Why We Fall for the Wrong Person with Couples Therapist Dr. Harville Hendrix

Maybe this sounds familiar: you fall hard for someone, and over a year later you're fighting about the very things that drew you to them in the first place. And you can't figure out how the person who felt so right suddenly feels so wrong. Dr. Harville Hendrix has spent 50 years studying love. And he’s also lived through its hardest challenges: one divorce, two near-misses in his current marriage, and a couple’s therapist who fired him and his wife, calling them "the couple from hell." That marriage is now 45 years strong. Harville is a couples therapist, and alongside his wife and creative partner Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt, they creator Imago Relationship Therapy. They’ve also written 10 books, including the bestseller Getting the Love You Want, the book that made him a fixture on Oprah for nearly two decades. Harville’s theory is this: we don't consciously choose who we fall for, rather our unconscious does. And it has an agenda. In this episode you'll learn: ➡️ Why you keep falling for the same person ➡️ What your childhood has to do with who you swipe right on ➡️ Why the "power struggle" phase might mean you picked the right person ➡️ The shift that saved Harville's own marriage after divorce papers were filed ➡️ Why some of us can't receive love (even when we ask for it) ➡️ What arranged marriages understood about commitment that we forgot ➡️ The difference between equal relationships and egalitarian ones ➡️ How to reach the stage where you have no needs left… only wants In this conversation, Harville makes the case that real romantic love is what gets built after the fantasy collapses, when two people commit to the work of meeting each other's needs instead of demanding their own. And the engine of that transformation goes beyond compatibility and chemistry—it's gratitude and service. This… is A Bit of Optimism. + + + Want to keep up with Harville’s work? Check out: https://harvilleandhelen.com/ If you’d like to buy Harville & Helen’s latest book, How to Talk with Anyone about Anything, head to: https://harvilleandhelen.com/books/how-to-talk-with-anyone-about-anything/ + + + Chapters Chapters 00:00:00 Nature's Agenda: Why We Fall for the Wrong Person 00:02:02 From Sharecropper's Farm to Oprah: Harville's Unexpected Journey 00:06:07 The 30-Second Encounters That Changed Everything 00:10:17 We Almost Divorced Twice: The Couple From Hell 00:13:21 Child Consciousness vs Adult Consciousness: The Critical Shift 00:15:57 The Gratitude That Ends the Yearning 00:18:45 Why Both People Don't Need to Change at Once 00:20:28 The Unconscious Imago: Your Brain Picks Who You Fall For 00:26:34 The 18-Month Fantasy: When the Real Person Shows Up 00:30:40 Arranged Marriages vs Choice: The Paradox of Commitment 00:34:47 The No Exit Decision: Why You'll Want to Quit When It's Working 00:36:34 The Transparency Trap: Afraid of Losing What You Found 00:38:35 Receiving Love: The Dinner Story That Changes Everything 00:45:49 Equal vs Egalitarian: The Recipe for Partnership 00:47:23 Dating IRL: Why Technology Can't Replace Face-to-Face 00:50:54 When Needs Become Wants: Life After Gratitude + + + Simon is an unshakable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it together. Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Simon has devoted his professional life to help advance a vision of the world that does not yet exist; a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. Simon is the author of multiple best-selling books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, Together is Better, and The Infinite Game. + + + Website: http://simonsinek.com/ Leaderful: https://simonsinek.com/leaderful Podcast: http://apple.co/simonsinek Instagram: https://instagram.com/simonsinek/ Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/simonsinek/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonsinek Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simonsinek

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Simon Sinek?

  And this is healthy?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  It's nature. Nature's trying to finish an agenda that it didn't get to finish in the parenting period of childhood. Nature's trying to finish that, and it's simple. It's about survival.

• 0:13Simon Sinek?

  So I'm trying to think about the people in my life when I was a kid, and what did they not meet? Uh, and then what am I attracted to now? Ah, shit, it works.

• 0:28Simon Sinek?

  You're right. Ah, damn it. They say that it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. But you know what's even better than that? Learning how to stay in love. Now, I have my own podcast, which means I get to bring on whoever I want. And it may or may not be a coincidence that I have had multiple relationship and love experts. And the reason is because the stuff is hard, and I have a life of failed relationships to prove it. But that might all change, thanks to my guest, Dr. Harville Hendrix. He spent 50 years figuring out love. Working alongside his wife, fellow relationship expert Helen La Kelly Hunt, he's written 10

• 1:09Simon Sinek?

  books, including the bestsellers Getting the Love You Want and Receiving Love, the subjects of which made him a fixture on Oprah for nearly two decades. My conversation with Harville really challenged me, but then that doesn't help me understand...

