Transcript for:
Exploring Modern Love and Relationships

a lot of sex conversations about sexuality especially in the United States is either smut or sanctimony it's rarely just a natural conversation an amazing window into the self you can ask a couple do you still have sex that's not the same as what is the role of sex in your life my guest today is Esther Perell a psychotherapist a best-selling author and one of the most prominent and original Authorities on relationships and sexuality A's fluent in nine language is her TED Talks have amassed over 40 million views her Mega bestselling books have been translated into 30 languages and her podcast where should we begin is a fly on-the-wall immersion into her doctor patient experience in a long-term relationship everything that is spontaneous already happened if you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are familiar you strengthen the Friendship dimension of a relationship but if you say I want to feel alive in my relationship then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the Cozy this is a conversation about Modern Love in candid terms we discuss sexuality dating navigating conflict and how to maintain or resuscitate sexual desire and long-term relationships a topic let's just say Demands a certain level of vulnerability on my part before we dig in Ester was kind enough to offer all of you a discount on on her newly launched course called the desire bundle enter code rich5 when you sign up at Esther purell.com and save 15% now through December 2024 Esther is amazing and I think you'll find this conversation is packed with Priceless actionable insights sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship people think of sex is that something you do you have sex rather than it's an experience where do you go in sex tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make [Music] love today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show [Music] possible Esther it's a delight to meet you thank you for doing in this today I'm excited to talk to you here how was your event the other night you had a big Los Angeles live event as part of this ongoing tour that you're on yes yes yes yes so I'm on a my first US tour it's an immersive experience in with thousands of people it's now I'm starting the west coast and I've been very used for so many years to be in my office behind closed doors and four walls in a very quiet confidential space and then I decided I wanted to open the door and lower the walls to my office and invite people to actually come into the office and hear what are the stories and the Transformations and the challenges that people experience there because most people have no idea what's really happening in the lives of others and then I thought how about if I take the office outside and take it with me onto to a stage and I recreate a communal experience of people about relationships and so that's what it is and here we were you know almost 5,000 people and the most beautiful compliment I can receive is when people said it felt like we were in the office with you and I just thought okay that's exactly what I wanted to do and um so it's very moving that's no small feat to be able to create something intimate in a room L with that many people like how do you even approach that to make it interactive in a way where everybody feels like you're talking to them and you're part of just you know some version of that one-on-one experience I mean I would want to say you should come to know I mean it's unfortunately it's totally sold out but uh it's about creating interactions in the audience it's about finding out who are the people who came by the themselves and know no one there and then making sure that the people who are next to them introduce themselves and you create Connection in the Here and Now rather just than talking about connection you make it happen it's about finding out who was dragged there and kind of showed up as a plus one but knows nothing about my work and is wondering where the heck did I land and just acknowledging them because I have a tremendous amount of respect for Skeptics and for people who are in this space who this is really not their natural vocabulary it's about asking people if they are in a relationship or if they would like to be in a relationship or if they would like to be out of the relationship that they are in or at least on occasion which I am too and I think that kind of establishes an level of honesty we're not just here to talk about perfection we're here to talk about the real life experience of something that we all share we are all born in relationships and we all have Legacies and we all want to find ways to connect with ourselves and with the other and I create a host of different interactions I make people talk to strangers I play the card game with the audience I do a very long Q&A it's half the talk half the evening and and the Q&A is is not just a question answer it's really a way of weaving together the the most important concerns that are available that evening you take all the questions sort of in a row right and then you kind of find ways to tie them all together into some kind of unifying principle yeah yeah yeah I think that unifying principle or the communality sometimes this question is formulated very differently but it actually goes at the same thing as that question which was asked from a completely different point of view or starting point and in fact both questions are aiming at something that is shared and when you recognize that you also create connections between people who didn't even know that they were thinking about the same thing so you're weaving not just the questions together but you're creating a community of questions how do you describe what it is that you do as a psychoanalyst and perhaps what do you think it is about your approach to this world that makes you unique and different I think it's two different questions you know I'm not a psychoanalyst I'm actually a systemically trained family therapist I have had a predilection for working with couples even though I see families and individuals and so I more and more Define myself that I primarily do relationship therapy the world of psychotherapy is vast and this is one area that I'm very much interested in I think that I follow the trajectory of colleagues and teachers who all look at relationships in context so we're looking at the sociocultural dimensions of the relationship we're looking at the family legacies that influence the relationships we're looking at the interpersonal Dynamics inside the couple and we're looking at the intra psychic or the intrapersonal aspects into the individuals it's four levels it's multi level Michel shankman I mean people who really were made influences on me so it's not a very narrow lens it's a very layered you know lens and that's something that I prefer to ask people why do you choose me or why do you listen to me or what inspires in what I say or in what way did I change the way that you dissolved your relationship or the way you allowed yourself to stay in your relation I mean I think it's difficult to to identify oneself you know what I hear people tell me I think I have a very Multicultural perspective I speak nine languages and that probably have been around the world I work globally I understand that you don't look at relationships dogmatically but you really look at them contextually I think I am a rather non-judgmental person I think I like to look at a question underneath the question I think I bring humor and creativity and curiosity to to my work I see Psychotherapy as an art I continue to practice I practice two days a week I think it's very important to stay close to the craft itself and and challenged because it's not an easy work I think that I have a capacity to connect the dots of what I think is happening in society and how that influences what's happening inside your sheets underneath your sheets I mean it's kind of macro mro right right right I think that I mean last piece question yeah no I think that last piece is for me um what makes your work so palpable I mean I think there is a certain kind of non-judgmental Jad deiv that you bring to it and a playfulness also to this landscape that is very inviting because it's intimidating and it's scary and we're all you know consumed by guilt and shame and fear and all these things that are barriers to even beginning the discussion or the conversation around these topics and you create like a permissiveness around that where it feels like a welcome that as opposed to like a danger Will Robinson sort of sign but all of it pivots around this idea of kind of navigating the vicissitudes and the landmines of Modern Love and the word modern I think is very important in there so you know how do you think about Modern Love as opposed to kind of love how we've always sort of conventionally or traditionally understood it like what's different about this moment or these times that make love perhaps a little bit trickier and more more complicated to navigate at least and I guess I'm speaking to a predominantly Western audience yes but the Romantic ideal has penetrated every small corner of the world sure so even though um that's what's quite interesting literally as you're asking the question I have like four different answers that uh maybe I could do like your live event and ask you like 10 questions and let you figure out how to synthesize it all I would start actually with highlighting what I think is a very important change that occurred around the realm of relationships period for most of History relationships are organized and and when I say for most of History it's in comparison to here for most of history and still today in many parts of the world and as I say in my audience and probably a lot of you sitting right here relationships are organized around loyalty and Community around Duty and obligation there's a lot of structure there's hierarchy that describes to you what are the roles the expectations the gender roles and there's a lot of certainty and very little freedom and very little personal expression and relationships are tight nuts from which you don't extricate yourself very easily and we move to a model where where structure is replaced by Network and the relationships become loose threats that you can fluidly go in and out of and we have unprecedented choices and options and now at the heart of relationship is the individual and this individual is in search of community previously they was in search of personal freedom and at the heart of this individual are his are their feelings and the dominant feeling is the feeling of authenticity and authenticity is being true to myself and in the name of being true to myself today we foro relationships to not betray me I will leave you and we have never been more free and we have never been more alone and we have never had more uncertainty and more self-doubt so that's the ground yeah yeah of Modern Love does that make you reflect on past paradigms of relationships with a sort of rosec colored glasses like was it better like I mean obviously we're talking about to drill down on it it's like okay in the past relationships were about class structure they were about power and security arranged marriages Etc you know they were political and the furthest thing from you know kind of freely chosen or about romance and love right well romance and love existed passion has always existed took Reas to get married but no I don't at all I think I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the situation of my grandmother so that is it's very simple no I think we have when I say unprecedented choices I cherish them I value them but I'm also aware that they come with a set of consequences modern love exists against a backdrop of emotional capitalism where we are constantly urged to maximize and optimize our choices where we end up sometimes evaluating ourselves as products where we have to deal with comparison as the thief of joy and where we partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism where we sometimes are afraid to commit to the good for fear of missing out on the perfect and we want to find a soulmate on an app this is Modern Love and this Soulmate by the way which has always meant God until now is now a person and with this person I want to experience wholeness and belonging and meaning and ecstasy and Transcendence all stuff that we used to look for in the