On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 3 Scientific Reasons Why We Lose The Spark and 3 Ways To Get It Back

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.Today, I am going to share with you the reason that ultimately leads to losing that spark that was initially there at the start of the relationship. Although chemistry is important, for many, especially for relationships that didn’t last, it is not sustainable. And it does not provide a strong enough bond to keep the relationship going. Let’s find out what these scientific reasons are and the tips to turn things around to help improve and sustain the partnership you have right now.  Key Takeaways:00:00:00 Intro00:03:12 Why do we lose the spark in our relationship? 00:04:27 We are addicted to having chemistry00:07:40 Why the ‘bad boys’ seem more attractive00:11:09 Reason #1: Transition from chemistry to character00:15:53 Reason #2: From being a collaboration to a competition00:23:10 Reason #3: Your partner will push you and challenge youLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, it's Debbie Brown, host of the Deeply Well Podcast, where we hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers and wellness around topics that are meant to expand and support you on your wellbeing journey. Deeply well is your soft place to land, to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is available now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Namaste. Regardless of the progress you've made in life, I believe we could all benefit from wisdom on handling common problems, making life seem more manageable, now more than ever. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of the One-E-Feed podcast,

where I interview thought-provoking guests who offer practical wisdom that you can use to create the life you want. 25 years ago, I was homeless and addicted to heroin. I've made my way through addiction recovery, learned to navigate my clinical depression, and figured out how to build a fulfilling life. The One-E-Feed has over 30 million downloads

and was named one of the best podcasts by Apple Podcasts. Oprah Magazine named this is one of 22 podcasts to help you live your best life. You always have the chance to begin again and feed the best of yourself. The trap is the person often thinks they'll act once they feel better. It's actually the other way around. I have had over 500 conversations with world-renowned experts and yet I'm still striving to be better. Join me on this journey. Listen to the one you feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Yvonne Gloria and I'm Maite Gomes-Rachon. We're so excited to introduce you to our new podcast, Hungry for History! On every episode, we're exploring some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, beverages from our Mexican culture.

We'll share personal memories and family stories, decode culinary customs, and even provide a recipe or two for you to try at home. Listen to Hungry for History on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Men tend to demonstrate what psychologists call the dark triad of characteristics more often. Now I know everyone's like, what's the dark triad? So the dark triad of characteristics are narcissism, psychopathy, and this last one is the manipulativeness and an extreme focus

on their own interests over others. These traits don't sound at all attractive, right? I mean, you're not going, that's what I want, but are you? Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world, where you come back every week to become a happier, healthier and more healed. Imagine we lived in a world that was happier, healthier and more healed. I think that it would have such a huge impact on our lives, our emotions, the lives and emotions of future generations, and on purpose is your commitment to making that happen.

So thank you for being here. Thank you for all the love on the Lewis Hamilton episode, on the Kevin Hart episode that we just had. For those of you that heard me on Caller Daddy, thank you so much for all the Instagram DMs, the tags, the tweets. It has been an unbelievable couple of weeks because my book, if you're listening to this right now, my book is out in four days. I would love

for you to order it right now because if you pre-order it before the 31st of January, you get my eight cliches of love workshop absolutely free. I want you to go grab that right now. And it really supports authors when you pre-order. So go to eight rules of love.com. You can do the audiobook. So if you want to listen to the book instead of reader, you can also order the audiobook. I read it as well. And I know a lot of you last time for think like a monk read and listened at the same time. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour. Love rules.

Go to jsheditour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now today's episode is something I think that's so, so important. And I'm hearing about it more and more because I think we underestimate the impact that the last few years have had on our relationships. We underestimate the impact that it's had on us, whether we're in a relationship or whether we're single.

And for a lot of us, our relationship status changed during the pandemic. Some people got into new relationships. So we're just starting. Some people actually broke up from even long term relationships. And then there's all of us who may feel social anxiety now, being out in public, meeting new people. And so I want to start addressing these issues and these challenges because I know they're very real.

And often as society, we like to gloss over them and move on, but then we don't feel seen, heard and understood. And so today, I want to talk about reasons why we lose the spark in relationships and how to get it back. Raise your hand if you've ever lost this spark in a relationship. And by the way, this episode is for you whether you're in a relationship or not, because I promise you, you're going to bump into someone, you're going to find that spark, you're going to fill that chemistry and then you're going to be feeling this way in six months time. It's actually biologically, chemically going to happen.

