Before this relationship. Try to remember a time when you were really happy, when you were feeling really fulfill What were you doing at that time, what were you thinking about, what were you reading about, what were you feeling? The best selling author and closed the number one health and wellness podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Thank you so much to all of you that are investing so deeply in your mental, physical, financial, emotional, and spiritual health by joining in and tuning in to our conversations here on Purpose. I'm so excited because we're going to be adding a really special offering onto the back of my solo episodes on Fridays. The Daily Jay is a daily series on calm and it's meant to inspire you while outlining tools and techniques to live a more mindful, stress relife. We dive into a range of topics and the best part is each episode is only seven minutes long, so you can incorporate it into your schedule no matter how busy you are. As a dedicated part of the On Purposed community, I wanted to do something special for you this year, so I'll be playing a handpicked Daily Jay during each of my Friday podcasts. This week, we're talking about your relationships and how to create the most meaningful connections with the people that matter to you. Of course, if you want to listen to the Daily Jay every day, you can go subscribe to Calm. So go to Calm dot com forward slash Ja for forty percent off your membership. Today and today, we have guests who've been on before. There's only a few of them that have been on the show twice and these are some of my favorites. Today's guests are none other than doctor John and Julie Gottman. The Gotments are the nation's leading marriage researchers and educators. John and Julie Gotman are the renowned experts on marital ability says The Atlantic, the Einstein of Love says Psychology Today, and the Dean of Marriage Experts says The New York Times. Today, we're talking about their new book, Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection and Joy, The Love Prescription. This is the book. We're going to put the book link in the captions and comments so you can go and grab your copy, John and Julie. It's so wonderful to see you. Thank you for making the time, thank you for giving me this opportunity to sit down with you again. I'm really excited. Jay. You know you should know that it's always an honor to be on your show and to be connected with your gifts. So thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah, I agree, Well, thank you both so much. I want to dive in because whenever I see one of your studies published, or a journal or a new book come, I get very excited because you truly have just studied so many interesting, fascinating parts of relationships. And I guess the first question I want to dive into straight away is when you're dating someone, what quality do you value or what quality should we be looking for when we first start that process, Because I feel like one of the most challenging things right now is we all have different things we're attracted to because of how we were raised, what movies we saw, what perceptions we have about what is attractive, what is male, what is female? Is beyond gender? Right like, we all have certain perceptions and misconceptions. What are some of the values and qualities we should be looking for when we're dating someone or when we're even looking for someone. So I think the very first thing you should look for is kindness, and not only kindness towards you, but kindness towards the people, for example, who bring you your food, who bring you your drinks, who bring you your car, the people that are all around you. Supported that date that you're having with this new person, do they treat everyone with kindness? That's a marker of that person being respectful towards others and not being to classist, not being racist, but being somebody who treats people with care and respect. So kindness is one. I think another is reliability. So does your dating partner actually show up when they say they're going to show up? That's very important. Or are they always late and then they're making an excuse for being late, maybe they don't even apologize. That's not a good sign. So reliability they are who they say they are, they'll be where they say they'll be, is very important too. One of the things that really impressed me about my son in law was that my daughter completely herself with him. So it's a little bit different than what quality did he have, but it was that she was really herself. There was no part of her that was being stifled. She had a boyfriend who didn't want her to sing, and she's a natural singer. She's a jazz singer. And my son in law I just loved her singing, loved her being silly, loved her being tired and crabby. She was completely herself, and I think it's an important thing if you can be completely yourself and feel accepted by this person. Those are both SuDS great answers, and John I loved that thought, the idea that it's not a quality that someone else has, it's that they allow you to be all of your qualities and they don't dampen or hamper any of those. I think one thing you touched on that which really got me curious and intrigued is I think more and more or today people have been in relationships where they feel stifled, or they feel controlled, or they feel manipulated, or they feel like their light had to be dampened. I think I speak to a lot of people. I'm sure you've spoken to you know, God knows how many people over the years that have felt that way. Why is it do you think that it takes us so long to notice that. Sometimes sometimes we've become so intoxicated and enamored by another person that until we actually leave or we get the courage to break up. When it happens, we think, oh, my gosh, I just realized they've been manipulated for three years. I just realized I was controlled for three years. But we accept it, we tolerated. Why do we allow that to happen to ourselves? And why do we also follow up questions to that, why do we allow it to happen to our friends and family members and people around us when we can see it, but we're scared of telling them. First of all, nobody grows up without catching some baggage along the way. That baggage leaves us feeling insecure, feeling badly about certain qualities that we may have. And so when we first start dating, we try to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. That's number one. Number two is that as we get to know this other person a little bit, what happens is that we start to psych out who do they want us to be? Do they want us to accentuate our being athletic but downplay are being intellectual? What fits who? They are, and we try to mold