in an energy field. If you and I were in the same room, our energy fields would be intertwining. And we would be feeling each other in different ways from the way we are now. We're still feeling each other, but it's mediated through this distance of the screen.

49:38So it's not as informative. It's not as rich. And not as rich.

49:42Simon Sinek:Yeah. But it's okay. I mean, it's just different ways. But the realm of intimacy is a realm of intimacy. And that requires seeing, touching, holding, feeling. And that I'm fine for people to scour the world to find the right person. but then go see them, get together and smell them and touch them and all kinds of things. You heard it here first. The next time you go on a date, make sure to smell the person you're with. Exactly. Smell them. Harville, my favorite guests are people who teach me something, and I love to have people on here who know stuff that I don't know and help me think through things.

50:19Simon Sinek:I so appreciate you letting me go through it with you. I have definitely smarter and richer about relationships now. And you're giving me so many good thoughts about even how I want to approach my own relationships moving forward. And the construction that my commitment to the relationship, assuming that I think someone is worth it and they think I'm worth it, because it is a lot of work to commit yourself to see that the other person's wants, needs and desires are met, is a beautiful, beautiful thought. And I hope that I and everybody else finds the person that they want to make that commitment to.

50:50Yeah, that would be wonderful. And you clearly did. Clearly did. Took me a while to work through the anxiety. And mine was working through the anxiety of vulnerability. And my biggest need was visibility. But my biggest defense was vulnerability, which made visibility impossible. So I was a saboteur to my own journey. And we had to talk long enough until we felt safe enough in the conversation for the defenses to drop. And I think that is non-negotiable, that you have to be safe enough with the other person to be the real you. And now, Helen and I, we don't have any struggle. We walk around playing and kidding.

51:33I don't have a sense of a need. She doesn't have a sense of a need. We may have a want, like I'd like to go for a walk or I'd like to go out to dinner or I'd like to have pizza for dinner. But we don't have needs. The needs were cut off with the gratitude. and so all that's left is just our diversity and our difference which becomes negotiable we can say oh so you want x like the bedroom at the temperature every night is a conversation but it's a fun conversation i like that if this heater would just work for us better i love i love

52:08Simon Sinek:this harville i love this and i'm thinking my i've done the same thing where i desperately seek being seen, but don't give people insight enough to see the thing I want seen. So I'm clearly sabotaging, I'm clearly not going to get the thing that I want, because I won't show them the thing that I want to be seen. It's such a beautiful, magical paradox. I love, love, love the idea that you have no needs left. It's only just once. And how wonderful is that we should all aspire to have a relationship where our needs are completely met and all we have left is once. Beautiful. Harville, I'm so glad you said yes.

52:42Simon Sinek:I really, I think you're the best. Well, thank you. I'm so glad that you asked me. I never have an idea of being interviewed by you. But just so I met you at TED, and it's like, I met Simon Sinek, the guy that I admire so much. Oh, you're too kind. I got to spend a whole hour with you. All my needs are met. All your needs. I hope to see you soon and maybe we can do this one day in person oh I would love that and I'm available anytime and we'll get to smell each other this is the most fun conversation I can remember having oh thank you so much

53:25Simon Sinek:as always thanks for listening and if you liked this episode please do remember to subscribe to A Bit of Optimism wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts And remember, new episodes drop every Tuesday. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company, lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devin Johnson. And if you want more cool stuff or just to find out what I'm up to, visit simonsynic.com. Until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other.