Stop Attracting The Wrong Relationships. Do This To Find Lasting Love! | Lewis Howes

0:00If you want to stop being in relationships that you feel like you're failing in and they aren't making you happy then you need to stop repeating the same patterns that you've always repeated. And you need to learn how to become the best partner for someone and also learn how to attract the right type of partner for yourself. But how do you do that? Well, today I put together a masterclass with the five most impactful conversations with relationship experts that we've had here on the School of Greatness to help you understand how to create lasting love in your life. In this first section, I'm speaking with the one and only Esther Perel, who is a psychotherapist known for her expertise in modern relationships, erotic intelligence, and infidelity, and on the most important internal work that you need to do to improve your future relationships.

0:53What is the main thing you would recommend people work on themselves, whether in transition of relationships or in a relationship? Is there one thing that they could always be working on to improve themselves, to do better for other relationships? If their entire story about the relationship that just ended is about what the other person did wrong to them, something is missing in the story. Yeah. That doesn't mean that the other person may not have done things that were hurtful to them. But add to it, who were you in this relationship? Absolutely. What role did you play? what did you see that you didn't want to pay attention to?

1:37What things do you wish you had done differently? What pieces do you wish that your partner had seen and accepted from you differently? Where did you wish you would have said less? And where did you wish you would have said more? What do you learn from this relationship? And if when you say what you learn is just that I want to make sure that the next person is, or it gives me what I need. You know, or is less of this or more of that. You know, who do you want to be in the next relationship? How are you going to add value? A relationship is a story of many people. It's not even a story just of two.

2:16Who was too involved in your relationship? Who was not involved enough? So there's a cast of characters in a relationship. and uh and it's all those questions that you want to ask when you are in transition what what i think that's it i mean you can but they are both directions if you find yourself with a spotlight only on the other person and you in a passive receptive um stance you're missing yeah a whole pan of the story yeah and you're probably more of the problem of the relationship than them, if you're just focusing on them probably. A relationship is not about this person and that person.

3:00The relationship is what happens in between. This is my view on relationships. It's not an essentialist view. This is this personality and that personality. It's the dynamic. You can have a dynamic with a certain partner. You've had dynamics with certain partners. And of course, it was just the right fit between the match and the ignition. And so you had enough inside of you to react with a certain kind of, let's put your jealousy. But you may meet another person who acts differently and you may still have a little bit of that jealousy inside of you, but it doesn't get activated because this person is responding very differently to you.

3:42And when you say, where were you? They don't say, why do you always have to ask me that question? They just say, I just want to do this. It's all good, darling. I'm right here. I've got your back. And then you don't go into your chest pain. So this is very important to understand. We are not the same person with different partners. We may have certain things that come out depending on what is being sent over to us. So the relationship is a figure eight. It's what I do that makes you do something that then makes you react to me a certain way that then draws that out of me, that draws that out of you, and each one actually creates the other.

4:24And when you get that view of relationships, when you come out and you're in transition, you say to yourself, let's say, I was with someone who completely disconnected. Okay, they disconnected. Did I push them away? Are there ways in which I contributed sometimes? to the disconnection. And that is not self-blame. That is understanding the dynamic. You can take responsibility about things without blaming yourself. And you can hold the other person accountable without blaming them. It's not a blame dance. But it is an understanding of what did I do that made you do what you then did to me that then made me.

5:08That's the relationship. And if someone's like, you know what, they listen to you, Esther, they really want to have an amazing relationship. They want to have a rich life knowing it's not going to be perfect, but they want to create beauty and adventure and play and go through life through the sadness and the adversities and all the things that happen in life. And they're thinking to themselves, how much should I pour into myself for my dreams, my health, my friends and family? How much should I pour into the other person, into their life that I'm creating a partnership with and how much should I pour into the relationship itself?

5:45What would you say to that? But you asked me, it's different questions, right? What keeps a relationship alive is one question. How much do you invest in a relationship is a different question. So I'm going to go to the one about what keeps it alive because it's part of, and I'm suddenly watching the box and thinking, it is what I'm mostly interested in. Because I work on eroticism. What keeps us alive? What keeps us hopeful? What keeps us engaged with possibility? Not physically alive, but connected alive. Physically connected to life. Life force, life energy. Why? Because I think everybody understands relationships that are not dead versus relationships that are alive, teams that are not dead, companies versus companies that are alive.

