Good Life Project - Reimagining Relationships | Expert Panel

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Would it surprise you to learn that the depth and quality of your relationships is the single biggest determinant of a life well-lived? Well, that’s what one of the longest-running studies on human flourishing, the Grant study, showed. But, chances are, you don’t need data to believe that. You just need to look at your life, and the lives of those around you. Having genuinely open, kind, honest, vulnerable, loving relationships make simply makes life better. And, over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to sit down with many of the leading voices, researchers, and thought-leaders on the topic. To ask them about their experience, insights, awakenings, and strategies. And, today, we’re sharing a powerful relationship roundup with you. We’ll hear about a reimagining of family as a more expansive chosen family of friends and community with Mia Birdsong. We’ll explore how Buddhism’s four noble truths can both guide and transform long-term, loving partnerships with Susan Piver. We’ll discover both the magic and the challenge of creating new true friendships as adults and explore ways to invite more of them into our lives with Kat Vellos. And, we’re kicking things off with Julie and John Gottman, married and collaborating professionally for decades as the founders of the legendary Gottman Institute, often known as the Love Lab that brings together powerful academic research with tens of thousands of hours of practical application. Their science-meets-on-the-gound reality will completely open your mind and give you powerful new ideas and tools to work with. So, let’s dive in.You can find Julie & John Gottman at:Website : https://www.gottman.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/gottmaninstitute/Small Things Often podcast : https://pod.link/1498172564You can find Susan Piver at:Website : https://susanpiver.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/susan.piver/You can find Kat Vellos at:Website : https://weshouldgettogether.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/katvellos_author/You can find Mia Birdsong at:Website : http://www.miabirdsong.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/miabirdsong/More Than Enough podcast : https://pod.link/1494165763If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the full-length conversations we had withJulie & John Gottman : https://tinyurl.com/GLP-GottmansSusan Piver : https://tinyurl.com/GLP-PiverKat Vellos : https://tinyurl.com/GLP-VellosMia Birdsong : https://tinyurl.com/GLP-Mia-Birdsong-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So would it surprise you to learn that the depth and quality of your relationships is the single biggest determinant of a life well-lived? Well, that's what one of the longest-running studies on human flourishing, the Grant study, showed. But chances are, you don't need data to believe that. You just need to look at your life and the life of those around you, especially in our recent experience of life. Having genuinely open, kind, honest, vulnerable, loving relationships simply makes life better.

And over the years, we have had the opportunity to sit down with many of the leading voices, researchers, and thought leaders on this topic to ask them about their experience, their insights, awakenings, and strategies. And today, we are sharing a powerful relationship roundup with you. So we'll hear about a reimagining of family as a more expansive chosen family of friends and community with Mia Birdsong, and we'll explore how Buddhism's Four Noble Truths can both guide and transform long-term loving partnerships. We'll discover both the magic and the challenge of creating new true friendships as adults, and explore ways to invite more of them into our lives with Kat Velas. And we're kicking things off with Julie and John Gottman, married and

collaborating professionally for decades as the founders of the legendary Gottman Institute, which is often known as the Love Lab, that brings together powerful academic research and tens of thousands of hours of practical application. Their science meets on-the-ground reality will completely open your mind and give you a powerful new set of ideas and tools to work with. So let's dive in now, opening up with Julie and John Gottman. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. In a great relationship, even during conflict, the ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions was five to one, five times as much positivity as negativity, even when they're conflicting about something. So a great relationship was something I'd never experienced before. I hadn't met Julie yet, but you know. Let's make that one perfectly clear. That's right. Tell me what you mean by positivity and negativity though.

Well, all the positive emotions like interest in one another, amusement, shared humor, empathy, understanding, kindness, compassion, calming your partner down, reassuring your partner, all kinds of things that people do to be nice to one another, kindness and generosity. All those positive emotions, including joy and ecstasy and things like that, which we rarely observe in a laboratory. And all the negative emotions like hostility and belligerence and domineering and anger and disappointment and sadness and hurt feelings and all those negative things. And those come out in conflict as well. But in unhappy relationships, it's like negativity is like one of those whirlpools that just spiral down and people can't dig out of it. They're caught in this trap, this whirlpool of negativity. But in good relationships, they have so much of a cushion of positive emotion that they can easily escape when negativity hits. They can exit as well as enter. And in unhappy relationships, they can't exit.

They can enter, but they get sucked into it and they can't get out. So that was a real surprise. In a way, those findings are really very simple in describing the differences between happy and unhappy marriages. So to think that we need five of these positive experiences for every negative experience to reach, however we describe healthy. Well, that's only during conflict.

Okay. During non-conflict, it's 20 positives to one negative. Right. How do you define conflict versus non-conflict? Conflict is when you're trying to solve a problem and you have a disagreement. Okay. That's what we mean by conflict. So you're discussing a problem, you have different points of view about it, and you're trying to figure out how to solve it.

That's how we're defining conflict. So during that phase of discussion, the good couples, five to one positive to one negative. And when you're just going about, you know, your everyday interaction, you're cooking in the kitchen, you're, you know, just having fun with the kids, you're hanging out together, that's 20 positives to one negative. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I guess that also introduces this concept from the work that you do of bids. Tell me more. So John and I created on the University of Washington campus an apartment lab. And in this little apartment, we created a room that was very much like a B&B. So people stayed there for 24 hours.

They were, you know, bringing groceries in. They would make meals. There was a TV and so on. And we watched them for 24 hours. So it was just like a B&B, except that we had three cameras bolted to the walls. We took their urine. We took their blood. But other than that, it was a perfect B&B experience, right? And what we noticed in all of the tape we were watching was that people would make these little tiny bids for connection. So at first, you know, we couldn't figure out what were the differences between the successful couples and the ones who

didn't do well, because we were following these couples for years after they came to the apartment lab. And finally, John and a colleague of his figured out that there were these little bids for connection, meaning you might just call your partner's name and see if your partner said, yeah, that's a good response to a bid for connection. Or one person would look out the window because there was a beautiful view outside and might say, wow, look at that fantastic boat going by. And the other person could do one of three things. They could either turn against, which looked like, stop interrupting me, I'm trying to read. Or they could turn away, meaning nothing. There'd be no response whatsoever. Or they could turn away, meaning nothing.

There'd be no response whatsoever or they could turn towards and that would just look like this. Huh, wow, that's all it took. And it made a huge difference. We found that when we followed these couples, the successful couples turned towards each other's bids for connection 86% of the time. 86, that's a lot.

The disastrous couples who ended up really unhappy or divorcing turned towards each other only 33% of the time. See that difference? 53% difference in whether they turned towards or turned away or against. So we saw that this was an incredibly powerful factor in what made relationships successful or disastrous. How much of the result of success versus failure was due to the act of turning towards versus the response to? To me, I guess my curiosity is how much of it was about simply noticing that there was a bid being offered and acknowledging it versus the nature of the response to the bid? Was that something that was even deconstructible? No, not usually.

