We're really good at seeing all these different types of diversity of relationships in our platonic lives, but for some reason, we put so much pressure on the romantic relationship, right?
And it still is interesting to think about why you have to put so much pressure on just one person to make you happy.
It's just about, I think, a readjusting of what you actually need that partner for.
And I'm not anti -marriage, I'm not anti -partnership.
I just think that everyone benefits when we turn down the pressure to make marriage and romantic partnership.
The only version of happiness that we're made to achieve.
So, have you ever felt the weight of societal pressure kind of bearing down on you telling you that your life is somehow incomplete without a romantic partner, that your very sense of happiness and fulfillment just hinges on finding, quote, the one?
If so, you're not alone.
For too long, we have been fed a narrative that singlehood equals loneliness, that marriage is the ultimate goal to strive for.
But what if that narrative is flawed or at least it's not right for most people?
What if there was another way to live a truly fulfilling life, one built on authenticity and diverse connections and relationships and self -acceptance?
My guest today is Megan Caine, and her new book, Party of One, Be Your Own Best Life Partner, it serves as an empowering antidote to those societal pressures.
Megan is the founder and supervising editor for NPR's Life Kit, bringing listeners advice on personal finances, health, parenting, and more.
Previously, she was a producer for award -winning podcasts like Invisibilia and Ted Radio Hour, exploring the invisible forces that shape human behavior.
In our conversation, she offers this powerful reframe on the mythology of having to find a partner to live the life that you dream of, and she also shares pragmatic strategies to silence the inner voice of doubt and rumination that can so often plague the single mind.
You'll learn techniques to build resilience and cultivate our harmonious passion toward romantic pursuits and redirect that energy into exploring your values and nurturing diverse connections.
From reframing loneliness to intentionally investing in friendship, this insightful discussion really provides a roadmap for crafting a life brimming with authenticity and fulfillment regardless of your relationship status.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
Excited to dive in, you're writing about a topic that I think is near and dear to a lot of people's hearts, but it's also something that I don't hear a lot of conversation around.
We like to explore some of the big issues around what does it mean to live a good life.
And one of the big aspirations is the classic rom -com or the romance novel.
There are literally entire genres of media that are built around the ideal of partnering.
And it seems to be like, well, this is what we all aspire to.
This is the quote, right way to step into grown -up hood and then the rest of life.
And you're basically saying, this is like a record scratch here.
Not so fast. Yeah, because we are marketed that idea of happiness, right?
It's not even just marketed that our economic situation is built around making sure everyone gets married.
There's a lot of different angles where we're being told from a very early age, partnership, romantic partnership is not just what is expected of you, but it's the only way you are expected to be happy, right?
And I'm a millennial.
I'm 35. I thought I was in this wave of feminism where it was not going to affect me.
I was like, that's fine.
I can wait. I have a great life.
I have a cool job. I got good friends.
I'm good. But I started to see how those messages about you need to be partnered, you need to be partnered were still seeping into my brain and making me feel really bad and making me feel a lot of shame that was really frustrating.
And I was having shame about the shame too.
Which is like unnecessary as well.
But I was really just struggling with what does it mean when your life doesn't perfectly fall into this one neat box.
And I really wanted to write this book because I knew there are other people like me who, yeah, they know that being single is awesome and wonderful.
Like my mom is widowed for almost 20 years.
My aunt, who is basically like another mom to me has never been married.
I have a lot of friends that are single.
I saw all these great examples, but it was still bothering me.
And I wanted to know how to deconstruct where that pressure was really coming from and how to just live with more ease.
So let's dive into some of the mythology around this also, you know, because I think we tend to equate what do most of us, you know, if you asked the typical person on the street, like, well, what do you want?
I want to be happy.
Yeah. And then we make this logically that says, well, happy equals dot, dot, dot.
Yeah. And then usually people then equate happiness with a specific goal, right?
The goal of partnership of marriage and the problem with making marriage a goal in your life is that it is immediately pass fail, right?
Like you either have it or you don't.
And that feels bad when you don't have that.
I really struggled with being told you want to marriage, right?
And you want partnership from all these different angles.
But then when I felt bad about not having it, it's like, Oh, well you're sad.
You're pathetic, right?
It's like, well, you told me to want this in the first place.
Like this feels like I can't win either way.
And so in writing this book, I was seeing how rethinking even like goals about what you want out of a life, unpacking those getting underneath them and really thinking about what values you want to live in your life is so much more flexible.
You start to see really what it is you want.
And are you living in your values rather than do I have this thing?
Cause we've all been there before where I want to be happy.
So I think that means a promotion.
I make this certain amount of money.
It means being with a partner.
And as soon as you get some of those things, you get a temporary bounce in or a spike in happiness.
But then research shows you kind of go back to more or less your happiness set point.
So the goal kind of framework or unhappiness treats happiness like there's a finish line.
And what I've been learning is that if you get underneath the golden is like, what do I really want?
Like what is the value underneath this school that opens up so many more venues for how you can express those values.
And just, it's just more kind.
It's more flexible.
I find. And I do want to unpack that a bunch.
Cause I think there's a lot in there.
Um, I want to understand a little bit better also because we're talking about an ideal that we've all been kind of handy as saying like the ultimate aspiration is to be in some sort of long -term marriage or partnership, like a romantic coupling, right?
Where does this come from in the first place?
Oh yeah. Uh, from the, the stories we're told about caveman and woman, right?
Like the idea that the man hunts on the plane and the woman stays home with the, uh, the kids at the cave, right?
Uh, and we also see it in like the 1950s, right?
In America, how this tr - quote unquote traditional marriage, often meaning white heterosexual, right?
Monogamous type of marriage that we see in the kind of leave it to beaver style of marriage is like what everyone should want.
And it's been pushed extremely hard.
And what I was finding in my book and reading a lot, especially through historian Stephanie Kunst's work is that marriage for love, the quote unquote traditional marriage of the 1950s and such are really recent inventions, right?
Like we all know this intellectually, right?
Like we watch Game of Thrones and we see how all these marriages are political packs, right?