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't create nature.

• 1:28Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  But I've watched this for 50 years.

• 1:30Simon Sinek?

  And it really helped me reframe what's supposed to happen in a relationship, where we learn to stop seeing each other as a resource to meet our needs, but rather that relationships become an act of service. Trust me, this will help anyone who's either looking for love or is looking to stay in love. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.

• 2:02Simon Sinek?

  So I'm always fascinated by someone's origin, like how they got into their careers. Because I bumbled and fumbled into mine. You and your wife and your books, you were in Oprah a million times and you still are. You know, the go to for anybody who's trying to understand love and relationships. You know, how did you find yourself in that place?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Oh, in that place? So I could start with the fact that my first interview was when I was 15 years old. I didn't know that was the beginning of my career. And I became a pastor of a church at 17. So I've been on the stage regularly every Sunday. And I've done stuff like that ever since I was ordained at 17. I grew up on a sharecropper's farm. I had no money, no status, no nothing. I just happened to speak one day at church. And people said, hey, this boy can talk. And that led to the ministry and blah, blah, blah. So I have a PhD. Then I got a divorce in 75.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  I was a professor at Perkins School of Theology here in Dallas. It's a Methodist seminary. And at that time, it was a conservative Methodist seminary. So the dean had to fire me because his supporters in the Methodist church could not have a divorced professor. Five of his tenured faculty were divorced five years later, but I was not tenured.

• 3:28Simon Sinek?

  What you're saying is you're a pioneer and a trendsetter?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I didn't know that. But I, but I decided they, I got my degree to be able to be paid to write and read and talk. They put me on committees so that 20% of my time was on teaching, 80% of my time was on committees. So when they fired me, I said, that was not fun. I was a clinician. So I decided I would go full time in private practice, started psychotherapy, then met Helen the fifth year of my divorce. And we clicked around a bunch of things, started talking. Five years later, we got married. And then I had begun putting together this Imago Relationship Therapy, theory stuff.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  And so our conversation has continued about what causes conflict, why do people get divorced and so forth. And then when we got into it, Helen became the second most important person in the world in the women's movement after we got married. So we did parallel for a while. She was doing the women's world and she was number two, along with Gloria Steinem. Helen paid the bill for the women's movement. Gloria was the face. Then Helen decided she liked working with couples and we co-wrote books. She began to join me in lecturing and doing workshops. Our life just merged together.

• 4:56Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  So that right now, we do everything together.

• 4:59Simon Sinek?

  You had one failed marriage before this happened.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:03Simon Sinek?

  And now you have a relationship that you're still together and you're, I believe you're 90, right? How long have you, the two of you been together?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Forty-five years.

• 5:12Simon Sinek?

  Forty-five years you've been together.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Almost divorced twice.

• 5:15Simon Sinek?

  Right, which we will come to.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  All right.

• 5:21Simon Sinek?

  I mean, I can tell you from my standpoint, like, I never imagined that I would be talking about leadership and culture. I came from the marketing world and I was talking about communication and it sort of became that those who could communicate from this thing called why, which is what I was talking about, were actually the best leaders. And so I discovered leadership.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:44Simon Sinek?

  Rather than pursued it. How did you discover love and that you had a point of view on it, especially after one relationship ended in divorce and then you found love again?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  When we both met at a party neither one of us wanted to go to. And she was single, I was single. And it turns out she was in one of my classes, at a big class, and I didn't know her at all. She sat on the back row that had a door that went out the back end of the room. I didn't know her, but she came to this party. And I didn't recognize her, but I was leaving because I didn't want to be there anymore. I'd dated enough and it was really tired of women. I thought I'd be a monk or something like that and I would leave. But on the way out the door, she stopped me and said, Dr. Hendricks, I'm Helen. At that time, she was called Helen Kryling. And I said, so I'm trying to leave. And she said, well, I was in your class.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And I said, cry. Okay, okay. So Helen, because it rung a bell. Helen Kryling, I remember she wrote the best paper in the class. That's why I remembered the paper. These are those thirty second interfaces that they don't happen, nothing after that happens. So, oh, you wrote that paper. I'll go to my office tomorrow and be sure, because I saved the best papers, yet wrote the best paper. Only one in the class was worth reading because I learned something from it. Everything else was a regurgitation of the lectures. So I called her and said, I do have, I do have your paper. She said, you want to get together and talk about it? So we got together and talked about it and we started talking about we were both divorced. How come? I'm a university professor.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  She's one of the richest women in America because she's the daughter of H. L. Hunt, who was at one point in nineteen seventy six, the richest man in the world. And so she's a socialite and she's educated and beautiful. How come you're divorced? Why come I divorced? So we started asking that question. And so we got to, well, the couples conflict and what's conflict about? So I am the theoretical mind, so I began to put together more questions and more answers and more research and interviews and all that. And after a while, I found I had a system emerging about how do people get attracted to each other? How do they pick each other? What if romantic love turn into conflict?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And we kept having all these conversations. Now we were dating and fighting. We've always fought. We would date and fight, but they were not polarizing. It was just serious disagreements. And so that eventually turned into lectures, which I started giving in public here in Dallas. And people started showing up and wanted to be trained in what I was talking about. And so I decided when I moved out of the university, I would move into practice. I became a psychotherapist, but then I got interested in marriage after I got my divorce.