6:45What is flourishing versus surviving? And because it is part of my personal history, and I come from a background of survivors, of parents who were in concentration camps, and I wanted to understand how do people stay alive when they spend five years in a concentration camp. So that's why I've got interested in eroticism. Sexuality is a piece of this, but sexuality is not eroticism. You can have sex every day and feel nothing. Eroticism is the poetry that accompanies it. It's the meaning we give to it. Right? It's the story that's attached. So eroticism in a relationship is the quality of imagination, curiosity, playfulness, mystery, risk-taking, novelty that people bring to their relationship.

7:36Those are the things that I think bring life to a relationship. So in the research of Eli Finkel, it means doing new things together, taking risks beyond your threshold, out of your comfort zone. Because if you do pleasant things that are familiar, it's cozy, it's friendship, it's love, but it's not exciting, it's not erotic, it's not necessarily desire. it's calibrating your expectations so that you have and that means diversifying your intimate connections or your deep connections for me intimacy doesn't mean sexual either it just means people that are important to you that accompany you through the life stages and through the big events in life these three things expectations, calibrating expectations diversifying your social connections and taking risks and doing new things is the research of Eli Finkel for thriving relationships.

8:35But then in that piece, I think play is essential. It's huge, right? Playfulness, it's huge. And it is actually the quality of emotions that is the least talked about. How often are you playing in your relationship? All the time. Humor is essential. It's an essential salve and balm in my relationship. I can be in the middle of an argument and then I start to laugh. And then I just get perspective and we just kind of ground ourselves back again. It's flirting. It's teasing. It's making fun of. It's that whole realm of we're not really serious and we don't take ourselves that serious. And what happens when relationships are taking themselves very serious and they're not playing?

9:24Look, I had a teacher who once said to me, if a couple comes to you for therapy and there is absolutely zero humor left, it is diagnostic. Really? Now, is it true? You know, nobody has proven that scientifically. But what you know is that humor, and if you listen to my podcast, if you listen to the sessions on where should we begin or on how it works. You'll see in the middle of talking about trauma, painful event, major fights, strife, I laugh with them. I manage to see if they can see themselves, if they have a bit of distance, of perspective, if they understand sometimes the absurdity of the things that we get into, the things over which we fight, the way we do it.

10:12And even if it's just a glimmer, a smile on the side on the corner i know they know that i know that we know and we and it creates that complicity and it invites a new possibility some people may be resisting the humor they're like no they want to hold on to seriousness yes if you want to hold on to righteousness to i am right to victimization to i have the view that is the right only view that matters and only my perception and my experience is the truth, then you are in a polarized system that is rigid and unyielding. Humor and play is possibility. Possibility invites change. Change invites healing.

10:59Yes. I want to ask you a few more questions, then I want us to play your game for a little bit. Over the last two years, was there anything that came up for you personally in your own inner world that you noticed, oh, there's something, like we talked about it, it created a lot of pressure for people if there were things that came out. Was there anything for you that you were like, oh, there's something I still need to work on myself or need to continue the healing journey of that came out in the last couple of years with being at home and not doing things the way they used to be? I will answer this in two ways.

11:35The way that I experienced the pandemic. So in the first, in the beginning, right after I left you, I went back to New York and I went in lockdown. And basically, it was in the, you know, suddenly kind of, I got gripped with a bit of a panic. And primarily because I thought I can't catch this thing. Because if I catch it, I am now suddenly considered elderly. I'm past 60. But you're 35. Yeah, yeah. for the pandemic had changed. It suddenly shifted overnight. I became elderly. And that meant I wasn't sure if we entered the hospital, me or Jack, that we will pass the triage. Interesting. And he's older than me.

12:20And I got really, really scared. I had a lot of post-traumatic stress symptoms that are very much connected to the Holocaust and to my family experience. that sense that overnight, this whole life I have built could just disappear like this. And it was irrational. I was terrified that Jack would die to the point, you wanted to know about humor in my relationship? So we are in the middle of construction at the time and the workers. And at that point, he comes to me and he says, I asked the workers to dig a hole in the garden. I said, oh, yeah, why? He said, so that when I die, you can just roll me right in.

