Modern Wisdom - How The Partner You Choose Reveals Your Self-Worth - Quinlan Walther - #1110

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

Quinlan Walther is a writer and a relationship coach. Why do we keep choosing the wrong partners? We meet someone new and think, “Maybe this is finally the one.” But then the pattern starts to feel familiar. Different face, same pain. Different relationship, same lesson. So why do we keep dating our trauma, and what does it actually take to break the cycle? Expect to learn how to build self-worth and have a better relationship with your partner, why you often choose a “wound” other than a partner, how to stop mistaking anxiety for chemistry, how to set good standards versus unrealistic expectations, the internet's big problem when dolling out relationship advice and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (0:00) What Your Partner Says About Your Self-Worth (2:31) Where Does Self-Trust Come From? (5:18) Why Curiosity and Capacity Feel So Difficult (8:53) Are Our ‘Types’ Just Unresolved Trauma? (19:17) Who Do You Need to Be to Feel Loved? (23:31) Are You Choosing a Partner Or a Wound? (34:41) Are Avoidant People the Most Attractive? (38:21) Why Healing the Past Changes Everything (41:07) Is Too Much Empathy a Bad Thing? (45:43) The Boundary Lessons Everyone Needs (52:04) Is Ego Getting in the Way? (56:43) The Most Common Misconceptions Between the Sexes (01:00:39) The Mistake Many Women Make When Men Open Up (01:02:01) Have Dating Standards Become Unrealistic? (01:07:16) The Hardest Relationship Cycles to Break (01:08:33) How to Repair Ruptures in Your Relationship (01:15:01) Balancing Impulse and Overthinking (01:18:03) Why You Need Self-Trust in a Relationship (01:23:36) What AI Relationships Reveal About Modern Love (01:32:40) Where to Find Quinlan Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How much does the partner that someone chooses reveal about their level of self-worth, do you think? I like this, starting with a strong one. Well, I want to add a little bit of context to that. How does the partner that someone chooses reveal how much they love themselves, how they see themselves? It can tell a lot, but I think more importantly is the way that they feel about someone's judgment of that. So the way that I frame it is, if someone told you that they could tell how much you love yourself by the partner that you've chosen, how would you feel about that? It's kind of like if I say, oh, is that a new shirt? And you're a little insecure about it.

Or like, do I look a little heavy? Do I look a little? Can my muscles look small? Right? Like, there's an insecurity there. Versus, thank you. It is a new shirt. Doesn't it look gray?

You know, this color, the new cut? You're securing it. So when someone says, I can tell how much you like. love yourself by the partner that you've chosen, there's a bit of intuition in that, in your reaction to that. It's an interesting prompt to give somebody. Yes. And the sense of, oh, or.

Yes. And I always try, I frame it up that way intentionally because it's not about someone actually passing a judgment on you. It's your interpretation of that judgment. It's like a Rorschach test for your own partner. Yes. It's like, I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am.

I am what you think. I think, I am. We did it. We did it. It's interesting, though, right? Like the idea that if you feel like you're being mistreated and you believe that the love that you are prepared to accept is a reflection of your level of self-worth, that probably tells you everything that you need to know about your relationship. Yes. Well, it's, does it feel like a compliment or does it feel like an insult?

Does it make you proud of the love that you've accepted and the treatment that you've tolerated? Or does it really hit that sensitive part of you? It's like, I've been treated like shit for years. Or simply, this has really just never felt right. You know, it feels kind of mediocre. Maybe it's not a reflection that you totally hate yourself. It's more just like, that doesn't really live up to the way that I know love could feel. And someone who really loved themselves probably would have gone and found something that really aligns rather than just.

settling for what was there. So there's a lot in there, but it requires the introspection to really get into the meat of it, into the context. Where does self-trust come from? Self-trust will be my greatest obsession for the foreseeable future. Self-trust is essentially

building a relationship with yourself that allows you to know who you are, like who you are, and build a life that actually feels like yours. That's like clear, summarize it. That's the brief synopsis. self-trust to me is ultimately what you have to build in order to find fulfillment, sustainable fulfillment in this life. The way that I see it, the majority of our issues, emotional anyway, issues come from uncertainty.

What's going to happen to me? What are people going to think of me? What am I going to think of myself? What happens if this uncontrollable thing plays out? How am I going to handle it? But more importantly, how am I going to feel if this person breaks up with me? if I don't get this job, if someone that I love dies. Right?

Most of it is how am I going to feel on the other end of that? And there's no way to outrun that uncertainty. There's no means of control or no ability, no strategy that was going to apply to all of those situations, except for trusting that you will be there in every single one of those situations. You'll be on the other end of that supporting yourself. The way that I kind of break it down, there's four Cs of.

self-trust. Number one is curiosity. So do you know what you're feeling? Do you know why you're feeling that way? Do you know what you want in this situation, in the next situation in life in general? Do you know what you don't want? How well do you, how much space do you give yourself to really ask yourself the hard questions or the fun questions and learn the answers? The next one is capacity. So how good are you at being emotionally flexible? When discomfort arises, do you trust yourself? to stay in the disappointment, in the sadness, to support yourself through that. When things go really well, do you trust yourself to not totally self-sabotage and fuck it all up? Screw it all up.

And then you're looking at compassion. That's the fourth one. So do you have compassion for your own, not just yourself, but also an understanding of your intentions? Do you trust your heart? Do you have compassion that you're well-intentioned and that still means you're going to screw up sometimes? Right? Can you recognize your own humanity? And then the last one, C, last see is commitment, which is, do I know the kind of life that I want to build? Do I know the kind of person that I want to be? And am I committed, devoted to bringing that to fruition? Am I committed to this life? Because that's what's going to move you forward through all of that. So in short, that's what self-trust is. Which one do people struggle with the most? either capacity or curiosity.

Why? I think we like to pretend that we're curious, especially in today's day and age. I have a label for everything. I'll just find the label. I'll explain it all the way. Give me the diagnosis and I can stick a band-aid on it and we can just keep pushing. You sell yourself short when you do that. You sell yourself short when you don't take the time to maybe question the label or look underneath the label.

What are you really feeling? What are you experiencing? What makes up this pattern that you don't like? Are you picking shitty partners because you have daddy issues, slap the label on it and do away with it? Well, I've explained it. I'm done with the curiosity. What do you mean? Let me move on to the next one.

Rather than there's an association that I have where love is supposed to feel like abandonment. There's this association that I have that love. love is supposed to hurt. So I'm supposed to expect these like high highs and then these super low lows. That's the real problem. My association with love. If I just slapped the label on it, I'd miss the whole, all the important stuff, all the context.

It's a protection mechanism in some ways, a shallow level of curiosity that, oh, well, now I've pathologized it or identified it or given a term for it. That's enough. I've done the work. You've got, no, that's actually. antithetical to doing the work. It's actually pushing away from it because it's making you feel like you've done something whilst actually stopping you from diving into the thing that would have fixed it. Bingo. Totally. Completely. And the other part is the curiosity continues on. I mean, it's kind of ever

changing the way that we feel, the things that we want, change shape, change form. So there's a lot there. And then capacity, we're not really good at sitting in discomfort. We're pretty good at finding every possible way to get out of it, around it, under it, over it, all of the things. And we typically prefer what's familiar over what's unfamiliar. So if we're used to our certain few emotions, we're used to a good bit of disappointment, good bit of sadness, a little bit of anxiety, and then a smidge of joy, we're going to probably stay within that ratio unless we intentionally decide to expand the capacity. there where it's like, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to stay in the disappointment. I'm going to

teach myself how to move through it. I'm going to support myself and whatever I need to do to move through this rather than just staying in it and drowning in it, whether that be... Or fleeing from it. Or fleeing from it. Yes, exactly. And the positive, quote-unquote, emotions, it's the same thing. We like to think, well, if I can just get rid of my anger and my sadness and my disappointment and all of that, I can just relish in all of these good emotions. And the reality is, 99% of us, if we took a good hard look at it, when the good stuff comes up, we're either waiting for the shoe to drop, well, it's not going to last long. So what's it going to be? What's going to hurt me? Right? We've already checked out of the happy moment because we're expecting something to come

around and kick us over. Or it's self-inflicted and we self-sabotage anyway because we don't trust it. You mentioned there about people feeling unusually familiar with negative patterns in the present related to something that they're probably become acclimatized to from their past. How much of having a type do you think is just unresolved trauma showing up in adulthood? Oh, this is a good one. Can I open my new tonic for this one? Get that in you. Yeah, yeah, you need it.