ourselves into this jigsaw puzzle piece that isn't being true to ourselves. And a lot of us have the experience as children of doing exactly the same thing. We realize that perhaps our father really didn't like it when we out maneuvered him in a political debate, so we tamp it down, or our mother didn't like it when we dressed like an athlete instead of like a very feminine stereotype. So who are we? As little kids? We figure out you only get approval for fitting somebody else's notion of who you should be. Then if we don't work through that, we don't process that, and we don't acknowledge that who we are is absolutely perfect in every way, even though we have our strengths and we have our challenges. We go into a dating situation where again we're trying to mold ourselves. It's that same process of trying to figure out what's wanted of us and molding ourselves to that. Also, Jay, you know, we live in a very critical culture. At jobs, we are rated on a totem pole, where do we fit high or low on the totem pole? Same thing in classrooms, our own individual passions may not be honored. It's only how well do we memorize the capitals of states? Right, So we're always having to mold ourselves to fit somebody else's standards, and we have to work through the fact that all those others out there had very distorted mirrors of who we were and what was beautiful about each one of us. What we have to do is create our own mirror that yes, of course it will see the cracks, it will see the flaws, it will see the weaknesses or challenges that we need to continue to work on. Like mine is impatience and one of the most impatient people I know, so I always have to work on that. Always, you know, five steps ahead of where somebody needs to be. So I have to work on that. But at the same time, I can understand that a lot of things that I am that may have threatened my parents are things that are actually strengths that are beautiful about who I am. Each one of your audience and everyone else has strengths, they have challenges. The work is to see your strengths without the distortions of everyone else's mirrors of you. That's a beautiful response, and you're so right that so many of the things that distort us, gifts or gaps that we received from our parents, where we you know, functioning differently based on how we were loved and how we were shown love. And what's really interesting about that journey? And I'm focusing on that feeling stifled and restricted because I think it's just such a big theme and such an important thing that you raised. When someone comes out of that, when someone finally breaks through a relationship where they were feeling stifled, where they were feeling controlled, they can feel extremely lost in who they are, and they can become confused about their identity and about their value. And often people will say, well, I just doubt myself now because I was doubted or I have lost my self esteem. What are some of the building blocks you think, and what is the importance of self awareness and self esteem? I mean, Julie, you just said it right now. You said, Hey, I know that I'm impatient and that's something I'm always working on, which means you have self awareness and you can still a positive self esteem because you know it's something you're building on or working on. What role do a self esteem and self awareness have in healthy relationships? And how does one redevelop them after a painful experience. I love that question, Jay, because you know, every single day I see clients who are in exactly the kind of pain you're describing, where they've come out of a painful, painful relationship where they were treated badly, disrespectfully, they've been devalued, or they've felt invisible, unimportant, and they are lost because they've tried so hard to mold themselves into a paper doll that they've lost track of who the real person is behind the mask that they've displayed. So the building block of change is, first of all, seek people and more connection with those people that you actually really trust, who care about you, who see the beauty in your heart, in your soul, and talking to them about your experience, asking them what was their perception of what was going on in the relationship. Does it make sense to them that they were being controlled or being manipulated? Can they help you with their own objective eyes understand what process you were involved in. Now, that may be a friend, that may be a sibling or a relative. It may be a therapist or a healer, but somebody that you can trust who reflects. First of all, more accurately what was going on for you and who you really are. Then what you need to do is follow your own passions. At first, it's really difficult to figure that out. What are my passions? I don't know anymore? So you go back to before this relationship. Try to remember a time when you were really happy and you were feeling really fulfilled. What were you doing at that time, what were you thinking about, what were you reading about, what were you feeling. So I have a client, for example, who was really controlled and manipulated by her partner, and then her partner betrayed her and left her. So now she's very lost trying to figure out who she is. So we listed a whole list of potential passions and had her close her eyes and reflect on, Okay, each one of those, how do they resonate with you? How do they resonate? And she generated this very short list of things she loved about herself and she loved doing. There was sailing, There was learning about music and playing guitar. There was going swimming with her children. Swimming in particular was something that she really really loved to do. So seek out that passion, pull the thread, see what's at the end of it, and then expand that passion into something that becomes a regular part of your life. And not only that, but most passions include the participation of other people. So if you connect with other people that share that passion with you, you then begin to feel like, ah, this part of myself that i've shut down that I'm now recapturing is something other people loved too. Hooray, And you go out to live those parts of you that you split off but now you're reconnecting with. That's a brilliant answer. You've given us so many practical things that we can do there when we're in that position, and they all feel really tough and difficult in the moment, for sure, but they're tried and tested, They work, they make sense, they align. And you know, anyone who's listening or watching right now who's been in that scenario recognizing what Julie was saying, like, there was a you before this relationship, and there will be you after this relationship, and the you that got lost during the relationship is