 Thanks for coming tonight. Welcome to Bear Palm's book for the book launch of Love Between Equals, Relationship at Spiritual Path by Dr. Polly Young Eisendraff. Yay, she is joined tonight by her partner, Dr. Robert Caper. Love Between Equals, I'm gonna hold it up, but general, it's a pretty book. It's a book like no other. A book that connects the dots between psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and the spiritual, cultural, and personal realms. It is filled with gems of knowledge about how to love in the 21st century, biology, attachment bonds, and personal love, and practicing mindful witness. I hope you all all enjoy tonight's program and also by a copy of the book. And I hope it helps you deepen your own practice of mindful witness within your relationships. Copies are available at the front counter and Polly will be here to sign your book after the talk. Our program tonight will be about an hour with Polly talking and reading from the book, then a facilitated interview with Dr. Caper, and then time for Q&A from the audience. A few housekeeping items. The bathroom is located at the back of the store to the right of the back door. The front door is locked just to keep people from intruding on the reading this way. If you need to exit, the back door is locked. The front door will be open right after the talk. And if you haven't already, please mute or turn off your cell phones. I'd like to let you know about some upcoming bear pond book events. On Tuesday, January 29th, we'll host Vermont College of Fine Arts President, Tom Green, to launch his new novel, The Perfect Liar. This book just came out today and it's a thriller. It's quoted as an utterly absorbing chiller. You can learn more about our events on our website, bearpondbooks.com, on Facebook or Twitter. Or by signing up for our newsletter, we do have a clipboard being passed around. Thank you. A little about our guests tonight. Robert Caper, MD, is a psychoanalyst and author of three books, Immaterial Facts, A Mind of One's Own and Building Out Into the Dark, and numerous papers on psychoanalysis. He maintains a private practice in Vermont and supervises widely. He is a former member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He has lectured and taught in the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. We're happy he's here in Vermont tonight. I don't know if he is, but it's cold here. Dr. Polly Young Isindrath, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and psychotherapist in private practice. She is the clinical supervisor at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont in Burlington. She is the chairperson of Enlightening Conversations and Conferences, which bring together participants from the front lines of the interface between Buddhism and psychotherapy. She is the author of numerous books, including The Self-Esteem Trap, Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance. Please help me welcome Dr. Polly Young Isindrath. Okay, so can you hear me well? Nope. So first of all, thank you so much for being here. It's the very first night of talking about the book and it's lovely to see so many people. And I hope that you get something out of this. The thing that I'm going to talk about tonight, especially, is love in a couple relationship. But everything I say applies to love between equals in any setting where people want to be seen as reciprocal and mutual in their relationship. So think of adult children and parents and friends, co-workers, or friends who are close over time. And the thing about equality, once you introduce ideals of equality into a relationship, you also introduce the ideals of unfairness and inequality. And so we've introduced these ideals into our relationships and our families and our parent-child relationships. And we have very few skills for working these ideals out in reality. So tonight I'll be talking about that and I will talk also a little bit about the arc of couple relationship that starts with falling in love and goes then into disillusionment of power struggles, the making of an enemy, and then whether it goes further or not is up to the individuals. Often that's where it stops. In the past it used to be a Cold War. It ended with people dying. And now people get out of relationships once they feel that that sense of intimacy is deadened. And so I'll be talking about that, but again everything I say and when we get to the question and answer period, feel free to ask about relationships between adult children and parents or between friends or other kinds of equals. Does that make sense to you? So, but there is something very specific about an intimate couple relationship is which is that people have sex. So that makes things even more complicated or at least they think they're going to have sex when they get into it, whether or not they actually do over time is another issue. So again we'll be talking about those kinds of things. So I'm gonna read a little bit of a book about the history of marriage, but I wanna say a few things first just to sort of give a framework for the whole presentation. First of all, from Leonard Cohen, I would say that love is a cold and broken hallelujah. So it's a hallelujah, but it is not a lot of fun. And if you don't know that, you need to get to know that because otherwise you'll think it's your fault that you're doing something wrong, that your particular brand of loving has something wrong with it. But in fact, the whole path of love is very, very challenging. It's not a picnic in the grass. And it's very interesting that people feel like it should be something else, that it should be fun or it should always be sort of energized or interesting. Where in fact, if you look at any love relationship that lasts over time, you see that it actually is a difficult path to follow. And one of the most difficult things is to stay interested in the other person. We're almost always interested in ourselves. And we do try to protect ourselves. And we have a lot of internal talk to ourselves about how we should be treated. But we very often lose interest in the other person, especially if we feel that the other person has actually hurt us or harmed us or treated us really unfairly. So the path of love is a path that will break your heart in the long run. You generally are not gonna die at the same time that the other person will die. So you're gonna lose, or you're going to leave behind, or you're going to separate, or you're going to something or other that brings about the broken heart. So I think a lot of reasons, a lot of the reason why people are hesitant to actually get into the business of love is that inherently they know that it will break their hearts. And so I hope this is obvious to you so far what I'm saying. I mean, if anybody's had a different experience than they'll let me know because I have never run across one. So love is not a picnic on the grass and nobody succeeds in it absolutely well. And that is a good way to think about your own relationships because then you don't feel so ashamed or afraid or blaming of what is happening with you. So I wanna say a few words then about love in the 21st century. And then this is a PowerPoint presentation that I do in various kinds of