The Relationship Therapist: "This Statistically Is The Best Age To Get Married So You Don't Get A Divorce!", "Men Should Not Split The Bill", "80% Of Women Want Men Over 6ft When Only 15% Are 6ft!" | The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Some of the studies I was looking at shows that if you get married after 30, each additional year of age increases your chance of divorce by 5%.

And I couldn't figure out why.

Oh, I think there are several reasons for this.

So first of all… Lori Gottlieb Renowned psychotherapist Best -selling author Couples counsellor Who's helped thousands of people find or save their relationships.

People use the first date as, I'm supposed to feel this one thing or else forget it, and people will come into therapy and say, I didn't feel like butterflies.

So I'm not going to go out with him again.

People said they wouldn't go on a second date with somebody because he ordered tap water.

He must be really cheap.

There was one where somebody said, oh, he did this impression from Austin Powers.

Yeah, baby! He was just nervous.

He was trying to make you laugh.

What about he asks to split the bill?

Would that be an ick?

If he doesn't pay, that would be a huge ick for me.

Really? But it's really important to understand why.

Which is… Interesting.

Now your partner has to be your best friend, have the same interests.

He has to rock my world in bed, or someone who's really ambitious, but also really family -oriented.

No one human could possibly do that.

If you look at what are the most important things that would predict whether a relationship is going to last, it's really important.

Are very important.

And then emotional is really important.

What does that mean?

It means… You went to therapy because of heartbreak?

Yes. How do we navigate through that dark cloud?

One strategy that might be helpful is… It's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show, and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show.

We now have 5 million subscribers on YouTube, which is a number that I just can't comprehend, and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had.

We started the Diary of a CEO just over 3 years ago now, and in my wildest expectations, we might have had 100 ,000 subscribers by now.

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Let's get on with the episode.

Laurie, if you had to summarize what it is you have done for people over the last couple of decades, how would you summarize that?

I would say that I help people to learn what gets in their way from living the life that they want to live.

And what departments of their life do you tend to focus on?

All of them. They're all so important.

But I think it's really about people's relationships.

And I mean relationship to self.

What is going on with the way that I talk to myself, the way that I make decisions and choices, the way that I hold myself back.

Relationships with friends, with romantic partners, with family members, with professional colleagues, all of it.

And of all of those subcategories, what are the categories within there that people come to you advice for most often through your podcasts, through your articles, through your therapy work?

Well, it's interesting because it's usually somebody coming in and saying, I really want something in my life to change.

And what they want to change is someone else.

Right. And so I think what they're surprised to find is that, yes, there are difficult people in their lives.

You know, we like to say that before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes.

So, you know, there are really difficult people out there.

But the question is, where's your agency?

What are the choices that you're making?

Are you setting boundaries with these people?

Are you adding to the tension between the two of you because you're kind of in a dance and you're doing some old pattern that you're in with this person?

So I think it's really important to become self -aware and say, what am I doing in the world that gets me closer to the way that I want to live?

And what am I doing in the world that keeps me from getting there?

And since you got into this line of work and since your sort of education in this area began, what changes have you seen in the types of questions and the types of issues that are being presented to you in a sort of clinical setting or online or through your DMs, et cetera?

I think most people are really seeking connection of some sort that they don't have in their lives.

And there's a sense of being alone, whether it's I'm the only person who feels this way, I'm so ashamed, I don't know why I'm so anxious or I'm so depressed, or it's a feeling of, I feel like I have all these sort of friends, kind of peripherally or friends in the world if you look at their social media,

but they don't really have someone that they could call and say, I really need to talk to you about this.

Who's this person you can confide in?

You know, there are these studies that have been done where they looked at several decades ago, how many people said I have someone close that I can call and most people had at least someone, usually a few people, now most people have zero people.

They have said zero, I have nobody that I can call and confide in in that deep way.

Does that mean that there's a greater pressure now put on our romantic partners to meet more of our needs?

Yes, absolutely. And that's one of the things that I think you see in dating, especially with younger generations, because it used to be that your community was there to meet all different kinds of needs.

So now it's, you know, people like to say, well, my partner is my best friend.

Well, but you also have a best friend.

Most people also have a best friend, right?

So what happened? Or maybe they don't anymore because of what we've been talking about.

So the question is now your partner has to be your best friend where they are there to meet all of your emotional needs.

Whereas before you had, you know, I could talk to this friend about this and I had this friend that my partner doesn't like this hobby, but I get to go.

My partner doesn't like move these kinds of movies, but I could go to these kinds of movies with this person or, you know, whatever it is.

And now it's like, we have to kind of have the same interests and we have to be able to talk about all the same things.

And we have to, you know, he has to rock my world in bed or she has to rock my world in bed or they have to read my mind, right?

And so no one human could possibly do that.

There is no human who can do that.

And so what happens is we think something's wrong with this relationship if I'm not getting that from this person.

And what are the other sort of big picture items that are making it harder for us to be satisfied romantically these days?

I think, again, the sort of expectations of what it means to be loved.

I think that when people really put everything into this other person, they aren't getting the kinds of emotional nourishment that they would be getting from the larger community.

So whether it's extended family that used to be around, most people, a lot of people don't even live where they grew up anymore.

So they're kind of putting down roots somewhere else.

They are kind of, you know, they have to form like a whole new group of people.

There's something to be said for the people who knew you when you were young.

There's something about that about really being known because I think in relationship, people really want to know and be known.

I remember I had a couple come in and this was so striking to me where she said to her husband, you know what, three words I really want to hear?

And he said, I love you.

And she said, no, I understand you.

And that was so profound that how deep a yearning we all have to want to be understood.

And I think that that comes from, you know, you have history with people and you have shared experiences with people.

But we're moving around so much nowadays that we don't have that history or those shared experiences and people didn't know us at different times in our lives.

When you're truly known, oh, you went through this transformation or you went through this difficult time or I remember that fun time we had when we were 16 years old.

And so a lot of people just don't have those kind of deeper connections anymore.

What is it about being understood that we want?

Like what is the fundamental there?

Does it make us feel psychologically safer or what is it?

Oh, it makes us less lonely.

If you feel like you're the only one who understands what's going on for you, you're all alone.

And that's why it's so interesting, you know, having the Dear Therapist podcast or having the column where most people write in and think that they are alone.

And yet I have thousands of people writing in the same exact thing.

So they're not alone, but they think that they're alone.

They feel no one understands or no one would understand.

And I see this more with men also than with women, although both, I get that.

But it's interesting because they think that with men, you know, often they'll come into therapy.

Men get into therapy sort of one of two ways.

They either come in because they're in a couple and there's a problem in the relationship and so they come into therapy or they come in kind of secretively.

Like, you know, no one knows I'm here.

And they'll say, I've never told anyone this before.

And the thing that they tell you is something that women will talk about quite easily.

And it's not that men are less deep than women.

It's that women feel more comfortable to, over lunch with a friend, say something like that.

And when women come in and they say, I've never told anyone this before, they'll say, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend.

So they've told a few people, maybe one person, maybe two, maybe three.

And so I think it's interesting because I think that, you know, men can be particularly lonely because they really don't have the place to kind of connect in the way that women are more culturally acceptable to do so.

Women sometimes have an expectation that their partner will open up in the same way that their best friends will open up.

Yeah. And many men fall short of that expectation.

I, you know, I think there's often a narrative that women want a man to kind of sit down and talk about his problems and open up and listen and all those kinds of things that a woman might do with her best friends.

But men for some reasons tend to struggle with that.

Yeah. Well, they women want that and they don't want that.

So women say they want that.

And they think that they truly mean it when they say they want that.

But in couples therapy, I'll see something like a woman will come in and she'll say that exact thing to her partner.

You know, I really want you to open up.

I feel like we're not connecting.

I want you to be more vulnerable with me.

I want you to tell me what's going on inside.

And if he does, and let's say he starts crying, tears up, or really starts crying, she inevitably will have this reaction of, I don't feel safe when he doesn't open up to me because I don't feel connected to him.

But I don't feel safe when he's that vulnerable with me either because there's something just some cultural programming in her around what it's like to be with a man who's crying or a man who is vulnerable.

And so I think that that's really problematic.

And I think that makes it, you know, kind of harder for men to feel like, well, I have a safe space to open up.

Like, it takes a lot for a man to really feel like, oh, this is something that I want to share.

Whereas I think women just feel a lot more free to do that with their partners.

I saw a video yesterday that I'm actually going to play to because I saved it out of this conversation.

It caused a lot of discussion online on Twitter.

Okay. So this is the video, okay?

I just want somebody who's so obsessed with the Bible and so obsessed with Jesus and who understands, and like you said, like, who can teach us things.

Like, I want my dude to speak in tongues and have tattoos.

I just want a good man.

Like a nice, classic man.

I want somebody who will literally protect me and beat someone's butt if they need to, but also will sit there with compassion and just like a good hearted man.

That's what a true man is.

There has to be that dichotomy.

It's the same thing with feminine women, too.

There's always a dichotomy.

There's a softness and a strength.

And for men, being masculine is being able to beat someone's butt.

You know, maybe not physically, but like being a protector and like doing what he needs to do to protect his family.

But then also being soft enough to like be able to tend to his wife's feelings and like to be able to...

That's hilarious. But that's, you know, people would say, well, I'm not like that.

But yet when you actually talk to people about, when they're dating and you're talking to them about what's going on and why they're not going out on another date with somebody or, you know, why they won't even go on a first date with somebody.

Those are the kinds of things, that's an exaggerated version of the kinds of things that you will hear.

Which is what kind of things?

Like they're not 6 '4".

They're not strong and soft at the same time.

Yeah, yeah. You know, they have to be this and this.

These two, you know, they want someone who's, you know, I want someone who's really, really ambitious, but also really family oriented.

I want someone, right?

These kinds of things that are hard to find both of those in equal measure in the same person.

Someone who's extremely ambitious, is probably going to spend a lot of time at work.

You know, I want someone, so I'm 5 '2".

And it would be, you know, someone like me saying, you know, and he has to be over 6 feet.

You know, just all of these kinds of things.

So in my book, Maringham, I wrote a whole book about this because I was looking at how do we date today?

