 Dr. Brandon lives here in California in Lake Arrowhead and he is currently practicing psychology in his own private practice in Los Angeles. I am pleased to give you the man you've all been anxiously awaiting and looking forward to Dr. Nathaniel Brandon. Thank you. One would think that after so many years of lecturing on man-woman relationships and romantic love and having written three different books on the subject I would no longer be intimidated at the prospect of trying in a brief space of 40 minutes to say something interesting about the obstacles to success in man-woman relationships but nonetheless the very enormity of the subject in the context of the brevity of the time that we have together continues a little bit to psych me out because the choice of what one might say is so overwhelming that whatever I might choose to light on driving home I know I will be saying to my wife oh my god why didn't I talk about X Y and Z having given myself the satisfaction of feeling the remorse in advance of the talk I am now free to enjoy the balance of the program I don't know let me begin in an odd angle I don't know that I would have felt quite so passionately about the need to write so much on this subject and to think so much about this subject if I didn't grow up in a home with parents who generated an atmosphere that took unhappiness as this most natural way of life when you are both Russian and Jewish that somehow comes very naturally and although my Catholic clients assure me you don't have to be either for it to come naturally to you in any event I remember that as a boy growing up one of the things that struck me was it just about everybody in all the family not just of everybody relatives in all directions of whom there were large quantities was unhappy and so who's happy was a sentence that I heard rather a lot and it really struck me as wrong as insane it never made any sense to me that people should be as unhappy as they obviously were and for that matter are it never made any sense to me that most marriages should be as so frustrating and boring as they so generally seem to be at least to my teenage eyes confirmed by my 30 40 and 50 year old eyes and so for a very long time I found myself intensely interested in the problem of why it was that an enterprise that is so often begun with such good will and such passionately high hopes and such deeply felt yearnings toward another human being so much affection so much caring should so often collapse into so much pain and bitterness the failure rate of love as an enterprise far succeeds just about any other human endeavor that I can think of if you rapidly inside your mind make a mental list of everybody that you know personally who is best you can tell not that we ever know inside somebody else's life but as best you can tell is reasonably successful or has a good deal to be happy about relative to his or her career and then you make a second list of people who are married and about whom as far as you can tell they are pretty happy and successful as a married couple I feel very safe and saying that the first list will be longer than the second or more to the point the second will be shorter than the first so I don't think that I need to persuade any one of you that it's awfully hard to sustain happiness in romantic love one of the things that shocked me when I was on promotional tour traveling around the country for the psychology of romantic love in 1980 and got interviewed a lot by newspaper interviewers and by radio and television people a lot of whom I guess this is more about me than about them were surprisingly young I was about to say and I just realized that's a statement about me they're probably the same age they always were but I'm not I happen to be thinking of one time where I was sitting with a reporter from the one of the LA papers in a restaurant she was interviewing in the book and I was thinking gosh how young she is and she was 28 well there was a time 10 minutes ago when 28 was an older woman after all anyway the thing that that struck me in these interviews was the terrific amount of fear associated with the subject of romantic love in other words they kept saying well but like dr. Brandt like suppose it doesn't last you know I saw what happens to my parents marriage I saw how many like how many divorces look what's happening to the divorce rate and they they were kind of reassured I felt by the fact that here was a gray haired man talking with enthusiasm about romantic love but they were also a little bit in awe and I was struck by the amount of fear and while I would imagine that people have always approached love with fear it's hardly a phenomenon of the last decade or two I don't doubt that the escalating divorce rate the rapidity of every kind of change and the general dissolution of the culture in so many ways probably contributes to an overall sense of the instability and the unreliability of everything I think that many people when they marry they marry with the idea that in a world of change in a world of the unpredictable in a world of the untrustworthy I will have one rock to stand on one sanctuary of safety called my home it's pretty hard to have that kind of confidence getting married in 1984 if you're in any kind of contact with what's happening in the world and yet the requirements for success at love have not changed so far as I can see in any essential way since the beginning of love the pressures change the social context changes but there are some fundamentals that seem to persist and I want to talk briefly about what I think they are only a few because there are many and that's what makes this issue hard to touch upon briefly the two subjects that have preoccupied me through all of my professional life have been self-esteem and romantic love as my two chief interests as a psychologist and they're very intimately connected because they both have to do with love and some of you have read me say that the first love affair that we need to consummate successfully in this world is with ourselves because until we have done that it's awfully difficult to sustain successful love with another person but not just for the reason that you so often hear not just as you so often hear because if you don't love yourself it's hard to love another person that's true of course it's incomplete as a psychotherapist I'm much more struck by the other half namely the terrible and misfortunes and calamities that happen in relationships from people's fundamental doubt of their own love ability their anticipation of rejection their internal sense that no one who really gets to know them is going to go on loving them their sense that it can't last so that I can't think of any greater single downfall of love then a lack of an adequate self-esteem and self-confidence on the part of the participants needed to sustain it let's think about what we do when we are in a love relationship but we don't really feel lovable to begin with some of us immediately disparage the person who loves us because what is wrong with this person that their