And we understand that in this, this like fictional way, but when it comes to our, our lives and understanding the long history of marriage, it's like, well, everyone's married for love forever and always, right?
And so I was starting to see and remind myself how, how marriage was used for a lot of property gain, right, for years, um, and political power, economic power, and how in, at least in America, this idea of marrying for love was not really president until Victorian times.
Um, when people started to leave their homes, they, you know, the industrial revolution made it so you could actually make wages outside of your family.
You weren't tied to your family's farm as much, right?
And so you could marry for love.
And no, I will say that type of love and Victorian homes was very much around still like piety and keeping the home in a very particular way, right?
Wasn't exactly super like feminist, I would say.
And then you jump to the 1950s where we are taught, especially in America, that this was this beautiful time of so -called traditional marriage.
But the reality is what I learned from Stephanie Kuntz was that was never really ever tradition.
It was an anomaly in the long history of marriage, right?
It was men from World War II were coming home looking for stability.
Wages were high enough to actually allow it so one person could work and be the breadwinner for the whole family.
And so there's this kind of perfect storm that happened there, but yet we treat it like, oh, this is how time and memoriam relationships are supposed to go.
And it just doesn't feel like very fair way to set up the rest of your life when you start to see the long arc of marriage is a lot of different things that are very complicated and not always self -serving.
Yeah. I mean, it is really interesting, right?
If you think about most of the arc of marriage along to partnering was based much more on practicality.
Exactly. Yeah. It's like survival.
It's like transfer of property rights.
It's like, well, all the different things, it was more just sort of like, this is a contract.
This is the way it is.
And then we hit the fifties here and it's like all of a sudden it's love and it's transcendence.
And it's, are we completing each other?
Like another interesting myth.
And I wonder if in part because around that same time, we started to feel like some of the practicalities, some of the things that were being delivered by this type of relationship, more and more people could get without it.
But we didn't want to leave the institution behind.
So we started to figure out like, so what else?
What else can we load into this sort of like contract?
And sort of like love and transcendence becomes the thing that gets into it.
Like that's what's left.
Yeah. It's interesting because we're already really naturally good at understanding diversity of relationships within friendships, right?
Like we know that we have one friend who loves talking about TV shows with us and another person likes to talk about novels or sports or whatever.
Like we're really good at seeing all these different types of diversity of relationships in our platonic lives.
But for some reason we've put so much pressure on the romantic relationship, right?
And this is an approximation here, but yeah, I think what you're getting at is that as we see all these other things fall away from traditional marriage, quote unquote traditional marriage, that society has to build in all these other things to get incentivized people to want to marry, right?
And I think for me understanding to just take a step back to be like, well, does it have to be that way?
And a lot of people are already like miles ahead of me, right?
A lot of people in the queer community or polyamorous community, they understand this.
They're like, this is old news, right?
But it still is interesting to think about why you have to put so much pressure on just one person to make you happy.
Because some of the best marriages I see within some of my friends, they do things all the time without their partner.
And it's just about, I think, a readjusting of what you actually need that partner for.
And I'm not anti -marriage, I'm not anti -partnership.
I just think that everyone benefits when we turn down the pressure to make marriage and romantic partnership the only version of happiness that we're made to achieve.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
And one of the assumptions that I think we make, you speak to this pretty early in the book also, is this notion that singlehood equals loneliness.
Yeah. Take me there.
Yeah, totally. Singleness is often thought of this kind of exile, right?
That you are on the outside of something.
I definitely have felt that before.
Everyone's having this fun party without me.
I'm in this waiting room with the same people on the dating apps I always see.
And the idea that you're lonely or pathetic because you're single is just not true when you think about it more deeply.
There's research, one, to show that singles have more social ties than married people.
My thinking there is that it's partly because they have to.
They're just good at making all these different connections.
But there's this kind of, I think, unfortunate narrative around being alone is somehow inherently automatically always lonely.
And the reality is that loneliness is a dissatisfied state with being alone, right?
And anyone can feel this.
And we also see people in marriages, by the way, in partnerships feel extra lonely from a partner who maybe doesn't understand them or dismisses them.
We know what it means to feel lonely in a group of people.
But for some reason, we love to cast that shame upon singles.
Well, you don't have a romantic partner, so you're alone and lonely.
But alone is just you just are by yourself.
It doesn't necessarily have to have an extra layer of shame on there.
What was interesting for me to kind of crack open was understanding this alone versus loneliness dynamic, right?
If loneliness is this, a lot of state of resistance against feeling alone and everyone feels it from time to time.
Like I'm not saying you don't ever need to feel lonely, but I really got into the work years ago of John Cassiope.
And he was a researcher at University Chicago.
You know, he's pioneered this idea of what loneliness really meant.
And I really connected to it, which is that loneliness in his approximation, in his research showed that it's a biological signal akin to thirst or hunger telling us you need to seek something out.
In this case, social connection.
Your body's telling you, hey, you need to make connections right now.
You're feeling lonely.
It's just for me, that helps neutralizes the shame that can be around loneliness because you wouldn't feel bad about when you need to have some water or have to eat something, right?
But for whatever reason, when we are feeling this natural signal telling us we need connection, we get pushed further away from connection from other people sometimes in society.
And it just feels really unfair.
So what I've been finding is that a lot of singles I know in my life, yes, they, you know, they long for a partner, some of them, not all of them.
But I see a lot of people in my life who are single who feel they're maybe alone at home, but feel really connected and have a full social life.
And so singleness doesn't always have to mean loneliness.
Yeah, in an interesting way.
I almost wonder if whether this is just your choice, this is just the way that you would like to be, you don't actually aspire to be partnered like long -term.
And yes, that is a way to be.
Plenty people, yeah.
Right. That is not just because you quote, can't find the one yet.
Some people are just like, I'm good with myself.
I really am. I've got great friends and I get to choose them.
And I also get to sort of like move in and out of different circles with different interests with different seasons.
And they like the freedom of that, the sort of like the ebb and flow, the fluidity of it.
