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Anne: So, you were in Texas initially, is that where you got married?Ben: Yes, in Texas.Anne: Your wife. When did the business start blossoming to help you move out of Texas?

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We behave in needy ways when we feel bad about ourselves. We try to use the affection and approval of others to compensate for the lack of affection and approval for ourselves. And that is another root cause of our dating problems: our inability to take care of ourselves.

A needy person stays at a soul-crushing job they hate because of the prestige it gives them in the eyes of their friends, family, and peers. A non-needy person values their time and skills more than what other people think and will find work that fulfills and challenges them based on their own values.

Think about it, if you’re acting needy, you’re trying to get someone to think of you in a certain way or act a certain way towards you for your own benefit. Think about the way you feel when someone is blatantly trying to sell you something with high-pressure, salesy tricks. It just feels wrong. It’s a similar feeling when someone is acting in a certain way just to get you to like them.

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Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls again and again.9

Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail over the other’s, when one person can treat the other in a way they’d never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a problem.

Acceptance of human flaws. You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human. And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws and reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t work on self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner’s, and they’re part of the package I knowingly chose to spend my life with.”

From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole. But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.

The Needs-Driven Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the meeting of needs—she cooks for me, he’ll be a great father, she’ll make a great wife, he’s rich, she keeps me organized, he’s great in bed—becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner. Those listed things are all great perks, but that’s all they are—perks. And after a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of the relationship she’s chosen or she’s in for a dull ride.

Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the right life partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all kinds of otherwise-rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The types of fear our society (and parents, and friends) inflict upon us—fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, sometimes just fear of being judged or talked about—are the types that lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. The irony is that the only rational fear we should feel is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the exact fate the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse

Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision. The choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone, and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. As such, other people’s opinions and preferences really have no place getting involved, other than an extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse. The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn’t actually care about (religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family insistence or expectations. It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is thrilled with his relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it’s not actually that great from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.

Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked—things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item like being foreign or having a specific talent. Everyone has certain on-paper boxes they’d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her potential life partner when weighing things. If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-tron boyfriend” or a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly fill out all the bubbles. I’ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.

The “My Way or the Highway” Type This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and opinions are simply more important than her partner’s, and she needs to get her way in almost any big decision. In the end, she doesn’t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her single life and have someone there to keep her company. This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a pushover with a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals, almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.

The Main Character The Main Character’s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner who serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favor. Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion centers around his day—after all, he’s the main character of the relationship. The issue for him is that by being incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up with a sidekick as his life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.

So when you take a bunch of people who aren’t that good at knowing what they want in a relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get? A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships

In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies from 25 – 35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.

And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times.

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Anita: Let’s begin by you telling me a little bit about migrating to the United States.Luisa: Migrating to the United States: okay. My parents had an extremely bad divorce - very, very, very bad divorce. My dad's family is on the wealthier side and a little bit on the powerful side, and my mom has no money nor connections, and she's poor. When they were divorcing, by the end of their marriage—I think it was the most awful marriage that I've seen—he was threatening her with taking us away and completely … you know she would never see us ever, so like a thief in the night, she grabbed my two sisters and I and she moved us to the States.

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Mike: No, that was actually... She was still in high school. She was in senior year I believe. I wasn't in high school anymore, I was working at that time, working for the Solar Spot. I had barely started working for the Solar Spot and she kind of gave me motivation to do better. When you have somebody, you want to take them out and do extra stuff. So you're like, "Yeah man, I got to get this money."Mike: And that was another motivation that helped me kind of get up at a higher level than I was. But it was just a lot of stuff. When you have kids young, you think you want something, but you don't know. It's just like you think you like the person but you don't like them. You just like them for their looks or their body, and that was my mistake. And yes, she actually told me if I wanted to marry her.Mike: I didn't like her and I didn't want to do that to her. But she was just wanting to help me out so I could get my papers, but I couldn't do it to her, man. I just imagine myself like, "Damn, she's going to marry me." And then like, "What if I'm not the right one, and then she's going to have to go. She's taking that sacrifice for me. I don't feel like that's fair."

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