40. FALLING IN LOVE: Is there really “the one” or is “the one” YOU?

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Hello,

listeners that we love so much.

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

I think we have an interesting show for you today.

We'll see.

First of all, I want to tell you how we think of these topics, okay?

So that we're going to discuss each week.

Usually

we just try to come up with ideas that drive us all nuts in our lives.

Like, what are the things that we all think about incessantly?

that we're convinced if we just nail one way or another, our lives will be fixed.

It's never true.

And yet here we are.

And then what happens is, I think usually I've usually thought of something that we've, I've been discussing with friends or with, okay, let's tell the truth with myself or with Abby.

And then I picked.

You tell the truth because you don't have friends?

Yeah.

I was like, wait, who the hell?

What am I saying?

What?

On all my picnics with friends and like all my coffee dates and

get-togethers and such.

No, it's what I'm thinking about by myself and then with Abby and

reading about usually.

And then I pitch the idea to sister and Abby and then we think about it for a few days.

Everybody goes and thinks.

I only think.

They do other things also.

And then

Abby and I usually go for a walk.

We go for a thinking walk together.

So this consists of me saying, okay, we're going to go and we're going to talk about, let us say, falling in love, because that's our topic for today.

Okay.

we're gonna we're gonna talk about falling in love what the hell is falling in love what does it mean what does it mean to fall out of love what does it mean when um we get to the phase after the the wild falling in love part which we're calling on the pod landing in love and what is all of this even for in our lives all of this drama and trauma and beauty So we go for a walk.

We did this last week.

Tell them what happens when we're on our walks almost every single time.

Oh, this is the most meta fun, wonderful thing: we're walking, we have this path, okay, near our house, and it's a walking path.

And so, everyone in our area walks on this path every day.

Some people roller skate, some people bike, some people are walking.

Okay, so Abby and I are walking every all the time, and we're preparing our pod.

She's talking, I'm taking notes while I walk, she's guiding me so I don't run into things.

And

every time

a group of women or two women or a woman stops us, sometimes someone points to us and gestures towards her ears to tell us that she's listening to the podcast right now.

As we are passing her preparing the next podcast, the last time, babe, remember during the loved one,

a group of women.

stopped us and were like, this is our pod squad.

We're talking about the pod right now.

No way, really?

Yes.

yes it was so awesome

so that always feels really cool and and then of course i get my oh my god this is so stressful how do we make it i it has to stay good it has to stay then i get my anyway we're letting that go

so we're on our thinking walk

about falling in love

and i say to her because Abby is, I don't know anyone on earth.

No one is a bigger romantic than Abby.

Abby believes.

believes she has believed her whole life in this idea that there is someone out there for her and that it was destined she just her favorite her favorite movies are what

the notebook the notebook and

titanic titanic

she is the ted lasso of love she's the ted lasso of the world she is

She really is.

True believer here, people.

She's the true believer.

And so I asked her what that was like.

And she said, she kind of slowed down on the walk and she said,

you know, I don't know.

I just remember when I was little

sitting outside in my backyard looking up at the stars and just knowing that someone was out there for me, like my soulmate.

And I just stopped walking because

one of the earliest memories I have in my life is sitting outside in our backyard, sissy.

So, with that little like brick patio that we had in the back, because I wouldn't have actually gone into the yard.

I actually used to get grounded outside.

Oh my gosh, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, if I got in trouble, I was grounded outside of my room because inside is where I want to be.

Okay.

And I remember at night sitting outside, looking up at the stars and knowing that something was out there for me, but it was never a person.

I was always yearning for like God, for this like divine love.

I know there's a God somewhere out there for me, which is so interesting that you were always yearning for romantic love.

I was yearning for a divine love.

So, babe, here's what I want to know.

This soulmate that you believed was out there for you as you stared up at the stars.

What did you believe that this someone, this soulmate, was going to do for you?

Like, what was the point of them?

Well,

at the time,

I didn't have the words for it because I couldn't conceive of the fact that I was broken.

It just felt an unalignment that was happening inside of my body.

