Why You Feel Unloved | 5 Research-backed Shifts That Change How Love Feels | Harry Reis

So, how can you be surrounded by people who care about you, say they love you and really do love you and still feel like love somehow isn't landing? Like you're unloved, maybe even unlovable, and how can that change? That question has been a deep curiosity of mine for years because it's also such a common story. And because when love doesn't register, it doesn't just hurt emotionally. It turns out it actually shapes our health, our sense of belonging, and how safe we feel being ourselves. Today's conversation is with psychologist Harry Reece, who has spent decades studying close relationships, intimacy, and emotional connection. And he's also the co-author of How to Feel Loved, a research grounded exploration of why feeling loved is not automatic, even when love is clearly present. We talk about a powerful back and forth dynamic that determines whether love is felt or missed, and why giving more doesn't always lead to closeness and how listening with real curiosity it just changes the emotional texture of relationships and why being known matters more than being impressive. This is one of those conversations that just quietly rearranges how you see your relationships. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. Hello, it's Greg James from The First and the Curious. Our podcast is currently being sponsored by Sky Sports. Someone's doing well. The new F1 season kicks off on March 6th in Australia and this year we're heading into a proper new era, new cars, new rules, and new teams. It genuinely feels like we're about to race into the unknown. And that makes this one of the most unpredictable seasons ever. You can watch every practice qualifying and race live on Sky Sports with unrivaled coverage across the whole race weekend. You can also stream Sky Sports with a flexible now membership if that is more your thing. You can watch a new era of F1 on Sky Sports or via a now sports membership and search get Sky Sports F1 for more details. In a world of noise and uncertainty, IG is the investment platform that backs you. Take a reflexible stalks item which gives you the freedom to withdraw funds any time and replace them in the same tax year all without losing your £20,000 tax free allowance. And if that's not enough, pay no commission on your stalk shares and ETFs when you invest with IG. IG, trade, invest, progress. Your capsules at risk other fees may apply. Tax-tutement depends on individual circumstances and a subject to change. I had a deep fascination with how people build relationships for probably my entire adult life. In all different contexts, whether it's loving intimate partners, whether it's friends, whether it's family, chosen family, colleagues, there's just such a growing body of research that shows that the depth and quality of our relationships are so determinative of a life while lived. You have been in this field for a long time researching, exploring, writing. In the new book, make an interesting statement which is effectively that we can be objectively loved, that partner's friends, family, and still not feel loved. Take me into this. Well, objectively loved is a funny kind of statement because the question is what is the objective of criterion of being loved? Now if to most people that would probably mean that there are other people who have a loving attitude towards you. There can be people like that, certainly in childhood, most kids are loved, but the feeling of being loved requires something more. The feeling of being loved requires that you experience what you're getting from other people as something that is genuine, something that is really authentic to the person that you believe you are and they're getting through to you. That doesn't always match. Some of that has to do with experiences that people have when they're growing up. But more importantly, we think that has more to do with the experiences people have when they're relating to each other's, when they don't reveal their true selves, when they hold back, when they're afraid, perhaps that if I let you see my true self, you'll be repelled by that. People hold back, and the irony of holding back is that it, first of all, it prevents you from giving to other people, but more importantly, it prevents you from receiving because the message that you're getting doesn't connect with the authentic or what we would call the real self. Yeah, that's one of the murky things about this four-letter word that is so central to the human condition is that, you know, if you ask ten people, like, what does it mean? You're going to get ten different definitions. And my guess is, if you ask ten researchers, what does it mean? You probably wouldn't even have harmony there. So it's almost like, what hope do we have of understanding what this actually is? If the people who are leading the research on it can't even agree. Well, if you ask ten researchers, the first thing you'll get is people saying that love is probably the most ambiguous word in the English language. You know, you can say you love chocolate ice cream. You can say that you love the New York Mets. You can say that you love abstract art, or you can say that you love your mother and your partner. Now, those are very different kinds of feelings, very different kind of experiences. So the first thing that, if you ask ten researchers, the first thing they're going to do is ask you to define a little more closely what we mean. Now usually, we're certainly in our book, but also in the research that I've done over the years, what we mean by love is the feeling of caring deeply about the welfare of another person. And that can be the passionate kind of feelings that one has when one falls in love, usually the term in love, one doesn't say I'm in love with chocolate ice cream, but it can also mean the deep feeling of caring and concern that two colleagues would have after working together for 25 years. It can mean the kind of affection that a parent has for a child. It usually means, you know, a feeling of concern and caring for another individual. Yeah. So if we accept this premise then that we can be surrounded by people in theory, quote, our people and still feel like we're not getting the feeling that we want. We can be in a relationship for a long time and feel like we're not getting this feeling that we want, whether it's any one of the different