environments. But I picked out a few slides that I thought would summarize what I'll be talking about tonight. You can take that with you and think about it some more and hopefully buy the book as well because it certainly fills out the information. But right now in the 21st century, we've actually come to a point where we've gotten some of our wishes about love. Now this whole sort of transition of marriage from being a relationship that is essentially a corporate relationship in which the two people stay together for the corporation, which is going to exist over generations and wealth is going to be inherited or land is going to be inherited or children are gonna be taken care of and propagated and so on. So the early commitment to marriage was very much an impersonal commitment. It was a commitment that was generally arranged often in important families. It was arranged at the time somebody was born. Even now over the majority of the world, marriages are arranged and so they're not haphazard. They're not about falling in love. So marriages were arranged. The commitment was until death do us part. That is not like as long as this suits me or as long as I feel good. That was an impersonal vow and it was usually made in a church or a synagogue or some other place and given some sort of legal stamp and that was that. It was more or less this is where you are for the rest of your life. Now around the 18th century people started getting, they got upset about this. There's a lot about the history of marriage that's very interesting but one of the I think very important things to know is that love was never intended to be part of marriage. Marriage was business, love was love and so if you were among the wealthiest you would get your love needs and that outside of marriage through relationships that fell outside of those formal arrangements and the formal arrangements were themselves kind of overwhelming because there were a lot of children to take care of or business to take care of or property to manage and so on. There was not a lot of time for dallying around and just having a good time. So love was for propagating, I mean, sorry, marriage was for propagating and love was for relationship. So right around the 18th century the ideals coming from poetry and art and so on of having something like a soulmate or a partner who would be a very special partner, those ideals started to get into the popular imagination and people began to think about the possibility of falling in love, of finding a soulmate and marrying that soulmate and now that idea kind of developed in its own way until about mid 20th century still with people getting married in churches and in general with the vows being impersonal until death did us part. And then around mid 20th century people started saying basically I should be able to choose anybody I want, doesn't have to be in my religion, my tribe, my race, this person doesn't have to be anybody that my parents approve of. So our first wish was to marry anybody we wanted to no matter the gender, no matter their race, no matter their background, we got that wish. And then our second wish was to be able to develop this intimacy. Now this wish about equality, mutuality and reciprocity really doesn't come into being fully until about the 21st century but we had this wish that we should be equals and that there should be gender equality in marriage. Nobody should be in charge. And previously there was hierarchy in marriage and that hierarchy was stable. It might include abuse and oppression and addiction and so on but it was stable over time and now people wanted the equality reciprocity, mutuality kind of formula or ideal in place of the stability of hierarchy. So we got that wish. Now we're in relationships where pretty much everything has to be negotiated constantly around the clock and people very often get their feelings hurt easily because of that fairness element. It doesn't seem to be carrying through. And the third wish and this one is a little harder to often to convey in a nutshell is this wish to be seen and known to have a witness and what that means is that you are with somebody who provides a mirror for you and in that mirror you see a reflection of yourself and you want it to be accurate. You want that person to remember who you are, what you like, where you're going. You want the person to feel your feelings. You want the person to hear your words and you want the person to see you from who you are. You probably all recognize this. You want to be witnessed accurately and empathically by this equal other that you have chosen personally through an idealizing projection which is almost like a psychotic delusion. So if you're falling in love you idealize this other person who's gonna be perfect for you and then you get to be with that person now as an equal and you want that person to be a mirror. Now you put these three things together and this is an impossible situation. It's just an impossible situation and that's about where we are right now. So in my career as a couples therapist and a psychoanalyst I have never seen so much suffering in couples as I see now and I see that in both individual therapy and couples therapy and what I see is that it's very difficult for people to be in an intimate relationship over time and continue to be interested and trusting each other and the typical couple, the suffering couple that presents in therapy is a couple where when you hear them in the opening gambit you think somebody had an affair. I just saw a young couple a couple weeks ago and they talked about just not being able to trust each other and they were living separately. They had two young children but they were living separately and so as soon as I began to interview one of the partners I said, you know, so has there been an affair? Oh no, no, no, no. Has anybody lied to anybody? Has there been a financial deception? No, no, no. But well, so what is the trust issue? Well, I just can't talk to this person any longer. I can't talk to him because I don't trust that he can understand me. Everything I say we get into these repetitive conflicts. We can't solve the simplest issue together because every time we get into an issue where we have to make a decision together like how much money should we spend on the vacation? What color should we paint the kitchen? Anything we get into always comes back to the same conflict and the conflict is about our relationship and whether, you know, from the one person's side whether, you know, he knows this or that about me, whether he sees this or that and then there's always a list of evidence, you know, like he didn't do this or that, he said he would do this and he didn't do it in. And then when you talk to the other person, that person says, no, no, that's not true. That's not true at all. No, that isn't even, I didn't even show up there on that date. It wasn't like that at all. So each person has a version of what goes on and those versions are often pretty separate and pretty different. And they both believe that there is some truth. There's some objective truth about what happened between them and they collect the evidence that they have the truth on the other person. So what happens in today's presenting