And like you said, also, there's this, I think also assumption that when you find that one, you know, that you're getting everything that you need that you are no longer lonely if you have that relationship.
Yeah. And as you described, there are plenty of people that are not only as lonely within the context of the relationship, but maybe even more lonely because then they have this person sitting across from them who they feel profoundly disconnected to.
And then there's shame in terms of like what's wrong with this that you pile onto it.
It's like it's not a, it's not a self.
No, it's not. And it's interesting too, because I feel like married people are afforded this level of privacy about their romantic lives in a way that single people are not right.
People think that singles dating lives, romantic lives are just open season and that they can just ask about little house dating life.
Can you imagine if you ask someone, how's your marriage going?
You know, it just seems so rude, but I think that privacy part of it is what makes maybe people who are marriages that aren't working or feel particularly lonely feel, well, I can't tell anyone about this because I'm supposed to be happy.
This is what I chose.
There's no path out.
And I think we've all been in that scenario where you feel there's a disconnect between I know I should feel some way and I don't.
And that just creates more sadness, I think.
But yeah, it's interesting how we think that this marriage is going to solve problems.
I mean, it's interesting.
I started to think a lot about how we love weddings, right?
As depicted in movies and in romantic comedies, but a lot of sitcoms over the years show the actual life of marriage as like drudgery, as like we have like the wife, who's like the nag and the husband who's a doofus, a lovable doofus, but he's causing all this chaos.
And so I'm like, where do we go wrong?
I feel like I see very few examples in pop culture when marriages like really work or feel good or I would love for even like people to show off how marriage is the actual hard work of marriage or not even hard work.
It should be easy, right?
If it's in a good relationship with someone, but I would love to see more examples of what hard conversations look like within marriages because yeah, it gets lost in the mix.
Yeah, no, it definitely does.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
You coined a phrase, singalism.
I actually didn't coin that phrase.
But you speak to it.
Yes, I speak to it.
Yes, yeah. Yeah. I want to explore this a little bit more because I think it's kind of built on what we're talking about here about the assumptions that people make and then the way that they treat you in turn.
Yeah, totally. So singalism is a phrase coined by Bella DiPaolo, who's a researcher and she's written about extensively.
Her whole career has been about researching what it means to be single.
She's one of these people who she calls herself single at heart, which is what we've been talking about.
Actually, my best date is not in a romantic partnership.
And the way she defines singleness and the way I understand it is that it is the discrimination and marginalization for single people, right?
And we see this in some really big ways.
We see it in healthcare, we see it in housing, but we also see it in our everyday social lives, right?
We see it in employees who have to work on weekends because they're single and don't have kids versus married couples who have to pick their kids up from daycare, right?
We also assume that a single person is lonely, right?
Or they need to be set up, right?
There's something to be fixed here.
And the more I thought about singalism, I was like, oh, wow, this is so pervasive, even just in these casual ways that we talk about when someone does get coupled up in our lives, it's like, oh, like congratulations, like, oh, thank God, or something like that.
You know, it's like a relief.
And it's just like, were you just rethinking the bless of me because for all these years, because I just happened to be single.
And so what I've really learned from Bella DePaulo is that we can all fight singalism, which is great news.
We can do really simple things like just treating your single friends and people in your life like you would a married person.
I know that sounds too simple, but simple acts like making sure you celebrate your single friend's birthdays, like buying them a birthday card, you know, like when they have an accomplishment that does not look like a marriage or a wedding, show up, celebrate them.
If a pet dies, treating that death as serious as you would a spouse dying and asking them about their passions and interests beyond what their dating life looks like.
Because believe me, if someone is dating, and single, and they want a partner, they're already thinking about it.
And they're pretty tired of thinking about their dating life.
They have all these other things they'd rather talk about.
So, singleism, it's really all around us.
And once you see it, you can start to push back in all these ways.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
And just for out of context, for anyone who's listening to the singleism, like we're talking about this and you know, ageism, like the ism side of it is sort of some sort of bias against or discrimination.
Exactly. Or just framing of like othered in some way.
Completely. In a particular way.
I'm thinking also of young parents.
So, you know, we're, I'm a parent of a kid who's now in her 20s.
You know, so this was a long time ago for me.
But I remember in the very, very early days, finding ourselves when our kid was, you know, like a baby, an infant, a toddler, basically surrounding ourselves almost exclusively with other young adults with kids in the same age group.
Yeah. And it's like the rest of the world kind of like I was doing the very things that you're talking about, you know, and that many of us were.
And it was almost like the focus on just early child raising took over everything.
And one of the first things to go was, huh, I wonder how my friend over here is doing, how my friend over there is doing, who was not sort of like in this similar state, going through the same struggles and the same focuses.
So I wonder if that sort of like the singleism happens in a real way, but unintentional way often.
Yeah, I think absolutely.
Right. I mean, you know, these things can be very subconscious.
I know I don't have kids, but you know, from what I've heard, they take a lot of time, especially in those early years.
So who could blame you for needing to get a lot of support from other parents, right?
But that is interesting that you look back on that time and you think, oh, maybe I didn't check in on a single friend as much as I could have, but I was talking with Marissa Franco, who I think you've had on the show who wrote platonic, who is wonderful.
And she talked to me about this dynamic where you have the single person who doesn't have kids, and then they have the friend who then starts to have children.
And then there's this divide.
And often she says people have a mismatch in understanding what the person actually needs.
Sometimes the single friend is like, I don't want to bother them.
They're too busy. And then the parent is usually like, oh, I can't relate to them right now.
Like I want to see them, but, you know, I have this kid.
And oftentimes what she says is like, you can't find a middle ground sometimes and just like reaching out is all it takes.
And just to give options and flexibility, sure, your relationships aren't probably going to be, okay, we're meeting at 8 p .m.
for drinks until Monday anymore, but finding some mutuality within maintaining a friendship, like this won't work for everybody.
But I think we often assume we know what another person's going through.
And all it takes is some simple communication, right?
Like just reaching out and being like, I'm thinking about you.