realm of the Divine and all of this is changing the definition of modern intimacy modern intimacy is no longer about I come to you with my diary and my her modern intimacy is I come to me with my interior life and I'm going to communicate with you it's a communicative experience and I'm going to open up and share with you my fears my vulnerabilities my aspirations and you are going to reflect back and validate me and momentarily help me transcend my existential aloneness so modern intimacy is into me see yeah it's a lot the degree of difficulty is insanely High and the level of pressure uh that is shouldered by not only the Seeker but you know the sought is equally insane and this is all set against a backdrop in which our culture is increasingly secular we don't have our religious Traditions to look for the Divine anymore so we look for it in other individuals and you know particularly or acutely individuals and psychedelics yes that's a newer thing there's something acutely American also about the individual like sort of reigning Supreme right it's all about me what I need what my needs are and and my individual happiness and there's a lot that gets then projected on the sort of romantic candidate to fulfill a number of categories to be kind of worthy of playing that role want the list yeah let's hear it yeah so I want all the things that I have always wanted in that we have always wanted in traditional relationships companionship economic support Family Life Social Status but I want you to also be my best friend my trusted Confidant my intellectual equal my efficient co-parent my fitness buddy my professional coach and my personal development Guru and on top of all of that I want you to be my passionate lover to boot right for the long Hole by the way and that long hole keeps on getting longer it's amazing that any relationship survives this you know list of but many of them are crumbling under the weights of the expectations I mean this is an overburdened system with an underresourced reality since the traditional support systems are not in place and this is one of the challenges of Modern Love Point so I mean that's like how do I even begin with that right like so how does one who comes to you who is in a relationship dilemma I realize this is very general but what's the first thing I say about this this is okay so here's all the things here's all the expectations that each person has on each side there's no possible way that two people coming together are going to be able to meet that for each other so with the understanding of that landscape how does one figure out how to reframe that or come up with a different Paradigm that's going to be functional and healthy I think one of the first questions I often ask is who else is in your system who is part of this social system a relationship exists in an ecology it's an ecosystem who else is here who is there from the family of origin or from a chosen family or among friends or mentors or teachers who supporting you you know when I officiate at weddings which I happen to do sometimes I say to them you know this is not just about we coming to celebrate couple such and such this is about you're offering your support as the witnesses to this couple for the rest of their life because every person at this wedding is thinking about their own relationship while you're listening to these lofty vows so that's the first thing is to help people to not think about their relationship as a story of two that's a concept that's a paradigm shift thinking of it more broadly as a communal dynamic in which there are it's a multiplayer game correct yeah it you may have all these needs there's not you know people always say so after this long lists are we asking for too much I say no we're not I think it's beautiful what we are asking for but we shouldn't ask it from one person what about the people that are part of the relationship in Shadow only you know the people that live in our interior Lives who might not actually be present but residue of past experiences with these people tend to show up and impact relationships in ways that maybe we don't fully appreciate or understand positive or negative both H I think that is reality it's right everybody has had people who took care of them or raised them or did not and should have people have had people who have heard them in the course of their life and others who have inspired them others who believed in them even before they believed in themselves exes lost children I mean we have a legacy a relationship with loads of people who live inside of us so they appear in different ways sometimes they appear with an acute sense of loss I wish my mother was here to see this sometimes they appear as a sense of hypervigilance I let my ex get away with that I'm not going to this again sometimes they appear as a deep sense of longing I want to feel that freedom again that I used to have as a kid so they're associated with situations emotions and often yearnings or yearnings to not repeat or yearnings to experience some of that once again and the most important thing about it is to be aware of it I think the shadow people is our human existence but sometimes we don't realize that they are shadow people and we think that the way I'm responding to you is because of what you are doing to me when in fact I'm projecting on to you something that someone else did to me right of course we all have those shadow people and I think I mean that was very well said my sense is that a lot of relationship difficulties could be avoided with adequate self-awareness on both sides of what you just said and then also being able to talk that through because both parties are bringing all of that to this equation and unless the other side doesn't really understand all of that with their partner that stuff's going to come up and derail their relationship or create conflict where it's not even clear like why this conflict is occurring or what the way out of it is yes yes but I think the you know I I was answering it kind of as you were asking your question I I also think that one of the most important things that often is missing is a sense of humor a perspective humor is a form of reinterpretation of what's Happening that's the perspective and it creates a certain distance from it it's a rewriting giving meaning to something that is completely different than the literal meaning and I think that what happens when people get into stalemates gridlocks impasses conflicts escalations then you name it they often become extremely concrete and literal and serious and that seriousness is what leads them to interpret their stories and to hold on so tenaciously to their stories as if it is the truth relationships are stories sure but when you're in that reactive mode or that cycle of conflict and resolution it's it's hard to hold on to like levity and humor like humor feels like a far distant thing that can at times seem impossible yes because you need to start much sooner you don't do humor when you're already in the dark pit you do humor when you say oh we've been there we've been there so many no we're not going there come on yeah you know you want to do number 63 again number 63 is really a good one for us no and you join you don't do sarcasm you don't belittle you don't degrade you just say oh we are more important than just this we we're going to do what the toothbrush we're going to do this one this fight you know another one every year the holidays come back and every year we have the same fight and it's a kind of a let's not go there it's meant to be a salve it's not and a diffusing and it's meant to say we control the narrative rather than the narrative controls us mhm mhm when people come stuck which is mostly when they come to me the story rule rules them they're no longer authoring their own story it just plays itself out in a split second they hate where they are they have no idea where they devolve there what the hell is going on you know but they don't know how to get out of it the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and conversely the stories we tell about who we think our partner is become so all powerful right like I'm this way because of this and here's what's important to me or whatever it is it doesn't matter what it is we all have that story of course and those then become predictors of of behavior and rationalizations and excuses and the like we can point to our past and say well I did this because of this or you know here's my wound and you know you need to understand that and a lot of these things get weaponized and projected onto our partners and become inflammatory rather than a road map out of it like we become entrenched in these stories and then we just repeat these patterns that ultimately lead to the destruction of of relationships in a way that for many people like they don't even know how they got there I mean I I often say you know that when I see people are stuck stuck is made up of often two elements one is trapped in increasingly rapid cycles of escalation of blame and defense which means reactivity rather than curiosity and reflection and number two is the story that people tell which is that the story becomes very rigid and we hold on to it and the story is made up of two cognitive distortions often when it gets that fixed the first one is that we get caught in confirmation bias yeah confirmation bias is that once I have decided that you don't care or you're selfish or you're a slob or you really don't didn't mean when you apologized or you don't value me or whatever of those things now this becomes the lens to which I see you and I seek evidence that reinforces my belief and I disc evidence that challenges it I have a whole course on conflict that I produced and this one is a very very big one is to track yourself what did I pay attention to so sometimes I just tell people I want you in the course of the next few days I know what you focus on I know what you see I know that you also engage vividly in what we call fundamental attribution error which means that I am complex and you are much more simple mhm if I'm in a bad mood it's because you know something happened along the way and it really kind of influenced my mood today but if you are in a bad mood it's because you're just a nasty person you know mine is circumstantial yours is characterological and so then I give the framework and then I say now go out for the next few days and I would like to just for you pay attention and write down every little thing that you notice that your partner is doing for the good of the community for the good of the relationship as a way of breaking that denial that self-reinforcing self-fulfilling idea you know because it's tenacious the way that the story wants to hold on and so it keeps looking you know I mean you never do this you know and this never means I would like you to do more but when you present it as a fact it's a pseudo factual thing and you it's okay to say I would like you to do more of XYZ but that's not the same as you never do this and if I tell you you never do this I promise you you will find the one example to refute my argument to prove to me that that's not true because what about six months ago when you did this uh there was a comedian I can't remember who it was but he he he had this great joke it's something like uh My love language is uh my list of all the ways that you've wronged me we hold on to that so tightly you know and we seek out evidence to support it whenever we can information bias exactly but you know the interesting thing is that at the same time as people do that they yearn for it to be different but they don't know how they themselves are contributing sometimes to making it not change not change I bet there's a lot of you out there who've been and pondering that new website you'd like to have but just haven't pulled the trigger well with Squarespace it's easy and affordable to build your own beautiful designer website so Squarespace has been a long time partner of the show and what I love about it is it just demystifies everything about what's required to make a website you don't need to be a designer you don't need to know how to code everything is right at your fingertips they make it super simple and they've got these unbelievably beautiful templates to choose from that are oriented around whatever your needs may be whether you need a simple landing page or a full-on online shop snap crackle pop Squarespace has the tools