Lottery of Love

Today we are talking about the lottery of Love, This is something I’ve talked a lot of times about, the fairy tale framework and people always say yeah, yeah, but I don’t think almost anyone recognises how deep that , that really goes 70% of all our neural network is wired up by the age of 7 ,  So a neural network is when two neurons connect and they become, form a neural pathway, and so that’s basically how we think, it’s basically the, So, when you initially walk, you have to be able to move and that’s like you connect like a network, a pathway of muscle memory and neurology that enables you to do that. So, if you think about life before the age of 7, most of us are like we, we don’t know anything that’s going on in the world and so we listen to everyone else like, adults seem to know everything, they seem to be this kind of person that has all the secrets and they know how everything works. 

I can remember being young and hearing something and recognising for the first time that adults didn’t know everything and I can remember in primary school our teacher was teaching us something about Romans or something like that and then I remember going round to somewhere historical and I realised that she told us something completely false but I was in my 20’s before I recognised it. Has everyone had that kind of experience where you’ve been told something by someone that you believed when you were little, and then when you get to like late teens/adults and you realise that they told you something that was wrong.

Participant: Yes, Santa Claus

Rob:  Yeah, that’s a good one. I had that with my daughters I was like, I don’t know that I want to lie to them about it and because, I think, I know it’s a bit of fun, but what are you teaching them, you’re teaching them that you can’t be trusted, erm, so yeah, there’s, there’s all these kind of things Nicole, did you have another example? There’s lots of things, and I think if you look back, you’ll probably see lots of examples so, and often at times adults will give us a simplified version of something because our brain isn’t fully developed, we can’t understand, I think it’s something like 25 or 27 by the time our adult, our brain is fully matured and so, like there is reasons, teenagers are particularly bad at judging road distance because they haven’t got ,  There’s some distance perception or something they haven’t quite, It isn’t formed until your 20’s and so we, so, even teenagers aren’t fully capable of understanding all the complexities, like anyone who’s got teenage son or daughter knows like they think they know everything and you can see, like my daughters are 20 and 22 and their like, Ho, yeah, yeah we understand this so much more than our teens, But they assume that they know better than,  like, your generation did everything wrong. 

So, So, this neurology, all their neural Connections have been set before we are able to understand the world. And so, when you look at 7, like your basic model of how you deal with relationships and what you believe and what you expect about relationships is set by the age of 7, So you will override some things, but it takes a lot of effort and attention and energy to override something that’s already in your neurology. So, Stan Tatkin does a lot of work on his specialties like attachment theory. For anyone who doesn’t know, attachment theory, attachment theory is the idea from John Bowlby initially that, how your first caregiver like, Usually, your mum or maybe your dad or whoever looked after you.  Like the very first person who looked after you when you were helpless, how responsive they are to your needs determines your attachment style, which determines how much you’re going to trust other people and how much you think the world is a safe and secure place or insecure and won’t meet your needs and so, there are, they talk about 4 main attachments style so, secure is, , if you have, if you have someone, like, you cry and like a baby cries  to communicate and someone comes along and. looks after you, consistently, then you become, you have a secure attachment. So, then life is much easier because you expect, ok, People are generally good people will, someone out there will look after me. So, when you go into a relationship and so, attachment theory has been extended, I think Sue Johnson that did it first but Sue Johnson and Stan Tatkin are the 2 biggest people that look at attachment theory in relationships. So, Sue Johnson says, when you are in a relationship, what everyone is really asking is can I trust you? Will you be there for me? Do you really care about me and so we’re like children within a relationship? Because we’re looking at our partner as being the new person, like whereas say our mum or whoever initially looked after us, they were the ones that we put all our trust in and being in a romantic relationship, when you’re in this partnership, with this life partner, you’re putting your trust in this other person, So, Stan Tatkin says that a relationship. is really an interaction of two nervous systems, depending on how these nervous systems are wired up. Depends on the level of drama. Depends on level of meaningless depends on the level of insecurity and anxiety. So, the, so people who have secure attachment styles generally find relationships much easier. People with anxious attachment styles are always scared, worried that the person doesn’t really love them, isn’t really going to be there for them, and then this is the people that will push people away by, are you there? are you really there and they will set tests which create a lot of drama because what they want is constant reassurance, because the world seems so, it seemed like the world didn’t care, it seemed like the person was supposed to care for them didn’t care about their need they now feel anxious that their partner won’t care for their needs, So, it’s, so, a relationship with someone who’s got anxiously attached is going to be much more challenging, they are going to need a lot of reassurance. So, it doesn’t mean they can’t do relationships, but what it means is they need to partner that that will be reassuring, be sensitive to them. Doctor Mario  Martinez has talked about healing and, and he says relational wounds come from relationship and have to be healed in a relationship., so, he talked about the frequal wound of shamed, so like for example, if your parents make you feel shame and you want to be in a relationship where you feel honoured, So, like the person shows, accepts who you are and kind of like heals the shame. Shame that someone else put in, and that addresses it. If you’ve been betrayed then you need loyalty, so shame, betrayal and abandonment, abandonment. So, if you’ve been abandoned, I’ve mixed them up, so the opposite, so loyalty goes with abandonment, honour goes with shame and there is another one that goes with betrayal, which failed it, but basically, it’s where someone displays the exact opposite behaviour and shows you that you feel that you’re worthy and that they’re going to be there for you. 

P: Who’s works was that, Rob?

R: The fields of healing was Doctor Mario Martinez. 

OK, so, people who are anxious are going to need a lot more reassurance, and they are going to need someone who is a lot more understanding.  People who are avoidant are really difficult for relationships because these are the people that will push people away because they’ll be afraid of being too close, they will be afraid of being dependent and then there’s another one over anxious avoidant for people who are anxious and avoidant. 

So, the problems in relationships are really about the neurology, which is really about what’s wired into the system, of the beliefs and the assumptions and expectations that you have of a relationship. So, most of those are wired up by the age of 7. So, ok, so let’s just think about what creates the emotion.

Janos: Experience

R:  What do you mean? Can you tell us a little bit more?

Janos: It’s basically what something is a trigger, but most of the times if you experience something would make you feel great. You actually got the good hormones. So good feeling, good emotions. When you got something, but it’s makes you insecure or anxious you actually start feeling and you start to feel very anxious. 

R: OK, OK so experience but what creates the experience? 

P: It’s an external stimulus. 

R: OK, so one point is the external stimulus. So, it’s the, it’s what you experience, but if you just Like Janos is you always be present is the experience. OK, so that that’s one point. 

P: Memories

R: Yes, it can be memories, so that’s, that’s memories of an experience. 

P: How you see things, memories of our past condition. 

R: Yeah, yeah, so the memories recreate, so, sorry Nicole, 

P: I said about perception, how I I perceive things. 

R: Yes, kind of, so it’s really about, so it’s about how we perceive it. And what our expectations are. So, if what we experience meets or exceeds our expectation then we have a great experience, like if the reality meets or exceeds our expectations. We have a great experience. If it’s less than our expectations then it’s, It’s negative, 

P: but that’s the boxing battle, when we do box something that’s make me feel good, that make me feel bad, but when you do, creating more life experience putting expectation you actually just go with the flow, you get the flow mode, then you, you actually don’t create expectation because here I am, Let’s see what we get. 

R: Yes, so what you talking about is really like this heightened state of mindfulness like meditation. When you let go of your thoughts and you feel great. 

P: It happens if you’re confident, you have to be confident that it is going to be a good experience, that is not going to be harmful. 

R: I think that like the whole process of meditation is you, what your dropping is your expectations and you’re dropping your perception and you just pure experience, which I think you’re talking about Janos and so, we feel great when we let go of the expectations, but so, when we have a negative is because of how we, judging with the expectation, our expectations and it’s also our perception. 