standards are so low or else they're so dense that they have fallen in love for somebody like me see if I know I am not lovable I have to somehow make reality fit my knowledge so I may start out perceiving you as unavailable or unattainable or not yet mine in which case I can desire you and think you're fantastic but if you fall in love with me it makes me very happy but it also makes me wrong about a fundamental issue of life and one of the interesting things about the human beings as a species is we'd much rather be right than happy this is one of our most extraordinary characteristics you know it's it's it was said about the Germans that if they came to a crossroad and one road sign said to heaven and the other said to lectures on heaven that the Germans would always go to the lectures well not wanting to support ethnic jokes I'll now tell you a species joke if humans come to a cross and a road and one side says to happiness but the other side says to to misery combined with a sense of rectitude they'll always opt for the second that's unfortunate anyway so what do I do if I don't put you down for loving me and people do that I want her only so long as I can't have her as soon as I gather she loses a steam in my eyes or he does you all know that problem but there's another pattern the problem of self-sabotage can take if there's a voice inside saying something is wrong this is not my story then I will find ways to make reality conform I will sabotage I will pick a quarrel get a rationally jealous becomes hypercritical become mysteriously remote or depressed because the truth of the matter is that if I don't feel it's fitting for me to be loved when I'm loved my anxiety goes up because I'm out of step with what I think reality is and that will make anybody scared if I'm playing Russian roulette with the facts of reality that's nerve-wracking and so I do something very natural when we're anxious we all do something very human we'd like to reduce our anxiety and if and if and if creating trouble between us will reduce my anxiety so be it none of this occurs happens consciously but I've seen any number of perfectly good relationships sabotaged because I'm afraid so fear of love fear that it won't last fear that you won't find me lovable causes me to behave in ways that turns my fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy see that you can't understand human beings if you don't understand the extent to which our lives are operated by the dynamic of self-fulfilling prophecies if I open a store and in my heart I feel nobody's gonna want the product I've got to offer I can't possibly make a profit in this line of work and you come in to buy from me and as you're walking toward me there's a voice inside saying nobody can want the products you've got to offer you can't possibly make money in this line of work do you have any doubt that that's going to affect the way I say hello sir or hello madam or the emotional atmosphere I create or the spirit I create or the likelihood that you'll buy or not buy from me I remember when I was a kid in Toronto one summer I did something I can no longer believe I did I spent the summer selling magazine subscriptions or rather I spent the summer not selling magazine subscriptions I wasn't especially talented for but I do remember one thing that the guy taught all us high school kids the classic air that much I got he said you never never when the lady opens the door say something like hello madam you wouldn't like to buy a subscription to the Saturday evening post would you of course it's very easy for you to say you're right son I wouldn't well translate that to you know you wouldn't like to kiss me would you you wouldn't like to go on a date with me would you you wouldn't like to marry me would you you're right on the other hand there are people whom we sometimes call charming are very appealing or very likable because they obviously enjoy themselves and they like themselves and they kind of project it's very natural that you'll like them and why wouldn't you like them they're a likable person and you almost find yourself smiling resistively and because the door is open the door is open by the fact that I don't mean that they're arrogant or boastful but they have become a natural non boastful feeling of their own value and the natural benevolent confidence that you're going to be able to see it and generally speaking you do I don't mean to always fall in love but the odds change now in the favor of such a person so of course this leads to the immediate problem well what can I do if suppose this is all true Nathaniel but what might I do practically and I find that quite marvelous things can be accomplished relatively simply if you really make up your mind once you come to understand that you have a disposition to behave in self-destructive ways there's an awful lot you can do by raising the level of your consciousness in a fairly mechanical way I'm not long on willpower perhaps because I don't have much so I don't like asking that of clients of mine you know to do things by great acts of will because I rarely do things by great acts of will but I do like to find it look for ways to make it as easy as possible for myself to do the things that I would like to do well so I will often encourage a client to make lists of my favorite five or ten strategies for sabotaging relationships like a client comes in and says oh I've just met this terrific man I've met this terrific one but I know my track record I'm gonna do it again so after you work through the dynamics we get into okay how were how word is a self-destructive impulse fine come from and you know you can get into the reason the history is interesting most of us experienced a lot of rejectionist children most of us often didn't feel all that loved by our parents maybe a brother was preferred a sister was preferred or dad was or dad's bottle was preferred whatever the case may be I mean we all are graduates of one kind of rejection other mother ran off with another man we were five years old and and we feel abandoned and we have a destiny that all women will abandon us or all men will abandon us we I mean that we all understand but and I don't say there's no value in understanding that but it doesn't yet tell us what to do in the present the value in understanding it is that it only helps us to understand that we're now operating out of old routines that don't really bear upon the present tense reality of our life unless we choose to allow them to bear on the present tense reality of our life so let's assume that a person has got a fairly decent level of understanding about why he or she is so predisposed to feel unlovable or to anticipate that rejection or to fear sustained intimacy but he or she says now what might I do well one of the things that I find most useful I like charts and by that I mean I like to know the list of what are your favorite self-sabotaging devices and the interesting thing is and if you don't have any start to make a list you get stuck I always ask your partner the partner will help