I hear you got a promotion.
That's incredible. Like, and also something that I've been trying to think about with my friendships is there's just death by a thousand calendar invites with friendships these states, right?
It was like, I want to see coffee, but that's in five months.
And I'm a really big fan of making these like spontaneous like invites that don't always work out.
I don't always have a, you know, people are coming out with me every single time, but I'll be like, Hey, I'm like running some errands.
I'm in the neighborhood.
Do you want to like just walk around with me?
I live in a very walkable neighborhood.
So that helps or like, Hey, I am going to go for a long walk, uh, this Saturday morning.
You feel free to join.
It like kind of lowers the pressure of, okay, now we're going to have this like event and come together.
And I think people are really craving that spontaneous, like quick casual connection.
I've read about how there's these memory making types of friendship when you're especially in your early twenties and you're like in college.
And so you are out in the world together a lot and you are making a lot of memories.
And then you move into like these experiential relationships and friendships where you're just catching up with people all the time, uh, when you do see each other.
And I've been trying to think about more, how I can make more memories with friends rather than just being like, how was the last five months?
Tell me you'd run through the list of things that you were up to.
And then I'll relay my things.
And yeah, I think just making some small spontaneous invites, whether you're a parent, new parent or not, it goes a long way.
Yeah, I love that. And you literally just gave language to something that we had done for five years in a row, um, for a chunk of time from, I guess, 2013 to 2018, we ran an adult summer camp.
Oh, so fun. Right. Last four days of every summer, we have like 400 something grownups from all over the world, literally ages 18 to 81 swoop into a kid's sleep away camp after they've left and it's been fumigated and just spend four days like learning, playing, like lying on the grass until three am,
having those conversations.
And, and like distinction, you just teased out between memory making and experiential.
So much of the feedback from that was like people saying, I haven't had experiences like this that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life, literally for decades.
Yeah, you know, it's like, Oh, I thought I'd left this behind.
You're so right. I think we, like we tend to reach a point where we're like, Oh yeah, life's got just really busy.
Like friendship is just keeping tabs.
Yeah. And I guess maybe like the type of friendship it really is, it's more like a retelling friendship or recounting, right?
It just feels like you're going through the motions.
And then it doesn't feel like you want to necessarily like hang out again, which sucks because these are people I love, right?
And I love games as well.
I love activity. I actually, when I get into a situation where I'm at like a cabin or something with friends, I make them do what I call cabin Olympics, kind of like your adult summer camp and everyone, no one wants to do it.
But then as soon as we do, everyone's like, I'm so glad we did that.
And we usually laugh the most always like, you know, be like, Oh my God, remember when we did that?
So making memories with friends, it doesn't have to be a big thing that, you know, you have to, you know, rent a place out for, but I think just like bringing novelty into friendship, even on a small scale is so important.
So agree with that.
We were in New York city for 30 years and we're out in colorado now, but I find it's interesting also.
Like I never did what you're talking about when I was in New York, but out here that happens a lot more.
And a lot of it is just, Hey, I'm heading out for a hike in an hour.
You're like you want to join.
But before that, everything was just like, here's the calendar invite.
And it's so much more fun and freeing to not be locked in.
It's less brittle in a lot of ways.
Completely. Yeah. And like, I really love card games and I'll be like, come over.
I like, I have made some extra food.
I'll teach you a card game.
And even though like on that small scale, people are always like, Oh my God, let's play that game again.
That's so fun. Like, and it just also just brings variety to your own life too, which I think is good.
Yeah. And I think part of what we're speaking to here also is just like the joy of finding what you need in relationships from a wide range of people.
One of the things you also speak to is what you, and you kind of referenced it a little bit earlier is this notion of a hedonic treadmill of romantic pursuits.
Take me into this. Yes.
I first came across the concept, I mean, years ago and just working in, I was at Ted radio hour at NPR and this is a popular concept in psychology, right?
Where you are on this, this treadmill as it were, you're kind of working towards something that you think is a goal.
And then as soon as you get that goal, your happiness spikes momentarily.
But then like, like, as I mentioned, your research shows that you then likely go down almost always to like your, your happiness set point again.
So while you were right that it made you happy, it didn't make you happy long -term, right?
And when I read Jenny Tates, who's a psychologist, her book about singleness, she talked about as the husband treadmill where it feels like when you're dating, especially if you're heterosexual, you are thinking, if I just work harder and get this and I finally get the husband, I finally get the partner,
everything will fall into place perfectly.
I will never be unhappy ever again.
The reality is guess what?
Not quite the case.
So I think knowing that is helpful because then what research shows is that you can help your happiness set point kind of change or shift upwards a little bit by all these things about just investing in what makes a good life, right?
Like tools like being very mindful, being grateful for things that you have in your life, investing in hobbies.
It's not about this linearity or like another common thing you hear about in talking about singleness is the relationship escalator, right?
That you meet someone, then you automatically hit these milestones.
And at the top of the escalator, you get married and then no one really tells you what happens after that.
Instead of this linearity and thinking about, okay, I'm going to hit these marks, it's more about thinking, okay, can I go deeper with my life and have it go wider?
So it just starts to open up all these different boxes of, I don't know, ways to enjoy your life, I find.
And so getting off the treadmill is really about taking the pressure off of yourself.
And then also seeing all these other things in your life that can help you feel good and more peaceful without having to chase a goal of a partner.
Do you think there is a singleness escalator?
Oh, no. What would it be?
It'd probably be like a roller coaster maybe, right?
That's like full of twists and turns.
You might go upside down.
You might be a little sick at one point, but there's also some beautiful highs.
It's hard for me to come up with a metaphor because the reality is that single people have this gift of writing their lives however they want, right?
They don't have to necessarily fall into, okay, now I get married and now I have kids and follow that line.
They get to do what they want.
And there's the trope of the rich auntie, right?
Who gets to travel all the time.
You could do that. There's people I know who are single by choice who are really into volunteering in their communities and really rooting in.
It's kind of fun because you get to throw out the script and write your own.