Watch the nails. Thank you. Yeah, look, I... What do you think? What's your opinion on that? I think an awful lot of the things that feel exciting and activating to people in adulthood are absolutely familiarity masquerading as resonance. It's just something from your past. There's this line from Kathy Overman, where she says,

your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. And Jesus, fuck, if that's not true, right? Like how many people had the distant and difficult to please father that they had to perform for? And then if love is easily given to them in adulthood, they feel like they should run away. Or it's not worthy of something. There's something wrong with people who show them love too easily. And there's something alluring about people that make them work for it, even though by definition that probably the people who aren't showing up ready,

for a relationship and are going to turn your life upside down. Or somebody's mother was unusually fragile or explosive. And they had to walk on eggshells and they get into a relationship with somebody who seems to be slightly unpredictable and explode when you might not anticipate it. And that is felt by the nervous system as I've been here before. there is a there's kind of an iron law i think of of attachment that if you have something that's unresolved from your childhood you will continue to repeat that pattern until you finally resolve it in adulthood or never do and i think a lot of people end up in the never do right just it's like a book that you started when you were three years old never finished and then you spend the rest of

your life trying to find a couple of chapters to finish it off. I like that. You're speaking to the uncertainty that I was mentioning earlier, where it seems like most of the issues come down to uncertainty, where what would happen if I didn't repeat that pattern? What would happen if I sought out love that wasn't similar to what I've always known love to be? That's somehow scarier to our brains, whether it's conscious or unconscious, often unconscious. That's somehow scarier than the shitty, often destructive relationships that this familiar love brings. But there's certainty in it. So if I can rely on the certainty, at least I know, at least I can choose the devil that I know rather than the potential devil or the potential

heaven that I don't know. But I think the only way, the only way that we get around that is by being intentional by trusting ourselves to go figure out what we really want and lean in to the uncertainty and the lack of familiarity. Why is it the case do you think that so many people mistake anxiety for chemistry that it's again, it's another iron law. Am I wrong? Well, I mean, the funny thing about it is you're just talking about a bunch of bodily sensations. They're affective feelings. And so it's kind of funny because you asked that and my first thought is, well, it doesn't have to be anxiety and it doesn't have to be, it could be simply excitement versus to other people, it's the red flag. So it's really just your understanding of those bodily sensations. So if you're talking to someone

who grew up with really steady caregivers, really attuned caregivers, pretty much everything you just said, if you're looking at that person and their association with love is going to be calm and steady and consistent versus someone else who's really used to inconsistent caregivers, not feeling like a priority, love being hot and cold or hurtful, then that sense of adrenaline that kicks in when you meet someone who mimics the same, you're going to say, oh, that's love. That's love. Because I'm so used to these highs and these lows. And so the adrenaline in the body is essentially either a red flag or you've learned that that sensation is love is love. Isn't it interesting the way that this stuff gets modeled? So let's say that somebody's grown up in a two-parent household and it's being the same parents from when they were born. You're getting to not only have your relationship with both attachment figures and you're getting to learn what care and regulation and this is what happens when I need someone to look after me. And this is what happens when I've got a problem. And this is what happens when I've done something wrong.

Like, am I safe in realizing that I'm going to be loved on the other side of this? That I can do something wrong and it doesn't make me worried about abandonment. But you're also getting to model the example, the first romantic relationship example that you've ever seen, which is the two caregivers between themselves. So it's kind of this weird reinforcement loop, right? You've got, it's almost weird to call it environmental because it's so pre-verbal. and it's just beyond what your mom did during pregnancy, you know? It's almost the same as your mom smoking during pregnancy or drinking or doing whatever or like being real calm and looking after her coline levels and eating loads of eggs,

whatever. I don't know what women do. I need to do research on that. It is just outside of that window, but you're so permeable. Like kids are so absorbent to this stuff that it's kind of almost there. Anyway, and then you grow up. up and you get to have this reinforcement, but you've already got the predisposition. There's already a genetic predisposition for attachment style, right? And then that's got reinforced pre-verbal with the

extended pregnancy thing of you, naught to three, not to four years old or whatever. And then you come online at some point as like a conscious being. And then you're seeing a proper environmental, well, that's how mom and dad relate to each other. That's what an argument is. That's what, that's what a slow Sunday looks like. That's what happens when we get stuck in traffic. That's what happens when somebody messes up. That's how long it takes to come back together after someone's become disregulated, all of these things. And it feels like a real double, triple, quadruple, whammy of you had this predisposition genetically. It was reinforced preverbally, directly to you

and then you got to see it between your parents environmentally, culturally reinforced too. It is really no surprise that sort of people become who they are in those ways. I would love to see how long it would take

to see if there's any change in that predisposition. How many generations would it take to see them? How much therapy does it take to unwind this. Yes, exactly. And obviously, genetics load the gun environment pulls the sugar. But

at the core of all of that, the first question that we have is, am I safe? Am I safe? Do I belong? Does anyone, or is anyone paying attention to me? Because if they are and I'm safe, then I can look at all these other things, how I relate to other people and how do I get to have creative freedom to be my own individual person? Do you know, what do I want to do? Those. questions come second to, am I safe? And the question that comes right after that is, and do I belong? Do people love me enough to pay attention? If we don't get those needs satisfied, if we don't, and sometimes it happens later than it should, a lot of the times it happens later than it should. It's really difficult to try and figure out how to have a super healthy,

secure relationship on top of that, how to chase your dreams and be super ambitious and still have a good balance and feel good about yourself. And that's really difficult if your fundamental needs of do I belong enough, me at my core, do I belong enough for people to care and want me around? Like am I physically and psychologically, emotionally safe? That's going to follow you around like a ghost if you don't figure out. If you don't figure out the answer to that question, you know, like do you feel safe yes or no? but even more so than the defense mechanisms or coping mechanisms that you have to try and meet that need,

because we all have them. So if we're talking about self-actualization, which we kind of are in that whole thing, you have to start at the bottom, which is safety and belonging. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger.

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so you can try it every single day for three months and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below are heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. How does somebody build safety as an adult?

I think it's, I would start with the question of who do you have to be to be loved. That's a pretty good place to start because ideally the answer is, well, myself. And it feels, it feels quite easy to say that. Like, well, it's just, you know, I'm me. And my mom loves me because of this. My best friends love me because I'm just myself. Yeah, I don't feel like I have to be all that much.

Versus if that question causes you to really tense and you're thinking, oh my God, well, I have to be the guy with this job title because status. I have to be the guy with this much money because power and importance. I have to be the guy that never shows his emotions. and supposed to be strong and sturdy and everyone realizes. It's like, there's a problem there. There's a problem there. Because you belong just for existing.

I think it's Brne Brown that says the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Maybe. So to that, the opposite of belonging, the opposite of safety, is fitting in. Because you have to be someone that you fundamentally aren't. Performance. Performing. Yeah. So I would start with that question.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. I feel like the sort of hypervigilance that a lot of people are dealing with at the moment, this need to... It is about uncertainty. I think anxiety is almost exclusively about uncertainty that if I can imagine every different potential path that the future might take and imagine it, if it happens, I'll be ready. Yep. I'll be ready. I'll be ready to take on whatever catastrophe because I've imagined catastrophes that the physics of reality couldn't even deliver to me. My grandmas come back from the dead and she's shouting at me because I did that thing wrong. If I can imagine all of the different ways that the future might unfold, especially in horrible ways, I don't need to deal with the uncertainty of not knowing. So I've collapsed down the uncertainty of the world into a albeit tragic but certain nightmare. Well, and run that through. Grandma comes back. Grandma's here yelling at you.