P: So, when you say perception do you mean it’s about the story or the narrative? In other words, it the meaning we create and attach

R: Yeah. Yes, so really, it’s about, so, I was talking about. There’s never been more access to single people, there’s never been more single people. There’s never been, like we used to live in a village of 150 people. There were two or three other people eligible. Now we have the choice of everyone and yet people are saying there are no good men or no good women out there, So What happens is. That we don’t see reality as it is, we see reality through our perceptual filters

Janos:  That’s something you last describe it like we only see through our eyes 1% and whatever it’s our mind state so depends how we our mood or feeling how we choose to be, it’s that’s what feeling up to 99%, So if I’m anxious or if I’m angry, I will see everything. anger around me doesn’t matter to word our north, but I got that feeling and opposite if I’m in a good mood I can see everything very great just because of my mind, my mind state.

R:  Yeah. So, every everything is out there in life, but there is something like three million, three billion pieces of data that we are processing every moment and obviously that would overwhelm us so, from the principle of cognitive economy, what we do is we focus on what seems to be most relevant and people always used the example. This is the reticular cortex of what we pick up on., what is relevant, so if I said. What’s the temperature of the room? And you think about it, you suddenly become aware of the temperature, where maybe it wasn’t relevant, if your, like an example everyone uses is if you’re going to go and buy a car, you start seeing all those cars, now those cars were always there but you weren’t picking up on it as it wasn’t relevant to you and so like Janos has said, you pick up on whatever you are expecting. So, when your expecting, so when expect that all men are bastards, you come across all the bastards. When you expect that, whatever you, whatever you can think of, you can find evidence for it. 

So, one of the main sources of research and evidence for this is Jury witness testimonies and so you can have 5 or 10 people who have witnessed the same event, they all go into Court and they will give 5 or 10 different accounts,  because what we remember  Is different from other people remembered cause we were a different state, we were focused on something else, we were seeing something else and It’s been proven that,  what we, what we recall of something isn’t what’s actually there but half the time it’s what we expect it to be there. 

So, you’ve seen those like you have these optical illusions of all you can see is this and then someone shows you ok, but there’s this and then you can we can see is that, and there is that trainer, Is it like pink or blue or something? like some people see it as pink and some people see it as blue because it’s that people have different levels of Perception like, that, we believe things because we see in our own eyes

P: it the whole sense perception, isn’t it, you sense, smell, hear, touch taste, around you 

R: hum, because we think if we see something is concrete, it’s there, actually, all the eyes do is manage the light it all goes in, it just sends data into the brain and then the brain makes sense of what, what it is we’re actually seeing. So, the filters for the brain we believe, and we expect.

P: The understanding is that there are several realities anyway, so if that’s the case, it Is framed by your experiences, what you actually see and also your physical limitations. It’s not anyone thing, it’s a combination of all of those different things. 

R: So, it’s said, so if like if you if you look at dating site, the whole world is on dating site, there is good people, bad people., all of these things, but, So, who we will meet? How will perceive who we will meet, it depends because a different person would activate a different, this isn’t like saying you’re doing something wrong it means people are different with different people and so what you expect activates a certain level in them in how they respond so it’s a dance and so there’s, there’s no one set do this, do this, do this. but it’s about awareness of the dance and sensitivity to it, ok, so, does that make sense so far?

P: Yes 

R: So,

Sandra: Before you go on Rob, I’ve got one question. What about people who block receiving information receiving. Yeah, they don’t. They’re not receptive to whatever stimuli is coming their way, they, they, they block. 

R: As in people who never learn? 

Sandra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Rob: Yeah, people stay stuck because they, they have their story of life and don’t want accept another story. So, for example, when people go through a break up, it’s painful because it’s the shattering of one world and then you have to re-create a new world. Is it the pain of the breakup is because you tied your future and your perception of the future with this person. That person is gone, so your future seems to be gone and so the way that you heal from a break up is you create a future that is brighter and then you develop the belief in getting to that future. So, some people stay stuck and they stay stuck for 20 years and I remember talking to someone and she was in great pain and it had been 7 years or something since she broken up and she said, well, he was the love of my life, .so I said how do you know he was the love of your life? you have still got more of your life to live.  and she said no, no, no, he was the love of my life and I said what if you met someone and you loved him more and she said no, no I couldn’t as that would mean that this relationship didn’t mean much.  So I go, what would that mean if it didn’t mean much and she said it would mean I’d wasted, I had wasted 20 years and so she was stuck for seven years and should probably would be stuck for another 20 years because she won’t let that information in, because she won’t change the reality.

So, pain, emotional pain is when our expectation or our story, we won’t change our story and the reality shows us something else so, if this is our experience, like this is what we’re experiencing, like what reality shows us, but our story remains here. Well, there’s a gap and that the distress, pain is in between the gap and the reality isn’t going to change and if we don’t change our story, then we’re just going to remain stuck. So, it’s our story that holds us back from what we want and when people are too attached to their story, they can’t move on.

Sandra: But is it about the pain or not knowing how to deal with the pain that’s the issue. 

Rob: Well again its individual, but usually it’s about a deep fear,  It’s about something really meant something, I don’t want to look at this, so this is a great generalisation, I’m no expert on depression however, like, however I have an opinion working with people that are depressed that deep down there is a fear that I’m not a good person,  because I’m not a good person, I don’t want to  look at that too closely and anything that looks too closely is too scary and so fear stops them from looking at it, which, which, and of course there’s more, It’s a lot more complicated than that, as in there is chemistry and all of these other things but people who stay stuck, It tends to be fear of looking at themselves honestly

Sandra: so, Rob, isn’t changing your story one of the hardest things to do? 

Rob: Sorry

Sandra: changing your story and having a new story is one of the hardest things to do

Rob: Yeah, ok, so well, like Janos is talking about if you just let go of that story all is great, but, the reason why most people can’t do that, can’t achieve peace in mediation and all of these things is because of fear and that fear creates like erm, like mental fidgeting and all of these things that you’re not able to be at peace, so, yeah, ultimately I think if you got rid io fear you would have that great experience and you would have love, happiness, so, for me emotion is the intense, like the amount of, there is this energy of life that’s like happiness, love, whatever you want to call it but  that runs through a kaleidoscope of fear and the level of intensity of the fear determines the emotion. 

Okay so there is the trying brain theory which means that really we evolved,  so we’ve evolved so the most primitive animals show like crocodiles and reptiles and so that they have a reptilian brain and so basically a reptilian brain is about hunger, danger so everything that you need, so like if someone was to like suffocate you, you’d respond from the reptilian brain,  so then the next level is the limbic brain which is what creates like the lot,, where things like belonging status, control, power, all of those dynamics are kind of from the limbic brain and then we’ve got the cerebral cortex which is where we think, so where all here working from our cerebral cortex so this is an intellectual understanding, when you read a book it’s from an intellectual understanding, but when you’re  in fear, like when your life is in danger you’re reacting from the reptilian brain and that’s always going to override the cerebral cortex,  when you’re, when it looks like you don’t belong, when it feels like you’ve been rejected, when it feels like you’ve been like you’re the one left out of the group, when it feels like someone’s challenged your status of being capable, when it looks like someone taking  credit at work, when it looks like someone’s controlling you, when it looks like you feel limited, when you feel powerless,  that’s always going to override your intellectual understanding, so when we talk about these things and , or you read something, then you learn and you go yeah, yeah that makes sense, but we don’t do it, we don’t do it I because the neurology overrides what we understand, ok, does that make sense?