That was happening inside of me based on all of the

whatever you want to call it, like sitting in those pews as a kid and hating myself like

all of my childhood stuff

um and just feeling like

i was broken so i thought maybe somebody out there could fix me truly truly

um

because surely what was happening in my current life where i was sitting i'll never forget it i was like on my driveway looking up and just knowing my friends my high school friends were sitting around me and we we were just talking about how they're like where that person is, and that person is doing something right now.

And

I just have always been fascinated by it.

You know, I think that

for me,

I felt like somebody out there was going to help

stop the hurt.

Yes.

Okay.

That is what I thought about this God

I was yearning for, that I was

jacked up in some way or another.

That if I could just

figure out this God and love this God the right way, I would have like solved the puzzle of life, of myself.

I thought those answers, like life was hard.

And if I, if I found this thing, it would suddenly get easier.

It would stop the earth.

So I thought that the answers were in a God in the sky and you thought the answers were in a girl on the earth.

Yeah.

Right?

What about you, Sissy?

Did you, how did you think about this idea of

love or falling in love when you were younger?

I don't think I really did, actually.

I don't,

I don't remember like daydreaming or fixating on anything

like this.

But I do,

I do think that I was thinking about me a lot.

Like, I think that I was like thinking about becoming a person

that was

unequivocally worthy of love, you know, like the kind of person that was going to get all the things in life and be worthy of the kind of love that would be

awesome to have.

But I don't remember thinking a lot about what the other person would be.

And I wonder if that, I mean, I also think you said the puzzle to

that's going to fix you.

And I think that based on some early starts there in my life, that there were cases where I clearly somehow thought I was going to fix other people's lives because

the

relationship was clearly not adding to mine.

So it was like, like, kind of, I was the missing puzzle piece that was like going to come in and take the shambles of their lives and somehow like make it right.

If I'm being super honest, I think when it came right for me, like the times that I was like,

yep, there,

that's it, was when I felt like I'd kind of met my match, where I didn't,

like, it's kind of embarrassing to say, but it not based on like compatibility or

tragically, you know, any kind of wellness associated with it, but kind of someone that was unequivocally worthy of me and kind of like a superhero

way

that made for a good story as I saw it, but not necessarily like a great

warm relationship.

Ah, sometimes it can be a good story and not a good life.

Right.

But it's also so interesting, this idea of either you're the one who thinks you need to be fixed by love, or you think that you're the fixer in love.

You're either, even whether it's romantic or divine.

right?

I'm, I either desperately need God or I am God.

But don't you think that romantic and divine love are almost the same?

I don't know.

Maybe it's just different ways we think about what we need and forms.

But it's so interesting.

When you said that, Sissy, it made me think of like, okay, so what's the difference between neurotic and narcissistic love?

It's like, and we throw these words around narcissism and neuroticism.

Those are actual things that have actual meaning.

So

as an aside, I...

once asked a friend who's a therapist if I was a narcissist because there was this time when everyone was throwing that word around.

so especially any women who dared to talk about their lives publicly, they were we were all called narcissists for a while.

Because, like, if you're a man who talks about the world, you're a philosopher, but if you're a woman who talks about the world, you're a narcissist, right?

Like, that's it.

So,

so I actually asked my friend if I was a narcissist, and she was like, I need you.

She said, please don't ever tell anyone this.

So, here we go.

Because this is not a clinical way of

analyzing whether you're a narcissist.

But here, she said, do this little experiment.

Okay, Glennon.

You send an email

to somebody, okay?

And it's an important email to you, and that person doesn't respond to the email.

What is your automatic go-to assumption?

A,

you think you did something bad,

and that person

is mad at you.

B,

you think that person is a jackass asshole who doesn't respond to things.

Okay.

Automatically, 100%, I think I've done something wrong.

I hurt this person's feelings.

I stay up about it for five nights in a row.

I go into a huge shame spiral.

Okay.

If you chose A, you have more neurotic tendencies than narcissistic tendencies.

This is not clinical, which is why my friend asked me not to share this, which is why I'm sharing it with you.

Which is why I'm sharing it with millions of people right now.

So she said, Glennon,

you are not a narcissist, you are a full-on neurotic.

That's what she said to me.

But we get back to this idea of: do you tend towards neurotic love?

Oh my God, someone please save me.

