Talks on Love Playlist (1/5): Your relationship expectations could be holding you back | Stephanie R. Yates-Anyabwile

**Elise Hu** (0:00)
June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. A challenge for you today, listeners. Marriage and family therapist, Stephanie Yates-Anyabwile, says we should actually reject everything we know about relationships, and that doing this will be freeing and can be the key to having a great relationship. If this sounds counterintuitive, she will make sense of it in her 2024 talk after the break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Stephanie R. Yates-Anyabwile** (1:01)
I'm a couples therapist in an absolute romance theme. I'm talking about everything from The Notebook to Twilight, to a show some of you may remember called The Flavor of Love.
It's a reality competition show where the prize was the love of flavor of flavor.
I think about relationships a lot, and something that comes up a lot in my work is this belief that relationships are hard. And we believe that due to one primary reason. Our metric of success is based on what we've seen everyone else do. Imagine how you would honestly feel if you heard the following about another couple. OK, I said honestly, OK?
I heard they don't even sleep in the same bed anymore. They claim they never want to get married. I don't think they ever plan to live together. Would you think to yourself, it sounds like they have some serious issues? If we're honest, a lot of us would. And it's not because we're not open-minded, but we've been taught that these are warning signs for a relationship in trouble. And while they can be for a lot of people, that is not always the case. Relationship experts have found that one of the primary obstacles that couples face are their own expectations. When we compare ourselves to societal norms, we can develop a sense of resentment toward our partner, as well as a sense of shame for how we ourselves are coming up short. Now, before we really get into this, I have to say that some of us have to reckon with the fact that we may be with the wrong person. And that will be clear if your deepest desire is that your partner change fundamental aspects of who they are. You really want them to be a different person. But if you're confident that you're with the right person, and you just still feel frustrated and dissatisfied, we may find that rejecting everything we've known about good relationships is the key to actually having one. I work with couples every day, and I help them through relational crises. I remember I was working with an engaged couple for about a year. And when they first came to me, they said, we're 95 percent good, we just want to address the 5 percent. And I hear something to this effect often when I first meet a couple. It turns out that 5 percent was more like 75 percent and increasing. They were struggling to make a blended family work. One partner had kids, the other one had never lived with kids before, and they moved in together after only knowing each other for three months.
One time, I went on vacation, and by the time I got back, they'd called off their wedding. But why? Their love was honestly, it was evident, and they were not cruel to each other. Their issue was figuring out how to continue building their romantic relationship, while also figuring out how to raise teenagers, who to be honest, already had two very involved parents, they weren't really in need of a third. After a particularly big blow up over chores and responsibilities, I finally asked a dangerous question. I said, do you think that living together has hurt or helped your relationship more? We took a few weeks to explore that question, and they decided to test it out. They got a short-term lease on an apartment nearby for the partner who didn't have kids. And we were really strategic. We made a contract. Let's talk about dates, let's talk about expectations while you guys are living separately.
And by the time they came back to me, I'd never seen them communicate so well. They said that they were looking forward to every weekend that they got to spend together. It felt like a vacation, because they would spend the entire week planning their time together and savoring every moment they had together. They also found that their individual relationships with the kids drastically improved without the pressure of trying to transition them into an entirely new household dynamic, especially when they only had a couple of years left in the house.