• 8:40Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  So what is this marriage thing about? I blew one and I have no idea what to do next. So it began to show up as I began to see couples, they began to tell me what they needed. Cause I did have a good listening ear, like what do you need me to help you do?

• 8:56Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And I finally learned from them, if I do certain things, it really helps. If I do other things, it doesn't help. So I finally put it together. And in 1980, I had a working system that was enough that therapists wanted to come and be trained.

• 9:10Simon Sinek?

  That's fun.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And then I started writing this book, and here's another 30 second thing. The book got dropped in Oprah's executive producer's office. Her boyfriend came into the office that afternoon and they got into a fight. And Debbie DeMaya, I still remember her name, said, you know, we can't even be together without fighting. And Oprah called her in the middle of their fight. She had to go. He said, can I have this book on the top of the stack here? And she said, you can have all 40. He said, no, I just want this one. He picked up my book, Getting Love You Want, Guide for Couples, went home and read it. Came back the next afternoon and said, you should read this book. She said, I'm not gonna do workshops. I'm not gonna do any shows on relationships. They don't work.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  He said, no, no, no, no, not, not for the show, for us. This will help us. And she said, I nearly fell on my face. If you think in, this guy was a lawyer, so he was really smart, fast reader. She took it home and read it and went in the next day and put it on Oprah's desk and said, I changed my mind. I do wanna do a show on this book. 20 years later, I'm still on the Oprah show. Except during that time, Helen and I get into trouble. And I say to Oprah, I can't be on the show and be going through a divorce. And she said, well, when you fix it, call me. She had no, no belief that we were going to get a divorce.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  She's, but when you fix it, call me.

• 10:41Simon Sinek?

  This is important. The two of you are now, you know, in part due to Oprah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, we're visible.

• 10:48Simon Sinek?

  You are world famous for relationships and functional relationships. And you are a case study yourselves of a beautiful, loving marriage. But here you carve at the secret where you came very, very, very close to actually ending the relationship.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:04Simon Sinek?

  How close did you actually get to the, because people I think think it, you know, when they're angry, sometimes they talk about it when they're angry. But how close did you actually come to getting the divorce?

• 11:13Speaker 01

  First time was like, well, we backed off. The second time, we actually filed the papers.

• 11:19Simon Sinek?

  Wow.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And then we went to therapy and the therapist fired us.

• 11:23Simon Sinek?

  Wait, wait, wait. Why did the therapist fire you?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Y'all a couple from hell. She said, you're untreatable. You're a couple from hell and I don't want to see you anymore. So Helen said, look, you've been teaching dialogue now all over the world. Why don't we practice that ourselves?

• 11:42Simon Sinek?

  Not, not a little idea?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Okay. So why don't we do that? So we said, okay, we're going to practice what I preach, the dialogue process. She was now still in the women's world, so she hadn't been teaching it very much then. So we did that nine months of dialogue on a weekly basis. And finally got to the point where we moved through our polarization and went through this revision in which we moved out of seeing each other as a resource. Cause that always generates frustration and see each other as a gift. That generates gratitude and that is what transforms marriages.

• 12:25Simon Sinek?

  One of the things I'm astonished by is you're, you filed the paperwork for divorce, which means you've sort of gone through the trials and tribulations. You've even tried therapy to help save the marriage. I mean, you've done it and you've given up that there's nothing else that we can do. And yet you then commit nine months, which is, let's be honest, if you're filed for divorce, that's quite the commitment to stick around for nine more months. What kept you in it?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  A commitment? Because this therapist was a catalyst for that because she was so cruel in her diagnosis that we said, we'll show her.

• 13:04Simon Sinek?

  So you both shared a spite for the therapist, which is what motivated you to fix your marriage?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Right. And there was no therapy that would help us, so we needed to use our own therapy. And it worked. And in fact, that transformed my own understanding of my own intellectual system.

• 13:21Simon Sinek?