I'll explain in this episode. And I want you to stick around for that. But raise your hands if you've ever lost a spark in a relationship. I think every single one of us can attest to that. And today I'm going to talk about the reasons why that happens. And I think some of them are actually going to surprise you. And then I'm also going to share with you methods that I've used, that I and Rade have used, and that research shows will actually work, whether you're in a relationship, whether

you're just started dating, whether you're single, or you just broke up, please do listen to this because it may even answer your questions. If you're someone who just broke up, or the relationship just ended, this may actually answer a lot of questions, especially if you didn't get closure. All right, so let's dive straight in. We are fascinated and addicted to this idea of chemistry, the amount of times they're here. So we went on a couple of dates, but I didn't feel any spark or I'm not going on a second date because I didn't feel any chemistry or

we've been seeing each other, but you know, there isn't that feeling. I don't get the butterflies, right? We've all heard this. We've all said this and it's true. We want to feel chemistry with the person we potentially could spend our lives with. There's nothing wrong with that and I don't want to say there's anything wrong with that. I think it's normal. It's natural when I first met Radi. I felt tons of chemistry. And even today, I feel it in a different way.

And it's something that I don't think should be underestimated, but also sometimes it's overrated, right? It's that balance between underestimated, but also sometimes it's overrated, right? It's that balance between underestimated or underrated and overrated that we need to get right. And so so many of us sometimes overrate this chemistry idea and we underrate the character idea. Chemistry starts relationships, character continues relationships. Let me repeat that again. Chemistry starts relationships,

character continues and keeps relationships. And I think this idea that someone's character and your character is really shown by when you're stressed, when you're tired, when you're exhausted, and that's what happens as a relationship progresses. When you're seeing each other in the beginning, the reason why there's so much chemistry is you only see each other one hour a day or two hours a week or two hours every two weeks, or whatever it may be for a day, every month. And in that time, you're not really seeing a 360 degree view of this person. You're seeing a 45 degree view or less of an individual. We're so much

more complex. We have so much more going on. And our character traits, such as our interests and our values are more of the nurture part of who we are and come from the cultural forces that surround us as we grow up. So what I would say is that in any relationship we have to evolve from chemistry to character if we really want the relationship to progress. And I think too many of us keep placing too much emphasis on chemistry for too long. It's kind of like saying, I really enjoy driving in gear 5. And so even when I'm going up a hill, I'm going to try and drive up in gear 5.

Right? I just want that feeling. I just want to hear the sound of the car. I just want to feel that experience. Now, some of you may have actually tried to do this. If you've ever tried to drive a car in gear five, and now everyone's like, what's gears do? We just have automatic cars, or electric cars.

Very true, I get it. But I remember driving a manual car, and the idea of just driving a manual car up a hill in gear five just doesn't make any sense, but that's what we're trying to do in relationships. I will come back to you with a better analogy that is more relevant right now, but we will get there. I also want to talk about, I want to highlight a particular experience where this happens. So this happens

in many different ways, how we overrate chemistry and underrate character, but I want to give a very specific example and a study on this. And it's all about the bad boy and biology or the biology of the bad boy. Now, how many of you have ever been attracted to the bad guy, right? The bad boy. How many of you have ever been, be honest. Be honest, do not be ashamed. Do not feel embarrassed, right?

And how many of you have ever been attracted to the bad person or the bad girl? Like someone who kind of is a rebel, kind of has that edge right, super attractive. And certainly there are bad boys and bad girls out there. And the bad boy type is far more common because men tend to demonstrate what psychologists call the dark triad of characteristics

more often. Now I know everyone's like, ooh, what's the dark triad? So the dark triad of characteristics more often. Now I know everyone's like, what's the dark triad? So the dark triad of characteristics are narcissism, psychopathy, and this last one is the manipulativeness and an extreme focus on their own interests over others. Now when we look at them clinically, these traits don't sound at all attractive, right? I mean, you're not going, that's what I want. But are you? When we sound at all attractive, right? I mean, you're not going, that's what I want. But are you? When we look at that clinically,

even though it doesn't seem attractive, in the real world, they can be quite alluring. Now Gregory Lewis Carter of the University of Durham and his team gave 128 undergraduate women descriptions of two types of men. What we'd call regular guys, who served as the controls for the study and bad boys. The bad boys were described using traits

from an inventory of characteristics typically associated with narcissism, such as a desire for attention and admiration, a lack of remorse or sensitivity, lack of concern with moral standards and cynicism. The researchers then asked the women to rate the attractiveness of the men based on these descriptions. And you guessed it, bad boys came out on top.