And what are the expectations that we have?

And, you know, the publisher called it Maringham, the case for settling for Mr.

Goodenough. It's not about settling at all.

It's actually about having higher standards, not lower standards, but having higher standards about the things that actually matter.

So I looked at all of the data and I talked to behavioral economists, and sociologists, and historians, and I talked to, you know, people, therapists who specialize in divorce, who specialize in couples therapy.

And it was really interesting to hear, to see like how expectations have changed over time.

And then also to see what it is that actually matters to have a happy, fulfilling, long lasting relationship and how when we're dating, we're not even looking at those qualities.

And so for example, the character qualities.

If you look at what are the most important things that would predict whether a relationship is going to last, what qualities do you want in a partner?

Flexibility is really important.

What does that mean?

So flexibility, meaning you're not a really rigid person.

People who are really rigid, it has to be this way.

I need it this way.

I expect this of you, right?

You know, on social media, we might call that boundaries right now.

And boundaries are really important.

Don't get me wrong.

Healthy boundaries are very important, but rigidity is when you say that, well, I'm just very boundaried, but you're actually really rigid.

So we have to have flexibility.

We have to have room for the person to also be them and that you are a separate person from the person that you're with.

And oftentimes it's hard for people to see that because they're so focused on what I need without thinking about what does this relationship need?

And what does the other person need too?

Emotional generosity is really important that you give someone the benefit of the doubt, that you're not bringing your old wounds into the relationship and projecting them onto your partner.

So I would call emotional maturity or emotional stability.

So many times people overlook that when they're dating.

So that looks like someone comes into therapy and they say, I don't understand why...

I love him so much and I don't understand why he didn't call when he said he would or I don't understand why he canceled.

And I will say, what do you love exactly?

Is this how you want your life to go?

To always be on edge, to always wonder, to be with someone who's unreliable, who doesn't do what they say they were going to do?

What part of this do you love?

Oh, but he's so funny and attractive and he's so smart.

You like qualities about him, but you don't like the way he is with you in relationship.

And so people need to have higher standards about the character qualities, things that are important to them like loyalty, reliability, emotional stability.

Again, emotional generosity.

Can they be supportive of you when things are going well for you?

On that point of expectations and how expectations are evolving, I found some stats.

I think some of them are very much inspired by your first book, Marry Him.

One of them is that 80 % of women want to date a man over six foot tall when only 15 % of men are over six foot tall.

Yes, that's in the book.

I found some other studies.

An E -Harmony study found that 40 % of single people have deal breakers that are associated with physical appearance and 50 % of singles expect their partner to be their best friend, soul mate and to fulfill all of their emotional needs.

That was a study done by Match .com.

And then the other ones that I found quite interesting where you talk about in the book how this sort of generational shift in expectations and where that's come from, but in like my granddad's generation or even my dad's generation, I would assume they wouldn't have had the same set of impossible expectations,

I would assume, is that what you found in your research?

I think everybody wants to feel that really deep connection with their partner.

And so I think that the way that society has improved is that we are not just marrying for sort of practicality, but we are also marrying because we genuinely enjoy being with this person and want to go through life with this person.

But I think what we're losing a little bit is do our values align?

Like the practical part matters.

So I think the pendulum swung in the other direction, went from almost pretty much all practical to now it's all like, is this person my soulmate and do they move me?

And I think you have to have both.

I'm really attracted to this person's essence.

And what I mean by essence is most people will say, I don't know where the study came from, but I remember reading this study, that most people will say that they chose to spend their lives with is not the most attractive person they ever dated.

And I think that a lot of people say, well, I wouldn't want my partner to think that, but you're more attractive to your partner holistically.

That's why they chose you.

That's why you chose them.

That's why you're together.

So it's not just about, is this the person who was the most, the hottest person you've ever dated?

And so I think we really have to think about holistically, who do we want to be with?

And that's what kind of trips us up because the practical side matters.

Do you have similar ideas about the kind of life you want to live?

Do you have similar ideas about if you want to have kids or if you don't want to have kids and how many you might want to have, where you want to live?

What kind of things you want to do in your lives?

What matters to you?

Who you are in the world?

Political beliefs, often people say, well, that doesn't matter as much.

I think when you have very different views, not necessarily about like what political party you're with, but more about how you see the world, if you see the world very, very differently, that can cause a lot of problems in the relationship later on, not because you're fighting about the world, but because those

differences will show up in the way you treat each other.

I hear you saying all of that and I have to say I agree and I think everyone would really agree because it makes perfect sense.

But in reality, I was thinking about if I turn to some of my friends that are really struggling with dating right now and I said all of that to them, I don't think any of it would work because they are so hardwired to be in search of this perfect person.

When I speak to some of my friends who are single and say they're over 35, they've really never been in a relationship before.

The things that they say as reasons for why they're not giving this person a chance are so unbelievably petty.

I have one friend and she knows who she is.

She's a really good friend of mine.

She's been a good friend of mine for more than a decade.

Shout out to your friend.

Yeah, but I was on her profile once and she told me that the reason she wasn't going to give this guy a chance on this dating app was because in the back of the picture, his display picture, he had boxes on top of his cupboard and she was like, God, he puts boxes on top of his cupboard.

So that's why she didn't give him a chance.

So here's the thing.

What happens is people look at dating profiles and they're going through the apps and I think men and women tend to do this a little bit differently.

Men are like, am I attracted to this person's swipe?

Which also doesn't necessarily work out for them.

They're not really looking for who do I want to be with?

And women do the opposite.

They look at it, they look at all the pictures.

They'll read everything that the person wrote as if, do I want to marry this person potentially or not?

As opposed to do I want to spend 45 minutes having coffee with this person?

That's really different.

And also on a first date, it's the same mentality where a lot of people think, oh, people will come in to therapy or even friends will say, I went on this date, I had a good time.

It was fun. I just, I don't know.

I didn't feel chemistry.

I didn't feel like butterflies.

I didn't, I wasn't, didn't feel that what I feel like I should feel.

So I'm not going to go out with him again.

And I'll say, well, why don't you just go spend another hour with this person and get to know this person and see if something develops?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

And so, but it's like you had a good time.

You did think, they said, I did think he was attractive, but I didn't feel chemistry.

So it's interesting because there's a study in Maringham where it was a longitudinal study and it followed people from the time that they met their partner, like that first date, all the way through.

They checked in with them every five years for I think 20 years.

And what happened was they found that the people who were very happy together had kind of revisionist history about what it was like on their first date.

So people who were really happily married said, Oh yeah, I knew immediately.

I felt immediate chemistry with this person.

I knew this person was the one.

But if you go back to what they reported at the time, often they reported at the time, yeah, nice person.

Not sure. Okay, so, so, but they've changed the story.

They really, truly believe that they felt something different, but we have data saying, No, you didn't.

On the other hand, if people did not last, if people are divorced, that kind of thing, they will say, Oh, I was never attracted to the person or I knew there were red flags in the beginning, but that's not what they reported at the time.

At the time they reported, Wow, this person's amazing.

So it's really interesting that people use the first date as like, I'm supposed to feel this one thing or else forget it when people who are very, very happy together, totally in love, totally attracted to each other, often didn't feel those sparks on the first one, two, three dates.

You know, maybe they were even friends for a while, but people don't give each other the chance to get to know the other person or to let the other person get to know you.

And I think that because the apps give this illusion of so many people are juggling multiple people at a time.

So someone will go on a date with someone and then they'll say, Yeah, that was fine.

Not, you know, maybe it was like a seven.

So, nah. And then they're like, I have another date tomorrow.

Or they just they're leaving the date and they're walking to their car and they're swiping on the apps already.

Because they have the illusion there's so many people out there, but if you just keep juggling people, you're never going to get to know anybody and to know if that person is someone that you want to be with.

So what would you say to a serial date then?

You'd say to go on the second day, even if the person is a seven, or is there because I know I know people that have gone go on hundreds of dates a year.

And I think statistically they must have met someone that they would have been happy with by now.

Yeah, maybe it depends if they're making good choices about who they go on dates with.

So some people just go on dates to go on dates other people if they're being really, you know, if they're saying, Hey, this person seems like someone I would want to be with and that's who they choose to go on a first date with, then yes, but I would say the question you ask yourself at the end of a first date

is, did I have a good time?

The answer is yes, I would go on a second date.

Doesn't have to be I had a life -changing transformative, you know, I was, Cupid's arrow shot me.

No, just did I have a good time with this person?

Yeah, go on a second date, see what happens the second time.

Who has higher expectations typically men or women and who is most likely or most willing to adjust their expectations?

I think it really depends on the person.

And I think that the expectations are higher in different areas.

I think for men, the expectations are very high around physical appearance.

And I think for the younger generation especially because they're growing up on all of these thirst traps that are posted on social media and they're seeing all of these girls just posting, you know, all of these really provocative pictures that have been filtered that have been, you know, it took them

30 shots to get that one shot that they put up.

And so when they see people in real life and what they really are like on a day to day basis, they have these very unrealistic expectations.

And I think that's different from in the past when you saw many more people in real life than you do now where you're seeing more people online most of the time.

And I think for women, the expectations are, you know, I think it's confused with feminism.

So feminism is great.

I'm a feminist, but I think that feminism is not this person has to meet all of these criteria that are not really human.

And I go through them in the book, you know, the kinds of things that people say and I have all these surveys in the book about the kinds of things people say they're looking for and they're not finding the right person.

And I talk about this study that Barry Schwartz did, he wrote the Paradox of Choice and he looked at the difference between maximizers and satisficers.

And this applies to dating as much as anything else.

But, you know, the way it doesn't apply, the way that you can look at it, the way he did in his study was, he said, look, if you go into a store and you want to get some jam and they have 30 different varieties, most people just leave because they can't choose.

They're just, they get anxious, they don't know what to pick.

It's not like more is better.

If you have two different choices, it's easy.

You say, oh, I like this one.

And you're really happy with it.

The people who did choose from the 30, they're less happy because they're trying to maximize and then when they taste it and they go home with it, they think, oh, I wonder what that other one would have tasted like?

You know, because there were so many choices.