the one you're trying to reawaken, rediscover and give an opportunity to rise. For So, I think that recognition that you may have lost connection with who you are, but you are not lost to you are nonexistent, which a lot of people can actually end up feeling if we move forward into we started with and then we went backwards into breakups and now I'm kind of going back into dating again. But I think one of the biggest challenges today is the paradox of choice. Right today, there is more choice, there are more options, There is a quicker ability to say yes or no to someone on a dating app. You're not meeting people within a one mile radius or five mile radius of where you grew up. You're meeting people online through a picture. You don't know their family, you don't know what school they went to, you don't know many of their friends. So the way we meet people today has drastically shifted in the last ten to twenty years alone, what to speak of over time. And on top of that, there's this feeling that people have of like, well, if I'm not with someone who's perfect, well then I can just drop them and find someone else because there's so many people out there. So tell me about what you've noticed with the paradox of choice and what can we do in our dating life to actually learn quicker and foster whether someone's right for us or not, and what does that really mean. Let me say something about what modern research has found in selecting somebody, and it turns out that really nobody has been able to find anything to measure that determines whether you'll like somebody. So you can ask people even what are they looking for in a partner and to list all the qualities, and then you can select for those qualities, and that person is unlikely to even like that person. So I you know, my answer to that is to find somebody you can trust. And trust is very different for everybody, but it's somebody you feel safe with, Somebody really makes you feel accepted as you are. And our best index trust is to pick somebody who is able to think for two not just for themselves, but can think about what benefits both partners, and that person winds up being very trustworthy. When we talk about choices of dating, part of the problem is that everybody is on the Internet trying to find a match. But because basically the Internet is black and white text, it gives people only a tiny little sliver, one dimension of who somebody is. You know, that's always a problem in my head because people will describe themselves in a way that doesn't include how they smell, what they really look like, what their history is, who they really are. So you're not going to find the perfect partner. What John was saying about somebody that you can trust. In my world, what that means is somebody who makes you feel good about yourself. So one of the questions you need to ask is how do you feel about yourself when you're actually face to face with this person. So, you know, fine, go out and look on the internet, see who appeals to you through the internet, but try to meet up with them, have coffee, you know, for thirty minutes, taught to them. See how many questions they ask you, and how do they respond to your answers. Do they just change the subject? Are they looking over your shoulder at somebody cute who's sitting at the back of the room. How are they responding or are they really focused on you and making you feel like that person seems to really get what I'm saying. They're understanding there, responding not by interrupting me and talking over me, but by really wanting to even hear more, and gee, I want to hear more about them? How self disclosing, aren't they Are they self disclosing appropriately, not oversharing every personal detail, but letting me know the basics of who they are so that I can respond to them and slowly get to know them. So, you know, I'm afraid all of we Internet users, when we limit ourselves to looking for somebody on the internet, we're really making a mistake. We've got to meet up with people face to face, see how we feel being with them and how they feel being with us. Yeah. I think one of the greatest notes that I liked out of that from both of you was I think trust is one of these things that just takes forever to build. And you know, you hear about people who they've been with someone for twenty five years and they feel they trusted each other, and then the person after twenty five years goes, I don't love you anymore, and then you know you're dealing with that. And so the thing that really resonated with me was the idea of safety, like do you feel safe when you're with someone? I think that's a very current, immediate way of building trust because trust is this big thing takes a lot of time, a lot of building blocks, so many other things, But do I feel safe with this person is something you can ask yourself right now, and you can know whether you feel safer around someone emotionally, whether you feel safer around someone physically, or whether you feel fearful, or whether you feel unsafe, or whether you feel threatened, or whether you feel intimidated. And I think that's a really great question that people can ask themselves in the moment, in a day. And of course the insight of getting as quick as possible to meeting someone in person is the only way that you can really start making better decisions in dating and dealing better with choice and knowing that the research shows that there is no perfect thing to look for and perfect partner. I mean, that's very freeing. I'm hoping people hear that and go, oh, I get it, Like, there isn't just the perfect thing to look for, and there isn't a perfect formula and there isn't a perfect recipe, which means I'm going to work with a lot of ingredients that don't make sense, and there are going to be things that are contradictory, and there are going to be things that don't perfectly align. And that's okay. That's what the research shows, right, So I think that's a healthy way of approaching. I think the challenge I've seen is we're so focused on finding the perfect person that we don't create a process of creating something meaningful with the person. We're weird, and so we keep finding perfect, chasing perfect, chasing perfect, pursuing perfection, not thinking, oh, I can actually create, make and build something pretty good if I direct my energy this way. Let's dive into a few of the questions that you ask in the book. So we talk about the seven days to more Intimacy, Connection, enjoy, and I think one of the things you talk about that I love in this book is about asking big questions. And the reason why I like this idea of when you're in a relationship, how do you increase intimacy is that we've been wearing how long we've been in a