I'm broken.

Or, oh my God, here I am with my superhero cap.

You're broken.

I choose you.

You are my project.

Neither tend to end well.

If, if, if that's, if, if all everyone I know is a test case

here's what i want to know

actually from both of you okay because i've this is the part that i've been looking forward to of this particular conversation because my wife abby is a hopeless romantic hopeful hopeful see she won't even let me say a negative connotation of that

Okay, she's a hopeful romantic.

She believes that there was that we were predestined to find find each other, that her whole life there was, I was out there and that we found each other and that is why things are good.

The one.

She believes in the one.

Sister,

not so much.

So, and I don't know what the hell I think anymore.

So, what I want, babe, can you talk to us a little bit about your belief in the one

and what that feels like to be that sort of person?

Okay.

So

I have to start this off with making this claim that I completely understand

the absurdity

of all of which I will say about how I feel and what I believe.

But just this is my body.

This is my opinion.

This is, this is truly, this is, this is my choice.

And the only way I can explain it is is

very similar to that like experience of looking up at the stars.

A lot of which people

say

they believe in God.

I feel like

this has been my experience.

I'm a very optimistic person just by nature.

I see things happening well.

I think part of my training at soccer, like I experienced a lot of times, a lot of failure in my life.

And I was always able to figure out how to manage through that optimistically.

And I think that that plays a big role in, I think my personality plays a big role in me being able to actually believe in this idea

of the one.

Because

logically, it doesn't make any damn sense.

It just doesn't.

However, is it that like one in 7.6 billion thing that throws you off?

Okay, just wondering if that's the logic.

Because I've also had relationships

that have

not

continued on, that have ended.

And some of those relationships, I believe that

those people were the one, but maybe they were the one at the time.

I don't know.

I digress.

I just feel like

I've always felt like

there was a person out there for me.

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What I want to know is what does it mean that you believe that there's a one for you?

Did you believe that there's one person that's predestined on the earth?

I want you, if you could describe in a few lines your belief in the one, what is it?

Well, I think that, of course, I believe that you are the one okay that's what i'm trying to get at just

i believe i believe that everything that i did in my life prior to meeting you led me to be

able to see you and and you able to see me at the that exact moment it's like fate it's like

there's no reason behind it there's no you can't there's no facts it's just i know in my in my bones that the reason we met was because I kind of also even believe that we met in a past life.

And so it was like a, it was like a remembering, like, oh, here you are again.

Thank God I've been looking for you this whole fucking time.

Like, why did it take, I mean, how many times in a week do I say, why did it take us so long to find each other?

Like, why did I have to go through all of that suffering and learning to find you?

It's really how I feel.

I don't know.

Every couple days you say that.

And she's not joking.

And also at least once a day, she looks at me and she goes,

I can't believe you married me.

I did it last night right before bed.

I actually cannot believe that you also,

because

you don't really necessarily believe in the one other.

Like that's not like in your DNA and in your belief system, but here you are.

You jumped right on in as and as the as a big believer also.

I know.

It really surprised me.

Do you think this is all just total horseshit, sister, that Abby and I have that, well, what do you say to Abby's belief that it was fate, that there is one, and she was spending her life trying to find it.

And once she found it, she had some peace.

I honor and celebrate Abby's

belief about that.

I really do.

I think it's wonderful.

I also note that the entire time she talked about the one, she was actually talking about herself and her view of the world.

And that

I think

for me, I think that when we set it up kind of in the culture as there is the one, it's just a very uninteresting notion to me.

It's just an uninteresting way to live because I think for me, it's very fear-based.

Like it's, it sets up this whole kind of like scarcity panic.

life of like, will I find the one?

How will I know if they're the one?

Do this person just do something that whoever my the one is wouldn't do?

And

I understand that people think that's a romantic notion, but I don't think it's a romantic notion to think of your life as like, do you happen to have now?

or will you ever find the one that holds these kind of like elusive keys to the kingdom?

And it's must, much more romantic to me to believe that, like, you are the fucking kingdom.

Like, you,

you can do this lifelong journey of diving into your fears and your pain and your dreams with yourself, or you

probably,

sorry, Abby, a fair number of one of those 7.6 billion people.

