Paul Brunson: Women Need To Lower Their Standards! If They Have These 3 Traits, Never Let Them Go! If You Get Sick, There’s A 624% Chance He’ll Leave!
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January 30, 2025
TLDR: Relationship expert Paul Brunson discusses key aspects of a successful relationship, including top signs, dangers of serial dating, reasons for women's attraction to taller men, benefits of doubting your relationship, and qualities to look for in partners.

In a thought-provoking episode of the podcast featuring Paul Brunson, a renowned relationship expert and matchmaker, critical discussions about dating, relationships, and societal expectations unfold. The episode, titled "Women Need To Lower Their Standards! If They Have These 3 Traits, Never Let Them Go! If You Get Sick, There’s A 624% Chance He’ll Leave!", dives deep into what makes relationships thrive in today’s modern world.
Who Is Paul Brunson?
Paul Brunson is known for his successful matchmaking agency and relationship advice. He has authored several impactful books, including "Find Love" and "Keep Love", combining insights from over 15 years of experience in relationship coaching.
Key Insights from the Episode
Evolution of Love
- Changes Over Time: The discussion encompasses how love and dating have evolved, particularly with the rise of dating apps. Many individuals feel overwhelmed by choices, leading to dissatisfaction.
- Expectation vs. Reality: Brunson points out that societal pressures have led individuals to hold unrealistic expectations of partners, which contributes to relationship dissatisfaction.
The Risks of Serial Dating
- Navigating Choices: The abundance of dating options can lead to serial dating behaviors, making it difficult for people to commit or feel satisfied with their choices.
- Importance of Community: Brunson emphasizes the need for community support rather than relying solely on one partner to fulfill every emotional need.
Successful Relationship Traits
Brunson outlines the top three traits essential for a successful relationship:
- Open-Mindedness
- Resilience
- Focus on Well-Being
These traits not only help sustain a partnership but also contribute to overall relationships satisfaction.
Attachment Styles and Relationship Dynamics
- Understanding Attachment: The episode discusses various attachment styles—secure, anxious, and avoidant—and their implications in romantic relationships. Anxious partners often feel the need for reassurance, while avoidants might distance themselves.
- Partner Selection: Brunson shares the importance of introspection in partner selection to avoid repeating past relationship mistakes.
Jealousy and Apologies
- Jealousy: It's normal for partners to experience jealousy; however, how it's expressed can impact the relationship. Jealousy rooted in insecurity can be harmful.
- Apologizing: Brunson advocates for effective apologies that encompass acknowledgment, remorse, and commitment to change, as this can foster healthier communication.
Managing Relationship Conflicts
The episode highlights conflict management as a crucial aspect of relationship longevity:
- Healthy Disagreements: Couples should focus on understanding each other rather than ‘winning’ arguments.
- Navigating Problems: Constructive conflict resolution can actually strengthen relationships and promote deeper connections.
Conclusion
Paul Brunson’s insights challenge traditional views on relationships and encourage a more nuanced understanding of love, attachment, and partnership dynamics. The message resonates: while seeking love is vital, the real work begins in maintaining and nurturing that love through understanding, patience, and communication.
Listeners are encouraged to reflect upon their perspectives regarding love and relationships, recognizing the importance of lowering unrealistic standards and focusing on the qualities that truly matter. For anyone navigating the complexities of modern love, this episode serves as a valuable resource of guidance.
Was this summary helpful?
Should you keep secrets from your partner? This is big. Yes. And the data shows it will help to increase satisfaction and lower conflict in your relationship. So, give me an example of something that I shouldn't say to my partner. Here's a juicy one. So... What about... Oh, no! No! No! No!
Paul C. Brunson is the world's most influential matchmaker. Who blends groundbreaking science research in over 15 years of expertise to prove that anyone can create unshakable foundations for long-lasting, life-changing love. I read about this study that says the men are approximately 624% more likely to separate if the woman gets timely ill. What is going on there?
Typically, it's because there is a low-level satisfaction in the relationship from not having enough sex, for example. But this is a major issue because 80% of relationships have a lower level of satisfaction today than any point in history. And part of that is because most of what we know about finding and keeping love has unfortunately been fed to us through lies. Let's pause that because I want to talk about those myths. OK.
So does having more sex increase the happiness in your relationship? No. What about having doubts in your relationship? Is that bad? That couldn't be further from the truth. Really? It's actually healthy to have doubts about your relationship. And this is why. What about if someone cheats, is that the end of the relationship? Brilliant question. And quite honestly. And then what are the most important qualities I need in a partner? OK, this blew my mind. So these are the three traits to have a phenomenal relationship. Number one,
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, whatever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
Boom! Steven, good to see you again. It's awesome to be here. I'm going to ask you a question that assumes that I don't know who you are, which is quite hard because I know you very well. But who are you and who are you to write these two books that I have in front of me? Find love and keep love.
Well, who am I? I'm first and foremost a husband. I'm a father. I'm a son. I'm a brother. I'm a cousin. I'm a uncle. I'm a mentor. I'm a mentee. I'm all of those things. I feel like those are the things I am first. But I have a longstanding history with relationships. I became a matchmaker. My wife and I launched a matchmaking agency. We became one of the largest agencies in the United States.
And what's interesting about being a matchmaker is that a lot of people don't even realize that is a career. There's legit matchmakers. There's probably, I'd say, roughly 1,000 full-time matchmakers around the world. And what we do is we literally match people together for long-term committed relationships. But what ends up happening, if you're successful with that, is
two people enter a long-term committed relationship. And because they've built up a relationship with you, they have questions about how do they keep that relationship? How do they keep their love? So my wife and I then began to transition into counselors.
and coaches for married couples or couples who are in committed relationships. So that's where that started and that went on for over a decade. And then on top of that, I started, you know, I had research, global research at Tinder, which is a great opportunity for me to look at a very large data set and make predictions as to what's happening with our relationships. I host television shows, reality TV shows, which for good or for bad, I think help to
spark conversation about relationships that are needed. So doing research there, you know, I do podcasts like this, you know, so my life actually is all about relationships. And that's the reason why I wanted to write this book. And that's the reason why I feel qualified to write this book. So how long ago was it that you started doing the matchmaking?
So 2008 is when I officially began matchmaking. 17 years. Yeah, 17 years. It was a long time ago. The reason I asked that is a lot has changed in 17 years. Yes. We've been through this evolution of dating apps and matchmaking services and things like match.com. And my question is, where do you think we find ourselves today as it relates to relationships? What is the macro picture? How are people feeling?
The person that's watching this right now, that's either single in looking or in a relationship and maybe struggling, can you give me an overview, synopsis of how they're feeling in their head? Sure, sure. And why? All right, this is a great one. So we're feeling different things. There's a small percentage of us, and I'll go to Eli Finkle Research who wrote phenomenal books, but one is called The All or Nothing Marriage that I Love. And in it, he states that if you look at marriages slash committed relationships,
that 20% of us have higher satisfaction than we ever have in the history of relationships. And you think, 20%, one is that's fairly small. And do they really have high satisfaction? And I fully believe this. And the reason why is because we have tools. We have people who watch podcasts, read books, watch television shows. We have tools like we've never had before, more access to therapy. So 20%, very satisfied.
but 80% more dissatisfied.
more upset, more confused than ever before. And I would say that those who are not in relationships, the pool reflects that as well. I think there's a 20% of singles who are hopeful and are developing the tools and developing the skills and learning active listening and all these things. And they will and they believe they'll enter strong relationships. They're very hopeful. But I think there's 80% out there that are
perhaps hopeless, disgruntled, confused, dismayed. And I would say that that's the landscape today. That being said, the reason for that
is because we, over the years, have placed more emphasis on one partner versus having a village to lean on. So we're leaning more, so we're requiring more from our partners. So what that means is that if we're requiring more, if we're requiring our partner to be, we want our partner to be our best friend.
We all want to launch a business in via CEO, right? So we want our partner to be co-CEO or COO. We want our partner to be a great parent. We want our partner to come home at night, take their clothes off and do backflips in the bedroom, right? This is what we want. This is what we want.
more from that one person versus 30 years ago, 300 years ago, 3,000 years ago, 300,000 years ago when humans really began 300,000 years ago. You look at all this and you say, wow, we want more. Therefore, we're going to have lower satisfaction. This is what I believe the landscape is today.
And if we start then with people that are looking for love, people that are in search of love, how are the current tools? Because I see so much online about how people are disenfranchised with things like dating apps, and they've tried social media. And I've got so many of my friends who are struggling at the moment, they're going on 100 dates a year, and they're unable to find anybody. And I ponder to myself, I go, you're going on 100 dates a year, you're almost a professional data, and you still can't find somebody
Surely that's not through lack of options or like the top of the funnel there, this sort of exposure is fine. But there's something further down the funnel as it relates to them being able to convert somebody that seems to be off. Right. But also, I would argue that it could even stem
You could go deeper to the root, right? So you think about attachment styles. Attachment styles, I know you've talked a lot about attachment styles. Attachment styles are kind of the hot thing, the hot trend that people are talking about, rightfully so. I like this. And if you think about that, they're primarily three, right? We know we have secure.
There's anxious, and there's avoidant. There are other variations, but in essence, these are the three. Now, depending on who you talk to, roughly 50, 60% of the population are secure.
That means the balance are going to be anxious or avoidant or some combination. So therefore, if you are on a date and you have an anxious attachment style or you have an avoidant attachment style and you have someone in front of you who is the perfect match for you, they're taking off all the boxes.
You could be so anxious or so avoidant that you push them away or you lay blame to a certain characteristic or a trait that they have. That means nothing to the relationship and you dismiss them. This is going to sound funny, but it's sad. Do you know what we found when we were matchmaking? What the number one reason why people did not allow someone to get a second date with them?
They had a Velcro wallet. All right, so you know what it was? It was around attraction. So when it was, you know, physical attraction played in particular was.
because they smelled. Really? They had bad breath, halitosis, right? Or there was some odor. Now, you can argue that scent plays a strong role in our partner's selection. Dr. Taurus Fort talks about this quite a bit, right? So there's an evolutionary biology that comes with scent. Yes, I agree. But to look across from someone and say, you know what? You have like your breath stinks, right?