The person who picked from one of the two is very happy with their choice.

So if you look at the kind of dating analogy, it's like, I like to use in the book, I talk about a sweater.

Say you want a sweater and you know exactly what you want.

It needs to be this material so it's not itchy.

This color looks good on you.

This is the right size.

This is the right price.

This is the style you're looking for.

You go into a store and you find it.

The satisficer will buy it, be really happy that they found it and really enjoy it for a very long time.

The maximizer will say, oh, I found this.

But while I'm at the mall, I might as well just put this one, you know, back on the shelf and I will go look at a few other stores to see if I can find something that's maybe a little like the color is a little bit better or the prices.

Maybe there's something on sale or maybe there's something that's a slightly different material and they keep looking and then they find something that's maybe slightly better in their mind and they buy it.

They're less happy with it because then it took them all this anxiety and energy to find it.

And then they find it and they're always looking over their shoulder.

Well, maybe there's another one.

Maybe there's a better one.

Maybe there's a different one.

And the next time they're walking and they pass a store window, they think I should have gotten that one.

So, maximizers think that they're putting in all the research to find the thing that's going to make them happiest.

But going through that process makes them unhappy not only by going through that process but when they get the thing that they decide on.

So, with dating, we want to be satisficers which means we have very high standards.

It's not like, oh, I'm satisfied, that's enough.

It's like you're satisfied because your standards are very high but you're not always looking over your shoulder to wonder what you're missing out on.

You're not always in this state of FOMO.

Do you see a gender difference between satisficers and maximizers at all?

Again, it depends on the person.

It really does. I mean, I think that when you look at the surveys in Maryhem, women do tend to be maximizers more than men.

But I think that men do have very high standards.

But I think that men are also like after they get over the, oh, I need to be with a supermodel and then they come back down to Earth and they say, oh, I need to be with someone that I'm really attracted to, which is a different thing.

They're much more holistic.

They ask the right questions.

Who do I enjoy being with?

And I think for women, there's so many different things.

In Maryhem, I talk about the things that people said they wouldn't go on a second date with somebody over.

And it was like, he ordered tap water instead of sparkling water.

He must be really cheap.

These assumptions that people make, when they came by and said, which kind of water do you want?

And maybe he's just accommodating.

Maybe he just said, tap water is fine.

Or he wore those kinds of shoes with that kind of belt.

He doesn't have any fashion sense.

There was one where somebody said, oh, he did this impression from Austin Powers, this movie.

He did this impression and it was really embarrassing.

And it was so cringey.

It was like, he was just nervous.

He was on a first date and he was trying to make you laugh.

Why don't you go on a second date?

And if he does something cringey on the second date, okay, then you know.

But a lot of times on a first date, people are just really nervous.

So they did one thing but the rest of the date was great.

Go on another date with them.

Do you think it's really that?

Like in the case of the Austin Powers impression or whatever it was, is that really the truth?

Was it really that or is there something else going on in their psychology where they've got commitment issues or you know, because I just think surely it can't be that.

Yeah, yeah. I think you're right.

I think when you really get down to it, you see that, you know, there are reasons that people will find something wrong with a partner if they are avoidant of intimacy.

So you do see that.

But also I write about in, maybe you should talk to someone.

One of the patients that I write about is this young woman who I call Charlotte in the book.

And Charlotte is somebody who is in her twenties.

She's attractive and professionally successful and, you know, like a lovely person but she keeps going after men who replicate her childhood.

And she's not alone in that.

Most of us, if we haven't really worked through whatever it was that we didn't get growing up or that we got too much of or not enough of, what happens is we end up seeking out the familiar.

We end up our unconscious has, our subconscious has radar for people who are like the person that hurt us in childhood because it's our experience of love.

Even if it wasn't a positive experience, it's the only experience that we have had of love.

And so the imprint that we have is, Oh, that's love.

So what happened for Charlotte was she would meet somebody and he would seem very different from her parents.

Her mother was very depressed.

Her father was very kind of either very present for her or then abandoning her.

And he also drank too much and had alcohol issues.

She would find somebody.

She would think, Oh, this person's so different from either of my parents.

Then she'd get to know him and realize, Oh, wow, he drinks a lot too.

Didn't realize that except her subconscious did.

She somehow had radar for that person or this person yells a lot to or this person is really inconsistent with me.

They're either love bombing me or they're disappearing and I never know where I stand with them.

That was her experience of her father.

So if once she really kind of processed what happened with her family, she started going out with different kinds of people, meaning she started being attracted to different kinds of people.

In that transition period, she was like, Oh, I'm going out with this person, but I'm not, he seems really good for me, but I'm not really attracted to him.

That was because she was still attracted to sort of the father and the mother, the different qualities, the victim -y mom and the unavailable mom and then the dad who was kind of inconsistent with his availability and also his temper and his drinking.

So it's interesting to see that she would date people just like that without realizing at first that she was choosing them.

So I think that one thing that therapy can really do for people is to help you see why is it that you're having trouble meeting someone?

Why is it that you're having trouble once you're in relationship with someone if you get that far maintaining that relationship or finding someone who's good for you?

If you sat down with someone who had repeatedly made the choice to date and have one night stands with people that were clearly going to hurt them or were clearly not going to call them back the next day but they had this pattern of continually going for people that were clearly either not interested

in them or saw them as like a one night stand transaction.

What would your assumption be about that individual's backstory?

I hate to make assumptions but I would say in general what I would probably find would be that this person is terrified of intimacy.

This person doesn't feel that anybody will love them.

They feel unlovable.

They feel like nobody would want to be in a relationship with them so it's you can't fire me, I quit, right?

So I'm not even going to put myself in that position.

I know this is going to be a one night stand.

I don't have any expectations.

I'm empowered, right?

This is the story they tell themselves is I'm so empowered that I don't have to feel.

I don't have to get attached.

Look at me. I am above my feelings.

But the thing is they're really terrified of their feelings.

They're terrified of being attached.

They're terrified of seeing whether somebody can love them because they're worried that they're going to get what's confirmed by somebody else which would be the confirmation would be, oh look, I tried.

I got attached to this person and they didn't reciprocate it or we dated for a month and then they broke up with me.

So see that proves that I am unlovable and that doesn't prove anything.

It just proves that this person was not the right person for you.

Where would you start with trying to help somebody that was in that situation?

I would go straight to the question of loveability.

I would go straight to the question of you know, what would it be like to feel your feelings and how terrifying is that for you?

To feel attached to someone.

How scary is that? To feel like they are the arbiter of your worth.

And how can we switch that?

So when you go on a date, it's not will they love me?

But am I interested in them?

Do I want to spend time with them?

So it's not about am I going to be chosen but I get to be the chooser.

What is that like? Because that person has never been able to be the chooser.

And yes, sometimes you will choose someone who doesn't reciprocate that but you also get to choose someone.

Sometimes you will choose someone will choose you but you don't reciprocate that.

So you just, you know, so it's not, this person is not saying, whoever you go out with, they are not determining your worth it.

You know what your worth is no matter what happens.

And I think you really have to work on the self worth part and where the story came from because we all come into therapy with narratives about ourselves.

And there's stories that someone told us about ourselves either verbally they told us like, you're not good enough, you're not this enough, you're not that enough.

Or they told us with their actions like they weren't nurturing to you, they didn't love you in the way that you saw other kids being loved.

And so you took in the story of, I must not be lovable.

Jumping back to something you said earlier because I was thinking about this, the general disconnect amongst men and women these days.

You used the word feminism earlier.

There's been a lot of changes in society's expectations and views of the role of a man and a woman in a relationship, but more broadly in the workplace and society.

And this has caused a lot of interesting dynamics that I think might be having an impact on people's expectations and their amount of satisfaction in dates.

Some of the studies I was looking at ahead of your arrival today was one study that shows that 71 % of people say it's very important for a man to be able to support family financially to be a good husband or partner.

But by comparison, only 32 % say it's very important for a woman to do the same thing.

And that's Pew Research survey.

But also another study that said, this is on Sage journals, that men showed less attraction towards women who outsmarted them.

And when you look at the changes in income and intellect, in 1980, women earned about 60 % of what men did, but by 2020, that had risen to 83%.

And there's obviously still issues with gender pay gaps and such.

But what we're seeing here is the kind of macro trend is that women are more educated and have more money.

The expectation that a man is going to be the provider in the household still persists.

And men don't wanna date, again, speaking generally, according to some studies that show attraction preferences, women that outsmart them.

Right, so the interesting thing is that, when people say I want to have flexibility, meaning a lot of women will say this.

I want to have, they'll say, I absolutely expect that I'm going to have a career, but I also don't wanna be the sole provider for the family.

And if they're really honest, a lot of women will say, I would like my husband to earn more than me.

At the same time, more women are getting college degrees, more women are getting graduate degrees, more women are getting ahead of men in those areas.

And so women will also say, and I want someone who's as educated as I am, but there aren't as many men just number -wise.

So if there are more women who are educated, meaning college, graduate school than men, but those women want men who have those degrees, there's low inventory of men who have that.

And so there's sort of a problem with that.

And so what I really wanna encourage people to do is when they're dating, and this is not about lowering your standards, it's about saying to women, there are lots of kinds of intelligence.

So yes, you wanna be with someone who is equally intelligent, but that doesn't mean that they have the same degrees that you have.

Who do you wanna talk to?

Who do you have interesting conversations with?

Is this causing an issue for successful women that are over 30?

I was reading an article, I think it was on the Washington Post, where a lady was interviewing another lady who'd written a book called, I think it's called the gender gap or something.

And they concluded that much of the reason why successful women above the age of 30 were struggling in dating is because of this issue that men don't wanna be with a woman that is like better than them and it's somewhat emasculating to a man.

And so I've had lots of private conversations with very successful women.

I know a lot of successful women that are very exceptional relationships, but I've also got a small cohort of women that tell me that they're struggling in dating because they're too successful and men don't like it and are emasculated.

Is that true? I think there's this narrative in our culture that women who are successful are not finding men because they're focused too much on their career.

And I think that's absolutely false.

I think that when you are out there in the work environment, you are meeting men and that's where you're, and you're meeting other people, you're meeting other women who maybe are married and their husbands have friends, you're out there in the world and people are seeing you.