I wonder if you agree with this that the notion of marriage and sort of what is expected is becoming much more fluid and beyond expanding into different communities, queer communities, into gender fluid communities, into polyamorous communities.
Even within the more sort of like conversations where one, I know this, I'm thinking of our friend right now who basically said, okay, so I need a ton of time and solitude.
I just know this about myself.
I love being alone.
This person is a writer.
They love just going off on their own.
And that's the way that they've always been.
And they're happy in that space.
But they also love this other person that they wanted to commit to and the other person.
So they really had conversations about like, okay, so this is going to look different.
We may be apart for weeks or months.
And that doesn't mean there's something broken or wrong with this.
That just means that we're honoring who we need to be within the larger context of this frame of the relationship.
I feel like I'm getting exposed to more, I don't want to say negotiations, but just open conversations about like, okay, so we're going to do this differently.
And that's actually okay.
I'm curious why you're seeing that also.
I am. Yeah. And I think your friends example is really wonderful.
It sounds like they had a really honest conversation about values and how they want their lives to look, because there is also this pressure with marriage that you do everything with your partner, right?
And knowing that about himself or themselves, I think is super powerful.
Then you're not spinning in this like state of resentment.
Like, well, I'm not getting my alone time.
Like, you know, that just makes sense to me.
I mean, I am seeing a lot more of that and people just understanding what values really work for them and what is important.
And are we honoring those values as a couple?
I think that is what a marriage should look like.
I'm, you know, again, I'm not anti - marriage.
I'm just more thinking, okay, get off the escalator or get off the treadmill and just be like, what do I actually want out of this?
And like, you know, we talked about, you know, marriage as a goal and it's so pass fail.
But I think what's important is when you start to look under goals and think about, well, what are the values that are driving the goal?
You can actually kind of kick the tires on that goal, right?
And be like, oh, actually I don't think I really want a monogamous marriage, or I don't actually want a marriage where I am 24 seven with this partner.
I need some alone time.
You can actually start to see the different contours of what you need and what maybe a partner needs and why not make it your own, right?
It just seems like an easier way to live.
Yeah. No, so I agree with that.
As you're describing that conversation, I had a little while back with Matthew Grossman who co -teaches a class at Yale called the life worth living.
And he described it as one of the most frustrating classes that any of the students will ever take because it's all questions and no answers.
Yeah. And he said one of the questions that he poses really early on is what's worth wanting.
That question has literally haunted me since he like offered it up and it's become so center.
But when you're talking about goals and values, I think that's also, it's really kind of speaking to that.
It's like I say, I want the same.
Is it worth wanting?
And that really backs us back into values and expectations and assumptions and all this other stuff that we have an opportunity question, but often we rarely do when there's a prescribed path ahead of us and the expectations that we'll follow it.
When you don't follow it, and this is one of the things that you speak to also, and you're like, okay, so I'm in state of singleness in my life right now.
Oftentimes that leads to two things happening in your head, which are not necessarily constructive.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm totally perfect in heel.
No, yes. I've heard.
Yes. I wrote a whole book about, I'm sorry.
I wrote a whole chapter of the book about living inside your own head.
And for me, the damaging story I was telling myself over and over again was what I call the rebound girl.
So I had these two relationships in my twenties that were not very long, but they were very significant to me because I really didn't have many committed romantic relationships at the time.
So for me, I was really holding on to this, like so hard, like this has to work or else I'll be kind of exiled into singleness again.
And the both of these relationships were people that had gotten out of longer relationships beforehand.
I was the next person they dated more seriously.
And then, oh, actually thanks, but no thanks.
And then they went on and wouldn't you know, they met their long -term partners right after me, both of them.
And so that felt like a pattern for me.
And I'm a deeply therapist person.
I was like, I love ripping open the emotional floorboard and being like, what is under here?
What is the rot? Like I need to figure this out.
And I thought that I could just think my way out of what is wrong with me.
Why is this happening?
If I just spent longer on this problem, I can figure this out, right?
All some magical answers going to land in my lap.
What I learned is that that's not a good way to beat rumination or to be in relationship with rumination.
The problem is that your brain loves knowing an answer, right?
When you have a question of like, well, what am I going to have for dinner?
It's like, well, these are the things that we had for dinner the last week.
What about this? And you go, great, got it.
And you can move on.
When you ask a really big existential question, like why haven't I met someone yet who really loves me and wants to be with me, your brain is like, uh, hold on.
And it's trying to like, got to go through the filing cabinets and pulling out different things and throwing you scenarios that aren't very helpful.
And so you keep spinning and spinning and spinning.
And as a result, exhausts you, it's physically and mentally taxing to overthink.
So what I was starting to learn was if I want to break this rebound girl story, I had to get really clear about how to work with rumination.
And I did that a few different ways.
But one big thing is really flipping a why question.
Like why am I single?
Why is this happening to me?
Why have I met someone just starting to ask myself a, what question instead to kind of give myself something concrete to do next kind of what can I do later tonight?
That's going to make me feel good.
What can I do to move my body?
What can I plan in the next week with a friend that is going to feel nourishing?
These are not questions that then answer these larger existential questions before me.
But it gives, it gave me mental space to one, just feel better, to feel more regulated, to do something actually nourishing rather than depleting.
But then it gives you, yeah, like this mental space of I maybe I actually don't need to figure out the reason of this.
Like maybe this is actually not a really good story I'm telling myself.
Maybe I'm just hurting my own feelings.
Maybe I was in those relationships and they just ended.
And that was just what it was.
And maybe it has nothing to do with my self worth.
So rumination is, it's so nasty, but I know we all deal with it.
And it is a combination of self blame and these open -ended existential questions.
And once you start to see that, there's a lot of different ways to back off of it or be in relationship with it rather than just letting it take over your brain.
Like it's the weather, right?
You can actually like start to talk with it and think about it rather than just fall victim to it.
Yeah, that makes so much sense.
I know one of the questions that rumination sometimes plans also is because I've heard this from a friend, after sort of like a series of relationships that didn't work out, the question in that person's head was what's wrong with me.