Janos: it does but don’t you think co-dependency can override aa lot of things

Rob: Sorry, can you say that again

Janos: Can co-dependency, people are so like co-dependent

Rob: co-dependency, yes co-dependency comes from neurology because that’s deeply wired into the neurology, so yeah all of those things,  so if you’ve been in a relationship, you,  at some point you’ve acted like a child and recognise that you’re acting like a child in the playground and that’s because of the neurology, it’s because you felt rejected,  because you felt your status was under threat, because you felt controlled, because you felt that you can belong, because all of those were threatened you react emotionally and it doesn’t matter how mature we are intellectually, emotionally is what drives what we do because in order to react intellectually we’ve got we’ve got be calm first of all, we have got to have time to think about it and we rarely have in a relationship, most of it is response, it’s automatic,  it’s this happens I feel this,  this happens, I  react and so,  no one has time with  how busy our lives are to be able to react intellectually,  we can later think about it and think,  why did I get out that was stupid, but we react from the reptilian or  limbic system most the time.

Ok, so let’s talk about love is,  the idea of love is a lottery,  so, when we look at relationship,  what we understand of relationships where,  we’re looking at it was wired up by the age of seven, most of it, so, how do we understand relationships at the age of 7, well what we really learned was from Disney films and fairy tales and,  and so basically the fairy-tale is Prince and princess meet, they fall in love and  they live happily  ever after,  so there are four lessons from the fairy-tale,  is that there’s one out there for all of us, that if you meet the one and your beautiful enough on that day or gallant enough you will fall in love and  if the love is true you’ll live happily ever, so the path to true love is to meeting the one and being beautiful enough or gallant enough on that day,  so really there, the problems with this is that, ok, so on day one so,  the normal curve of a relationship goes like that , initial high then  drops down and we were talking about to change that,  too,  to have it to be more level or even , so what really happens is when it goes down, couples feel like they have no pathway, they don’t know how to resolve a problem, because even if you can look at the setup of relationship, like  relationships,  people,  we can see what people value by how they spend their money, and when, when you look at relationships the average wedding is £32,000 pound,  how many people spend, and there was some American study that the average time planning a wedding is something like 400 hours and so then there is like the engagement ring was like £2500 or £4,000 or something like that but who spends any money preparing for a relationship,  like knowing the skills and how to make their marriage work, not just the wedding day, so, couples go into from relationship with no understanding or expectation off there to be problems and  how, and halfway of how to deal with problems, so what happens when there is a problem is that people say well that mustn’t  be the one or it’s like, when you look at what people do when their relationship is going wrong and they want to save it, is initially they will go on like a makeover  or they’ll start hitting the gym or think like, typically for a woman, like he must have lost interest in me or a man feels it’s like,  ok, I have been dutiful and like, like, I’ve given her everything she wants and she is bored of me now, she doesn’t respect me anymore, so, people do that because they think, being loved,  like deep in their neurology, I’m not talking intellectually but I’m about how we are wired up is to think if we not loved we are not beautiful enough or for a man gallant or powerful enough so there is no pathway for couples to fix something,  they just think,  we just grew apart, we just lost connection,  we’re incompatible but all of these aren’t the real symptom, the way we explain something,  the dynamic that’s happening, 

Sandra: I don’t think people are prepared to fight for their relationships, they don’t go into relationship and prepare to fight for them and to get down to explore the reasons why it’s going wrong and go into depth with what’s, what it was like it beginning and what’s happened along that journey and where it went wrong and who’s interfered, maybe interfered with it and the ins and outs of everything. And to go on for long enough, I think they give up it with the first one or two hurdles and then stop instead of going on and on and on, and continue through the fight.

Rob: I think your right, I  think they do give up but I think the reason  is because even the ones that do try then realise they don’t have any way of fixing it because and, what it really is,  they don’t believe it will work and often it doesn’t,  even for the ones that persist because they don’, they don’t really know what to address, Because you often hear people say Oh yeah we’re working on our relationship, or  I’m working on myself, but,  what do they do, like there is no like, here’s the KPI’s s of what I’m going to do, here’s what’s going to make the difference,  I need to do this and I need to do this and I need to do this, it’s kind of a vague thing ,  I’m working on myself, what does that mean?

Sandra: I think it’s, like it means, it like that they trying to work out there are in their own head process where they may have gone wrong themselves in the relationship.

Rob: So I think, it’s like they generally do,  but it’s,  with relationships I think we have a mediaeval mindset so, by that I mean that if you look 300 years ago,  so, like now we have got this coronavirus,  back when we had plague everyone,  it wasn’t a medical issue because people thought it was it was a damnation from god, and so when you look about 300 years ago,  not many people went to the doctor, they went to like the local witch, people went to their priest and this is where priests were selling indulgences and priests were like go and do 10 hail Mary’s and 5 our fathers and your son will be  better,  so,  medicine only grew when people believed that medicine offered a solution and then when there’s lots of research and so, between that time and now, we have now got vaccines and so the population grew seven times in the last 120 years because we got sanitation and vaccinations that now mean that most children live,  whereas if we look about 300 years ago,  I think it was most  parents would lose maybe 3 children, 3 or 4 children on average,  so it changed when we understood what the cause was,  so,  even in 1920 when Samuel Weiss said that if Doctor’s would just wash their hands in childbirth that we, we would get  rid of infections and it took 20 years for doctors to do that because they didn’t believe and because they didn’t want, they didn’t believe it would work and they didn’t want the hassle and they didn’t want to admit the blame caused the deaths up until now.  

So, when you look at how medicine has developed in the last 2 centuries,  there has been huge change,  like now we have genetic understanding, we can mark out something, we can to have something,  we can do surgeries that we couldn’t do, we’ve got, we can deal with antibiotics, we can deal with infections but when you look at relationships, so we have this body of knowledge about medicine but where is the body of knowledge about relationships, so, psychology you would look where it comes from but psychology, that psychology is a discipline that’s only 150 years old and for the early part psychology was mostly focused on intelligence, individual differences, mental health,  child development,  all the kind of things because if you look at school, where in a curriculum is there any understanding or teaching about relationships and there’s none as schools are set up for the good of society,  meaning who can become an economic,  who can be becoming the economically productive citizen, your happiness your relationships are seen as down to you so, really relationship research is probably last 20 years, I know John Gottman has been going for about 40 years,  but, even if you look at say John Gottman who has probably done more on relationships, John Gottman, Steve Duck, probably, than anyone else,  all he did was data until he met his wife because he had no way of interpreting it, he was just a maths correlations and identifying all these factors that he was, he was great at that but it was only his wife that years of the therapy that put together the story that enabled them to make any use of all of that data,  because before all they were doing was publishing,  OK,  this, this happens, this happens, there’s the mathematical correlation so, so, as a society we haven’t, well as a society we haven’t valued relationships because relationships are for the individual and so the story of,  if you look, right, so, if you look at, so the average rate of divorce it changes depending on time and the statistics but, so, but on average there’s about a 55% divorce rate, so, so I’m thinking about Matthew Side wrote a great book called black box thinking and in it he talked about how I think as I remember it was like airlines, the airline fault rate, you know like airline crashes right, you know like airline crashes and things, faults that led to airline crashes and medica, like faults by medical staff were, I think that they had quite similar rights or anyway but he looked at airline crashes went from having a spate of them to almost none  now where as medical,  in the medical field it’s still pretty much the same error rate and the reason was that airlines made it, they changed their culture so it stopped  being blame and they encouraged their pilot and airline staff to tell them about near misses,  whereas if doctor had a near miss they wouldn’t, OK, generalisation but they generally wouldn’t share it because they would be judged, it would lower their status,  it would make it seem like they were lesser and so what airlines did is they didn’t blame pilots or staff because another thing that they found was because of the hierarchy, the ground  staff or the staff on a plane could see crashes coming but wouldn’t say anything like on black box in black boxes they were able to see that  other people were picking up on signs but they weren’t saying anything because they, because they assumed this pilot knew but the pilot was just having an off day or just wasn’t switched on and so ended up killing, like killing the whole plane load because they didn’t want to challenge him and So what the airlines did was they made it, I can’t remember exactly, but they created the system that all staff have to log when they see something and they can, so they created a culture where they could give feedback to the pilot and it wouldn’t be like, who do you think you are telling me that and so  what happened is they minimised air crashes, like airline safety is really like minimal accidents because they created a system that didn’t create blame, so whereas in the medical field they haven’t done it so much because there is that hierarchy, people aren’t like, seen as lower status I isn’t taken too well to  be able to challenge or respond to ,yes so the culture.  