couples is more almost like the judge and the jury have already made the decision. A lot of evidence has been collected and in fact there's a feeling of not trusting and the sense that one is with an enemy now and that the field of engagement has switched from what was originally the falling in love to the sense of now I have to protect myself. And so very often all of the trappings of intimacy have fallen away. And so sex is infrequent, really, really great looking young people having sex maybe once every other month. People who have been together for years and have plenty of time now to have sex once a year. They have sex. You kind of think like, why did you go to all this trouble to live with this other person which is inherently difficult and you never have sex? What's the point? We used to believe that one thing that was an advantage in being married is that you could have sex at home and that just doesn't seem to be the case anymore. So we've gotten all of our wishes and we've ended up with something that is very, very difficult to negotiate. And so I'm gonna say a word about that in a minute but I wanna read a little bit from the book and then just talk about the art of love and marriage in the 21st century. And then Robert and I will talk. So the contemporary practice of freely choosing someone to be your life partner has spurred a quiet revolution. From the time marriage became a legal institution in 12th century Europe until about 50 years ago, our social and religious practices required marital partners to be committed not to a personal relationship but to a contract and an institution. Marriage was for procreating and raising children and for protecting wealth and other resources in a family over generations. Arranged marriages were the norm until the 18th century and still are the norm in many societies that embrace hierarchy in the home. When marriage was essentially a business arrangement and male ownership marked by the man's family name being passed down over the generations was part of the larger cultural marketplace. Marriage was not about pleasure per se nor did it have the connotations of personal development with which it is now viewed. In the traditional patriarchal model of marriage there is a hierarchy of power. Someone makes the decisions and someone else follows orders. Depending on the society it may be that the man makes the decisions inside and outside the home or that the man makes the decisions outside the home while the woman makes them inside. Partners are not encouraged sometimes not even allowed this is really still true in China to make decisions jointly nor are they encouraged to be too interested in each other. Why is this? If they're wrapped up with each other they might forget to protect the family resources and care for the young. Spouses are expected to have sexual relationships primarily for reproduction not as a means of developing personal intimacy or for mutual pleasure for its own sake. That is not to say that sexual pair bonding cannot produce pleasure, the feeling of connection or even intimacy under these circumstances but reciprocity and mutuality are not expected or even encouraged to develop. When political, social and economic realities are the cultural underpinnings of marriage empires can rise and fall in relation to these underpinnings. Think of King Henry VIII of England for example. Personal love and attraction between individuals is then a dangerous threat when it becomes the central part of marriage. Outside of marriage it is more tolerable. Romantic love and sexual liaisons have always been pursued outside the business of marriage by the wealthiest and the stealthiest. It was in the late 18th century when romantic ideals and possibilities for love began to enter the popular imagination in a new way in the West. Instead of pursuing romantic love outside marriage people began to long for romance inside marriage. The idea of personal choice of a partner based on attraction first began in poetry, philosophy and art and then starting around the end of the 19th century in the West people began to feel that choosing a partner was a personal right no matter their background or that of the beloved. That is falling in love became a reason or an impetus for people of different classes, religions, races, sexual orientations and backgrounds to marry and spend their lives together. However, this romantic ideal was at odds with and ill suited to the religious, social and legal underpinnings of an institution like marriage that had been designed to conserve resources and family identity over generations. Having your partner chosen for you by an elder such as a parent or grandparent meant you would marry a suitable partner from your own tribe that is the same religious or class background who had adequate social and financial capital. Falling in love with Cupid's arrow arbitrarily striking your heart makes no sense at all for traditional marriage. As the sociologist Stephanie Kuhn says in marriage a history how love conquered marriage. Quote, when the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage and companionship its basic goal was first raised observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people's satisfactions with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. Marrying for love has indeed made marriage more fragile. As a commitment or bond modern marriage seems weaker than ever before. More than 50% of first time marriages and about 65% of remarriages end in divorce on average. Marriage no longer even promises a stable environment for raising children. In the family life cycle couples break apart most often when they have children younger than school age or after children leave home. In the first instance there is greater pressure on the couple for cooperation decision making and sharing of tasks than before children arrive. And so I will just skip down here and say that in fact in many European countries now people don't bother to get married in order to have children because in fact they recognize that the pressure of having children actually makes marriage legally a difficult situation because you have more than a 50-50 chance of breaking up. So why not just avoid that whole legal situation just to have the children without getting married? So marriage has become that fragile an institution. So I wanted to set that up because what I'm gonna say then and what Robert and I are gonna talk about is marriage in the 21st century. What I want you to wake up to is this is a whole new number. This is not your parents' marriage. This isn't even my first marriage. This isn't even, I would say it's not even a marriage from say the 1980s. This is a whole new animal right now. And what is particularly difficult about it is what makes it also attractive. That is that it starts with falling in love. And so I'm gonna say a few things about falling in love and then Robert and I are gonna talk about what happens after that. So falling in love is when you have a kind of idealizing projection about what the other person's gonna bring you and how that person's gonna complete you or how that person is going to enhance you or bring something into your life that you did not previously have. That idealization sets up