relationship as a badge of honor. Right. We look at the amount of time someone's been with someone as the success of a relationship, and we know that that's not factually true, whether it's a job, a relationship, a home. You could live in a home for thirty years and hate it every day. You could work a job the same day, same job, every day in your life for fifty years and hate your job. Or you could be with someone for a long long time and not really enjoy their company. And I think what I've noticed is that the reason that happens is we think when we get married to someone, or we move in with someone, or we're in a committed relationship with someone, you almost have this little voice in your head that says you already know them, that we wait till we know someone to make commitments, and now that we know them, there's almost unconsciously nothing left to know, there's nothing left to discover. And so when you talk about these incredible ideas that you're sharing in this book, the reason why I really like them is this idea that you can always learn something new about someone that you've known a long time. So someone who's old in your life, there's still something always new to learn about them. And one of the ways you say is by asking a big question. Can you describe what a big question is and why it's a great way of building intimacy. So a big question is a question that has a long answer, It doesn't have a yes or no answer. My favorite color is purple in a one word answer, It has a much bigger answer, like what are you thinking about death and dying these days? You know you've just turned eighty five, What are you thinking about it? What are you thinking about? Who you want our children to be, especially growing up in this world where so many things really need to change drastically and quickly. Who do you want our child to be? So they have big answers to them these questions. One of the reasons that these questions are so important to keep asking is the following. We are not static. We are not like you know the fireplace in your home that never changes, that has the same form, the same bricks, the same wood. You know it'll burn, Replace it with a little more wood. It's not the same fixture. We are not a fixed entity. We are constantly evolving. We are changing, We are moving forward, and we are being impacted by our world to shift our beliefs, our thoughts, our feelings about things, our hope or our hopelessness. We're changing all the time. So if we don't continue to ask those questions, then we may have a picture of our partner in our minds that's obsolete, that's ten years old, and that person has been replaced by somebody totally different, but we won't know it. So the big questions keep us connected with this beautiful changing form. We are like the c J. The c is never the same, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. The sea is always changing, color, wave forms, smoothness versus turmoil. It's always changing. Well, so are human beings inside of us. We have a sea that's being influenced by all the powers and forces in our world. So how does that change us and our partner and how can we stay attuned to each other? The big questions are the way to do that, to address who are you here and now today? How have you changed? That's really special and I love the analogy of the sea, and I feel like when you are saying that with the ocean, what I was thinking is that often a lot of us subconsciously are either scared of asking that question, or we don't ask that question because we're fearful that someone may change in a way we don't like. And that's often what makes relationships so difficult, is that two people, two oceans, as you beautifully described, are always changing, and then someone changes in a way that you don't like anymore, and you go, well, I don't like that. And when I ask you about it, and now you start telling me about this new thing that you're into or whatever it may be, I don't vibe with that. Like, that's not something I resonate with. How do we continue to build loving relationships with people? We've committed to people that we feel like it's going somewhere, but then they get into something, whether it's like you said, it could be pain that changes who they are, or something that brings them joy that changes who they are, but we don't quite like it. We don't enjoy how it's changed them. How do you deal with that? I have a great example of this actoy. Okay, so I'm one of those people that looks at a piece of bread and games five pounds. That's why I can look at a slice of cake and be twice the width the next week. So I have to be really careful about what I consume, and consuming carbs and so on is not necessarily a great choice for me. Okay, So what does my precious, beautiful husband get into bread baking? This is a new passion that he has and he's got he's got, you know, a pizza stone, and he got the little like curving baking pan for making multiple baggetts, like I could eat three baggetts in one city. So you know, he's gotten into a passion and he's baking bread, you know, whenever he has spare time. So is that my favorite passion for my husband to be baking bread that I can look at and you know, expand myself in the wrong ways with? Probably not. But the thing I have to do is to understand by asking more questions, why this? You know, what what is it about this particular passion by darling that you really love doing? What part of you is this fulfilling other than you know, your tummy? What part of this are you loving? You know? Help me understand this passion. He's so cute and so I want to understand him. This may not be the favorite evolution of mine that he's going through, but because I love him, because love means accepting everything about your partner, even the things that are challenging for you. I want to get to know this part of him too, even if it's something that you know doesn't fit with man who says I'm the center of the universe and everything has to revolve around my lives and just lives. I'm not, so I want to understand this aspect of him. And my mother was trained as a hotel chef and I miss her. So one way to remember her is to learn to be a baker of Viennese pastry. And that's where I'm going. Oh my god, well headed to Viennese pastry. Jay, Can I move into your house? I bet you have really healthy you. No, and I And thank you John for sharing that insight about why you've got into baking. I mean that, you know, when you hear it from that perspective, you're like, wow, that is wow that you know. I can only understand how meaningful baking is. What a beautiful you know description to share that, And Julie, I thought that was a great example because it's the same with me and my wife. Like