Okay, so how does this relate into relationships,  well in, if you look at our legal system,  so when, when someone gets married it becomes legal because we involve the state so, when you marry you have to get a licence and then it becomes a legal contract so then it’s not just two people but it’s also the government or society and so the legal system works on blame, blame therefore means that someone who is at fault if a relationship doesn’t work,  I know like you have the quickie divorce,  but that’s the basic structure that we have, so, you and to get a divorce unless you use quickie it means you have to prove who was at fault, so,  when relationships end so, so like this is , this is something we don’t never really normally think about but it shows the underlying psyche in which relationships are, so, even like even if it’s a relationship and you haven’t got married, there’s this thing of like what happened, you have to have a story so many people and this is relevant Sarah to what you’re talking about, but many people, like couples therapy has quite poor results and  what, what they found was that couples that go to therapy what they found was that couples that go to therapy, it wasn’t that that effective in helping saving the marriage but what it does is it creates the story, so if you’ve been in a relationship and then you break up and you go back out dating,  you really want to say well I was, I was a shit  husband and I cheated and I drank and I was abusive, you have to have some kind of story, so people have this story after a breakup, it’s a story like people talk about it as closure, it’s some story of why it came to an end and so this is where people come in with like it was incompatible or we grew apart or something like that,  but the story that people have isn’t necessarily why the relationship broke, when you look at it fundamentally a relationship broke because it wasn’t working for one or both parties and so that is the long downward slope,  so the behaviour that creates the final break isn’t necessarily what, isn’t necessarily the first cause of the breakup it was like that it was draining,  it was no longer worth being in,  so,  if you have 55%,  like if 55% of surgeries didn’t work out,  55% of airlines ended in crashes we don’t blame all surgeons,  we don’t blame all pilots we say that there’s a systemic problem when, but when we’re looking at individual relationships because they  all seem to they all seem to have different causes different situations on the surface they all look individual, so,  we, we say oh I just cause that person was a shit, it was because they were the wrong people who was in the wrong situation so it looks like a whole myriad of excuses or how myriad of reasons but really what it is, it  is that this is systemic problem, the systemic problem is the framework that we are operating from that we do relationships from,  so this systemic like idea the framework that we do relationships from is the thing that is flawed and yet everyone is going round and so when you add that into like the general there’s a general fear about relationships that will never have a relationship I know that will work and I’ll always end up alone and unloved and that fear creates a lot of anxiety around relationships and so then what happens is peoples experience feeds into that and they go what’s wrong with me, I didn’t get the memo about relationships, am I unlovable,  is there something wrong with me that I can’t make relationships work and so everyone is looking at themselves and no one’s looking at the whole systemic framework that we are from,  so it’s a bit like the emperor’s new clothes,  where you know, like the story, you know where the emperor is told only clever people can see this and he goes out naked and  everyone is going like, if anyone who thinks he’s naked is stupid and so we’re  like that in in relationships,  were like yeah it’s me,  it’s me,  what am I doing wrong why, why is not working for me and no one has ever questioned the emperor,  like the emperor’s framework, so it’s the problem of what’s wired into our Neurology rather than us individually.

So, okay, so the fairy tales and what’s word into our Neurology is that fairy-tale and so that leaves us with there is no pathway to fixing, it also means that people get played so when you look at relationships with narcissists and people like that sociopaths and all of that, it’s because people believe that there’s one out there,  that people believe that they’re going to fall in love with this person, it is going to be this one person to be different from everyone else and they’re going to see something special in them, it’s all going to work and because of that what the unscrupulous person does is play that role,  playing to that story people go into it and even though they’re not consciously thinking of it, it  is what their neurology is wired up to respond to, so, it also seems that love is out of your hands and it also means like if you have to be beautiful enough or you have to be,  like if there’s one person and you have this one chance to make it work, it’s by impressing them there and then,  then that puts a lot of pressure on every first date, it puts a lot of pressure on what if I’m not good enough, what if I’m not beautiful enough, and it’s actually what the cosmetic industry is driven on, it’s what luxury cars are driven on  because men feel if they don’t have a big enough car and they don’t seem to have enough status then they are not a good enough hunter, then no one is going to love them, so it leads to a lot of anxiety about relationships and interactions because, what if I screwed up my one chance.

Okay does that make sense?

Sandra: you talked about the perception of beauty of self, um but your perception of what is beautiful and would attract Prince Charming or lady, whoever may not be what is actually desirable because you have created something in your head which does not play out for other people.

Rob: Yeah , yeah, completely,  I mean you look at and what happened is as media and social media have accelerated this it’s got to a state when no one can live up to and women feel a pressure to look as good these models that don’t look as good as there are pictures and then you got filters, so, so where I first understood all of this, I didn’t understand all of this,  but where I first identified that some of this was, I used to have a gym and in looking at why don’t people stick to their like exercise and diet programme I trained in therapy and I started using, when people were interested in joining the gym, I, I used that as a chance to kind of practice therapy and what I found was when you got to the root of why the people join gyms, and it’s not everyone, but a lot of them join a gym because they’re worried about their husbands looking at someone else,  they are thinking of leaving their wife or vice versa or they’ve had a break up they are on the dating market and they want to get in shape and be in the best shape, now when someone leaves a relationship 15/20/30 years in it’s almost never about looks, it’s never about because there’s a couple of extra pounds, it’s about how they feel in the relationship and yet the first thing that people do is like go to the gym, get in shape or have a makeover or change their hairstyle or something like that because they think that’s going to spice things up, but it’s never about that, it’s about the other person, about how they feel and if you really spoke to them, so, typically why mean will leave a relationship 20 years in, been happy, have got kids and but after 20 years the kids and his wife are looking at him and he’s just someone who puts out of rubbish just someone who tells these silly old stories and he feels that he’s not respected,  someone else maybe he’s got a little bit of power at work and he’s, he’s respecting maybe there’s someone younger that looks up to him and feels like they’re going to learn from him and feel like he seems so in control of things, he feels different because of like the adulation or the attention that is getting and he feels his respected,  he feels powerful he feels better and he’ll walk out of a perfectly happy relationship, happy as in aside from he didn’t feel as respected his as he wanted, but really it’s about, for men like a generalisation, men will respect, women will love,  is that men have to understand that we are not special, we just who we are and women have to understand that as in you’re not going to be loved and put on a  pedestal forever, your,  it’s a human to human relationship,  does that make sense? 