Like it's not a magic person.

It's like a magic journey.

And that's romantic to me.

And I feel like so many of us are just making ourselves miserable searching for Oz when everything we're looking for was right here with us all along.

Like it, it really is us.

And I think it has these other weird things that kind of

the

like we're in it with someone and we're like trying to decide the whole time.

Instead of being with them and seeing how we're feeling and seeing how it's going, we're like, Are they the one?

Are they the one?

Are they the one?

And we're like looking for this mystical distinction to fall upon us.

And then when something does go wrong in our relationships, we're like, well, not the one.

Onward with the search for the one.

And then we never do an autopsy.

We never figure out like what what the hell led us there, why we stayed there, how it ended.

We're just like onward with the search as if we had nothing to do with that.

As if the other person,

their like cardinal sin of being not the one, was solely responsible for that relationship.

And it doesn't make any sense.

And for me, it also has this like

kind of fucked up effect on our whole lives.

It like disassociates us from

our whole experience where

it's this singularity of the one that counts and that needs to be the one that lasts longest and ideally forever and

like glennon what if someone told you that you had to pick one book that was the one for you she would pick that feels absurd

right that feels absurd that feels insulting that feels sweaty yeah that feels sweaty because there are books that like rocked you and comfort you comforted you and grew you exactly where you were,

exactly when you needed them.

And Ramona Quimby

was everything to you when you were eight.

And are you supposed to just disavow Ramona Quimby just because right now you feel like not reading her at 45?

Never.

She was the one for me.

She was the one.

I love this because she helped me know myself at the age eight.

Ramona Quimby, age eight, helped Glennon Doyle age,

let's be honest probably three because i was such a good reader so early

but that's what i know myself that's what i mean and and it's this this one notion forces us to just dispose of some really great loves and some really wonderful times that we had with people and they get thrown on the same compost pile with all of the assholes because they have the audacity to not be the one

and it's actually not true We like get to claim all the loves, we really do.

And if we're lucky enough to have

a lot of great loves, then we get to like collect them all and keep them with us and

not like be threatening whoever we're with now.

And I think that's

a library of loves.

We keep

a library of loves.

We keep them all.

And I just feel like it's just, that's a more interesting way to

live.

And I just,

I think it's it's Dave.

I know you're the goat, but I just feel like slightly sister won that one, just a little bit.

I knew before we got into this that she was going to win this.

And it's funny because we actually didn't talk about what sister was going to say.

And I think after having a lot of days to think about this and talking to you, Glennon, I mean, I told you last night what I was thinking, G, but

I do think

over the last five years of finding this person in you, Glennon,

I have understood that

I think that I wanted to go through life in this fairy tale kind of way.

Like that there was always this option, this like thing out there.

And so I've had loves, I've gone through them, and

they were not the one for me.

Because I was never, because I think I was still so afraid of myself.

And so so one thing that I've learned deeply about being with you is that you are the one that I have found that has made me not scared of myself to do the work

internally that I think that I am supposed to be doing on this planet.

I've been avoiding myself like the plague.

I mean, this is why addiction was so prevalent in my life.

And

so I think that the one has everything to do with the journey you take to be able to find yourself.

Like you said, sister, you said fear, like this is a fear of whatever.

And I think that I could also flip that on you, that maybe it's a very scary for some people to surrender to the unseen order of things.

And I think that love is so complicated and twisty and turning that we can't like put it in a box.

And though we might have many loves, I just think that the one true love that we are all here to figure out is the one that we have with ourselves.

I think that it's confusing.

And I know that I'm still ridiculous, but like, I still love the notebook.

Well, you said last night, and it's, you said, some people need realism.

And that's, and you said, I need mysticism.

Yeah.

That's what, that's what moves me.

That's what keeps me going here.

And there are people who are comfortable in the mystery of things.

And while sister's points make so much sense to me, they also make sense to someone who prefers control, also, like me and sister, because then it's all me inside me.

And there's nothing to surrender to really between two people.

It's all the keys are inside me.

But I do love the point.

