The Key To ALL Successful Relationships | Esther Perel

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

0:12What are the core reasons or the core things you see over and over that either end or make a relationship challenging to be in the longer you're in? What are the challenges that come up over and over that you see? I think there's a number of things in a relationship that become the cornerstones of the demise. And I'm not going to list them in order, but they all are part of each other. Indifference and contempt and neglect and violence are probably the four most important. I'm not talking about big violence. Microaggressions are plenty. Indifference, when you start to feel like the other person fundamentally is not really caring about you anymore.

0:54Or you don't care about them. What they feel, what they think, who they are, what they're about. You just don't care. You've lost interest. But it's more than losing of interest. It's also when you are indifferent, you degrade the other person. They're less important to you. They don't matter. And ultimately, what we feel in relationships is that we matter. That is the essential reason for connecting to people is that we are creatures of meaning. I matter to you. I'm someone. You care about me. You want my well-being. You're proud of me. You want good for me. You're benevolent. All of that. When you are indifferent, the whole thing goes.

1:29And then you start to, there's that coldness that creeps in, that sense of estrangement, that complete disconnect. The second one is neglect. Neglect, when people just basically take each other for granted. You know, they take more care of their car than of their partner. Or their dog. Or their dog, anybody, anything. Their yard, anything. Anything gets attendance. Their business. Their business for sure. Their business for sure. You know, everything gets priority. Everything gets reviewed, evaluated, attended to, 360s, you name it. You know, new input. People have this idea that they put it all in when they were dating.

2:07And then once they tie the knot, it's like now they don't have to do squat anymore. And they go into this kind of complete sense of complacency and laziness. It's an amazing thing. They think this thing is just going to live on its own, like a cactus. Violence. Violence. the abuse, the level of disrespect. I mean, most people talk nicer to anybody else than their partner when a relationship degrades. Why is that? Because you can't get away with it. Because if you talk like this at work, you're gone. Because if you talk like this with the police, you're gone. Because if you talk like this on the street, you're being punched.

2:39But with your partner, you have that sense that they're going to be there anyway. They're just going to take it because it's family. And family is this kind of this thing that doesn't dissolve so easily. so you can just lash out at them and talk to them with a tone and a dismissal that is phenomenal so that kind of violence I'm not talking physical violence and all the other big things you're talking about aggression or resentment all of that all of that passive aggressiveness all of that contempt I think is the top one contempt is the killer of them all because in the contempt there is a real there's the degradation of the race is that complete, you're nothing.

3:22You're nothing. I can kill you with that one gaze, that one eyebrow that goes up. Who do you think you are? And that's it. You're done. You're done. So how do we even get to this place? After having been so in love and so romantic, right? Does desire reflect that? Or if we're not desiring the person anymore, then we start to feel one of those categories? There's only two relationships that resemble each other. the one you have with your parents or the people who raise you and the one you have with the people you fall in love with people can sit in my office all the time and say i have this with no one else i don't have this with anybody at work nobody among my friends ever thinks like that you're the only one who speaks like this or thinks this about me or with whom i do this no you're the only one and now we go back in history and i'm sorry to be the psychologist but that's really right it is the place where we often learned about closeness, trust, loyalty, commitment, sharing, taking, receiving, asking, all these essential verbs of relationships.

4:27We learned that at home. We also learned jealousy and all this other things. Possessiveness, vengeance, you name them. The beauty and the not beauty. Yeah, we saw it all as children, right? We saw the fights, we saw the love, we saw the coldness, the lack of intimacy, the intimacy, yes. And we bring that with us. And we often promise ourselves, I'll never be this one. I'll never be this way. I'll never talk like this. And we find ourselves often much closer to the apple. And then resenting ourselves. Up to the tree. We resent ourselves. We're like, how do we do that? Why do we get to this place?

5:01And then we feel ashamed about it. And since we don't like to feel ashamed about it, we hide it. And one of the ways we hide it is we blame the partner. That's just one of the ways. We are very resourceful in not owning our shit.

5:21I 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 want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to 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 thank you for listening to this episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

6:04Thank 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.

6:54Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.