Yeah. And it's like the shame and the blame.
And then, and then that became the rumination point.
And for those who may not really understand what the word rumination means, it's really, it's like a thought that you're bringing latches onto and then hit spin.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it just loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and it becomes increasingly consuming.
And what you're talking about really is rather than sitting here and trying to loop faster and deeper and harder to try and get an answer.
What if you actually just did something to break the cycle, like a doing something else, like to basically give your brain a break and just snap out of it a little bit and say like, Oh, there's a world outside of the spin cycle in my head.
Yeah. And isn't that always like such a relief when you get out of that?
Yeah, exactly. There is a whole other world.
Other people are out here living lives.
I should join them.
You know, there is opportunities for thinking deeply about things and for self -examination, right?
But I think just to get through your day, like it's just so much easier to like, take down the pressure and to get out of the, like you said, like the spin cycle because rumination is so seductive.
It makes us think we're problem solving, but we're really not.
I can't tell you how many times I'm like, I, if I just think a little bit harder about this, I will get to the bottom of it.
And then I never do.
Like I often just like, it just makes me feel worse.
So yeah, taking these mental off ramps, it's also really helpful with emotions too.
Like when you're experiencing a really big emotion, it's not to say don't feel the emotion.
The resistance to the emotion is causing a lot of angst, right?
But being like, okay, well, I am going to calm myself down and then I'm going to do something else.
A therapist I talked to in the book said that emotional regulation, I think this is true for rumination, I would say is not about a state of eternal Zen, right?
It's not about being happy all the time.
It's about maintaining choice because when you're dysregulated, you feel like you are, have no choices and that you're stuck, you're in that freeze state, right?
And emotional regulation is self -awareness to know how to give yourself the healthy choices to bring you down to earth and then do something nourishing next.
Yeah, it's like putting more options on your menu.
Exactly. It's like, instead of like not just not eating food, it's like, let's understand how to like feel it fully and then know that you have the tools, the options to be okay still completely.
Yeah, which ties in with like, I don't know whether it was Dr.
Keltner who first coined the phrase emo diversity, but I think I saw it in his research, maybe, but like this idea that we are actually in our most fulfilled state, we're flourishing more, not when we're just happy all the time, but when we experience the full spectrum of emotions.
The goal is not to just always be happy, but I think often we kind of delude ourselves into thinking it's to experience it all, but have the tools, the emotional resilience.
I mean, this is one of the, you write about, I think it was in that same chapter, the notion of building emotional resilience so that you can feel it all and still be okay.
Yes. We are, happiness is not a set point and it's not a final destination.
Like it's a motion and emotions have arcs to them and they end.
And so even when you feel, you know, happiness, like heightened sense of happiness, it crests and it falls and then something else comes over.
Maybe it's something more neutral.
Maybe it's not, maybe something bad.
Negative emotions have a role too, right?
They tell you when a situation is dangerous or you need to leave something or something doesn't feel authentic to you.
So it's important that we have negative emotions or we have thoughts, right?
That it's often so tempting to be like, I wish I thought less, right?
Because our donation can be so taxing, but you do need the diversity.
And I don't know, I just think living in sometimes the bittersweet sweetness of life, it's underrated in my opinion.
And yeah, I just, you're totally right that like in order to be resilient, it's to know that things are going to ebb and flow in life no matter what.
And things will always change and how you navigate those change and maintain a lot of emotional regulation as best you can.
It's just, I know I keep saying this word again, it's just easier.
It's a kinder way I think to get through life.
Yeah. So agree with that.
And I agree with the notion that there's value in sort of the bluer side of life.
I mean, Susan Keaton wrote a whole book about this bittersweet, which like process what you can and whatever it is that you can't turn that into your art.
That's her invitation.
And I think that's so powerful, not that you have to suffer to make art or do something, but if it's going to be a part of your life and it just is for us, how do we not just say no to that, but actually say, okay, so what do I do with this?
Really reframe it. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
Another exploration that you have in the book is this notion of okay, so if my current state of singleness is what it is, and I don't necessarily want to just jump on the, okay, but I want a problem solved for romantic love because I got to get out of this.
Where I am right now, who I am right now, how do I actually build a life that I really love being in on a daily basis?
And you start to really drop into some of the things to think about.
And one of the opening invitations is really like, what have you just kind of accepted the present reality?
Yeah, I know. I drew a lot in that chapter from dialectical behavior therapy, right?
Which is all about dealing with hard emotions, big emotions, especially when we have trouble accepting those big emotions.
For me, the idea that you're talking about is radical acceptance.
It's what it's called.
It's this idea that when you are met with resistance about how you feel about something, I'm single, I want a partner, I don't have a partner, and I feel mad about that.
You're allowed to feel mad, you're allowed to feel sad, frustrated, but if you keep running up against that resistance, it's going to feel pretty awful, and I've definitely lived it for years and years and years and years and years.
So instead, what radical acceptance is teaching us is to first be aware that you're feeling the resistance.
Notice the resistance.
How does it feel in your body?
Some basic mindfulness tenants.
How does this feel in your body?
What does it feel to resist?
And then reminding yourself, things are exactly how they are right now.
It doesn't mean you have to accept something harmful or bad or saying that things are unjust.
You have to make a change or whatever.
It's that beat before you then move forward.
It's just reminding yourself, this is just how things are right now, and it turns down that resistance that you might be feeling.
Then it gets you, again, to this, I would say, a regulated moment of then having a choice.
What can you do next?
What can you do to make sure that the life you have in front of you is a good one?
Because for me, I saw two very different realities ahead of me, which was I could be partnered for however long, right?
I could have a vision of my life where that happens, or I could have a vision where I'm single for maybe more or less the rest of my life.
It felt unfair to me to think of one as better than the other, and I wanted to live like those two realities were equally as possible and equally as valid.
The radical acceptance piece was a big sigh of relief.
Then you can do something that I also learned from dialectical behavior therapy of just building up positive emotion more in your life.
There's this thing called the ABCs in DBT, more alphabet soup for you.