So I think, and also you have meaning and purpose in your life and you're doing something you enjoy.

And I think that that's very attractive.

I think that there are, I think that people are wanting someone who can not live their work, which is different from being successful because you want a partner who's also available to you.

But I don't think that it's because women are too focused on their careers that that's what's happening.

I think it's because of this gap that the women who are maybe achieving certain things in the world are not finding men who are achieving at the same level.

And so there just aren't enough men for those women.

The numbers just don't work out.

And so then there's this question of, as a woman who is a very high achieving, do you have to be with somebody who is high achieving in the same way?

And that's a very hard cultural shift for a lot of women to make.

And the other problem is that when high achieving women want to be with high achieving men, a lot of those high achieving men are not great partners.

And that's the thing that, so they might be dating a lot of high achieving men and maybe they are finding them, but then they find that this person doesn't have time for me or this person isn't really nurturing or this person is married to his job.

And I don't like that.

I think it's hard when you have two people who are extremely focused on their professional lives and neither one of them has time for the relationship.

So I'm not saying, there are a lot of relationships where that works really well where both people are very focused on their careers, but they also understand each other in a way that helps them.

And then there are the relationships where you have two very high achieving people and they both expect that the other person is going to be more involved in the relationship to help them support their own career.

And they can't because they're supporting their career.

So you can't do both.

Yeah, just with this stat in mind that 71 % of people say it's very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner.

If we get to the point, which is kind of the trajectory we're on where women and men are earning the same, women already have more college degrees than men by about, I think it's roughly about 10 % at the moment, roughly, we're going to find ourselves where, yeah, expectations for what a man can offer

are really, really high, but reality is really low.

And then it feels like that the amount of women that are not finding what they want is going to continue to increase.

And the amount of men that don't feel like they are good enough for a woman because they're not smart enough, they don't have enough money, they can't contribute in the same way is also going to increase.

But then also with general working dynamics, we're seeing that people are getting married later and later, they're having less and less kids.

So are you at all concerned about this trajectory?

Yes, very. Because I think it leaves a lot of people who really want to partner and could really enjoy having a partner who maybe is different from what this cultural norm is.

They don't go after that.

So a woman will say, oh, I'm not going to even go on a date with this guy because he's not successful enough.

You know, we're too different.

And a man, on the other hand, might say, I'm not going to even go on a date with her because she's so focused on her career or I'm not good enough for her.

So they don't even get a chance to even see if they might be a good match.

And sometimes it's a great match because you don't necessarily want two people who are exactly the same.

And I see this all the time with couples who come in for couples therapy, where they thought that what was so good about their relationship when they first got together was we're so the same.

And then they find that, wait a minute, but there's no one here to be more of the nurturer or there's no one here to spend more time with the household or there's no one here to do more of kind of logistical things in the house because we're both doing exactly the same job.

Isn't that sort of central to the equality narrative that you should share the responsibilities?

Right. So equality doesn't mean that you have exactly the same responsibilities.

It means that you feel that there's not a power dynamic.

So equality means one person doesn't have more power than the other person.

But that doesn't mean that, you know, I do laundry 2 .5 days of the week or 3 .5 days of the week and you do laundry 3 .5 days of the week.

Maybe someone only does.

Their responsibility is the laundry.

That doesn't mean that there's a power dynamic.

It means the other person, maybe they're always doing the dishes or whatever it is, it doesn't have to be split up in this way.

So I think that when people think about having an egalitarian marriage, we're talking about that there's not a power differential.

But you still get to choose, like a woman might say, and I'm being stereotypical here, it might be the man.

But often it's the woman who says, you know what?

I want to switch to part -time with my work.

So that doesn't mean she has less power in the marriage because he makes more now because he's working full -time.

It means they've divided up things differently because that was their choice.

That was something that was chosen.

It wasn't like you can't work.

It was I would like to do less.

Do you tend to see issues unique to relationships when a woman is earning more than a man?

Yeah, I do. I still think this is something that is very primal for us around what it means.

I think that women sometimes feel resentful.

That's why they want to be with someone.

It's funny because a woman can be making a lot of money and she won't even go out with someone who makes the same amount.

She has to go out with someone who makes more, which is interesting because she won't necessarily say that.

I think it's hard to acknowledge the contradictions.

And I think for men, the same thing that a man will say, you know, I want a woman who has her own life.

I want somebody who is doing something in the world that is important to her, but I don't want her to make more money than me.

It's hard to say that out loud.

This comes out in couples therapy where people start talking about, wow, there is this difference.

And maybe it didn't even start out that way.

Maybe it started out where he was making more and then things shifted and then she started making more and it changed something in their dynamic.

And so they start fighting a lot, but they're not fighting about that.

They're fighting about all different kinds of things.

And so it comes out in different behaviors and they come to couples therapy saying, we're having, we're fighting all the time or we're not having sex or here's what's happening.

And it turns out it was really about this issue of who has power now?

But they didn't realize it was about that or they weren't willing to kind of look at that.

Do you think it's getting increasingly harder to know what the role of a man and a woman are?

Because I think, you know, I've had so many conversations on and off this podcast with people who have sons or daughters.

It's often the ones that have sons.

I'm thinking about a lady that I know.

And she says she's so confused by what to tell her son a man is these days.

And, you know, when I think about suicidality and how much of a big killer it is, especially in the UK, I know it's sort of a Western trend, but I think it's the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 is themselves.

I'm thinking, you know, there's often a narrative that that's because masculinity is changing.

They're not being masculine enough.

And then there's another narrative that says, no, it's because they're not being feminine enough.

What's typically associated with sort of feminine traits.

Yeah. Well, it's true that more men die by suicide than women do.

And some people say, well, that's because the method that men choose is we're lethal.

But I also think that that's only part of the story, because when men do come into therapy, they truly, truly feel that conflicted about exactly what you said, that I don't know how to be a man in today's world.

It used to be much more clear.

Now I'm not saying that was a good thing that it used to be much more clear because there were all kinds of power dynamics that weren't so healthy for men and women.

But I think now what men are saying is, I maybe don't want to be the person solely responsible for, I would like my partner to also bring in some income, but that creates all kinds of problems.

Or I want to be able to, again, open up to and talk to my partner in this way, but I'm afraid that it makes her feel unsafe.

So what do we do? What does it mean?

And I'm raised, so I could say, I'm raising a boy who is now 18 years old.

And even things like, does he still pay?

He always wants to pay on a date, and then some people don't like that.

And he thinks, well, I'm just being sort of chivalrous.

But there are all these ways in which you don't know sort of like what is expected of you.

So it's like, if he pays, then some people take offense.

If he doesn't pay, then some people take offense.

And he just doesn't know what to do.

How much of these things that I feel are being sort of the role of a man in a nice way, like protecting, taking care of, will be offensive to some people because they see it as kind of a power dynamic.

So what is the role of a man?

It's really unclear.

I mean, that's the thing.

And I think that it really needs to be discussed.

And that's where I think there's hope is that when people can actually say, hey, I'd really like to pay on this date.

And if she says, well, I don't feel comfortable with that, I think a question is, okay, that's fine.

We can split it. But I want to, let's talk about why.

And to be able to talk about, what does this mean that I pay?

What does that mean to you?

I think a lot of people would say, oh, well, it means that you expect something back from me.

You expect that we're going to have sex, or you expect whatever these old ideas are.

And I think that we need to be having these conversations.

That's my point, is that it's not so important that we know what it means.

It's more important that we know what it means to the person that we are interested in.

What does it mean to them?

It's going to mean something different to everybody.

So if we can't talk to this person that we're interested in about what it means, then we're just going to, both people are going to be mired in confusion.

Yeah, I'm a bit of an old school romantic, as they say.

My partner, she has a great job, she has her own money, but I just absolutely feel the need to open up every door for her, pay for every bill for her.

I would absolutely not have it any other way.

Maybe that's because I'm insecure or something, I don't know.

But I just, I watch my dad do it for my mum, and it's like hardwired into my DNA that my role is to protect, take care of, do everything I can to support.

And if she, I'd really struggle with her paying for me.

And she's got her own money, she's got her own business, her own job.

But have you talked about it or just worked out that way?

She never said, can I pay this once?

Or can I? Yeah, yeah.

She pays. It's like a bit of a competition.

She'll like sneak off to the bathroom and pay and stuff.

But generally, I think it's, I've always wanted to do that on dates.

And I think, if you sat people down and ask them the question, you go on a first date with a guy and he asks to split the bill, or he asks or, you know, he doesn't immediately pay.

Would that be an ick for you?

Would that turn you off then?

That would be a huge ick for me.

Yeah, so even for you, it would be.

Yes, yes. If you went on a first date with a guy and he didn't know.

Yes. Would you? Absolutely.

Why? It's hard to articulate because, and this is what people, you know, we'll say, all women will say of all ages.

I think from my age, we grew up with that was the expectation.

I think for younger generations, maybe it's not the expectation, but I think a lot of people still like it or want it.

There's something about it that says, I really valued our time together.

I care. I'm interested.

It's a way of signaling interest, but I think even if the person isn't interested and you're never going to see each other again, it's just a nice gesture.

But I don't have any rational way of explaining why.

And if I were to get rational about it, I would talk myself out of it.

Yes. I think that's a very honest answer.

And then the counter sort of rebuttal to that means, okay, so if men are expected to pay, then we're going to need more money.

Yes. Yes. And it gets very expensive to date.

Yeah. It does. I mean, you know, people will say, oh, you can go on a hike.

Doesn't cost anything.

You can do a picnic.

You can watch a movie.

There are all kinds of things you can do.

But the reality is, it's kind of like I remember that old Chris Rock joke.

In the first three months of a relationship, you're not you.

You're the ambassador of you.

So you want to impress somebody.

You're trying to show interest in somebody.

But I do think there's that really primal need for safety that is gender based, that we don't like to talk about or acknowledge, but that I think women really, I think if somebody doesn't pay on a first date, if a guy doesn't pay on a first date, I think a lot of women don't feel safe.

That's what it comes down to.

It's a tricky world.