you I want you to make a list of maybe five or ten or fifteen of the things you most typically do to obstruct you and your partner being happy together and generally speaking if they are married I asked them after you've done your best list show it to your spouse get his or her input so let's really may take two three weeks to get a really high-class list okay then we talk about for each of those items what the person imagines they might like to do instead and that kind of situation and we talk about that a little bit until I know that they've got some clear concept of alternatives because we don't give up doing something just because we know it's bad or self-destructive if we have no concept of what what we could do instead generally speaking if something doesn't work we do it again but with more frenzy I know the therapist do that so we don't abandon a behavior if we don't have any idea of what behavior we could substitute for it now comes the fun part the fun part is how to get change happening without agony and a lot of change can happen without agony and I am very partial to lists and by the way I've used this with a parent who wants to clean up his or her behavior with a child I'm just using the man-woman relationship because that's what I'm talking about today but the principal could apply to you on your job you with a child you with a friend okay I say now you make a list a picture of you will a chart on the left side you got each of these items and then you have the day broken up draw a nice chart Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday and you put this on the mirror where you shave or you make up and then I say now I don't want you to change or improve or clean up your act all I want you to do is to make a tick each day every time you execute one of these behaviors that you have labeled as self-destructive or self-sabotaging you're not asking me to change or improve doctor no absolutely not hey when people ask me to reform all I want you to do is make a tick of course what happens immediately if you can really get the person committed to do the exercise the self-destructive behavior begins to diminish because what you have done is really used a kind of a technique to interrupt automaticity once somewhere in my brain I know that before I go to bed I got to make my entries my doctor may not have told me be more conscious in the daytime but there is no other way to carry out his instruction or her instruction except to be more conscious in the daytime do you see and in that way through a fairly simple for mechanical device we actually maneuver ourselves into being far more conscious of what we are doing and if we do this over two or three weeks we notice something that when we forgo the self-destructive behavior in favor of behavior that self that is self-serving two delightful discoveries are made and the chief reason you need a therapist is like a therapist is like a coach my favorite metaphor for what a therapist is in my world is a coach if you can just have something to keep monitoring and watching over for a while two things happen after a few weeks typically a you find that you like what happens in your life more when you don't do these self-destructive behaviors and the second thing you find out is that you don't die and that is a very exciting piece of news because many people feel and this also pertains to self-esteem that they don't really feel entitled to be happy we may have got messages that you don't deserve to be happy or we may be raised in a religious home where it's a sin to be happy or if you're enjoying yourself you can be sure you're on in trouble kid anybody who's having a good time is for sure sinning now my clients tell me that for example nuns are really good at teaching this but I think others beside nuns are very good at teaching this all right so if I feel that I'm not worthy of happiness or I'm not deserving to be happy or mother would be so hurt and abandoned that she would feel that I'd be more happy in my marriage than she wasn't hers that's a real problem for a lot of daughters how would mother feel if she saw me making more of a success than I made of hers mother would be hurt mother would appreciate me however it happens we're not concerned with the ultimate causes at the moment all that I care about for the moment is there's a voice inside saying it's not appropriate for me to be happy but consciously I want to be happy but when somebody comes to me and they tells me I'm unhappy you one of the very first things I want to know is deep inside is it okay for you to be happy and you'd be very surprised perhaps to know how many people feel it is not okay I want it they're not lying I want it but there's a voice saying it's not okay there is a lack of internal permission so what's the good of teaching you better ways to communicate important though that is or 14 new sexual positions interesting and enlightening though that may be what's the way of teaching new ways to be happy if we don't at some point deal with a voice saying it's not appropriate or okay for you to be happy happiness is not your destiny now you may find that hard to believe or not I don't know but since I cannot talk about everything in the world that I would like to say on this subject I want to tell you that I personally believe that if most people if so many people rather did not regard unhappiness as so normal they would fight harder to make their relationships work they wouldn't allow months and months of silence and frustration and they wouldn't lay down and live with misery and frustration if unhappiness didn't feel so damned normal so damned familiar so damned comfortable I observe a lot of heads nodding I guess I feel understood I think that one of the biggest things that separates people psychologically is whether or not unhappiness predominantly feels to you normal or abnormal for example typically if most of us and I guess all of us wake up in the morning with the cold or the flu or we're otherwise feeling ill if it's illness we regard that as an exception we don't say I've got a headache I'm sneezing my nose is running my joints are aching so who's healthy we say gee I think I've got the flu we regarded as a temporary condition we figure out what we can do and we expected in a few days will feel better because most are all of us in this room regard healthiness as normal and unhappiness as an aberration not a crime but an exception to the normal run of things and some estate to be dealt with and gotten over it's not a crime to have a cold or to have the flu or to break an arm but if you are out skiing and you break your arm nobody says so who's got a comfortable arm that could move but now your partner has shown no interest in sex with you for the past year your partner's soul communication is to inquire what is for dinner and you say every marriage has its problems can I be certain my next mate would treat me any better see there are two funny things about people I don't know which is more unfortunate one they give up too soon and the other is they hang on too