The researchers concluded that two issues may be at play in the women's choices. For one, biology. The bad boys had traits that women could have interpreted would make them stronger genetically and therefore better mates for reproducing. But on a more everyday level, it could have been down to the bad boys ability to sell themselves. Remember, among the dark triad our characteristics of manipulation and ability to represent themselves. Remember, among the dark, try out our characteristics of manipulation and ability to represent themselves favorably. So the reason I'm sharing that with you and why we lose the spark is because

we're attracted to the wrong person in the first place, right? So what ends up happening is we get attracted to the wrong person, we then start to see the reality of that individual. And after we see the reality, we have to readjust. And I want to break down those three steps, right? It's natural to make the wrong decision to be attracted to the wrong thing, then see reality. And the biggest mistake we do is often it's glaringly obvious that this person is obviously wrong for us and we keep trying to readjust to stay. The best thing we can do in that moment when we've really learned about the reality and if it's fully that extreme is to move on. So the first lesson of today, the first

reason is this idea of how we have to transition from chemistry to character, right? Chemistry to character is one of the biggest reasons why relationships end. Now, I want to talk to you about how this changes biologically, right? So let's dive into a study about love at first sight. According to a study in the journal for the International Association for Relationship Research, that's a mouthful. Participants who reported having had love at first sight experience

were also more likely to emphasize the importance of physical attractiveness over concepts associated with true love, such as intimacy and commitment. Notice how we're constantly led astray. Now, study show that when we're constantly led astray. Now, study show that when we're younger, our prefrontal cortex is less developed. So we're more likely to follow our feelings as opposed to reasoning in self-control. That's why actually, which is so fascinating. Don't you feel like you felt more

chemistry when you were younger? Like, don't you feel you just felt more naturally attracted to people when you were younger, even when you didn't go on a date? Whereas now as an adult, you go on so many dates and you don't feel anything. The reason is because now your brain is developed and your reasoning and your self-control is so high that you're actually able to be more discerning. Now, the reason I'm talking about this is that as the researchers wrote, we therefore suggest that love at first sight is not a distinct form of love, but rather a strong initial attraction that some label as love at first sight, either in the moment or retrospectly. Now, when I talk about me and Rady, it was definitely

attraction at first sight. Rady did not care. If you ask Rady, she'll say, yeah, I didn't even notice him. I noticed her for sure, right? Just to clarify how deceiving it can be. Now, Hedonic adaptation is a psychological concept that describes why, for instance, studies show that while happiness spikes in the first two years of marriage,

this could be a two years of living together, then returns to prior levels. Researchers call this early stage of love passionate love. Over time, if love lasts, it tends to morph into something still beautiful, but less charged by the exciting and sometimes stressful dopamine spikes that accompany newness. Now, this is really interesting. When something's new, you experience stress and excitement at the same time. So, the excitement is, they gave me their number. The stresses, will they text me? The excitement is, oh my gosh, we're going on our first date? Distresses, do they like me? Right?

So you're going through this pendulum of excitement and stress, excitement and stress, excitement and stress. And that's what makes you feel like you have a spark biologically, chemically. Hey, it's Debbie Brown. And my podcast, Deeply Well, is a soft place to land on your wellness journey. I hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers and wellness and mental health around topics that are meant to expand

and support you on your journey. From guided meditations to deep conversations with some of the world's most gifted experts in self-care, trauma, psychology, spirituality, astrology, and even intimacy. Here's where you'll pick up the tools to live as your highest self. Make better choices, heal and have more joy.

My work is rooted in advanced meditation, metaphysics, spiritual psychology, energy healing, and trauma-informed practices. I believe that the more we heal and grow within ourselves, the more we are able to bring our creativity to life and live our purpose, which leads to community impact and higher consciousness for all beings. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is your soft place to land, to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well is available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Big love, Namaste. Namaste. I am Mi'amla and on my podcast, The R-Spot, we're having inspirational, educational, and sometimes difficult and challenging conversations about relationships. They may not have the capacity to give you what you need and Insisting means that you are abusing yourself now. You human That means that you're crazy as hell just like the rest of us When a relationship breaks down I take copious notes and I want to share them with you. Anybody with two eyes and a brain knows that too much Alfredo sauce is just no good for

you. But if you're going to eat it, they're not going to stop you. So he's going to continue to give you the Alfredo sauce and put it even on your grits if you don't stop him. Listen to the art spot on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our 20s are seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree, full in love, make mistakes,

and decide what we want from our life. But what can psychology really teach us about this decade? I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the Psychology of Your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money, friendships, and much more, to explore the science and the psychology behind our experiences, incredible guests, fascinating topics, important science, and a bit of my own personal experience. Audrey, I honestly have no idea what's going on with my life.