so, I'm someone who's very certain about my passions, my purpose. You know, what I'm doing on this planet and what I care about. And I've developed that over time. It's not that I just stumbled upon it yesterday, and it's always evolving and growing, and of course it changes and moves. And my wife someone who is very talented and gifted, but she's often trying to figure more out and she's more open to this fluid version of herself and discovery. She's in a space of discovery. And so when you have certainty and discovery, it's very important that there's massive flexibility and adapting in both people. It's not just me to her or her to me, it's both, right, is what I'm hearing you say. It's like, she has to be adaptable to the fact that she's married to someone who's super certain about what they want in life. And I have to be open to the fact that I'm with someone who enjoys a lot of different things and figuring it out and being in discovery mode. And that encourages me, if I see it that way, to spend more time in discovery, and me being this way encourages her to spend more time in certainty or discovering things that are more certain. But that requires a lot of flexibility and adaptability and maturity to be able to do it in a healthy way. And that's hard. It is hard work, right, This is not easy to do. It is challenging, It is difficult, it can be painful. How do we build that flexibility? Because I feel that most people I speak to today there's a lot of like, well, this is the way I am, and this is what I want, and this is not what you're providing me, right, especially when it gets to bigger things than what we're talking about. So how do we develop that flexibility and adaptability? Because I think people have very clear plans or parts of how they want their life to go, and your partner changing tact or changing track can maybe i'll, you know, derail you sometimes, right, you know, I think it goes back to John what you were seeing earlier, which was you have to think for two, you have to think about, you know, if you really love this person, what is going to benefit them? And how far can I stretch myself outside my own ego, my own way of doing things, my own rigid path. How far can I stretch myself beyond my own rigidity to adapt to my partner's path? And can we talk through the differences between us the new path that my partner may be following, and find some in between. I'm thinking about an interesting example of somebody who was married and had had a fairly kind of atheistic set of beliefs and the other person was very comfortable with that, and then that person went into a very deep spiritual pursuit and started doing kind of visionary quests, and those brought him to a very different place than they had been in together philosophically in terms of more of an atheistic set of beliefs, and poor thing, I mean, she had a heck of a time. She did not know how to accept this aspect that her partner was evolving into, and she felt abandoned by his journey. So what was really necessary was to establish that her journey, even if it maintained an atheistic framework, was still a value, was still important, that he was very happy to continue to support that belief system, and that it wasn't an abandonment of her to go into a spiritual journey himself. It was a pathway leading to a deeper part of himself. It wasn't about her, And in fact, what he could do is apply his new spiritual perception to understanding who she was from a very different place than he had before. Understand from a spiritual perspective why she made the choices she did who she was, and both could be embraced within a sphere of love. There was no abandonment the love to grow because each pan gifted the relationship with different new but very beautiful ways to still stay connected, staying curious about your partner as your partner changes. And that's what I'm saying that I think people are scared of that curiosity because it may lead to something they don't want to discover because it's it can be so emotionally destabilizing personally. But I think you're right, Julie. I I appreciate that response because the understanding is the only thing that's going to help in that moment, like you know, and what the thing that stood out the most was you said, you know, realizing that it's not a journey you have to go on, right, Like it's it's not a joint journey. If someone needs to go down this journey for themselves, you're going with them on their journey, but it doesn't have to become your journey. And I think that's often the pressure that couples put on each other where it's like, well, if I'm going to do this, then you need to do it too. And that's where it starts to become unhealthy, where our journey becomes projected onto our partners. So in this book you also talk about some really practical things around saying thank you more to our partners. And you talk about how we always notice the bad things or the mistakes they make, and we all know that, right, whether it's not having the dishes done, whether it's not cleaning up the house, whether it's the shoes left at the door, whether it's whatever it may be, right in your own home. I'm just naming things my wife doesn't like that I do. When when you look at those things, there's so many things that we point out as mistakes and criticisms and negatives consistently. What does the research show around aid the amount of positive versus negative communication we have with our partners and be how negatively do those critical comments affect a relationship? And then I'll come onto the next of all, which is all about you know, how do we really say thank you in a deep way? But let's let's start with that. Well, there's a wonderful study by two women, Robinson and Price, And what they did that was so interesting was they put observers in a couple's home, one person observing the husband, one person observing the wife. These were only heterosexual couples and just observing positive things that one person did for the other, and they trained the husband and wife to do that as well. And what they found was that in an unhappy relationship, people miss fifty percent of the positive things that their partners doing. So, you know, initially people thought, well, what has to happen to make a relationship happy is that people need to be more positive to one another. But what they found was that people were already being positive to one another even in an unhappy relationship. It's just that their partner wasn't noticing fifty percent of that positivity. So that suggested that you need a habit of mind in a relationship that's going to work where you notice what your partner is contributing to the relationship. Rather than focusing on your partner's mistakes