  There's many things that I know anybody who's listening now wants to know. Okay? For people who are struggling in relationships, who may be considering divorce or breaking up, and maybe in the process, what was the transformation that took place?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is a technical thing. So I'll say it right now. When you're a baby, your orientation to the world is that my needs are outside of me. So I gotta find that nipple. Then I gotta find that hug and that eye contact. I call it now the child consciousness. It follows you all the way into adulthood. And I think nature sort of sets it up that way. In adulthood, however, you become a parent and you can't now live in child consciousness with your children. You have to move to adult consciousness and you become a resource for your children.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  But somehow, nature didn't figure out how to shift the adult consciousness to your relationship. So one side of your brain says, Helen, you're my resource. The other side of my brain says, my children, I'm a resource for my children. So I would be fine with the kids, be a good parent, and then fight with Helen because she wasn't meeting my needs. So what you have to come to understand is that when you become a parent, nature has set it up that you also become an adult.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  So that your needs are not outside of you. You are a resource, not looking for resources. You are a resource and you have to become a resource for your relationship.

• 15:07Simon Sinek?

  I assume that for the relationship to succeed, both parties need to come to this realization.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:13Simon Sinek?

  Otherwise, one will martyr themselves in the attempt to save the relationship, while the other just milks it, no pun intended.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Right. So in working with a couple, that's exactly what has to happen. Nobody ever gets to this place on their own. And I hate to say this because it sounds so arrogant. This particular insight into the transformation of relationship does not yet exist generally in human consciousness.

• 15:39Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Because we do three things. Romantic love is all about you meet my needs.

• 15:46Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Power struggle is all about you didn't meet my needs. The third stage, which is built into relationship is we have to move to another place where we meet each other's needs.

• 15:59Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  That helps the power struggle work better, but it doesn't end the frustration.

• 16:05Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Because somebody is always going to blow it. So you really have to make a cognitive decision that I need to reframe my view of you as a blessing instead of a resource. And when I see you as a blessing, that generates a gratitude. And now it's amazing what gratitude does to the brain.

• 16:29Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Gratitude cuts off that deep yearning that never got met in childhood, cuts it off. It actually goes away. I no longer have that yearning. And so then we live supporting each other's full potential.

• 16:43Simon Sinek?

  When you hear couples in trouble or you hear couples breaking up and you say to them, what happened? I've done it myself. I've given this list. I, I point out all the other person's failings. It can be done with no anger, but rather this person is incapable of meeting my needs.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Simon Sinek?

  And, and these are the things I need. And we even call them, these are my deal breakers, my, my non-negotiables, right? That they haven't met. So what you're proposing is that that mentality is rather to look at oneself and say, did I put the work in to meet their needs? If both individuals can come to the conclusion that that I did not, and both still wish to, that the relationship is savable, and you may actually be a good couple for each other.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And this is where the dialogue process is the engine of that conversation. So the therapist holds the couple, looking at each other, and essentially gives them words to say, to get them started. Because the brain, I don't think we human beings have evolved to this point yet. But it's obviously on the way, or it wouldn't have shown up in my mind. So you hold this couple in this conversation, and they're gonna wiggle, but you don't wiggle. You hold them in the conversation. And at some point, they relax enough to drop their defenses. And here you say, now we, I want to shift you out of,

• 18:19Speaker 01

  what I now have already told them is a child consciousness into adult consciousness. You remember when your children were born? How you shifted to be their resource?

• 18:31Simon Sinek?

  How do people do this if they don't have kids?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Well, then we talk about it as a theoretical possibility.

• 18:37Simon Sinek?

  And do you have to have a therapist to do this? Or can couples, can couples do this themselves?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  I have not met a couple yet that can do it by themselves.

• 18:45Simon Sinek?

  I assume that, that if one of the members of the couple, if one of the individuals cannot make that shift into, how do I help take care of you, rather than you just taking care of me? That if one of the individuals cannot do that, then the relationship should move on? That, that you should go find someone who-

• 19:04Speaker 01

  No, definitely not. So if one of you can do it, and that's usually it, there's one more willing and capable than the other. So we support then the one who can to hold the one who's reacting without reacting to them, without judging them and criticizing them. And that person then will experience something in their lower memory cell, the hippocampus, that they didn't have since childhood.

• 19:32Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  So the person who holds them becomes safe enough for them to drop their defenses and then move into the work.

• 19:39Simon Sinek?

  Okay, so now let's move on to pre-relationship, finding

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Pre-relationship.

• 19:45Simon Sinek?