Join me as we explore what our 20s are really all about, from the good, the bad, and the ugly, and listen along as we uncover how everything is psychology, including our 20s. The psychology of your 20s hosted by me, Gemma Speg. Now streaming on the iHotRadio app, Apple podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts. Now over time if love lasts, it tends to morph into something still beautiful, but less charged by that excitement and stress. This late to state is called compassionate love,

and is characterized by deep connection. So when something becomes routine or consistently available, it naturally loses its spark, right? When someone, when you have to kind of guess, when you're going to see someone, when you're going to surprise each other, naturally that is spark. Now though our brains can and do adapt to anything that's routine, arousal and physical passion tended to be affected more.

When these things fade, much of love's heavy lifting is done by our deeper attraction that of our character and values and how well they're suited to one another. If we never looked beyond the spark when the initial chemistry begins to fade, the relationship fizzles, right? So I want to keep emphasizing the power of goals, values, a deeper understanding of the human being. And by the way, if reality surprised you and you don't want reality, that is absolutely fine too. You don't have to keep putting yourself in a position. You don't want to be in.

So that's a big reason, right? That's a really, really big reason as to why the spark goes away because we've talked about the idea that, you know, we're attracted to the wrong thing in the first place. We're not switching from chemistry to character. And if we don't, the chemistry we have to understand, that's biology, it's literally changing, right? Our hormones are changing. The chemicals that are released are changing as you spend more time.

You become more comfortable with them. You become more natural with them. Now, this one's a really, really big one. This next one, I think it's something that again, we don't talk about enough. I find that it's fascinating that at the beginning of a relationship, you want to win the other person over, but then fast forward into the relationship, you want them to lose in an argument, right? You spend the whole first few months trying to win the other person over. And now all you want to do is beat them in an argument. Notice how you went from winning them over to wanting them to lose.

Now, that's the challenge. That the relationship now goes from being a collaboration to a competition, right? It goes from being a collaboration to a competition. And that's where relationship starts to disintegrate. It starts to break down. It starts to fall apart. So this is fascinating to me because you went from having a collaborative, exciting, chemistry-based,

compatible connection and now all of a sudden it became a competition, right? It became a competition. And listen to this, author Anne Leary met her husband when she was 20 and he was 25. They were perfect together. They had similar attributes and psychological makeup. They were both intensely competitive, both emotional and sensitive. They loved kids and animals, they even looked similar to one another. But as Leary writes, when the couple had kids, their matching attitudes and temperaments started

to cause problems, they began to keep school, noting who each thought was doing more to contribute to the family and who was being more critical and self-serving. After years of this, they sought therapy, but one evening while sitting in the marriage counsellor's office, they simply agreed it just wasn't going to work and they should get a divorce. On the way home, they stopped for a bite to eat. During which Anne decided to finally tell her husband everything she'd been holding back. Every time he'd failed in her eyes or led her down. To her surprise, instead of pushing back and arguing, he apologized.

Shocked at his response and softened, then confessed everything she was sorry for, too. Instead of discussing the divorce, they called their apartment and asked their kids if they wanted to see a movie together as a family. They never did fall for divorce and instead learned to shift the dynamics of their relationship. Their competition is now more of a friendly rivalry and instead of being critical, they've learned to celebrate one another's success. Now notice how those two trajectories, right? You're going down this road of chemistry. Hopefully you find compatibility and then you have this split point. You either choose competition

or you choose connection. Competition leads to complaining, criticism, comparison, and you know, connection leads to all the great stuff that we're really looking for. And so everyone's at that fork in their relationship always. Right? And you have to decide whether you're choosing to compete with this person or you're choosing to compete on who can love each other more and deeply. And so that's another reason why relationships fizz allow is that we choose competition over collaboration. We choose

competition over connection. We choose comparison over care and compassion. And I think if we can really think about our life as we're always choosing between those two, when you're next in an argument, ask yourself, am I competing with the person I tried to win over? Because that doesn't make any sense. Or do I want to collaborate with give him an ask yourself, am I competing with the person I tried to win over because that doesn't make any sense. Or do I wanna collaborate with them? Literally ask yourself that question. So I hope this is really being illuminating for you.