or what they're doing wrong, focus on what they're doing right, focus on what really is happening that is positive in the relationship, and then that changes the relationship. That ability to have that different mindset where you're noticing what's going right. When you're focused on the negative, it turns out it actually affects your own health in a very bad way. You wind up being more irritable, being you know, more vindictive, and less cooperative, and you wind Up Living List is an Israeli study that shows that people who respond during traffic to somebody who wants to cut into their elane by thinking, you know, that guy's not going to get into my elane. I'm not going to let that happen. That sort of angry response viewing this behavior in a negative way reduces their lifespan. So this positive habit of mind really is very powerful increasing the amount of positivity in a relationship. Yeah, that's amazing. That's study about missing fifty percent. I mean that's a big number. That's that that should not be forgotten on the toilet, and I guess with that. The second about my question was how do you show appreciation effectively in a relationship too? Because I think what ends up happening is there's so much familiarity, there is so much negativity, and most people have kind of walked down the negative path and now they're trying to rewire. Right, So you've already built up a relationship over a few months or years maybe where you've just repeated the negative patterns, and now all of a sudden, you listen to this podcast, people read your book and they go, oh, wait a minute, I need to start being a bit more complimentary and noticing it, and now their partners are like, well, this just feels artificial. Or sometimes when you start being positive towards your partner, they also don't how to receive it because they don't think they're worthy of it. So often I've found that where you can say thank you to someone for something, but they don't know how to receive a compliment. They don't know how to really accept that, and so you keep saying the compliment day after day after day after day, but they never really digest it. So, if you're making a switch in your relationship from negative to positive, how do you say thank you in a deep, meaningful way that it will be received, And how do you do it when your partner struggles to receive compliments? Like you might say to your partner, hey, you look beautiful today or you look great in that, and they always pull a funny face or they go, well, no, I don't look I look like this or I look like that, because they are struggling themselves with that area of their life. A compliment doesn't solve that. So, first of all, let's discern between compliments and gratitude. Those are two different things. So you know, giving somebody compliment is seeing something positive about your partner, some quality about your partner that you are commenting on and saying, wow, you look beautiful. Wow, that was a smart thing you just said. Wow, that was hilarious that story you told. Right, So that's a little different than saying thank you so much for making the coffee, thank you for doing the dishes for me, and I was it was my turn and I was feeling really tired. So most people are much more able to hear thank you. But when you haven't said thank you for a really long time, and all of a sudden you're saying thank you, it's like, oh, yeah, right now you tell me thanks? Yeah, right, sure, sure, what do you need? Are you, you know, setting me up to manipulate me to get something else, you know. So they'll be distrust at first because it doesn't feel real. It feels artificial. But the way to make it real is don't exaggerate it, you know, in other words, don't drop on your knees and say, you know, oh my god, this is the best coffee I've ever had. Thank you. So, you know, I mean, you've got to make it realistic, right, So thanks for making the coffee. You keep it attuned to where the person is, what they've actually done, and if they've done something that's really meaningful to you, then you tell them why it was meaningful to you. So, you know, you might say something like, thank you so much for doing the dishes when it was my turn, but I was just wiped out and tired, because you know, here's what it meant to me as a kid. I never got off doing my chores. Whether I had a fever, whether you know, I hadn't slept all night, it never mattered. I always had to do my chores. So the fact that you had some compassion for me and you took over doing the chore, that means a lot to me. So thank you. You see. So when you accompany the thank you, especially if it's a bigger one with why it has meaning to you, that's going to give it more weight, more in fact, and enable the the person to hear it in the atmosphere you want it to be given. Well, let me say something about that, because I think the changing from a negative habit of mind where you're really noticing what other people are doing wrong and trying to fix them, to not noticing what's going right and feeling gratitude about it is a process of changing yourself, So don't focus very much on other people and how they're receiving it. I know that when I was in a very negative place, you know where I was, you know, experiencing you know, anger driving, you know, people who were driving badly, and you know, I noticed that I had that negative mindset in general, and it took me a long time to change my own self so that I was noticing all the power set of things that were happening around me and feeling grateful. So it's really focusing on yourself and going, wow, you know this, this is really quite a wonderful world in a lot of ways. And I've been looking at the glasses being half empty when actually it's half full. And it took me really two years to change myself from this negative habit of mine to a positive one. And then suddenly I wasn't walking around being irritable all the time. I was walking around saying, wow, you know, life is really quite nice. I'm very I'm really a lucky person, and you know, all these wonderful things are happening in my life. So you know, my advice would be don't focus so much on how others are responding. Really focus on yourself and realize that you're changing the way you're viewing the world and being more grateful for what really is wonderful about your life. Yeah, the great thing about that is that it has a big, no kind of act on your entire life, Like we just you know, it's it's like we the fact that you're saying, we miss fifty percent of the good things. And then Julie, you're a description of how to say thank you based on why it's meaningful to you. I think that is such great insight for your partner as well. Like you know, you're just saying, oh, thanks for washing