kinds of love. If I ask the question, well, why does this even matter? A lot of us will be, but love is everything and love. We love the feeling of love. Are there bigger reasons? Are there more physiological or survival or, you know, like psychological reasons why this is really important? There's little reason to doubt that the importance of loving and feeling loved is deeply embedded in our brains and our bodies. You know, the evolutionary significance of those feelings is unquestionable. It doesn't mean that everybody feels it all the time, but it does mean that in the typical human, there are a whole series of biological processes that regulate all of that. It's been critical to our species. It's obviously critical to mating and producing offspring, but it's also critical to survival. If you think about the era in which humans evolved, if you weren't closely connected with other people, you had no chance. You know, how many years can a newborn not survive without having some kind of attachment to caregivers? Those processes are very much regulated by the kinds of feelings that we would call feelings of love and attachment. So they're absolutely critical to our species. And I would add probably to other species as well. So there's a strong argument that says love doesn't just feel really good, but maybe maybe the reason it feels really good is because there was a survival basis. So it's almost like somehow through evolution of the species, this feeling has endured because, and maybe we wanted it, it feels good for all the other reasons because it also helps us stay here as human beings. 100%. When you feel that way towards another person, at least let's talk about the passionate romantic kind for a moment, when you feel that way to another person, you want to create a mating relationship. You know, you want to have sex and of course sex produces offspring, but those feelings also bond parents together and they bond them to their children and, you know, they see their children to maturity. And the most fundamental thing about the continuation of our species comes directly out of those feelings. Now the companion type is a little more relevant to the idea of us living in groups. We certainly evolved to live in group contexts, right? Most people who study this, you know, claim that the typical human group was about 150 people who all had various connections to each other. It's like it was like Dumbar's number. So that's done bars exactly right. And we lived it together, we hunted together, we shared food with one another, we warded off predators together, we built structures to protect ourselves from the elements together. And it's not that much of a stretch to call those feelings, the feelings that create those bonds, love, you know, they're more the companionship kind of love, but those are the feelings that built those kinds of relationships. Now, question for you then, is there a distinction in your mind between companion love? And if people are struggling with the word companion, by the way, I think we could probably just replace it with like friends or friendship, like deep friendship. I know, I hate the term too. It's a weird word. Yes, it is. Nobody uses that in natural language, but you know, like good friends, long time for like like friends that you love. Is there a distinction in your mind between that and the feeling of belonging? That's a really interesting question. And I think one could say that they're kind of similar. The biggest difference that I would say is that when we talk about belonging, we tend to talk about the feeling that one fits within a group. The feeling that a group will accept one and not reject one. So you know, when I say that I have a feeling of belonging in my family or I have a feeling of belonging in my community, we're talking about the relation of me to a group or an entity of some sort. When we talk about friendship love, we're really talking about a one-to-one kind of thing. Now I would say there's certainly a similarity and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if the underlying physiology turned out to be, you know, fairly similar. Many of the things that describe human behavior, we psychologists can, you know, differentiate things to a very fine gradient, but in the physiological reality of them, they're drawing on similar kinds of mechanisms. And that makes a lot of sense to me. So if we agree that the feeling of love and belonging, they have very real benefits both emotional, psychological and physiological and also societal, you know, like to help us survive as a people. Then what's the cost of not having that? Like are there well-defined costs? Like if this doesn't exist in your life, beyond just feeling like, well, I wish I had it or not, like, what are the actual costs? One of the things that is quite misunderstood about these kinds of evolutionary arguments, it's assumed that everybody has this. That's not the case. Now, how does evolution work? Evolution works by individual differences. Evolutionary terms you call them mutations. So some people have a lot of this. Some people have very little of it. If it's evolved, it means that the having of this tendency was related to survival and reproduction. So there are going to be people who don't feel this way. And I think we have pretty good evidence right now. There are a decent number of people in our world who don't have these kind of feelings. Now that can mean that for whatever reason, they don't have it as a drive, in which case they are, you know, content with their lives without having strong friendships and strong community relations. Or it can mean that they do have those needs, but they're not being satisfied. Now the former case is presumably not problematic. I remember reading about a lighthouse keeper in Siberia who had 20 minutes of social contact each year. Oh my God. And he was fine. Right, right, right. So okay, good for him. I'm just hoping I had a lot of really good books. But yeah, I would hope so. And he enjoyed the natural environment. On the other hand, if someone were to live in those kind of circumstances, but to feel a loss, this is the kind of thing that we refer to now as the loneliness epidemic that we've all heard about. That exerts real cost. The feelings of intense loneliness are pretty strongly related to just about everything bad you can think of. You know, by now we have dozens and dozens of studies that show