Why is that bad? Because I don't belong. Because I'm wrong. Well, she would probably say something that would hurt your feelings. Yeah. So you're essentially running away from a bad feeling. Hmm. By imagining a worse one.

Spend days and weeks and months and years trying to avoid a bad feeling. A bad feeling. Like you're letting emotions, a feeling, run. your life and not just run your life, but exhaust you in the process. When if you, I mean, I'll go extreme here. When my mom died, and I was in my early 20s, I was relatively young, I had younger siblings too, so there was a lot in that. But I remember when my mom died, I was like, well, you have a lot of options here, Quinlan. You can throw your hands up and, you know, stay in a ball on the living room floor for the next three to five years and pick your head up

then and see what's going on. Or you can, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps lovingly and just venture out little by little with the grief, with the sadness, with all of the stuff, you know, on my shoulders. Just like venture out, little by little every day. And the other, the first option really included like, okay, but what happens if I start crying in public? What happens if I get a call that my brother's having a breakdown? What happens if, you know, why you're saying, what happens if I'm in school and I can't remember, I was in college at the time, what happens if I'm in school and I can't remember anything on the exam that I was just studied? All of these things were essentially, what happens if I get sad?

What happens if I have to deal with an emotion that I don't want to deal with? And there's no way to control that other than to prep yourself, support yourself, building the capacity to feel these feelings. And then you aren't so concerned about what the world's going to throw at you, because you know that these big uncomfortable feelings, though uncomfortable, you can manage them. You can feel them and it won't kill you. How do you think people know when they're choosing a partner versus choosing a wound?

Like you have this old, ancient script that's running inside of you. These patterns are laid down. This is what love is. This is how people relate. And then someone comes along, the difference between chemistry and chaos are usually kind of hard to discern? I think the question there,

I would tailor it a little bit to do you like the way the relationship feels? Because we can, if it's really all conditioning, right? If the wound is essentially bad conditioning, meaning it brings out a destructive relationship versus positive conditioning, if you would, positive associations with love bring you a happy, healthy, stable loving relationship. It could be my patterns from my past make me only choose people who respect me and are there for me and show up for me and make me feel like more of myself.

I should get rid of those things. No, no, no, no, no, no, keep those ones. You need those ones. So I think the real question is how do you know if you're choosing from a wounded place? It's, well, do you like the way the relationship feels? And if not, there's probably something in your conditioning that has taught you to associate this suburb. par behavior with love. Interesting. It's a great answer, but how many people are surprised by, well, yeah, my relationship probably

should make me feel good all the time, most of the time. Revolutionary. Show me where. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like that is, well, no, because, you know, it's, life's hard. Life's supposed to be hard. And sometimes think, yeah.

Okay, but up to a point. Yes. And life is hard in a lot of other areas. I don't think that your relationship is supposed to be one of them. I agree. I came across this line. If you're working this hard to make it work, it isn't working. You had a conversation with someone, I can't remember who, hopefully you do,

basically saying if all of the late night journaling sessions and all of these tough, difficult conversation, Like if it's really not quite moving the needle, you probably need to leave. Yeah. Well, that's, I think, a pattern that a lot of people that are big interpersonal growth and working hard on themselves feel, which is I've been rewarded throughout my entire life. If I work harder, things get better. Which means that if this isn't working, I just need to work harder. It's a challenge.

And guess what? To the people that listen to modern wisdom, challenges are their feelings. fucking thing. Yeah, is it ever. They're the sort of people that eat challenges for breakfast. Unfortunately, they are applying a noble mindset to the wrong environment. Well, and you're looking at, I mean, think about like the hedonic treadmill, where things get great and you get the promotion or you get the great new girlfriend, you love her somewhere,

you get the great new boyfriend, whatever, whatever, you're naturally going to come back down to baseline. And the novelty wears off. So I agree with everything you just said with the caveat that you shouldn't be looking to your relationship for something that your relationship isn't supposed to supply all the time. Peace most of the time. Absolutely. Love, support. Most of the time.

Absolutely. But novelty, excitement, dread, disappointment. I mean, right, both sides of the spectrum here is what. I'm trying to paint. Activation. Yeah. That's not where your relationship is supposed to bring you. I just think nowadays we aren't comfortable with just being really, really, really, really not good at just being. Like, feeling content is something I don't hear anyone speak on much these days, as in people our age just in conversation. Like, I'm content. It's usually, oh, I'm awful or oh, I'm so fantastic. Yeah, or I'm grinding, I'm driving very hard. It's unbelievably radical to say that you're satisfied. Right? Because it sounds like leaving a lot on the table. If we live, and I'm, you know, big fan, big beneficiary of capitalism. I think it's what's that line? Capitalism is the worst system apart from all of the others. And but the problem is if you got meritocracy, people from, what, when do people go to preschool? Four years old or something? There's already this big, this big.

of a ranking that's going on. There's assessments. When's the first homework that you get as a kid? Maybe six years old, seven years old, something like that. You should take this home and bring it back with macaroni drawings or whatever. Your name spelled out. Yeah, exactly. That is already beginning to create a, if you work hard, then you will get rewarded. If you work hard, then you will get rewarded. And that just continues to spin up. Problem is that creates a situation where you kind of look lazy or like you don't have big dreams for yourself or a lack of self-respect or you're not maximizing your time on this planet if you just say I'm good I really I just like I like what I'm doing I like what I'm doing I don't have any desire to 10x it I don't have any desire to recruit other

people to do what I'm doing and coach them to do it better than me now as in Bali on this life tour thing and it was so much fun. I'd done the last show and I caught up with a friend. The friend was out there doing nutrition coaching and they'd started this business and had previously worked in London and then moved out there and said, I'm just having the best time. Working with women who want to optimize their hormones and stuff and skin health and lose weight and do this. And I said, how are you working with them? How do you work with your clients? She said, I work, I work. I work, one-on-one over WhatsApp. And I was like, that's stupid. What you should do is you should have a lead magnet on the front end that's going to capture all over emails. And then you need a

squeeze page that gets them in on that you need a low end on it. Yeah, exactly. And then you're going to spin them up. You're going to have the low end. And that's just to get the credit card information really. And then after that, you've got your mid-ticket. And that's really where the big bulk of people go. But you want your high ticket. People are working with your one-on-one. You can't just give that away. That shouldn't be your base level. That needs to be the people at the very, very top. Now, obviously, you're going to need a sales team because you can't sell anything on the internet over about $2,000 without having a sales call first, and you don't want to be doing all the sales calls. So you're going to have to require a sales team to come in.

And, you know, it is going to become a little bit more complex because you might need a sales manager, manage the sales team. And that is going to look a lot like a sales business. But I promise you, I don't like, stop myself part way through. I'm like, I'm going to curse this person with the exact challenge that so many of my friends are now trying to extricate themselves from. I've overcomplicated my business. I wanted more, more, more. I've stopped doing the thing that I wanted to be able to do in the past. I'm no longer coaching women on how to improve their health.

I'm now managing a fucking sales team who sell people on how to... Have you heard the Mexican fisherman story? I was going to... I basically did the Balinese nutrition coach was the equivalent of the Mexican fisherman story. They out there living life, balanced, sometimes working. Literally saying, I'm the happiest I've ever been. After the sentence of I'm happiest I've ever been,

let me tell you how you can become miserable but richer. And here are the value. Well, and you're, okay, now imagine you take that into a romantic relationship. And you're looking at someone who doesn't value ambition or 100xing their income or even productivity. Like efficiency doesn't really matter. to them. Is that inherently bad? No. It's just not you or me. I fall in that category more than I'd like to admit. But the reality is we're more than likely to look at that person and try to change them.

Try to project onto them what we value rather than looking at them as what they are, which is a whole other person. That's an interesting pattern. To a degree, I certainly think at least my friends, as we all hit our 30s, we increasingly valued people around us, friends and partners, that encourage us to slow down as opposed to speed up. And that's a kind of difficult realization. I think a lot of guys especially, but probably high-powered women too will realize this toward the end of their 20s, they go, I actually don't want to be around that many more mes. I'm me enough for me.