long on the one hand there are people who in a relationship when there are difficulties I'm supposed to have fun but can't have fun who wants to be here they have no concept of working on a relationship of trying to communicate and get to the root of what's wrong and see how we might fix it that's one error is not having like a child's notion that if it doesn't happen spontaneously and automatically forget it now that's the view that's given romantic love a bad name because that view is sometimes identified with romantic love and of course that's to me is nonsense that's why I wrote romantic levels for grown-ups it's not for children that's truly a child's notion of love nothing in this world just happens nothing including love we all know about our work that you don't just say well I love my work what else is here to say now I'll let the prophets roll in also have to show up at the office don't I and about work don't I know that no matter how much I love my work there are days when I don't have to wake up I don't want to go to bed I don't want to go to the office I don't say typically I'm gonna quit psychology or I'm gonna quit law I'm gonna quit business I say I'm not in the mood to work today for some reason but people go into a panic when they have the same range of totally normal relationships about a lover or a spouse the assumption that there is you get into one fixed ideal groove and if you ever leave it it's calamity in other words there's no psychological realism of the natural up and down in the emotional pattern of our life in love just as there isn't work you could be insane about your work you can love the work and there can be days when you don't want to go to your office you can be insane about your partner there can be days when you really want to be alone doesn't mean you don't love your partner but a lot of people don't understand that so they interpret any kind of trouble as calamity and they respond with tragedy or with flight but the other error both errors by the way sound opposite but they have one thing in common the bottom line is the same it's spelled misery spelled frustration the other error is no sense that a lifetime of pain is not normal the loss of all recognition of the fact that pain always signals trouble now the trouble doesn't have to be lethal it doesn't have to be the end of the universe but they have no sense that pain means something needs to be dealt with a lot of people have and especially intellectually inclined people and especially men I think men more than women though I'm not snow I take that back not men more than women people a lot of men have a lot of people have a very that was definitely a slip because I just recently saw this dramatically manifested in a man but I can immediately think of it equally equal examples from women but the last one that hit my consciousness was male and it's influence me anyway a lot of men have a very funny notion of strength I am strong I can endure anything I can endure a wife that's that ridicules me I can endure a partner that doesn't treat me with respect I can endure going without sex but once in four years I've just about the strongest most manly character you've ever met so I say sometimes we measure strength by what we can endure and sometimes we measure strength by what we refuse to endure because if we only measure strength by what we can endure are we kidding ourselves you know we have done we have glamorized a trait for which the proper name is passivity see passivity you want to dress it up and glamorize it you call it endurance endurance do you want endurance is a great virtue when you have to do something and you have no choice and it hurts but it's necessary then virtue has served then endurance has survival value endurance when it has no survival value is anti survival because it means you are continuing to put up with something that is bad for you but observe that whether you keep changing partners every 10 minutes because you don't know how to work on a relationship and don't care to learn or you put up with an impossible relationship for 50 years because you're so heroically strong the bottom line is you never find out what happiness and love would mean for more than 10 minutes now I suppose that one of the most important things that people don't understand about love is how much consciousness love requires we understand it about work the world is full of people who they walk into their office you know office is an almost a kind of a soul you walk into an office and have you ever had this experience I know I could walk in my office maybe there'd be three four or five people there I can't even fully explain how you do but I know the mood in the office within two minutes if a machine is not working right somewhere inside I know something is wrong you sense with you with your business very often the most exquisite kind of awareness your accountant tells you something when you're running down the hall wait a minute ten minutes later something's clicking your brain those figures don't sound right you go back and you say hey George check that again did you forget about X oh gee I'm sorry mr. Jones I forgot how did you know because it's your business and you care about it and you cultivate a kind of super consciousness of what's going on now you could take let us say a business man who has this in his work and you say tell me something what was your wife's emotional move when you left the office this morning I don't know what were your kids talking about at breakfast when you're all together why ask me when was the last time you spent time alone talking to your wife are you ask a wife tell me something is your husband fully contented in his work I don't know what does he dream about what was the last time that table was dusted Thursday at 345 the hard thing about explaining this issue is because it sounds so very abstract living consciously I think that we approach the problem of romantic love all wrong if we start with the questions why do so many relationships fail I think they're interesting questions why do some succeed because if you consider how most of us were raised how most of us were brought up how few of us had decent role models in terms of our father and others how inadequately we were prepared or educated for love as adults it seems to me that the great miracle is that some people through their own independence of their own perseverance of their own creativity make it and I'm among those psychologists who believe that we can learn more by studying success than by studying failure and one of the things that devils and I tried to communicate in the book we wrote together the romantic love question and answer book some of the things that we and other psychologists have found out about what are the elements that make relationship successful rather than why do so many fail I think that's something worth meditating on I suddenly find myself thinking of two colleagues I know one of the West Coast one on the East Coast both psychologists both psychotherapists both married both who in different ways