you need to launch your business including e-commerce templates and inventory management so make that website you got it click the link in the description below for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code Rich Roll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or [Music] domain I'm long time in recovery and as you know one of the key Tools in 12 step is performing the inventory right which is basically like looking at your part in every equation and getting out of blame and that is a very powerful tool in in many contexts not the least of which is this like being able to step back and in a place of equinity like really get honest with yourself about the ways in which you're contributing to the unhealthy Dynamic to kind of disabuse yourself of that cognitive bias and but you know why it's so important because one piece is I take responsibility I'm accountable okay so I've I've checked myself and here are the ways in which I think I've done things that are not necessarily helpful to us and here are things that I think actually I'm want to do or I am doing that I think are for the good of us but beyond that I think what's so powerful about the inventory or accountability as a whole is that it really is the foundation for self-esteem and self-confidence because it says this is what my friend Terry real always says I am flawed but I can still hold myself in high regard in order to take responsibility you cannot sink into shame I'm a piece of [ __ ] I'm such a lousy person you have to still respect yourself and have dignity but at the same time you know that you're capable of nasty harmful destructive cruel stuff that that's side the whole spectrum of it yeah and that's what happens when you do the the inventory you say you know because if you just say I'm such a piece of [ __ ] then I feel so bad about myself that you no longer have any reason to be angry with me right but there's a there's a sort of indulgent narcissism with that as well you know like you you can sort of like go around saying that to people and there's a performance aspect to that that's a little bit dishonest like you're saying that to is as much about reaffirming whatever your view of yourself is as a way of like keeping people at a distance or you know kind of playing the victim basically you're not really seeing the other you're still at the center of the universe right you're making it about yourself about you it's about you and that's why when you actually really make it about the other and you really own it then ownership is freedom that's what I mean by I'm flawed but I can I'm I'm standing tall and and I own it and by owning it I'm free it's a very important concept people think that by owning it I'm the blame and I'm the bad person and no the way into that for me is to do my best to not get defensive particularly In the Heat of the Moment Like if I can just hear it out and take a beat and then reflect on it and say oh that's that's interesting yeah I I should look at that or let me look at that or tell me more about why you feel that way like from you know a 10,000 foot view like if you can really extract yourself out of the emotionality like the heightened emotionality that seems to have served me well in those circumstances absolutely our instinct is to just defend ourselves and get defensive and lash out and be aggressive and of course that just creates a downward spiral but sometimes we come with a predisposition a propensity for defensiveness but sometimes we are defensive because someone is attacking us and instead of them saying you know this for example I wish you you you did more of this or less of that or acknowledged here or saw me there we basically say you never do you never see you never say nobody wants to be defined by someone else it's a kind of a thing we want to have prop proprietary rights about is me you don't tell me who I am stay out of that zone and that's what triggers an instant defensiveness as well so it's sometimes internal I'm defensive cuz I instant can feel bruised and criticized and etc etc and vilified and victim and sometimes the defensiveness is relational H isn't everything relational though isn't this one of your big things we are relationship animals and although we reflect on ourselves uh and our own kind of like trajectory through life we are who we are because of our relationship with other people I tend to think like that yes I think we are who we are because our relationship with other people also influence how we see ourselves I mean I do think that in the presence of the other we discover ourselves I think in dialectic terms I don't think you can know happiness without having known suffering I don't think you can you know know beauty without knowing you know or good without evil I mean these things are inter dynamically connected and the same thing is through relation I can't know others if I don't really know myself and I can't know myself if I'm just standing in front of my own mirror right so the monk who's been meditating alone in a cave for many years uh is one thing but the true test of that person's you know sort of spiritual metal is when they go out into the world right or in the AA context it's like if you really want to get confronted with your Character defects get into a relationship right because that's the the engine for growth in many ways like you can only do so much by yourself it's only in your connections with other human beings that you learn what needs to change and how to grow correct but some people choose to live more in relationship to Nature some people choose to live more in relationship to the Divine I mean so the monk may be less preoccupied with their relationship to other humans if they're living in a more insular way I study people who are in relationships with parents and children with friends I'm very interested in Friendship these days colleagues co-founders creative pairs all kinds of diets and that's myh that's the field of study for me so yes we are relational but we may choose to actually live in a different relation ship which is to Beyond humans what is the biggest uh relationship issue that you find yourself contending with the most with your patients and the people that you see I think that they they're various different things and they also are generational and they cultural I never think there's just one thing I mean yes people often if they are in relationships come to say we don't communicate but that is a line that opens up an entire portal you know to a host of issues so these days is people are way too much living in a contactless world in which they don't really need to leave their house for a lot of things to get food to work to exercise to meet people I mean and they are more and more isolated and they become more and more disembodied and they lose a sense of Attunement and physical Attunement to others and they lose the capacity for nuance and negotiation because they also are influenced by algorithmic Perfections which give them very polished answers so that you can bifurcate all the inconveniences of life and all the frictions and then they find themselves rather stumped when they have to deal with conflict or friction or differences and so they polarize and they cut off that's one narrative is that part of why you're so interested in friendships right now yes yeah because I mean also you know you get questions and then the questions sent to me begin to tell me of a concern that is growing in the society friendship breakup I don't remember 20 years ago having this question at my door as frequently that doesn't mean that there were not breakups among friends and certainly among brothers and relatives but this is a very important piece because this is how tensions in the culture and the political systems at large are literally fracturing relationships between people who once cared about each other deeply I think this description that I just gave you is quite generational but uh of a of a great concern to me it's more and more interested I see more and more people in my office who carry over the expectations for Perfections that the algorithmic Perfections are giving them and those become their expectations for relationship it shouldn't be hard it shouldn't be it shouldn't be this it shouldn't be that so that's why I create courses on conflict and on sexuality because it is it does maybe it shouldn't but it is it's part of relationships it's intrinsic to relationships I think that contempt is a major issue you know the the gments have the what they call the Four Horses of Apocalypse I agree I think indifference criticism defensiveness and contempt are major breakdowns of relationship so they don't call it that they call it we don't communicate but underneath do we don't communicate at these four mhm and once you reach that stage of contempt it becomes very difficult to walk it back contempt is often seen as the the hardest of them all well we're in a very deranging time loneliness is another big issue MH inside relationships this is another piece you know say more about that I mean it's not like people haven't been lonely in their marriages okay and but they had communities they went to Neighborhood associations churches synagogues temples um you know workplaces where they spend a lot of time so that they support groups of All Sorts that were not designated as support groups but that's what they offered so you could spend a lot of time in relationships with other people rather than just have to confront your partner all the time but now it's a thing that I've come to call ambiguous loss have you ever heard that term ambiguous loss is actually a term that was coined by a psychologist poine boss and she originally created it to describe situations of unresolved mourning when you don't know if the person is still there or not there so you can have somebody who's physically sitting right next to you but they are emotionally or psychologically completely gone like Alzheimer or dementia they don't remember your name they don't know they exist but you can also have situations where the person is physically gone but they are emotionally or psychologically completely Vivid deployment disappearance hostage taking and in both situations you don't know if the person is there or not there and this days you find two people sitting at home on their sofas watching television scrolling on their phones trying to say something to each other where the other person basically says uh-huh uh-huh and you know that they're not really listening and that that personal thing you just shared kind of evaporated in midair and you experience that incoherent sense of aloneness next to somebody that ambiguous loss is I think one of the very interesting things I look at these people I say and you came to talk to me about not having sex I mean should we talk about sex or should we talk about this situation first being alone in a relationship yeah and doing things that are by by their very nature keeping people not just separate but immersed in other worlds while they're sitting on their couch together now now you could say then what's different if two people are sitting and reading a novel certain things are not that different they are in a fantasy world they're elsewhere Etc but this thing on an everyday basis where people sit at their dinner tables and their faces are in their screens and their communication is on WhatsApp there is something that is fraying at the edges sure yeah we're running this gigantic social experiment uh that I think at this point we know is not in our best interest that is uniquely deranging for a whole variety of reasons one of which is these devices that we're all holding um are all bespoke to us and us alone like what we're seeing is completely unique and we could be in partnership with someone else and they're looking at their phone but what they're looking at is you know like you're moving apart from each other because you're immersing yourselves in Worlds that might not overlap entirely until one day you wait up and you don't know who that person is meanwhile all our interactions socially are through the device and it gives us this illusion of being connected when in fact it's creating more and more loneliness and layer on top of that the increased suburbanization of the world and work from home and all of these things where the opportunities and the occasions for being with other people in real life are fewer and far between and of course there's going