I actually could do with someone who encourages me to take my foot off the accelerator. Maybe not press the break, but it's like, hey man, that's just close for a bit. We can just go and hang out. And it's a strange realization. Well, you have to be humble enough

to take a look at the mirror in that moment. You have to be humble enough to think, oh, I think I'm so big and bad. I'm so important that everyone needs to... Is the best way. Like, who the hell do I? Sit down. Quinlan? Absolutely not. And a lot of people would look at that and think, well, they're just

not meant for me. I'm going to throw away a perfectly fine relationship because I'm so caught up in myself and my own values that I'm judging someone else based on something that is a me problem. I think we end a lot of good relationships, potentially great relationships for that reason. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my Whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. and the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Woop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day. Your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't.

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30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to join.wop.com Modern Wisdom. That's join.wop.com slash modern wisdom. Do you think avoidant people seem disproportionately attractive in the dating market? People who have a strong sense of self are attractive, period. Asther Perel talks a lot about this, where typically we find our partners most attractive when they're in their element, when they're self-sufficient, when there's a level of mastery or agency at play. We find people most attractive when they are doing their own thing.

avoiding people just tend to have that on the surface more readily available to be seen and admired. They have their lives, their jobs, maybe some friends, they hobbies, there's more going on. They're not so obsessed with the validation of everyone else around them, right? Avoiding people just tend to show their more avoidant tendencies, or I'm sorry, anxious people tend to show their more anxious tendencies kind of right off the back because you can sense it. So on the surface, yes. I think the answer to your question is yes. Avoidance just seem to have more of that independent sense of self, firm sense of self right off the back.

That's very interesting. I wonder how much as well the intermittent reward of we're on, things are good, and then hang on, where the fuck did you go? And we're on again and things are good and then you sort of ran away again. I wonder how much that combined with, they're so impressive. They just seem to have, especially if you have the classic sort of anxious and avoidant relationship coming together, one who maybe is a little bit less self-assured, one who does need a little bit more reassurance from the other person, and someone else who seems to have it all together and can then provide the amount of stimulation and reward that you do want and then withdraw it.

I think it depends on what you value. And a lot of that often comes with age. I won't say always. But you get to a certain point where that roller coaster is unattractive. You get through those first inconsistent exchanges, you haven't texted back in days or canceled plans again. Part of you just says, I don't know. No, thanks.

Not interested. Been here 17 times. I'm not interested in an 18th round. Like, no, thank you. I value communication, transparency. I don't need you available to me all the time, but you absolutely need to let me know rather than canceling last minute. Your standards are just clearer when you know what you value in a relationship. It becomes a hell of a lot easier to say, does this feel the way that I want love to feel?

And if not, I'm good. I don't need to understand why. I don't need to know why you're avoidant. You know, what was it your mom and your dad? The late night journaling sessions. Yes. It just doesn't help at the end of the day. The relationship isn't, for the most part, feeling the way that you want it to feel.

That's the important distinction. Such a basic rubric. Crazy. Right. Of all of the different bits of relationship advice, do you feel good in this relationship? And is it making you feel the way that you wanted to feel? Yeah. And that's a good thing to ask if you're already in a relationship, too.

If you have a conversation with the person you're with, like, hey, is this feeling the way you want it to feel? Pulse check. What's up? Is there anything that I can do? Is there better ways that I can love you? I mean, again, it's kind of a cliche at this point, but do you know how the person you're with wants to be loved? Or are you coming in so big and bold and self-obsessed

that you're only giving what you want to receive? Looking outside of yourself. It's an interesting one around disappointment. You know, it's very easy to show up well when things are going well, but to sit in, I've been disappointed and I now need to try and be my best self too, even if this person doesn't deserve it. Like they messed up. Yes.

This person messed up. They don't deserve me to be good now. Like I'm allowed to stamp my feet and be petulant. Yes. So there's this line from Visakan Varasamy that he calls the divorce paradox. He says, why is it that so many people seem to divorce their supposed best friend? And it's that the way people handle bad times, is a much better indicator of how long the relationship will last

than how they handle good times. And the fact being that if you're able to go through a hard time and come out the other side, okay, safety, that is so much more predictive than we just didn't have enough peak experiences. We didn't go to six flags enough. We didn't go to six flags enough. He wouldn't ride the fast roller coaster with me or whatever it is. It is all about how do you and your partner get on?

Obviously, there's other things. But I think way more separations occur because people couldn't deal with bad times, not because they didn't have enough of the elated ones. Well, I think it's not, I'd venture to guess it's indicative of a bigger issue. Like the not handling bad times is actually a symptom of a bigger issue, not handling bad times well, where just take consideration. consideration, a general consideration for someone else's well-being. If you don't naturally have that, if you aren't actively working on that,

if you aren't aware that that's important in this relationship, you're definitely not going to show up with that in bad times. And that would make the good times a hundred times better. You see what I mean? Where if you're pretty self-centered, if you're not all that introspective or self-aware, if you're not trying to become more emotionally mature, which I think most of us can almost always progress in that area, of course when bad times come around,

your capacity's shot, you're kind of like running on E, and what's left is none of the good stuff, none of the stuff that keeps you together that values connection, nothing that's going to feed this love. But I think if you have it tenfold, if you have all of the love and consideration, all this things, that when you get down to running on E, there's still a little bit of that left.

Yeah. Yeah. It makes total sense. Do you think empathy can become dangerous then in that regard? It overrides self-respect and boundaries. Too much understanding can be a bad thing. Yeah, absolutely. It could...

Empathy without boundaries is self-abandonment. And on the back end of empathy that lacks boundaries, is some sense of lack. Like, okay, if I just empathize enough, if I can understand why this person is treating me so badly, then I'll be able to rationalize it and I can keep them around a little bit longer because I still need to be chosen.

So the idea of being lonely and not having anyone there, we can't, that's last thing we ever want to encounter. So let me just try to empathize enough to be okay with the behavior that I don't like because it's meeting a need. So rather than having a pretty firm sense of self that says, I'd rather be alone than be treated like shit, I'm going to say, no, I'd rather be anything but alone,

so I'll be okay with being treated like shit. It's so interesting that you're saying empathy is rationalization to help us keep going. Yeah. It's actually empathy becomes very selfish in that way. Absolutely. It's both self-abandonment and selfish at the same time, but it's not really about the other person. Well, self-abandonment is almost always self-serving.

It's always the abandonment of self to meet some deeper need. Same more. So if you're people-pleasing, right, similar to what we're talking about with empathy, well, I'm just going to make nice so everyone around me will be good and appeased because I need people around. I need to be accepted. I need to belong. right? So I'm going to abandon so that I can get this fundamental need met where the self is really more your self-respect, like your self-concept, the you that is maturing and has a firm sense of,

this is what I am, this is what I like about myself, this is how I allow people to treat me, etc. But self-abandonment always comes with some kind of benefit. We don't just do it for fun. It meets some deeper psychological need that isn't being met overtly. It's so interesting to think about that, that empathizing aggressively allows you to understand the other person's situation, which just extends that fuel. It just pours a little bit more fuel back into the tank. Yeah. I can keep on puttering along a little bit more. And then something else then, oh, but their childhood, you know, but their relationship to their stepfather.

And what about it? And what about it is always what you follow it up with? What and what about it? We're all the way that we are because of something. No, should we just fall out of the sky like that? There's a reason. There's a why for everything. It doesn't mean that it's reason to tolerate behavior that's disrespectful or harmful. Ultimately, it gets to, is this making you feel the way that you want it to? Yeah. And regardless of the reason for it or against it. Yeah, this is a very British thing, actually, I think.

the nobility in putting your desires to one side sort of I mustn't rock the boat I mustn't make a fuss don't want to make a fuss too much I certainly saw in my last life as a club promoter like a guerrillion different relationships make up and break up in the space of no time at all and a lot of the time neither side felt like they were

allowed to say what they wanted. And I think that that was, it's a kind of boundary setting, hey, this is how I would like to be treated or this is the thing that I want. And they were young, but it's still interesting to see kind of the pluripotent stem cell, like the little proto, you know, the proto relationships that happen when you're sort of 18 to 25. It was really interesting to see those because I think that is you, without all of the learnings and the insight and the things that come with age. So it's really, it's dating at its most raw in some ways because all you are your childhood patterns. It's attachment at its most, 100%, 100%. It was really fascinating to see. I can't, I'm sure alcohol really helped with that too.