And I'm not going to give up the second date. And as a result of your breath stinks, you have long fingernails. You're in a track suit, right? To look at these moments and say, because of this thing, I'm going to dismiss you as a partner. I think for a lot of people, sounds logical, but then for a lot of people, sounds ridiculous. You know what I mean? Now,
how you got to that point is the challenge. If you think it's ridiculous how you got to assuming that because someone has a tracksuit on, because they have long fingernails, it dismisses their
their validity of being a great partner, that is about you, that is about you, your attachment, that is about how you've been socialized, that is about. So I would argue that people who are going on lots and lots and lots of dates and they still can't feel like they can find the right partner, the first place to look at is yourself.
I do wonder this because I think the more dates you go on, the more reference points of comparison you then have for the next person. So date 101, if you've been on 100 previously, you've now got 100 guys who are maybe all good at one thing, and date 101.
is going to be compared to the previous 100 on all factors. So maybe date 49 had great sense of humor. Date 53 was rich. Date 67 was physically beautiful. Now date 101 is going to be compared to all previous dates on all of those factors and you're always going to find something
that is less good, at least one factor that is less good than someone you did previously. And I've always wondered, are you like accidentally expanding your comparison set by meeting more and more and more and more and more people? Yeah. So I think this reads to Barry Swartz's work with the paradox of choice, where, you know, what Barry Swartz did with the paradox of choice, which is brilliant, is that when we're presented with more options, which is, in essence, all of these dates,
When we choose one, we have a less level of satisfaction with the choice because we saw that we had 100 choices versus if you have three choices and you have to choose between one of those three, there's going to be a higher level of satisfaction as a result.
A real life example is my grandmother. So my grandmother grew up in, I say, the bush in the bush in Jamaica. Super, super small town in Jamaica. My grandmother literally had five or six options as a partner.
Now, as a result of my grandmother having those options, when she chooses one person, there's going to be more value, more emphasis, even more, if you look at the investment theory, more investment placed in one of those options, versus if she had 100 options and she makes a choice, that choice with 100 options becomes more disposable, right?
This is one issue that we have in terms of giving ourselves so many options. The other challenge with this is when you watch people date, they typically date the same person.
It's typically the same characteristics. Even physically, you know, the same. I argue that some of the greatest value that we can receive in the dating market, if you want to look at it as a dating market, is to take ourselves out of our market, if you will, and put yourself in someplace different. I call this the premium effect.
So an example of this is, I had a friend who was a white woman, roughly 35 years old, who lived in Northern London. And she was like, Paul, I'm dating all these guys. You know, I can't find the right one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, look, look, you love art, don't you? She said, yeah, I love art. I said, all right, I want you to take yourself down to the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton.
And I want you to go to this, you know, this exhibit that they're having. And she was like, rexted. I said, yeah, rexted is cool. I go there all the time, right? I want you to go there. Now, why did I ask her to go? I asked her to go because the moment that she goes, characteristically, she's not going to look the same. These are mostly going to be black men and women, perhaps even a little bit younger than she is.
different culturally, right? But yet, they have the same value in art and their appreciation for creativity, et cetera. The moment that she goes there, what happens? Some people in the room, look at her like, what's she doing here? Why is she here? Those are the closed-minded people. Carol DeWick talks about this in her book, Mindset. We have closed-minded, open-minded. Those are the closed-minded.
But how do the open-minded react to my friend? They lean in. What are you doing here?
and they're curious, and they engage. And all of a sudden, she opens her network to a whole new group of people. Some of those could be romantic interest, some of those could be platonic, they could be friends. So when we're dating, the serial data is especially the 100 people, is it's important for you to step outside of your sphere, if you will.
I want to pick up on something that you said that white woman went into a black space and in that black space you'd be considered a premium because basically her characteristics make her rare. Yes. Right? I was just doing some research then and it says that studies and surveys indicate that ethnic minorities, particularly Asian men and black women, often face unique challenges in dating in both the UK and the US,
and these challenges stem from a combination of social stereotypes, cultural biases, and the preference expressed on dating platforms. And the reason I'm asking this question is it's not a lived experience I have because I'm not an Asian man, although sometimes people think I am. There are a group of people where I don't have a shared lived experience who are struggling in ways in the Western world that like maybe mean you don't understand. Yeah. No, it definitely, definitely. You know, we have to understand
that we exist in a highly racist society. And a lot of people don't like to acknowledge it, don't like to talk about it, like to sweep it under the rug. But when it comes to dating, it shows up in this statistic that you're talking about. Now, let's think about this. If you are someone who is not black,
and you are interested in a black, I'm sorry, you're interested in a partner. And then you've had no experiences with black people other than maybe watching some black people on television and your parents and your community have set all kinds of crazy things about black people. And you have all types of negative belief structures around black people.
And you're a man, you're say a white man, and you're presented with a black woman on a dating app. Are you going to swipe on this person? No, you're not because you don't understand how incredible she is, how smart she is, how beautiful she is. You have no appreciation. So the reason why they're not swiping is their ignorance. That's what it is. And this is the reason why.
One of the most important things we can do is widen our social groups. This is the most important thing. I mean, it positively impacts our romantic relationships. It positively impacts our life is that we need to have a diverse set of people that we interact with and truly understand how beautiful
how beautiful people who are different than us actually are. Is there a bit of a systemic issue here as well? Because when I was thinking about your grandmother growing up in that village in Jamaica that you referenced, she would
spend a lot of time because of the nature of how she would meet that person in the village, that other man in the village, getting to know him beyond his surface level appearance. So if he lived across the street, she would interact with him, see his behaviour. He might have long fingernails, you know, but she gets to learn that he's a kind, generous person and he's got a good sense of humour so she can look past the velcro wallet and the long fingernails. But in the way that we've designed
dating in the modern world where most people, now I believe, are meeting online in some form, whether it's social media or other. We're actually purely judging someone in the fingernails. We make a decision in a couple of seconds, whether this person is compatible or not. And obviously that's not possible. And I just feel this real strong sense of dissatisfaction, frustration, and
desperation from people at the moment as it relates to finding someone. And I just think the systems that we've built, social networking, the screens, have only exacerbated this frustration and desperation.
My question, which is somewhat linked to this, is really around the old ways of doing things, like you were talking about your grandmother. I was really curious about one subject in particular, and wondered if you had any data on this, which is arranged marriages. Yes. Yes. Are arranged marriages?
as successful as the relationships we form today via social media screens, et cetera, et cetera, because back in the day, we were kind of put together with somebody based on, I don't know, family or economic reasons.
Did those marriages succeed? Many of us don't want to acknowledge how successful arranged marriages actually have been and continue to be. Really? Continue to be. But we have to look at the why, right?
Now, when people hear this, they immediately say, oh, well, what about all the abuse and the dissatisfaction that happens in these relationships? Does it happen? Absolutely. But it also happens in non-arranged marriages at significantly high rates. So why are arranged marriages so successful? To some researchers, they have a higher level of satisfaction than non-arranged marriages. And here's the reason why. The reason why is because
You have families coming together and negotiating and determining whether or not this particular person fits within their family structure. And what does that mean? That means that you have literally
a mother, a father, a grandmother, a grandfather, a brother, a sister, who come together and they discuss and debate the characteristics. They discuss and debate whether or not this person is an upstanding human being. Is this person open-minded? Is this person going to be resourceful? Are they resilient? They debate these characteristics.
And the reason why it's so beneficial is because the person getting married is not involved and they're not involved because they would be entirely biased. What happens today is incredibly dangerous. What happens today is when we meet someone, we typically do not involve any friends and family.
We are already infatuated with the person, so we're obsessed with them. Therefore, we can't even determine whether or not they have any of the traits that we want. We are living through our own trauma.
And we're not even selecting them. Typically, they are selecting us. So we end up sliding, if you will, into a relationship that was never right for us to begin with. Whereas in arranged marriages, you have a true debate happening around whether or not someone will fit within the life of that individual. Another example is,
My wife and I are a matchmaking agency. We pioneered something that had never been done, at least to our knowledge in matchmaking. Like Steven, if you were a client of ours, you would be the perfect client at that time. Because we had many men who were incredibly successful professionally and felt as if, okay, what I'm missing is I'm missing
love. I'm missing partnership. So if you came to us as a client, instead of me saying, all right, Stephen, tell me what you want, right? And you give me this long list. I know you'd give me a list of like 150 things that you want. Instead, I would say, no, no, you go sit over there. I'm not, I'm not even going to talk to you. Instead, let me talk to your brother.
Let me talk to your coworkers. Let me talk to your exes. Yes, let me talk to your exes. Let me get a 360 perspective of who you are from the people who you are closest to. And I would then build out a profile based on the consensus of what they're telling me. This is so true.
I've got one of my best friends in the world has struggled with a few of my best friends, but there's two I'm thinking about in particular, but one I really want to focus on. He's struggled in relationships for the last, I'd say 15 years. And every single time he gets in a relationship, as his friend, I go, that's not it. That's not it. And every single time he gets with somebody else, I go, that's not it either.
And I, after this last relationship failed, I sat with him and I'm trying not to like, you know, intervene too much. But I said, bro, I will know, I feel like the same way that he knew when I found the right one and he would literally, if I was to dump my current partner, he would literally
Reversed the decision. Yes. He would write an executive order to reverse the decision because he knows that person is exactly what was right for me. In the same way, I could literally draw a picture. I could tell you the occupation, the age of the right person for him based on knowing him and him being my best friend for 10, 15 years. But for some reason, he goes for everything opposite than that. Right. And I've always wondered this. I've always wondered like,
Should we be picking our friends' partners for them? No. If, as a society, we went back to our nearest and dearest family in social circle. Yeah. And I want to emphasize the people who we truly love, because like, not all families, family. Yeah. So if we had that circle making the decision for us, we would have much higher satisfaction rates in marriages.
Without question or much higher satisfaction rates in partnerships is because of precisely what you said. Three in a study here, it says a 2012 study published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies found that couples in arranged marriages in collectivist cultures reported similar or higher levels of satisfaction over the long term compared to those in love marriages. Yes.