that when people, let me be clear, we're not talking about, you know, feeling lonely some of the time. We're not talking about feeling lonely, you know, when you move to a new city. We're talking about feeling lonely a lot of the time, most of the time. Those kinds of feelings are associated with every illness and disease that's ever been studied. People die on average about seven to ten years earlier. When they're chronically lonely, they have trouble at work, adolescents have trouble at school. Just about anything that's ever been studied has been shown to be related to a loneliness problem. Now most of us believe that right now, relatively, let's say 50 and 60 and a hundred years ago in America, we're considerably lonely as a society than we used to be. This concept was made famous in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone book, which I'm sure you know. I think it's safe to say that loneliness is a bigger problem than it used to be. There also are quite a number of studies that compare countries to each other. America is sort of right around the middle of those. We're certainly not near the top. The countries that fare best on those are the Scandinavian countries. And you know, there are a number of reasons for that. And there are a lot of different explanations that have been given for why loneliness is increasing today compared to the way it was. You know, let's say 50, 60 years ago. Yeah. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Hello, it's Jo and James from Jo and James Fact Up and we're currently sponsored by the current account Switch Service who makes switching bank accounts effortless. I must admit, I love anything that could be described as effortless. Yeah, same, same two few things are. 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Plytly turned down a Nobel Peace Prize and turned up on Mars in your own reusable rocket while struggling to turn on the dishwasher. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover business development titles on Audible. SubscriptionRequatchyAudible.co.uk for terms. We're at this point then where we agree that this thing, friendship, love in particular and probably sense and belonging. These things and of course like being in lovely. This seems all matter to us. They make life richer but they also have these, they have real survival, physiological, psychological, emotional impacts on us and when we don't have them because all manner of pain in our lives. Are we going about getting them in a way that is actually working? That's such a great question and there's no straightforward answer to it either. What I would say is some people aren't and some people aren't. What do we know about the different strategies that people can use? One thing we know is that you could ask yourself the question, why does loneliness exist in the first place? Well loneliness is signaling that I lack the kinds of social connections that I want and so a very healthy strategy is well, go out and get them. If you're sitting in your apartment and you're feeling lonely, call someone up and go have dinner with them. That's a very healthy strategy and clearly you know would be associated with success. On the other hand, other strategies that people typically adopt using drugs and alcohol, binge watching television are probably less effective. So there are healthy, constructive ways of dealing with those feelings and there are unconstructive ways of dealing with it. I think the trick is to recognize that the feelings exist in order to get us to go out and try to make those connections. If you want a romantic relationship, that's the precursor to going out and making one. Of course it's not that simple, right? Finding a partner that works takes time and effort and it can be a challenge for many people. But it's the drive to go out and do that that ultimately can lead to good outcomes. Yeah, I mean what you just said is so important. I don't want to gloss over it also. The feeling that you're having is kind of there as a motivational source fuel for you to in some way mobilize to put yourself in situations where you can actually make these connections. Absolutely. And I think the other thing to recognize about that is this mechanism, this drive, predates are becoming humans. If you look at most mammalian species, an animal is isolated, what does it do? It seeks out other members of its species. It's group, it's band, whatever. We've all seen the nature channel. You see animals bunning together when there's a predator around, they form a group. What drives that? Now I'm not going to say that's the same as a human feeling lonely. But I will make the argument that the mechanism that exists within the brain of the organism is pretty similar to the mechanism within us humans that it's designed to make us go out and seek connection with others. But you also made another interesting point. This is a point that I stumbled upon years ago, I was actually working on a book on Belonging and I found the researcher John Cachopo, who's no longer with us. But he's made the one of the seminal researchers on loneliness. And I remember in the research that he was pointing to, he said, you know, it's actually really complicated. And some people when they have this feeling of loneliness, like this feeling of isolation or strange pain, all sorts of variations of this feeling, that becomes for them this motivator to become social, pro-social. I want to go out, I want to be around people, I want to help other people, I want to join things. Some people though, I remember the research said, it has exact opposite effects. It literally makes them anti-social. The feeling makes them feel like they're being shunned, that they're being unfairly, you know, like banned, and it actually makes them anti-social and it inspires feelings of rage. And it's almost like the exact opposite. And the story is complicated, it sounds like. The story is complicated. And again, the thing to remember is that there are big individual differences. I knew John very well and I actually worked with him on one of his projects. I think when that happens, more often than not, it's a reflection of early life experiences. You know, one of the things that parents do is they teach their kids what to do when those feelings arise. Now, some parents will respond well, you know, initially it's the parent. Later, it's the parent encouraging the child to, you know, seek out peers