Okay so alright, so let’s look at, so, if that’s the fairy-tale framework, let’s talk about the four relationship truths,  and so,  the four relationship truths are,  relationships are a  struggle and so the biggest, I think my favourite relationship quote is that Dan Wiles said, or the late Dan Wiles said that when you marry someone, you marry a set of problems, so if you didn’t marry this person you wouldn’t have these problems but you would have a different set and so when you choosing a partner you are choosing a set of problems, so you are  and the other quote I love about relationships is Mignon, anyways it’s someone but she said no one’s ever been ever been loved in the way that everyone wants to be loved and so I think when you born usually you come out of the world helpless and your so cute and your parents fall in love with you and they shower you with adulation and every time you do anything, they say aww, isn’t he cute, isn’t he wonderful  and so you get like, wherever you go, like, everyone loves babies, well most people love babies and babies like, like most of what these years is related to what baby is,  like big eyes, like smooth skin, ,all of those type of things that we’re genetically wired to respond with love to a baby, so there is this thing that this baby goes around and is surrounded by this cocoon of love where everywhere it goes everyone thinks everything he does or she does is wonderful and from then on life is just downhill, just like you get to three your parents are screaming at you they are tired, they have had no sleep, you little shit, just get in there and do that behave, like don’t do that, who do you think you are, like shut up,  all of this stuff so that, hang on, like three years ago you thought I was wonderful now I’m not just not good enough,  so we grow up feeling we’re not good enough, like shut up, who are you, talking out in school to,  sit down, your no different from everyone else in the class, do as your told, so, we go from this adulation to like it it’s a drop, and I think what we are all craving from a relationship is that adulation that we had as a baby, we are looking for this partner that whatever we do, like that, what are we like, we want unconditional love, what does unconditional love mean, whatever we do we put on this pedestal, with like you got this fantastic person you are amazing so, but that’s not realistic and when, when they have looked at, when you have looked at unconditional love which in research they call the gappic love and they have tried to studies on it and they’ve had to abandon it because they couldn’t find enough people capable of it, so,  maybe if your Jesus or  if your buddha or your this enlightened being you can love unconditionally, but most of us can’t and I’m not even sure that it we necessarily should because if you were going to love unconditionally that would mean you would accept someone cheating on you, you would accept someone abusing you,  you would accept all the kind of behaviour that would make you miserable and I’m just,  I’ve just seen a little bit of the chat, I’ve just seen get a dog, yeah, I think that’s why people do get pets,  I’m going to pick up a puppy on Sunday so maybe that’s me,  but, yeah I think that’s why, why we love pets, its why we love babies,  so that’s why relationships are a struggle,  because of our story and so when you look at, if we are operating, if our neurology is wired up from the fairy-tale framework then when someone leaves the cap of the toothpaste, when they leave the toilet seat up, it  becomes,  people react and it goes,  if they really love me they wouldn’t and it becomes, like you wouldn’t the emotional responses to someone leaving the toilet seat up to someone leaving their clothes on the floor or a cap off the toothpaste is out of alignment with the level of the problem and it’s because people aren’t really fighting about that they are fighting about this means you don’t love me and that plays  into the anxiety which creates the strong emotions and yet people continue to fight over the toothbrush and not how they really feel because they don’t say, because they don’t want to be vulnerable and they don’t want to say I’m, that makes me feel anxious that you really don’t love me

Sandra: But couldn’t it also be about self,  if you are a tidy person and that is how you feel good about yourself and how you approach the world and somebody constantly clutters up your order and creates disorder, it starts the day off on the wrong foot, you feel totally discombobulated and you are irritable because you cannot get yourself back in order because this creature,  this because this person becomes a creature at that point just keeps on putting things and disturbing, yes, nature tends to enter people,  but this is not one state where you want to be in chaos and there’s this constant force that creates chaos in your desire for order and you’re always fighting for order,  I like my desk clean,  I like my things put away and here is this person with the socks, the shoes, I rest my case, but, so, so to me it’s, it’s two things, it’s yes about the person maybe you’re disgusting your annoyance of the person and , and they yeah maybe if you loved me you would listen to what I’m saying and do it but also I think from the individual, your personality is also under attack and your ability to function properly comes under attack and so you feel stressed which means that this is a vicious circle that you’re in, 

Rob: yeah, so yes, so you’ll need to be tidy to be organised is wired into your neurology, so that’s your individual wiring, so, tomorrow, that’s what we’re talking about tomorrow but, yeah, but having said that because you have obviously had this situation, you’ve obviously had this argument, so did you ever explain why or did you just react on the level of the clothes? 

Sandra: It’s, it’s an odd thing because from, for those of you who don’t know me , others do,  I’ve been married for 34 years and lived with my husband for 10 and I’ve been in  the UK on my own, so, I’m very jealous of my space and my neatness so, so, which makes it even worse but when I was in Jamaica at first it wasn’t a problem because I had, I had staff at home to clean up after him so I didn’t see it, okay, so,  coming up here and him coming and I felt like my space was invaded because we would spend Christmases together, the family would be together you know, etc, etc, so, he’d be here twice a year and I had this feeling which I had to sort of say no, no, no, calm, calm down, behave yourself, be generous, but at times and it wasn’t all bad because there are times when he recognised and he would clean up and he’d wash up and he do all the rest of the stuff but for me at that time I was going to school, I was working part time and my son was probably about 8/9/10 going on, okay, so I was totally stressed out, so, if I put something here it means that I should be able to find it in my sleep you know when you’re half asleep at 5:00 o’clock in the morning trying to get ready to go out,  yeah and if you have moved it and I cannot find it means that I’m losing time and I’m going to be late for the train,  okay you get it ,OK.

Rob: So you are stress is created by your story because the train and all of these things so, yeah, it’s, and all of us, all our rows, all of our emotions are created by the story, to that, and what we have got is 2 people with 2 different stories  that may not being like, completely different stories, completely  different destinations and we don’t really know what they stories are because we operating them were arguing about the clothes, we are arguing about the toothpaste, we are arguing about the toilet seat, we’re not saying you know like, what do people argue about people argue about money, sex, children, they’re not really arguing about money, they are arguing about what money means to them, John Gottman was talking about this, it is like he asked people actually when you say money mean to you, money means security, money means love, money means power, money means control over all these things, money means freedom all of these things so people are talking about different things, but they’re arguing about you spent this and I think we should save it, but they are not talking about the story of  I believe that I need to have this amount of money in my bank account before I can feel safe or  I need to spend this money because for me spending money means showing love and so people are arguing about symbol but not what the symbol means to the,  so that’s why relationships are struggled so they are a struggle because of the narratives and if you let go of the narratives then you can have better relationships, the path to happy ever after is letting go the narratives and so, then the next bit is that there only really a few basic, so there is 7 basic problems in relationships and those 7 problems are 7 skills,  now in areas that we’ve more developed, we’ve got more of body of knowledge in that field, there’s less there’s less emotion, there is less like old housewife tales, like which is, like in relationships there is a level of housewives tales or the superstitious stuff,  you need to do this, you need to do that and when you’re looking at, so we talked about, like dating advice is often about you have to be someone different and then we wonder why we are disconnected because we are not connecting, connection is  human to human and if you’re pretending to be someone else or you , you think this is the text I need to send, this is the dating profile I need to have you created a disconnection between you and who you representing so people get into relationships with who  they are representing and then they are wondering  why they haven’t got connection, so, we have also talked about emotion and logic, emotion is why you get into a relationship, emotion is how you know the quality of the relationship, but when you navigate the process of a relationship from emotion then you’re working from all of this anxiety, you’re working from all of this drama,  so logic is the way that you find your way, so if you look at a GPS system, if it worked on the prettiest route or the route that makes you feel best, you would never get too  where you wanted to be, so it’s about logic, it’s about how to what’s the best route what’s the quickest route, where is the most traffic,  all of those things,  OK so we’re looking now at, so we talked about, in the first one we talked about connections is more important than a relationship and it’s about a relationship journey because if it’s about a relationship then you’ve got a fixed point and so when you have two be fixed points you’re stuck because you can’t move from this point and you can’t move from this point so you can only ever have one fixed point because then you can navigate to it, so for example people stay stuck because they won’t let go of their narrative and they don’t want the result that their getting with their narrative so the framework of the assumptions, beliefs and, that framework sets us up for the results that we have, if we are not getting the results that we want it is because of our framework, so if you don’t change the framework or the narrative and you are not happy with the results where your stuck, you’re stuck unhappy, but if you change this, then you can navigate to where this,  to where you want to be,  does that make sense? I don’t feel like I’m explaining it properly 