Accumulating positives, that just means noticing positive events in your life when they happen.
This could be a big thing, right?
You get a promotion that you've been wanting, you move to a better apartment, but it also is about tiny things like your dog is running up to another dog on the street and they look really cute when they do that, right?
It's enjoying that cup of coffee that you look forward to in the morning.
It's just noticing when things are good, even if they feel really tiny.
Then building mastery kind of goes along with that.
That's about feeling like you're good at something or working towards feeling good at something.
I love playing tennis.
I'm not good at it, but I play, and when I do hit a forehand that feels really good, I feel great, like the one in and out of every 20, right?
It's noticing that you did something that felt not even just good, but you felt like, okay, I'm building a sense of competency here.
Or it could just be, make sure you paid all your bills on time that day, right?
There's different levels of this.
Then coping ahead is a strategy about basically building up your confidence in a situation where you would struggle.
So the example I think I talk about in the book is imagine you're going home for the holidays and you know there's going to be a relative who's giving you a lot of grief for being single or wants to talk about your dating life.
Coping ahead is a strategy where you're imagining yourself in that scenario.
You're at the table, you're hearing that relative trying to start up, here they go.
It's not about thinking about what's the perfect comeback or the perfect thing to say.
It's about imagining yourself handling it really well.
In this mental rehearsal, really helps you build up a little bit of confidence of like, I can do this, I've got this.
Those three things of the ABCs, again, they feel small, but they really build up into just building up positive emotion and confidence in your life even when it feels like you're not exactly in the place that you would like to be.
Yeah, I love that the ABCs, I'm going to be thinking of that for a while now.
And it really, it's sort of like that sits on top of the foundation of sort of like accepting the present reality.
It's like, okay, so like if this is it, this is not necessarily something that needs to be cured or fixed or changed, like maybe it is at some point or maybe maybe it's different, but like, what if this just is like, like, how do I enjoy that?
How do I revel in it?
How do I save it? How do I make it all that it possibly can be in the ABCs sound like really powerful mechanism to help you step into that mode.
You also introduce something that I've heard some of the research around the past that I've always been fascinated by this notion of exploring your passions, but then also like the two different types of passion that can be really good and really filling in your life and they can also take you down.
Yeah, I stumbled across this when I was writing the book, this idea of obsessive passion versus harmonious passion.
And I realized I was applying obsessive passion to my dating life where obsessive passion is like, it feels like you have no control, it feels compulsive and you keep doing something with so much vigor and drive, but it's because you feel like that your self -worth is somehow on the line or there's some
outcome, there's usually some social pressure, you're doing it because you kind of feel like you have to.
And I definitely treated my dating life kind of like a journalist to be honest, which was like, I can put like we love deadlines.
Like I work in radio, like I used to work like in the newsroom where the, you know, the radio broadcast, you would be like what we call crashing, like for like seconds before your piece is on the air.
And I was like crashing in my dating life, where I was just like, I'm going to go on as many dates as possible.
I'm going to like keep switching it up.
I'm going to just like throw everything I have at this because I feel like I have to, and it felt compulsory versus what I learned, which is called harmonious passion, which is you don't feel so obsessed with getting into a certain activity, right?
You feel like you can, I want to say like take it or leave it, but like you're less attached to it and it has less outcome on your self -worth or your self -perception as the name would suggest, more harmoniously engage in that activity.
For me, that was a really good way to think about how I approached dating or looking for a partner and kind of in a way what the whole book is about is like how to switch from obsessive passion to harmonious passion.
And then yeah, from there you can start to be like, okay, well, if let's say, you know, you want a partner, but you're not, you don't have one right now and you can kind of help move to a harmonious passion.
Like what I like about that is then it starts to open up all these other parts of your life that you can bring that passion to, right?
You can still date and think about, you know, be open to that if you want, you don't have to be, but I know the horror of going to a date being like this has to work out and it's so unfair and it usually won't.
So then I started to see a lot more of like, okay, I'm going to deepen friendships more, right?
I'm adult summer camp.
I'm going to do cabin on this road trip so I can go on this backpacking trip with friends.
I'm going to make sure that my 30th birthday is going to be a great trip and involve a bunch of friends and things like that.
I was starting to just see, okay, I'm not going to wait anymore to do anything.
I can pursue all these other things in my life to make it really feel really full.
Yeah. I think that research is so interesting.
A dear friend of mine has certainly been deep into it for years and I was asking him recently because I said, you know, okay, so I get the fact that obsessive passion in terms of you flourishing as a human being is not a good thing because it literally just pulls you into the hole of whatever it is that you're
obsessively just pursuing, right?
The rest of your life doesn't exist.
It's so narrow. The creators, creators, everything else but the thing.
But I said to him, okay, so yes, that's not a good thing.
But in the context of that one thing that you're pursuing obsessively, wouldn't it make sense that you're more likely to make it happen?
And he said, there's actually research on that.
Oh, interesting. And the research shows counterintuitively, the opposite is true, that actually you're more likely to like eventually get that thing that you want.
When you pull out of that sort of like obsessive pursuit, and you step more into harmonious mode because it gives you the resilience that you need to handle the struggle, the challenge, the adversity, it's going to come up through that sort of like pursuit, because you're acknowledging and participating
in all the other awesome parts of life.
And they give you the strength, the fortitude, it's really the scaffolding to actually stay in a more humane way, but to be resilient to it and present to it.
And he said, the research actually shows you're more likely to accomplish.
I think it may take longer, but you're actually, at the end of the day, you're more likely to check that box if you pursue it in a much more harmonious way, which I was like, oh yeah, that actually makes sense to me.
I didn't think about it that way.
It was certainly going to the question.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me.
It makes me think of, I talked to the psychologist at College of Will and Mary who's done a lot of research about flourishing and values.
His name is Kelly Grace and he talks about something very similar, which is that we have this concept of if you pursue your values full speed ahead, that somehow more attention equals greater outcome, right?
But like you're saying and what this researcher also told me is that that's not the case.