to be a decline or a integration in our skill our emotional intelligence our ability to navigate conflict to be in social situations and the less we do it the more intimidating it becomes the more fearful it is and you know I see this with young people and my younger children and they just they don't want to text they don't want to get on the phone they don't want to talk like they don't know how to talk to somebody and it's like you H you have to learn these things right it's almost like I have to push them into the world in order to you know make sure that they're developing those skills you everybody their friends are doing it and and and it's like what is this going to reap for this generation it's called the rise of artificial intimacy yeah and then and it's it's like yeah it's not it's not headed in a good direction I mean it's headed somewhere that I cannot imagine and predict but what I do know is this thing about artificial intimacy it's changing our expectations and um I hear very often people who are very very moved that someone sends them birthday wishes on a text rather than a DM and that that means that they were really paying attention to them and I'm thinking they couldn't pick up the phone and sing a song and I mean you you really don't ask for much isn't it you can have a thousand virtual friends and no one to feed your cat when modern loneliness masks as hyperconnectivity and then nobody to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy and then we confuse friends with friendship that's part of why I would also interested in Friendship these days it's like what is friendship and how do people cultivate that people know how to cultivate friends supposedly but it's two different things talk a little bit more about that this is such a rich topic fren I would I would one day I'll just do talk about friendship alone but friends accompany you through phases of life or through your entire life good friends hold you accountable they reckon with you they hold you when you're about to collapse it's like they have their hands underneath you so that before you hit the ground you're in their hands and they won't let you fall friends believe in you when you're you know fretting friends are there also to tell you when you should get out of a relationship that seems to really not be very good for you friends basically sometimes say stop acting like a jerk friends play with you friends discover the world with you explore travel are curious I mean friends are erotic experiences and they are the only mutually chosen I mean you cannot be friends with someone who is not friends with you you can love someone who doesn't love you back but that level of mutuality is that is of friendship and reciprocity is absolutely unique friends is the first relationship that you choose as a child as that is a free choice yeah I've never thought of it that way but certainly it's it's a dynamic that requires effort and work right there's a difference between somebody you call your friend because you text each other on the internet occasionally versus the person who's going to show up in your moments of need um Arthur Brooks calls it the difference between deal friends and real friends MH we're chatting you know via text with a bunch of people but that's very different qualitatively from a real friend look I think it's a piece of it that is also very cultural I mean English does not have many middle words it has acquaintance friends good friend best friend French has a few words in between yeah you know but I do remember that you know when I arrived to the United States I I had to learn that people often say I have a friend but that would be someone they hadn't seen in 10 years and I just thought that's such a we that doesn't exist what is the French word for that I know someone yeah I met someone I know someone you know I used to have a friend and this is because of Mobility this is because people move here a lot you know I'll tell you one thing that is very interesting about friends and I don't know how this today but it was a thing I experienced as a mother when my child my youngest child was in kindergarten he had a very close friend and we thought it was a beautiful relationship these two boys and it was obvious that they should be together in the same classroom in first grade and the school basically told us no what's important is that they learn to make new friends that they be agile adapt at new relationships CU they're about to move around anyway for the rest of their life here they better know how to create new friends each time this was the opposite culturally of the way that we had learned about it in Belgium when you had a good friend you made sure to make to have the kids stay with their best friend because it meant that they were entering into this new phase of Life first grade with building support and that you looked at friendship as how do you reinforce continuity rather than how you reinforce replicability yeah that seems like a violent act to like engineer a friendship breakup under the under the idea of like instilling resilience or something yes but it was that idea yeah back to the AI thing uh I'm imagining a not too distant future in which there is like a her device and people can engage with an artificial intelligence that sounds and feels very human and says all the things that you want them to say and you feel seen and heard and understood but that artificial intelligence is just that it lacks a soul it lacks a Consciousness and it's a dynamic that's one-sided because it's engineered specifically to meet your needs and so what it's teaching you is that you don't have to worry about your partner's needs because this is a computer right and so when that person goes out into the world they're being programmed into this mentality that that they don't need to worry about meeting another person's needs and any successful relationship is a balancing of meeting each other's needs correct and then we're going to get artificially engineered Partners yeah who will provide exactly that kind of and you're going to have to open up a new part of your practice to like deal with these people and all the D I think that it is a central question I mean Cherry turkle's work on artificial intimacy is really studying that thing it's like relationships are I and th relationships are not just about how the individual gets their needs met in a rather narcissistic way which means all with the arrow turned toward me relationship involves reciprocity mutuality atonement empathy those are all experiences that have the arrow pointed towards the other and in the machine you get an other that doesn't have a subjectivity that other doesn't have a reaction to what you do even though that will become programmed at some level and this is a big big debate is what kind of lessons for a relationship is this development producing you talk with people in AI or people who are very techno optimistic and they always not always but they often answer you not yet it will happen you know and if you question that you know you're often seen as not necessarily um going with progress so to speak I think look I'll give you another an example of the opposite of this of this a thing right I asked a question in the tour just really one of these simple questions but it tells me so much how many of you grew up playing freely on the street did you sure any of your kids do they play freely on the street uh did they no because we live on a a a busy sort of road where it's not safe to just go out and run down the street which is something I've thought a lot about so last night you asked me about the show here in La I asked these thousands of people and the hands were high up when I said did you grow up and when I said how many of you have children or no children that are playing freely on the street it was a trickle what does that mean it means that play which is such an important ground for experimentation and Learning and Development free play used to be this ground for social negotiation where kids learned to make friends to make peace to have enemies to make Wars to broker agreements to make rules to break rules and this whole ground for unprompted unmonitored unscripted negotiation is gone and that to me is an essential piece of what we are talking about here when you're talking about the AI that only has one direction you are programmed to say what I want to hear is not a relationship it's a pacifier it's inevitable also I mean I live with the developments you know but it's not at this moment I do meet people who enjoy you know even I sometimes think my robots are far more reliable than my husband you know I mean but these are all these are all problems born of I guess at some point good intentions like you know the idea that I'm going toids don't go out and play what no I was going to say I'm not going to AI is extremely important it's doing a ton of great things but in the realm of relationships of what oh it's terrible we could say it I'm in total agreement with you I was thinking back to kids in play like the idea that we need to protect our kids came about at some point where we were all meant to be very afraid of the world and we're putting helmets on kids for everything and knee pads and are kind of projecting a fear onto them that the world is a very dangerous place that has has put a damper on you know this kind of free range idea of kids being out in the world and as a result we've sacrificed not only what you mentioned but kind of the awe and wonder of going on adventures and you know sort of stretching your own independence uh which are of course also important skills that you need in the world and you know how does that translate into what kind of adults these people become when they internalize that fear and approach the world from that place of thinking that we should all hermetically seal ourselves from it rather than embrace it and welcome it and skin our knees and have those experiences which create that resilience and that ability to navigate conflict and difficulty and deal with obstacles as they come agree yeah I've been with my wife for a long time 25 years or something like that so I would be remiss and not h you know exploring what you might be able to share with me that might be helpful in my own marriage and I would say that I have a very successful marriage and I still we love each other very much and I think we're really good at communication and navigating conflict we have four kids and they're on the older side now but I think like a lot of couples who've been together for a long time you know relationships are a constantly evolving thing and we go through phases with it and and now with the kids older it's sort of like okay who are you now and like where are we with this whole thing and how can we get back to you know some more of the intimacy that was so integral to our relationship in the earlier years and do it from a perspective of of playfulness right and so we're we're in this process of finding our way back to that place like it's an exploratory phase and it's [ __ ] hard man you know like it's this is not an easy thing and it brings up like so much stuff and you know it's hard to talk about this stuff when you been with somebody for so long stuff means what yeah good question stuff what does stuff mean having to confront the ways in which old patterns continue to resurface and lead to conflict um ways in which old traumas continue to rear their heads and create conflict I suppose and also everything's good right like we can just continue on on our way and we're both kind of fulfilled and happy in what we do um and it's easy to kind of perpetuate that and not acknowledge like hey we could be more together um than we are currently and how do we find our way back there so stuff what is the stuff I guess there's a lot of stuff but one would be just allowing things to continue as they always have complacency under yeah complacency that was the word I was looking for I can easily fall into the illusion that it's a static thing when of course it's not it's an always evolving Dynamic are all the children out of the house so you still have some living with you yeah we so we have a 17-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old daughter and they're both out of the house one is in boarding school and one is in college and then we have a 29 and a 28-year-old uh and they moved out before the pandemic and they were living on the other side of town