I think that the idea of the one plays into this whole narrative that makes us think that any love

that doesn't last forever was a waste,

was wasted

and that i think is the most dangerous ridiculous you know we used to talk about it as um

it's like some loves are um

which which is the annual and perennial you guys like annuals do they come up every year that feels like that would be right but then perennials i think it's the opposite it's so tricky because it feels counterintuitive i think the perennials are the one that comes back every year and the annuals are just one shot the annuals are like spring break 2000.

Okay, that was a nice annual.

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It's so annoying when words don't make sense.

Just as an aside, yesterday I was finally going to be really like healthy and take a vitamin.

So I found this bottle of vitamins that was in my pantry probably for like 16 years and has made it through four moves.

So I'm not sure it's like the most healthy vitamin at this point.

Gummies are stuck together.

Gummies, they're all stuck together in one thing.

And so I'm reading the freaking, the, all the directions to try to figure out how many to take, right?

And I can't find it.

I can't find it.

I look at the whole front.

It says one a day.

The whole thing, one.

I'm like, oh.

There we go.

Okay.

It's called one a day.

I'm supposed to take one a day.

Then I look in the small writing on the back of the thing and it says, shoot two tablets a day.

I'm like, is this not some bullshit?

This is like the story of my life.

It's called one a day.

Small print, for sure take two a day.

Back to the story I really have,

you know, when people would call my previous marriage a failure.

Like, how did it feel to go through all of that?

It would always blew my mind because there's no part of me that felt like that was a failure, that my marriage was a failure.

Like it, I went into that marriage with Craig, like totally busted up, absolutely, you know, I've been sober for a hot minute.

He had his own stuff going on.

We helped each other grow.

We

changed each other.

It's like some loves

are those

perennials and they just keep coming back and they keep growing and they're long and long and long and last forever.

And some are those annuals where they just like

die out.

But then what happens with those plants?

Like they, all of those nutrients that they like disintegrate into the soil, they become the soil beneath you.

That love informs you.

It decomposes and goes back into your veins and your blood and it changes who you are for the next part of your life.

It never leaves you.

Like there is no friendship or love that is ever wasted.

Just because it lasts for a short time doesn't mean that it changes you any less.

And maybe the point of love is not that it lasts forever, but maybe it is that it grows us and changes us.

Exactly.

And that's why I think this whole like the one question out there with if everyone is spending all their time like analyzing their relationship to figure out, are they the one?

I don't know.

Maybe, ah, maybe not.

And that's where all the mental load is going.

I'm just saying that I think

that if that's the line of inquiry we're taking to our relationships, it just seems kind of wasteful because I feel like there's wherever relationship you're in,

you can do a lot of that digging and figuring out and figuring out where you are in it.

Because really, honestly, if people are being super honest, it has nothing to do with logic.

The only common denominator in all of your relationships isn't like the way they love you or the way you love them or whether they're a good fit for you or whether it's working out.

It's you.

You are the only common denominator in any of your relationships.

And so it's you, you get to figure out

what am I reacting to here?

What does, what does this thing that's happening actually have nothing to do with them?

What has something to do with them?

Like there's, there's things you can figure out in any relationship you're in that is much more interesting to me than just,

is this,

is this the one?

And how do I determine it?

It's like asking the wrong question in some ways.

Yeah.

And it's this idea also, the magic part of it, babe, the magic.

I mean, we can be forgiven for thinking of it as magic because

that initial part of falling in love

feels like such

wild magic.

Like, can we talk about that for a minute?

Like the beginning of falling in love?

Because we think of it when we talked about the three of us.

There's two different parts here.

There's the falling in love part, which is when you lose your damn mind.

And then there's the landing in love, which is when your brain chemicals start to like

normalize and stabilize.

And you're like, oh, wait, this is just another person and I'm still me.

And

so that magic part tricks us into thinking that

this love is saving us, which is what we were kind of

thinking with this magical thinking.

Which is what we were hoping for.

Which is what we were hoping for.

But I, but like, see, I'm not joking.

Like, the more I thought about this,

when

this is why

when we say falling in love, when I say lose our, my mind, I'm serious.

My desire to escape my own self has been my greatest quest

since I was 10 years old.

Yeah.

Just like, save me from living in this brain.

Save me from living in this body.