a kind of fanciful love in which the person is not at all seen as a complete and whole person but rather in terms of the viewfinder that you're putting on at all which is what is going to happen for you and what's gonna be brought to you. That will inevitably change into a disillusionment as soon as you start to get together as a couple, soon as you start making plans and you have to make decisions together. That disillusionment then can feel like a betrayal of your first feelings when you fell in love. And at that point, you have the possibility of entering into this thing that is in psychoanalysis called projective identification in a negative way. It's actually a mutually idealizing relationship is also a projective identification. It's just like a good one, the one that you want. But the negative project of identification is where you see the other person as in some way causing you some sort of difficulty that you're projecting often from a relationship in your early life that was wounding and you at the same time evoke from that person some of the things that you're projecting so those projections seem to be confirmed. You see your partner is being depressed and lo and behold you collect evidence that your partner really is depressed and then pretty soon your partner is angry and depressed because of all this evidence that's going on. And so the full cycle occurs when that's going both ways. Both people feel in some way or another that they're trapped with an enemy and that there is no way to actually solve the problems of the relationship because whatever kind of problem solving they get into they come around again to this cycle in which they see each other as being harmful. And it's that cycle of finding an intimate enemy confirming that enemy is really there that everybody will suffer from in today's relationships because you are looking for somebody who is going to be a personal love, who knows you personally. And so then when there is this harmful interaction it feels personal, it feels intentional. It doesn't feel like this person simply doesn't know who you are or has made a mistake but rather the person is hurting you personally. So getting into that dilemma is what then leads people to not trust each other. That causes a falling off in intimacy, often also in having a good sexual relationship in emotional satisfaction. If the people have children they'll tend to turn to their children, each individual for that emotional satisfaction. And many times in younger couples these days they're preoccupied with being great parents. They're not at all even really interested in being great partners. That's kind of dropped to their lowest priority. They want a career, their career needs to be good. They want children, they want to do that in the right way. But when it comes to the partner after they've gotten into this disillusionment and this kind of wounding that sense of the relationship being an important element really drops away. And so what we find in this period of time when we seem to have so much freedom is a sense that people feel that they're trapped in a situation where their self-esteem is wounded. And actually it is the case if you do research on people who aren't happy in today's marriages that they have health problems, they have self-esteem problems and so on. And so leaving the marriage looks like the better sort of result of a situation like that. And healing that situation is difficult without having certain kinds of skills. And those are the skills that the book actually tries to teach and show. And there are skills that have to do with being able to continue to be in contact with a partner even when you're emotionally triggered, even when you're in pain and being able to tolerate your own pain without blaming the other person for it. And then to stay open and curious in the midst of all of that so that gradually you come to know your partner as a whole self, a person who has strengths and weaknesses as you develop a sense of yourself as a whole self. And the two of you then begin to relate with what I've called a mindful space between you, that there isn't the merger of either that early idealization or that later enemy making in which you feel like you're trapped with somebody in that second one that you cannot really trust or talk to. So that's kind of a brief overview. The whole self to whole self, there's a lot to say about it but it truly is like a spiritual path in the sense that the other person becomes both familiar and mysterious simultaneously which is really interesting. And there's always something new to say because you don't know each other like the back of your hand because you recognize the other person is changing, is a mystery, is unknown to you fundamentally so you're always interested again. So that's a view of the arc of the relationship now. Robert and I are gonna talk about not our own relationship but these issues in relationships. So I'm gonna hand the microphone over to my partner. Thank you, hi. We're not gonna talk about our relationship and of course we may be demonstrating this. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna say first of all that I love this book and I'm not saying that just because I'm supposed to although I think probably I am supposed to but in addition to that, I love in particular certain things about it that I did is that I find intriguing. Holly, you didn't really elaborate this too much in your talk but this impasse you're talking about this disillusionment feeling of betrayal, feeling of being trapped with an intimate enemy, you really go into how that's actually a good thing in the sense that it provides an opportunity for development, I would say psychological development. You might say spiritual development but psychological development that you wouldn't have if it weren't for the disillusionment. And this is, this book is really about making silk purse out of a sow's ear. So having said that, I wanna talk about a couple of things that I found really intriguing about the book. I think you do a very good job of, and I'm gonna talk like a psychoanalyst now, I'm sorry but I've been doing it so long I can't help it anymore. You talk about idealization being like a psychotic delusion, which it is. Falling in love is, I think it's been recognized for a long time, a normal psychosis. It's crazy, to an outsider it doesn't make any sense at all but it happens and it's completely normal. What follows though this delusion, this illusion or delusion that people have about each other is disillusionment. And the disillusionment is what produces the feeling of being trapped with an enemy but it's also what produces the opportunity to transform the relationship into a mature, formal love. Not that not the crazy falling in love which is not bad. I'm not saying that's not what it is. It doesn't have great legs, it doesn't last very long. And leads to the disillusionment that can then lead to a more realistic perspective. One of the things that struck me just as you were talking Pauli is that you said equality is an ideal and I think it's an ideal that becomes a kind of crazy ideal when it merges into identity. That people should be equal in every possible way which is not possible unless you're