Yes, go back, Eli Finkel, 80% of our marriages have a lower level of satisfaction today than any point in history. And you think about the emphasis that we place on the individual. This is something that needs to really be emphasized because the more that we require,
our partner to deliver everything to us, the higher their bar becomes, the expectation, and the moment that they're not meeting that expectation, we're not satisfied. Now, they could be delivering on nine out of 10 things, but because our expectation is 10,
we have low satisfaction. Because ultimately, that's what satisfaction is. Satisfaction is really based on our expectation. So what do we do about that? Because a lot of people will be able to relate to this idea that their partner is multiple things in their life, or that they feel like they are expected to be their partners, therapists, maybe financier, best friend, sports buddy on the weekend to play paddle with,
I've known life coach, et cetera. Some people will feel that pressure while they're also trying to run their own life. What do you do about it? Because you can't come home and say, babe, listen, it's over. I'm only going to be your boyfriend from now on. A lot of people won't like this, but we have to lower our expectation of our partners. We really do. And what I mean by this is, first, we have to begin with determining what do we want out of our partnership.
Because if we go back, and we don't have to go back thousands of years, we can literally go back to my grandparents.
The decisions were not, am I going to get all 10 things from my partner? It is three of the 10 things. And I'll be satisfied with the three of the 10 things. Why? Because I have a full community that I can go to. A friends, coworkers, colleagues, people who, you know, in my running club that I can go to for other facets of my life.
confidence, intellectual stimulation, whatever it may be. So that's where it begins. What do you want from your marriage? Then the next step becomes, all right, are you then prepared to do the work required to sustain that relationship? You know, the Gottman's who I know you've had on the podcast and are really the foremost experts in the world around couples therapy, right? John and Julie Gottman.
They said something to me that was profound when I was talking to them. And that is we're all compatible with each other and let that sit in for a second. It's like, okay, what does that really mean? What it means is that if I were to drop you with another human being on a desolate island and say, that's it. It's just the two of you for the rest of your lives.
you were going to form a very strong emotional bond. Chancellor, you're going to form a very strong physical and sexual bond, right? Why? Because you are required. There's no other outlet, but to make it work with them. Look at today. We don't feel like we have to make it work. There's countless options. We can just leave, right? And so,
This notion that we are compatible with everyone I think is profound because what it means is that you can get through that, you can increase your satisfaction by putting in the work. I can totally relate to that. I remember working in a call center once upon a time and I was broke and lonely. And as I worked in this call center, it was late rooms call center in Cheetah Mill in Manchester. I basically fell in love with the girl sat next to me in a call center.
Now, listen, I've seen her since. I think 10 years later, she came to one of my meeting greets, which was called Rosie. I literally, she's probably the first time she realizes that I fell in love with her. But in the context of there not being many options and me being a guy that basically had no other options, I wasn't going out to nightclubs, I couldn't afford it. I just fell in love with someone who was in close proximity and I just was really, really into her. And it shocked me because
objectively speaking, had I written down what my type was at that period of my life. I wouldn't have written that, but just because we were held in close proximity for long enough, I found the attraction. Yes. The attraction came to be. And fortunately, that's not the world we live in. And
In fact, one of my friends who's struggling the most in relationships, her job is literally to me people. That's like the base premise of her job, and she can't find anyone. And I think part of what I'm seeing there is what we've described with having too many options. But what does someone do about that?
Like, what's the actionable thing to do if you live in the modern world and you're struggling to find somebody, even though you realize that if you were held in a room with five total strangers, you'd probably fall in love with one of them. Yeah, it's tough, right? But it always begins with self and self-awareness. And I would literally start at, well,
What is my attachment? That will inform an incredible amount. If she goes back and does the work and realizes that she is avoidant, that will begin to fill in the gaps as to why maybe she's been emotionally distant relationships, why she feels like she doesn't need anyone, right, why people need to jump an even higher bar to be in a relationship with her.
start with your attachment and realize that if you are avoidant or you are anxious, you can earn a secure attachment. And there's work that's involved, but you can do that. And by the way, you can do that without a therapist. It's always advisable to go with therapists, but let's face it, the wait times for therapists, the cost for therapists, they're not. And also, the number of therapists on a per capita basis is decreasing.
So they're not as accessible as often. We make it the mount to see. So that's one is you want to start with self. That's one. Secondly is really get grounded on the type of relationship that you want. And the reason why this is important is because therefore you can make it clear what your boundaries are when you begin to engage with people. Because I always say that
If you don't assert your boundaries, you can take well-intentioned people and turn them into bullies, just as a result of not asserting your boundaries. So in order to assert your boundaries, you have to know your boundaries. So that's the second piece is beginning to know, okay, well, what do I want? What do I want? For example, there are hundreds of variations of relationships that you could have today. My grandmother, right,
There was one. It was committed marriage until you die. That was it. Now...
You don't have to be married, you could live apart, but be together, see each other on weekends, you can decide, we don't wanna have children, you can decide. There are hundreds of variations. Be very clear on what you want. And when I say assert your boundaries is assert what you are interested in right from the beginning. These three steps are incredibly important.
I want to talk about the different variations of relationships and a lot of the sort of myths that keep us held in this sort of modern idea of what a relationship looks like. Okay. But you said something now which I, which sparked a thought that I had read in your book when you said till death do us part. Yes. I read about this study that says that
Cancer research on heterosexual couples found that if a man becomes terminally ill and his wife becomes the caretaker, there is a 2.9% separation rate. If the woman is terminally ill and their male partner becomes the caretaker, they leave at a 21% rate, which basically means that men are approximately 624% more likely
to separate from a woman if the woman gets sick. And that was on page 48 of your new book, Keep Love. What the fuck is going on there? That is alarming shocking. And it was so alarming shocking. I had to include the study in the book. For me, and I wrote this in the chapter around, love is conditional. And we have to understand that the myth that presents itself is that love is unconditional.
It is, you know, if you find the right person, there's no conditions. That could be true with your children, right? Your child could go do something heinous, and I believe there could or would still be love for them.
But that's not the case with our partners. And for us to be aware that there are conditions when we go into these relationships, that's the most important. So it's almost a warning sign, in particular to women in that chapter, to say, there are conditions. And unfortunately, when people have gone through and interviewed these men who have left
the women on their deathbed, and even the women, because it's 2.9% of women leave men, even the women who've left the men, what they will say is that they're no longer getting, fill in the blank. They're no longer getting the emotional intimacy. They're no longer getting the physical intimacy. They're no longer getting the, you know, you fill in the blank. And as a result of no longer getting this thing, and the thing is the condition,
They're out. So why men, though? That over 600% more likely to leave a terminally old partner than women are. Yeah. You know, there's a disproportionate amount of the relationship that's placed on the physical side of the relationship, right? Sex. Sex.
It's not all about sex, right? It's not all about sex. But what it typically means is that there is a low level of satisfaction in the relationship. And as a result of there being a low level of satisfaction and the low level of satisfaction could come from
not having enough sex or not having the sex that they like. It could be from there's no respect. They don't feel like there's equity in the relationship, whatever it may be. But because there's already a low level of satisfaction, when they go into a place where the partner is terminally ill, they're more
Ready to leave, right? This is normally what you see. What you see happen when you see a partner leave another partner where you see infidelity happening is you see that there was already a low level of satisfaction. The level of satisfaction in the relationships not only dictate the survivability of the relationship, it dictates the survivability of us. There was a study done.
James Coyne, this one blew my mind. He pulled 200 patients who had congenital heart disease, right? So not terminally ill, but as close as you get to terminally ill. And he was able to look at the 200 and he broke down the group based on those who have a high level of satisfaction and those who have a low level of satisfaction in their relationship.
Two years later, the couples who had a high level of satisfaction, the person in that partnership who had congenital heart failure, you know what? They died about 11% of the time. So 11% they died. But those who had a low level of satisfaction, two years later, 45% of them had died. Think about that.
little greater than three times the likelihood of death because of the low level of satisfaction in the relationship. So the satisfaction in the relationship is the key. And this is part of what I've been trying to drive in this book. And a lot of my messaging is that we place too much value on longevity.
It's ridiculous. When I sit down for interviews, typically the top is saying, and thank you for not asking me this, the typically the first two or third question is, Paul, how, so you've been married for how long?
How long have you been married? How long have you been married? And the idea is that because I've been married for 23 plus years, that I'm successful in my marriage. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. The question should be, how satisfied are you in your marriage or in your partnership? And so we can't, we have to stop putting emphasis on the longevity and really focus on the satisfaction. How satisfied are you in your marriage? Steven, this is...
I hate you for asking this question. No, no. I am. So, the reason why I bought- Especially for your wife when we got her answer, of course, we'll just keep having- Yeah, you tell me what she said first. Yes. Are you sure you want to know on air?
What, the reason why I hate trying to answer a question like this is because so many people would say, oh, I don't believe, I don't believe what this guy said. Truly, hand on my heart, word to my children. I have the highest level of satisfaction with Joe, you know, with my best friend today than ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And I think the reason for this
is because of the enormous amount of work that we put in. You know, a lot of people don't realize is that when I read a stat, Jill is typically right next to me. Last night, literally last night, we're in the bed and we are talking about the history of marriage. And we're debating Clovis, the first of Franks and how he made an impact on relationships. We're always
discussing these topics. And as a result of having the conversation around these topics, it helps us to be open. It helps us to dialogue. It helps us to debate. It helps us to have doubt. It helps us to have trust and autonomy. And therefore, it helps us to have this strong level of communication and emotional intimacy
that then feeds into all aspects of our life, into our sex life, right? Into our ability to parent our children, into our work, right? All of this feeds from having the strong connection. So the satisfaction is sky high. And
This is a topic that is funny because I was like, I just even does the research. So he could have asked Jill, I am very confident. Jill would say the same. The reason why is because we always check in with each other. We're always like, how are you feeling right now? Do we feel like we're going in the right direction? You know, when I think about, do you have strong satisfaction in your relationship? The questions that always come to mind is, do you feel safe with your partner?