Helped is a complex word. Help as a viewer. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm sure it did. What do you wish more people knew about how boundaries worked? I think that this is, I, I, I'm aware that a lot of the time pathologization of therapy speak language, but also a really important thing that you're supposed to do inside of a relationship. So what are more people need to know about boundaries? Boundaries are rules for yourself, for yourself. They are rules that I will abide by because I know what I want for myself, for my life, from the relationships that I will have in my life. It's a rule for myself. And people tend to think that it has to come with a means of control, controlling the other people around them, getting what they want out of life. It doesn't. It's, I will do this or I won't do this. This is what I want in or are you out? If you're specifically in romantic relationships, there's a creator that I was, I can't remember who it is. I'm sorry. They're I was watching a video and basically this couple that's married, the guy was saying that he didn't,

want to marry a woman who was going to bars. Wasn't what he wanted. You know, bars are typically for single people. Now, whether you agree with that or not, it's a boundary of his. And he didn't even ask her to stop going to the bars, didn't ask her to leave. He just said, I don't want to, you know, I'm looking for a wife and the wife that I have isn't going to be going to bars by herself for whatever reason. It was his boundary. She said, cool, I'm good with that. Don't need it. I'm also looking for the same thing, the same level of respect. So, no more bars for me. That's his boundary. And she had the option to say, cool, I'm in or no, sorry, I'm not. That's an example of a real boundary. Not, hey, you better leave because I told you that I wasn't cool with this. And so if you go

to the bar, I'm not going to talk to you and you're going to, no, it was his rule. She got to opt in or opt out. That's a boundary. Interesting how many disputes that we've seen, you know, some text leak of a couple, famous couple or whatever, and one person is saying one thing, this is what I like or this is what I don't like. Yeah, the delivery of it, there's an awful lot to be said about that. But ultimately, how many debates have been had online on podcasts about should you be okay with your partner going to the bar or whatever? And you go, that that is a completely personal choice for you with your partner and it is a completely personal choice for them too it is absolutely fine for you to want whatever you want yes up to a limit must put a caveat in

check the laws exactly um for the most part it's completely fine with you for you to want whatever you want you want to go to bed at 9 p.m that's fine you want somebody that is quiet in the morning. It's fine. You want somebody that's vegan. That's fine. You want somebody that's conservative. That's fine. You just need to ensure that you make that plane. And the other person is allowed to opt in or opt out. It feels really almost all of the relationship problems that I see that happen on the internet are just two people who aren't compatible for each other, shouting about the fact that they're trying to make it work. They're trying to like hammer this square peg into a round hole. And then everybody else gets to sit on the sidelines and say,

I'm more like them or I'm more like the other one. Yes. Just both of you should fuck off and find someone that's like you. Leave each other alone. Yes, yes. Leave and find someone that wants to go to bed at 9 p.m. or has never voted Democrat or doesn't want to weep me. Well, the politics is something that I actually disagree with.

A lot of people say you can't be with someone who has a differing political abuse than you. And I disagree in most cases if we understand the why and the values behind. Okay. So we can take any of these situations as an example. We can use the bar. We can use the time you want to go to bed. We can use politics. Do you know why those things are important to you?

Why is it important? What's the value behind not going to a bar if you're in a relationship without your spouse? What's the value behind going to sleep at 9 o'clock versus 2 o'clock in the morning? What is the value behind having liberal views or having conservative views? What are the values? And from there, it becomes a real conversation rather than this fight of who's right and who's wrong. And I can't believe that you would want to kill these people and you don't care about these rights and da-da-da-da-da. It's like, well, at the end of the day, we don't even know what we're fighting about because I haven't asked you why that's important to you.

Why are your views on this, that, and the other? What does that mean to you? I'm actually curious about what that is and do those things align. You can have similar values and, oh, God, I should put on the thing. You can have similar values at the heart of it and it can look quite different as far as who you're voting for and what you believe. I told myself I would never speak on politics. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider all that, Chris.

Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in. Never happen. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off.

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Bottoms up. What do you make of the differences between the sexes right now? Like men and women just becoming less culturally compatible? I think we're all becoming more egocentric. It's almost like a rested development. Children by nature are egocentric because there's no way that their little brains can conceptualize anything beyond just them and their need to survive fundamentally, right? And so then ideally you grow up and you can ascertain the stability of the world and whatever you go on to form an identity.

in a sense of self. If you get stuck at a more egocentric age or in a more egocentric phase, everything is about you. Everything is a reflection of you. Your needs are the most important thing. People who have different opinions or values or feelings, all the things wrong because it is me and I am I and the center of the world. I'm being hyperbolic. But I think that we have a really difficult time both men and women really looking outside of ourselves without losing ourselves. Are you familiar with the term differentiation? No. Are you familiar with the term enmeshment?

Kind of, yes. Okay, so they're chips off at the same block. So differentiation is essentially I can stay connected to me while also being connected to you. So we are not one. And this goes for platonic relationships, familial relationships, all the things. But I can hold my sense of self while still being connected to someone who's different than me. Give me an example of the opposite of that. Inmeshment.

Okay. Codependency. Right. Right. Your feelings are my feelings. So if you're not okay, I'm not okay. And I have to fix it for both of us. That sense of we are just one unit.

I think that being able to hold on to who we are, what we want, what we value, and still being able to relate to people that have, that feel differently, that see the world differently, that have their own sense of self. I'm not sure that we have much practice in that, let alone solid examples of what that really looks like. And that's contributing to men and women struggling a little bit in the modern world because of cultural differences, because they're stuck in this childhood ego phase? I think it's, that sounds bad. But yeah, I think it is a, it's a socialization issue where we aren't really taught how to relate in a way that says, tell me who you are. And I'll tell you who I am. And we can still have a relationship, even if all of these characteristics don't align.

As if your self is a threat to myself. Yes. Now, that's interesting. And that's certainly something I think that we see on the internet a lot, that somebody's stating a view, a girl stating a view about what. she thinks to do with child rearing is seen by not only men but especially women as a threat if they don't agree with that particular view that everything becomes tribal but yeah i didn't i didn't realize that we're basically sort of enmeshing ourselves with the entire world and that because of our lack of a strong sense of who we are we see somebody else's sense of themselves as a threat to

Well, and you're also looking, I mean, to differentiate requires a certain amount of safety, whether that be safety within yourself or safety within the people that are closest to you, right? Like, you know who you are. You trust the people closest to you to reflect that back, and then you get to go venture out into the world and meet people that want to argue with the opposite points or, you know, have differing views. Part of the greater problem at large, I think is that we're using shame, judgment. and criticism to try and change the other party. I hear a lot of hate towards men. I hear a lot of hate towards women.

I hear a lot of hate of, well, it's their fault that we're like this and their fault that we're like this. And it's like, these are conversations that we need to have, but we're having them with the entirely wrong attitude, an entirely wrong attitude. No one wants to change because they're shamed enough. Sustainable change, real conversation, real understanding. doesn't come from spewing vitriol at other people. It doesn't come from hatred. So I think that that general atmosphere is already adding fuel to a fire that's raging.

What are the most common misunderstandings that you think modern men and women have about each other? If you were able to pull a chip out of one sex and give it to the other? Hmm. This is a really good question. I think I would want women to understand the power and influence and importance that they play in men's lives. I think that gets lost in conversation. You know, a good, loving woman is quite powerful in a man's life if he also loves and respects her. Like, and I think that that gets lost, especially in today's conversation of like submission and being a docile good woman. And it's like we just put the rules aside. You're important. You make a really big difference in this man's life. And I think that that should be reiterated.