identical. People are different and people have different talents and different needs and different vulnerabilities and they can't possibly be equal unless you're the same person. And what struck me, and I might get into trouble over saying this, is that it seems to me that one of the things that's happening in our society now is that gender equality, which is a great idea, is beginning to morph into almost gender irrelevance so that gender doesn't matter. You can be whatever you want. And which means everybody's identical. Everybody has the same potential to be anything. And that, it seems to me, transforms a good idea of gender equality into something like a crazy ideal. Well, let me just, can I say something about that paper? No, I actually agree with you about that but here's where I think, I mean I think what's interesting about where we are now with love and this ideal of equality and what you mentioned about the opportunity for developing emotional and spiritual and psychological maturity within a marriage. Number one, this was never possible before. So from about the beginning of the 20th century, people did fall in love as the means for getting into a marriage. But then when they got to the disillusioned part it was the war between the sexes. And in my parents' generation, my parents were not friends. They had fallen in love. But then when they fell into the sort of hatred thing, my mother saw us from her friends, her women friends and her sisters. And my father from the people he knew through the church and his workplace. And I think that was true for most families. So that couple, those two individuals did not become best friends. I mean you must have noticed this in your own lives. That instead of becoming best friends with each other, they were best friends with outsiders outside of the marriage. That took the steam off of the conflict. But it was a cold war inside of the home. Or from time to time that cold war might be resolved temporarily. But it wasn't as though these two people were developing together, looking for that mirroring of each other together. Now we're trying to do this and we're trying to do this in the atmosphere of equality. I don't know if it's possible. And I think if we take the equality too literally, it won't be. Because then we collect evidence on each other, we become judge and jury. We're terrible eyewitnesses. You should know that right off. When you're in an emotional moment, you really don't remember the details accurately. There's a lot of research on this. And so we should stop trying to be eyewitnesses in our relationships. Instead we should be interested in the other person's version of the event. So I have my version and you have your version. And not try to make that into a third perspective that is the objective thing that happened. So that's where the equality thing comes into relationship in this literal way that could kill it. That could actually kill the whole project of trying to be with an April partner. And similarly, like you say, in society, if we take equality too literally, it becomes nothing. It becomes just everybody's fight to be themselves in some way that's approved of. And that's really not what equality is about. I think the quality is about that everybody has a point of view and everybody has a starting point. Everybody has a point to start from. In a love relationship, it means that Robert and I have each our own view of something that happened or something that happened between us. And we may never agree about a point of view that fits all together. But if we're interested in each other, then we actually grow and develop through that interest. Yes. This is not a point of disagreement. There are plenty of those. The feeling of being trapped, I think, is part of this crazy equality in our relationship where there's a feeling that if you're falling in love, you feel like you're merging with somebody who's ideal and completes you and who's everything you've been looking for. It's what you've been missing your whole life. But there's a loss of individuality and all that. And when the tide turns, it becomes a feeling of being trapped, which is the other side of the loss of individuality. It's not like you're in a relationship with someone you may not like very much. You're stuck in this relationship in a way that is as unrealistic as being in love. You're not stuck, you know, if you're a survivor, an adult, if you want to go off on your own, you're personally capable of doing that. But the feeling of being trapped, to me, indicates that this merger relationship that started with falling in love is still persisting, only it's falling in hate, as Ansali has probably said. And those are both characteristics, this feeling of both of idealization and negative idealization, having an intimate enemy rather than an intimate friend, and the feeling of being merged with somebody are part of the same psychological constellation, which is present in all of us from very early in life, but maturation involves somehow moving beyond that into being able to have the kind of distance within an intimate relationship that permits witnessing, permits interest, and permits, so I can say, well, you know, you think this way without feeling like that threatens my identity because now I have to think that way. I can, if I have that mindset, I can't witness it because I have to maintain my own identity, so I can't lose that. In a sense, so you could say that there are advantages and disadvantages in being able to divorce as we can now pretty, nobody divorces easily, it's always painful, but we have the freedom to divorce, which gives us the freedom even just on a sort of basic fundamental level to recognize that we're not in prison. When women were financially dependent on their husbands, they were in prison, they couldn't leave. There wasn't a sense that they could survive if they got out. Now, generally speaking, couples are each one, each person able to survive individually, financially, and you get out of the marriage. And one thing that's true about being able to develop in marriage is that you have to feel free to leave. You cannot have a situation where you choose to stay because you can't leave. That's more like a prison. And a marriage or any love relationship over time should not feel like prison. It should feel like you could go if you wanted to, but you're staying because you want to. And that's one of the reasons why choosing love freely and being able to leave also endows the relationship with a sense that you really do care about the other person because you're freely staying, you're choosing to stay. And of course, very often when suffering couples come into therapy and I ask what are the benefits in the relationship, why do you stay? They say, you know, a person says, well, I'm staying because of the children, or I'm staying because we've already been together for 15 years. And of course, this is not actually an answer that the partner wants to hear. That's actually a humiliating answer. And so staying freely, being able to witness the partner and then opening up to the idea that those differences actually are inherent differences and they're not personal actually gives you the possibility of psychological and spiritual