And it's getting increasingly trickier.

It feels, you know, it feels like an insult almost that the person doesn't pay.

Not many people, some people would, but no one would really publicly say that, though, because it's like not socially acceptable to say that.

No, it's not. But in private conversations, of course, everyone I know is that if they weren't on a date with a man, so in a heterosexual relationship and the man either asked to split the bill or suggested that you might pay, this person's not going to get a second date.

Of course not. No, no, unless it was the woman who said, oh no, let me split that with you.

But if it was his decision and he said, oh, let's split this or he put it in the middle.

No, no. I, in therapies, the young woman came to me recently and she said she went out with this guy and they went to a cafe and they got coffees.

And he asked her to split it coffee.

And she said, and she was having so much fun on the date until the bill came.

And she was shocked.

And she thought, OK, well, she made it.

It was very personal to her.

First, she thought I must he must really, really have had a horrible time with me to have want to not pay for my five dollar coffee.

And then he asked her out again and she said to me, I don't understand this at all.

So he was interested in me and he didn't pay for my coffee.

And she did not go out with him again.

So these are the kinds of signals that it very much is emblematic of something.

Who pays on that first date?

Do you agree with that decision that she made?

Hundred percent. And I didn't say that as her therapist.

It's really about understanding it for her.

But but I do agree with that decision.

And I think it's because there's something there's something like a half note off a better person who doesn't even see that it's a five dollar coffee and you're interested in this person, and she wasn't making any moves to pay.

She was just sitting there for a very long time.

And the she said is the way she told the story was that the person came around and couple times and said, are you ready?

And the guy said, oh, no, we're not ready yet.

And then at a certain point he said to her, oh, do you want to put your credit card down?

Right to her. And so she just said, I could never go out with somebody like that, even though they had a really good time before that.

So if we zoom back out, then so are you saying that that is a telltale sign of a broader character issue that this individual has?

Because you said that we really should be focusing on like character traits.

Is that a red flag of some kind of other character trait?

I think that when things are hard in the beginning, that's not a good sign.

So I think that when there's like a big disconnect in the beginning, that you should pay attention to that.

So a big disconnect is not he.

You know, the example I gave earlier of, you know, he said yes to the tap water.

That's different from he didn't pay for my coffee.

That's different. The tap water might be, oh, I don't know, is he cheap?

I don't know. Let's see, let me get to know him better.

This is about generosity.

They're different things.

And so, you know, I feel like relationships I always say to people when they overlook things in the beginning, I think there are two camps on this.

There's the people who think everything is a red flag.

That's not like the tap water, not a red flag.

But there are people who don't pay enough attention to the red flags in the beginning.

So they say, yes, this person, they kind of disappeared for a couple days, and I didn't like that.

And you know, but or they were they're late all the time or, you know, whatever it is, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a deal breaker, but it's kind of a flag that you want to discuss early on.

So what happens is if you don't discuss, it is a person will say, you know, after they're now they're in a relationship and they've been dating for several months and then and they're moving along.

And the person says, I can't stand it when you're late every time.

And he says, why is this a problem?

I've always been late.

Why is this a problem now?

Right? So if you bring it up early before the cement rise, so, you know, I always say relationships are like cement, that there's room for things to move in the beginning before things kind of really get hard and difficult to change.

But once the cement rise, it's much harder to change those habits or those interactions or the dance that you're doing with the other person.

So if you don't like something in the beginning, you might want to bring it up to see how much wiggle room is there here?

Can this person be more aware of being on time?

Because I don't like sitting there for half an hour every time we make plans.

We're getting married a lot less and we're getting married later.

Later, yeah. So there was a stat that I found that said for the first time ever, people over the age of 30 have been, haven't been married in higher numbers than ever before.

So, yeah, marriage is getting later and later in people's lives.

But I also found this really interesting graph, which I printed out, which shows that there seems to be an optimal time to get married.

Yes, I was just going to mention that.

This is the graph. There's a window.

So I'll put it up on the screen for anyone that's looking and I'll put it in the description below.

But it essentially shows that if you get married after 30, you're more likely to get divorced than if you got married between 25 and 30.

Right. So there's a sweet spot.

So if you get married too young, you're more likely to get divorced, meaning if you get married sort of under 20, I think it's 22 or 23.

But if you get married over, I think it's 28, you have more likelihood of getting divorced.

So the study which I have in front of me by the Institute for Family Studies says there is an optimum age to get married if you want to statistically avoid a chance of divorce.

And it seems to be around ages 25 to 30 ish.

Someone who marries at 25 is over 50 % less likely to get divorced than someone who weds at age 20.

Before the age of 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11%.

However, after 32 years old, every year increases your chance of divorce by 5%.

I couldn't figure out why.

Oh, I think there are several reasons for this.

So first of all, I think it's sort of obvious about marrying too young that you don't necessarily have the skills, you aren't really established in your own life, and you don't necessarily have the maturity to do what you need to do to be in that kind of relationship for the long term.

You also don't really know who you are yet.

And so you might think that you want a certain kind of life and you find out your partner wants something very different.

But once you get into your mid -20s and even sort of later 20s, it's an optimal time because you have a better sense of who you are, you know more of what you want, and you can grow together as a couple.

And I think that's really important.

You're going to have more shared experiences.

You're going to know more of each other's families.

Your parents are probably still alive on each side.

You're going to get to know each other's siblings.

If you have siblings, you're going to be more integrated into each other's lives.

As you get older, first of all, you're more sort of set in your ways.

We talked about rigidity earlier.

You're more rigid. You have different expectations.

I think when you're younger, you're more flexible in terms of just being more open -minded.

We get less open -minded generally as we get older around relationship, around the things that we expect.

And we also have a history as we get older.

So we have more negative experiences of maybe heartbreak, being broken up with, breaking up with people, relationships that didn't work out that then inform the way we behave in our relationships.

And I like to say, it's almost like we're punishing our current partner for a crime they didn't commit.

So if you were in a relationship before where maybe you were cheated on or someone didn't treat you well, then you are less trusting of the partner that you're with, or you're more on guard or more closed off because you're worried you're not going to get treated well.

So it's almost like the more dating experiences that you have, some people would think counterintuitively, they would think, if I have more dating experience, then I'm going to be a better partner later on.

But often, because those were not great dating experiences, sure, you might have learned something in them.

But if you have too many of them, it's good to maybe have a relationship or two before you get married.

But to have five, it's harder, right?

Because you have all this baggage that you're bringing in, and the other person who's also your age has all this baggage that they're bringing in.

And there might also be something, it's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you, that maybe you are doing something in relationship.

And that is why. It's not that you haven't been able to meet someone, it's that you've been pairing up with people in a way that is not really healthy.

And you haven't spent the time to really figure it out.

So you're just going to keep repeating and repeating those not great relationships, even if you marry the person, it might not last, because something has not been working in those last five relationships, and you haven't figured that out yet.

In your TED Talk, you talk about part of getting to know yourself is getting to unknow yourself.

Why do we have to get to unknow ourselves?

Well, I think that so many people think I'm going to come into therapy and I'm going to learn so much about myself.

And you do, but part of learning about yourself is learning what the faulty narratives are that you've been carrying around, whether it's I'm unlovable, or I can't trust anyone, or I'm no good at this, or this thing is wrong with me.

These, again, are stories that you picked up about yourself from a long time ago.

And it might not even have been your parents.

It might have been at school.

Maybe you were bullied in school or maybe you were in an environment that, well, maybe you had ADHD and you were told you weren't smart because people didn't realize that you learn differently and you actually are quite intelligent.

So you have these stories.

So it's to unknow, people come in and say, well, I'm not that I'm not really smart.

Well, you have to unknow that because that might not be true.

Let's find out. So it's really, you know, it's interesting because I was a writer long before I was a therapist and I still am a writer, but I use so much of writing and narrative in the therapy to kind of help people edit their stories.

Let's look at, you know, is the protagonist going in circles or is the protagonist moving forward?

Who are the supporting characters?

And do the major characters need to be more minor characters in your life and do some of the minor characters need to be more major characters?

And what is going to be the next chapter?

How do we look at where the story is going?

So a lot of this is unknowing stuff about the character, which is you.

You know, if you come up with a character as a writer and you say, well, this person is not very smart and they're kind of weird and they're unlovable.

Well, you're going to write the story a certain way thinking the character has those traits.

But if you say, actually, this person is quite smart and they're quite lovable and they're quite attractive.

Well, you're going to write a different next chapter for them.

I've always on that point about sort of narratives we've written.

I've always considered myself to be very productive.

Maybe the more honest answer is a bit of a workaholic to some degree.

I think that my work is fundamentally attached and associated with my own self -esteem.

So I think when I'm working really, really hard and I feel really productive, I think at some deep level, I think I'm worth more or I'm like, I fit in.

It goes back to when I was younger and I felt like I didn't fit in.

It feels like I'm more valuable.

Now, the problem you have as an adult when you're trying to achieve a different set of goals, like have a healthy relationship, is this kind of gets in your way.

And I think I found that in myself that I still have this urge to be really successful and work really hard because at some level, it's doing something for my image of myself.

But as I get older, I kind of need to figure out a way to drop that down a little bit or else I'm going to miss out on something that's going to make me happy, which is relationships.

And a lot of people that I speak to, a lot of people that listen to this podcast are in a similar situation where they just can't get off the train in terms of their work.

Yeah. Yeah. So we were talking about defense mechanisms.

And so one of the defense mechanisms is where you take something that comes from an unhealthy place and you put it into something that looks on the surface healthier.

So I don't feel worthy or as worthy as I would like to.

So I'm going to succeed in this incredible way.

So on the surface, it looks great.

It looks like you're doing something really healthy, but actually you're not really working on that self worth piece.

Another example might be somebody who has a lot of anger and they take up boxing, right?

Or they become a surgeon because they cut into people.

You see this a lot, where somebody takes their anger, so they put it into something that looks healthy, but they're not really dealing with the underlying issue, which is the anger.

You see that a lot, that people that have anger issues sometimes take up roles like surgeons?

Sure. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Anything where you can do, again, boxing, it could be anything, where you're putting it into a socially acceptable container as opposed to dealing with the issue.