have from occasion to occasion given me I wouldn't say give me a bad time but been a little taken some pokes at me on my advocacy of the kind of romantic love that I write about that I advocate and what's interesting to me is in both cases these are guys with a incredible history of extramarital adventures with wives who are filled with undoubt with rage who assiduously avoid talking about the great issues of the relation of both cases which I know to my certain knowledge but who occasionally in letters or in person attempt to give me lectures on my failure to understand that what love is really about is a conjugal affection and not looking too critically at the other person's shortcomings a position which I can well understand their desire to to spread shall we say I don't mean that nobody should talk about these subjects who is not perfectly realized but because all of us have faults all of us make mistakes all of us at times don't act from our best knowledge I know I don't but I think that we have to have had some experience of high-level happiness over some period of time to be able to talk intelligently about what this particular situation requires now I want to do a small exercise before concluding if you'd be willing to you can do it from where you are because it just illuminates one other aspect of the situation and if you'd be willing you can do it in your seats it's pretty simple it's pretty easy it's a little fantasy that might illuminate one other problem that in my experience seems relevant to people's difficulties and would you be kind enough to sit with your feet flat on the floor and close your eyes and I only ask you to close your eyes so you can have a minimum of distractions and go inside and what I want you to do is to imagine something now you might not need to imagine it because for you it might be a reality so much the better if it is but whether it's a reality or something you're imagining I want you to go inside and imagine that you are really feeling very fulfilled in the area of romantic love that you're really feeling happily in love and very profoundly fulfilled in that area you're really feeling fulfilled as a man or as a woman whatever it was you really wanted to have in that realm you feel I've got it and take a moment to kind of enter into that state of imagining what that might be like now it doesn't matter in real life whether your parents are living or not for the purpose of this little fantasy is let's assume they're alive and what I want you to do is to see mother and father or it could be a step parent but whoever function is mother or father kind of standing by and they're witnessing your romantic happiness they are somehow seeing you in a state of incredible happiness and fulfillment in love and if you pay very careful attention to the looks and the expressions on their faces you'll probably notice they're feeling a lot of things not a simple emotional reaction but a compound or a complex emotional response I'd like you to just keeping your eyes closed for a reason that's important which I'll tell you in a minute try to notice what are the messages coming off of their face to you take a moment to put it into words and with your eyes tightly closed that's very important for this next step with your eyes tightly closed I want to ask you a question if you imagine that you are getting something that you would call a negative message from at least one parent would you raise your hand to the ceiling high up to the ceiling high high up high up touch the ceiling with your hand and now open your eyes and look around with your hand high up welcome to the human race now the second half of the exercise now we'll stop for the second half has to do with work but since I'm just talking about love will skip work I will just tell you I have done this exercise I can't tell you with how many thousands of people I've done it at university audiences I love to do this exercise is great favorite research for me with many many thousands of people I'll tell you something the whole exercise goes like this if I ask the group how many people think you're getting negative messages from at least one parent unfailingly roughly eighty five percent of the hands in the room go up if I say from both parents it's around sixty five percent now think about the implications of that does that mean that most of our parents told us when we were little I don't want you ever to be happily married of course not and yet somehow we have pictures of mother saying are you sure you have made a mistake or a mother or father looking hurt and betrayed and abandoned how could you do this to me or a father feeling jealous or a mother saying are you sure she's good enough for you or are you sure this person is really loves you or a look that says it won't last it won't last right now what I want to put in your mind is this idea parents don't act are the malevolence they're just have their own struggles they're just doing their own thing but they they create a certain kind of home life like my mother loved to tell me nobody will ever love you like your mother thank God I didn't believe her I'm happy to say I done much better since but suppose I had believed her suppose I had believed her don't trust any other woman as much as your mother or imagine a father saying with no evil intention you'll always be daddy's little girl and you see daddy looking so happy being married and having orgasms would mean I'm no longer daddy's little girl daddy made me feel better than anybody else in the whole world my whole sense of safety and security is tied up with daddy but now I've got a conflict see I'm grown up and I also got the message I'm expected to be a grown-up woman how do I be a grown-up woman and be forever daddy's little girl how could I do that well I could do that depending upon other variables I got a lot of choices of course one way is to remain so immature and so childlike that I literally never grew up in an obvious way and marry a stern authoritarian figure who will be a father substitute but who I will always compare unfavorably to daddy or there's another way of remaining faithful to daddy and that's called sleeping with everybody in sight that's a very special way of always being faithful to daddy because if I sleep with everybody I belong to nobody except you daddy and I'm always faithful to you in my fashion now did daddy really have it in his mind to create these kind of problems when he said you'll always be my little girl he was just trying to stop time probably this was one of the happiest days of his life he looked at her but you'll never be five years old again life is so great if only I could freeze this moment I wouldn't have to die you wouldn't have to grow up this moment is so wonderful there was nothing evil in his motive the point is not to blame anybody you understand me but but but consequences consequences consequences so I have been a long time fascinated by the fact that in just about every one of the heroic myths or legends in just about every culture that I know about Eastern Western