development within a relationship over time pretty much of the sort that you would have in psychotherapy, in a good psychotherapy. It's not psychotherapy in the sense that the other person is not there for your benefit, for your development, but it is like psychotherapy in the sense that there's some emotional distance while there is the connection. So I don't know if there's anything else you wanna say before we open for questions, but we're getting close to that time. Just one more thing. You mentioned psychological and spiritual development. They're distinct things. How are they, could you elaborate? You mentioned mystery. Yeah, right. Could you elaborate on the difference? Okay, I mean, the sort of short answer is that psychological development is something like the development of emotional maturity where you can actually tolerate your own thoughts and feelings and you don't have to do something about them like project them into somebody else, try to shape up that other person to be the way you want to be. So I would say it's something like emotional maturity. Whereas I find spiritual development is something like a bigger perspective on what it means to be human, that you're actually kind of involved with the sense that human life has certain kinds of constraints and possibilities in it, and that you are learning about those in your own life on this path. Whatever kind of spirituality you embrace. And I'm a long-term Buddhist and I weave Buddhism into the book a great deal. But it just happens to be one sort of frame of reference. But whatever spirituality you embrace, you will find that it's trying to teach you a bigger perspective on what life is about, both on the human level and also maybe on an ultimate level. And a relationship can do that when you recognize that there are deep constraints. There are things about the relationship that you have no control over. And one of those things is that your partner, whoever your partner is, the flaws, the limitations and the personality of that person are not under your control and should not be under your control. And so you have to learn to live with, for example, the example that I usually give is if one person is a smoker and the other person is not a smoker, you have to learn to live with passive smoke if you want to be with that person. You do not have the right to change the person. That's not under your control. To me, that's like a spiritual issue. It's a bigger issue. Like why should I put my health at risk to live with you because you want to smoke? To me, that's a very big question. That is not a small question. It's on the spiritual level. I hope that makes sense, does it? It does, this is a difference in perspective I would include both of those on your side, but I think those are two aspects of the same developmental psychological thing. I think we may be just talking about words here. Well, in the book, I think I do try to open up the big questions of love, death, and so on that come through a long-term relationship. And I believe they are spiritual questions at root, but you could call them also existential questions. So, I mean, this is where Robert is not a Buddhist. He does not follow a Buddhist path. And so it's really been interesting to, in the beginning, I was hoping that he might like that path, but didn't go that way. So that's been an interesting development. So is it okay right now that I wanna... So why don't we open to questions, and just feel free to ask anything. There's a lot more to say about this. I hope I've given an overview so that you can see what's different about love, marriage, and so on right now because of equality, mutuality, and reciprocity, and also because this mirroring thing, this witnessing thing that people want. That was not what our parents were doing. So, yeah. Hi, thank you so much. I'm thinking since this is such a new animal and there are no role models for it, and like the 50% divorce rate really scares me. Like do you talk, would you say you're optimistic about choosing one person as like a marriage, lifelong partner, not only being possible, but like preferable, that the idea is that choice is actually gonna bring more benefits than being alone. I feel like in today's society, we have so much freedom to choose. There's online dating, and in my mind there's always been that option of being alone and without those role models, and with that 50% divorce rate, why would we sign up, why would I sign up for this disillusionment process and all this hard work ahead of me? Right, I know. That's a very good question. I actually, when we did a talk on this in New York, several people in the room said they would never sign up for it, but the fact is, first of all, that human beings are social animals. We need to be with other people. What is one of the worst things that can happen to you in a prison? Solitary confinement. In solitary confinement, you still get to eat, you get to do other things, but you just don't see anybody. So we need this emotional mirroring where you can actually have it over time with a particular individual. You come to know not only a great deal about the other person, but you come to know a lot more about yourself. And over time, really, there is this kind of mystery that develops that's fascinating, that I mean, how can you be so familiar and so mysterious at the same time? And I think that, I don't think that there's ever been an opportunity for sort of ordinary folks to develop this kind of soulmate thing until now. I think it was the extraordinary opportunities of finding a soulmate in the past. That was what was in the poetry and the art and so on. But you had to find that. And as... There's a Polish poet named Zimorska Vaslowa. Zimorska. She has a poem called True Love. Check it out online. She basically says, you know, why does anybody believe in true love? It happens to so few people, you know, that millions of children are born without it. So this true love thing where you can actually find yourself by looking at someone else's eyes has been a rare opportunity. And I think now there's the possibility of that developing for ordinary people. But it is actually a path that you have to follow. And that path actually does have to move from the falling in love through the disillusionment into an intimacy that is based on a certain kind of emotional maturity. And I would say spiritual maturity as well. And I don't know that everybody who's called to this game can finish the game well. I really don't know, because it's a new game. And so if I had to bet on it, I would say in this period of time, I think that there'll be more people with that kind of relationship than there ever has been previously. But I don't know what the numbers might be. And I don't know if a 50% divorce rate is reasonable given all of the challenges. And the other thing that I don't know is that I don't know if we really can live with so little hierarchy in our homes. I mean, hierarchy does make people feel more comfortable. We're like dogs, you know? If you know what your place is, you feel more relaxed. And so the thing that can replace that in terms of an equal relationship is negotiated policies. Where there really is a policy for who cooks and who washes the dishes and what time things happen and so on. But they have to be negotiated. And then they have to be renegotiated. But you don't wanna go through every day negotiating every issue of difference between the two of you. It's just, it's tiring. So, you know, in terms of the big picture, I think this is a tremendous opportunity. I wouldn't be without it in my own life. And before I always felt like it was a matter of luck to find somebody that you really could love. Now I think it's much, much better than luck that you can actually learn how to do it. And in learning how to do it, I think it opens that doorway to this kind of witnessing that people have always, always longed for. So, you know, I think it's more than worth its weight and risk or whatever. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Maybe continuous with the exchange you two had is the notion that we seem to... Did you wanna answer it? I just wanna, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna... You can jump in on it too. Thank you. What is it about a 50% divorce rate that scares you? I mean, I wouldn't accept those odds in any other endeavor I were doing. Yeah, you've got a 50% success rate. But if you don't try, you've got a 0% success rate. But I have 100% success when I'm alone. The idea is to hit the ball over the net, but that's a good question, yeah. You know, and being alone really does guarantee, honestly, emotional immaturity over time. I hate to say that, you know. Not to scratch. And then, you know, in some very special situation, you actually remain kind of emotionally immature if you live alone for too long. I believe that. Anybody out there or something, no. Yeah, go ahead. You said you quickly injected the notion of... Just hold on for a second, just a second. Go ahead. You quickly injected the notion of, you need to hit the ball over the net, suggesting that, you know, the game, so to speak, requires some inner play. The analogy I was thinking of is that it seems, it feels like we've thrown out the sheet music and we're all confronted with improvising. That's good, that's right. And it's not just in the nature of interpersonal relationship, but, you know, it seems like there used to be this balance of mayors that had all these externalizing the shell to it that created role division and hierarchy and expectation and so on that were very well laid out. With those changes coming into the contemporary moment where much of that is just gone. As you said earlier, genders on the table too. Where is that, what is that? But the external pressures apart from those external divisions of what definitions of what mayors could be have increased so much. So, much of life is frankly very unreliable. And then into that stew, we still try to find this successful union and you know, whether it's marriage or just interpersonal relationship, you know, without that bond. Well that's why you need to get this book. The book has a chapter called The Three Seas and you have one of the slides on The Three Seas here, which is The Three Seas, they're still a part of a long-term relationship. Commitment, containment and constraint. And I think that in the book I talk about the fact that people really don't like constraints in this period of time. We think somehow it's better to live without constraints because we have these ideas about freedom that I think are really misplaced. And there are constraints of all sorts on our lives all the time. They, of course, aging is one. Another one is attachment and pair bonding. There's certain constraints that have to do with attachment and pair bonding, the way it works. And also, in a love relationship that's gonna become a true love relationship, there are certain things that really are not allowed. And one thing that I didn't go into at all would be the active and passive aggression with your partner. That is either attacking, fighting, that kind of thing, or withdrawing, withholding as a means of communicating with your partner. That will not work in this kind of relationship. You have to actually be able to speak about your own experience and to do that with respect for your partner in times of conflict. And so there are various kinds of constraints and rules to follow. They're just not the old rules. In a certain sense, the old form of marriage, it did have all the stability and trappings of a kind of a container which provided continuity and unity over time. But what happened within that container is that typically one half of the couple was pretty oppressed and that was the female half. And that person, that female person was really more like a slave in the environment without the means of living freely. And so what we've traded now for that kind of unifying form over time is this unreliability, and like you say, more like improvisation. But improvisation is also constrained. It's not as though improvisation is just an anything. They're rules. They're rules to it. So there's a setup within which you can make music but it's not that just any kind of noise is music. So I think that that's a very good analogy for today's long-term committed relationship of enduring love. I very much believe in enduring love. I think in fact it is the only show in town because a human life is a difficult thing. There are all sorts of things that make it hard. But enduring love actually gives you something that's like a poem about the difficulties. It makes the difficulties beautiful. It makes the difficulties transformative. And so enduring love means that you can do those things with the same person over time. And there is again that sense of familiarity which is comforting to us. In the book I talk about personal familiarity and impersonal familiarity and how they are different and how so many of us really do prefer. We prefer to chat with a neighbor to say hi to somebody rather than go into depth with somebody that we know well. And there are reasons why because of the actual emotional aspects of each of those kinds of engagements. So do we speak to your? Yes. Thank you for continuing the analogy. That's good. So I want to go to the place that it feels to me and like one of the most challenging places. So if you were a kid and a monkey as a child, your parents were accurate mirrors of you. And you felt really good because you felt like they really saw you. They understood you and they saw you accurately. Are you talking about which generation? Because I would say in our generation that was almost impossible. But maybe today's generations. And so very often that didn't happen. So many of us grew up with a longing to have an accurate mirroring of ourselves. And so we bring that longing into this relationship. We have this tremendous longing and we fall in love when we see this person blah, blah, I think that they're going to be able to see all the good in us and so forth. And then the time that it sounds really good, this accepting, I'm just interested and curious about your take on this situation or your perception of the situation. But when it's feeling like you're getting feedback from the other person that I feel that you are manipulative and controlling. And this and this and this, it can feel so awful in that moment and even scary. And like, no, no, no, no, that is not