Do you feel safe? Do you feel like you can express your true vulnerability to them, right? That's one. Secondly is, do you feel respected? You know, with John Gottman's research, number one, you know, he saw he could predict divorce at 99 plus percent or 90 plus percent because of contempt or disrespect in the relationship. So do you feel like you have respect? Another one.
Are you optimistic about where the relationship is going, which suggests how much effort and work your partner is placing in the relationship? So many of us are hopeless about the future is because we know our partner's not doing anything to further the relationship. So are you nurturing the relationship?
Many of us are quick to focus on self-love now and nurturing ourselves. But the question is how much nurture are you giving to the relationship? Because that's a separate entity.
You're talking there about sort of the pillow talk with Jill about relationships and constantly it being part of the conversation in your household. One of the things that I was pondering as you said that is, should we spend more time talking about the relationship with our partner? Because if I think about the relationship I'm in now, we spend a lot of time talking about the relationship. Whereas in previous relationships, it was kind of the elephant in the room all the time. So we never really had an opportunity or a forum to
Ask those questions about unmet needs or are you happy, et cetera, et cetera. And I just think that probably the missing piece for a lot of people in relationships is they just don't have a space in their week where they sit and talk about the relationship itself. Yes. So, yes. Should we be speaking more absolutely? Would it save many partnerships? Absolutely. Would increase the satisfaction, absolutely.
Do we not have enough time? I would say this becomes our cop out. Like, we're so busy with life. Think about this. I'm so busy with life that I can't give the person that I plan to spend the rest of my life with time.
Right? We have to prioritize our relationship with our partner. We have to prioritize this. We have to figure out when we can build in time to talk. And we have to actually talk about the real things. You know, I'm willing to bet.
that most men don't even realize, especially in heterosexual relationships, heteronormative relationships. Most men don't even realize that their partner doesn't even orgasm when they have sex. You look at the orgasm gap and you say, oh my God, you have,
men orgasming at 95% and women at roughly 65%, maybe a little bit higher in these committed relationships. That means that there's a significant percentage that never orgasmed. I bet you their partner has no idea. No, no idea. Why?
because there hasn't been a conversation around it. Now, the issue is a two-way street. It's not only the man's issue that he needs to be aware and have the conversation, but she also needs to be able to tell him. But you know why she probably doesn't tell him? Because
She doesn't want to hurt his feelings. She has not, she's not been having an orgasm for the last 10 years. So she feels like if she brings it up now, it's going to be detrimental to the relationship. So she's trying to protect him, right? And she, or she's embarrassed or whatever it may be, he is completely oblivious and unaware and they never talk about their sex life. A matter of fact, their sex life is a script.
which is typically most people's sex life. It's just a script. It's two or three moves that are done, men, orgasms, women, women doesn't, that's it.
Think of how powerful it would be if they could just simply have dialogue and discussion. It's hard to start that behavior though. I imagine in your relationship with Jill, you guys are pretty advanced, right? So if you're level one, what's level one in karate? Is it like a white belt? Oh yeah, white belt. You feel like a white belt in this stuff where there's been 10 years you and your partner just really don't talk about these things. It's kind of always been the elephant in the room.
loads of words have been unsaid. What would you suggest as like a good starting point to get the ball rolling in this direction? All right. I like this. So baby steps. So in the book, I talk about how we have to normalize the fact that we will be attracted to people other than our partner. No one wants to talk about that.
No one wants to talk about, you know, it's just my partner. That's it. I'm not looking at anywhere else, right? Are you attracted to other people? Oh, my statement. Come on, man. Are you? Absolutely. Absolutely. And not only that, and there are different forms of attraction. You know, there's physical, there's sexual attraction, there's emotional attraction.
But to your question of what do you do if you're level one in your relationship is you start with these baby steps. So Jill and myself, we had to start around this topic of attraction because I had a very hard time.
just thinking about my wife being attracted to someone else. I couldn't fathom it. The jealousy, the anxiety, the anxiousness, I have an anxious attachment style. So it was just fear, right? And there are many different things that you can do, but I'll give it to you. One is that you just have to normalize that these behaviors are a part of our human experience.
Well, all have physical attraction. Some of us will have sexual attraction. Some of us will have emotional attraction to people who are not our partners. If anyone denies it, they are lying. Okay? This is one. We have to normalize this.
we normalize it, then we begin having conversations around it. So what my wife and I did around this, and she will hate me for saying this, but I wrote this in the book, so it's cool, is we started talking about celebrities, easy, low-level way, people who were arm-length distance. Who do you find attractive? I saw that. My wife
as does, I think, 99.999% of women and men loves Idris Elba. She's like, Idris is it. To the point where I was like, will you leave me for, I think she will leave me for Idris Elba. She will definitely leave me for this man. But we begin having conversations around it. It becomes a bit of a joke, right? It is embedded in our, in the normalization of it. And then,
I begin to do what I call taking my thoughts to court, take your thoughts to court, right? Whereas I would identify, okay, what is the issue? What's the emotion? It's actually fear. If Jill's talking about someone else, she was with, it was fear, but then I, then I, then I, then I draw on that fear. What am I in fear of? I'm in fear of her, of her leaving me. She's just going to leave me, right?
but then take that thought to court. What are the facts that I have to support or discredit those feelings? Well, I've been with Jill for 20 plus years, right? We have a high level of satisfaction. It's normal to have attraction, right? So you take your thoughts to court and then you can begin to recalibrate your perspective on the thing.
So it gets to the point where do you know that every anniversary Jill gets the biggest bouquet of flowers from Idris Elba.
I write love Aegis Elba. So I'm writing this. So I've now, it's now, it's moved to a point where I couldn't even stand this idea to now, it's so normalized. It's jokes about it. So it's very important for us to normalize, have these conversations, take our thoughts to court. And if we are, and we have to realize this, and I wrote about this in the book, is that it is also healthy.
to have doubts about your relationship. We're told that if you're in the greatest relationship, if you found your soulmate, you should never have doubts. Myth. Myth, right? It's healthy to have doubts, but there are healthy doubts and there's unhealthy doubts. If it is a doubt that is about the growth of your relationship,
That's healthy to express that. If it is a doubt that is predicated in your own fear or your anxieties, your traumas, that's unhealthy. So to know that informs, you know, how Jill and I have tackled that idea of
let's normalize a conversation. Is this a healthy doubt? It is. Let's build this into our relationship. So Jill, so I know Jill's adores Idris Elba, and she knows I will leave her for Beyonce. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. Yeah, I can just imagine that I've got a certain type of listener who is more, how would you word it?
advanced in terms of the, like, belt. You know, when I talked about white belts and black belts, more advanced in their curiosity, their intrigue, their willingness to, like, develop and evolve in the relationship I would bet. And this is stereotyping, I understand.
that it's typically women more than men that are like more open minded to like learn to grow to deepen the bond. I think it's typically women more than men. I would hazard a guess that it's more women buying your books than men. Yes. And I would hazard a guess that when I make conversations about love and relationship, it's typically not always because I can kind of see the numbers, but typically more women that are trying to learn to deepen their relationships.
So I imagine there's a certain person in my audience that sat there thinking, I want to do this. I want to have these conversations with my partner. I want to take down some of these walls and start talking about the lack of orgasms I've had in the last couple of years. I want to talk about X, Y and Z. But I know if I bring this conversation up to Dave.
Dave's gonna think I'm weird. He's gonna roll his eyes and put the football back on. And I feel a sense of dissatisfaction in this relationship, but because we just don't have a bridge of communication, I feel like I'm faced with a choice now. Do I just leave this guy? Or do I just tolerate it?
and put up with this. And that first step to bridging the gap, what is it? Do I turn the football off and scream at him? Do I send him the link to this podcast? I think that's probably the best option. I think it's just keep sharing the podcast. I think sharing the podcast with everyone you know, I think is probably the...
I'm Jersey, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Truly, this is the first step. So say it's Lottie and Dave. Lottie's listening to us right now and she wants to deepen her emotional connection with her partner Dave. What does she do? She sends Dave a link to this podcast and she says, let's listen to this together. Let's have a date night, let's listen to this together and let's just talk about
What's happening? You know what I've noticed with one of the shows that I co-host, married at first sight, UK, what I'm so proud about is I'm stopped all the time by men. And they'll say, Paul, I watch your show with my partner.
and our kids watch it as well and we debate what you're saying and sometimes we disagree with you but sometimes we agree with you and I think this is what we need because just talking about it and having the conversation around it helps to contribute to awareness which puts you on the path to developing skills
which then allows you to begin to heal. And ultimately, that's what therapy is. Therapy is healing. And so having the dialogue based on this podcast, based on a book, based on a television show is truly not just a first step, that's a significant step towards your black belt.
I am thinking about the history of relationships. I often wonder how many of the rules of relationships that we've been handed by society are now invalid, or maybe we're never valid. So, you know, we have these sort of constructs of like marriage and monogamy and even like heterosexuality, all these things that have been passed to us through religion and through history.
I was looking at some stats about marriage, and it says that in 2019, marriage rates for opposite sex couples fall to their lowest on record since 1862. That's in the UK. And in the US, marriage rates have been declining since the early 1970s. I'm not married, but I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I should be or not. I actually had a conversation recently with my partner where I said, do you want to get married? And it was abundantly clear that she does want to get married. But then I asked why?
And really, it seems like it was really just more for the wedding than for some kind of legal contract that we signed with the government. So I'm really wondering, based on everything we know about history and the trade-offs of marriage, should I be getting married? Yes, because your partner was, too. Is that a reason enough? I think the institution of marriage
What you're going to see, this is my prediction, is that because nuclear families... What do you mean by nuclear family? Well, it's interesting, there's different perspectives down on nuclear family, but I look at it as you have two partners and children, and that creates the nuclear family.
That becomes an economic unit which drives a society. And as that has disappeared, there's been less of a base to drive society per many researchers. So as a result, what I believe is going to happen as we see right now in Singapore, as we see right now in China, as we see right now in Japan, you're going to see government heavily involved
in incentivizing marriage. And marriage is already incentivized right now in terms of tax benefits, being able to leave assets to your partner or leave assets to family members.