13:02Oh, my God. Wow, talk about humor. But I cracked up because he showed me, girl, you're gripped in fear. And I just started to laugh and I just realized, no, no, no, he's not dead. Because I was ready to stop construction. I said, we're not making this. No one can come here within a thousand yards of our day. No, no. It's more like we will not survive. No way. I was really, when it's post-traumatic, it's trauma is the word, right? So I really was very, very, very scared. And his humor diffused it for me and just brought me back and said, we're continuing to build. We're going to live. We're going to survive.

13:40Don't worry, girl. It's like, so this was one. And it slowly, you know, I entered into the long term of the pandemic and it dissolved. And that's when I understood this came out of that. I missed my friends. I missed my dinner parties. I missed intimacy. and I created a host of different group experiences, pods. I had a movie club on Zoom on three continents. Oh, that's cool. I had a book club. I had a yoga group that met four times a week still till now that is over two continents. Wow, that's cool. And I had a hiking group. I had a swimming group in the summer. And then one day I said, I need to play and I need to continue to have conversations where I learn something new.

14:29I was so freaking tired of talking about the pandemic all the time. Sure, sure. And I said, I'm going to create a game. Not having any idea of what this thing was going to become and what it represented, I just thought, oh, I want to do something creative. And I'm going to, I want people to be able to talk about something that isn't just like, you know, when you live six months like this in lockdown, you begin to have the same conversation. Of course, yeah, yeah, of course. So I just thought, how am I going to make couples have fun, get energized, you know, be curious about each other, talk about something else?

15:02And I thought, we need to play because play is a container. Play gives you the possibility to take risks, to talk about things that you would otherwise not talk about because it's under the guise of play. Play allows you to ask questions that you would otherwise not ask, certainly not to your partner, because we get more shy with the people that we live with than with strangers sometimes. Interesting, yeah. You know, you're more daring to ask sometimes questions to strangers. You're never going to see again. Or people you've just met than the person you live with for decades on end. That's interesting.

15:34I just, so play became very, very central. When you play, you still are able to lift yourself from the ground. And it means you can enter the world of imagination and where the rules are different. And every child at this moment, you know, around the Ukrainian crisis, you can see when kids are still able to play, it is the moments when they are not in hypervigilance. It is an essential survival skill. Yes, yes. Underrated. And from that place came where should we begin? It's one of the key things in a relationship and in life is what I'm hearing you say. It's essential. It's essential. It's essential.

16:17Now, here's another side question before we get into this. Play is problem solving. Play is creativity. Play is risk-taking. Play is... Spontaneity. It's all these things. It's the other side of fear. Next up, I speak with Jillian Tarecki, who is a renowned relationship expert on why understanding your own psychology is the key to attracting the right type of person for your life. In order to know who is right for you, you have to understand your own psychology. You have to understand yourself. You have to understand where your vulnerabilities lie, where your weaknesses lie, where your strengths are, the trauma that you've been through.

17:02You know, if you've been if you've had a rough go at life, then you're going to need someone who makes you feel really accepted and safe and doesn't judge you for that. It doesn't give you a hall pass to bring that trauma in. But the reality is our past is our past. And so understanding who's the right partner for you is not only understanding your psychology, but getting really real with yourself. Because people will say, oh, I just wish I was this person. I'm really attracted to outdoorsy people. And I just wish I was more outdoorsy. Oh, I could be more outdoorsy. No, you have to be really real with yourself.

17:37You hate the outdoors. You might be really attracted to someone who likes the outdoors. But sorry, Charlie, like that's not going to be right for you. You can't sleep in a tent for three nights with bugs. That's not you. It's not you. You've got to be super real. And that person who you're really attracted to who does that, sorry. It's not going to work long term. It's not going to work long term. You could have a fun fling, but it's not going to work long term. So really knowing yourself and honoring yourself is how you choose well. Yeah, that could be the summer fling. But then it's like if you're with the outdoorsy guy, he wants that to be his life, six months in the mountains a year.