and arranging, you know, for play dates and all this kind of stuff. Other parents maybe don't do such a good job and the message the kid gets is that peers are not going to be accepting, that if you let your needs be known, you're in fact not going to be accepted, maybe you're even going to be rejected. We certainly know that the experience of abuse and neglect in childhood is a major predictor of having exactly the kind of reaction that you're describing. So the infant cries, the infant says, I need to, you know, communicates that, you know, I need attention and they, what do they get in return, you know, they get something that says other people are dangerous, stay away from them. Yeah, I mean, it seems like also when you're talking about the messages you're receiving in by the family, I think this is brought home so power-fling. So many people saw this four part series of things. Early this year or late last year, adolescence, which sparked so many conversations because you have an adolescent boy who felt wronged, who felt outcast socially. And the only emotion that he felt like he was permitted to feel and then express as a male, it wasn't sadness. Like for him being outcast and like not belonging, the feeling of loneliness, it wasn't allowed, it wasn't appropriate for that to show up as sadness. The only appropriate feeling was rage, you know, which translated to violence. And I feel like that show started so many conversations around this issue. Right. Well, certainly our culture has long taught boys that expressing sadness, expressing a desire for connection is not, is not healthy and instead teaching boys, you know, to channel that into more aggressive kinds of impulses. I think we're starting to move away from that somewhat, but it's still a very powerful drive. Yeah. If we zoom the lens out here and say, okay, love matters, belonging matters, friendship, these things all are critical to your nutrition and they just make every day better. You know, like forget the research, we just all know life is a whole lot better when we have this in our lives. You know, on a regular basis and acknowledging at the same time as you've shared, people will have very differing levels of need for this. Some people can get by with a little bit, maybe very nearly random. Some people really need a lot more of it. It's not a judgment thing. It's just we may be wired differently. We tend to go about it in ways that sometimes are effective, sometimes aren't effective. You have a model that looks at relationships, the CSOM model. It kind of says, why don't we look at this a little bit differently? That a lot of what we're, you were yearning for, the feelings that we want to get and also give. And it eventually comes down to developing a back and forth type of dynamic in relationship and also understanding these five distinct mindsets. Take me into this. Let's talk about the CSOM model first. What's one of the most powerful dynamic processes in human behavior? It's reciprocity. We respond to other people in the way that they have treated us and in the way that we expect that they're going to treat us. The CSOM model is based on the idea that in order to feel loved, what you need to do is help your partner feel loved. If I help you feel loved, in most instances, not 100% but in most instances, that will lead to a cycle of behaviors that will end up with my feeling loved. We call it a CSOM because the idea is, if I lift you up, then you will lift me up. So we can do that both ways. So the irony is that one of the best ways to create the kinds of interactions that will help you feel loved is to do that for the other person. So we talk about the mindset, the idea of course being, that it's the mental frame of reference that you enter interactions with. So if you enter your interactions with desire to really be open-hearted towards the other person, to listen to what they have to say with genuine curiosity and genuine interest and to show that interest, that will help the other person feel, wow, this person really values, appreciates, cares for me, and that will motivate the person to do the same for you. So the CSOM idea is this idea that by giving love, you're increasing the likelihood that you will be getting love in return. Now it can't be that one side, of course, because you can't continually just be giving and listening all the time. Right. Because I mean, it's going to lead to contempt if you're just giving, giving, giving, and it's like, what about me? That's exactly right. When is my turn come? Yeah. So the other person does have to buy into it, but also you have to make yourself be open. There was a book that was really popular when I was in college many years ago called, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? And the idea of the book was that many of us will not talk about our deepest feelings, our goals and aspirations, the things that are most important to us for a variety of reasons where afraid of being exploited, where afraid of being vulnerable. We feel like we might be embarrassed if other people knew these things about us. So to make the CSOM work, you do have to open up to the other person so that they can respond to those things in a positive way. One of the most interesting lines of research I know is work done by Nick Eppley at the University of Chicago. And one of the things he does is he asks people to first say, Suppose you told your friend about your deepest secrets, the things that you're most concerned about. It doesn't matter exactly what it is, but just things that are relatively deep to the self. What do you think would happen? Some people will say, Oh, I'll be embarrassed. You know, I'll be ill, I'll be vulnerable. Then you ask them to do it. And the interesting thing is that people almost always report not the things that they were afraid of. They report that the conversations go well, that they're happy doing that. He calls them miscalibrated expectations. Now of course, sometimes that it might happen. But more often than not, opening up to another person leads to a genuine interaction, a genuine feeling of connection with another person. That makes sense. And yet we are terrified of going there. That's right. On the whole, what happens though, if you're like, Okay, let's do the seesaw thing. You sit down with a partner or a friend and it's like, things that haven't been great or you just, or you're just, you kind of know this model