How All Successful Marriages Navigate Change Together | Mark Manson EP 540

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11is love trust and respect enough to sustain a long-term healthy relationship in your mind it's a really good question and i think it depends i don't think you'll ever find two people that are 100 aligned on values everybody is a little bit different right i think you also want a little bit of diversity of values within the relationship you want to have different standards for different things and different opinions about different issues. It just makes life way more interesting. There's probably a threshold or a breaking point somewhere. One of the examples I've used in a book before is like, if somebody is a priest and the other person's a stripper, like it doesn't matter how in love they are with each other, it's never going to work, right?

0:57The handful of things that seem to come up all the time are differences of beliefs around money differences of beliefs around religion and differences of beliefs around kids and family yeah and i think if you can probably survive not being aligned on one of those but if you're not aligned on two or all of them you're probably in trouble like you're probably just gonna butt heads over and over again what if someone evolves their values over time you know five, 10, 15 years into the relationship, you know what, I actually don't have those beliefs and that lifestyle choice anymore. I'm going to try something different.

1:39Do you think the love of the past, the history of the relationship can sustain if it's too much of a conflict around those lifestyle choices or beliefs? First of all, everybody does evolve. Their values do evolve and change. Like, I think that's just natural. I think the challenge within relationships is when you commit to somebody, it's because there is some amount of alignment and it's working. but as the years go on if you start to evolve in two different directions that can cause a lot of strain you often hear married couples that are getting divorced or people who have been together for a long time and and are deciding to get divorced they say like you know we've become two different people or or we don't i don't recognize him or her anymore right um and i think that that's a case of like we were 10 years ago we were completely aligned and we've both changed and evolved over the years.

2:31And my partner's gone this way and I've gone this way. And so now there's just this massive gap and we don't feel like we can bridge it anymore. We don't relate to each other. We don't understand each other. We don't agree on anything anymore. We don't do the same things for fun anymore. And that's tough. And so I think part of the trick is to kind of intentionally evolve together is to be very conscious. And this is something that my wife and I try to pay attention to is that if I feel myself changing my mind about something very significant in my life, about my career, my beliefs around family, relationships with friends, I communicate that with her.

3:13I'm like, hey, I'm starting to move in this direction. Really? Right. Just so she can be aware and adapt, you know, and just understand like, okay, that's kind of where he's at. Huh. Is there an example you can share on this in the last few years? maybe? So the two most significant ones that have happened, first one was my career. When we moved to LA, I took six months off. I was completely burnt out. And I really had this period of just, I'm not having fun anymore. I need to take some time off, figure myself out and really decide like, okay, what's this next phase of my career going to look like?

3:48What's the next decade of Mark Manson's career look like? And so I communicated that to her. I'm like, hey, I'm not going to be speaking, not going to be traveling I'm going to be at home a lot you're probably going to see me on the couch playing video games you know, this is kind of what I'm going through right now, right? and I'm probably going to come out of that different with different priorities different metrics of how I'm going to make decisions money might be different, right? like suddenly that huge speaking gig in Dubai that I would have taken a year ago to cash that fat check. Now I'm not going to take it.

4:25And we're not going to get that fat check, right? So it's important to communicate those things that she understands like, hey, I'm at this pivot point in my career and I'm probably going to start going to different directions. Just so that she knows and like isn't shocked, right? When I don't take the speaking gig and do that. On the other front, this dies in the health thing. She was a good influence on me. So my wife has a couple autoimmune conditions. She's been aware of them for a long time. But as things happen, as you get older, things you could get away with. He can't anymore. Yeah, in your 20s, it's like, you don't hit me.

4:58You got to pay attention and focus on them. You start coming up on 40 and it's just like, they level you. And she was starting to get leveled by them. And so starting right around the time of the pandemic, she got very, very serious about health. And at that time, I had been overweight for a while. My lifestyle was very unhealthy. I was traveling five, six months a year. I was drinking three, four nights a week, eating junk food, desserts all the time. And I was aware of that, but it just, you know, on that totem pole of priorities, it was pretty low on the priority list. But she got super serious about it.

5:33She really did because she didn't have a choice. Like it was... It was affecting her health. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, it was to the point where she could barely function throughout the day. Wow. If she wasn't being very, very intentional about what she was eating. She was feeling sick. Yeah. So she started kind of going on this journey and really cleaning up her diet and getting her health in order. And I started kind of becoming the beneficiary of that because she does most of the cooking. So I'm starting to eat healthy a lot more often. We're not going out as much, not drinking as much. And I'm starting to feel better.

6:09And I'm like, man, I'm like, I'm waking up bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, feeling pretty good, right? you know and she and I were in communication about that and she was very clear like this is I need to make this a top priority in my life and I'm gonna become that person who like doesn't eat dairy doesn't eat gluten like doesn't eat sugar and I was like oh this is oh god this is gonna suck like my life's gonna get so boring and actually the opposite happened is that it's I've kind of followed her on that she's been a very positive influence in that way in that I started to notice benefits and I said, you know, my health has been pretty terrible the last five years.

6:49I'm getting up in my 30s. Like I'm not bouncing back the way I used to 10 years ago. Maybe I just hop on this train with her, see where it goes. And that's a big part of what happened. And so now health has become a big priority in my life. Yeah, man.

7:13Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:03Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.