18:11Exactly, exactly. And you're like, well, I'm trying to create a stable home with kids in the future. Exactly. It doesn't work. It doesn't mean they're not great people. It's just not going to work. It's just not what you want for the vision of your life. Exactly. And people have to get really real with themselves. And they don't. And then they end up paying for that. What's been the biggest mistakes you've brought to relationships? Me personally? That you've later had to realize and take accountability for. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was responsible for this or this. Or I could have shown up differently.

18:41Yeah. Yeah, for me, definitely has been in the past codependency. And what it looks like is it's funny. You know, relationships are funny. I mean, I've had some really beautiful relationships and I've had some not so beautiful relationships. And that's why certain people are going to bring out certain things in you, whereas others are not. But I've definitely brought codependency and low self-worth to relationships, like depending on my partner too much for my happiness. Really? Yeah. What happens when we depend on our partner to make us happy? Um, catastrophe. So here's, here's the paradox. I think that we need to be with someone who wants to make us happier and that we want to make, we want to add value to each other's lives.

19:24We want to make the path easier, but no one can walk our path but ourselves. And so what happens is that when, and it's unconscious, you know, and it's part of it is also conditioning. It's like, be with someone who makes you happy, this or that, you know. The problem is that if you don't feel at least mostly whole, you know, we all have our things that we're dealing with. But if you don't, if you feel really fragmented, and you think a relationship or another person is going to actually bring all the pieces together, then what's going to happen is that you're going to be really disappointed because then you're relying on another fallible, flawed human.

20:04imperfect human imperfect human and you're going to have all these expectations and your your shoulders are going to be crushed by the weight of failed expectations constantly um but you know so yeah i've done that yeah um not really standing on my own two feet emotionally I have brought stress to a relationship and not and not my self-awareness around stress to the point where I've closed or yeah where I've closed you know not been receptive to love. Guarded. Yeah, guarded or just tense and stressed and just totally expecting to be loved anyway. And it's, you know, relationship is so filled with paradox.

20:57It's like, yes, they should actually contribute to your happiness. But you also have to know how to make yourself happy. No, you don't have to love yourself completely to be in a relationship. But yes, you have to love yourself at some level, you know. Or you learn to love yourself in a relationship, but also you can't enter a relationship hating yourself. There's just so many paradoxes. And I would just say that people just need to find sort of the balance for themselves. And like the reality is that we should be adding value to each other's lives. We should want to root for our partner and we want to see them win.

21:37And we want to see like their path be just like paid with gold. and we will do anything to help them, but we can't actually pave the path for them. And that's the key difference. And we can't expect that from someone. Right. I think that's, you're speaking my language right now because, you know, over the last couple of years of doing my own healing journey, I was just like, if I enter a relationship again, right? It was kind of like if, you know, because I was just like, I'd rather be happy and on my own. no but I love intimacy and connection yeah it's like okay I want it but it's like not at the expense of like suffering yes and abandoning my my values and my vision and lifestyle my needs yes but I was like I just want to make sure that I'm always taking care of it and loving myself and taking care of myself and creating my own joy and happiness and fulfillment independent of a relationship.

22:35Never needing someone, but the way they show up can just add to that joy, add to that happiness. And I want to be in a relationship with someone that is a joyful person. It's kind of like their baseline. Because they've processed stuff, they've been on the healing journey, they're whole, not perfect, but whole and continuing to improve. But they're just, their baseline is joy. When someone's baseline is joy, you don't have to do something to make them joyful they are joyful yes and so it's getting your place to a state of peace and joy and fulfillment in your own life so that you don't need the person to make you happy yeah absolutely and then you're not going to self-abandon i think or diminish your self-worth in the relationship if someone's abusive or acting out of character consistently you're not going to stay in that You're going to be like, well, that doesn't work for me.