I mean, basically the unit was the attempt to connect and the response to it. So it's a kind of interaction unit rather than, but it was true, interestingly enough, that in couples where there wasn't much turning toward, there was also not very much bidding. There was not very much attempt to really connect as well. But of course, you know, in all of these findings, these are correlational findings. So we don't know what's causing what, right? Is it the happy relationship that's causing this? So we had to do experiments. And it turns out when you increase the amount of turning toward noticing bids, you know, which is an important part of that, and the willingness to really meet the need that's being expressed, sometimes non-verbally expressed, then a lot of other good stuff increases. So we could really

measure and assess whether these things were causally related or just correlations of being in a happy relationship. So it turns out that these things really are skills. If you build the skills, you'll change the nature of the relationship. That's what Julie and I discovered when we first started working together. Julie, from her, you know, really huge amount of experience doing therapy with the most distressed people, my experience measuring things, put that together and we created a theory with hypotheses about causal connection. And then in 23 years of working together, we could test those out. And mostly we were wrong. So the data were informing both of us. But it was a combination of her clinical experience, her sensitivity for people in pain. And my training and measurement and mathematical modeling of

relationships and statistics combined together experimentally that could create a theory that could help people. Yeah. It's like the super skill of observation, the super skill of coding, sort of like together creates this near magical. Yeah. Let me also point out that because we studied over 3,000 couples, what we could do is look at the successful couples, see exactly what they were doing. Because there were really very clear patterns about what they were doing to make their relationship successful, then we could create exercises and interventions to help those who were distressed to do the same things in their relationships that the successful couples were doing. So we very carefully analyzed what were they doing, created exercises, tested those exercises to see if they

actually worked. And sure enough, they did. And then we began teaching those to couples who came to our workshops, who came to therapy. Yeah. So it's almost like if, John, as you described, when you noticed in the problematic relationships that there were just very low level of bids happening in the first place. And then you do the research to figure out causation versus correlation. Then you can start to understand maybe this is actually more of learned helplessness that you just give up. Right. And then if you can see that, you reverse it and say, okay, if people are learning helplessness, well, then maybe they can also relearn to be constructive together. Beautifully, beautifully put, Jonathan.

What we were really trying to do is create the safety for those couples to actually make more bids for connection so that they could slowly build trust. And teaching the other partner how to respond to those bids, it didn't take a lot. It was just a small little tiny response like, yeah, or uh-huh. That's all it took. And they could change the whole course of their relationship over time. Which seems almost so counterintuitive. You know, it's that hard, yet that easy. Exactly. You've got it. You, at some point along the way, also, I know in the work that you did, you identified these things that you call the four horsemen.

I think it's four horsemen, the apocalypse, right? Right. Can you sort of like walk me through those a bit? Sure. So we found very clear patterns of negative behaviors, negative emotions, and how they were expressed that were the big problem. It wasn't the emotion that was the problem. It was how they were expressed. So let me talk about each one. Criticism is when you put the blame for a problem on a personality flaw of your partner,

right? So an example of that might be something like you're just too lazy. There's the criticism. You're too lazy to clean up the kitchen. So the emotion is frustration that the kitchen is dirty, right? You're blaming a personality flaw, lazy. You're blaming the problem on that personality flaw of your partner. You're too lazy to clean up the kitchen. So it's like an identity level thing. It's a character thing. Okay.

Yes. So there's a character trait that you're seeing in your partner that's very negative, very bad. And all problems come back to that particular flaw in your partner. Okay. You're too selfish. You know, you're so thoughtless. You're so inconsiderate. Those kinds of words are criticisms. And when you express your anger, your frustration, your resentment, and so on, by describing your partner negatively that way, that doesn't work. It creates defensiveness. Defensiveness is the second one.

Defensiveness looks like, I did too clean up the kitchen. So it's kind of righteous victimhood, right? Don't get mad at me. I'm such a good person. So that's one form of defensiveness. Another form of defensiveness is counterattack. You say something like, oh, yeah, well, you didn't pay the bills, right? You're attacking back.

All right. Defensiveness doesn't work. You're not taking any responsibility for the problem at all. You're just saying, no, it's not me, or no, you're bad. I'm good. Right. Right? All right.

The third is contempt, and contempt is the worst. It's like sulfuric acid on a relationship. So contempt is when you're also criticizing your partner, but you're doing it from a place of superiority, of moral superiority. And contempt manifests through sarcasm, through you know, like with an eye roll. That is contempt. And contempt makes the other person feel ashamed. It shames them. It's saying, you know, you're so disgusting to me that I can barely look

at you. That's contempt. And not only does contempt create demise in the relationship, it's also been found in our research to really destroy the immune system of the listener. So the number of times a listener in a relationship hears contempt correlates with how many infectious illnesses they'll have in the next year. So there's a whole secondary immunology thing happening. Yes, that's right. So it's really hurting the immune system. The other person is probably secreting cortisol and adrenaline when they hear that contempt, which erodes the immune system. The other person is probably secreting cortisol and adrenaline when they hear that contempt, which erodes the immune system. So that's the third.

So contempt literally, quite literally, causes physical harm to the other person in the relationship. Yes. Psychological harm and physical harm. You've got it. That's right. So the fourth horseman is what we call stonewalling. And it looks exactly like it sounds. The other partner turns into a stonewall and doesn't give any response whatsoever to what the speaker is trying to say. Now we found out, because John and Bob measured physiology in the lab, we found out that stonewalling, which typically happens more in men than it does in women, is a way that that person is trying to go inside and self-soothe. What we found is when that stonewaller was actually really questioned later on about their experience, they felt like they were facing a saber-toothed tiger who was attacking them. And their heart rates would jump above 100 beats a minute, even though they were sitting there quietly listening to their partner. They'd be aerobically escalated. They'd

be in fight or flight because they felt so attacked and powerless at the same time. So, but my guess is while internally they're just trying to hold on for dear life, externally, it probably presents as something which is disrespect, you know, as something which is, you're not even hearing me, you're shutting down. Like, you know, and it's, it actually probably exacerbates the problem. Exactly. If these are the four things that are massively destructive, what can we do about them? Well, when we look at the masters of relationship, we see we get additional information.

So instead of criticism, most of the time, the masters are reassuring their partner and pointing their finger not at their partner, but at themselves. And having a very gentle beginning to the conflict discussion where they say, hey, Jonathan, don't get upset about this. You know, I love you. You're a great guy. I love this relationship. You know, we're doing fine. It's just that every now and then at dinner, you know, you'll be doing your email.

And that kind of makes me feel unimportant. And I wish you wouldn't do your email during dinner. Positive need. A positive need is there. It's what you're asking for. Let's have conversation during dinner instead of you doing your email and us being disconnected. So a very gentle startup.

But even when the partner was critical among the masters, they would be communicating, okay, you know, well, that makes sense. Sometimes I am kind of selfish. Sometimes I am really thoughtless. You're right. You know, tell me more about what you feel and what you need. They're taking responsibility for the problem. Unlike defensiveness, where they're pushing it back and accelerating, you know, and counterattacking or acting like an innocent victim. They're saying, you know, you're probably right. There are times when I'm not a very good listener. There are times when I'm not a very good partner. Tell me more. I want to hear more. I want to know what you need. A totally different reaction than defensiveness

creates. And then instead of contempt in the apartment lab, we saw them in very small moments, building respect and affection, saying things like, you know, you really look sexy this morning. I'm having all these lewd thoughts about you, or thanks for getting me the butter, or thanks for doing the dishes, or I enjoyed the conversation at dinner. They're doing that. And when they do get physiologically aroused, they're talking about what they need and what they feel. Okay. So they're repairing effectively when things aren't going well rather than stonewalling. So it's a whole different kind of configuration where they're communicating to their partner. You know,

when you're upset, the world stops and I listen and I'm not defensive. I try not to be defensive. So that was kind of what we learned from the good relationships. And part of our research strategy was to oversample unhappy couples and oversample happy couples. So we had enough power statistically to describe what they were doing. And you get all these wonderful recipes that can be useful in therapy from these good relationships. It's not just that they're not doing the four horsemen. It's that they're doing additional things that actually build that positive climate of acceptance, understanding, shared humor, all those kinds of things that really work to make understanding much more likely. Let me add a little bit more to that. So for both

criticism and contempt, you know, typically there's anger and resentment. There's sadness and so on. There's typically a need that's going on that they're trying to express, but they're doing it the wrong way. So we saw there was a formula, actually, that John is describing. Here's the formula. I feel something. I feel upset. I feel stressed. I feel upset. I feel stressed. I feel angry. I'm worried.