Save me from this intense discomfort I feel being myself.

That's why I reached for the booze.

That's why I reached for the binging.

That's why I reached for the drugs.

That's why, like, I disappeared.

It numbed me out.

I disappeared.

My mind, I was not in my mind anymore.

My anxiety was gone.

My depression was gone.

I was in this

place of

fake peace, but it felt like peace.

And that, in retrospect, is how I felt when I fell madly in love for the first time in my life, which was when I fell in love with Abby.

It was an obliteration of self.

I was gone.

It was like being totally wasted.

It is like being totally wasted.

The levels of dopamine in your system when you're falling in love have the same effect on your brain as taking cocaine.

Literally.

So, I mean, you are high as a fucking kite that whole thing.

Can you tell us?

Okay, just sweet, sweet listener.

I just need you to know that when I fell in love with Abby and lost my mind and was high as a fucking kite, a sister would say,

it happened to intersect with the weeks and months right before the biggest book I'd ever written was coming out called Love Warrior.

And so sister's job was to manage publicly a wasted person.

And when I tell you that I, I actually,

I don't know if you guys remember this, but I did it an IG live about Love Warrior at that time.

And people wrote to us asking if I had fallen off the wagon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were deeply concerned that you were drinking again because you did a couple of IG lives.

And they wrote very concerned about that because, well,

you were clearly high and you were.

And you were high on love.

Let's

be clear.

But they wrote, they wrote a lot of emails, very concerned.

Oh, that's so sweet.

Wow.

Well, what was your experience of me at the time?

Because I didn't know.

I know, I knew that I felt different and I wanted to feel this way forever.

Okay.

The same way I did the first time I was started drinking, the same way the first time I did drugs, I wanted to feel this way forever.

I believe this starts in a really good place.

It's like that yearning for joy, for peace, for the divine, for the whatever.

This,

you know, the a lot of people feel that way, that like the beginning of addiction is an earnest search for an escape from self.

So,

what was your experience of us at that time?

So, I would say

it was like a night out with your bestie and she

is out of her head living her absolute best life, like flailing wildly about on the dance floor.

But you are the designated driver and you are doing everything you can to ensure that she doesn't get kicked out of the club.

But you're also trying really hard not to mess with her buzz that she's having.

But

it was like that, but the club was a business meeting and it lasted for three straight months.

And it was so public.

I was on like TV shows and at tables with New York in New York fancy people and I did not give a shit.

You were just gone.

You were out of your head.

You were under the influence of euphoria.

And it was like, John had an

outpatient procedure recently and I had to pick him up because he had medication.

and his discharge paper said

this treatment may affect your judgment.

In the immediate period, do not operate heavy machinery or make any life altering decisions.

That

was like how I felt about you at the time.

I just kept saying to you, like, I'm so happy for you.

This is so wonderful.

This is, I'm just so happy.

And also, you are literally high right now and you have no idea that you are.

And for the immediate period, I will be operating all of the heavy machinery and we will be avoiding as many as possible life-altering decisions.

Thank you very much.

Because you were just

protect me from life-altering decisions.

So it was like your drunk friend who's wasted, but then she has to go on Good Morning America.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

That's exactly what it was like.

Do you, okay, this is what I want to circle us back to here.

Because if you are a person who is eight years old and wishing or 10 years old, looking at the stars, stars, wishing that there was something out there that would save you from yourself.

And then you find this falling in love situation that saves you from yourself, meaning you are gone.

You are obliterated.

You are

no longer you.

You are this us-ness.

You are this weeness that you've always been searching for.

You are in a fugue state that is where all of your anxiety and your neurosis is gone and you are just in this love place.

You basically don't exist anymore.

What I find, that is what you were looking for.

And so you think you found the Holy Grail.

And what I think is so interesting about you,

when we talked this through, is that you said

that the shadow side, one of the shadow sides of believing in the one and then having this falling in love experience is that when that fugue state wore off,

you would always end up in a breakup.

Yeah.

Right away.

And that was because

when the fugue state wears off, you are back.

You're chasing the high.

Oh, you're not.

You're chasing the high.

You are back.

This isn't the one.

This isn't the one.

They didn't fix me.

I don't feel good.