So as a result of the decrease of marriage and decrease of nuclear families, you will see government step up even more to incentivize. So you're going to see all types of benefits being thrown at people to get married. Especially as you not only see marriage rates decline, but as you also see birth rates declining as they are. Now, your question around what should you do is that
Um, this is a question around values. And this is a question that I believe is very important app early on. Now I was saying, you know, when you meet someone, you should lay out exactly what you want. This is a very important question to have early early on. Now in terms of where you, where you are with your partner, I would say that if she is for, if she's pro this,
and you were indifferent, it feels like you're indifferent, not anti, but indifferent.
Yeah, I think I'm somewhat agnostic to it. However, I can call out a bunch of downsides to getting married. Really? Like? Well, again, I don't know because I'm not married. So all the married people are like screaming at me. I know this because they DM me. They've been DMing me for many, many years since I started the Diaries. Because in some of those early episodes, I was really like, I was really quite against it. But over time, I've kind of developed my thinking here.
I just wonder, I can't understand the first principles as to why having a
like government or religious contract with somebody is going to increase the probability of success in the union of love. There's obviously the issue with the pre and up situation. I actually don't have this concern with my partner. So I think she's, I think you've met, you've met her. Oh, yeah. From a distance. Yes, from a distance. Yeah, I don't have a concern that she's going to try and bankrupt me or that I might try and bankrupt her. So that's not really a concern.
The whole charade of like doing a massive wedding I think is a little bit weird. I think why can't we just have lots of events over the next 50 years where we bring our friends and family versus like one. I've also watched a couple of my friends at the moment who are getting married. The like two years of pain and heartache and like canceling date nights so that they can afford this one wedding day. Yeah. Feels like highly illogical to me. I've got one particular friend who
He's having to cancel so much for their everyday joy to save up for this one big event, which is stressing them both out. And I don't think they're going to have, well, I don't think he's going to have a great time at the wedding anyway, because he seems so stressed by it all. I sometimes hear that people can't get out of their marriage without having to file a divorce thing with through lawyers and going to court and battling out in court. And I just think you could be free to leave if you want to leave.
I don't know, I just think this is a terrible analogy and completely unrelated, but in football, many of the problems we see with
my favorite club Manchester United at the moment is we've got people on five-year contracts who we just can't get rid of and like they want to go we want them to go but because we signed these long contracts with them it's like incredibly difficult and now these players are being like thrown in the back room and they're not playing football and we're like just completely ignoring them because we can't get out the contract yes so I don't I just think yeah I hear you I hear all right can we talk about this yes all right
There are many secular marriages, so you don't have to do anything religious related. And it sounds like a big difficulty that you have. It could be that the number one is the wedding. But the wedding to me, the premise of it is a public declaration of your love.
And to your point, it could be as small as you want. It could be as big as you want. You could have as many as you want, right? That public declaration could happen 50 times over 50 years. It is up to you. So that is you and your partner navigating that space with regard to getting out of it.
This is the single biggest change that we need in marriages. Marriages, in my opinion, should be much harder to get into. You shouldn't be able, like literally, you and your partner could go to Vegas, drive up. So drive through, you could have an Elvis Presley impersonator marry you, you pay $25 and you're married. It's ridiculous. I think that there needs to be
There needs to be hurdles in place. There needs to be some type of vetting, some type of premarital coaching counseling. So everyone is aware of the commitment that is about to be made. And you have the tools, you have skills around conflict management, et cetera. It needs to be hard. But then if you want out, you should be able to get out in an hour.
It should be easy. Drive up, Elvis Presley says, it's over $25. Free. Yeah. Free, right? That's the way it should be, but it is the reverse. Now.
You're right. Marriage is hard to get out of. That's changing. There's now the introduction, especially in the UK of the no fault, right? But that still takes, it still could take six months or so. There still is a lot of haggle. So, so I agree with you there is that it should be much easier to get out, but ultimately,
What marriage is, is marriage is a declaration of commitment done in a formal way. Can you not do that without the marriage? Like, can you not do a declaration of commitment without having to go to like a church or whatever else and sign documents and stuff?
I don't know, is it not possible? It is, you know? It is, it is. So, I think I just have commitment issues. I think that's probably what it is. Yeah. I think that's at the core of it. Because you know what's so interesting to me is that you're already going to, well, how do I get out of this? Yeah. Right. And it almost feels as if there is a fear of committing to someone for the rest of your life. Yeah. Because that's a massive, I mean, think about this.
you're gonna commit someone for the rest of your life, for the rest of your days. And what we feel, because I've been there, because when I... I'm getting anxiety as you say it, I'm like fucking all the rest of my life. The rest of your life. But think about this, the anxiety is the fear of what has not even come yet. So that means that you can now interrogate your thoughts. Okay, you have fear over what? What's the fear?
But isn't it just a terrible idea to commit to someone till death do you part? Because like, imagine if I said to you, you've got to pick a job and then you've got to do it forever. Yes. The amount of procrastination that would occur because of the significance of that decision would basically stop you picking any job at all. Because you'd be like, I've got to pick one and do it forever. And you'd become a perfectionist. You'd be looking for perfection in every single job. And maybe this is in part the issue is that
because we see marriage as being such a final thing, that we really have to make sure the pick is perfect. It's perfect. I agree. This is one of the myths, right? This whole notion of till death do us part, which really was handed to us in religion. If you look through Christianity, Hinduism, even a lot of the modern day Islamic
marriage ceremonies, there's some formation of you will be with this partner for the rest of your life. And I think what that does is it actually sets us up for a lower level of satisfaction. It sets us up for complacency. Oh, this is all we get. Like it instead, they can't leave me. They can't leave me. So therefore, I don't have to try as hard. I don't even have to talk to them now. Yeah, I don't have to get to the gym. No, I could just sit here like, still,
That is a myth though, because we know where divorce rates are, separation rates are. We know that there are, you can get a divorce. So you can get out, she can get out. We have to put that to the side. But the key is to think about when I was like interrogate the fears is, well, what's the upside? What's the upside of having a partner for life? What would you say, upsides?
I mean, I could also name the upsides, I think. So there's a certain sense of stability and focus that comes when you know that home is kind of locked down. So as an entrepreneur in particular, I advise anybody that's going to pursue a big, grueling, tumultuous, uncertain challenge like building a business to have a partner at home.
And I know Sir Alex Ferguson was big on this when he was selecting players from Manchester United, he would often inquire about whether they were in a relationship because if they had a stable home life, then they would be much more focused on the training ground. And I see that with myself, you need a stable base. If you're single, I think, as an entrepreneur, it can become an immense distraction, an immense distraction, because on one hand, you're trying to build something over here, and you're trying to build something over here. I think marriage is useful as well because
When you know that it's hard to get out of, it means that exiting isn't the path of least resistance, which means that you probably will go to therapy first and you probably will see if you can fix it and figure it out versus just throwing it away. So it becomes less disposable, which means that you're more likely to fight to fix the thing. And what are the other upsides?
I mean, the stats, right? So the stats around health and wealth all suggest that if you're in a good, productive, healthy relationship, you're going to earn more money. I think it's 4% more a year in a productive marriage, both partners net earn 4% more a year. And according to Robert Welding, I came on the show, you're going to live longer.
So I get it. And you'll be healthier? You're gonna be healthier, yeah, yeah. Good work, Steven. Do you know what it is? I'm not trying to throw the marriage out. I'm wondering if there's an alternative. Do you know what it is? Part of me as well, if you look at the way I live in my life, I've always...
try to test the system. So school, like not going to school, dropping out of university, being an entrepreneur, there's always been a bit of a fuck you and me to the system. And a real pause in questioning what I'm being handed as the right answer to interrogate whether it's still valid now. Okay. So like many of the answers I was given, you go to university, then you go get a job and then you hand out your CV, all of these things.
proved in my life to just be BS. There was a better way. So when I'm approached with a conventional system like marriage, immediately I go, hmm, let's interrogate this thing. And I would say I'm with you. Throw the system out. Think about just one thing. And you said this and there's research behind this. It's the investment model, right? Theory. So the more you invest,
in the preparation of your partnership, in the actual partnership, the more that you're investing, time, all resources, the higher satisfaction you have. That's fact, right? That's research. That's in essence what you're saying, right? So that's the way that I would approach it, is how can I invest as much as I can in this partnership with this person that I love? What is it that predicts a successful marriage in your view?
Well, once again, what is success? To me, success is high satisfaction. High satisfaction has a strong correlation around well-being.
Dr. Carol Riff, I think, is the OG of wellbeing. She doesn't get enough credit. She created a model called the Six Dimensions of Psychological Wellbeing. And in essence, if we are working to increase each one of these dimensions, so for example, one is having a vision of your life.
Like what is that vision that you have for life? And the question, though, is do you feel like you were actively in pursuit of that vision? If you don't feel like you know what your vision is or you're not in pursuit of it, you're going to have lower wellbeing, right? So the higher wellbeing that you have individually, the higher satisfaction you have in your relationship, the more successful your relationship is. All of that.
like fundamental qualities that I should be looking for in a good partner. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a million. But the core, the core that I like to write about is, and I actually, I'll even synthesize it, you want to have a partner who is aware of their well-being and who is focused on their well-being. This is incredibly important because
One of the most profound re bits of research that I feel like I include in the book is that most of us believe that having alignment in the values of our partner is the most successful or is the high is the number one determinant of having a successful partnership. We think it's about values. We're told it's about values. We're fed values, which by the way, goes back to you know where that goes back to? Religion.
You know how? Have you heard of you need to be equally yoked? No. Oh, you haven't heard this. You don't read your Bibles. All right. So the Bible.
talks about, you have to have a partner, you have to find a partner who's equally yoked. What does that really mean? Equally yoked comes from oxen, right? So two, you have one ox here, one ox here, they're tethered together, they're plowing the land. If they're walking lockstep, they can plow the land. If you have one going off this way, one going off this way, you can't plow the land, you can't produce. So the Bible says you need to have a partner who's equally yoked.
pastors then interpreted that over the years to be what? Values. You need to have a partner who shares your values, has the same religion, has the same accent. This is how we became regimented in class. This happened century after century after century, right? We get to today, you ask anyone on the street, we grab 10 people, nine out of 10, and we said, how important are values? Nine out of 10 would say, values is everything. What?