I'm threatened. I'm frustrated. I feel, I feel. About what? They describe the situation objectively. I feel angry that the kitchen is a mess. I feel frustrated that there's a new dent in the car. Then they say, here's what I need. And when they express their need, they're expressing it positively. So they don't say what they don't need, what they don't want.

I don't want you leaving the kitchen a mess. That's a negative need. The positive need, they flip it on its head. They say, I would love it if you would wipe down the counters after dinner. They tell their partner what their partner can do to shine for them, you see. And that's a whole nother message. Doesn't make the person feel defensive. They're describing themselves, their feeling, then the situation, and the positive need that can help the partner shine for them. Thank you both.

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Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just

15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So I love the different lenses that Julie and John bring to the kind of the invitation to cultivate lasting, loving relationships. And next up, we have a chance to learn from New York Times bestselling author of nine books, longtime Buddhist practitioner and teacher and founder of the largest virtual mindfulness community in the world, The Open Heart Project. She's also a dear friend, Susan Piver. Susan has been featured on

Oprah Today, speaks around the world and leads teachings and retreats on Buddhism, meditation, relationships, and the essential practices of a life well-lived. And in this moment in our conversation, we're focusing in on her deeply unusual and wise application of Buddhism's four noble truths in the context of loving partnerships and marriage. So many ahas and reframes to discover. So here's Susan. As a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a longtime wife, I will have been a Buddhist for like 22 years and a wife for like 20 years, basically, as of right now. But as a longtime Buddhist practitioner, where there are millions of teachings on wisdom and loving kindness and how to be a good person, I just noticed in many people, including myself, it all sort of falls apart when you go home and look into the eyes of the person you're in a relationship with. Like, we're Buddhists except for right now. Exactly. Except for when you drop all your crap all over the floor, then I'm really, you know,

it's weird how your big mind sort of devolves into little petty pissy fits. And you know, why is that? Why is it actually the hardest to love the person that you love is a question that I've always been interested in. And also, I wanted to be happy in my own relationship. I want to be a good partner and I want to be happy in my own relationship. But we go through phases, you probably have no idea what this is like, where we just don't like each other. Where it's like, who are you again? And why am I sitting here talking to you? Because everything you do irritates me and nothing you say makes any sense.

It's like suddenly you find yourself in this place where you're very distant from each other. And one time, Duncan, my husband and I, were in one of those places for a long time, like months. I mean, I think I wrote in the book, we fought about everything. And once we even fought about what time it was. Yeah, I remember reading that. I'm like, how do you do that? How low do you have to go to make that a point of contention. So I was really upset and I didn't know what to do. Nothing that we tried worked. And one day I was literally sitting at my desk crying, thinking, I don't even know how to begin fixing this.

And it sounded like also the way you described sort of like that window, that it wasn't where you could point to something and say, oh, this is what it's about. This is what it's about. It's almost like it's this non-specific sustained thing. That is so right. That is so right. There's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. There's these little slights, little slights. You blow by that one. And then suddenly, shit breaks loose. And it just blows up. And then because it's so weird, you just struggle to find some, well, it's because you did this or I did that. But at least for me, I don't think that there is such an explanation. There's more like the weird irritation of trying to be close to someone else every single day creates this weird tension. I don't know. Does that sound right to you? Yeah. I think we're married actually probably similar amounts of time. We're working on

21 years this year, actually. Congratulations. Yeah, it's really interesting how everything changes and everything evolves. And we're going to get a lot more into that. So you get to a point where you're just kind of like, what? Exactly. What? Exactly. I'm thinking, literally, I don't know where to even start

because I've tried everything. And then I heard myself say, I hesitate to say I heard a voice because there was nobody there but me, but something inside me said, begin at the beginning. At the beginning are four noble truths. I kid you not. And to me as a longtime practitioner, that meant something because the entire Buddhist path is built around something called the Four Noble Truths, which I'm sure you know. And I'd never thought that they had anything to do with relationships. Life is suffering. Grasping creates suffering. It's possible to stop suffering. There's an eightfold path for doing so. Right view, right intention,

and so on. Didn't think it had anything to do with my love life. But then in this moment, it's like those teachings kindly reformed themselves in my mind to apply to my relationship. So I wrote them down. Tell me more about just the basics of these four noble truths. Sure. Happily. So when the Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago, and he went back to his practicing posse, not sure what they called themselves, and he was apparently enlightened, they could tell. They said, what did you learn? What did you see? He said, I saw four things.

Number one, life is suffering, which is really easy to interpret as life sucks or life is awful. But upon great investigation, I conclude that that is not what he meant. He meant that everything changes. There's nothing to hold on to. And everything we do to create stability or ground with this relationship or that home or this degree or this amount of money, it's all going to dissolve and it's very painful. So that's the first noble truth. Life is suffering, aka everything changes. The second noble truth is the cause of suffering, which is called grasping, which basically means

not wanting the first noble truth to be true or pretending that it isn't. Well, okay, maybe that's true for you, but I am going to construct this fortress for myself that is inviolate and so forth. So you hold on to what you think will make you happy and try to push away the things that you think won't. And that's called grasping. And that is actually the cause of suffering, not the suffering itself, not the loss, not the dissolution. Painful though it may be, the real cause is holding on. The third noble truth is called the cessation of suffering, which means, oh, you can stop. Now you know the cause, you also know the cure. Stop grasping. Of course, much easier said than done, but just mathematically, that's the answer to how you stop suffering. And then the fourth

noble truth is called the Eightfold Path, which is how you actually do that. How do you stop grasping? And I don't know if I can say them all, but right intention, right view, right speech, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right mindfulness, right wisdom. All those rights have a vast canon of knowledge around them, and you could study one for your whole life. And if you do those eight things, just like the Buddha, you got the same trick bag. You too could attain liberation from suffering. So it's the whole path right there. So you go from this place of, thank you for that overview of the Four Noble Truths, by the way. I want to take you back to that dark place where you had this big awakening.

Okay, cool. So you go from saying, okay, so I don't know which way is up with my loving partner. Somebody give me an answer. You go back to the beginning, the four noble truths come to you, but you take that and then create this additional overlay so that they become, it feels like much more relevant to the context of relationships. Yeah. It really helped me to look at them this way. So four noble truths have a kind of sequencing. There's a truth, the cause of the truth, the cessation of the suffering connected to the truth, and how to do it. The truth, the cause, the cure, and how. So when I took those into my marriage, what they looked like was the truth. Relationships are uncomfortable, period.

You know, if you, of course, we were just talking about the ordinary irritation of just living with someone. You've been in a relationship for 20 plus years. You're like, why are you doing that thing again that you said you would never do? Why are we having this argument again? There's just this discomfort, this everyday and beyond everyday discomfort. But if you haven't even ever met the person, like you're going on a blind date, there's already discomfort. What if they don't like me? What if they do like me? And so on and so forth. So in every phase of relationship, there's discomfort. That's the truth. That's the first truth.