Also, like, where's that high?

They don't treat me that good.

Because when you're in love too, you just, you're completely blinded to

the realities of certain circumstances.

And when the, when it rubs, when it wears off, it's like,

you know, here I am again.

I don't want to be with me anymore.

That's also chemical.

Like when you're falling in love in that state, it turns off the part of the brain that

activates negative judgment.

So you literally are incapable of making negative, i.e.

accurate assessments.

of the person during that initial period.

Well, that it wears off.

Then you're like, wait, have you been like this the whole time?

And they have, by the way, been like that the whole time.

Yeah.

That's the stage where you're seeing red flags and you're just taking your big green marker and you're just coloring all those red flags bright green.

Well, Glennon, tell them what I actually told you during just about the end of that like falling in love stage.

Oh, you were so pissed, Glennon.

You were so pissed.

You were starting to.

So, so imagine you're sitting on the couch.

You've been wasted in love for like a few months and Glennon's never fallen in love before no I thought I was fixed I thought I had found the thing that would make me gone forever and so I'm getting anxiety

I wrote a poem about it in Untamed it was like I've always been midnight blue and you were this pearl color And then now we were just sky blue mixed together forever.

And I was never going to have to be midnight blue ever again.

My midnight was gone.

I was just going to live in this sky blue place forever.

I was gone.

And then

a few months in, or I don't know how long, honey.

I'm not trying to pinpoint it.

It was like

slowly becoming midnight blue again and being like, shit.

It was like the high wearing off, coming down.

And I could see it happening on you.

And I was, and I had to actually step in and be like, listen, because I've had experience of falling in love before.

And I was terrified of the come down for you that you would then be like, I'm out of here.

You know, I can't do this anymore.

So I like started preparing you.

Said, okay.

I did.

Yeah.

It was almost like you would see me suddenly look at you and be like, are you still fucking chewing ice on the stage?

Like, is this for real?

Is this the love wasn't covering up my little idiosyncrasies?

This no longer feels like crystals, you know, shining in the ether.

This feels like somebody who's choosing to to chew ice next to me

it was like the daggers you'd see from my eyes and then you started talking to me about this next phase you said there's going to be

this this this fugue state this whatever it is this is going to wear off and we're going to be in a new place and i remember saying to you wait a minute are you i was mad at you

Because first of all, I felt panicky, like I don't want to be myself again.

And also,

are you telling me that we're going to go into this next phase where we're going to love each other less?

Like, that's what I felt like you were telling me.

And you said, no, we're going to go into this next phase where we are going to have to love each other more than we do now.

Because it's not going to all be just serotonin or whatever is happening in our brain.

It's going to have to be our choice.

to like stay in this and love each other.

And that was

so upsetting to me.

I felt felt like we were wasted at a club and you were like, so we're going to have to do our taxes now.

Like, I felt like you were just like bringing me down

and I didn't like it.

Yeah, you were, we're just going to have to be like all these raggedy other people that are just

doing it off of sheer will.

Oh, actually, sister, that's the point of it.

Like, I felt like we were different.

Yeah.

We were magic.

We were

every Disney movie.

We were the thing.

We weren't like normal people who chew ice and get annoyed with each other on the couch, but in fact, we were.

Okay.

And this is why

it feels to me like

you,

you cannot ever have real love if you are not someone who can be alone with yourself.

If you are not someone who can be with your midnight blue or whatever color you are,

then you can never actually land in love with someone else because you are only using the other person to protect you from your own loneliness.

Which, and the other person can always sense that desperation, and that other person can sense that it's not personal, it's not about them.

Yep, it's about you not being alone.

You literally explained every relationship I had before you, every single one.

Really?

That, like, I just couldn't be alone with myself, and I was using this other person so that I didn't have to be alone with myself.

And then, when I met you, and if you can see yourself in my story in any way, listener know this also

that i didn't get fixed and then met glennon like i met glennon and then as our love progressed the falling in love stage went into the landing in love stage

i started to believe that i was worthy and that i wasn't actually in fact broken And it wasn't, I didn't do the work beforehand necessarily.

I was doing it while we were starting, while we were falling in love.

So I just, I think.