P: Rob, you said only 7 basic problems in a relationship, can you elaborate in that leverage which

Rob: I will on Friday,  that’s Friday, So, so basically, 7 problems are, will you break up, so there is basically seven stages of the relationship journey, there  is breakup, there  is healing,  if you don’t heal properly you’re going to be afraid of the next relationship, dealing with conflict is another, finding a partner, so dating skills is one project, building  relationship connection is another project, so there is basically seven points of a relationship,  so, being able to find a partner and then being able to choose the right partner, being able to build a relationship, being able to  deal with conflict,  being able to heal and being happy in yourself,  so all of these are really a project, there’s a process to go with every project, so it’s just about finding ways to process, so if you’re looking at dating it’s about knowing who you are and what kind of person you’re going to need in a  relationship and how do you express yourself, how, like how do you connect with humanity, how do you connect, how do you connect to people and then another project is when you’re connecting with people your dating, how do you choose who the right person is, so, we talked about the criteria for that yesterday, so there is project, there is process and practices, so,  being able to deal with conflict is something, being able to, we talked about I think about connection and conversation is the point of developing connection, but conversation is a skill,  it’s skill of being able to listen properly,  listen which is be present and it’s also about that like we talked about vulnerability of being able to share who you are because if you don’t share who you are eventually the connection is going to break, when you look with less emotion about relationships, and people don’t, people look at relationships with such charged emotions that they feel that if you look at it logically you’re losing something and when you examine  why, then they are like, you’re losing the romance,  the structure enables you the freedom to have the romance because if you want the romance without the foundation then you will have that biologically, like Helen Fisher says we have 3 drives, sex drive  that you gets you out meeting people,  the romantic drive which narrows from all of these people your attracted to,  to this one person I’m going to fixate on and really want to develop a relationship with, she talks about that seems to last about 3 years which is the honeymoon period, which is why relationships go like that, because when  the honeymoon period drops people don’t realise that and  think they have  fallen out of love, it isn’t that they have fallen out of love, it’s the  biological process but that, in order to have that, the other  relationship is the third drive for deep companionship, which is like the life partner, so there’s a romantic , like people who’ve been married or been together 20 years are different than the couple that have been together two years and it’s just a fact of being together, you’re not going to put, like this is one of the things, the narrative means that we feel like if someone isn’t putting us on a pedestal and adoring us then we feel they don’t love us anymore. It’s that the love has changed, it’s evolved and so when you look at an 80 year old couple that are still in love, it’s because they have a deep companionship, it’s not the romantic,  it’s not,  it’s a different kind of love, it is not the romantic type of loves, it doesn’t mean it can’t be romantic, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a passionate relationship but it’s not that obsessive type of thing and a lot of people are looking to recreate that constantly obsessive, you know like people who date for a while and it’s all exciting and they are talking about how excited they are about this person and then you talk to them again and they go, ah it  just died down and then how I’ve met this other person and it just gives me butterflies,  that kind of thing, that’s not sustainable because you, you can’t feel that way,  it’s like if you have a new car you can be all excited about it or a new computer, or new shoes or a new game or whatever you’re excited about, you can be excited about it for a while but then after a while it habituates, so, it’s a different feeling and a lot of people as Sarah was saying, a lot of people give up and a lot of people give up because they mistake the butterflies and the obsessive romantic thoughts as being love rather than being  a stage to lead you into deeper love, so just to finish off then there are really 3 keys, 3 elements to a relationship, there is you, there is your partner, and there is how you interact together and so any problem is going to come from one of those and often it’s us, often we go into a relationship, like we’re in a relationship and  we are feeling bad and we don’t really know why we feel bad and but we, when we feel bad we typically look to blame and we look at why am I feeling bad, it’s because of you,  you left your shoes and socks there and because I’ve got the train to get, it’s  that kind of, we blame the other person, but it was the stress we were under and we hadn’t looked at it and they are doing the same and sometimes it’s because we blame them about leaving the shoes out and  they are resentful and they’re like right I’m going to get back at them and then something happens and they are like  look you’ve done this and so it becomes this constant thing and when you link that back  Stan Tatkin talks about 2 nervous systems clashing,  two little children say do you love me, will you be there for me, can I trust you,  looking for that adoration that we got as babies and we’re not getting that we say, well this must not be love, you mustn’t be the one and that’s when people give up and then move onto and so if you’re not the one and this isn’t true love then I need to go and find my one and so if you look at dating profiles, if you look at how people explain it they talk about I need to find my prince, I need to find my one, I need to get this happily ever after, so you could, So I tell people about this  fairy-tale framework and they are like yeah, yeah, I don’t believe that, you might not believe it in conversation intellectually but  neurologically that’s what your behaviour is showing me that is wired into your system, so, when you look at, you can see, it’s like I often say don’t, don’t listen to what someone says, what someone does is more significant than what they say because people will say anything that’s easy, what they do is what they really believe and in the same way if you look at people’s behaviours intellectually they can tell you in great detail about relationships but their behaviour acts from the fairy-tale framework so if you look at what people do relationships you can see the level of their operating system, so that whole neurology is why I called and relationship operating system, this is the framework that we get and we can  go and learn some technique but if we are operating from a different framework, under stress, under limited time, we’re going to do what’s in our neurology,  so most people are playing, like they are playing the game of relationships as if it’s a lotter,  that they have this one ticket and they hope, but they’re not sure it’s going to work and if we look it more it’s projects, processes and practises,  what are the practises I need to do, what are  the processes to achieve the projects I want on my relationship journey then it’s not about, it’s not down to luck, which is where the anxiety of most people are like,  going back to the days of cupid,  if only cupid  fires his arrow,  that’s what’s going to take for me to live happily ever after but when we see it’s not, it’s not about luck and the luck of just happening to be, to bump into the one, it’s about what we do and this is why it’s more about the relationship journey than a relationship because the person your with or the person that you get into a relationship with may not, so this is like where people say yeah, yeah, but you can do this, but what about the other person, well then is about how you navigate, if someone isn’t capable of giving you the relationship that you want then that’s their choice it’s not about control and making them different,  but it’s about how you respond to that,  you can’t have, there are some people that you can’t have that relationship with but then,  if you want, the quality of the relationship you want is more important than a specific partner because if you lock onto this specific partner which so many people do like,  like,  Derick in accounts is hunk and he’s the man I want to be in a relationship with and so, it makes a change from Dorothy in accounts but if you lock onto one of these people and you say, yeah, I need to win him, how am I going to win him, I know, I’ll wear this make up and this dress and I’m going to tempt him and get him into a relationship, well, then you’re stuck with his or her neurology and how willing and capable he is to go with you on that journey,  whereas is if what you hold is, and ultimately what we want a relationship for,  which we talked about this the other day, is for connection,  we want to feel connected to someone because we have this deep need for connection to belong and if we hold onto what we want is the feeling, the  connection, the  belonging, the supportive life partner or whatever it is,  if we hold onto that,  then everyone’s out there and if we are not seeing them is because of our perceptual filters and because of that it’s about what’s the story we are telling,  what’s the anxiety that were feeling,  so relationships are really within our grasp but it’s not about an individual relationship, it’s about the relationship you want, so you can’t say this is a relationship I want and this is the person I want that relationship with because they might not go together, so you have to be flexible to who but hold to what you want and the relationship is to enrich your life, so it’s not a particular person but the quality of the relationship that enriches your life,  so this has been one long monologue so we never had any breakout or conversations but I kind of went on a rant there, does anyone have any questions or?