Values change. They change. I value things much differently today than I did 10 years ago. Our values change. They're not constant. We need to throw away values. Are they important? Yes. Are they the most important? No. So therefore, let's de-emphasize the focusing on finding someone who matches all of our values instead, well-being key. Are they focusing on their well-being? That's one. Two, yeah, values is important. But you know what's equally, if not more?
Is you know what? How open-minded are they?
How much do they lean in? How curious are they? And then a third is how resilient are they? Because having a relationship with anyone means tough times. So are they able to bounce back? Or when things get tough, do they just land their back? So if you have a partner who's resilient, you have a partner who's open-minded, you have a partner who's focused and nurturing their well-being, you have a great partner. What about ambition? Does that matter?
I think ambition is a value set. OK. OK. Yeah, I just wonder because a lot of people would say that they want that in a partner, but.
just by running the mental numbers, not everybody can be ambitious. And people that aren't necessarily hugely ambitious also find love and keep love. But when you ask them what they're looking for, they'll tend to have a preference towards someone who's ambitious or goal-orientated. One of the things we talked about, kind of in between the lines, was
How society has changed? And one of the ongoing conversations and dating at the moment is around how women are struggling to find compatible men. Because women are more educated. I think there's more women graduating with college degrees now. The top 10% of men seem to be having all of the sex, according to some studies that I read, a lot of the sex. And then there's this bottom 50% of men that are somewhat disenfranchised because they
They're not getting the attention. They're probably turning to things like pornography. Women are dating up into the right, I'm told. So women, I did read a study that said the majority of women are still looking for a man who's adding more than them, but in a world of equality, which we all agree is a good thing, but women are more educated now. There isn't enough men up into the right anymore.
So there's this sort of disparity between what women are looking for, but actually what's available in the market potentially. These are all facts. However, we have to
we have to interrogate this data. But more so, I think we have to interrogate the narrative that's being handed to us. So I feel like the narrative that's being handed us today is that, you know what, the top 20% of men or 10% of men, they're good, but the bottom 80% you suck. That couldn't be further from the truth.
And I think we have to acknowledge, and this is where two things could be true. One, we live in a patriarchal society, absolutely, absolutely. But do we need to extend more grace?
to our men? Absolutely. We do. Are men lonelier than they ever have been? Absolutely. Are men confused? Absolutely, right? Are men being misled? Absolutely. Let's extend more grace to our men.
What does that mean? That means being aware that we do live in a loneliness epidemic. Being aware that less than 27% of men have a friend that they can feel is a confidant. That 0% of them now feel like they have someone who they can go to at 3am in the morning. It's being aware of these things.
It is saying, you know what? I can appreciate other traits and characteristics outside of how much you earn or how tall you are. It's important to be able to understand. And you just ask me. I said nothing about how much money someone makes, nothing about how tall they are.
But at the same time, what we have to understand is the narrative that is handed to about women is that all women are looking for the six foot plus CEO, right, who's making over a hundred thousand pounds or dollars a year.
And that is also not the case. This study here says, despite advancements in gender equality, research indicates that better educated women still tend to prefer husbands who earn more than they do. That's from the Institute for Family Studies. An analysis of online dating behaviors across 24 countries found that women are more selective than men showing a marked preference for men.
with high incomes and education levels, which again, proves this up and to the right thing. But there's just not enough men up and to the right. So there's going to be a lot of women that are somewhat dissatisfied according to this. All right. So the challenge of if I'm really interrogating this is one is it's talking about highly educated women. So we know that highly educated women
are on average dating hypergomously, which is what you're talking about, up. So someone who's dating, someone who has the same or higher level of education, the same or higher level of financial resources. And why is that? Because that's the script that society handed to women to say, the only way you can survive is by finding a man who can deliver this to you.
Right? And I think we have to accept where it came from. It was this terrible society of, you know what? You're not going to be safe unless you find a man who could provide. But you fast forward to today, a large percentage of highly educated women are dating this way. But that's not all women. The other part is, yes, are women beginning to out earn men and out educate men? Absolutely. In certain cities,
not everywhere of the world. Men on average still earn more income. So if you look at the narrative that's handed to us, you could say, well, you know what? Men on average still still earn more. But my point is this. My point is that I think we all need to reevaluate
what it is that we want. No longer do we need to have a partner for most of us, or should I say, this is me speaking out of privilege for many of us in the West.
No longer do we need to have a partner for pragmatic reasons. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and you just divided it into three categories, you would say the bottom kind of wrong is all of our psychological and physical needs, food, shelter, right?
then that kind of middle wrong is belonging and connection, and the top wrong is self-evolved. We want to be self-evolved, living our best self, contributing the most that we ever could to this world.
marriage and partnership and selecting a partner was largely based on that lower rung all the way through to the 1960s. That's like yesterday. If you think about how long we've lived. It's not evolution as well because you see the same thing in the animal kingdom with like the orangutan, which has like 90% same DNA as us. They still select for survival factors. So I think what's interesting when you look at different mammals,
And the evolutionary biology is that there's lots of similarities, but then there's also lots of traits that are different. So it's one of those where we have to appreciate that as homo sapiens.
We are unique and we live in a structure that we have largely created ourselves. We're debating about the institution of marriage. I mean, marriage didn't exist for the vast majority of our existence. But this golden rule thing, you told me about this. Yeah. And you told me that it's cross-cultural.
Yes. So it is. And this golden rule thing, please explain it for people. But for me, that is evidence that there's still an evolutionary component to selection for men and women. And I was reading this study that said women, almost 50% of women prefer to date only men that are taller than themselves, while only 13% of men prefer to date only women that are shorter than themselves. And another study revealed that women are most satisfied when their partner is approximately eight inches taller,
Whereas men are most satisfied with a height difference of about eight centimeters taller than their partner. Yes. So women clearly have a preference here, a significant amount of them to dating a man that is bigger than they are. Yes. All right. Yes. This is so good. All right. A couple of things here. Do we have these preferences? Absolutely. There's a lot of this handed us through evolutionary and our biology? Absolutely.
Is most of it handed to us through socialization? Definitely. Do we change as we increase our wellbeing? Yes. So here's my point. If you were to go back and say, Zendaya, look, you go back 10 years, say, Zendaya, look, would you prefer to date a man that is taller than you? I would say there's a, there's a good chance she would say, I would prefer it. Yes.
Has that been her result? No.
Does she appear to be incredibly happy and satisfied? Yes, right, with Tom Holland. That's from my outside looking in? Yes. Why could that have been the case? Because she grew up being handed a script. She grew up the disnification of relationships. She saw the prints and how large the prints always was in comparison to the princess. She saw that the prince was able to pick up the princess. She saw all of these things. She believed all of these things.
And then as she became more mature, as she realized that she doesn't need anyone's validation, as she understood the things and the traits that she loved, she was like, this Tom Hahn, guys, hot. But that is an exception, obviously.
Because also, Tom Holland's got 30 million in the bank. But this does happen. You hear the show. It happens. But it's the exception, isn't it? It's not the rule. It is. And you know why? Also, that's the exception. And I agree. I'm with you. It's the exception. Because most of us have poor well-being. Most of us have low self-esteem. Most of us do. I would argue most adults have low self-esteem, mid to low self-esteem. And what does that mean? It means that
we need the validation of others. And this is the reason why I always say it goes back to us. Do you really think this is the answer to this? Do you not believe that there's a big evolutionary component to attraction selection preferences? Because I'm struggling to believe that society
is the only reason why we pick certain people. And I do part of me wonders and slightly worries that
We've almost accidentally inadvertently designed society in such a way where what we're looking for no longer exists necessarily. So we have to confront this new reality that, in fact, we're going to have to adjust some of our preferences if we are going to be happy and find what we're looking for. Yes. I do believe that a large percentage of the decisions that we make
have been handed to us genetically. So I'm with that. And I think the research suggests that. So if you have, for example, I was talking to Dr. Tara Swert in talking about a woman in the club, if she's ovulating or not ovulating, just based on that, men are going to be attracted or not attracted. Or you think about scent. Really, what we're trying to do with scent, the reason why we're turned off with scent is that
It's genetic. It's that if we end up mating with someone who has too close of a genetic mirror to ours, the child won't be as strong. So we need diversification in our genetics. And we don't realize this, but we can determine that through our scent by being turned off. It's a whole sniff test.
Do genetics play a role? Absolutely. Golden Mean, we talked about Golden Mean, where in essence, this is women on average loving to see wide shoulders and a thinner waist and men on average loving to see smaller hips, smaller waist, wider hips. Now,
Can people debate these concepts? Absolutely. Do they stand up? I mean, are there evolutionary reasons for these? Yes, because it speaks to being fertile for women, or it speaks to being strong to protect, right, for a man. All of this does play a role, and sometimes we don't realize how
much of a role evolution has played in why and how we make decisions, which is why it's also important, though, to understand how the society that we have created as human beings also plays a role, how we were handed
you need to have a partner who's the same class as you. When you find your partner, that's the person that completes you. When you find a partner, that's till death do you part. Those pieces were handed to us. So there's no wonder why we're confused. We have all this evolutionary decision-making happening that we're not even aware of. And then on this side, we have society telling us this is the person that we should have, and this is the reason why.
And I go back to why awareness is key and understanding how and why we are gives us a power. It gives us autonomy over our decisions so that when you are making that decision on your partner, you can ask yourself, you know, yeah, I would love to have a partner whose
over six feet, but how important is that really to me? Why do I think I feel this way? And once you begin to have those debates with yourself, that puts you on the path to making a decision that you're going to be more satisfied with in the long haul. I think that's the key.