I also think that if women know that they're appreciated and that they're valuable and just their presence and their love and their attention goes a long way, that's how we get things to change. when you feel valued, when you feel appreciated. It's like, oh, that's great. I want to give more. So that needs to be communicated. And I think that I would want men to know, so if I was implanting this, I think I would want men to know, I would want men to know that there's far more value in who you are beyond just what you can offer on a piece of paper, beyond just the things that you can write down. I see that a lot. In clients that I work with who are dating and clients that I work with who are.

are married, it's still a lot of these norms of your only really worth anything if you can, if you're of a certain size, stature, if you make a certain amount of money, if you have certain status, power, whatever, the things that you can write on a resume, basically. And just the value in showing up and being present and being loving and being available as a man is also important and necessary to women. So basically less bravado, if I make a long story short. Yeah. Do you think emotional men often get overlooked? I think it's starting to change.

But I do think that there is a bit of socialization that is taught us that men aren't supposed to cry. Men aren't supposed to have more feelings. They're definitely not more feelings than the women in their lives. That's like, that'll scare you away. Like, oh, can't do that. And I don't think that's true. And I think that that conditioning, I know that's not true. And I think that the conditioning around that is starting to fall away.

I think that we're having more conversations about it. We're taking a real honest look at what we were socialized to believe. And then it doesn't really make sense. Right. If women are complaining about all of these emotionally unavailable men and I can't get the man to have a conversation with me and like he doesn't care about my idea. Like if you want an emotionally available guy, that's going to mean that his emotions have to come to the table. So, you know, what do you want? I want you to be able to sit in emotions, but only if they're mine.

Right. I don't want you to have your own. I see that mostly in the work that I do. It's like giving men the vocabulary and the language to express what it is that they're feeling and, like, the space to actually communicate that. And then I often see a lot of the work with women is the practice of allowing the men's emotions to take up space and not just theirs. What are the problems that women encounter when giving enough space, giving space to men's emotions? I think there's a fear that if their emotions aren't being recognized, if we're making space for his feelings, his emotions to come into play, then mine are just going to be overlooked. then mine get put on the back burner

and then I'm just appeasing him and then what am I even here if I'm just here to validate him and he doesn't do anything it's like okay well nothing's going to get done with that attitude. Nothing. The real question is

can you build the capacity and the practice of having your feelings and tabling them for a second while we also talk about his? Right? Women tend to feel and express boldly, largely. loudly in a lot of ways,

which I'm not against at all. I'm very passionate. I'm quite loud myself. But it has to come with an understanding that if you want to be in this relationship with another human who has feelings, sometimes we have to give it a beat. Emotions are not emergencies.

Just because you feel a certain way doesn't mean that you have to act on it now and it doesn't mean we can't give attention to the other person who's in this dynamic. Does that make sense? It does. It does. I've been thinking for a while,

I wonder whether, I wonder whether standards have risen or expectations have become unrealistic. Both? Am I allowed to say both? I think it's both. Yeah. I think that far more people are actually marrying for love. I think that, again, as Sarah Perel talks a lot about this, but we're expecting one relationship to fill the needs that an entire village would have before.

And we're on social media that is filled with every single. highlight real magical moment that's all been produced and very meticulously crafted, by the way. And then comparing that to our normal Tuesday nights. It's like, well, you must not love me because you didn't send me $7,000 worth of flowers on Valentine's Day. And you know, I can't be with her because, to be honest, I mean, she's not a double D and she's like put on like 10 pounds and like she's kind of a bitch sometimes. It's like, can we just, where's the humanness in all of this? I think we've lost the plot when it comes to expectations. And we need to make room for the higher standards that we have while also accounting for people's humanity,

for the connection that occurs just between two people who have a little bit of chemistry, similar visions of the future, and decide to build lives together. So I think it's both. Yeah, I see it in common threads all the time about problems. with coupling and I would say on average it's more our standards have risen from women and more the expectations are unrealistic from men that at least from where I see it in comment sections I would love someone to do some data on this regardless of who is

saying what it's not it's not particularly helpful to say either of those things at the other side. Like, you need to be better. Women or men. You go, well, do you not fucking think that they're trying? Who's actively trying to not be better? Right? Who is actively trying to not be better?

And when was the last time that somebody was like cajoled, like beaten over the head into change en masse as a group? No. It doesn't work. No, no. People think that they can change other people. but they can't. People think that they can't change themselves, but they can. It's one of my biggest pet peeves, this idea, and it's kind of come back into trend recently,

that we should be shaming ourselves into change. Like, bring back public shame, bring back, and it's like, why don't we just bring back, like, respect and, you know, a sense of decency, but not shame. Shame, shame doesn't create any kind of sustainable change that anyone's going to want. the more that you criticize someone, the more that you shame them, the more that your actions are going to be fueled. I mean, okay, shame at its core is this fundamental belief that you are broken or bad. So everything that you do is going to be to some way disprove that you are fundamentally broken or bad if your actions are fueled by shame. At some point, you're going to be exhausted and you're going to run out of energy to do so because you can't outrun it. You can't disprove it.

There's no way to do that. Not the actual belief of shame. You're much better off trying to say that's not a person that I want to be. And I believe in who I am. I'm devoted to being a better person, not because I'm fundamentally broken, but because I know what a good person I can be. And that's my commitment is to be that person. Do you see how, you see how that differs? So this idea of shaming your way into change, bring back public shaming is like it doesn't work. And I think that it perpetuates more negativity, more aggression, and honestly more isolation than it does any kind of beneficial change. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution?

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bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code Modern Wisdom, a checkout. What do you think are the most difficult cycles for people to get out of in relationships? The ones that are just kind of bad. I'm kind of taking a left on your question, but this is what came to mind first. the cycles that are most difficult to break,

I find are the ones where the relationship is fine, not totally destructive, but like kind of bad. Because neither person is really all that committed to making the change in the relationship because it's just kind of bad. So then over time, the cracks grow and the cracks grow and the damage continues and it expand in your, you're basically looking at an issue that could have been repaired if it had only been a little bit worse, a little bit earlier, because you probably would have taken it more seriously.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the... It's a thousand tiny paper cuts. Yes. Yes, exactly. Or there's another option that people, if anyone's listening and it's kind of like, oh, that's me.

You can care. You can just start to care. You just have to intentionally see that this kind of bad thing could get worse if you don't pay attention. to it. You mentioned repair there. What's the gold standard for rupture and repair, in your opinion? Well, you have to start with curiosity. You have to make sure that you understand why the rupture happened, how the other person was feeling, share how you were feeling, you know, whoever was, whoever was kind of on the receiving end of that damage, has to be able to say, this is why this hurt. This is what I was feeling.

This is what your actions meant to me. And then the other person has to take accountability. It's really that three-step process, curiosity, accountability, and then actually changing, implementing the change. And I think what often, what becomes difficult in this rupture, repair kind of cycle is the fact that we often don't change it right away. It will more than likely happen again sooner than we'd like. And tolerating that disappointment can feel really difficult. So you rupture, you repair. I won't do that again.

And then you do. And then there's just same thing. Same thing. Sensitive issue. Comes back, comes back. And you're up. Hang in a second. I just gave you my trust that you were going to change this thing.

You didn't change this thing. It happened again. It's never going to change. Yeah. I now can't ever trust any more repair. Yep. and the disappointment that you fall into with that. There's a certain tolerance for disappointment that we all need.