doing their thing and then when Co happened they moved back and they're they're still at home but they're like they have their own lives like they live at home but like you know it's not like I have to worry about picking them up or where they are on a day-to-day basis so it's not quite an empty nest situation in that traditional sense um but it is a a moment in which we're attempting to kind of reconnect with each other in a more meaningful way yeah I mean it's a lot to say about this but I I tend to think I like this this is a framework that I have often found helpful is that most of us today in the west will have two or three adult relationships or marriages in our lifetime some of us are going to do it with the same person so this is your transition are you going to have another relationship with each other and that often involves a lot of ritual I find ritual is an extremely important and undervalued experience in relationships and the ritual sometimes is about saying goodbye to your first marriage and having the opportunity to create a second marriage it may involve writing new vows it may involve having a ceremony with friends it may involve having a ceremony alone but it involves a ritual something that is symbolic that declares the intention that puts in the investment that articulates it that throws things in the ocean in the water in the on you know Burns It on the Mountain whatever it is but the beauty of of of elevate you what this a ritual it it's a routine that is infused with creativity and intention and what you're talking about is how do you break the routine well by turning it into a ritual so that's first thing my wife is all about rituals this is the conversation that we' had you know and she's somebody just for context like very much lives in that kind of heart centered space where I get lost in my mind and sometimes we miscommunicate because we're speaking different languages and that's a result of many things she she's all about that just tell her take me I mean because the take me is I'm curious I'm open I'm receptive to something know I know my ways I know I can be complacent I can be lazy you know I can admire myself in routine number two is this and this is the research of Eli fle that is very useful if you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are cozy and they are familiar you strengthen the Friendship dimension of a relationship which is huge but if if you say I don't just want to survive I want to feel alive in my relationship I want to infuse that erotic energy erotic as in aliveness vibrancy Vitality curiosity playfulness that then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the Cozy and that means new experiences it's like generate new cells new experiences that involve risk an active engagement with the unknown and the novel curiosity playfulness all of that for some people that's travel for some people that's getting into a thing together that they never did for some people it's what is the thing that you've always wanted to do and never got to for some people it's Journeys together for some I mean it's different things but they involve a meeting with yourself and with the other in a new context that reveals new things about yourselves and about each other and that means risk playfulness is when risk and uncertainty are fun what long-term relationships need to be willing to let go of is the illusion of safety and certainty as if it can continue forever because there is a difference this is so important between surviving and thriving mhm when some people people don't need to do the driving like it's not for everyone but those who say I want to feel that energy that that connection that Vitality that again it doesn't happen on its own a culture that becomes invisible dies a relationship that doesn't do the things that maintain its aliveness and freshness becomes cozy and familiar and familiar and that is beautiful but that is not going to give you the prickle that you say you would like to feel on occasion yeah and the risk and there's no risk the uncertainty well like there's no risk to the relationship sure sure sure but that's premised on a foundation of trust like you have to have trust in order to take the risk so that is a major debate in the trust research field tell me more do you need to to trust in order to take risks or is risk-taking what builds trust oh interesting this is the big debate in the trust research field and trust is when I mean Rachel butzmann says it's beautifully trust is an active engagement with the unknown it's a leap of fi trust if you need Assurance up front then you're not trusting then it's not trust right right right that's a bit of a mind [ __ ] no it's just a different way of looking at it no when I say risk it means that that risk taking will in and of itself I mean is meant to strengthen the trust and develop a different kind of intimacy it's an intimacy of adults it's an intimacy that doesn't go straight through the role of parents it's a different level of Engagement where two people get to ReDiscover each other and themselves at a different stage of their relationship sometimes it's new friends sometimes it's New Horizon sometimes it's a new house sometimes it's a new job the word new stands in front of everything we're brought to you today by Roa glasses are not something you normally think about as a piece of performance gear which when you think about it is kind of insane because you can't perform at your best if you can't see well the Geniuses at Roa basically rebuilt eyewear from the ground up no matter how active you are or how much you sweat these things never slip or fall off your face they're super durable they look awesome and they've got tons of super classy modern styles to choose from I've been rocking Ras for about four years at this point I love them I'm a big fan of the Hamilton style and gloss black that's this Frame right here as well as clear or I guess they call them vintage on the website and uh if you want to try them out for yourself you can do that right now and unlock 20% off your order with the code Rich Roll roka.com or you can click the link in the description below okay back to the [Music] show I think what my wife is looking for most is intimacy and feeling like she's truly being seen M and I think um my predisposition or my preset is to lose myself in my own mind and go out into the world and you know pursue achievements as a proxy for love like I think part of my you know wounding or my wir ing is around love being a transactional thing and my worthiness or my deservedness for love being a function of you know kind of how I show up in the world and do things like under this idea of like specialness and so I'm doing those things thinking that that's the how many years have you been saying this well many years this is the story that's the story and this gets to like like you know the stories that we tell ourselves about our childhood trauma or whatever it is and what aspects of that are informative in terms of like self-awareness so that you can heal them and move forward and where do we get stuck in them as a story and and just get into like a whole drama around it yes it's like how helpful is this story I mean I mean it's good for self-awareness and then when I do something I'm like oh maybe I can make sense of why I'm doing this but it doesn't help me in terms of like resolving it no the minute you start telling it to me I'm thinking man this is his can story he's so used to that story it's so like it just pulls it out of his uh and that doesn't mean it's not true that doesn't mean it doesn't have tremendous validity but it is utterly stale and it doesn't justify anything at this moment in your life at this moment in your life keep your story but if you say I want to make sure that my relationship gets a new Trust of energy of of breath of expansion then go do the things that you know will make a difference to just say she wants this and I'm more than that I'm it's self- serving and it's a little still if you allow me yeah yeah no it's good so you know um she wants to be seen Bo I'm sure by now after 25 years you have a certain idea of which way she likes that of course and decide I'm going going to put her in the center of my go for think of five days three days you don't this is the but I'm going to Once fully fully fully satiate this wish of hers I'm going to be there complete don't even take my phone with me nothing I want her one time to be radiating in the Center of My Universe what else should I do okay what else I'll start with that that's good then the second thing you do is I mean that's not in order but when you were talking I thought I couldn't see you write a letter I I'm very big on letter writing because I think that writing gives you a chance of being with yourself while you talk to the other and reading a letter is being with the other while being with yourself and I think you should write her a letter and just say you know I was talking to this woman on the podcast and I found myself saying this is what you would like and I just answered in the same usual defensive tried out story of why I won't do something that would just probably be a risk for me and something unfamiliar and something that is not my comfort zone and I realized how often I must have told you that story and how much that story is kind of holding me back and here we are after 25 years and I'm thinking man at whatever age I am I'm still telling the same thing how true is this now and how much does it serve me to actually not make changes and I just thought that you should know that I know I'm not impervious to this and I know that that story has probably kept me away from you many times and it also makes me lazy and it also and etc etc and just own that that's where we started our conversation with responsibility I think when people get that letter there's suddenly a real sense of shared reality what I've been trying to tell him is not delusional I get it I see it I know it I feel it and when he confirms it we're in a shared reality this may be true in other directions for other things you know mhm and from there you you make a commitment to something a commitment to the fact that you know every system straddles stability and change continuity and Innovation security and freedom every living organism every relationship as well so when you raise kids and you stay together you emphasize the stability the predictability the reliability the security the anchoring dimensions of life but at the stage that you're entering or are have entered if you want that relationship to not just be a scaffolding but really a relationship then you want to bring back the playfulness the Vitality the risk-taking the novelty the engagement with the unknown curiosity replace comfortable with curious to feel seen she need to feel your C curiosity mhm yeah she said as much okay tell her that uh I never met her but uh we have somehow can I report back to you you absolutely can I love that I mean it's it's so doable that's the thing like I can do that you know I can do that like what has held me back from that I mean the good news is I'm in like I'm not like I want to have but you can be in richness of experience like you know I don't want to have just a normal thing and I don't want out of the marriage like I want it to be the best that it can be but and I am willing to do what that takes right so that means being in is nice but you don't want to be in with minimum effort you don't tell your children to do minimum effort you probably tell them a lot of things about how to go for things and the same thing is true in so there's something about that coasting yeah and that you know the thing holds on its own without nurturing you know when you so talk about performance and work and this and that it's like I see a lot of people who bring the best of themselves to work and the leftovers home yeah the attention you paying me in this conversation here where you focused on everything I say do you have that focus when she talks right right right right yeah or do you come home and you say I'm done working and I can kind of put my attention on the co interesting it's interesting and and also the just the human mind's capacity to dilute ourselves around the static nature of things like whether it's a relationship or anything else like in in AA it's sort of like everything you do is moving you towards a drink or away from a drink there is no coasting in sobriety there's