Relationships are uncomfortable. I'm just sort of like the umbrella of the first noble truth of love. You also talk about this thing called the three poisons. Tell me about this. Yeah. Also a classical Buddhist teaching. These three poisons, and we each have our poison of choice, although we all have all three poisons. These are the things we do to throw roadblocks in our own way. And they're called passion, sometimes also called grasping, aggression, and ignorance or numbness. So these are three neurotic reactions we have to the things that upset us. Rather than opening to them and experiencing them and letting them form us and responding to them and so on, we have things that were like, the passion part is, I need this. I must have it. If I don't have it, I'll die. Getting super

attached in the neurotic way, not in the wonderful way, to particular outcomes or to the prevention of particular outcomes. So that's poison number one. And of course, in a relationship, it's really easy to hang on the person's every word. Does this mean you like me? Oh, this means it's over. This means it's great. So there's this intensity, this grasping of the moment as proof that you're either going

to leave me or you're going to continue to love me. Nobody particularly cares for that, giving or receiving. The second poison aggression is meeting the things that could hurt you with a sense of, I'm going to destroy that. I'm just going to decimate it. I'm going to get it out of my way. Ixnay, whatever it takes. Aggression. I'm going to move against it. I'm going to get it out of my way. Ixnay, whatever it takes. Aggression, I'm going to move against it. Okay. We all do it. Some people, that's their default response. The first two,

passion and aggression, you can kind of work with because you can kind of see them. The third one is most insidious, ignorance. The poison of just shutting down, turning off, turning away, avoidant. This is my particular poison of choice, so I'm familiar with it. Just not happening. I'm going to do something else. That's the opaque, difficult poison. But we do all three of these things, and it would be very painful to think, well, I got to stop doing those three things because there's no passion, aggression, ignorance switch. So if anybody wants to work with the poisons, the best place, the only place to start is by just noticing them, noticing when you employ them, noticing them when they are employed against you and just starting to learn their texture and their personality and get to know them makes it much easier to work with them.

And these are all sort of, I guess, the poisons, you could also translate them as common and destructive reactions to having to face the first noble truth of love. Exactly. They are common reactions to fear. Okay. Second noble truth of love. Thinking that relationships should be comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable. So, of course, I hope everyone's relationship makes them happy and comfortable and so on, and I want to be comfortable and happy and all that, but I don't think that that's necessarily the job of deep, romantic, intimate love.

However, when most of us say we're looking for love, we don't normally mean that, according to my anecdotal observation. We're looking for safety. We're looking for someone to make us feel that everything's okay, or someone with whom we can sort of turn our back on certain trials and tribulations and make a cocoon. And okay, those things are great, but if there's one thing I have learned about love and that I can say with great certainty about love is that it is not safe. There's no way to make it safe. And the minute you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love and starts to look more like some sort of a transaction.

I will do this and you will do that and so forth and so on. And I don't know what that's called. I just don't think it's called love. So we think, well, if only it was comfortable, if only you didn't have this behavior, if only I could make that amount of money, or we lived in this house, or you stopped jiggling your foot every time you talked to me or whatever, whatever crazy things, which you are not doing, by the way, whatever crazy things. I'm looking down at my foot right now. I looked at it too.

No jiggling here. Then we would be fine. Sure, okay, work on your problems, your foot jiggling and your money problems. Work on those things. I hope you solve them all. But thinking that when you do, everything will be cool, that's where the problem comes in because the weirdest thing

that I ever learned about a relationship, and I'm fixing to tell you what it is right now, this drove me crazy. They never stabilize. They never stabilize. So I thought, well, we'll be in this relationship. We'll get to know each other. We'll have these kinks. We'll work them out. And then at some point it is fine until it is not. And I can't predict what weather fronts are going to blow through this now close to 25 year relationship with someone I know really well and who knows me really well. I still can't predict. I could be really nice and kind and sweet and sort of get a blank stare. I can be a complete ass and just see him looking at me with the eyes of love.

There's no telling. It doesn't stabilize. It never does because it's alive. So trying to get it to stabilize, like let's make it perfect and then hold, actually is what creates the discomfort. The discomfort's not the problem. Thinking it should be comfortable is. Third noble truth of love. Third noble truth of love. Remember, in the Buddhist sense, it's the cure. Meeting the discomfort together is love. That's the third

noble truth. So normally we look, so there's a problem. I look at you, I go, this is your fault. Or it's my fault. I'm really sorry. Let's dispel this discomfort by assigning blame. And once we assign the blame, we're like 90% on the way to solving the problem. It's like, all right, now that we've cleared that up. Okay, problem solved. Let's have dinner.

What do you want? Exactly. Next fight. Exactly. It's so hilarious. How could you possibly eat that? We have been there a billion times. But if a great partner in my mind is not someone who will blame you or take blame, or, but one who will sort of stop looking at you and turn, my visual is you turn and you put shoulder to shoulder and you look at the problem and you meet it together and you see, oh, now we really love each other. Or now I really love you, but you don't seem to be that

interested in me. Now we don't like each other. Now we seem to be in love again. Now we just want to be apart. There's these incredible waves that roil and roll through the relationship on a daily basis, a minute-to-minute basis, certainly a yearly basis. And to ride that together, to me, that's the ultimate love. We're on this ride together. And I'm feeling this way about it, and you're feeling that way about it, and now it's beautiful, and now it's not. To me, that's an incredibly loving partner. That's a beautiful thing to do. That's a companion.

Yeah. Take us to the fourth. Fourth noble truth is the path. There's a way to work with it. And it's not an eightfold path, although I do apply the eightfold path stages to relationships, like what is right view and relationship and so on. But there's a threefold path that, to me as a meditation teacher, mirrors actually the practice of meditation, which has three particular qualities,

which I will just mention briefly. The first is meditation is precise. You're a meditator. I know you know this. You place attention on the object of your meditation, which in most cases is the breath or could be a mantra or an image. So it's very one-pointed. You place your attention on the breath or the mantra, whatever it is, and if you stray into anything, it's considered thinking. So you come back. Foo! Super precise. One-pointed.

From that, oddly, something interesting happens. You sit there being one-pointed, allowing yourself to be exactly as you are. From that, oddly, something interesting happens. You sit there being one-pointed, allowing yourself to be exactly as you are. You like yourself, you don't like yourself, you're distracted, you're not distracted. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Because to meditate, you don't have to stop thinking. Please, if you think that, stop thinking that.

You just sit there with yourself as you are. You open. And from this precision, the ability to open arises magically. Meditation is famously associated with insight, sometimes called the practice of insight. So from this one-pointedness, this openness of mind happens. Insight arises. It's quite expensive. The third quality is called letting go. Because you put your attention on the breath, you let yourself be as you are, then you notice

you're distracted. That's awesome. You just woke up. The instruction is let go. Letting go is very profound. Because then you let go and you're in space for a moment till you come back to your object, breath, or mantra. Letting go is the lesson of being human. Letting go, letting go, letting go. So precise, open, letting go. In a relationship, what do these things mean? So the precision is the foundation of meditation.

The foundation of a relationship, in my mind, is very simple. It starts with good manners. That may sound really cheesy. It's, am I actually thinking of you and what you are experiencing and how I might be kind to you? Am I noticing you? Good manners are a profound form of thoughtfulness. And you actually think about the person. It's radical. If you don't have that, it's very hard to establish the foundation of a relationship. So it's like the focused awareness in a very directed way. Exactly.

Without an agenda. And also to be honest, like to say the truth when you know it and to say it skillfully, not blurtingly. Those are the precise, aback when I realized how this came into play, which was to imagine that the person you're in a relationship with is of at least equal importance to yourself. Shocking! Oh, you're there. I'm going to be open to you. I'm going to be open to you. I'm going to be open to you. And the third step, and the book has more suggestions than this, is letting go. I find this very interesting, personally. As we were talking about, romance ends.

Just does. Sorry. But intimacy has no end. The letting go piece in a relationship is letting go constantly of how you think it ought to have gone, to be with what is, in such a way that everything you encounter, wonderful experiences, detrimental experiences, loss, boredom, confusion, everything that you encounter together can actually be used to deepen intimacy, which has no end and that you can commit to for a lifetime. You can't commit to romance.