and you're just, you see, I'm going to run a little bit of an experiment with somebody new. I'd love to develop a deeper friendship with them. You start acknowledging somebody, seeing them, giving them the attentiveness, like responding to their bids, lifting them up. And as we talked about earlier in the conversation, being loved and receiving love are two different things. And it's almost like, you know, that kid's thing, I'm rubbery or glue with every say. Right. Yeah. You know, they're not receiving any of it. Like you're, you're really trying. And they're just, they're like Teflon. They just, nothing actually lands with them. And because of that, they probably are not getting the signals that would tell them, Oh, I should be reciprocating. That's a great question. You know, and there's, there's several responses. The first response I would say is that trying it once doesn't work. You know, you spend two minutes doing this and you say, See, they were wrong. This is more of a, of a long term kind of thing. And, you know, maybe they had, maybe they're having a bad day. But I would also say that if you've tried this genuinely and, you know, with a reasonable degree of effort and time, then the argument is maybe it's not the right person for you. You know, this isn't going to work with anybody. You can't just walk over to some person. You can't just go over to the most popular kid in your school and expect them to, you know, be your friend just because you opened up to them. It's a case of sort of picking your targets well, picking people who are likely to respond well. People who are, you know, what I would call good matches, you know, people who are have compatible interests, compatible values are at a similar point in their life space. But it's not going to work every time. And at some point, it may be time to sort of move on to someone else. Yeah. And now I'm thinking also maybe actually it is the right person, but it's not the right moment, you know, maybe this person just deep into a work product and they're just, they're burned out or maybe they're struggling with something or maybe they've got trauma that they've been carrying for a long time that they have not actually turned in work to process. And maybe five years later, they're going to be in a very different place and you connect with them again. It's like, wow, absolutely. And you know, the place where you see this most is in the romantic arena. You know, one of the things that's always fascinating to me is the large majority of people who want to find a partner do find a partner. Now the interesting question is a lot of times you meet that person. It's a coincidence. You know, it's something strange. So if you hadn't met that person, does that mean that you would have been lonely for the rest of your life? Oh, of course not. I won't go into the whole long story, but the way I met my wife was a total coincidence of someone making a phone call at the right time. I'm the same actually. With my wife 33 years now and there was a moment in time where if that moment didn't happen, we would have never known each other. Right. And so one of the ideas is that, and I'm sure you've heard this terminology, when you're ready for a relationship is when you tend to find someone. Now does that mean you wake up one morning and you're ready and the next person you see is the person? No, of course not. But you meet and encounter many people in your lifetime and you know, creating that kind of match depends on you being in the right place, the other person being in the right place and then finding each other, which, you know, you know, the right, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince kind of idea. So it's a process that you have to be genuinely open to and you have to be willing to experiment with in order to find the people for whom those connections will really work. No, no, that makes a lot of sense. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Hello, it's Jo and James from Jo and James Fact Up and we're currently sponsored by the current account switch service who makes switching bank accounts effortless. I must admit, I love anything that can be described as effortless. Yeah, same, same two few things are. If minimal effort was an Olympic sport, I'd at least try to watch it. So while life can be hard, switching bank accounts with the current account switch service won't be. That's why they'll move regular payments like direct debit, standing orders and even your salary. It's like they designed this just for you, Jo. Search current account switch service to find out how simple switching can be. Talk to me now about the role of these things, you call the mindsets. The mindsets have to do with the idea that how you approach the possibility of connection to the decisions has everything to do with how they go. Let's talk about listening. Listening is in many ways the most interesting of the five mindsets that we talk about. It's one that is starting to be a very popular idea in research. And one of the really fascinating statistics about listening is that something like 85% of people say they're good listeners, but when you ask people how often you experience good listening, it's about 8%. Somebody's wrong. Somebody's wrong. I took part in a workshop in listening a few years ago and I will admit that I thought I was a really good listener at that time and I was terrible. It was really hard. Stephen Colby has talked about the idea that we don't listen to learn, we listen to respond. While we're listening to the other person, we're thinking about the next thing we're going to say. One of the things that's really important and we actually have two mindsets embodied in here. One is called the listening mindset. The other is called radical curiosity. The idea is really listening to another person with interest as if there was going to be a test on this tomorrow so that you're really trying to learn what the other person is about. More than that, you're making the kinds of questions, giving them the kind of non-verbals that encourage them to go deeper. You're saying things like how did you feel when that happened or if you've just met someone you could say, what's the best thing that happened to you on the last week and then really going deeper in these kind of experiences? It's amazing how powerful that can be. The cocktail party, someone party, a party, someone asked you a question and you answer