Northern Southern every legend every great myth that deals in any culture with the hero's journey seems always to have one common element back as many common elements but you know what one common element is there's always the myth of the hero in every culture it always involves leaving home going out into the world and often or sometimes involves coming back and reconnecting with the family but in an entirely new different way with a new set of rules in a different context now it's a magnificent metaphor because what is the dilemma for many of us many of us feel unconsciously attention attention between on the one hand protecting our relationship with home with the first big matrix with family with security with mother and father and evolving into fully who we are which would include the possibility of an adult love relationship so that there is consciously or less unconsciously some feeling of a tension between really coming into my own as a man or a woman and really protecting that relationship with mother or father so that in the happiest of households we have to at a certain level say goodbye before we can say hello to our own positive potentialities as adult man or woman and it's interesting how wide spread is the intuitive understanding of the relationship between the thrust towards self actualization individuation and growth on the one hand and the need to separate from home and tip and perhaps most significantly from the mothering figure on the other hand as as the cost of fully realizing our human possibilities and it's interesting to think that when you're on a date or in a marriage you are engaged in a kind of heroic journey because that's not how you ever thought to think about it that is to become fully who you are and to reach your own best possibilities against that incredible gravitational pull which says the safety and protection and security of childhood and all you have to give up is the adults is happiness possible only to adults I must tell you in conclusion anybody who is happy over any period of time is admirable it never happens by accident anybody who is happily married over any period of time is awesome it never happens by accident if you see anybody who is happily married if you see a couple of it happily married for any period of time whatever I don't mean that don't they know everybody fights and everybody has fractions and every time everybody sometimes have his misunderstandings in you yell I'm talking about basic happiness basic commitment basic joy the other person anybody who has sustained that over a period of time has really learned and mastered something really profound about what life is all about it's got to be what one of the most extraordinary of all human attainments evidence by the failure rate if you weigh the number of people who try it against a number of people who succeed I said this will give me my last point but it has a full script I can't help myself I told you on this subject there's no such thing as drawing the line and saying that's it folks I got to say one more sentence our culture is not designed the values of our culture are not designed to support romantic love I'll give you an example of what I mean I'm walking down the street and I meet a friend and he says hi Nathaniel what you've been doing and I said what have I been doing I've been working 16 hours a day at my word processor I've just written three new books in the last 10 minutes you know and or whatever you know and boy that's great I can't believe you you're a regular productivity machine that's fabulous I don't know how you do it I kept terrific reinforcement you know but now I would say imagine what you've been doing Nathaniel the last three weeks having fun with my wife oh that's nice what do you say what do you say but a lot of us know that one is actually for some of us easier than the other through no fault of the white but through our own bad habits and and and maybe guilt when we're not working or whatever the case may be the culture is not geared to respect happiness in marriage it's it's geared to disrespect the failure of marriage you're not supposed to get divorced I mean strong in its negative position but it doesn't strongly support what an extraordinary attainment it is when people pour time and energy into making themselves in each other happy so I think that one of the things that people know who are able to be happily married for a significant period of time they know it's an achievement they know it's an attainment they know damn well they're doing something unusual nobody has to tell them it takes consciousness and perseverance they know that since I'm very eager to have some time for questions feedback and interactions I think I'll pause here and thank you very much for your attention yeah Linda choosing for your lover someone who is also also has potential to be your best friend would you agree that that is a primary or a very significant characteristic toward a favorable prognosis and on the other side you see any downside risks to that that's really interesting I would phrase it a little bit differently and you'll tell me whether we're talking about the same thing or not okay I as a writer and obsessed with the nuances of words and their subtleties of meaning so that if you said to me in choosing a partner is it supremely important to pick somebody that you not only love and desire but also like and respect or admire I would have without missing a beat said absolutely yes if you said to me is there a sense in which your partner is your best friend or you want your partner to be your best friend I would again have said of course yes I'm going to give you a highly subjective and highly personal answer allow me to answer you less as a psychologist than as a man there is for me personally something dangerous in the concept of friendship but I use dangerous in a poetic sense now in a romantic sense now in a positive sense now in the person that I love there is a certain kind of excitement a certain kind of electrical charge that I associate with that kind of connection which is much more than sexual but which I don't associate with friendship now that may be more a statement about me than about the subject matter I'm not at all prepared to say that what I say right now has got any objective validity whatever I feel I'm answering you very subjectively at times I certainly have said to diverse you're my very best friend in the whole world and meant it but I generally say it half-smiling like it's not quite the terms in which I ordinarily think when I'm thinking about love and yet you certainly would never want to feel that your partner is not your friend there is a kind of for me risk in love because you maybe share more of yourself than in any other relationship maybe because you put more out onto the table than in any other relationship more of who you are gets manifest and that has me the feeling of some exciting difference from close friendship which even if it's intimate close friendship always feels has a such a different feeling for me personally that I'm