You can't commit to any feeling, but you can commit to deepening intimacy. That made me very happy when I realized that. I could do that, honestly. I can't honestly say, yeah, I'll always love you, but I will always try to act lovingly towards you or see you or be with you or stay near you as you go through what you go through and we and I go through things that I can commit to. So that to me was very, very hopeful. So precise, open, let go. This all emerged out of your own seeking to try and understand which way it was up in your own relationship and trying to figure out, how do I understand this? How do I navigate it? How do I be in it or not be in it? But how do I at least figure out how to be okay with this person in this moment and maybe in another, another, another, another? And wow, when I go back to the beginning, this whole idea kind of jumps out at you. You start to apply it in the context of your own relationship. and like you said also um duncan is not a buddhist were you sort of were you actively and openly saying okay i am now sort of engaging in the four noble truths of love in the relationship and

sharing with him what you were doing and how you were doing it and say come come do this with me or was this just huh here's a bit of wisdom let me try it on for size in relationship and maybe he'll pick up on what's happening and not. And if he wants to engage in any of these reciprocally, awesome. And if not, that's fine too. How did this then turn around and unfold in the context of your relationship? Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. There's actually a great benefit to being married to a non-practitioner, quote unquote, when you are a practitioner of something, in my case, Buddhism. And the great value is that you cannot bullshit them with Dharma notions. You cannot unload some Dharma stuff on them and think that it will mean

anything. You have to be those things. So I didn't say, hey, baby, I've discovered the four noble truths of love. Let me tell you what they are. Instead, I started acting like discomfort was part of the deal and looking at it together was loving and meeting it together could deepen our intimacy, sort of doing those things. Luckily, he is, I'm not saying this to be humble, he is much more loving naturally than I am. He's more relational. He's more naturally attuned to the dynamics of a relationship than I am. So I didn't have to convince him of anything, but it was more the way I showed up. And of course, the way you show up

has much more impact on the way someone else shows up than any charts and graphs that you can unroll about. This is my theory of relationships, which is basically useless. It's useless, the theory. The practice is the only thing that matters. So all I had to do, which is not a small thing, I'm not trying to minimize it. All I had to do was just try to do these things. And it changed things for us. Yeah. I love the idea of the Four Noble Truths applied to the context of love. And I'm actually

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Such powerful insights from Susan. If you're starting to feel that getting deep friendships rolling and cultivating lasting love or powerful yet also complicated, well, you're not alone. So often we focus on those intimate loving relationships, but if we zoom the lens out, well, what about friendship? Not the superficial colleagues or social media followers that you kind of know, but don't really. We're talking about legitimate, deep, enduring, vulnerable, and honest friendship. Those make life so rich, and yet they're not the easiest to create as adults.

So we had an amazing conversation with Kat Velas, who is a UX designer and author, and she shares really powerful insights into how we can continue to seed new friendships as the pace of life picks up and we're all feeling crunched. I love this because Kat takes her user experience design and pulls it out of the world of technology or products or business and applies it to the quest to create friendship. And the lens and the insights and the tools are really powerful. You use this term platonic longing that I thought was fascinating. Tell me more about it. So this came out of a lot of the research and interviews I had with people about their

friendships. Because like I said, I got kind of fascinated with the topic of friendship when I started having difficulty with it here. And being a curious person, I would ask other people, like, what is your experience of community like? What is your experience of friendship like? And over and over, there was this very nuanced description that people were giving for what they were experiencing and feeling. And it wasn't always loneliness, even though, you know, we're in a loneliness epidemic. There's a lot of that in our community in America, but people didn't always feel lonely because they had say coworkers that they got along with, or they had a roommate that they got along with, or they were in a relationship. But when they were craving for a really intimate friendship, feeling safe, feeling heard and seen,

feeling comfortable sharing anything, whether it's a happy day or an angry day, and knowing that they would be accepted and still loved and held by that friend, or feeling cared about in a time of need. This was a very, very specific ache. This was an unmet need and a hunger for a specific type of connection that was missing. And it was the friendship connection, which is why I call it platonic longing. So it's different than, you know, we know unrequited longing, which is always just given a romantic frame, this, you know, this longing for a partner or a lover or whatever. And what was here was this longing for like a really, really deep friendship love.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you use the word friendship love. I remember a couple of years back doing some research on love and seeing it sort of deconstructed into these four types of love. There was compassionate love, which is the one that sort of allows you to feel empathy and very often inspires altruism. There was romantic love, which is what most of us think about when we talk about love. There was attachment love, which is simply just this really long-term dynamic. And then there was companionate love.

But I don't think most people think about that companionate slash friendship as love. But it really is. And it seems like when I hear platonic longing, what I hear is almost like the precursor is that we haven't quite accepted the fact that real friendship is about love rather than just like, you know, like kind of hanging out and doing fun things and shared interests. And it's that deeper, genuine love that we're really longing for. Because I think so many of us don't actually acknowledge that that is in fact a quality of genuine friendship because it's a little bit scary, I think. Yeah. I mean, when we look at the culture that we're in, there's so much emphasis and validation for wanting, say, a romantic love or wanting to have a partnership. And there's almost this shame or embarrassment

about wanting a best friend or admitting that you don't have the kind of intimate friendships or close friendships that you really want. And I think that's really telling. There's something there that I think needs healing in our society and that I sincerely hope we can transform so that people can feel just as comfortable saying like, yeah, I'm looking for a boyfriend or a girlfriend as they're saying like, yeah, I'm looking for my bestie or I'm looking for a close friend, you know, and to understand that just as much as we crave that love to come from another, and we have that love to give to another, that we, the same is true in friendship and that it should be safe and acceptable and comfortable to admit that that is an extremely, extremely valuable source of love in our lives.

Yeah, so great. I mean, it's interesting because you also, so this starts as a personal issue for you. This is like, okay, so what's happening with me? Your design mind, like human centered, it's sort of like zooms, it sounds like zooms the lens out and says, huh, this can't just be about me. Let me really dive into this and start to see what's going on. I want to talk about some of the things that you discovered. But also, I guess part of your research project revealed that this in fact is not just about you. The statistics on adult friendship and loneliness, especially in the US, are kind of horrifying right now. Yeah, they really, really are. And even in the short time that I was working on my book and

researching this topic so deeply, it was shocking to me how quickly I would see the stats changed in the process of writing the book. I had to go back and update the stats because they were getting worse. And I was like, what is happening? This is not okay. For how many people feel like nobody understands them? How many people feel like they have no one to turn to in a time of need? How many people feel like they don't have the number of friends that they want in their life?

Or how many people like haven't made a new friend in however many years? And it was really moving and really motivating as well. You know, and when I started out that project, one of the things I've learned as a user researcher and someone who's just generally curious about people all the time is that whenever one person's having a problem, they're usually not the only one. You know, when I have a friend who describes like, oh, I can never figure out how to use this website or this thing always confuses me. What's wrong with me? And I'm like, there's nothing wrong with you. It has to do with the way that thing was designed. And you're probably not the only one.

And I've seen this over and over again. And so as I followed that thread of curiosity to what does this mean? What does friendship look like for people? What does connection look like for people? And the more I heard people saying over and over that it was not, say, meeting their satisfaction level or exceeding their satisfaction level. To me, it was just like any other usability issue where it's like, oh, I'm like manipulating this thing and like forcing it to be a certain way. But it's like with intentionality, because that's what I believe design is, is the art of intentionality and bringing that purpose and intention to creating a certain desired outcome. When we're kids, maybe our friendships just happen. But in adulthood, there's way too many like distractions and responsibilities and challenges. And if you don't bring any intention, it's not just going to magically happen. And so that's where my curiosity led me. And what I'm

hoping to draw people into is understanding that like, there actually is some control that you have here. There is a way to be intentional in how you create it and what you bring into your life and what you bring into your friendships in that way. We're not really taught how to do these things in adulthood. Growing up, unless you're lucky enough to go to a super progressive Montessori school or something, there's no education about how to navigate these things. How do you build trust? How do you demonstrate commitment? How do you handle conflict resolution? Knowing that things are not going to go perfect all the time. You know, people will disappoint us.