And I hate, it's such a, it's such a, it's such a, it sounds like such a negative phrase, it's such a bad connotation, but there is a certain amount of disappointment that we have to tolerate if we're going to be in relationship with another imperfect human. Now, the second, third, fourth time that that issue comes around, that it was ruptured again and it was ruptured again. I wouldn't say that's a sign. It's not a sign that you're necessarily with the wrong person. If each time it comes around, you can stay in it with the same curiosity, with the same genuine, like, okay, shit, this is why I did, okay, you're feeling this way? Okay, that's similar to last time, but this time there's a little more anger than there is sadness. Okay, so the reason why I screwed up this time for the fourth time, honestly, I just slipped my mind. And so because it just slipped my mind, this is what I'm going to do to try to keep it more topic.

of mind. How does that sound to you? You're going to have to keep coming back to the same issues for at least a little bit, if not for a long bit. You've got this line, life doesn't remove what isn't for you. It just lets it exhausts you over and over and over again until you choose differently. Yeah. Yeah. There's, I also, I take issue with pretty much anything that starts with someone who loves you would or someone who loves you wouldn't i know it sounds like it's kind of a yeah okay i'll explain but the you lose a sense of intuition when you take other people's black and white assumptions without any kind of introspection or feeling into your own sense of right or wrong so someone who loves you would it's like well someone who loves you would text you every would text

you good morning every day because they love you and that's just how it is it's like okay well that's a little silly there's plenty of ways to love people i want to feel into whether or not this love feels right for me because like that um that line is is highlighting there's a sense of knowing that you have a sense of knowing whether something is really for you or really not so the universe doesn't remove what isn't for you it just lets it exhaust you over and over and over and over and over again, that's going to be a felt sense of shit. This is the 700th time that I've felt this way. Yep.

There is no right, wrong rule, boundary. Like, no one else is going to be able to give me the knowing that I build within myself. And that's what's going to help you get up and make the change that you need to change. A lot of this is tapping into a sense of self-trust. Like, hey, my desire is a legitimate. I'm allowed to want what I want, and I'm allowed to not like something that doesn't make me feel good and that I don't like. It's strange how much acrobatics, Olympic-level acrobatics people are prepared to go through in an attempt to hide away from or justify or legislate. I don't like that.

Is it okay for me to not like that? It's okay for me to not like that thing that I don't like. you need the 10 rules of if he loved you, he would, or if he does these 10 things, he doesn't love you. It's like, where are we, can we be so for real? Does it feel like the kind of love you want to receive? Just because he doesn't text you good morning every single day, okay, well, he takes out the trash every time that he realizes it's getting kind of full. You didn't ask him to do that. Maybe you don't even live together. But he notices it, right? He opens your car door. You never asked him to do that. he lays there and lets you put his cold feet under his legs at night in bed even though he hates it.

Like there's so many ways to receive and give love. And I think that the real, the love that is for you is going to feel right to you. It's not going to come in a list that someone on the internet gives you or that the universe will magically remove what's not for me. It's like, no, no, check in here. It'll just exhaust you enough until you can't bear it anymore. Yeah, there was a line very similar to yours. I saw that the universe will continue to shout louder and louder until you finally hear the lesson. And it is, it is.

At least as far as I've seen most of my friends that are smart originally, eventually end up at the place that they're supposed to. The goal is to try and reduce down the dose that you need. It's like, do I have to wait 700 times? Can I not go up there at 350? that I have not got there at 100. Yes. How do you come to think about, and I think it's a really nice rubric.

You are allowed to like the things you like. You're allowed to not like the things that you don't like and your desires and the way that you feel is legitimate. But also, we know that instinct and intuition and gut feeling can cause us to act rashly. They can cause us to follow our impulses when we should have actually taken. taken a little bit more of a step back and tried to be a bit more equanimous.

I know you're a fan of the mindfulness gap in between stimulus and response. Yeah. How do you come to think about balancing those two things? Because I think the curse of the overthinker is somebody who goes, okay, so it's important for me to feel how I feel and how I feel is right. Well, yeah, but there's also impulse in there and a lot of reaction and sometimes activation. Do you understand how these two things could be sort of on opposite sides of the same scales. I think it comes down to knowing your values. The majority of the decisions that we make

become a lot clearer when we know what's important to us. So if kindness is important to you, what's the kinder decision here and genuine kindness? As in maybe I need to leave this relationship because it's unkind of me to stay in it, knowing that this other person is fully in it and I'm not. Like it's unkind of me to stay. So then the kind decision would be to leave. safe, right? The, when you're looking at the values that you hold true to you, you basically are left with, okay, yeah, this one's more aligned and this one's not. And if you aren't, then it's pretty much a game of self-trust because you're going to say I'm going to go left and I'm going to make the most of whatever left is going to bring me. I trust myself to do that. I've looked at the,

I have another video where I say, um, actually it's on overthinking. And it's, um, it's, um, basically, if things go according to plan, great, keep it moving. If they don't, great, keep it moving. But the reality is you need to know that you are there to pick yourself up if or when things don't go according to plan. So make a well-intentioned decision, preferably one that aligns with your values, and then take it from there. But if you're, I think if you know that you, that this decision isn't going to genuinely harm. someone, if that's pretty obvious, right? If it's going to harm someone, you probably shouldn't do it. But most other decisions are typically going to come down to what do I genuinely want more of or less of in my life.

And it's going to feel really big and really heavy. And it's going to feel like this catastrophic or potentially catastrophic decision. It's like, well, if you really boil it down to this one's going to bring me more of this and this one's going to bring me more of that, which one do you want? And then you decide. So much of it is, again, self-trust. It really does come back to that. I wonder how people are able to operate functionally inside of a relationship if they don't have self-trust. Not well. Not well. I mean, you're looking at, you have to look at, you have to look at who you are in this,

I call it like the third entity that you're building is the relationship. and you have to look at your side of the street, and that's really difficult to do without shame spiraling. Like being able to take a look at how you've contributed to the circumstances of your relationship that you dislike, being able to genuinely do that is necessary to move the relationship forward in a healthy way, but it's impossible to do if you don't trust yourself to go there.

If you don't trust yourself, you spiral. It's like, oh, I'm so bad and everything's so awful. And you also can't hear the other person in the relationship, without falling into, you know, defense mechanisms and another shame spiral and more judgments and deflection, right? If you bring something to your girlfriend, wife, whoever, if you're to say, hey, I'm really bothered by this. You know, I really miss you. You know, you've been working a lot. I've been working a lot. And I just, I want more time with you. She could hear that as he doesn't appreciate the work that I do. He just wants me home. He doesn't even understand. He only

cares about his job, right? When in reality, you're saying, hey, I miss you. Could you, could we spend more time together? You have to be able, she would have to be able to really trust her ability to handle her own feelings and thus trust you in the relationship to really hear the request there. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's, it's interesting how many people would prefer to default to a shadow sentence, a passive aggression. Oh, going out with your friends again tonight, supposed to, I miss you. And I'd really like to see you. And I'd really like to see you. And it would be really great if we could spend some time together this week. Yeah.

Like the difference in those two senses. And one of them kind of encourages this ever escalating game of tit for tat of, well, last time when you did that thing. No, no, no, no. As opposed to I see where you are. You're doing something just exclusively out of love pretty much. And fuck, like I should nurture that. I'm sorry that I haven't. And you said that so nicely there.

That was such a beautiful way of suggesting. But sometimes it does come off a little passive-aggressive. And even in that opportunity, even in that is an opportunity to actually listen into what's being asked of you, even though the delivery isn't great. That's, no, we don't like to talk about that. We don't like to talk about having to be the bigger person in the relationship. And I'm not saying that you should be with someone who talks down to you all the time, you know, but we all have off days where we didn't regulate before we came to the table. And we weren't able to say, hey, I really miss you. Could we please spend some time together? It comes off as, well, about time, haven't seen you all week. You know, first dinner we've had together in six days, yada, yada. There's an opportunity there to lean in and think, okay, what is being asked of me? What is the request here? You know, I care about this person enough. to assume that what they want isn't necessarily to my detriment, right? It's not going to hurt me.

They're looking for something that I can supply. So if they're looking for more love, what could the love look like in this passive-aggressive comment? That's not fun to do until you get really good at it. Then it's kind of fun. But then after a while, you do risk getting into the late-night journaling sessions for a very long time, well, explain to me again why it is that you decided to call me a fucking bitch.