no coasting in relationships and yet we tell ourselves like this is a static locked in thing maybe we do that because it feeds our our need to feel like we have control over our lives lives in in a world in which we actually have no control like I don't know why we do that but I'm constantly having to remind myself that things are not static it's a contrived illusion of safety because if we're not in control then we're not safe for some of us yes for most of us MH talk a little bit more about your definition of you do know that when you just said this you swallowed did what does that mean [Laughter] it means that it's a sentence that means a lot to you and what it means is not for here yeah all right I'm going to reflect on that I want to talk about uh sexuality a little bit uh you mentioned the word erotic and you have a very specific definition of that that's different from sex so can you elaborate a little bit more on what you were talking about earlier sexuality is the Instinct it's nature it's the base but eroticism is sexuality that it is transformed by the human imagination it's what gives sex meaning and we are creatures of meaning modernity has brought these two together as if erotic means sexual turn on arousal this that but eroticism exists in every spiritual tradition and it is really about a quality of aliveness of vibrancy of Vitality and an engagement with Serendipity and the unknown curiosity imagination creativity those are the essential ingredients of the erotic you can have a lot of sex and feel absolutely nothing women have done that for Centuries by the way but in the erotic you can do very very little and feel a tremendous amount because the central agent of the erotic mind is the imagination and I think it's a very important distinction because when people come to me and they say they often want more sex but they always want better sex and this better is in the quality of Engagement in the attention in the intimacy in the freedom in the surrender in in in what is being communicated by these IES so I'm very interested in in the erotic because because I'm interested in not just having relationships survive and not die I'm interested in relationships feeling alive and that's the opposite of what you call the status quo it can be really hard to talk about this um for cultural reasons or just the way that you know we were raised where you know these are verboten subjects and then as adults we don't have the vocabulary or we're we're so captured by guilt and shame around our own innate sexuality that it creates challenges in terms of communication between partners around this terrain you know I wrote mating in captivity almost 20 years ago and I have had conversations with thousands of people all over the world about the very that they had never spoken about and I began to think Beyond just coming to my office how do I provide people with exercises language vocabulary perspectives tools to actually have these conversations it's one of the things that I'm most interested in is helping people have difficult conversations conflict is a difficult conversation sexuality is a difficult conversation and I I just I'm I'm creating it's releasing next week but uh it's a course bundle it's called the aoral desire bundle and it's two courses on sexuality one for people who are really stuck and just want to even talk about it and and not derail each time and one for people who really want to the flicker to just ignite a little bit more into a flame and it's called playing with desire the second one and it's all that it's very concrete tools to help you have a understand your own sexuality and understand how I think about sexuality which I'll say in a moment and then how to play how to have conversations and my card game does the same it's a I've looked for multiple ways to give people Ease comfort fluidity playfulness to talk about these things without going oh you know all eeky and tense right cuz like in a card game it's all it's all fun like the stakes are lowered right but you can reveal a lot you know play is when risk is fun so you can reveal a lot of things because you're in the midst of play you know a lot of sexual conversations about sexuality especially in the United States is either smut or sanctimony it's rarely just a natural conversation an amazing window into the self sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship ship the traditional the common way people think of sex is that something you do you have sex rather than it's an experience where do you go in sex what kind of place do you enter is it a space for for deep connection for naughtiness for playfulness for Mischief for spiritual union to surrender to be taken care of to be safely powerful to be vulnerable to finally abdicate all responsibility of good citizen ship I mean what's the space you enter what parts of yourselves are you connecting with which sense is most alive in the erotic experience for you if you really understand sexuality you you know that it's a coded language for our deepest emotional needs not for what turns you on that what turns you on and what you experience there is actually you know what are the Deep needs wishes wounds fears that to bring you know from your emotional life into your sexual life and your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code you know your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a fantasy a good fantasy States the problem and offers the solution you understand that's that's a Michael bad L you know it's a a good fantasy is is to subvert the fears and the inhibitions that Roy inside of you and turn into you know play and so once you enter the sexuality from that point of view once you understand that people have erotic Blueprints and that they're how they were loved how they connected how they learned to experience pleasure how they learn to receive I you know that all these emotional experiences translate in the physicality of sex tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love m that's the blueprint and so you give people a set of questions and they begin to answer them and I know I mean I know because I've done it a thousand time and and now we're doing it through the course and I hear people just saying we never talked about any of this it's like I'm discovering this person or I never thought about that for myself and this opening up this unlocking of that conversation because people often can do sex but can't talk about it and so certainly not with the person they're having sex with MH they'll talk with any and why is that like what what's at the Crux of that a lot of different things you know I mean one is this is a subject that we learn to be silent and secretive about in the past you had to feel ashamed if you had sex now you have to feel ashamed if you don't have sex men typically Lie by exaggerating women have typically learned to lie by under representing when I say men women I mean it's also men identified and women identified but the structures that are in place is that male sexuality is rather fixed men are always interested they always want it they're you know In Perpetual Motion in search of an outlet it's spontaneous unprompted they don't need any help it just you know they come ready and women's sexuality is more diffus more subjective more Rising on a Lattis of emotion more contextual and there's a tremendous amount of myth and wrong ideas that are just filling people's heads and the beginning of the course is really to demystify a whole bunch of things that are utterly not the case I mean it is clear that male sexuality is no less influenced by the internal life a guy who's depressed or who is anxious or insecure if you think that doesn't influence their sexuality in one way or another but it does sure it's not true that men just exist in their you know groins and that women actually it may be all about the supposed idea that they have less interest sexually but in fact maybe women are getting bored with monogamy much sooner than men and what keeps them interested is a lot more risque activity creativity Interest being seen and all of that and that's why they're not interested it's not they're not interested in sex is that they're not interested in the sex they can haveh at least made many men right so for somebody who's listening to this or watching this who who has struggled with initiating this type of conversation I mean they can take your course and we'll put links to all of that in the show notes and there's the board game Etc what would be like a tool to to you know kind of confront that fear and take on that risk and take that leap and ask that first question or create an environment where that conversation can take place maybe for the first time it's either you just go straight up and you just say I listen to this conversation or shall we I mean what is a podcast doing what does my podcast do you listen to couples having those sessions where they do exactly what you just asked me and as you listen to it together you just turn to your partner in the car and you say have you ever thought of that is that ever been a question that you ask is that something you've ever wanted that's basically what how a podcast becomes a transition object and we're talking about the podcast but in fact we're talking about ourselves so much of where should we begin has been about that it's people listen to another couple the more intensely they listen to these other relationships the more they see themselves and the more it gives them the words and the courage to have the conversations that they want to have so I have done it through my podcast I have done it through my card game and I am doing it through the course because those are three entry doors that I think one of them you will find accessible if I say to you go talk to your wife like that not really but if I say you know there's an episode I think that it would really be interesting it's also a couple that's been together the kids are leaving they they want to reconnect rage then you listen to the story it's like watching a movie reading a book you're soft pedaling your way into it okay if I say a group of friends come you don't necessarily start playing with your partner alone and you say I got this card game you know and I actually saw this woman or these people troan horse but you don't start with the most difficult questions you put two cards underneath everybody's plate and you don't do the whole game and you just say thought we should have first you know I have yet to ever see people have the courage the guts to just simply say I want to do something else tonight I saw this card game and I want to try it out on ourselves and I think we know each other enough to do so and then they realize that man this is so much more interesting than most of the chitchat they ever always have I mean I have literally yet to see someone who says this was a complete flop you know sometimes it takes a bit of time till it gets going but when the story is become interesting you're like I thought I knew you dude when did that you know it's interesting yeah yeah you know I just did it with 5,000 people so I can tell you I take a few of the questions that are gentle don't start with sex questions per se begin with questions a risk I took that changed my life of message I fantasize receiving if I could whisper something in the ears of my younger self a guilty pleasure I Sav her is stuff like that right and then you sort of slowly tiptoe into no then you go afterwards they leave your friends and then you go with your partner and then you say I have a few other questions I thought we could try yeah and then you say you know we never talk about this stuff and it's weird it's like why not I mean what are we talking about you know Death Sex and Money it's three subjects we never talk about and yet they're present in everyone's life the podcast is so great because you're truly a a fly on the wall getting to EES drop into the way you work with couples who are going through problems that we can all relate to and I think its power is in you know kind of modeling what those convers ations look like and what they can be especially for somebody who has no previous experience in a therapeutic modality it's really empowering and they're almost like they have threea structures to them like there's a beginning middle and an end like you're you're on a journey with these people as you hear their you know innermost thoughts and working through