We are going to disappoint people. Sometimes our communication will be great and other times it's going to be real crappy, you know, but how do we fix these problems and how do we create real durable friendships and relationships? It's not something that we're taught. And unless somebody gets inspired to go to therapy or read a bunch of self-help books or is lucky enough to have people in their life who are incredibly skilled demonstrators of these skills and can role model that for them, a lot of people are just stuck, you know, figuring it out on their own or just feeling confused about, like, how do we do this? And how do I bring this up in a room full of other people when I don't know how they feel about it? Or will I look like the weirdo, you know, if I say the thing and people like, uh, whatever. So it's so important that we make it acceptable to talk about and make it a shame-free experience to bring up and to express and to say, like, I'm learning and growing and I'm messing up. And how are you guys doing? And can we work on this together?

And let that be okay. Yeah. I feel like it's, I so agree. And I feel like so often we look at people who seem to just make friends everywhere they go. And we're kind of like, they're the haves and the have-nots. Like, they're the people that just, you either know how to do it and everyone gravitates you, or you don't. It's not a skill. It's not something that you create, with these elements of compatibility and frequency and commitment and proximity. And I think these are sort of like the, some of the, some of those skills or some of the conditions. Tell me more about those.

So I'm a gardener and for many years, as I've trained and learned more about plants, it's really taken over my metaphors that I use to process life. And one of the things that was apparent to me when I was coming across some of the research about how many hours it takes to make a close friend, one of the studies was saying it takes 200 hours to make a friend, to go from a stranger to really feel like a close friend. And the study was done with college students who had access to each other on a much more frequent basis than most typical working adults. And I was like, wow, I was like, how am I going to share this without anybody feeling completely demotivated or like deflated when

they hear that? Because they're like, where am I going to get 200 hours from? And the metaphor that came to my mind was around hydroponics because, you know, we know now that you can grow a plant in water without soil. But when that thought was first introduced, you know, it was like laughable. People were like, how on earth could you grow a plant without soil? That's crazy. Like you should never say that again. That's bananas. Nobody will ever do that. But of course it's true and it works. And the way it works is because you give the plant the nutrients that it might've otherwise absorbed from the soil. You just put it in the water and then it grows which is what most adults feel like they're lacking to put into their friendships and that 200 hours is going to be kind of freaky and scary for them. In the absence of that much time, what could we do to create a close friendship instead? And hydroponic friendship is the notion that if you're short on time, you can amp up or feed your plant, right? These nutrients that it needs instead.

And so those are experiences of vulnerability and intimacy and like shared experiences and the things that are also shown in research to help people bond and feel a sense of belonging with each other. And if you purposely increase those things in a condensed amount of time, people can get closer quicker. And I've seen it happen. I've seen it as a facilitator at summer camps. I've seen it as a facilitator at adult programs where when you're in a containerized space, that's like, hey, this is our social contract. This is how we're going to be together for this amount of time. This is how we'll share. This is how we'll accept, communicate, et cetera. People can. They get a lot closer,

a lot quicker. And it's always this kind of time warp, mind bending experience to be in a situation like that where you're talking to somebody and you're like, wow, after a few hours, you feel like you've known them for 10 years. And I've seen this happen, facilitating spaces that are intentional around how we use conversation and what are the things that we talk about and how do we connect? And because I'd seen it happen over and over again in facilitated spaces, this is why I believe that it's possible in friendship as well. If people bring that same intention and mutual agreement around how we will contribute to each other in this, you know, thing we're doing together and then build a friendship more quickly.

Yeah, we've seen this happen also. I got really fascinated, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, there was a modern love piece in the New York Times that exploded, went massively viral by Mandy Lynn, where she discovered these, what are now known as the 36 questions. So researcher Arthur Ahrens out of Stony Brook University wanted to see if he could cultivate real intense intimacy between perfect strangers in a remarkably short period of time. So he manufactures these 36 questions that are designed in three sets of 12 that kind of progressively step you into vulnerability and

revealing more. And then at the end of it, you gaze into each other's eyes. I think it was for four minutes. And I was fascinated because the research showed, as soon as I read the story, then I went and actually looked up all the research and I read all the studies. And it showed that people who had done that, college students who were total strangers before, felt after like an hour with this person that they knew each other more deeply and had stronger friendships than people they had known for years. That's after an hour with just the right conditions and the right prompts, which is kind of mind blowing when you really think about it. It says a lot about the power inherent in purposeful interaction.

Yeah. was a micro version of what you're describing there called milling, where people just walk around a space and you pair them periodically to answer questions that increase in intimacy and self-disclosure from very light to something a little bit more meaningful than something that's kind of close to the heart. And it's like a 15 minute activity that seriously, in the same way, people would come in as strangers. And then like before you're even halfway into a program, they feel like they've made a new friend that they can't wait to hang out with again. They want to trade phone numbers. And then I built out from there, like this experience called Better Than Small Talk. Cause I struggle with small talk as an introvert, I don't like it. And so creating like an evening experience based on that kind of interaction was some, one of the other

experiments I did when I came to the Bay Area, because I was like, I'm not sure I'm not the only one who doesn't like small talk. So if that's you, like raise your hand, like come in this room and know that here you are free from that. And you'll be provided with like hundreds of alternatives and a willing set of people who are also bought in to saying like, let's be together in a different way. Like let's have a different kind of conversation. And when you create a gathering with that kind of purpose and that mutual intention and a set of tools to help, right? So the questions, the guides, the invitation, magic can happen. It really can. I've seen it over and over again.

And people self-select, right? If you're really clear about the intention and the quote rules of the game or rules of engagement and you offer the prompts, by the time people show up to participate in that, they've already opted in to a certain extent to being uncomfortable. And to saying, I don't know, I don't really know how to do this. And I also, but I mean, I think what's even more stunning to me is they're also kind of saying I'm lonely because it's, I have to imagine it's part of why you're showing up, which is a profound act of vulnerability to do that before you even know who else is going to be there. And it's also this act of, I think, hope, you know, of believing that like, even if you feel lonely or even if you've lived here for two, three years and don't feel like you have your people yet or your friends yet, it's an act of hope to say, you know, I haven't given up yet. I'm still going to put myself out there and I'm still going to try. And I find that incredibly just inspiring and really motivating to keep doing the work and to keep creating opportunities for people to step into when they say they're willing to step out.

Yeah. I love the whole part of that because it is. I think there's this sense, I think, after a while to just drop into a sense of futility. Like, oh, this is just what it's like to be a grownup. We don't get to have that level of friendship or that level of community, that level of chosen family. As adults, it was great while it was there as a kid, but that's not what being a grownup is about. But in fact, it is. And that sense of hope, that possibility, right? That, well, maybe this can sustain for life. Maybe I can recreate it in all its different versions as I move through all the different stages of my own life. Yeah, that is an act of profound hope. I hope that it'll be true in my life. I hope that I'll continue to make deep friendships over the decades and will continue to experience new things with really

different kinds of people and to be surprised and to be challenged and to be pushed to grow and to continually evolve, you know, and to say, you know, the best years of our life are not in the past. The best friendships of our life don't exist in some like sepia tone photo from the past, you know, like they can still be created today and they can still be created tomorrow. Yeah. Thank you. So I love the way Kat approaches adult friendship as a design problem to be solved and then shares real actionable advice.

