Deeply Connected Relationships - Gay Hendricks - #983

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I wanted to explain, actually, before we got started, why I'm so interested in this stuff now. And it maybe sort of frames it in the broader context of what I've been interested in over the last sort of three or four years. So I got kind of interested in mating dynamics probably about four years ago or so. And I started off with what lots of people do, which is macro trends. So rates of coupling, birth rates, levels of satisfaction, what's happening socioeconomically, how many people are single, so on and so forth. These sort of big trends, right? It's the big stuff that's happening up top. And as soon as you've found out that, wow, there's some real changes going on here and it seems like we're in a turbulent time, you then ask, okay, well, what are the sort of underlying principles that drive human attraction? And that led me down the path of evolutionary psychology. So, what are we looking at from an adaptive standpoint? We're looking at hypergamy and mate guarding and jealousy and male parental uncertainty and intrasexual competition and kind of that suite of things, which I guess are kind of some of our psychological source code. And then the next stage that I went on to was, okay, well, modern culture. How is the macro trend and the underlying sort of ancestral programming? How is that, what's happening in the modern world, changes that have happened, that have sort of led us to some of this turbulence may be occurring? So you're talking about sexual revolution and the creation of the pill and dating apps and technology and distraction and so on and so forth. And all of that was really interesting and it kind of starts to form a perspective, right, about the world. But what I've sort of, this is my current working theory. All of that stuff is very interesting.
But every person's actual day-to-day, the mechanism with which they interact with their relationship is none of those things, right? They are all very highly contributing background noise. The mechanism that everybody's experience of their relationship is mediated through is how they relate. It is the way that they show up. It's their emotional state when there is a disagreement. It's how they communicate with their partners, whether they have unspoken expectations and premeditated resentments. So for all of this stuff, I'm kind of like the worst Sherlock Holmes in history, looking around at all of these different places. It's the trends, it's the ancestral programming, it might be the sexual revolution and what's happening with dating apps. But ultimately, everybody's experience of their relationship is how they show up, how consciously they are, what the commitments and agreements are that they make. Like what are the nuts and bolts and the mechanism through which their entire relationship is mediated. And that has sort of led me to get interested in your work, in people like Stan Tatkin as well, in an attempt to try and understand the actual mechanism of relating. And I just thought that might be an interesting little story arc to give you some background and lore to me and how I arrived at this stuff.

**Gay Hendricks** (3:15)
Well, I appreciate the background. Well, Katie and I have been together now for 45 years. And we have in that time made our own discoveries that made our own relationship work. And then one day, a rising young self-help TV person named Oprah called us and invited us on her show with our book Conscious Loving. And at that point, my life kind of went into the spin cycle on the washing machine and has just recently slowed down a little bit. But during all of that time, Katie and I not only had our own relationship, but we also worked with about 4,500 couples and more probably in our seminars. But so my perspective is going to be kind of down in the trenches rather than up at the evolutionary level. OK, so there are really three big things that you have to do reliably over and over again, thousands of times to have a good relationship, certainly with your beloved, but pretty much anybody.
And those three things are you've got to get good at feeling your own feelings. You've got to get good at knowing how you feel because somebody's going to ask you a lot of times, what are you feeling right now? And we should be taught this in the first grade, but I didn't learn it until I was in graduate school. But there's a whole vocabulary of inner experience. There's, I'm angry, there's, I'm sad, there's, I'm scared, there's, I'm sexually attracted to you, there's, I don't know what I'm feeling. But there's a whole suite of things that can be said and tuned into in the realm of feeling. So the first thing is both people and if there's more, people have to get good at making this inner move where you kind of go inside and say, hmm, what's going on in me right now? If you can't do that, well, we've had people in here in this very office who have been unable to do that and they're suddenly at retirement, now facing problems with their spouse or partner that they put off through all those years of being successful and everything. And they always boil down to starting with, how are we feeling inside? The second thing that's absolutely essential to have a good relationship is telling the truth, that being honest, like I was saying, you know, if somebody asks you, how are you feeling, being able to say, I feel sad right now. But you'd be surprised at how few people are that conversant with their feelings, that somebody can ask them that. A third, while I'm on the one, two and three, so feeling your feelings, telling the truth, big third one though, which is the ability to take responsibility for things that come up every day in relationships.