The awareness comes from confronting both realities, which is on one hand, there are some evolutionary things that are going to make me have a bias towards a certain type of person, as certain attributes. Even if those attributes are actually not going to lead to a long-term healthy relationship, like fuck boys, like charisma and bravado and confidence is somewhat attractive, but it might not be a great husband. And then on the other hand, there is tons of things society has handed me through magazines and media.
that have portrayed an image of what beauty looks like, that are also just bullshit. I think understanding both is the key to that sort of autonomy, being able to say actually, I understand where that's coming from in me, but I will make a rational prefrontal cortex decision to select something else. Some evidence of this, the evolutionary basis of attraction, comes in this idea that people who have symmetrical faces
are more beautiful and more attractive across cultures. Is that true? Yes. So there are many scientists that will say, absolutely. But here's what one thing I know definitively about attraction is attraction to someone else is largely based on your self-esteem.
And this is what I mean, is that the lower your self-esteem, the more dependent you are on the validation of the public. So therefore, you will want to have a partner who is considered to be attractive. So if society, if the script is that symmetry is it, or if the script is wearing
this type of trainer, is it? If that's what society is saying, then if you have low self-esteem, you want a partner to look like that because you need the validation of the partner. However,
Whenever you see someone who's walking around with a partner and you think, how did those two get together, right? Chances are there's an element, and remember, I'm not talking about one is super high income or one has super high status. I'm just talking about, you look at a couple and you say, they look odd, right?
One of them could be traditionally attractive. One of them might not. Normally what's happened is that you have someone with high self-esteem who has no need for the public's validation of their partner at all. I don't think people talk about this enough, but it's so unbelievably true. In fact, I know an individual who
has a historically low self esteem and went through a lot of stuff when they were younger. And I remember when they got into a relationship. I remember exactly where I stood in London. I remember the time of day when they turned to me, they just got into relationships, someone with a historically self esteem. And they said to me, Steve, I really like her, but I'm kind of worried. This is an exact quote. I'm kind of worried. Like, if I walk into a restaurant with her on my arm, is it going to be a good look?
I remember saying to this person, like, if that's the way you're assessing this person, based on how they'll look on your arm when you walk into a relationship, my God, this relationship is fucked. Because you're overlooking the actual things that matter, the most important things. And this person has gone from one relationship to the next, to the next, to the next, all of them failing.
And the more time I've spent with them, I thought to myself, like, it's because their selection is being made through insecurity and low self-esteem. Yes. Just back to back to back to back to back. Yes. It's not being made based on the essence of the person, the other areas of compatibility that matter more of the long term. It's that constant surface level connection. Yes. And I think most of us are making decisions based on
our self-esteem. Did you see this as a matchmaker? You know, yes. Because you were saying rich guys, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, I distinctly remember when I was on previously and you'd asked about like what was one of the most profound things that you saw. And I never had thought about that question until you asked it. And it was these men who were coming who had incredibly low self-esteem. And what it was is these were what I call late bloomers.
You know, it was the guy who always felt like no one liked, you know, no one liked how they appeared. They were the quote unquote ugly duckling.
They then found the gym later in life, right? They found their mojo later in life. They were always studious. They were a bit introverted, maybe shy at the same time. And here they are. And when people walk past them, they're like, oh my god, this guy's a stud. Like, look it. Look at this guy's a stud.
But he never thought he was a stud, nor does he think he's a stud today, which is why I say go back to doing the inner work. We would take a client like that and opposed to saying, let's put you on a date. We can't do that. We have to begin to work with you so that you realize how incredible you actually are. Why can't you just check them on a date if they've got their self-esteem? Because, okay,
We could sit them across from the most incredible match, but they won't recognize it because they're making decisions based on their self-esteem. So they're making the decision that your friend made, right? How will this person look on my arm when I bring them to the Christmas party opposed to
what's their well-being look like, or do we share any values, et cetera? So you can end up taking someone who could be great for you and push them away or dismiss them, or worse, you can invite someone into your life who's not the best placed for you.
because of result of your insecurities. Like a narcissist. Like a narcissist, like a sadist, like a psychopath, like a Machiavellian, right? You know, there's a distinct group of bad people in the world. David Bus writes about this that we have to realize they play on our fears. They understand when someone has low self-esteem, low well-being. They're attracted to that person. Why? Because they're better able to manipulate them
What's our best defense? The best defense in any relationship in life is our well-being. It acts as a wall against all of the bad people in the world. And what it also does is it acts as a magnet
for the great people in the world because people with high wellbeing and high self-esteem tend to surround themselves and understand and even attract people with high wellbeing and high self-esteem. Okay, so two personal case studies popped to mind in my friendship group that I'm aware of, people that I'm aware of. They are approaching their forties. They would both probably say that they had low self-esteem. They don't feel like they got the time pool.
to figure out their self-esteem, because in both situations, they're like, I need to find someone, and they're in a bit of a rush, I'd say. One of them is a male, one of them is a female. Now, what would you say to both of those people? Approaching their 40s, feel like they're in a bit of a rush. One's sort of continuing with a biological clock. The other just is continuing with social comparison. All of his friends are in relationships and settling down, and he's still single.
both fundamentally have low self esteem. So the way that they're trying to solve this problem is they're trying to get blow dries to make themselves look pretty on the external to attract people in and dating as many people as they possibly can to try and find someone as soon as possible. Yes. I would tell them you haven't even lived half your life yet. You have plenty of time. Period. But I've got a biological clock over here. You know it.
I understand that. But you know what's worse? You know what is incredibly sad is that I've seen a large percentage of people say, I have a biological clock. I want to have a child. So therefore, I'm just going to have a child with anyone. What happens?
What happens? What ends up happening is it ends up becoming a incredibly difficult scenario to manage because you now are in a partnership with someone who you don't like, you don't feel safe with, there's no emotional connection, they create stress on you.
They end up not being apparent to the child. That stress leads to other issues that you may have like autoimmune disease. You end up not being able to show up as your best self for the child. The child sees this and they have a myriad of issues as a result of you wanting to beat your biological clock.
I say this, I understand the desire to have children. I get it. I wanted my wife and I tried for eight years. We went through IVF. You know, I get it. To this day, we still pay for our embryos to be frozen. It's like, it's one of those where I understand the desire to have children. Where are you? Oh my God. It was probably 16 years ago.
when we started IVF, we were early to IVF. And by the way, even before the 16 years, we had tried naturally to have a child. We went through one year of cycles, unsuccessful. We ended up losing a child, right? Devastating, absolutely devastating.
And then we then have a cycle that works, which is our first son, Kingston. And then we have a cycle that works fairly close after our second son, Liam. But one of the untold stories about IVF, and I wish people talked about this more, is that you may still have eight embryos, six embryos that are still viable. We have nine embryos that are still viable. And so what do you do?
Some people will donate them to science. Some people will have them destroyed. But there's other folks like my wife and I that are thinking, you know, these are lives that we've created. Like, what are we going to do? And so we have paid.
to store them. So every month, since we began our cycles, we have paid to store them. Now, some people have told me that there are limitations in certain countries around how many years you can actually store your embryos. But it's such a grueling decision to have to make. And it's one that we made.
I understand the desire to be a parent. I'd fully do. How old were you and Jill when you decided to do IVF? I say this because you said 16 years ago. You look about 30. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, this is the thing is how old are you? Well, a lot of people don't realize this. This year, 50. So you were about 34, 35? Yeah. I would say I was about 30. Yeah, I was mid 30s. And Jill was saying mid 30s. Okay. Yep.
And you were trying for eight years. So quite honestly, we had been trying. So we got married when I was 25, right? We started trying shortly thereafter because I've always wanted to be a father, always. And so very quickly after we got married, we thought,
you know, children as us will have it. And it just doesn't happen that way. And what we began to see is that one of the challenges was around the stress that we had in our lives and how we were unhealthy as a result of the stress and the impact that was having on our inability to have children.
Did it cause a strain on your relationship when you went through these struggles with fertility? Absolutely. You feel like, you know, the script that I thought was handed to me, and this was a script, is that.
You're a man. And if you can't have a child, you're not a man. That was the script. That was literally, I remember being at the barbershop, right, when I had here. But I used to go to the barbershop. And that was the idea. You'd have the guy who was like, I've got eight kids. And as a result, I'm the manliest man in the room.
And I would leave thinking, I can't even have a child. What's the issue? And then you begin to think, OK, what are all the factors? And you begin to go through the test, and you begin to your point, and you've already done this, as you see, there's a multitude of issues. And for some people, they're incredibly fertile, and it takes
Boom, pregnant, eight times. But for others, and I'm in the others, it takes years. But I will say this, and this goes back to the investment theory.
the more that we invested in the pursuit of having children, the more the desire increase, and then now the level of cherishing our boys is on a whole noth... I think because of that experience is on a whole nother level.
I can imagine it really tears relationships apart. This issue of fertility in children, especially if the results come back. I was super scared when the sperm analysis came in and they like sent me the email with a password on it. I was like, Oh my God, if imagine if I open this document now and it says that my sperm are like not not good, like she's going to leave me.
You know, that's what you kind of think. Yeah. And I'm sure she might have felt the same way. There might have been a doubt in her that said if her results came back and it was bad, then maybe I would leave or something, obviously I wouldn't. But I'm sure it has a lot of families apart, a lot of relationships apart, these issues of fertility. Yes. And that's why it's so important for us to spend more time
in determining whether or not we feel like we have the right partner. Before we decide to commit to them, before we decided to have children with them, which is a massive decision, before we decide to move house or move into a house, our partner
Our partner is often life or death for us, the selection of our partner. The selection of our partner is I truly believe the most important decision that we will have because of all these things that it dictates that we've talked about. So having more emphasis on who that partner is and the dialogue up front is so incredibly important. You know, you think about this is like,
The top, the Gottman's, you know, they talk about how 69% of problems in a relationship will never be resolved.
69%, never be resolved. That's scary. That's scary. What does that mean? That means that you have to learn how to manage it. So that means that you have to have a partner who has superior conflict management skills and so do you. If your partner doesn't have that, you are in for a world of hurt. Wouldn't it be great to have determined that before you decide to have a child with someone? Because once you have a child, the level of conflict is going through the roof.