P: Rob, I have a question in regards to  a fair one and the whole love is a lottery thing because I think I’m kind of confused, studies have shown that most successful relationship are not from love but there from arranged marriages but if you look at the framework that is built of arranged marriages we have marriages whereby the woman is expected to stay at home and take care of the husband the woman does not have that much freedom yet this is where success in marriage is being viewed as,  so what does that say,  do we have to follow that Framework or do we continue with the whole dating, love which has been shown that the longer you did the more likely you’re going to get a divorce after getting married

Rob: So, we have to look at,  yes arranged marriages do work better,  so, why do I think arranged marriages work, they work particularly well because people go into them without much expectation,  people go into them,  okay so people who date typically get into a relationship from lust, from excitement,  from their idea of what will make a relationship, they have, if you look at Helen Fisher’s idea of the romantic drive, of where it will last for that three years, that’s a great time dating, you feel great on dates with someone, it’s all it’s all new, you, you get into domestic relationship which is completely different from dating and you get into a relationship or marry someone based on how you feel initially and then after three years it drops down and people don’t understand, why they go, oh why, this isn’t the person,  but it’s because they expected, so this is something I always think of,  is that if you go, if you were a wedding,  the two people and there’s always someone that goes marriages are hard work and you’ve got to work at it and you’ve got to talk and you’ve got to compromise and all these kind of things that people say, and the couple go, yeah, but it’s different because we both want the same things and we are so alike and we are so good and we love each other so much, so it’s the lie that love is enough,  because love is how you feel in the moment and the soon as someone starts leaving the clothes on the floor and start leave the toothbrush of and forget your birthday and all of these things,  you no longer love them but it’s because people are,  get into a relationship with someone they, based on their feeling and it’s a feeling that, a lot of it is lust, a  lot of it is hope and anxiety and a lot of it is not really about the person,  OK,  so, so, that’s, so that’s kind of abstract but, let’s make it more specific,  so, people in arranged marriages first of all there is an  expectation that you are going to stay, so this goes to what Sarah was talking about of work, because the expectation is that you are going to work on it, so, you could get along with most people,  like if you were, if you lived in a,  again it’s about thresholds of how sensitive you are and whatever, but if you’ve lived with people at uni, if you’ve had flat mates,  all of these things, you can get along with someone,  now people in arranged marriages get along like that , so without  the distraction of, do you love me, will you be there for me,  all of those things,  people feel, people are able to get along but there isn’t so much anxiety towards it, Does that make sense?

P: I can address Ingena’s  question regarding woman expected to stay home in mot arranged marriages, I don’t think that’s the case in China, I guess it depends on different cultures and different families, my parents have an arranged marriage, an arranged marriage and a lot of people in their generations also have arranged marriage,  they usually last for life although they, hum, there is, which it doesn’t mean they don’t have problems, they have lots of problems but the, I think that a few reasons, I feel like I have to address, not all women serve their husbands, like my parents, in their relationship, my mum is the guide and my dad is the helper, the executor, one part I have detected is that in arranged marriages actually the couples are very, very complimentary,  they generally speaking, opposite in terms of both personalities and skillsets and they complement each other very well, I believe they don’t meet by chance, there is a divine spiritual, a spiritual force behind their matching and that’s why they’re so complimentary and there is usually the sufficient amount,  amount for conflicts in the marriage or relationship which helped both of them to grow or even transform and another reason that arranged marriages usually last for life is because when people enter into arranged marriages have given up their self-will, they let the matchmaker or god to decide for them so they are not arrogant and delusional in,  in terms of believing that they know what they want so they are actually more humbled in that sense , that’s another reason arranged marriages  last longer and I also would like to address another point that I  believe there is the one and, and believing that there is the one person out there for all of us doesn’t make things more complicated and makes things much more simpler and  we don’t have to worry about our attractiveness because will be attractive enough for the one that’s meant for us and usually they will have a similar level of attractiveness so that we don’t have to compete, if we don’t believe there is the one then everyone is our competitor in our, within our gender and that’s very, very stressful and also by believing the one actually then we are more willing to, the one is what we are meant to be with, then we are more willing to put in efforts to make the relationship work, we will not walk away easily because we know we have no other choice, this is the only person that we got so we have to do, we have to take the ultimate, ultimate, ah, ultimate responsibilities and put in the maximum amount of effort to make the relationship or marriage work, so we are not going to, we are not going to walk away easily so that’s why, so, that’s my perspective on believing the one for me I think it eliminates lots of doubt, oh am I missing on something better, no this what I have got, the only person I have got is the one, I don’t have to, to ponder about other possibilities, this is the only possibility.

Rob: Ok, thank you Faywu, I do think, I do think we have to look at cultural, our culture is wired into our Neurology and so when you look at arranged marriages like Faywu says a lot of it is because culturally they are built for that relationship, and so all those expectations and all those things are trained into someone, and yes different cultures have different relationship styles, Nicole?

Nicole: I, I just wanted to ask, earlier you mentioned about three drives and you said that the romantic drivers was one of them, I just wanted to know what the other 2 were?

Rob: Sex Drive, so the sex drive gets us out looking, like being attracted to people, the romantic drive narrows it down to one and deep companionship and she, she believes from her research that it is  biological and So what we’re looking at and so, so this is like why do people do why do people put their relationships at risk to cheat,  why do people, so if you want to look at people cheating often it’s because of the sex drive but,  that in itself isn’t enough but often it is when you look at that peak of a relationship, that three year peak where is that like most blissful, the most exciting, the most passionate, well when that goes down and if the relationship is now starting to drain and someone feels they are not getting any attention, they are not, there is no spark and  like Derek from accounts or Dorothy from wherever,  like you see them and you’ll have it that spike there, oh, but this is the person I really love, this is the person and that’s really the romantic drive  and so the way that you make relationships from that curve is you develop a deep companion and I think arranged marriages for that’s what they do is they might not have the romantic drive or might not even be the attraction initially but they have that deep companion drive and ultimately a great relationship is really a great friendship, obviously it’s a great friendship with sex, passion and intimacy and all that but the foundation of it is the friendship. If if you don’t have the friendship the rest won’t work. If you have a friendship, you can build everything else. Well, if you if you have the potential, So, what I mean is like you can have a great passionate relationship or you like,  like pwoah, you have all of that lust and stuff, but if that’s all you have it’s just lots of great make up sex and huge dramatic breakups,  but if what you’re looking for is like 20/30/50 year relationship that’s really the deep companionship and so obviously it’s got to be someone that your sexually attracted to because otherwise you are going to have no passion but most of, so,  this is where it’s contradictory because Esther Parrell will say it shouldn’t be affectionate, she says that there’s two polarities of lust and familiarity and so she,  I think ,I think she’s taking facts and taking the wrong story or I think because she says like if you’re too, if your too affectionate, if your hugging too much, it’s too much familiarity and you won’t have the lust and so she said she you should kind of keep distance whereas John Gottman they find  the basis of a great sex life is a couple that have great connection because what usually gets in the way of the intimacy is the resentment about shoes on the floor the toothpaste, the toilet seat up and then we’re  not,  we don’t feel open because we are resentful, we’ve got all this anger, we feel hurt so we close down sexually.

P: So, I vote for separate living quarters, you can do what you want in your bedroom, you can live at your pigsty for all I care, when you come out just be clean.

Rob: Why you looking at me Sandra?

P:  I read that we should actually to be successful couples take separate bedrooms, there was a study that 

P: The Victorians had the right thing with the gentleman’s dressing room et cetera so he could do all that he wanted inside there and I wouldn’t have to see it, maybe we should go back to that, that’s …

Rob: When I talked  in the first, day one, i talked about we come from the age of control, we are in the age of confusion but we’re moving towards the age of choice and I think yes,  it is individual about,  we’ve all got different thresholds, thresholds are what we can live with tidiness, what we can live with emotional, emotional intimacy,  libido, it’s all thresholds and so the right relationship,  there’s no one this is the perfect relationship and everybody needs to do this, it’s what’s right for you, how, what is the relationship that serves you and so it starts with a bigger awareness of, what do you need to be happy and then who is the person that is capable of that relationship that could make you happy, so, yeah, I think it’s individual.

