How Your Relationship Can Save the World (I'm not kidding)
We get romantic relationships very wrong.
As a neuropsychologist who regularly treats couples, I want to tell you that nearly everything we have been taught about love is wrong.
Think for a moment: What do you think should be the highest function of the romantic relationship?
For someone to complete you? To steadfastly see you? To unconditionally accept you?
Please.
Look around you. 50% of relationships end in divorce. And what fantasies do you have about the other 50%?
What other thing would you invest so much of your life force—years and years of your life, your body, your beauty, your labor, your effort—for such statistically poor returns?
You have been sold a potentially valuable product with a terrible user’s manual.
So many of us are shrieking about a dangerous world out there—a world full of people who can’t be trusted!!! People who are greedy! People who are mean! People who are scary!—when the truth is: The people who have caused you the most excruciating pain came from inside your own home.
Mom. Dad. Grandma. Grandpa.
And now: husband and wife.
The planet is changing at a breathtaking rate. And it’s time to uplevel our understanding of whose business it is to take care of the pain we feel inside of our own bodies.
The highest function of the romantic relationship is not to save you from your pain. The highest function of the relationship is to activate it.
We have all partnered with our unfinished childhood business. This is less a statement of opinion and more a fact of neurobiology. The ways that we learned to love and the ways we learned to hate happened *in* relationship—and importantly, whether you want to admit it or not, you learned most of it from your own family of origin.
You chose your partner precisely because you thought it would satisfy a wound that still festers.
Came from a volatile home? Steady Eddy’s stability is fantastic… until his calmness morphs into a coldness too bleak to bear. Emotionally distant parent? You can’t get enough of her emotional vitality…until all this emotional incontinence chokes you in the fucking throat.
More importantly, many of the ways you have been so devastated by your marriage would be impossible to know until the long-term chemistry of the relationship activated it. Think of it like the chemical reaction of water boiling. There needs to be enough heat and time to catalyze the reaction.
In other words, you did not fail. There is no conversation you could have had or questions you could have asked because these problems can only materialize at a certain temperature in the relationship.
Your calling is much, much higher. What is happening in your marriage is actually human evolution unfolding before your very eyes. It's remarkable if you use the right frame.
Stay with me.
The answer to the next question determines the future of something much bigger than your marriage; it determines the future of humanity.
When pain flares up inside your body—fear, rejection, despair, catastrophic loneliness—what *specifically* do you imagine the other person possesses that you do not have?
An ability to remain calm?
A lack of fear?
A confidence about the future?
Do you imagine they are not tormented by their own incessant sense of unworthiness? Do you imagine that, sure, they’re hurt, but NOT AS HURT AS ME?!
Your deepest fantasy is that they agree with you—that, deep down inside, they agree you are more right. And in their agreeing, you would feel like you mattered—that your ideas were finally compelling enough, your pain worthy enough, your life meaningful enough.
This is an ancient longing—a phantom from long, long ago. An understandable, but infantile call that our parents could have somehow given us the very things that were denied to them.
Now, you have 2 choices:
Continue arguing with ghosts.
Understand that this is evolution in action.
Humanity is at an extraordinary inflection point. All of this uncertainty is an extraordinary opportunity to build emotional sovereignty. In fact, it is only in the energy of uncertainty that true authority is built.
I work with leaders all over the world and I can see there is a new type of leader emerging on the planet: Leaders who will no longer measure their worth by other people’s agreement. Leaders who no longer need to be understood by people who don’t really understand themselves. Leaders who understand the difference between a boundary and a wish.
Leaders who understand that, sometimes to get to real love, we must let go of what feels certain to find what is true.
The highest purpose of the romantic relationship—at this stage of human evolution—is not to have someone else rescue you from your pain. It's to show you that you are the answer to it.
Happy Valentine's Day.
If you're fascinated by the intersection of the brain, relationships, and leadership, check out my book Energy Rising. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, Energy Rising shows you precisely what your brain needs to build exceptional emotional power in your relationships.
If you're especially interested in the connection between early brain development and how you lead your life today, you'll love Neuroenergetic Code 5 in Energy Rising. This neuroenergetic code takes you to the origins of your emotional power—to the earliest ways you learned to lead yourself through tough situations at work, at home, and in relationships. To get there, let’s start with a question: Who first taught you about leading yourself and others?
Your parents.
To strengthen the way you lead, this code is dedicated to examining your parents as the most powerful leaders in your life. Note that I did not say the most loving leaders. Nor the most attentive, helpful, smart, or even the most present. I hope your parents were all those things. But the inescapable fact is that whatever your parents did—the good, the bad, and the in-between—it was the most powerful because of what was happening in your brain at the time they were doing it.