And I wanna talk to you about where we can go right, how we can improve this, right, for ourselves. Like what are some of the things that we can do? So I looked at some research as to what makes a marriage good after the honeymoon. And this applies to what makes a relationship good after the honeymoon phase. And to answer this question, anthropologist Helen Fisher did some great research. The team found a group of unicorns, not real unicorns, but people had been married for an average of 21.4 years and reported they were still very much in love.

They scanned their brains while these people looked at pictures of a familiar acquaintance, a close-long-term friend and acquaintance with whom they were less familiar and their partner. Unlike when they looked at photos of others, when they looked at pictures of their partners, they showed activities in areas of the brain that are associated with all three of our basic human drives. The sex drive, our drive for romantic passion, yes, that's an actual drive, and our drive to feel attachment. Now attachment, what researchers call liking,

can form the basis for a happy long-term relationships. It's almost that idea of like, you say you love someone, but do you like them? I had someone say this to me. I was officiating a wedding a couple of years ago and this person came up to me and they said, Jay, I broke up with someone because we realized we loved each other, but we didn't like each other. And I thought that was such a fascinating statement because you think love encompasses

everything. But liking someone means you actually like being around them Love means you care about them. You may have deep feelings towards them But you don't like them. You don't get along with them So when the researchers compared the results to brain activity in those who were experiencing early stage love The newly in love showed activity pretty much entirely in wanting areas associated with dopamine-fueled passion at love. So you can see it's very, very different.

The researchers said, for someone they look at their partner, it looks almost as if their brain is on fire. And in a way it is, we can still experience intense love many years into marriage, but in these later years, what fuels love changes. You can think one of the early stage of relationship and all of that initial passion like gasoline. It will burn hot and fast when it ignites, but it's not sustainable. When we connect on a deeper level, when we listen fully to one another, when we hold

hands or share long hugs, we're putting wood on the fire, and over time we get the enduring warmth of a long-lasting relationship. And what we understand from the Gottman Institute is that rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, couples embrace each other's needs, right, it's the idea of, do I make my partner feel seen, heard, and understood. And do I feel seen, heard, and understood? And are we making enough time to feel seen, heard, and understood? And I think too many people, we feel that I already heard my partner. I've already seen them. I already know them, right? There's this assumption of, I've already figured them out. I already fully understand them.

And that actually blocks us and that's why the spot goes away because now we're only looking at old things about our partner. We're not learning about the new things. I want to go a bit deeper with you all if I can. One of the reasons why relationships and chemistry fade and what we can do about them is that we don't realize that relationships are not just for pleasure, but therefore reaching our truest potential. Your partner is going to push you, challenge you in ways that no one else ever has, and

actually it could bring out the best out of you if you're willing to let it come out. And I think too many of us are scared of letting it come out because of our ego. We don't want our partners to challenge us. Now I'm not saying that your partners should criticize you or compare you to other people. That's not healthy. But our partner can challenge us in so many other ways and challenge our ego in so many other ways. And so there's a lot of growth to be had. And there's a beautiful statement from relationship counselor and former monk as well, Thomas Moore. He writes in his book, Soulmates, Relationships are not meant to provide us with unending happiness. When we focus our attention on the soul of the relationship, instead of on

its interpersonal mechanics, a different set of values come to the foreground. We begin to see relationships as the place where the soul works out its destiny. With our focus on the soul, we won't feel the impossible burden of doing the relationship right. So he says, when we look at the issues from the standpoint of our soul, we stop putting ourselves as the center. We don't ask, what's wrong with me? We ask, how does the failure of this relationship serve me? Or what is our out of alignment within me that I chose to be in a relationship that does not honor my values? So more also writes that the problems with an relationship don't necessarily mean

that something is wrong. Instead, these challenges may be inviting us to lean into one another. Periods of stress and points of disagreements can actually serve as initiation of sorts into a more meaningful relationship where we understand and relate to ourselves and the other person on a deeper level. I love this idea. I love this idea that challenges doesn't mean we just walk away, that we throw it away, that this could be the greatest growth that we could go through. See, the problem is in a relationship, we measure our self-worth by how well the relationship is going.