So there's nothing wrong with being a great surgeon.

There's nothing wrong with being somebody who succeeds in work that they love.

But then what happens is, when you're not doing the thing that gets the societal approval, then what do you do with, in one case, your anger and the other case, your self worth?

And so I'm glad that you're looking at the self worth piece because that's going to be important because you're not always going to get it from your work.

How do you improve your self worth?

What would you do with a patient like me?

I think we do this on the podcast where we do something very practical, where we have people make a list of the things that other people would say.

So there's two columns.

There's one, what would other people say are your best qualities that have nothing to do with your work?

What do they appreciate most about you?

And then what do you appreciate most about yourself that has nothing to do with work that you think other people don't see?

And when you start to look at those, they're very quiet at first.

People don't have a long list.

They're kind of like, I don't really know.

And I'm looking for really tiny things like this person really appreciated that when they were sick, I called them.

This person really appreciates that I'm funny, that I make them laugh.

I appreciate that about myself, you might say, right?

You might say like, I really appreciate about myself or I appreciate that I can be calm under really stressful circumstances.

I appreciate that I notice my partner and I do nice things for my partner.

I appreciate, not my partner appreciates that that'll be on one column, but the other column is, I appreciate that about myself.

So looking at how can I pay more attention to some of these areas that I don't pay enough attention to because I can only see the real shiny thing out there, which is how many people, you know, how many millions of people follow me or how many people, you know, download the podcast, those kinds of things.

And is there a reason why, okay, the reason why you separate work from that is because you're trying to find yourself esteem in other places outside of the work.

Right. So it's both and it's not to say don't get, don't, don't feel worthy because of what you do with your work.

That's a big part of what we do with our lives.

Think of the number of hours that we spend in work.

We're spending most of our days doing work.

So of course we want to get self -worth from that, but we also want to know that we have other areas in which we are worthy and that we don't pay enough attention.

We don't give ourselves enough credit.

It's kind of like in a relationship, there's a statistic about the bank of goodwill.

So in a healthy relationship, there are, we think of deposits of how many positive interactions do you have with your partner to how many negative interactions do you have?

And so you want to have 20 positive interactions for every one negative interaction in a relationship.

And when things are not good, you want to have, you know, you hope you can do five positive ones to one negative one, but that's, that's a lot.

So it's, it's really noticing.

These are, these are small little deposits that you make.

Like I held, I, I took my partner's hand when we were walking down the street, you know, those are like small positive interactions.

You're not counting them.

It's just a way of being.

But what happens is when your self -worth is all in one bucket, you don't notice you're not making enough deposits to yourself of into the self -worth bank.

So it really is about noticing what are the deposits that I'm making?

So I'm making a lot of deposits in the, in the work bucket, but I'm not making a lot of deposits and noticing.

That was really, I really liked that.

I was really funny in at that dinner party.

That was really fun.

I was really kind to that stranger on the street.

That was really nice of me.

Do you think that some people are scared to go to therapy because they think if they are to heal from something, whatever that means, it will rob them of something that they value.

I, if I go to therapy and I work through my childhood trauma, then maybe I won't be as ambitious or successful or driven, et cetera.

I think the fear is I will have to change.

I will have to change and I will have to do something different.

And I might not like that.

And that's why people are like, if I go to therapy and I take off my mask and this person sees the truth of who I am and I see the truth of who I am, I might need to do something difficult and I might need to get rid of one of my defense mechanisms.

Like I'm avoidant, maybe.

Or I might not be able to do things that maybe I get away with that are not very healthy because they're easier.

In your book, you say something, maybe you should talk to someone.

You say something that really surprised me, which is that sometimes when someone changes, those around them will sabotage them and basically get in the way of that change because it changes the dynamic that that relationship has with a person.

And I mean, we see this generally when someone becomes successful, for example, their friends from their hometown might be a little bit resistant because they want to keep the dynamics the way that they are.

The examples that you talk about in the book about like, you know, someone gets over their alcohol addiction and then a friend might sabotage them by, I don't know, giving them alcohol or taking them to a bar.

Yeah. We're really, really striking.

Yeah. That happened with Charlotte in the book when she realized that her drinking was a problem.

She was the young woman who's in her twenties and was dating and she realized that she drinks too much and it's really affecting her life and her functioning.

And so she decided that she was going to do something about that.

And then when she was having a birthday party and her friend said, oh, let's do it at this bar.

And she said, no, I'd rather do it at this other place because I don't want to be in that environment.

And her friends are just like, you're no fun anymore.

And you don't come out with this anymore.

But the, but the real issue is that she was holding up a mirror without realizing it to her friends because they were saying, oh, maybe we aren't drinking in a healthy way.

And they didn't want to look at that.

So if they could get her to go back to the old way, you see this in couples a lot when one person decides they're going to get healthy in a certain way, like I'm going to start exercising and the person starts exercising and the other person doesn't exercise at all.

And they're really unhealthy.

And that person says, why do you get up early and go to the gym?

You're no fun anymore.

You know, you're obsessed with exercise when they're not, they're just going to the gym in a normal way.

And really they're feeling threatened.

They're like, you know, this is changing the dynamic between us because we used to be both unfit and now my partner's looking really healthy and hot.

And now it's really clear that I'm not really healthy and I don't look as good as I could look.

And maybe I'm going to have to do this and they don't really want to.

They're resistant to doing that.

And the partner's not asking them to go to the gym.

They're saying, I'm going to the gym.

You do what you want.

But there's this implicit pressure of I have to look at myself.

That's why people, again, don't come to therapy is because I'm going to have to look at myself and maybe make some changes that are healthier.

And I'm not sure I'm ready to do that yet.

And I write in the book about the stages of change because I think it's so important that people understand that New Year's resolutions, for example, don't often work because people think I just decide this thing.

I have this goal. I'm going to do it and I either succeed or I fail.

And that's just not true.

There are these stages that people go through and it starts with pre -contemplation where you don't even know you're thinking of making a change.

And that's usually like if your partner starts exercising, you didn't realize that maybe in the back of your mind that that was something you had been thinking about but weren't ready to deal with.

Contemplation is you know you're thinking about making a change, but you're not ready to do it yet.

That's usually when people come to therapy.

They're thinking about it, but they don't really.

They're not really ready.

Preparation is when you start to get ready, you're preparing.

You're maybe getting a gym membership or you're taking an anger management class or whatever you're doing.

And then action is when you put the change.

And it might also be like you're preparing to break up with someone who's not good for you.

So you're getting thinking about how am I going to do this?

What are the logistics of this?

And then when you action is you actually do the thing.

You break up, you go to the gym, you change jobs, you apply for a job that you always wanted, you go back to grad school, you do the thing you wanted to do.

But then the next stage is the most important stage which is maintenance.

And maintenance is it's not like you're on this upward trajectory and if you go off the trajectory, then you failed.

It's not like that.

Maintenance is how does this become more habitual in my life?

So let's use the breakup example.

You broke up with this person, you're having a really bad day, you're feeling really lonely, you called them at midnight or you texted them at midnight because, oh, I don't know.

And so now you say, oh, well, I better get back in a relationship, I guess I'm back in a relationship with them.

No, no, no, no, no.

You slipped off, it's okay.

Then you say, you know what, I was feeling really lonely, I didn't know how to cope with it, I'm going to go to therapy, I'm going to have an extra session, I'm going to call my friend, I'm going to watch a TV show that I like, I'm going to read a book that I like, it will feel different in the morning.

Next time, that's what I'm going to do.

And so you have to get used to, we talked about the familiar earlier about going toward familiar partners.

Making a change is really hard because we're changing something that was familiar to us.

It's like when I was in therapy, my therapist said, you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out, but on the right and the left, it's open, no bars.

So that's us where we think, I would like to make a change, but I'm really afraid of going out, I'm more comfortable being in jail in this miserable situation than knowing that I have freedom, but I have to change.

I'm going to have to take responsibility for my life if I walk around those bars.

And so I think with change, it's really about how do I give myself self -compassion when I have trouble making the change and help myself get back on track and what kind of support do I need?

People think if I beat myself up, if I self -flagellate, if I tell myself I'm awful and I'm a failure, I'm going to get back on track because that's going to help me.

No, it's not going to help you.

In the short term, it might help you a little bit, but what's really going to help you is to have self -compassion because that actually gives you more accountability.

You're more able to say to yourself, okay, let me think about what I can do differently.

It's kind of like if your kid comes home from school and says, I did really badly, I failed this test.

Are you going to scream at them?

Is that going to help them do better on the next test?

Or are you going to say, let's sit down and figure this out.

What do you think happened here?

And your kid might say, I didn't really understand it and I didn't get help.

Or your kid might really be honest and say, I didn't study enough.

So we can say, okay, well, what can you do next time?

What's trying to think about?

Can you make a schedule?

Do you need to study with a study partner?

What do you need to do?

That's what helps people make long -term change.

Is that the wise compassion that you spoke about versus the sort of idiot compassion, which you talk about as well?

Idiot compassion is what we tend to do with our friends.

So your friend says, listen to what my partner, my coworker, my sibling, my parents did or said, and we say, yeah, they're wrong.

You're right. How dare they?

Because we're just validating their perspective.

And like we were talking about in my TED talk, there are many different versions of a story, all of which are true.

So you're only getting one narrow perspective when you're hearing one person's perspective.

That's why couples therapy is so great, because I can hear the same incident told by two different people who were there, both of whom are telling the absolute truth of their experience, but they're leaving out the other person's experience.

And that's where things get dangerous.

So in idiot compassion, we don't consider what the other person's perspective might be when our friend is telling us something.

We just back up our friend.

But they're not learning anything from that experience.

And when you hear them over and over, you kind of get a sense that maybe they're doing something like an example would be your friend keeps getting broken up with.

And we can say, yes, these men are jerks.

They're terrible. You deserve better.

Or we can say, you know, I think that sometimes you're a little bit too possessive early on in the relationship.

And I think they start to feel overwhelmed, and then they break up with you.

But if you could just hold your anxiety a little bit more at the beginning of the relationship and not be so overwhelming to them, that you might develop something different the next time.

That would be wise compassion.