problem individuals it's a and and there is a whole Ser on work the idea in my head was as you listen you will find the tools and the language needed for the conversations that you need to have that is the idea because these days your best friend can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming people don't really know the truth of other people it's happening in a therapist office you know confidentially and and that leaves a lot of people wondering is this only happening to me am I the only one who can't talk about this with my partner everything I do is about cultivating relational intell elligence helping people have difficult conversations finding the vocabulary understanding what certain things mean to them first creating exercises and structures that give them a way to to start you know how do I think about this before I even know how I talk about it how do I think about it what does it mean to think about sexuality and you know what's different out you can ask a couple do you still have sex that's not the same as what is the role of sex in your life life what do you like to experience in sex how do you connect you know what's the sense with which you experience sensuality the most and how so I have 150 of those questions it's not like it's only five or six but it's like wow this is what you talk about you know in our pornographic World those things have kind of vanished mhm you know and and so to make this actually a very rich intriguing you suddenly see people be like you know you think you know the person next to you and you don't and because you don't they actually remain interesting that is a part of what keeps a relationship life the mystery you know the presumption that you know the other person right next to you and that is's nothing left to discover is really boring and precludes in my opinion a certain kind of hope fulness if you can never be surprised anymore and you think the other person is like the inside of your pocket that's the contrived illusion of safety don't give me novelty in a place where I want to think that I already no surprises can happen to me and then you complain of boredom well you can't have it both ways it's so true how this subject is is divided in this binary way between the salacious and the Puritan and when I think of uh my own education my own sex education it was there was basically nothing and you're just sort of trying to figure it out as a teenager yourself and then the younger generation with just the level of access to porn everywhere and the lack of sex education and the lack of anybody like yourself who is helping young people develop a vocabulary and a confidence to have these kinds of conversations this is not a healthy Dynamic for you know how to kind of emerge into the world and be able to have you know healthy sexual relations no we need to like change the whole system around this there's a lot of ignorance there's a lot of myth there's a lot of misunderstandings and um and perfectionist ideals because of the algorithms and the social media or even uh romantic ideals that have been propagated through movies in which everybody is always just instantly ready exploding you know uh throwing themselves at another person nobody sees maintenance sex in a movie you know you only see passionate sex and while maintenance sex is extremely important in erotic couples you know so not everything is always a big production not every meal is a four course meal some meals are just very simple home-cooked food but they're no less pleasurable and so what we see is just creating a set of rather unrealistic expectations not everybody start sex after 18 years together just from being desirous and aroused and turned on sometimes you start from being willing and just open and we'll see what happens you're not always eating cuz you're hungry not everybody runs to the gym cuz they can't wait but I've never seen somebody come back from the gym and regret and sex is no different and sex is no different and we have a kind of an exceptionalism around sex as Marty kle says that is really problematic an exceptionalism because of just the imagery that we're exposed to no because it was so forbidden for so long sexuality was primarily for procreation sexuality was a woman's marital Duty you needed to have 10 children for which you needed to have 12 cuz two are not going to survive so you had a kind of a intrinsic motivation children had a very different meaning in the family than they have today and we switched gradually from this sexuality that had a goal and that was sanctioned religiously around that goal to a sexuality that went from duty to desire we took sexuality out of the realm of Nature and we socialized it sexuality became an element of our identity not just an element of our Condition it's not just what we do it's who we are and we completely gave a new definition to sexuality to its meaning culturally relationally socially and we freed it and once we freed it we said it's natural and once we said it's natural we began to think that it just could pop up at 11:30 at night after you finished cleaning up the whole house out of nowhere and that is kind of one of the evolutions it's like it may be more natural than what we thought but that doesn't mean it is just there ready to burst you know spontaneously in a long-term relationship everything that is spontaneous already happened mhm if you want it to happen mean committed sex is premeditated willful conscious creative sex and then people say oh but that means you have to schedule it and plan it I said you don't schedule birthdays you don't schedule your tennis game you don't of course do you think that it takes something away from your tennis game because you scheduled it no nobody thinks that but somehow this sex got forbid should have to be thought about and that myth of spontaneity is actually revealing how uncomfortable people are with sex they want it to just happen so they don't don't have to actually claim it own it that's a revelatory uh point because there is this stigma that if you're scheduling it that it isn't actually real sex because it it didn't spontaneously emerge yeah that is such a mindfield seriously the spontaneous myth is a subterfuge for people's challenges to actually openly willfully acknowledge that this is important to them and they are going to make sure it happens that they give value to it right and to show up for that appointment as scheduled whether you're in the mood or not is confronting right because if you have to then Channel yourself or get yourself into a state of receptivity and giving when you're not just spontaneously feeling it that's part of what it means to tend to this important thing between two people do you ever book a nice restaurant to go for dinner sure okay do you ever that whole day not think about the restaurant because you have a thin a whole bunch of things to do then you come home and you start to gradually think about the fact that you have this reservation then you take a shower you change you dress up maybe because you think it's kind of nice to be dressed up to go to this place then you're still somewhat in a rush thinking about all the things that you need to finish but you don't cancel your reservation because you're actually on some level looking forward to finally sit down and does all that preparation make you feel like you shouldn't go to the restaurant no cont or that the experience that you just had was less worthy because you put it on the calendar that's right this is when you think about what you're saying about how sex is about is supposed to happen we're not surprised that it doesn't happen nearly as often and as well as people would leg this being in the mood the mood comes the mood is something you cultivate the mood comes with the attention with the focus with the presence with being available the mood is not you know don't always eat cuz you're hungry but suddenly it smelled good and then you said oh wow what is that then you tasted then you took a little plate then you even ate more than you cared for then you really enjoyed it and then you said but I wasn't hungry Ry surprising you know that's what happens with sex too this being in the mood this notion that desire precedes everything and comes out of nowhere is a complete misunderstanding of how we connect sexually for sure in long-term relationships let me put it this way sex is never spontaneous it's just that when you are in the beginning or when you're single you prepare yourself alone first in your mind where we going to go where we going to eat what music what dress you know you always build the plot and nobody thinks at that moment that this is work that you shouldn't have to do when a painter starts to paint and they prepare their their materials they're not busy thinking ah boring have to no they're thinking as they're preparing the colors or they're not thinking they're actually trying to not think whichever process they're engaged in but everyone understands ritual to prepare a site or to go and put your skis or your your whatever your golf clubs or your tennis racket or your baseball me I mean there is you dress a certain way you put your acutal you bring your tools your accessoirs and nobody thinks this takes away from the experience everybody understands that that's what that is the ritual of going to this activity that's beautiful from hikers to bikers everybody has a set of rituals tools and nobody says oh bike toys right I think we we SE toys yeah we have this when you say ritualize or ritual like we have a reductive like notion of what that is it's candles and fireplaces and things like that but it can be it doesn't necessarily have to be that but it is a way of marking it and readying yourself and like honoring it's mindfulness an effect it's I'm putting my mind my attention onto this thing because I am creating anticipation and anticipation is the mortar of Desire anticipation is the mortar of Desire if I'm about to travel to Paris I'm anticipating this trip I bought a ticket I have a suitcase ready I prepared certain clothes that I can imagine wearing there I'm looking up for places I want to visit I'm anticipating it's an imaginary experience with which I'm projecting myself in Paris and sex is no different and sex is exactly the same if sex is a foregone conclusion and you know in advance what you're going to get why would you be interested all the time some of us are but many of us are not it's the Curiosity it's the whatever is going to happen and then if I go to Paris it's not a foregone conclusion even if I've been 10 times yeah yeah or you could go and be disappointed you can do that too but people don't come to get my help for disappointment yeah can we talk about dating a little bit M my lens on dating as somebody who's been married for a long time is through the adventures and Misadventures of of my boys it's through my my friends and peers who are divorced and now on the apps and it's through like friends of my wife and the narratives go something like this at least with respect to young men it's this is a game that's stacked against US unless you're rich and Powerful or unbelievably handsome uh there's no incentive for for any of these women to take a chance or commit to me like that's one story for the divorced men it's a similar story for the women um it's like where are all the good guys like I've been on these apps I've been on a million terrible dates and I just can't find like like just a a decent person that I feel like investing my time and energy with yep I those are stories you must hear quite a bit yes yes I Echo your stories I have two sons too I have a long-term relationship I hear the same the same things I think I don't know that I have really original things to say about it in the sense that I'm we're in the midst of this we're watching this at first updating allowed people to meet who would otherwise never meet updating is really very very helpful to Affinity groups but something began to happen around the apps that became a complete commodification of people you know the kind of a ubiquitous ghosting that can take place and and people stopped being caring and careful of the feelings the hearts the brittle responses of other people it's it's rough it's rough out there if I don't have to look at you in the eyes when I say I don't think we're going to continue or I'm not sure I'm interested or I met somebody else or I really wish you well but I would rather be friends or you