Escaping Love Martyrdom & Finding True Connection | Nick Viall EP 940

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:51If you could go back to, you know, 20-year-old you. When you're a star track athlete in college and high school and things like that, and you could give him three pieces of advice. That's a great question. On how to really become a great man and to attract a great partner for yourself. What would you say to him with that advice? That's a great question. I'd sit him down probably. And first and foremost, I would, uh, I would remind him that sometimes feeling in love doesn't always mean that you are in love and that sometimes feelings can be misleading. Um, you know, like you can feel that spark, you know, or seduction and things like that.

1:39And that, that you're pining over someone and that intensity of that excitement all can be misconstrued into love and things like that. I'd also remind him that there's no benefit to being a love martyr. What do you mean by that? It's actually something I was just doing another friend's podcast and it kind of came up because, you know, my background, I grew up, I had a great childhood, you know, lovely parents, family of, I have 10 brothers and sisters. I'm the second oldest of 11 kids. Wow. Parents are still married today. They were a great example of love. We grew up catholic and so there's a little bit i don't know how familiar you are with catholicism but there's a little kind of martyr and the whole thing and so i think that kind of passed down to us kids but you know i what i learned from my parents was that love is special but it's also you know relationships can be really hard and you know then you grow up watching rom-coms and tv shows Disney and yeah and movies like the notebook who have all these high stakes and quite frankly a lot of toxicity in relationships but those types of shows teach you that none of it really matters as long as you end up together and in reality that's not really the case but as a young man I kind of took those lessons and thought to myself well love is hard you know is special and it's hard.

3:06So you just have to fight through, you know, all these challenges. And yes, every relationship has its challenges and you, you know, you have to work through stuff, but I kind of turned into a bit of a love martyr. You know, I got to the point where it didn't really even matter if I liked them, you know, it's like, I didn't ask myself questions like, do I enjoy their company? Do they enjoy mine? Are we even compatible? It was more like, well, I'll fight for the relationship so much that the more I fought for it, the more special I thought that relationship was and what that meant. Even if they weren't the right match.

3:39Even if it wasn't the right match. I mean, there were, you know, my first girlfriend, God bless her. I met her when I was 18. We broke up so many times. Usually it was her breaking up with me. And, and, and every time she broke up with me, it was like, I had to fight for the relationship because, you know, again, love is special. And whether it was my parents telling me that love is special, but you have to work hard on things. You know, I had the right intentions so to speak but like it was a bit misguided and I think through that I spent a lot of energy on people who quite frankly it just wasn't the right fit but I kind of misconstrued my intentions so to speak and you know kind of became that love martyr and I think a lot of people are you know sometimes where you you kind of get stuck in these relationships and you think about things like, well, I can't break up now.

4:28We've been dating for so long as if like, so invested, right? Yeah. So invested. And there would be no value to these past three years of our relationship if we end the relationship. So I have to keep fighting. And if I fight, I will somehow be rewarded. And my love will be special because the worse it is, the harder I have to fight. And if the harder I fight, the more special it is. And it's such a misconstrued toxic way to look at relationships but i very much did so i would i would tell him not to be a love martyr okay and the third thing i would tell him to be careful about listening to your ego over your heart you know and i think that's something i did a lot of and i confused validation with love you know and i think we do that a lot so when our ego takes over and i think I talk a lot about ego on my show, almost to the point where I feel like it gets a bad rep in a way.

5:28But it's not really true. I don't know if you're a comic book fan at all, but I kind of equate ego to a superpower. A superpower that, like an X-Men, are you familiar with the Phoenix character? She's so powerful that she can't control her own power to the point where it harms others. And that's kind of like your ego. your ego can be a superpower. Your ego is what gives you the confidence to like act as if, you know, you had to have some kind of ego to do what you've done, right? To say, I could do this. Why, why not me? You know, that takes a little bit of ego and that confidence. And that allows you to step up the plate to, you know, face impossible challenges.

6:09But if you can't control that ego, if you can't, you know, be mindful of, you know, when it creeps up, it can really lead you down dark paths. Your ego will tell you that you have to chase the wrong thing because, again, your ego is like saying, well, you're not good enough. That person who won't give you respect, who doesn't make you a priority, who treats you with disrespect, well, if you can get them to change their behavior for you, even though they've done all this with all these other people, you'll be special. Wow.

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