That's what they're going to hear in therapy.

So in therapy, we hold up a mirror to them and help them to see something about their role in the situation that maybe they haven't been willing or able to see.

And so we think we're being a good friend by offering idiot compassion, but we're not actually helping our friends.

And that's what therapy I think can be really helpful.

When you start with a man and a therapy session, do you typically find that the woman expresses more emotion tears than the man?

Sometimes, yes, often.

I also think that emotions can be used as manipulation.

So an example is a pattern in a relationship might be that he brings up something that he wants to talk about, she cries because of what he said.

And he said it nicely, but it's something they need to deal with.

And she cries and then he gets terrified by her crying.

He thinks, oh my gosh, I've hurt her.

And so then he shuts down.

And so really her crying is a manipulation.

It's a, I don't want to hear anything that I'm quote, doing wrong.

And so I'm going to shut that down by crying and being the victim and being hurt.

Being a victim is actually a power position because you are making it impossible for anyone to deal with whatever is going on between the two of you because now you're the victim and now they look like a horrible person if they're making you cry.

So I will call that out in therapy and I will say, you know what?

He's going to talk and we're going to do something different where he's going to be able to say what he wants to say.

She might cry, but if she cries, I want you to please go on.

She's going to be fine.

I'm going to be here with her and you don't have to manage her feelings.

You're going to tell her about your feelings.

I will be here to help manage her feelings.

Hmm. Interesting. And you see that if you're not in therapy, you'll see that pattern where it's just, you know, someone will play the victim in the relationship and it could go either way.

It could be anyone in the relationship.

But when someone plays the victim, the other person actually becomes the victim.

They become so helpless in the relationship.

The true victim is the person who has to interact with the person who plays the victim.

Dreams. Something I was quite surprised to find in your book, but pleasantly surprised.

Yes. Do our dreams have meaning or are they just random?

I think both, but I think the dreams are really helpful.

And in the book, I do give examples of dreams where dreams are often a kind of a story that we tell ourselves that we aren't giving ourselves permission to think about when we're awake.

So an example might be somebody who has been who is worried that they have been doing something financially that is not legal.

They have a dream that they were speeding on the highway and they got caught.

Well, what is that dream really about?

It's this, I don't really want to think about this thing that I'm doing that's not quite above board.

And I know I shouldn't be doing it, but I'm not going to think about that.

You know, the dream that that I have in the book where so I come into therapy because of a breakup and I have a dream that I ran into my ex and it's this very elaborate dream.

But the point is that in my first therapy session, I had said to my therapist when I was talking about the breakup, I said, well, half my life is over.

And he really glommed onto that statement that that was really why I was in therapy.

What was this about for me?

It wasn't so much about the break of the breakup, got me into therapy, but this whole question of what am I doing with my life and how am I living my life?

And this question of mortality was really what was on my mind.

And so in the dream, I think I see that he has a new girlfriend and I see that she's older than me and I feel very self -satisfied by that in this petty way.

And then I look at myself in the mirror in the dream and I'm like this 80 year old wrinkled person.

And I realized, oh, this is really about this fear that I have about getting older and that half my life is over.

And so dreams really do inform our biggest fears and our biggest preoccupations that feel too scary to think about in our waking life.

And if we pay attention to our dreams, and what I mean by that is when you wake up and you remember your dream, if you write it down immediately, but you write it in the present, not we were here and this happened, but I'm here and I see so and so and so and so says to me, if you write it in the present,

it will bring back more of the dream for you and it will help you understand what connection it has to something that you really do need to be dealing with in your life that you're probably not dealing with.

Dreams can be a precursor to self confession.

Yes. That's what I say.

Self confession. They can tell you things about yourself before you're willing to admit them about yourself into yourself.

Yes. And it's so liberating.

I think that there's something about the safety of a dream.

Sometimes our dreams are really scary, but you wake up and you say, okay, now I can deal with it.

Now that I've acknowledged it to myself, I can deal with it in the dream, I just had to go with the flow of the dream, but now I can actually make choices about what I want to do in my waking life.

At the beginning of each therapy session, you'll often ask your patients to describe their last 24 hours.

Why is that useful to know what someone's been doing for the last 24 hours?

I think most of us don't realize how we spend our time.

We have no idea. If you said to somebody, you spend three hours a day scrolling on Instagram, they would say, no, I don't.

We don't realize. And I think that at the end of the day, most of us want to live our lives with intention.

And what I mean by that is I think that knowing that life has a hundred percent mortality rate that all of us has a limited time here.

We're living on borrowed time.

That's not to freak people out.

It's to make people say, how are you actually spending this borrowed time that you have here?

Because one day you might look back and wonder why.

And I always say that regret can lead us in one of two directions.

It can be a way of self -lagulating and living in the past, or it can be an engine for change.

And I really think regret is the most powerful engine for change.

I regret that I lived my life this way.

So if we don't realize how we are living our lives, we don't have the engine for change.

In that chapter 24, you say the opposite of depression isn't happiness, but vitality.

Yeah, that's Andrew Solomon and that I'm quoting there.

And I thought that that really struck me when he said that in his own book and his own TED talk, because I think that people think about, well, I'm either happy or I'm sad.

And, and I think what we're, there's no, you can't be happy all the time.

There's no such thing.

You would never know any other emotion if that's all you were feeling.

So I think that, that vitality is what people are looking for in life.

What is vitality? It's a sense of aliveness.

Okay. And this is why people have affairs, by the way.

Often when you ask people, why did you cheat when you love your partner?

I didn't feel vitality in my life.

I felt the sense of aliveness and awakeness when I was with this other person.

And it wasn't had not much to do with the other person.

And it really didn't have much to do with your partner.

It had to do with you didn't feel vitality in your own life.

And instead of looking at yourself and saying, what can I do to create vitality in my life?

I blamed it on my marriage.

I blamed it on my partner.

I said, I was going to find it with this other person.

And what they find is, yeah, that works for a little while, but not very long.

Does menopause play a role in this?

In terms of, I heard a stat from someone that was on the podcast previously where they said post menopausal women, but also women going through menopause will often divorce their partner because they have a lot of sort of psychological doubts about themselves and they maybe their expectations.

I think someone said to me that their expectations go up.

So they end up divorcing their partner because they're clear on what they want now.

But I was just wondering what role menopause will play in someone's marriage and their expectations, their view of themselves, their chance of maybe getting a divorce.

And if you see anything in therapy associated with this.

I think what menopause does is it goes back to this idea of I don't have forever here.

And if they weren't happy with the marriage that they were in, then I think people really wake up and they really say, what do I want in my life?

It's a, it's a very, there's a lot of psychological changes that come with it's not just the hormonal changes, but it's what does that represent that I am done with that chapter of my life and I'm now I'm, I'm, you know, halfway through again, half my life is over.

And what do I want to do to more intentionally?

Because often women have been serving others.

So that's what they've been doing.

They've been taking care of other people's needs, whether it's their partners or their children or their parents.

You know, they tend to be the caretakers.

And now they're saying, wait a minute, I only have this much time left.

And I really want to find that vitality in my life.

You went to therapy because of heartbreak.

Yes. I've been through heartbreak.

Who has not? It's one of the it's one of the worst feelings in the world.

And it's really hard to give someone advice when they're going through heartbreak.

I had a friend reach out to me recently and said, listen, I'm going through a heartbreak and I just don't know what who else to turn to.

It's this big dark cloud that hangs over everything I do think and say that just won't go away.

What have you come to learn about heartbreak from your own experience, but also from your patients?

How do we navigate through that dark cloud?

I think what people don't understand about heartbreak is the grief.

And so this is why I talk about it so much and maybe you should talk to someone because it's not just that you lost the present with that person, it's that you lost the future that you had created in your mind.

So you're losing the dailiness.

There's something really profound about the person you tell all the minutia of your day, the person you know, you know so much about each other and you know, each other's habits and quirks this again being understood being truly known, it's such a delicious feeling being truly known.

And so this person knows like what you what kind of pizza you like or, or, you know, this quirky habit you have or what TV shows you watch or that that thing that you do with your eyes when you're excited, they know all those little seemingly trivial details that are so important about being known.

And they know your history and they know about your family and they know who your friends are and they you've had shared experiences with this person.

So you have all that history together, even by the way, if it was only six months, you have a lot together a year.

And so in that time, you started to imagine, Oh, and then this is going to happen next year, and then in five years, this will happen, or we're going to grow old together, whatever you imagine will happen.

And you become attached to their friends and they attach to your friends.

And then you lose the dailiness of being known, you lose the bigger circle that you had, and you lose the companionship, you lose the physical connection, you lose all of that, but you also lose this idea of what was to come.

And so every day you're living in this future that is radically different from that day, as it would have been if you were in that relationship.

So it's very hard people think, well, how it's been this long, how come you're not over this person?

It's kind of like the same thing when someone has a breakup instead of a divorce.

People think it's not that big of a deal.

Why? Why is it less of a big deal?

It's still loss and grief.

Or it's like if someone loses a child, everyone surrounds them, all these rituals for how do we help people through that kind of loss?

Someone has a miscarriage.

People are like, well, you can still get pregnant again, at least you got pregnant.

There's a chapter in the book called What Not to Say to a Dying Person because one of the patients that I work with in the book is somebody who's a young person or a thirties who is newly married and then gets a cancer diagnosis.

And people say the most well -meaning but ridiculous things to her.

And so I think the same thing happens in heartbreak where people try to minimize it, they try to cheer you up, they won't sit with you in your loss.

And that's what you really need is someone to sit with you in your loss and to acknowledge how profound the loss is.

And people don't do that.

They either don't see how profound it is or they do, but they feel like, well, we don't want the person to wallow in it or if I bring it up, they're going to be worse.

No, they need to be seen and actually that's going to make them better and it's going to make them heal faster.

What impact did it have on you?

The way people reacted or the heartbreak.

I think for me it was a big wake up call again around this idea of half my life is over and what do I want in my life?

And why was I willing to overlook certain things in my relationship that were clearly there but that I didn't want to see.

How did you go about recovering, is that the right word, moving forward?

How did you go about moving forward?

That's the whole narrative of the book.

