Why We Fall for the Wrong Person | Couples Therapist Dr. Harville Hendrix

**Simon Sinek** (0:00)
And this is healthy?

**Harville Hendrix** (0:01)
It's nature. Nature's trying to finish an agenda that it didn't get to finish in the parenting period of childhood.
Nature's trying to finish that. And it's simple. It's about survival.

**Simon Sinek** (0:13)
So I'm trying to think about the people in my life when I was a kid, and what did they not meet?
And then what am I attracted to now?
Ah, sh**, it works.
You're right. Ah, d**n it. They say that it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. But you know what's even better than that? Learning how to stay in love. Now I have my own podcast, which means I get to bring on whoever I want. And it may or may not be a coincidence that I have had multiple relationship and love experts. And the reason is because the stuff is hard. And I have a life of failed relationships to prove it. But that might all change. Thanks to my guest, Dr. Harville Hendrix. He spent 50 years figuring out love. Working alongside his wife, fellow relationship expert, Helen LaKelly Hunt, he's written 10 books, including the bestsellers, Getting the Love You Want and Receiving Love, the subjects of which made him a fixture on Oprah for nearly two decades. My conversation with Harville really challenged me. But then that doesn't help me understand.

**Harville Hendrix** (1:25)
I'm sorry.
I didn't create Nature. But I watched this for 50 years.

**Simon Sinek** (1:30)
And it really helped me reframe what's supposed to happen in a relationship. Will we learn to stop seeing each other as a resource to meet our needs, but rather that relationships become an act of service? Trust me, this will help anyone who's either looking for love or is looking to stay in love. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.
So I'm always fascinated by someone's origin, like how they got into their careers, because I bumbled and fumbled into mine. You and your wife and your books, you were in Oprah a million times, and you still are the go-to for anybody who's trying to understand love and relationships. How did you find yourself in that place?

**Harville Hendrix** (2:22)
Oh, in that place. So I could start with the fact that my first interview was when I was 15 years old. I didn't know that was the beginning of my career, and I became a pastor of a church at 17
So I've been on the stage regularly every Sunday, and I've done stuff like that ever since I was ordained at 17 I grew up on a Sharecropper's Farm. I had no money, no status, no nothing. I just happened to speak one day at church and people said, hey, this boy can talk. And that led to the ministry and blah, blah, blah. So I have a PhD. Then I got a divorce in 75
I was a professor at Perkins School of Theology here in Dallas. It's a Methodist seminary. And at that time it was a conservative Methodist seminary. So the dean had to fire me because his supporters in the Methodist church could not have a divorced professor. Five of his tenured faculty were divorced. Five years later, but I was not tenured.

**Simon Sinek** (3:27)
What you're saying is, is you're a pioneer and a trendsetter.

**Harville Hendrix** (3:31)
I didn't know that. But I, but I decided they, I got my degree to be able to be paid to write and read and talk. They put me on committees so that 20% of my time was on teaching, 80% of my time was on committees. So when they fired me, I said, that was not fun.
I was a clinician. So I decided I would go full time in private practice, started psychotherapy, then met Helen the fifth year of my divorce. We clicked around a bunch of things, started talking. Five years later, we got married. Then I had begun putting together this Imago Relationship Therapy theory stuff.
So our conversation has continued about what causes conflict, why do people get divorced and so forth. Then when we got into it, Helen became the second most important person in the world of the women's movement after we got married. So we did parallel for a while. She was doing the women's world and she was number two, along with Gloria Steinem. Helen paid the bill for the women's movement. Gloria was the face. Then Helen decided she liked working with couples and we co-wrote books. She began to join me in lecturing and doing workshops. Our life just merged together so that right now we do everything together.