up, versus thanks for washing up because it gave me a little extra time to catch up on that thing I was trying to finish off for work, or you know, thank you so much for cleaning up because I was feeling quite anxious today and that's made me feel really calm. Like those kind of insights are so much more powerful for your partner to not only remember, but to repeat that act of kindness and for them to recognize how meaningful it is to you. And so I think that's super practical and the idea of just shifting our thought management of it's it's so easy to sit there and look at all the mistakes your partner makes, or anyone makes, but to acknowledge that in light of the positive actions they're making, that to me is just great thought management, because, as you rightly said, our thoughts are just constantly being dragged down into the dirt. The dirt. The studies that I've seen show we have sixty to eighty thousand thoughts per day, and eighty percent of them are negative and eighty percent of them are repetitive. And so it's not even like you're having a different bad thought about your partner every day. You're having the same bad thought about your partner every day, right, So it's it's not even like there's any variety in it. But we would rarely have the same good thought every day. It's easy to get lazy about saying thank you for breakfast every day, even though that happens every day. But if someone doesn't clean up every day, that easily becomes a recurring thought that causes a lot of pain. I want to go more macro. We've been focusing on compliments, saying thank you these are incredible insights you've given this book. I want to go a bit macro as well and zoom out and say, how does someone know if a relationship is going to lost and that they feel like this relationship has a future? How do you know that? Is there a way to know that? Yes? There is, and really has to do with commitment and what commitment really is. And a woman named Carol Rusbault, who did this research for thirty years on commitment, showed that the important thing is to cherish what you have and magnify what you have in life with this partner, and to not constantly make comparisons and think that you can do better. So when the chips are down and your partner is kind of grumpy and irritable, to focus on you know what you have with this person. They're positive qualities turns out to be very very important. People who magnify the negative in their partner and think after an argument or after you know, breakfast doesn't go very well or something that they can do better. They're always shopping, They're always comparing their partner to real or imagined alternatives. Those people have relationships that don't last. And what Karl Rustbo showed was that in an argument, you know, when they're unhappy with their partner, instead of talking to their partner about what they're said about, they talk to somebody else about how they're being persecuted in that relationship. They don't go to their partner and say, you know, hey, baby, you know I really miss you know, having adventures with you. We used to do that and we haven't done that in a long time. They go to some nice person at Starbucks and they say, my partner, you know, she's so dull that we don't have adventures, you know. And so Carol Rusboll showed that commitment is something that is inside you that you can control. You can really focus on what you have and how lucky you are to have this partner in your life, and then the relationship is much more likely to last, particularly if both people are doing that. On the other side of that is how do I know my partner is going to make that commitment? How do I know this relationship is going to last? And I think there are some indicators of that. You know, one is consistency. Is that person consistently showing up? Is that person more or less consistently empathetic with me, whether I'm happy, sad, defeated, triumphant. You know, how are they responding to these different parts of me? Do they seem to treasure these different parts of me that as I feel safer and safer, I'm showing more and more. Are they allowing themselves to trust me? Are they allowing me to hold their heart in my hands because they trust me that much and to be vulnerable with me? Then you know that's telling you that, Wow, you know, this person really does seem to get me. They love these different parts of me. They can laugh with me about, you know, the crazy parts of me without judging me so worshly so And does that happen consistent point? Or does something happen where all of a sudden your partner ghosts you, or you know, they disappear for a couple of weeks and then you ask them, hey, where were you? What happened? And they say, oh, you know, I just I needed you know whatever, I just needed some space. How come they didn't tell you they needed some space so that you could talk about that a little bit and then provilement with that space with knowledge. The other big question is how does that person make you feel about yourself. It's not only how you feel about the other, but how do they make you feel about yourself. If they make you feel valued, feel golden, feel funny, make you feel treasured even when you're crabby, and they can laugh with you, I think it is a big piece of it. Then that relationship looks pretty darned good. That's those are some good signs. Let me add something to that. You know that you know the phrase don't put all your eggs in one basket. Well, a marriage is about putting all your eggs in that basket. It's really scary to do to really trust in this relationship and invest everything in it. That's part of what Carol Rossball taught us. When you commit to somebody, you're putting all your eggs in that basket. You know that person's help, that person's longevity, that person is your treasure. And if they know that and you feel that about you know them, that they've put all their eggs into this basket, then that relationship lasts because something very special has happened. You know, your partner is saying you are the love of my life. You're it. You know I have nothing to offer anybody else. I mean, you have my whole heart for my whole life, and that's what makes a relationship last. Yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things that comes to my mind is that idea that things only lost if you want them to and if you make them right. It's like it's like me staring at a tree that I love in my garden and going like will this tree last? And it's like, it's only gonna last if it's taking care of It's not just gonna last because it's gonna last. And so I think sometimes we ask questions that are kind of outside of ourselves, like is this relationship gonna last? And it's like, well, it's