23:29And that's really the key point because honestly what's epidemic in terms of what I see personally is just low self-esteem. And people, it's sort of like two camps. I see people either being selfish and not appreciating their partner. Not giving enough to their partner. Not giving enough. Or I see the people tolerating too much BS. Right. And so to the people who tolerate too much, it's like you have to do something to raise your self-esteem. something because the what people tolerate out there is what i've tolerated it's it's unbelievable actually but part of that is also because people are so afraid to be alone and they're afraid to start over and the time invested with that last person exactly love your life single you can really love your life single but also really want a relationship i don't want to discourage i think that life is better in a good relationship it just is and and getting love from a partner and sharing and having that exchange is is really profound but it but you know you also have to give up your preferences to be in a relationship right you know like i tell single people all the time like you want to lie in your bed diagonally like go for it you like all that secret single behavior enjoy it because when you're in a relationship and you're living with someone, you can't necessarily do that.

24:57But you have to really, like you said, being in the position where you'd rather be single than just in something subpar. That is an amazing position to be in. Yeah, it's huge. It's huge. Are you in a relationship right now? I'm actually not, which is wild. I mean, I guess it's not that wild. I, you know, so the whole reason why I do this is that I taught yoga for 20 years. And so yoga is like probably the most important thing in my life other than people in my life. And I had a really difficult marriage that only lasted two years. It was like actually... How long were you together for before? Four years.

25:39Well, we were together two years prior to that. And interesting, this is an interesting story. So I would say 90 % was perfect before we got married, but the 10 % that wasn't was so, so profound. And yeah, I felt seen, safe, love, adored. I adored him. We had amazing rapport. We laughed hysterically. I really like it when I make people laugh. If you can understand, I have a really dark, nasty sense of humor. So if you can understand my sense of humor, I immediately feel very connected to you, right? And so we really connected. But there were things that um that i would never tolerate and this is something like we're cool like i hit things not working out with him and then my mother died so i went through a lot of tragedy to get to the place where i am now but i'm very cool with him in fact i have a joke that i should probably that he should probably send me a bill because i have this whole career based on this relationship that i had with him.

26:44The wisdom you gained from this experience. Oh, so I'm actually very grateful. But there's an interesting story, which is that we went to, we were about eight months into our relationship and I felt totally in love. We were both totally in love. And I don't know what triggered this because this was a while ago and I just don't, I just don't think about it anymore. It's not traumatic for me. But something triggered him and he had a proclivity towards avoidance and I had the proclivity towards anxiety. And my father was very, very avoidant and shut down. So here we are. Ancient and avoidant. Yeah, it's not a good combination.

27:25So it's a bad combination. But so he was shut down over something that I have absolutely something that was not warranted. And we went to this show called his own traumas. It's totally his own stuff. This was not something that I mean, I can take a lot of responsibility and have, but this is not something that I did. It's something that he interpreted. So we went to this show called Sleep No More. And I don't know if you heard of it, but it was like a thing in New York and it was really, really crazy and really cool. And you get there and they give you like these masks, like from Scream basically, like these crazy masks.

28:00And so you even know if you go with someone, it's a very, you kind of get separate. They separate you. Yeah. So it's a very solitary experience and everyone's behind a mask. So you're having your own experience. But on our way there, I could, he was in what would be the first of many of like these moods where he would shut down and I didn't know what was going on. Back then, I didn't have the courage to say, what is going on? Like, speak up. Like, what's happened? Did I do something? Let's talk about it. Now, it wouldn't even, yeah. You didn't have the tools then. Yeah, I didn't have the tools and I didn't have the self-esteem then.

28:39The courage. Yeah, all of it. And so when we went, he was totally shut down. We were separated. But there were times where you would recognize the person because you know what they're wearing. And I would be so psyched to connect with him. And he would pretend like he didn't see me. It was like a total stonewalling. And I was so incredibly upset. And all I could think about is I got to get this relationship back on track. Like I have to like make this better. From that one day? From that one night because he was stoned. I knew that I was like, his feelings changed about me. I have to make sure that whatever it is that triggered him doesn't trigger him again.

29:17So all this stuff came up. So you interpreted that too. Yes, exactly. So I got really anxious. Low self-esteem. It's not perfect. I don't want to. It's not that it wasn't perfect. It was really bad. So in other words, if I were to encounter that today, that relationship would have ended that day. You'd be like, hey, this doesn't work for me. Yeah. Without question, that actually wouldn't even been a conversation. It just would have ended because I would have known from a value system perspective and also from what is good for me that that is absolutely, we can have fights, we can have disagreements, but that is not allowed in my world.