And then often what that means is that as soon as you put so much attention on it, things like pressure, perfectionism comes in, all these things that narrow your focus and just make you feel like this has to work or else nothing else will, right?
And that being in relation with your values and thinking about, okay, well, did I actually live and express my values today in a way that feels good?
Is that as the barometer is a way to kind of check yourself, I think, and feel like, am I making a good life?
That leads to harmonious passion.
So yeah, I'm totally on board.
It makes no sense in what our capitalist culture has told us, which is work harder and you'll get the result, work a little less hard and open your focus and a lot more good will come of it.
Right. It's like all the hustle porn.
It's like you've got to be obsessive about the thing, whatever it is.
And you're kind of like, oh, well, actually there's research on this.
And it says, no. And I'm tired.
I'm also very tired.
Can I just lie on the couch and watch like reruns?
Exactly. You know, you sort of run at the conversation in the book with coming back to, okay, so let's just recenter.
Can we recenter the importance and the role and the contribution of friends and community, which I think we've been dipping into a lot of different ways, but like imagine bringing that and making that sort of like a primary call to action in your life, which like, how would things change?
And it got me thinking, yeah, we moved out to where we are in Colorado four years ago after 30 years in New York city.
So we kind of dropped into an entirely new place.
And also in the early days of pandemic.
And then we were kind of like, okay, so we've been sheltering just by ourselves or two of us.
And is this our place or not?
And at some point we started to realize the only way I'll figure that out.
And I was like, is if I actively invest in finding friends in building community and figure out like, are my people here?
But for that, I don't think I would have ever have done.
And now, fast forward a couple of years, fantastic, really close friends who I actually feel closer to here, than I did for people that I'd known for decades in New York.
And it was really a lot of it was because I said this extreme circumstance forced me into a mode as a highly sensitive intro, I never would have been in my life is so much richer for it.
And you really sort of like invite people to say like, what if we just made this an ongoing part of the way we step into our lives?
Yeah, I mean, I talk about how my mom and my aunt in the book are my models for me, of what it means to build intentional community and showing up.
And while I was writing the book, my mom had back surgery, and we heard that anecdotally that this particular type of back surgery wasn't that hard or, you know, it was gonna be two weeks recovery.
And like that was it.
And I don't know what we were thinking.
Maybe we were just like, we're just trying to get over the hump of what it meant to have my mom have surgery.
But it was clear that we needed a lot more help than we originally thought.
And so it was really impressive to see my mom's phone ringing off the hook all day with friends that she's known for over 40, 50 years calling her, checking in, people coming over to help change bandages, to bring us dinners, just really showing up.
And I was like, that doesn't happen by accident.
My mom really taught me, I think, kind of just by example, you got to keep friends in your life.
Because there are, there's just these times where we need each, even if you are single and self -sufficient, you do need other people.
It makes your life richer.
And I really also love to think about, yeah, like deepening rituals with friends as well.
And I love doing this like yearly tarot card reading I do with some girlfriends about like forecasting the next year.
And we really look forward to it.
Or as much as, you know, I talk smack about rom coms in my book.
I do love them. I do.
I love Nora Efron. I literally have her book right behind me.
And I think I like Nora Efron because she actually talks about friendship, like all of her, all of the relationships in her movies are about based on friendship.
But I host a rom com festival every year.
That's like 12 hours of rom coms.
And people just kind of float in and out of the day.
And people ask me, even like a month after we have it, they're like, well, what's the next year's going to be?
What's the lineup? I'm like, we just got done with this.
So people are looking for a ritual, I think, and looking for that diversity of connection.
And something that Marissa Franco taught me who wrote Platonic is making kind of what she calls romantic overtures for your friends, right?
Like thinking to yourself, what they're asking or what might I think thinking about doing for a romantic partner versus a friend.
That is really powerful because we start to see all these things that we reserve for romantic partnerships that have nothing to do with romance or sex, like picking up some from the airport, the most unsexy thing ever.
And yet, everyone says in a relationship, they just want someone who picked them up from the airport.
I'm like, other people can help with this, everyone.
So just starting to see, okay, would I do that for a romantic partner and then making that kind of quote unquote romantic overture for a friend, I think that helps build a lot of intimacy.
And I think about my best friend, Caitlin, who is someone who I just admire the hell out of.
And I feel like I have a very specific type of intimacy in our friendship that I can't get from a romantic partner.
And I love that. It makes that relationship really special.
Yeah, no, I love that.
And I know, when you look at all the research about what makes life well, there are a whole bunch of contributors, but consistently one of the big things that keeps getting pointed to you, this is something you reference, what's often become known as a grant study to the quality of your relationships.
It doesn't say whether you're quote married or not.
It's sort of like a broad spectrum of just genuine, deep, vulnerable, open relationships that you know are there.
And the reason the studies on global happiness, one of the questions they asked to really figure out to determine that is, if you were in need, if you're sick, if you're ill, if you're injured, do you have one person you could call?
A lot of people don't.
And for some people, that's going to be the romantic relationship.
For a lot of people, it's going to be someone else and have those people in your lives.
No matter whether you ever have that long -term relationship or not, it's like there's a broader spectrum of experiences and friends and relationships that are just stunningly nourishing to have.
And I think that's a lot of what you're inviting people into.
Yeah. I mean, when you look at it almost like data, it's like you could either have one person or you could have all of these people, including maybe a partner, it just doesn't make sense to be like, well, I only want the one person.
There's a lot of love for the taking out there.
So why not go for focusing on friendship and bringing in people into your life?
Even if you do meet a partner.
Yeah. Love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.
So in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
To live a good life for me means being really clear about what values feel authentic to you and showing up for those.
Splashy career or have a marriage with 10 kids or whatever it is or be a celebrity or these big outsize things maybe.
But we can all show up for ourselves and know how do I feel authentic to myself?
So living a good life is, I think, being authentic to yourself and your values.
Thank you. Of course.
Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe, but you'll also love the conversation that we had with Kat Velos about crafting adult friendships.
You'll find a link to Kat's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez.
Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adell for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.
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