not certain whether this is all semantics and the personal connotations that words have for me or whether I'm really talking about anything we're talking about as my honest answer yes Devers sometimes we call quote unquote too much of a best friend takes electricity out of it some excitement one of the problems I've had I've seen reoccurring when people say that this is my very best friend and start out that way that's not like the things that we are best friends but sometimes they end up like brother and sister one of the first thing that goes is the sexual excitement so one of the things I would say yes you should be friends everything Nathaniel said but if it screams too much in that direction invariably I have seen couples come in complaining that they adore each other they love each other like brother and sister and the sex is gone yeah they're like they're wonderful friends but there's no sexual electricity yeah I think Devers is probably reacting out of the same experiences that I have working clinically that perhaps we've observed the same sets of observations that lead us to have these feelings that's the best answer I can give I'm glad we agree I was since since we have never discussed this issue I had no idea what you were going to say later yes yeah I wanted to add you're talking about self-destructive right that's right that's exactly why so often people are advised to make this it's just a technique to raise consciousness I know that we tell them their one or two stories where we you know having told so many clinical stories and so many books my head swims right now I no longer can remember the two books in which we tell the most stories are the romantic love question and answer book and my book honoring the self at times my head swims trying to remember in which book I said what but it gives me an excuse to urge you of course to read both if only in the interest of literacy what else yes during psychology okay I'm not sure I'll be able to do this very well but I have an intrinsic observation in the bureaucratic in the bureaucracies of all countries that there tends to be a growth of unhappiness in these kinds of situations I'm a tax practitioner myself deal with many of the bureaucrats and in seeing that I guess when I'm tending to asking you is there some mechanism that we can use as individuals or that we as a society can do to train a happiness syndrome that I feel would ultimately kind of pull away from the in my sense the legion of the bureaucracy the growth of the of the desire to make great empires as opposed to deal with people well you know what I'm tempted to respond by saying first I thought of writing more on the subject of happiness and happiness anxiety in the future and some of you know what an ungodly battle it is to try to redeem into a legitimate positive meaning the concept of selfishness I have a feeling that if one ever tried to deal with happiness in a serious positive philosophical way one would end up drawing almost as much wrath down on one's head even though many more people give lip service to happiness than do any legitimate notion of selfishness but it is true that one of the things that makes people put up with every kind of unhappiness including taxes is too ready acceptance of suffering as inevitable I don't know how much time I've got but we assume somebody will tell me I don't know when it's to stop you're the boss whatever yes back row well as a man who grew up with three sisters I feel I have something worthwhile to say on this subject on the most difficult day of a marriage I have never been able to experience a wife in a sisterly way for me it is a relationship so radically different let me explain to you something again you know I'm very aware of the fact that there is no way to talk but I'm aware of impartially on this subject you start talking about the subject you're telling the person about your private life either as it really is or you want them to think of this but the point is there is no way just to you know be quote objective I don't quote and by that I'm trying to get across to is this idea if somebody would tell me that that would mean that they know they had lost the sense of experiencing the mate in any in any meaningful sense as a sexual being because at no time did I ever experience my sisters as sexual being meaning intellectually or cognitively I knew they must be but it had absolutely no reality for me as a man right now that doesn't mean that you're always equally sexually turned on to your partner but in any love relationship which is a true love relationship whether whether you're the mood for sex or not whether you're mad that your partner or not there's a kind of a primary awareness of them in a sexual way which radically separates it from brother or sister and that I think is true on the most sexless day of the marriage you understand what I'm saying she's got nothing to do with arguing the mood for sex right now it's got nothing to do with whether you're angry at your partner right now is the fact that your way of experiencing your partner so intrinsically carries that as an essential component that isn't that nobody would ever agree with your description but I would say that's an issue of our individual stories rather than of the nature of marriage do you see so somebody could say yeah after x years of marriage my husband felt more like a brother than he did like a husband but I would not say well of course what do you think that's marriage I would say well that's too bad that's the story of this relationship yes George strange way of stating it but you understand what I'm saying there are certain types of people and they're associated with artists or that type of mentality sometimes that are very safe century by ordinary standards and it may be that they're never going to be amenable to a normal sort of relationship in some way if they're very interesting people there might be a lot of excitement a lot of turmoil okay I I think the questions are really interesting one as a matter of fact and I think that within limits there are legitimate differences among people see one person could say well like I'm in a romance with X and X has got these characteristics and these characteristics but he she is so exciting it's so interesting when we are together it is so fantastic I can live with the trade-off and somebody else can say I can't I know what I want in marriage I'd love to have it with X but the frustrations are just too painful for me well I don't think you or I looking on could legitimately say one of them is right and one of them is wrong they're each making a statement about who they are and what their values are and that I from the outside unless you saw this wonderful charismatic figure really you know treating the person appallingly you know with no respect no nothing then you might say hey this is really untenable but assuming there was some really decent level of gratification and fulfillment in the relationship I think that's an issue of your individual personality and individual values how much but see you know