I went to therapy and it's really about what I learned about myself in therapy that helped me heal and helped me move forward.

I was thinking about the advice that I could give to my friend and how I could have been a support act because my natural disposition is to try and fix.

And from what you've said that's not necessarily the best approach to take.

Because my natural inclination is to go tell them the future will be better.

Share my experience of my heartbreak.

And those are all good because as a therapist I want to hold hope.

When somebody's really, really dealing with a difficult situation, whether it's a breakup or something else, I want to hold hope that they can't access.

They can't access any hope at that point.

So I'm going to hold the hope for them.

But I'm not going to try to cheer them up.

I'm just going to be the container for that hope so that they know that someone else is holding that hope.

So you did two things really well.

One was that you shared your experience so that this person knows this happens, this person isn't alone in this.

Because I think when you go through a heartbreak, intellectually you know other people have gone through it but you feel like yours is so much worse than anybody else's.

And so to know that you went through it too.

And here's what helped you.

And it also took time.

And it sucked. And all of those things.

And then I know that it will get better even if you can't see it right now.

To let them know that peace.

I know it will get better for you even if you can't see it right now.

So those are the two things that went well.

The third thing though, is to be able to sit in the grief with them.

To say, tell me about how things are different for you.

Tell me what you miss.

Tell me. And people think, oh, that's just going to stir up all the stuff.

They're just going to ruminate.

This isn't helpful.

You need to give them a place where they can feel understood.

And you can say one strategy that might be helpful is you can give yourself 30 minutes a day to go through all the things you miss.

Everything that sucks.

How horrible it is.

You get that 30 minutes.

So that the rest of the day they're not ruminating because every time they catch themselves thinking about it, they say, wait a minute.

At six o 'clock I get to do this nonstop for 30 minutes.

And so you can hold it.

You rewire your nervous system neurologically.

This actually happens.

Where that pathway gets interrupted.

If we can put a stop sign up between the feeling and the behavior, which is the rumination.

I feel sad. Oh, now I'm going to ruminate on this.

We put a stop sign up and say, I get to go there later.

Then later when we start having more of these feelings, we have a stop sign that we're used to now.

Now we're wired that way.

So we put more time between the thought and the rumination.

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On the point of heartbreak, at the deepest human level, is it about, you know, you talked about the bigger picture, the loss of the future, etc., in the past.

Is the fundamental reason we have heartbreak as a device built inside of us?

Because we are creatures that need connection.

And it's a mechanism to make us stay connected and avoid becoming disconnected.

You literally could not survive in early societies without being part of the group.

You had to belong. If you did not belong, you couldn't survive.

You wouldn't get food, you wouldn't get shelter, you wouldn't survive.

So belonging is just hardwired in us.

It's something that keeps us alive.

And we actually do need it to stay alive, even now.

And what I mean by that is you take, for example, when they did these studies and they looked at babies who were in orphanages and they thought all they need is they need food, they need to be fed, they need to be nourished, they need to have their diaper changed, they need those things.

These babies didn't develop and many of them died.

It's called failure to thrive because they weren't held.

They weren't held. They needed love.

They literally died from lack of love.

They couldn't survive no matter how much they just stopped eating.

They failure to thrive.

They wouldn't meet their developmental milestones.

This happens. This happens in really traumatic childhoods even.

So you actually cannot live without love.

You need some kind of love.

It doesn't have to be romantic love, but you need love.

So we need that. So our main goal in life is to love and be loved.

We may think it's about success and it's about appearance and all the things that we see on social media.

We may think that's what life is about and everything that our culture sells us.

But ultimately what we need is we need love.

We need to love and we need to be loved.

And so when that gets cut off, we forget that we have other people who love us.

We forget everything else.

Everything just feels extremely black or white.

It's like, I was loved and then I wasn't loved.

And that's how it's going to feel for a year.

So much of your work is centered on connection and the fundamental level.

And we're living in a world that feels like it's getting more and more disconnected than ever before.

If you go back a couple of decades, young people used to see their friends once a week or twice a week, about 80 % of people did.

Now it's getting down to about 30, 40%, which is really, really crazy.

I did a talk on stage the other day and there was 500, 600 people in the audience and the kid sat to my bottom left here, raised his hand.

And his question in front of 600 people was essentially, I'm lonely and how do I make friends?

He sat in a room with 700 people that are his exact age.

And he's asking me, in front of all of them, which I respect.

He's asking me the question, how do I make friends?

A lot of people ask that.

A lot of men come up to me and whisper it to me.

It talks. They'll say it to me because we film a lot.

They'll come up really close to me and basically express that.

They'll say it in my DMs.

How do I make friends?

Yeah. I get that all the time to the podcast, to the column.

That is one of the most frequent questions is I'm lonely.

How do I make connections?

How do I make friends?

From younger people, especially, but older people too.

And I think that it's really frightening because when I watch my son, who's 18, people think, look going back to your graph, that they are, quote, seeing their friends because they're sending pictures of themselves back and forth on Snapchat to their friends.

And they think that that's socializing.

But it's so different.

We learned this during COVID that there's such a difference between being in a room with someone and being mediated by a screen.

But they're not even having conversations like you would if you were with your friend.

Things happen. You have shared experiences.

You're doing things together.

Conversation just more naturally flows.

They're literally, they're sending texts to each other that are just emojis or a picture of this.

They're not really learning.

So it's not just how do I meet friends, but it's how do I be in friendship with someone?

And it's hard because a lot of people aren't interested in doing that.

Like if you said at that age, let's hang out, sometimes people will.

But really more people are just on their phones 24 seven and they think they're super social, but they're not.

It's like the difference between vulnerability online and true vulnerability.

So a lot of people, in fact, I was just on Instagram and I saw somebody saying, I'm going to be so vulnerable.

I see this all the time.

I'm going to be so vulnerable with all of you and share this thing.

And all their followers say, you know, that was so brave and lots of heart emojis and all of that.

That's not vulnerability to put that out on a public platform.

True vulnerability is what this kid was asking you, which is when you are face to face with someone, if you're with your partner or a close friend or a family member and you want to share something you need in the relationship or something that you feel shame about or something that is scary for you

to take the mask off and, and share with somebody.

That's true vulnerability because the stakes are high.

What is this person going to think of me?

Again, going back to I need to be loved.

We all need to be loved.

What is this person going to think of me?

How will they love me if they know the truth of who I am?

This thing that I'm about to share.

Very different from sharing it on Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

So I think that it's really important that we as adults look at how much FaceTime do we have FaceTime in person time?

Do we have with people?

Are we really prioritizing that and are we modeling that for the next generation?

What would you have said to him?

Because what I ended up saying to him, because it really took me off guard, no one had asked me that, obviously in front of a huge group of people, I said to him, what you've just done, do more of that.

And what I meant by that is he had been so vulnerable and open.

And I've come to learn that vulnerability in and of itself is a magnet, not a repellent that we think it is.

So I said, do more of that, but I thought maybe that's not the best possible answer I could have given him.

I love that answer.

That's a great answer.

I also might have said, I want everybody in this room to turn to the person on your right and introduce yourself to them and ask them about one thing that they want you to know about them, because that's how you're going to start making friends.

We didn't do that anymore.

Yeah, but we can, you see, they're simple things.

It's not like people say, it feels so overwhelming.

How do I make friends?

And they think they're going to have to learn all these tactics and techniques when really it's just about be curious, ask someone about themselves and the people who are receptive to that, they might become your friends.

People who aren't, I'm not really interested in that.

It doesn't really matter.

Laurie, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

Oh, this is a fantastic question.

If you had 60 days left on earth, what would be the first and last thing that you'd do?

Hug my son. No question.

It's simple for me.

There are so many things that I would like to do, but I think that if you read, maybe you should talk to someone, you'll see that what I did was I made sure that I'm already doing things that I want to do now instead of putting them off for later.

So there's nothing that I would be doing in these 60 days that would be drastically different from what I'm doing now.

And I think that that's where I'm trying to get people in therapy, is to live the life that you want to be living now so that you don't, when you get these questions about, if you only had 60 days left, you're not like, I would do things entirely differently.

Why? What are you waiting for?

We shouldn't have to wait.

Laurie, thank you so much.

Thank you for writing the book.

There's this quote on the front of the book, which I think perfectly encapsulates how many people will feel if they get this book, which is rarely has a book challenged me to see myself in an entirely new light and was at the same time, laugh out loud, funny and utterly absorbing.

It's a quote by Katie Couric on the front of the book.

And the remarkable thing about all of your work is that it's both so incredibly accessible, but it's so clearly built on real world experiences that I think so many people can relate to.

And you really tend to focus on the fundamentals of a problem, not the things that just appear on the surface.

And an ability to get to the fundamental of the problem, I think is a really magical thing to be able to do.

And I just wish there was, you know, I wish you could be everyone's therapist, but I think the book can be if you can't be because you only have a certain amount of time in a day.

It's really, really remarkable, the mission that you run and how many people you're serving by your column, by your podcast, by the books that you've written and everything that you continue to do.

Thank you so much. My pleasure.

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[Redefining Relationships and Modern Dating Expectations with Lori Gottlieb]-[The Relationship Therapist: "This Statistically Is The Best Age To Get Married So You Don't Get A Divorce!", "Men Should Not Split The Bill", "80% Of Women Want Men Over 6ft When Only 15% Are 6ft!"]

📋 Summary

Navigating Modern Relationships: Expectations, Realities, and Self-Discovery

The Trap of Impossible Expectations

The Role of Vulnerability and Emotional Maturity

Challenging the "Maximizer" Mindset

The Path to Self-Worth

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Redefining Relationships and Modern Dating Expectations with Lori Gottlieb]-[The Relationship Therapist: "This Statistically Is The Best Age To Get Married So You Don't Get A Divorce!", "Men Should Not Split The Bill", "80% Of Women Want Men Over 6ft When Only 15% Are 6ft!"]

📋 Summary

Navigating Modern Relationships: Expectations, Realities, and Self-Discovery

The Trap of Impossible Expectations

The Role of Vulnerability and Emotional Maturity

Challenging the "Maximizer" Mindset

The Path to Self-Worth

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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