I had some stats that show that in terms of mental health, the study published in Nature showed that unmarried individuals have a 79% higher risk of developing depression compared to their married counterparts. Maybe I should get married. But also research indicates that strong social connections like a romantic relationship can increase longevity significantly and a comprehensive study analyzing 43 datasets revealed that
The quality of one's romantic relationship is a significant predictor of overall life satisfaction. High relationship satisfaction correlates with increased happiness and well-being. And the stats go on and on and on and on. Even in financial implications, which is quite staggering.
Yeah. This is a bit of a different question, but we talked a second ago about self-esteem and how if someone came to you in your matchmaking days and they were like keen to form and find love, one of the first things you'd say is like, we need to work on the self-esteem. But if a man comes to you and they are, let's say you're one of your sons. Okay. Kingston, is that your oldest? Yes, as well, all this. Kingston goes, bad, listen.
What should I be doing to increase the probability now that I find and keep a partner? What can I do on my own now? Like, do I need to hit the gym? Do I need to read a book? What do I need to do? Do I need to go out and earn money? And I want the honest answer that you would say to Kingston when no one's looking. You know what's wild is, I've already started talking to Kingston about this. OK. Because we work out together on the weekends. And I'm shocked at how strong he's getting. He's 14.
All the time, I tell him, Kingston, King, surround yourself with great people. That's it. Surround yourself. Put yourself in proximity to people who have healthy relationships, to people who have high satisfaction in their relationships. It's no different than in business. You want to succeed? Surround yourself with folks who are succeeding in business. You surround yourself with those people. And what you begin to do is you begin to observe their habits.
You see their skills. You adopt their habits. You adopt their skills. You understand where the boundaries should be. What is a healthy doubt? What is an unhealthy doubt? You learn all of these behaviors by simply surrounding yourself with good people. This is the key.
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myths. Yes. We've talked about a lot of myths today. The book contains 21 different myths. I won't go through all the more because I think people should buy the book and read them all and we don't have enough time to go through all of them. But just picking out some of the ones that really stood out to me. Okay. One of the myths that you say in your book is that more sex equals a happier relationship. Is that true? Does having more sex increase the happiness in your relationship? No.
Now, here's the investigation of that. Studies show that couples who have a high level of satisfaction in their relationship.
They have a high amount of sex. But it's not as a result of the sex that gives them the high satisfaction. It's the high satisfaction that gives them the high amount of sex. So the challenge is that we have to reframe and we have to stop thinking that just because we're having a lot of sex, it doesn't mean that we have a great relationship. I see this happen all the time, especially on Merida First Sight. A couple sits down. The first thing they say is, oh, Paul, I don't need any help. We're having sex like rabbits.
First of all, lions have much more sex than rabbits. Secondly is, that doesn't mean you have a great relationship. The fact that you're having lots of sex, it tells me nothing.
The myth is that if you have lots of sex, it means you have a healthy relationship. But could you be in a sexless relationship and also be extremely happy? You can. Many people. Many people are in that space. You've met people that are like this? Yes. There are a significant percentage of people that are like that, especially as we get older.
give couples in their 80s who've now reached a point where the desire for sex is not there. Maybe it's once a year. And I know everyone in their 20s, 30s, 40s, even 50s are like, oh my gosh, once a year, this is crazy. But if you have a couple, there are two different desires here. There's one is called a spontaneous desire and one is called a responsive desire. Now there is a gender difference here.
Most men, even if you look through the ages, all the way up to 60s, 70s, they have what's called a spontaneous desire, which means that they are ready 24, 7, they could just go. They need no emotional turn on in order to have sex. They just get hard on sat there. Hard on demand. Okay. Pretty much. Whereas as women get older, typically,
They require responsive desire. What is responsive desire? They want some emotional connection, some emotional currency. They want some safety. They want a conversation and not just one, but they want to have a buildup of that emotional currency in order for them to have a responsive desire to the sex in order to have sex. So there's different desires when you talk about sex.
And I think that more discussion needs to be had around responsive desire and the importance of building what Dr. Karen Gurney talks about is as emotional currency to build up that connection with your partner. So it's almost emotional currency is almost like putting deposits in the bank account, right?
If there's an empty sexual bank account and you just go to your partner and you say, I want to have sex, in other words, I want to make a withdrawal, there's nothing there. You're getting nothing. Literally, you're getting nothing. However, if you are placing deposits in
What is that? That is, I just wanted to send you a text to tell you how much I do love you. I appreciate how well you take care of the kids. I can't wait for us to have date night tonight, just to watch the movie and have wine. These deposits
hugs, kisses with no requirement of sex. You know, I often talk about a 30 second hug and I gave you a 30 second hug once. Why don't you look happy about that?
No, it matters. It's important. Davina does the same. She's a really exceptional hugger. Yes, she's very good. So the 30-second hug, I talk about the six-second kiss, and so many people respond back. Well, if I gave my husband a 30-second kiss, he'd think that sex is at the end of that. No, we need to normalize these things. That's putting...
emotional deposits into our partner. So then once it's built up, then you could go make your withdrawal, right? And so, yeah, sex needs to be looked at it, I think, more and more from the standpoint of responsive and spontaneous desire.
Desire management, time that I talk about with my friends sometimes, should we spend more time apart in our relationships? We live in a society now, as you said, where we're becoming more and more individualistic, which means there's more demands being placed in our partner to be everything. And if they're everything, surely they're less attractive. Because if they're our counselor, our therapist, our accountant, our best friend, it seems like logically that they wouldn't be as spicy.
Yeah, if they are everything, we set ourselves up with a very high stakes relationship because the moment that they don't become everything, they could be 99% of everything. But the moment they're not 100% we're disappointed. But also like if this person is like,
my emotional support in so many areas of my life. They are my friend. They are my co-founder of my company. I wonder if the spice, you know, they say absence makes the heart grow fond. I wonder if the spice is going to leave the building.
The spice can, but there are other, I think, more challenging issues that can arise. And I'll give you my example because I fell into this, right? So I reached a point in my marriage where my wife was everything to me. She was my co-founder. We were running a matchmaking agency.
We spent nearly all of our time together. We were co-parents. If I had a business question, a platonic question, a romantic question, I would go to her. It got to the point where I saw myself disconnecting from my social circle. I had season tickets to watch basketball. I would stop doing that.
I stopped watching my NFL football on the weekends because it was just spending time with Jill and the boys. And I realized very quickly that what was happening is I was investing everything into my wife and my family. And the issue is that, and this is what happens with so many people, is that I had no other confidence in my life.
I had distanced myself from almost everyone. And the issue from that is then I'm bringing no value into the relationship because I have no other relationships. That's ultimately what that means is when you have other relationships, when you have other friendship circles, you're learning new things. You're bringing novelty into your relationship. You are adding spice to your relationship. I wasn't doing any of that.
That continued for quite some time. This is one of the reasons why I got involved with football here, is that being involved now with a football team in England has allowed me an outlet outside of my family, and even outside of my social circle that I was building here.
That is entirely different. It's a group of people who I had not come across in my walks of life, who I love and adore and learn so much from. And I have a sense of enjoyment. And because I have a sense of enjoyment there, I begin to have more purpose in my life.
I begin to have more joy in my life and the more joyful I am about my entire life, I can bring that to my relationship and help to boost that relationship. And so it's almost like if you think about an electrical battery and you're charging and you are the battery, how wonderful would it be to be able to get a charge
from eight sources opposed to one. Maybe the one is not working today, and therefore you don't get charged up. But if you're getting charged eight different sources, it hires the likelihood of you being charged up to live your best life.
And I think this is where the attachment styles comes into play again, because I think in my relationship, I may be a little bit more on the avoidance side, and she's maybe a little bit more on the extra side. So I think there's a desire in me to space, freedom, explore, wonder. She has that too, of course, but I think I just have it a little bit more, so it can sometimes feel like she's pursuing, yes.
the quality time, and I'm maybe pursuing being on my own, which causes this sort of dysfunction or this imbalance. I guess some couples who are both anxious, I don't know if they get on. No, I mean, what happens most of the time is anxious.
Find avoidance. Oh, OK. Yeah. So those are the two that end up matching. And it's very important to work for you both to work on an earned secure. And one of the best ways to do that is to surround yourself with couples who are secure.
Why is it that anxious relationship attachment styles go for avoidance? You'd think they'd go for anxious, right? And we should probably pause to define what these attachment styles mean. Sure, sure. So out of Mary Ainsworth and John Bulby research, which, you know, Bulby from the UK, Ainsworth from Canada, the whole idea is it was something called the Strange Situations Test.
which examined the relationship that we have with our first caregivers. And those who had a secure attachment is where your caregiver was really always there for you. So in your time of need, your caregiver was always there to be of support.
anxious, which a large percentage of the population is anxious, anxious is where your caregiver was there sometimes, other times they weren't. This is very prevalent in immigration communities, first, second generation, especially second generation immigrants where your parent was working. You know, they're hustling, multiple jobs, and they're there for you sometimes, but they can't be there for you all the time.
And then you have avoidant. Avoidant is when the caregiver wasn't there. So you had to learn to self-soothe. You end up seeing a large number of very successful business people are avoidance. Why? Because they've learned to be self-reliant. Anxious?
tend to be more of what feels to be needy, right? Secure, I'm okay, I'm okay by myself. Now, why do anxious and avoidance end up matching? Because the anxious feels comfortable in pursuit.
That's our disposition. And I think I'm earning more of a secure, but my natural inclination is that I'm comfortable in pursuit. And avoidant is comfortable being pursued because
You have an opportunity to connect, but then create the distance when you want to. So you end up seeing many anxious and avoidance come together. And it's important to recognize that. So you've already recognized this, which is half the battle is the awareness. Now you can begin to develop the tools to become more secure. That's difficult. That's the work. It's difficult, isn't it? I think step one is obviously awareness.
because then you can start to sort of catch yourself out and see yourself when you're exhibiting certain behaviours and really start to question them. That's kind of what I do now as an avoidant. When my partner's looking for attention and making those bids for attention as they call them, I observe what they're doing. I observe how I feel about it and I then rationalise it