it and then they go on to talk about something else. If you respond to what they say with genuine interest, it's almost like, huh? They typically will buy into it. The most important thing you can do if you want to start off this cycle is to approach a conversation with the desire to really learn what the other person is about, what's going on for them. By the way, this doesn't mean asking them to tell you about the most dramatic thing that happened to them and their childhood in the first five minutes of a conversation. It's like, let's go deep into our shared traumas immediately. Yeah, exactly. It's not that. It's like if they're telling you that they just watched the World Series, asking them, what went on during the game that was so interesting to you? It's showing interest in whatever they're talking about. Those two parts of how you approach a conversation with another person in the first place are really critical to developing. I'll just throw in there. I'd so agree. I've been doing this for 14 years now and I've learned over the years that one of the questions that I tend to ask more than anything else. It's become a question that I ask in just new relationships and new conversations. It's not even a question. It's a simple statement. It's for words. It's, tell me more. A lot of times people are like, well, what should I be asking? That's where you get into that trap where you're saying, well, now I'm trying to figure out what is the appropriate fault. Now I'm just listening to follow up now. If you literally just take a simple phrase, have it in your back pocket all the time, oh, wow, tell me more. Tell me more is an absolutely great one. It's such a beautiful open and you can use it in almost any context. It's beautiful. But I will also say that you then have to follow up with something that shows that you listen to the more. There's the caricature of the Rogerian therapist who just goes, I see it right now. They're not really seeing it. They're not really. You have to show that you really are listening to what they say. But tell me more is a great way to get that going. We have certainly be overlap of these two mindsets here then listening mindset and I think you call them a radical curiosity mindset. Right. Let's build on that. The next one that I think is all important is called the multiplicity mindset. And the multiplicity mindset is the idea that none of us are as bad as the worst thing we've ever done and none of us are as good as the best thing we've ever done. The example I give in the book is the story of a young man, I believe in Colorado actually, who had murdered his parents in a drug fit. And he was in jail and was going to be in jail for life. And his sister talked about how much she loves him. Now this man had made her an orphan and yet she still loved him. The idea here is that all of us have good sides and bad sides. We have weaknesses. We have strength. Acknowledging that people are many things is a way of giving them permission to be willing to be open with us. If I communicate to you that I'm going to judge you harshly if you tell me that you did something bad in your life, I'm going to shut down. And then I'm always going to have that feeling in me that I can't let him know this thing about me. And that's going to make it that much harder for me to feel loved by you. If I can let you know that gee, I did this bad thing when I was younger or I did something bad last week, you can criticize the behavior. Nobody's saying you should condone bad behavior. The difference is a difference that developmental psychologist talk about between criticizing the behavior or criticizing the child. If your child has been caught stealing something, you want to communicate that behavior is not acceptable. That doesn't mean that the child is unacceptable. So adopting sort of a non-critical attitude toward a partner having strengths and weaknesses, towardcomings, but also, you know, talents of one sort or another is a major part of helping them feel loved, but it also allows you to be more genuine. And that's the other thing. You know, we all know about the imposter phenomenon, you know, the idea that if we get promoted at work to a level where we feel like we don't really have the skills and if only if other people found out that we really can't do that, if other people find out that you're using AI to write your memos, you know, they're going to criticize you. Being open-minded toward people's strengths and weaknesses in that way frees you up to be that way for yourself. And that allows you to be more genuine. And one of the things that's absolutely critical to feeling loved is being genuine. I have to feel that you know who my full self is, warts and all. It's interesting though, because this one, the multiplicity mindset is again, complicated in my mind because we also know that there's this resource that shows that we often carry a bias that says, well, if this other person does this quote bad thing, they're a bad person. But if I do that exact same bad thing, well, I'm a good person who just made a bad choice. Yes, that's right. You know, so we've got to find a way around that. Yes, well, and of course one of the ways around it is realizing that we have this bias. The scores of studies have shown that, you know, the step one in overcoming bias is becoming aware of the fact that the bias exists. Having Sonia and I were writing the book, we visited with the Dalai Lama, which was a great experience. Then someone asked him, you know, do you hate the Chinese? Because the Chinese have treated the Tibetan's barely and all that. And he said, no, someone said, but after all the things they've done, and what he said was, you know, 100 years there'll all be dead. So why bother hating them? It's an unusual human being who can look at people in the world that way though. Yes. People aspire to it. Yes. We all have the tendency to be judgmental about people who do bad things, particularly very bad things. When I served on my university's academic honesty committee, you know, most of the people who came before the committee had done something that violated standards of honesty in the classroom in one way or another. And it was hard work to realize that this was not a bad person, but that this was a person who, you know, whatever reason, sometimes, you know, good reasons, sometimes not so good reasons, but, you know, a person who had other strengths, and this