And before, because

you had gotten sober.

Right.

I think what's really important is in my life, if you out there, listener, see yourself in my story, that you've used somebody else as a way to find out who you are or to fix something that's broken inside of you, it is okay that

you've done that, number one.

But the truth is, and the freedom will come when you understand that, that

you are not broken, that nobody out there can fix the world that's living inside of you.

And if you are in a relationship right now, you can start doing the work right now to free yourself from the belief, first of all, because it's a belief system that we think that we're broken individually.

That we need fixing it all.

That we need fixing it all.

And also it takes a while.

I mean, look, we're five years in, almost five years into our marriage, six years into our relationship, Glennon.

And like, I'm like just now starting to

scratch the surface of like my own internal, interior world that has terrified me my entire life.

And sister, maybe you would, would think that I've been using love as a way of avoiding myself.

And I would agree.

I would absolutely agree with you.

Oh, babe.

But

finding you, Glennon, though, finding you,

what i really think is so important is that i have had loves before but i've never had a love that gave me the space and honored who i was with all of my current imperfections so that the mirror that you've shown me

has been

safe for me to actually go, oh, okay, maybe it's time that I start this work.

Maybe it's time that I start doing this.

You can

believe in love and also work on yourself because I do think, sister, you're right.

I mean, I think that this is all about loving ourselves as much as we possibly can.

And then that love and sharing that journey with somebody else.

And Glennon, I actually don't think that I could find myself the way that I have without you.

And so that's why I also believe.

I think maybe both can be true.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

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I think it's

interesting that we both have had sort of like rock bottom moments in our, in our, in your romantic search, you've had rock bottoms.

In my divine search, I've had rock bottoms.

And they have both been parallel in that this belief that the answer is out there.

Because then you end up giving away every bit of your, of your power, of your intuition, of your whatever to the chase.

And you did that with humans, and I did that with religion.

Yeah.

The shadow side of believing the answer is out there is that you can find yourself in a freaking cult.

Like you really can.

Like you, you, and it started, those people that get lost in those things, like it starts with a beautiful desire for this divine connection, for this deep, deep thing

but when you're what i have figured out is that this divine thing that i've been searching for all the time my whole life was real and was beautiful but it is inside of me which is the exact same thing that you have discovered at the end of this romantic search of oh it's out there it's out there it's out there like yes i think you're both right like there is there is one

The one is real and the one is

you.

Yeah.

For me, it's like the most interesting way to think about it is just, because I think so many people are waiting to start their story until they find the one or they're waiting

or they're throwing away old drafts because they're like, well, that wasn't the one.

And I think it's just so interesting to think of, just think of your whole life as a love story.

all of the chapters in it like you know it's your family it's the it's like all of these beautiful chapters that make up your whole life and then it's like if loves loves come and they were great and loves come and they were real hard, the way you got through all of them and the way you showed up and the way you continued to survive, that's your story.

Like no one else gets to own it and no one else gets to disavow it.

It's all your story.

And it's okay, no matter what is happening next month or next year in your life, that none of us know what it is.

Like if you just

believe that your life is a love story and you don't know how it's going to end, and that's fine.

Cause let's be really fucking honest, nobody knows how any of this is going to end for any of us.

I mean, except for you, Abby, and your past lives and your future lives that you clearly already have figured out.

But like, it's just, I feel like it just gives us a reframing of our whole lives that

is just more interesting and satisfying to me.

than this idea that we just wait and search, right?

No, that is a beautiful thing.

Let us let that be our next right thing, that we are just going to consider our entire lives from beginning to now as a love story.

And at the end of the day, the love story isn't really a group project.

The love story of your life is just an autobiography.

And it will stop at different places and intersect with people's stories at different places.

And all loves,

no love is wasted.

And this idea that romantic love is the only love that is worthy is so ridiculous.

All three of us on this pod have had some of the most

life-changing relationships with friends, with children, with dogs, with

dogs.

We love you.

Your life is a love story.

You are the sole writer of it.

When life gets hard this week, don't forget that we can do hard things.

We'll see you soon.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire, I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on the back.

A final destination.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a heart gain.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes

things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

A final destination

lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard day.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do hard

things.

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