what the questions were interesting here is something let me speak from a man's point of view I have had many female clients say that raise this problem in therapy look the men who treat them the best are almost never the men they admire the most because the men they admire the most tend to be much more work-oriented much more achievement-oriented much more moving through life at 90 miles an hour and therefore not always as sensitive as the more laid-back easy-going less ambitious kind of boyfriend who is generally more sensitive to their moods more caring more nurturing more affectionate and that many a woman has come in and said boy you know this I got a guy who is wonderful in every way except you know he's a he's a life guard I've never had better sex I've never been treated better he's kind he knows my moods like nobody has ever known them he's the first man who listens when I talk to him we all know what that means right but Nathaniel what am I gonna do is a lifeguard she's a lawyer she says Nathaniel now I've dated a lot of high-powered lawyers I would never want to marry one but there's some of them that I really admire so that's one way to to focus why so what do we ask of life I think all of us have to know a what we want and be what we will reasonably settle for and I mean settle for not in the irrational sense of resignation to Zeltjoe but I mean settle for in a reasonable way like for example if you want to sell your house you can say well I'd like to get 400 thousand but I'll say yes to 380 I won't say yes to 40 you understand me well you know so when I say settle for I mean it in a reasonable sense we can say I want a what would I like I would like a wife who would always be interested whatever I'm in the mood to air my thoughts about the cosmos but I would happily I could live happily with a woman who would be interested enough of the time that I would feel I had a true companion for my journey even if she persisted in the delusion that she did have a life of her own so so it's always an issue it's always an issue is it not of saying what do I want is it reasonable what would I settle for would what I say I would settle for be harmful to me and finding that level that's why it doesn't lend itself to kind of yeah well like yes or no answer I hope this is a value this is how I would think about that question yes well there is no single simple answer because obviously the first thing that you don't need me to tell you to do is to say look partner here are some things you are doing that are hurting me or upsetting me I need for us to talk about so the difficulty with questions of this form is that it always takes this pattern they're almost it almost always goes like this somebody will say what do I do my partner won't discuss our relationship then I will say well you might say so-and-so in the next line but suppose I say so-and-so and he still won't discuss our relationship then I might say well then you might do so-and-so and then the answer goes back but suppose I do so-and-so and he still won't talk about our relationship and this dance continues so all you can do is say talk about what's troubling you tell her him rather what you are doing ask the person are you willing to talk about what you think your role is in our unhappiness are you willing to match me show the person what you're doing now the person says no I won't talk about it or I won't match you I won't acknowledge what I'm doing anything to make life difficult I don't know any easy answer to that one this has got to be the most complex subject in the world one more question yes no you've said it's fine marriage we as a species humankind has always had rituals formal actions through weeks we express events of importance like you know if somebody dies you know we don't just say would somebody phone up and say please well you don't cart the body away there's a funeral there is something if if there is a a a birthday or some event of important we all we look for some actions that would give some objective expression stop this is important we look to make some kind of what I would call socially objective statement to mark certain events as significant now if two people fall in love they can dedicate themselves to each other to the relationship without the formality of getting married true enough but since the beginning of society most people have always opted to be married and although there are many reasons psychologically why they do so I think that part of the reason lies in the fact that we have a desire for what I call social objectification whenever it fits meaning the desire to give some kind of social expression to the fact this is my mate whoever harms her harms me we are we are in many important respects hereafter to be treated as one unit there's a very complex public statement in saying she and I he and I are married or I wish to marry him or I wish to marry her it's a very complex social communication it's obviously a communication to the individual but it's it's also a social communication I was I don't think that if two people were living alone on the desert island if it were possible they would be likely to get married I think it's it's definitely something which has a social significance it's a way of defining ourselves relative to the wider world it says I place this person above all others and it also says don't any of you ever put me in a position where I will be expected to place something above her or him so it's a very complex communication involved in getting married do I think that everybody who is in love and who would like to spend their life together quote should uncoke it married of course not I think marriage is something that you shouldn't do unless you really want to do it okay I was coming to that as my very last point do you know that if I were writing the marriage vows or whatever do you know the only formula that I know of that is truthful as far as I am able to see into the future you are it as far as I am able to see I am committed to spending my life with you that is the honest thing that a human being can say and the nice thing about anniversaries is that each year you can say and it's still true that as far as I can see you know the first year comes around maybe he says how's your eyes honey can you see any father so what a reason why you know we celebrate anniversaries are we go up with our partner we say I love you ten times more the day we got married it's just ways of saying still nothing has changed as far as I can say into the future you are it the reason why I like that formulation is because people often night people say well how can anybody say I know that I'm going to want to stay with you for the rest of my life and the truth is there's an obvious sense in which you can't say it with absolute certainty you can say that by the best of my knowledge within everything known to me now and as far as I can see this is a true statement of my feelings maybe maybe it should read until and unless life do us part listen thank you I've really enjoyed being with you and talking with you