P: I was going to say but then shouldn’t we as young adults, when we’re young adults getting into relationship phase of life, that is when we need to start understanding who we are but nothing ever, we never get any training or any questions or any sessions with anybody that can point us to have a proper discussion with ourselves as to what actually we are about,  at that phase because of course we’re young, we’re immature,  we are still not mature enough,  we speak, we begin the process then of learning how to define ourselves and understand what it is that really pleases us.

Rob: Yeah, but again it’s because politically schools are about producing economically productive, law-abiding citizens and so, no one is going to care about your happiness, no one cares about your relationships and so that’s why we have nothing that works, there is no curriculum.

P: What about the church, the church for me, the church really is a social club says you know it’s a social organisation, it takes care of, supposed to take care of the flock and well you know and the shepherd that could be a place wherein people have these kinds of discussions too or this with without it being so grounded in following a particular path

Rob: It could but then that they have their own belief system of, we talked about before, that sex is bad and yeah all that and they have their own goal, any organisation is going to have its own goals, 

P: We sort of need neutral territory really, don’t we, neutral territory to be able to educate, I think.

Rob:  I think we’ve reached this we’ve reached a point where it’s like a breaking point with lots, with lots of things in society and I think we are reaching a point where the political systems and all these things are going to break down. As in Their not going to serve us for what people now want. Up until now, until like 1920, 1930, 1940 there was no welfare system and it was a struggle to survive, it’s only in the last, definitely in the last century that we’ve become rich enough and it’s only is only really, and when we talk about, we’ve become rich enough, it’s the western economies that have become rich enough that’s physical survival is no longer a struggle, but for most of the world or a lot of the world there is still that daily struggle and so there’s not been a focus, so survival was enough, this was why marriage was an economic unit throughout the  agricultural period where now people want emotional satisfaction and so we’ve got a framework that’s built for survival, as in arranged marriages are built for survival but we have expectations of emotional satisfaction and so now, our generations and younger generations want more satisfaction and they want more happiness and so the old structures are going to break and I think in 50/100 years there will be relationships and happiness on a curriculum, the government or different governments have talked for 15 years about making happiness on the school curriculum but haven’t done anything because what wins,  that not going to win votes, it’s not necessarily what’s in people’s concern so, and it’s also really if you look at it individually, it’s not what we value,  if you look,  like if we each looked at where we spend our money, how much money have you spent on learning to be happy, on self-awareness, on relationships and how much have you spent on iPhone and things like that, so individually, if you look where you spend your money shows where you are valuing and if you multiply that as a society that’s where  economically,  this is why Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi get 30 million a year and a nurse gets 30 Grand a year,  it’s because of value and value comes from not what we speak about but from where we spend our money because, and we have, we have a vote but  we vote for lower taxes and we vote for all these things, but we vote  once every four years or so but we actually, we vote with our money every time we earn money and we spend it.

Faywu, sorry, you have been very patient  

 Faywu: Yes, I would like to share my view on libido and sex drive, I think a lot of people lie to themselves and to other people but one thing they cannot lie is sex, sex is actually about ourselves, it’s self-expression and we are and we are only attracted to partners that reflect our own values, if we think we are unworthy we will be attracted to, sexually attracted to unworthy partners, if we are worthy, we will be attracted to partners who are worthy.

P: What do you mean by worthy or unworthy?

Faywu:  If you know your deepest convictions, your values and whatever your values are at any given point of your life you’ll be attracted to partners that reflect your values and your ideal of yourself at the time 

Rob: can I just ask your question you a question Faywu? 

Faywu: yes 

Rob: Okay you have a choice for one hot night it is Tom Hardy or the Dahli Llama, 

Faywu: I don’t know either of them, dahlia llama 

Rob: Okay, who is the most attractive film star

Faywu: Brad Pitt is quite attractive but I don’t know his character only know

Rob: Okay,  let me just ask you this question but you have before expressed before 

Faywu: That he is too old 

Rob: okay,  you before expressed admiration for Jordan Peterson wasn’t it, 

Faywu: I yes but obviously 

Rob: One hot night, One hot night you can have Brad Pitt or Jordan Peterson

Faywu: Jordan Peterson, if those were the two only two choices I had to make,  for me the most attractive person is my boyfriend I don’t find anyone else so attractive right 

Rob: So, we have run over again but before we go if anyone has any closing thoughts or comments or insights they’d like to share to everyone else 

Faywu: Well the reason why I’m not attracted to anyone else is because I believe my boyfriend is the one so I don’t waste time on other people and he’s currently not my ideal, he doesn’t reflect my highest values yet and I’m in the process of getting him to change,  to transform him I’ll keep you guys updated with the progress.

Rob: does he want to change 

Faywu: yes, but he’s very resistant 

Rob: Well, Good Luck

Faywu: He is very attracted to me sexually so that means I reflect his highest values but because of his past condition it’s a battle

P: Is that example of loyal expectations 

Faywu: No,  because for me to trust him, for me to have a healthy relationship with him, his currently a narcissist, he has to change to become his ideal because otherwise I cannot trust him and we cannot have a relationship

P:  so you’ve taken on a project then? 

Faywu: yes and it’s incredibly rewarding because I have been transformed myself through the process I’ve got rid of lots for my limiting beliefs,  prejudice, spies,  it’s very challenging but very, very rewarding 

P: All the best 

Faywu: thank you 

Rob: Steven?

Steven:  You talked about projects, processes and practises are those something you’re going to talk about another day in more depth. 

Rob: Friday, we are going to talk about the 7 projects, 7 problems and 7 processes.

Steven, I’m thinking something that you might find interesting is a guy called Alan Le Botton, he is a historian,  a trained historian, master philosopher and author and done various books about the romantic movement and, and that that the effect of the romantic movement on the western ideals of love and it ties in with some of the things that you said and I think you might find that worth looking at 

Rob: Yes, I’ve heard the name before, someone else 

Steven: He’s got some he’s got some great YouTube videos, some of them, two of them where he’s talking in the Sydney Opera House, so you know he’s pretty well respected.

Rob: Okay,  thank you 

Faywu: I listen to his ‘you don’t marry the wrong person’ and  I agree with that, the reason that he has that is he believes that he has never been truly loved so he’s cynical 

P: I guess it’s all down to that perception though really, isn’t it

Rob: And the assumptions,  all of us,  life is about we have to operate on assumptions and the results that we get show us whether our assumptions are accurate or not so I think everything is as hypothesis that, it’s like the old saying in advertising 50% of, I think John wanamaker said that 50% of what I spent on advertising is wasted but I don’t know but I don’t know which 50% and it’s the same thing in half of what we believe about everything in life, about  relationships is false half of this I talked about tonight is probably false,  um, but we only know,  like we have to have something to operate because if you look at,  if we if we believed the same as we believed  2/3000 years ago we would say, we would say that the world, like even 2 thousand years ago, the  world revolves around,  like the sun revolves around the earth, the earth was flat every, everything we discover everything we learn is because we find the assumptions are false and it’s just about being open and sensitive when I talked about pilots and planes being sensitive what’s the assumption and what’s false

P: Before you come into a relationship, do a risk analysis, identify the hazards, look at their impact and see whether you can manage, mitigate or you need to depart.

P: Shall we do a special risk assessment as well

P: And the exit is over here

Rob: So, we need a date risk assessment okay, anyone else got anything to share before we go?  Okay, thank you everyone and tomorrow we are talking about, so, there are really 3 core things we are talking about, think free, be strong and share joy, so tomorrow we are going to talk about think free.  Good evening