And we're going to bring this conversation home with Pathfinder community curator and storyteller Mia Birdsong. Mia Birdsong is a founding co-director of Family Stories, where Mia lifted up a new national story about what makes a good family. And as a vice president of the Family Independence Initiative, she leveraged the power of data and stories to illuminate and accelerate the initiative low-income families take to improve their lives. Her public conversations, like the New America series centering Black women as agents of change, and her 2015 TED Talk, The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn't True, drew a lot of attention to the stories of people who are finding their way into leadership

roles despite myriad barriers, while also highlighting the vibrant terrain of all marginalized people who are leading on the ground and solving for tomorrow. She is fiercely focused on re-imagining the notion of family as a more expansive and inclusive community, a chosen family, an invited family. And right now, we all need people in our lives who feel like family as we move into this next season. So excited. So let's hear a bit of our conversation with Mia Birdsong. So I ask people this all the time. I'm like, what makes a good family? The first thing everyone says is love. And then they talk, people who will be there for you. They talk about people who care about you, people who will support you. And like, you know, if you're trying to do something new, like they and they have biological children. No one has ever said that to me. And granted, like I'm not talking to like right wing fundamentalists,

but I think all of us fundamentally know that it is the function of family that is important, not the structure. And the fact is that the kind of insular nuclear family is a very recent invention. The idea that two people will provide, like all of the things that we need from human beings, that we would get it from like one other adult, and that two people can raise children is just like on its face absurd. Like that's never in human history ever been the case. We've always had extended families. We've always had chosen family, but always had family with people who are like in our tribe who we weren't necessarily biologically related to. We have always, and when I, you know, I'm talking about like thousands of years of human history, we've always collectively raised children. So the nuclear family really is this like bizarre, unnatural anomaly. And it is not serving us.

Because, you know, unless you are the very small percentage of people who has one person in your life who can be, you know, the person who you are romantically and sexually attracted to, and then like, actually have good sex with, the person who you are romantically and sexually attracted to, and then like actually have good sex with, the person who you can be roommates with, and manage a household with, and co-mingle your finances, and travel with, and be your best friend, and your confidant, and then if you have kids, raise kids with. Like that is too many roles for two people to fill, to both fill for each other. So, you know, what I see is that a lot of folks who are trying to do that are deeply unhappy because they're not actually getting their needs met. And they don't recognize, and this is particularly true of

straight men, and they don't really recognize that there are other ways for them to get some of those needs met. You know, like, I'm a terrible roommate. Like my, you know, my husband and I have lived together for like 20 years. But in some other configuration of our marriage, and in a world where housing was not so incredibly expensive, like it might be better for us to like, you know, live in a duplex. and I could make my mess upstairs and he could keep his, you know, part neat downstairs. So part of it is about reimagining, but part of it is also recognizing that we actually used to do something else. So I think of it as both kind of understanding and looking to like our ancestral history and seeing how, you know, our people did things before and then

re-imagining those structures and ways of being in relationship with each other for a modern life, right? So for what actually fits our lives. Yeah. So it's more, it's really more of a questioning of why we're doing it the way we're doing it when we have so much history of doing it differently and very arguably experiencing our lives in so many different ways and levels better. I mean, it's interesting because also there's this expectation that's set, I think now that, you know, if you shouldn't, you know, quote, should be able to get everything you need from this nuclear family and you don't, you know, you're feeling lonely, you're feeling stressed, you're feeling overwhelmed, all the different things that, you know, like pretty

much everyone tends to feel at some part of their journey in this sort of like small tight family. If you don't feel those, then you judge yourself a failure. And then you layer on top of that this all of these ways in which our, our culture, our, the design of like, you know, houses and cars, and certainly all the like benefits that exist in our culture are really created for and orient us toward the insular nuclear family. And there are a hell of single people in America who are having to just like navigate systems that weren't made for us and who are having to kind of exist in a culture that says that they're a failure, right? That says that there's something wrong with them. And not only is it saying that, but lots of folks also internalize that and assume that there's something wrong with them or feel as if their life is incomplete because they don't have a partner or they, you know, used to and because they don't have a partner or they, you know, used to and now they don't. And I think that is like, there's so many ways. And I mean,

one of the stories in my book that I love is my friend Deanna, who is does not have a partner, does not have a romantic sexual partner, but like her and her friend Cynthia are each other's plus one. They talk about retirement. They text each other every day. They have made this friendship that they have fill the role that many people look to a romantic and sexual partner for. And they both, you know, date people and have, you know, have had other relationships, romantic and sexual relationships, but this friendship between them is primary. And I love that. I just love the model of that. And largely, like so much, so many of the stories that I tell in the book, and the book is, you know, mostly stories. It's mostly the stories that I found that helped me understand and answer the

questions that I had about creating family and community. They're just these models that they're not like blueprints for us, right? They're not like, oh, like, this is what this person did. I'm going to go and replicate it. But it really is about having enough examples that allow us to expand our understanding of what's possible. And then we can kind of get into our own, you know, personal inquiry about what is it that I actually want in my life, right? One of the things that I learned from a bunch of the folks who I talked to about friendship was about kind of like getting rid of the very narrow confines of how we think about what a friendship is and what it's for.

And actually thinking about, you know, the people who, like, I think about what a friendship is and what it's for. And actually thinking about, you know, the people who like, I think about the people who I consider close friends, and like, be in conversation with them about like, what is the culture of our friendship? Like, what are the expectations we have of each other? What can we count on each other for? What are the boundaries that we have? And that's expanded the relationships I have with those people into places that do not fit into, you know, kind of the American box of what we say a friend is. And I love the depth of those relationships. I love the kind of intimacy that that's created between me and folks, both because we're like, we're actually having conversations about our relationship, but also because we realize like, oh, here's a, here's a thing that we want from this,

this relationship that is not, that we wouldn't have discovered if we hadn't had this conversation about like, how do we be friends? How do we be friends? Yeah. I mean, so you're really blurring the line, you know? So instead of, you know, okay, so here's the box for family, here's the box for friends, here's a box for acquaintances. It's it's just saying okay so let's throw it up against the wall and let's fundamentally ask the question what do i want and need from the relationships in my life what am i open to giving and then how do i how do i just construct it in a way from like the the universe of people who are in my orbit exactly that feels good that gives me and that gives them what they need. And whether we call that family, whether we call it friends, who really cares at that point? But that requires,

I mean, it really requires, especially in a world today where you've got this, you've got real separations, right? You've got a lot of people who go the traditional family route because maybe they feel it's right for them. And very often part of that involves pulling away from all of those people who not long before really did serve a lot of those same roles. And now they become more isolated. They start to expect they get everything from the traditional family. And then the friends that they're moving away from feel like, okay, so now I'm no longer in the, I'm no longer part of that family, but I'm also no longer a part of the bigger community of people who decided that this is the model of what family looks like for them anymore. And now you feel like, and society, as you mentioned, kind of labels them to a certain

extent and says, well, you're not doing it right because you're not there yet. And it just creates more divide. So I mean, talk about really needing to have intentional open conversation and making this a very intentional act and process. I mean, it's so important. You can't just wait for it to happen and hope it does. No, there's a, I mean, you're essentially choosing to counter our culture and doing that requires vigilance and tending. So I'm a cis woman and I'm married to a cis man. I am in a nuclear family. And I think the challenge that I realized in doing this work is that I needed to be vigilant. My husband

and I need to be vigilant about making sure that we're not closing ourselves off. And that's particularly true right now because we're all sheltering in place and I'm just in this house with these three other people. So I've really had to create a regular practice of making sure that I'm having conversations with my loved ones about our relationships. I'm checking in with people. I'm receiving when people check in with me, you know, one of the, one of the most powerful threads throughout the whole book is about how allergic we are to asking for help and accepting help and how powerful it is when we get over that. One of the things that, and this has been emphasized for me now that like COVID is happening, is that the offering support to folks I found is so much