Like, just tell me, is it because of your father? You did this thing. But I get it. And a lot of this is learning to temper your foot on and off the gas. But too much of that, too much of that overthinking of, well, am I, should I be a little bit more understanding? Or have I, is this really, I should take the five-step Byron Katie journaling protocol. that I can make sure that I understand.

Do you feel good? Yeah. It just comes back to do you feel good inside of this relationship? And is there, okay, let's play that situation back to passive aggressive, you're the bigger person, awesome. You found the request. There should also be a comment that's like, hey, I really love you. Clearly you're really stressed.

Can we work on this? Because like that wasn't fun to communicate with. You know, I'm really trying to stay in it. And like I care about you. So like what, what can we do to make that better? Not just to put up with it endlessly. But it gives the, I mean, think about that. You ever been in a really bad mood?

And you bump into someone who's in a great mood. And you're like, man, I just, I got, I need more of that. I need more of that today, you know. And then you do. You shake some of it off and you go on about your day a little bit lighter, a little bit more upbeat. It's similar in a relationship. Only kind of a hundredfold.

Like if you come to the table, try and. to be more emotionally mature, more secure. And the other person does too, you're going to have days where that doesn't perfectly align. But the fact that you're both committed to it means that you do level up. Yeah. What do you think AI relationships say about people today and their need for connection? I don't know. What do they say? Well, I mean, there's an awful lot, GPT-40 when that goes- Oh, you're saying our relationships with AI. Yeah. So the fact that people are having relationships with AI, what do you think that says as a comment about where people's attachments are at the moment? I think we search for the least amount of friction possible.

And that's an issue because humans are imperfect, right? Like we're all fallible. And that's a problem when you can log on to a chat bot who's going to validate your every request, every desire, going to validate your every thought, your every feeling with zero expectation, zero expectation of reciprocity anyway. And you get to scratch that itch. That becomes a problem when you're looking at, you know, real life. And if you're really looking for a husband, a wife, a partner, someone to even just friends then your friends become annoying because your friends have inconvenienced you unlike your chatbot does um that worries me a little bit it does do you uh Whitney wolf hood bumble CEO talk about how people's AIs will date other people's AIs and then

sort of pass that up to the inverse sales funnel I mean I don't see I would love to actually see what she's talking about because that just sounds insane that sounds that sounds absolutely bonkers. You tell so much about a person by the photos that they choose on their dating app, by the way that they answer certain prompts, by the way that the opening line that you get when you first message, like there's so much that you read into. What does that even mean? Your AI avatars are going to be speaking to each other. I don't think it should be legal. Sorry, I don't. I really, I think that you're crossing into really dangerous territory when it comes to choosing romantic partners based on your AI avatars. It removes the humanness from a fundamentally human necessity.

That's concerning to me. Well, the one area that AI sucks is most is taste, being able to be tasteful. If you ask it to tell you a joke, like write an interesting joke about this, I'm yet to hear any that even partly understands how human psychology works. And that level of discernment, I think, is essentially non-existent. Now, this may just be a compute problem, right? If you get 10 times the Transformers, maybe this will just come along for the ride. But something tells me that, yeah, it's fundamentally a human challenge. And also, there is something about the meat, what's it called, a meat cute story.

Like, how did you guys get together? no one wants to say online. No one wants to say online dating. I fucking bet even fewer people want to say, oh, my AI avatar and his AI avatar. They really got on well. And we didn't think it was going to work. But the AI avatars, they convinced us. Do we know how it's going to work? Are you genuinely going to be pulling up a conversation between your avatars? I mean, like, oh, that's going well. I'll get back to back tomorrow. I would imagine it will be some kind of pre-screening. So I imagine that you'll do some kind of psychometric evaluation, testing. conversate, what are the sort of things that you're into? What matters to you? And then you do the same with somebody else. They must have some kind of data set of compatibility of people typically who are like this don't get on or do get on with people who are like that. And then over time you end up filtering these out. Now what's interesting, what's interesting is that maybe if you do get away from swiping, and apparently this is, I don't know whether this is true or not, but I heard it.

sort of the swipe economy is eating shit at the moment. They're really struggling. User numbers, usage, revenue, all of this stuff going through the floor. So this is a way to try and counteract that. One thing that might be a bit of a white pill, at least a white pill lining on this, if you get around some of the biases and erroneous judgments that people have of others, maybe the AIs will be able to feed you partners that you would not have seen as a potential match that may go on to actually be a match for you because it's gotten rid of some of the, there tends to be a zeroing in like a gravitational pull towards certain people on dating apps. Now, that's because everybody's optimizing for the same quite small bucket of traits that are usually available through dating apps. if you have AI's, maybe they're going to be able to find people that you wouldn't have necessarily swiped on, but you would get into a great relationship with. And I don't know, maybe, maybe that

broadens the playing field a little bit more, makes it a little bit more. I'm trying, I'm scraping the barrel here, okay? What if we, I was going to say, what if we came up with shows, dating shows where we put everyone on planes and sent them off to go date? And there's like a hundred of those, right where we send people off to go. Okay, yeah, there is. I was on the movie. Yeah. Yeah.

You don't need any more of those. You do not need any more of those. But we do the AIs and the AIs talk to each other and then we watch the conversations and then we have an infinite number of dating shows. Yeah, that's part. That's such a good idea. And then we don't even need to date. We can just sit there and watch our AI Avatar's date on screen for us.

The dystopia is just, it's too ready. But yeah, I look, I, I, I... Can we just all go to coffee shops? Singles. Coffee shops, Thursdays, from... 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Especially someone like somewhere here in Austin. You know, I like this lectures on tap thing.

Have you seen this? Oh. So it's kind of in New York. I think it might be coming to Austin as well. It's professors and academics and other people that do interesting research giving presentations in what looks like bars and maybe sort of small event spaces. and people get to go and it's kind of like going back to school

but there was one about black holes and there's another about human evolution and then there's another about geology and whatever and I love it probably not great if you're trying to listen to a lecture to have someone going like hey hey be single what you're in stah

dude shut the fuck up I'm learning about how gravity works yeah I'm learning about how gravity works but you come in an hour early two hours early all the singles come in at a specific day. Like, they're just, I, I wish that we could, I wish that we could encourage people to get outside and actually speak to each other more. And I know this is everyone says it.

And I, I don't have an answer for it. I don't know how to solve the issue. But there is a magic that happens just by being in someone's presence. And then your laundry list of, to, of wants and non-negotiables and all of the things, maybe not the non-negotiables. But all of your wants seems so... Well, your non-negotiables become way more negotiable. It's right. If they're true non-negotiables, they'll stay non-negotiable.

But your list tends to dissipate quite quickly when you're just in the presence of someone that you enjoy. I had an idea for a dating app, which is all that you're allowed to put up is a one-minute selfie video. It's just video. Because what you're trying to do, basically, as far as I can see, most online dating,

is just you speed running through this sort of weird, sterile, autistic back and forth conversation where you try not to be too keen, but also try to make the needs known without seeming too needy, to get to the point where you can see and speak to the other person. Problem being, I've not experienced this, not a woman, reliably I've been told that the DMs of most women on the internet

are a fucking cesspool. And if you open up a dating app to just have video, I worry whether that would be a potential. You'd need some AI on there to filter. Okay. So people would be dressing their dick picks up with a mustache. They'd be sort of popping this on the top. And they'd be like, hello.

My name's Christopher. How lovely to meet you. It's like slowly getting like lower over time. Sorry, let me put some blood back in. It's like you're speaking from experience. No, I've never done that. Look, I've never done that. No, that's not how it works. Good.

Cute, let's bring this one home. You're awesome. I love your work. I think you're great. I love the fact that you're trying to help people understand themselves better. Where should everyone go to check out what you're doing? At Quinlan Walther on all the things, all the places. I'm doing a live tour. Super excited. 12 live workshops. Dates to be announced, but it's in the coming months. Got to keep that one a little, a little quiet.

I appreciate you. Until next time. Thanks, guys. Bye. See you next time, everyone. Yes. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real-life stories,

and that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it right now by going to chriswillex.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.