me. That does not feel like me. Maybe there's a little bit of truth in that, but mostly that does not feel like me. And I think that we have on our refrigerator this little list of good relationship, good communication skills from Monica McGoldrick. Don't placate, don't defend, don't shut down and let's see the other one. And so we try to do those things, but when somebody is giving you feedback like that and when you're in the cauldron and somebody's giving you negative feedback like that, it's so hard to know what to do. What do you do with that? How do you skillfully transform that somehow? So first of all, again, I can say, read the book. So the book is mostly about that issue and that's what we're calling projective identification or making an enemy. And so the way you described it, the feedback was actually an attack on you. It wasn't feedback to call somebody manipulative or disingenuous or I'm not even sure what that was. That's an attack. And so that actually is not communication. It's a way of discharging your feelings in a way that's destructive. And so that doesn't work. It's like, I mean, one of the things that I'm, I have a podcast called Enemies for More to Wisdom. And one of the things that I talk about in podcasts because it's in the public arena so much is that for some reason right now, in our public arena, we believe that humiliating somebody like the president of the United States is a good way to begin a conversation. And humiliation is the exposure of what we take to be somebody else's weaknesses. So we're exposing them in a public way. You're a manipulative person. Even if that is not in any way related to anything you've done or said, when the person says that in a way that it sort of seems to be exposing weaknesses, you can become enraged. There's a humiliation rage cycle. It just keeps going. So if you want to give any kind of feedback to your partner or to your adult child or to your friend, do not begin with humiliation, folks. It doesn't work. Don't begin with what you think of as the other person's faults. You always do this. You never do that. You have this in your character. That doesn't work. It will evoke from the other person a defensive rage. And so that isn't what I'm talking about is mirroring. The whole ability to see another person and be able to deal with the differences and the emotional triggers and so on depends on your own mindfulness. Depends on the way you're operating your own system. So you have to start to be good at getting to know yourself and getting to know what sorts of things trigger you. And then what kinds of words can you use to make an eye statement out of that? It's truly an eye statement that is not an accusation of the other person. We haven't gotten into the skills of dialogue, but a lot of the book is about the skills of dialogue. Yeah, I actually know all this. Right. But there's something about when you get into it sometimes with your partner, even though you may know Oh, of course. Yes. Oh, of course. It gets going, and then there's this terrible feeling and you feel like, oh, God, I just gotta get out of here. You know, or something like that. It's very important. Right. So I mean, you can know all of it, but still not be working with yourself. You know, because what happens is when we get agitated and we're in an emotional agitation, it is at that moment when we need the mindfulness skills. We can do the mindfulness skills every other place. Fine, easy, no problem. When we're in that agitation is when we really need them. And often in that moment, if we can bring them to that moment, there is a transformative moment right there, right there for us. And again, this is where going through this with a person over time, same person, with the constraints and with the whole framework, you start to learn about yourself and the other person in a way that you could not know otherwise. So it's, yes, dialogue skills, but dialogue skills when you're emotionally agitated with somebody that you care about tremendously. And that's really the key right there. That's why I call it a spiritual path because it tests you in a way that almost nothing else tests you. And you know, often I will bring in our adult children as in this conversation too, because when your adult child comes home as my son did and said, you know, I'm a conservative now and I voted for Trump, you know? I needed a lot of emotional skill. No, the rolling of the eyes would not work. I knew that already, you know? And I love this guy. I really love him. I know his heart. So I really had to work with all of my responses and say, tell me more. Tell me what was it? What is it? Tell me what the information is. Take me along your path. Let me see what it was. But I have learned so much and I cannot believe that I could have just cut myself off because I have a different opinion, you know? But we get very emotionally attached to our opinions and that can cut off our love in a moment, particularly the rolling of the eyes, you know? Because that's contempt and that gets communicated very quickly with even a slight gesture like that. Now, again, in relationships, you don't care so much about it's not so dangerous but in the ones that you care about, it's very dangerous. So this is, again, why I would call it a spiritual path. Are we up against a time when we do that? If you wanna do one more, we could or you could get the quick one, but there's been a long time. One more? Yeah. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on overcoming the intimate enemy kind of place of things and I imagine you get into it in the book but I'm wondering about any nuggets that you have. Well, it's really what the whole book is about and so it's hard to do it as a nugget. I mean, at the end here, I think I say, well, real dialogue creates a logical gap. Those are the rules of, and true love requires. And so I guess if I had one nugget, it would be that you need to really know what your emotional triggers are and that means on some level, you need to look into what it is that has wounded you most and where you have felt most either abandoned, rejected, or betrayed in the past and recognize that you will go there again in the moments when things are bad between you and your partner and in that moment, just as we were talking about right now, what you mostly don't wanna do is convey contempt or anything that's dismissive because in John Gottman's research on couples, on the four horses of the apocalypse or what signals the breakdown of the couple, contempt is the worst. So scorn, contempt, dismissiveness actually convey to the other person and it can be conveyed quickly just by the way your head goes back, rolling your eyes, sighing in a certain way. That right there can break the trust really quickly. So it's a matter of really being able to take a step back in yourself and remind yourself that your intention is to love this person. Your intention is to stay with this person and to go on knowing this person. So make that intention what you frame everything with and then say something. So that's just kind of like in a very sort of, that sounds easier than what it is but in nutshell that's what it is. Do you have anything else probably you wanna say about it? I think that's it.