We don't measure it by saying, well, how much am I growing? Right? We measure our self worth and our self esteem by how well is this relationship going, not by how am I feeling or how am I growing or what am I accomplishing separately? The other thing I'm going to mention here is the investment we make in our relationship. Now researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Emory University used data from more than 3,000 married people to determine the correlation between how much money you spend on weddings and divorce rates. This is scary. They found that the more a couple spent on a wedding, the more likely the marriage wouldn't last. Those who married on the cheap, relatively speaking, for $1,000 or less,

were 53% less likely to divorce, and couples spending between $1,000 and $5,000 were 18% less likely to split up. Conversely, couples who forked out over $10,000 to $20,000 for the big day were 29% more likely to divorce. Among those who went all out spending more than $20,000, the odds their marriage wouldn't last rose to 46%. Now I'm not telling you not to have a big wedding. I'm really not restricting you, but what I'm saying is, are we investing more in moving in and getting married or are we investing in our relationship? How many of us are, you know, when you're getting married, or are we investing in our relationship? How many of us, you know, when you're getting married,

you think about a guest list. How many of you have thought about which of the couples you really want to spend time with? That's the thing we should be thinking about. When we get married, we have a, a efficient, the efficient is guiding the ceremony. Who are our marriage mentors, or even if you're not getting married,

our relationship mentors, right? Who's coaching us? Who's guiding us through this? Who are we marriage mentors or even if you're not getting married, our relationship mentors? Right. Who's coaching us? Who's guiding us through this? Who are we turning to? And clinical psychologist Seth Meyers says that seeking counseling before getting married and I'm just talking about getting married is almost like a commitment in a relationship even if you choose not to get married. So Seth Meyers says that seeking counseling before getting married is the smartest decision

that any couple can make. Meyers believes this is one thing that religious institutions and spiritual traditions that require or at least recommend pre-marital counseling get right. Yeah, unfortunately, many couples who aren't required by institutions or spiritual leaders to have counseling before marriage avoid seeking this kind of support because of fear. They're afraid that if they talk about challenges they're already having, putting a spotlight on their problems will magnify them and they'll split up. Maya says it's typically the opposite that's true, having a structured environment where

you can express your feelings and be supported, working through early challenges actually helps you resolve the issues so they won't creep up later on when you're in a relationship. So at that point, later on, you could be so entrenched that they're harder to resolve and really could lead to divorce. So I think our avoidance of problems in hope that things will work out Really tend to work. I hope this episode has been really illuminating on how it's natural that chemistry will go It's natural that compatibility and character will rise. We then have a choice between competition or collaboration And finally we have a choice between really excavating and creating long-lasting soul connection and work, as opposed to the idea of, I just want to have a good time. I'm

not saying that relationships are not fun, they're not exciting, they are, they're thrilling, but at the same time, there is a growth that comes from it that is even more satisfying. I'm sure you feel that if you're someone who's gone to the gym regularly, even though it was uncomfortable in the beginning, the feeling is so much better. If you've been eating really healthy, the feeling is so much better. If you've worked on a tough relationship, the success, the accomplishment you feel from this type of growth is so much greater than any pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening to On Purpose. I hope you go and pre-order my new book. It's four days away, eight rules of love.com. Get the audiobook or the hardcover. I can't wait for you to read it. And I can't wait to connect really on my tour. I'm going on tour at jsheditour.com. If you wanna come and see me live,

it's gonna be a phenomenal experience. Can't wait to see you there. Hi, I'm Brendan Francis Newnam, I'm a journalist, a wanderer, and a bit of a bond vivant, but mostly a human just trying to figure out what it's all about. And not lost is my new podcast about all those things. It's a travel show where each week I go with a friend to a new place and to really understand it, try to get invited to a local's house for dinner

where kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party, it doesn't always work out. Ooh, I have to get back to you. Listen to not lost on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. When my daughter ran off to hop trains, I was terrified I'd never see her again. So I followed her into the train yard. This is what it sounds like inside the box car. And into the city of the rails, there I found a surprising world,

so brutal and beautiful that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there. And if you want to play with the devil, you're going to find them down in the rail yard. Undenail Morton, come with me to find out what waits for us and the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, cityoftherails.com. I'm Munga Shatekler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. Am I whole view on astrology change? Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think that it's a good idea to do it. handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happy with me, and my whole view on astrology change. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.