gonna last if you really wanted to, if you're willing to put in the work. And so often I think we sit there with that checklist of like is my partner loving? Are they understanding? Are they this? And it's like, well, are we any of those things? Right? Like are we bringing that to this relationship or we committed to that? Are we consistent in creating adventure if that's what we're missing in the relationship, if we're missing a sense of intimacy, are we creating opportunities for intimacy? Right? Because if we're not doing all of that. We can sit there waiting for someone else to have a brain wave. But chances are that what's happening in today's society is people are so distracted, bored, just dull, or have some numbness to themselves because of their own pain in their life that if you're having the brain wave, if you're having the intuition, chances are you're going to have to inject a bit of that into a relationship, you know, rather than hope, wish and want and wait for the other person and somehow magically create something. And so I, yeah, I really resonate with what you said, and that was just what was coming in my mind. John and Julie, you've been such a pleasure to talk to again today. The book for everyone who's been listening is called The Love Prescription. Seven Days to More Intimacy Connection and Joy, I highly recommend getting this book so you can talk discussed breakdown the seven We only dabbled with a few of them today that I asked John and Julie to expand upon. And of course if you haven't read any of their other work, I'm a big fan of all the books from the Gottman Institute, so please make sure you check those out as well. John and Julie. I'm so grateful to have spend this time with you. I think we shared some really I really enjoyed this discussion today because I feel like, with you being such experts and you get at simplifying things, we could go off in so many different tangents and directions. We spoke about breakups, we spoke about control and manipulation, we talked about dating, we talked about questions. I mean, you know, we talked about so many different aspects of a relationship. And I thank you both so much for your time, your space, and your energy and all the best on launching this book. I hope it goes really really well and grateful to support you as always. Thank you so very much. Jay. I love the wisdom and the depth of your questions which you always bring to your interviews, and we really love receiving that depth and real opportunity to explain all thinking. Thank you, Thank you both so much. Thank you. I'm excited to share this with everyone. At some point in our lives, we all feel lonely. It can be one of the most painful things to experience of course, the strongest antidote to loneliness can be our relationships. But here's the catch, not all relationships actually help. The next seven minutes are about your connections and identifying the ones that don't actually serve you. I'm Jay Chatty. Welcome to the Daily j First, let's center ourselves with three deep breaths inhaling, feeling your energy rise and exhaling the tension away, expanding and releasing, bringing awareness to this moment and settling in. Now for a little story, a traveler is wandering alone in the desert. He's lost, he's tired, but most of all, he's parched. Then suddenly he encounters a mysterious nomad. Hello, stranger. The nomad says, you look thirsty. I can offer you two options. The first is cold water, on the condition that you help me build a sand castle. The second is this bright, sparkling elixir, which you can have for free. The traveler is dehydrated and exhausted. He wonders why anyone would do work when the elixir is free, So he eagerly drinks the turquoise liquid, and it's delicious at first, But after a while, the traveler realizes he's still thirsty. In fact, he's even thirstier than he was before. The nomad says, don't worry, I've got plenty and gives the traveler more to drink. He keeps drinking, but it only intensifies his thirst. Time passes and the traveler remains stuck in the desert, still drinking the elixir and wondering why he has no strength. Now, I'd like to tell you about a different traveler. He's in the same situation, tired, thirsty, lost. He runs into the same mysterious nomad and receives the same two options. Build a sand castle for cold water, or drink the elixir. Construct a sand castle. He ponders, that takes effort. I don't know if I have it in me, but he feels like something's off with the elixir, while he knows that the water is exactly what he needs. So he gets to work, and as promised, he's ultimately rewarded with ice cold water. Feeling rejuvenated, he has the strength to move forward and find his way out of the desert. Time passes, and now he's back home, feasting. Loneliness can feel like a desert, a waste land that SAPs you of your energy, and when you're looking for connection, it can be tempting to rest your head on the first shoulder that comes along, but you need to carefully assess who they are and what you need. Some people may be demanding, others selfish or draining. Some relationships may look appealing, but you need to evaluate what's truly nourishing. I know it can feel like work to forward the foundation of a strong new relationship, especially when you're lonely. The idea of building something can seem exhausting, but the results are worth it. The right relationships are cold water when you're parched. They'll provide you with the strength and nourishment to find your way out of the desert. Now, let's take a moment to meditate and then reflect on your relationships. Start by getting comfortable wherever you are, giving your body permission to find a position of ease, closing your eyes if that helps you settle in or leaving them open. And now I'd like you to scan your body to check in with how you're feeling. So bring your attention to your head, noticing any sensations there, even the sensation of nothing. Move your attention to your face, softening the muscles and seeing what you find. Now scanning down your neck and back, shifting your awareness to your arms all the way down to your fingers. Try opening and closing your hands, observe how that feels. Scan down through your legs to your feet, even your toes, and finally bring your attention to the natural rhythm of your breath. Now, let's open this up. Think about the relationships that quench your thirst and those that don't. Do you find yourself settling in moments of weakness going forward? Can you prioritize the relationships that nourish you and avoid the pull of those that don't. Hopefully the Daily Jay can help you quench your thirst. Please share this message with someone who needs to hear it, and I'll see you tomorrow.