was meant to be a learning experience that hopefully they could move on from. And I think the same thing goes on in our relational lives. One of the most interesting examples of this kind of thing in marriages is affairs. Interestingly enough, one partner having an affair that comes out does not necessarily lead to divorce. It certainly does lead to divorce in a decent percentage of cases, but in many other cases it actually leads to an improvement in the relationship. And that's because there does have to be an apology and some degree of taking responsibility but it leads to a certain openness between the partners that allows them to improve whatever, you know, what's going on in the first place. I mean, I think that also leads to one of the other mindsets, open heart mindset. Yes. Yes. Open heart, open the open heart mindset is the one that most people will likely be familiar with. And that's simply the idea of approaching others with an open heart. That is with kindness, with generosity and with the intention of benefiting them in some way. This runs the gamut from little things like holding the door open for someone when they're following you into a building to contributing to a go fund me page to donating blood or a kidney. Creating others with an open hearted mindset is absolutely critical to creating that seesaw kind of interaction simply because we can't allow ourselves to be open to another person unless we feel that they have genuine positive intent towards us, that we feel that they're going to be benevolent towards us. I'm going to be that much more willing to be open with you if I know that you are going to be compassionate about that. You're going to be kindly to that. Similarly, I'm going to be more willing to be compassionate to you if you're compassionate to me. Again, that norm of reciprocity becomes important. There's legions and legions of studies showing that people will reciprocate kindnesses that are done to them, not necessarily even to that person. There's the pay it forward idea. I don't know if you've ever driven up to a, well, we don't have to hold those anymore. I guess this can happen. I know you're going with this. Back in the old days, they would tell you the person before you paid your toll. And then sometimes you would pay them for the next person. I can't do that anymore. Yeah, it's interesting that this popping into my mind is described this also is people who rescue abused animals. I've heard the story so many times. Somebody who's just motivated, driven to rescue animals. When they first rescue an animal, not unusual for that animal to be vicious, violent towards everyone around them, including this individual who all they want to do is give them love, take them, make them okay again. And yet there's something in the individual and the rescuer that says, there's no reciprocity happening right here. I am being attacked for every effort that I put into this. But there's something in me that knows that like this is all coming from a place of wounding. And if I keep showing up gently in the right way over and over and over and over again, with that open heart, with the warmth and acceptance and compassion, that this is going to make a difference and that that behavior is going to change and they will at some point be there to receive it. And whether it gets reciprocated back, licks on the face or like whatever it may be from that, you know, a dog is almost, I think, less important to them, but they just, there's something in them that says, I see the pain in this other person. This is not because they're a quote, bad dog, because they've been through bad things and I want to help the goodness become central to that being again. Oh, well, and you know, and you see this with shy, reclusive animals as well. You know, they will, they will hide away and they will not come out. But if you're patient with them, eventually they'll take one step forward and my wife works in an animal, local animal shelter on Thursday, as a matter of fact. And she has that experience with the animals. Initially that, you know, who is this person? I can I trust this person, not always, but usually if you're kind to them for a long enough period, they will respond to that. Yeah. And this goes back to the concept that you were sharing earlier where a lot of these ideas, the mindset, it's not about, let me try in this mindset for three minutes. You know, this is not the saying, well, let me actually see if if I can step into a relationship over a period of time and keep stepping into this mindset. And even when it feels like it's being rejected, keep saying, well, what if I keep showing up this way? What if I keep showing up this way over a reasonable period of time? But it's generally not like a hot second type of intervention. Yes. But you know, you can also think about it from the other side. So suppose you don't approach the person with a kind mindset, but instead with a hot still defensive mindset, you're guaranteeing that you will not form a connection. Whereas if you approach them with an open mindset, at least there's a chance that that kind of connection will occur and won't always and you do have to protect yourself in those situations. But more often than not, that will work. And that brings us to the fifth mindset also, the sharing mindset. Yeah. The fifth mindset is the sharing mindset or the idea that we touched on earlier that you have to be open about who you are as a person. You're not going to feel loved if all you're doing is being there for the other person. If you're just giving, giving, giving, giving to feel like you're being loved, you need to make yourself known to the other person. So you have to be willing to be open. You have to be willing to be sharing your full story, the full who you are. You can't be on your best behavior with the person every minute of every day. You have to be willing to be open. And the purpose of this is not just to be revealing yourself. The purpose of this is so that the esteem and the love you're getting back is experienced as genuine. If I give you a curated version of myself and you express, wow, that's really fantastic. I think you're such an interesting person. I'm not going to experience that as genuine because the person you're loving is not me. It's my curated image. And so many of us go through life feeling that way. The obvious example of this is online dating where the, you know, the profiles