know it's a it's easy to just disappear or when the courage to be vulnerable with someone is is met with the wrong reaction or disappointment so I have a lot of questions about how many time you know how much time I always find out how long have you been writing before you meet or did you call or did you see each other before you met what did you do on your first date a lot of first dates are often kind of akin to job interviews it's put it this way I suggest to people to do something very different than to go and sit in a noisy place or and and ask each other questions I think that is not the way you meet and then while you ask questions you wait to see if you're experiencing any butterflies you know I think what often happens is that people go on the dates if they go on the dates and they leave their life I can't see you tonight they say to their friends because I have a date I have a date Monday Wednesday and Friday this week I have dates and they leave their life to go on those dates and those dates don't materialize into anything and then they have to go back to their friends to say nothing happened and they feel this kind of emptiness in their stomach the thing is set up that I did I meet you maybe we continue and after a few months when we I know we're steady then I introduce you to my community something about this feels off to me you have a date you had plans with your friend bring your dates to the friends let's figure it out in some hermetically sealed vacuum yes you're when you're when you're outside of your life and you're in that artificial world you're both projecting idealized versions of yourself onto each other and you're running a checklist in your mind on that on that list that you kind of opened with like is this person going to satisfy all of these requirements that I have and then you compare that to this perfectionism ideal that you see on social media and it's a setup for disaster predominantly is it not like how how can anyone survive that I mean basically people get into it they do it for a few months they either meet someone and then that that's goes into one direction or they don't meet they get exhausted they feel degraded they feel flattened out and then they stop they get off the app and then they go for a few months in their life and then they kind of get the courage to go back on the app and it's this Revol and then they see the same people sometimes that they had seen months back I think that don't leave your life to go date that's my first advice to a lot of people bring the dates to your life now but I don't want to have to tell that it didn't work I just say I just met somebody it's the first time I'm seeing them I'm bringing someone along they're your friends M you know they will have a lot to say and you will have a ton of data points from seeing this person interact with your people in your life you know integrate it so that you don't cut off from your life to go you know put yourself in the petri dish so that's one thing I the second thing is don't sit and interview and ask questions go do something you enjoy doing and bring that person along so that you it's in multiple ways I'm thinking how do we integrate this things something is off in the in the complete cut off the it's like isolation tanks in which in which these day take place and asking questions isn't going to tell you much so there's a whole new generation now of people who are they're off the apps and they're going speed dating how do you feel about that is that a good thing I think we need to try a lot of different things people are often starved they want to connect they don't meet enough people the workplace is somehow no longer a place where you they don't go to work many times they spend the whole day at home MH so you know this is this contactless life so any situation where you are in person with people and not just you sit in lines you know facing people two minutes 2 minutes you create activities some people use my card games they do questions the there's an engagement there's an experience that is created and you will leave with someone with whom you're talking and you will maybe even see that person again and that person may become a friend or may become a date or may introduce you to someone else there is something Dynamic about it and 3D and embodi it embodied I think that that's the real thing here I have yet to hear people who've gone to the speed dating and say it's a horrible experience it's interesting cuz it sounds to me it like it sounds like a nightmare to me like I would not of it as being in a supermarket and having to look at a shelf and decide which box you want to take off it sounds like the ultimate sort of job interview type D but it's not done like that people come into little groups they have a question they have a they playing a game I'm talking about the ones I've heard that are done tastfully but they're springing up all over the place oh that's interesting it's almost like an it's an antidote to the apps on some level to like create collisions you know create a dynamic in which people have to like um interact with each other that's so interesting and all the ones who are there say the same thing I wanted to meet in person but I wanted to have a context for it a framework I don't want to be alone there's also a thing about a lot there's a lot of people they move right right right which kind of lowers the the stakes a little bit I guess one of the things that that I see in older people who have had you know many relationships maybe multiple marriages Etc the older you get you know yourself better you also know what you like and you don't like and it's very yeah you just you're inflexible you're like this is the way I like my life and uh I want to have a relationship but I'm really not interested in anybody who's going to challenge that way of living that I like and that I'm so accustomed to and so you're sort of dead out of the gate right especially if you're going to be dating somebody who's in your age bracket because they're probably coming to it similarly right and so somehow these people need to you know kind of embrace a little more flexibility around that kind of thing if a Rel relationship is going to have a have a shot yes I mean basically sometimes people will say I would like to be in a relationship but I prefer the one I have with myself okay then stay with yourself it's okay I mean you don't go to be with somebody else to stay unchanged part of what you experience by being with someone else do not just in a romantic relationship is to actually discover yourselves a new differently things about that you didn't know you may like so if it's to stay static and you kind of say it up front don't move me don't budge me don't shake me don't intrude on me then you kind of want to ask what happened what made that become such a prerogative for you did you feel like you lost yourself too much in the previous relationship is this a way of holding on to the previous relationship what is the the meaning of this static quality that you seem to claim you know what is it that you may be afraid of what is it that you're defending against even before the whole thing even started and and who tells you that someone is going to you know that that's what people come to do you're not a renovation project they've already done their homes so what are we talking about and you you that's my conversation when I hear that that dialogue but I think the first question often is how have you been in your previous relationships I think that we don't pay enough attention to how relationships end and I think that when they end we tend to think that they failed when in fact longevity is not only the only marker of success and I think that some relationships were very good for what they were meant to be and if people could understand that the ending doesn't mean they failed then they could take with them a very different story about what they bring to the next relationship because we come with our accumulated memories and lessons of the relationships we've been in yes some relationships run their course and were successful for what they were but are no longer viable and that's not a failure that was that's a success right for a certain stage of life you grew up together you build homes together you took care of your aging parents you have been there to help each other begin your professional lives or you've raised kids together you you've done a lot of things these are not small things these are not failed relationships maybe at this moment developmentally you need there is something else this is why I say we will have two or three relationships and some of us will do it with the same person and some of us will need another person to create something new some people can reinvent on location and reimagine themselves and some of us will leave We Live Twice As long and that means that longevity means something very different and at different stages you know you will see the these developmental tasks of family life for many is no longer at the center so what do you have together and some relationships will stay because there's a real deep connection between the two people and the quality of the relationship is what really holds them and for some people they will stay together because it's a very powerful scaffolding it gives them access to all kinds of things in the world that is what their relationship provides them and it's a lifestyle and and resources and people and that is the meaning of the relationship nothing wrong with that and it's up to the people in the relationship to make up those rules and what that contract looks like it doesn't have to adhere to our conventional understanding of of what a relationship needs to look like I also think that it's okay to want other relationships romantic relationship is not the only one for us to stay connected there are people who are wonderful siblings friends bosses mentors and they do not shine in the Romantic sphere but they are they are the friends you dearly want to have and we have so attached the word love and intimacy to the Romantic relationship when in fact there is deep love and Intimacy in friendships for example and there's a tremendous pressure about that romantic relationship but maybe for some people that that that same person that says I like my habit and I be my guest you know maybe have some sexual partners maybe have close friends maybe have people with whom you like to travel maybe you have people with whom you enjoy being together but you don't want to merge homes and you want to be a lat or living a part together we either accept that there's a multiplicity of models and there isn't a one size fits all but that being connected and having intimacy and meaningful relationship is essential to our survival and to our well-being and not to put all of it into one type of relationship I think that that's the more important piece is we need connection we're socially wired when relational health is essential to physical health to our overall sense of well-being but it doesn't just have to take place in the Romantic relationship I could talk to you for hours and hours more but we have to bring this to a conclusion thank you for coming here today I really appreciate it I think your work is vital and I applaud and salute you for the way that you show up in the world and and how helpful you have been to millions of people because relationships is a universal thing we all have our struggles and challenges with it and you have been um just a a wealth of information and inspiration and education in that regard so thank you thank you yeah you have a couple courses that are going live soon playing with desire and bringing desire back which I believe are dropping on September 17th correct which is very exciting and as a gift to our audience you are offering a um reduced price on that if you use the code Rich 15 at checkout you get 15% off and for people who want to learn more about those courses where should they go sell.com it's that simple all right thank you I hope you'll come back and explore more I had tons more I wanted to talk to you about but this was a real treat so pleasure H yes peace [Music] thanks that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. rich.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful 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Trapper Patt and Harry mat appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace PL namaste [Music]