more powerful for them when it's specific. So instead of just people, you know, saying like, let me know if you need anything, I have been trying to insert myself into people's lives, right? Crossing this, this like boundary that we think of in our friendships and trusting the intuition I have about what I know about people's experience and who they are and offering something that I actually think would be helpful. So saying specifically, you know, I know you've been doing a lot of caretaking recently, can I make like extra of what I'm making for dinner and bring it to you, as opposed to saying, let me know if you need anything. And then I think the same has been true for me. Like I've

had, you know, I have a friend who in the beginning of COVID, she would text me and a couple of other people and say, hey, I'm going to the grocery store. Do you need anything? And I felt my kind of resistance to saying yes, when I knew that, like, I'm out of salt, right? And if like, I can't, I can't, I cannot cook without salt. So if I can get this one thing that that means I can like, wait to go to the grocery store for another week, like that's actually helpful for me. So I have said yes, every time she has texted because there's always, you know, one or two things that I could use that would just bring ease to my life. And this last time I actually texted her and I was like, hey, next time you go, will you get us coffee? Because I knew we were going to be out of coffee in a minute. And I would

totally go to the store just to get coffee. But who wants to do, you know, especially right now, who wants to do that? So there's a way in which kind of creating that cycle of support, both giving and receiving support, lets us know each other more deeply and creates intimacy. And I feel so much more held and so much less isolated because of the, you know, the past couple of months, the way in which I feel like me and the people I'm in community with, have accepted support from each other and have offered support to each other. And, like, that's one of the things that I that I'm excited to take outside of, you know, COVID is just like, allowing people being vulnerable enough, right to allow people to know me in that way way and to be in my life in that way

and to encourage other people in my life to do the same. Yeah, I mean, being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be seen in a vulnerable state, even if it's a mild thing, like I need this, deepens relationships. I mean, what are the things that actually deepen relationship? It is generally it's vulnerability coupled with progressive revelation. And that has to happen both ways.

I often wonder if the reason that so few of us are comfortable doing that, and I'm raising my hand because I'm not the easiest person that way, is that there's something in us that's wired to keep score. And there's something in us that kind of says, well, I don't want to feel beholden. I don't want to, there's sort of like, somewhere there is a cosmic credit and debit sheet that's being kept. And if it's not in balance on a regular basis, I'm always going to feel like I need to give or I need to get. See, I think that's white supremacy. I don't think that's something that's wired deeply. It's something that we've learned. Yeah. 100% agree. 100% agree. But I feel like

it is a learned behavior in a lot of us. And it's so destructive. And it's almost like, once you have a group of people who just start doing it, and part of the agreement is nobody keeps score. I mean, I've experienced that in windows in my life. And part of the agreement is nobody keeps score. You know, it's, it's like, I mean, I've experienced that in windows in my life and it's sort of like everything dissolves and it becomes just really beautiful. Well, there's this, there's this generosity and abundance that exists when you do that. Right. And part of it, I think for me, like when part of what I, what I work through in my head, when I'm offered support is that I'm recognizing that it doesn't just do something for me. It does something for the person who's offering the support.

And I know that because I know what it feels like when I am able to offer support. And it's not because I'm like, yes, now I have another check in my column of what they owe me. And it's not about earning points with my gods. It really is about feeling like I am in this generative cycle of giving and receiving that is part of that, like deepens my sense of my own humanity and deepens my sense of being part of, yeah, being part of like community. And I know how good that feels for me. So partly like with this friend of mine who texts me about the groceries, I'm like, yeah, being part of like community. And I know how good that feels for me. So partly like

with this friend of mine who texts me about the groceries, I'm like, oh, like me saying yes is a gift that I can give her. Like being vulnerable and allowing her to insert herself in my life that way is a gift that I can give her. And let me not interrupt the cycle and like mess it up, right? By not providing her with that gift. So it is an exchange, right? And I think it's important for us to recognize it as that. But it's not about like, you know, it's not about like, I'm going to do this thing and then they're going to owe me. Because I also feel like in some ways, like, I mean, I haven't done anything for for them. I've let sometimes I leave eggs on the porch, because we have chickens, and there's like too many eggs. But like, mostly, she just drops stuff off. And like, that's it.

I also know that, like, I'm doing similar things for other people. So it's not even about just like my relationship with her and the kind of like back and forth between us. But actually, that is much it's part of a much kind of grander cycle of giving and receiving that we're both part of. Yeah, no, I love that. And one of the things that also comes up in the context of that, I think, is something that you speak to, which is this idea of yes, and there are moments also when you want to have boundaries. But at the same time, you can negotiate ways to interact with people. I know one of the stories that you tell, I thought it was a really fascinating way to approach is, you talk a lot about also family around food and kitchens and

friendships and how that enables all sorts of different things and how on the one hand, it's really nice to sometimes just have people drop by. Granted right now, we're not really doing that, but we're going to emerge from it. And then there are other times where you would feel really intruded on if somebody just swung by. And we certainly live in a culture now where nobody I know in New York City does that. If somebody just knocked on my door, even if it was a friend of mine and said, okay, hey, let's hang out.

It'd be awkward. Yeah, it'd be awkward. I'd be kind of annoyed. And I'm like, but it's not that I don't want to see them. It's really, there's a context. And the way that you handled saying, okay, how do I make this to happen in a way where we all feel good and comfortable? I thought it was really fascinating.

Yeah. So I, a friend of mine talked about the fact that she would love for people to drop by. And I was like, both like, yes, that would be great. And also like, oh, hell no. Like, I don't want people just showing up in my doorstep. Like I, because like, if I don't want to see them, that would just feel, I would be annoyed, like you said. So I was like, I just need to create a container for like a window in which like people are free to drop by. So I created this thing called drop by dinner and I emailed like 20 people. And it had a set of guidelines. And the first was, you know,

I don't know if I'm gonna remember all of them. But like, basically, like, I'm like, I'm not cleaning my house. I'm not preparing you a meal, you come over, bring something to add to, you know, the nourishment that we're going to have, I will give you whatever it is that I'm going to give my own children, but I'm not, this is not me. I'm not hosting. Right. So that was part of the, the thing I was like, you don't have to RSVP. You can just show up. You can tell me you're going to show up and show up. You can tell me you're going to show up and then not show up and not explain it to me. It's really like, we're not trying to kind of create a replicate any kind of like party situation. I also made it clear that they could not bring anybody with them unless it was their kids.

Because I didn't want child care to prevent people from showing up. But I also did not want to extend this experience to people like that I didn't actually feel comfortable coming by my house when it's a mess. And then I was also like, don't leave my house messier than you found it. I was like, clean the dishes, even if I tell you not to. So I sent it out to a handful of people. And I think 15 people showed up at the first one. And it was spectacular. I was wearing my pajamas. I don't think I had taken a shower that day. Everybody brought food. Some people had been to my house multiple times, so they knew where everything was. And some people had never been there before and just got support from other people and figuring out how to feed themselves and get what they

needed. And I would just do it every few months. And I would give people maybe a day's notice or a week's notice. And sometimes three people would show up, sometimes 15 people would show up. And having my community collide in that way, right, like the various parts of my community collide was fantastic. The conversations that we had were always really beautiful. And I loved just the experience of having my loved ones in my home. Yeah, I love that. I think it's, I have a feeling that even us being so isolated right now, so many layers of fear and possibility and change and transformation being in the air, that as we emerge from this space, that people are going to start to become more open to things

like this. And I love the fact that you're sort of out there right now planting the seed to reimagine models and ways to gather and ways to define friendship and family so that as we emerge from this sort of cocoon that we're in to a certain extent, we can start to really think about this more intentionally. How do we want to step back into our relationships in our world and reimagine it and recreate it? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I hope you enjoyed this relationship deep dive. And if

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