that people post are very curated. And of course they do that because they believe that you're more likely to get a positive response if you present yourself as beautiful, smart, accomplished, successful, athletic, fit, all these things. And that's all well and good for, you know, for step one. But unless you get past that, you're not going to experience that that person is loving the real you. And ultimately what we want is, you know, for other people to love and respect the real me. And I want to stress this goes beyond romance. You know, let's talk about being on a work team. If what you're constantly doing in on the work team is saying the things that will please other people on the team, when you get positive feedback, it's not going to ring true. What you want to be able to do is express what you really believe about the work and how you really feel about the work and what your ideas are. And if you get positive feedback for that, that's how you feel valued. That's how you feel like you really belong on the team. Yeah. I mean, that land so powerfully, I feel like so many people are walking around these days. You know, and they present an image of themselves in social media. It makes this so much easier. But even we have the ability to curate the way that we show up in different contexts so easily these days. And we may have all these people who are following us and they're interacting with us and they're like, you're the best and they're saying all these different things and come like welcome into my community, welcome into my friend group. And on the surface, like, wow, you must be feel amazing inside. And you feel completely hollow and you're trying to figure out why, why do I feel this way? Why am I so lonely when I've got all these people in my orbit and all in five different orbits who say how much they welcome me and want me and love me is because as you're describing, it's not actually you. It's the avatar you're projecting and you're never going to get what you actually want if all they ever get is the avatar. Exactly. And it's perfectly fine to use that avatar as a way of starting connection. I don't, I'm not saying people, you don't want to trauma dub. You don't want to present your flaws in the first five minutes that you're meeting somebody. But that should be the goal that you want to get to that stage so that you can, you know, we want to feel authentic. We want to feel like it's the real me that's out there in the world. Yeah. I mean, that brings us all the way back to Arthur Aaron's 36 questions where there's a couple of sets start kind of superficial and it requires this progressive, neutral vulnerability. But it doesn't start with the most vulnerable side. It starts acknowledging we all kind of need to feel safe. We want to present our best selves. But over time, we need to unfold if we want to feel genuinely connected. Yes. And I've done the 36 questions in my classes many, many times. So I've seen hundreds of pairs doing this. The thing that's striking about it is that the questions are carefully chosen. First of all, to be graduated in the way you're describing. But also to be the kinds of questions where people are going to say, oh, yeah, I can really relate to that experience. That makes sense. So it creates this cycle of reciprocity where I'm disclosing and you're responding positively to that. And then you're telling me something that I can respond positively to. And so it creates this dynamic of I feel really connected to you because we've shared both sides of the process. Yeah. No, that makes so much sense. Zooming back to the five mindsets, the CSO model. What I love also, and I want to just sort of double tap on what you said earlier, which is yes, these are valuable tools when we think about the context of romantic relationships, long-term partnerships, intimate partnerships. And at the same time, it's a basic set of tools and mindsets where if you think about, how do I deepen into friendships? How do I deepen into relationships with colleagues? It's a set of tools that function really on any level or any context of relationship where you want them to feel more real and genuine, where you want to feel more from them. And you're also open to giving more to them. Does that land? That totally lands. And I would say that we're in the period of the year where this becomes especially relevant. Thanksgiving and Christmas. These are tools that especially will work with the relative you haven't seen since last year. And you can keep the conversation at a superficial level. And that may be okay. You may have a sense of belonging like you, this is my family and I'm connected to them. But if you're sitting with the person and they're telling you, so how's your year been? And then you say, tell me more and really dig into it. You're going to have a much more authentic connection and you may not see them again for another year. But I think you'll feel loved by them and you'll feel really connected with them. And you may be more likely to have that tell me more reflected back to you too, which would be pretty awesome. Absolutely. And if they don't actually ask you to tell me more a question because they haven't read the book, what you can do is open up. Be a little more self disclosing. Be a little more intimate and see how they respond. I love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To me, living a good life, first of all, it's about having enough. But it's also about having connections. We know that the most important determinant of whether people are happy in their lives is that they have meaningful relationships. That just in case anyone's wondering that doesn't have to mean that you're married or partnered, you can have other kinds of connections as well. But having meaningful connections with other people is the number one criterion to being happy in life. Other things matter also, but it's those connections and relationships that are most important. Hmm. Thank you. Hey, before you head out, be sure to tune in to next week for my conversation. With Lucy Kalanathy about what still matters when certainty just disappears from your life. Follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app, so it's waiting for you. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young, Christopher Carter, a crafted hour theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor. 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