  Finding love. I think that from what I've read, and you're the expert, so you know, you can tell me if this is right or wrong, you know, that younger couples these days are taking more time, they're having sex later, they're waiting longer when they're in relationships very often, they're actually not in relationships as frequently. And it raises questions, which is, what's not happening? What are they missing? Like, how do we find love? How do we start a relationship that we meet somebody who wants to provide for our needs and that we want to provide for theirs? How are we supposed to date, I guess is where I'm getting to? Like, what are we supposed to do to find love? I mean, we're all looking for it. You know, it's a basic human need to want to feel it.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yes. The search for the partner is regulated by what's happening in the culture at the time. And so that is going to influence, you know, even the fact of having a dating site is a cultural technological innovation. But no matter how many people that may increase their contact with, or they may be working through some stuff from their childhood, and so they're just not ready to do that. But at some point, the selection process will be, you'll meet somebody who will attract your interest. We call it falling in love. You'll have an attraction. You can't control that. You can't make it happen. And when it

• 21:09Speaker 01

  happens, you can't stop it from happening. Because your brain has now seen a person, opposite sex or same sex, doesn't matter, whose personality is similar to a caretaker in childhood, from whom you did not get your needs met.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  So there's a yearning left over from infancy and childhood. And the brain is committed to survival. So the brain has to find a replica of that caretaker who didn't meet your needs. To put you in relationship with so that you can still try to get those needs met. But they can't be met because the person you fall in love with is similar to the caretaker who didn't meet them.

• 21:55Simon Sinek?

  You're gonna properly fall in love with somebody who replicates somebody who didn't take care of your needs?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 22:02Simon Sinek?

  But then how do you find attraction if they didn't take care of your needs?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  So your unconscious will look at this woman or man. And your unconscious will say mommy, mommy, the mommy who is not available. So the brain has an agenda. It has to finish that agenda to get the unavailable mommy available. Unfortunately, I know it doesn't make any sense.

• 22:28Simon Sinek?

  It sounds like trying to convince someone to love you. Like I'm trying, and it sounds like sort of like my mom wasn't there for me as a kid. So I'm going to convince the next person I meet to replace my mother.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:39Simon Sinek?

  It's.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  That's what you, that's what you do.

• 22:42Simon Sinek?

  And this is healthy?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  It's nature. Nature's trying to finish an agenda that it didn't get to finish in the parenting period of childhood. Nature's trying to finish that and it's simple. It's about survival.

• 22:55Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  So the baby doesn't get the needs met. So the brain is left with, I could die until I get this need met. So I have to get the need met with this person.

• 23:10Simon Sinek?

  I'm so confused, Harville, because finding love is finding somebody to complete the stuff I didn't get as a kid. To have somebody meet my needs. But what makes the relationship last and survive is that I have to go from a child brain, which is what this sounds like, to the adult brain, which now I have to convert myself to meeting their needs. So I'm now meeting the needs of the mother who didn't meet my needs?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Now meeting the needs of the mother who didn't meet your needs. Yes, that's, that's the way nature sets it up.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  So that puts the power struggle.

• 23:42Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't create nature, but I watched this.

• 23:47Simon Sinek?

  I know, I know, I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to understand, I'm tracking. But then that doesn't help me understand why one relationship succeeds and one relationship fails. It's not the nature that I'm pushing against. I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to understand. You had me, which is, I fully get showing up in the relationship and expecting somebody else to meet your needs. And that's why the relationship fails, because that doesn't work. And that what rescues the relationship is making the conversion of, instead of showing up in the relationship, expecting the other person to meet all your needs, we make this beautiful, beautiful, we mature and make this beautiful conversion of dedication and devotion to helping the other person meet their needs. And if both individuals are able to do that, the relationship thrives.

• 24:31Simon Sinek?

  And I'm thinking of my favorite couples, you know, that I watch the way they interact. And that seems to be the way in which they're organized, which is, how do I help my partner succeed and thrive? Find joy and happiness and all the rest of it. As opposed to how can they help me find joy, happiness and thrive?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:47Simon Sinek?

  You know, I get that.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  The struggle is over.

• 24:49Simon Sinek?

  Where you lost me and where I need help to understand is, and because I asked about finding it. This is, that's in the relationship, which I get wholeheartedly. But if I'm trying to set myself up for success in a relationship, wouldn't it be that I meet somebody who wants to meet my needs? I don't understand where I'm attracted to people who don't meet my needs. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to put my own, I'm trying to run it through my own filter rather than intellectualize it, right? So I'm trying to think about the people in my life when I was a kid and what did they not meet?

• 25:26Simon Sinek?

  And then what am I attracted to now? Ah shit, it works.

• 25:33Simon Sinek?

  You're right. Ah, damn it. This is really interesting. So I'm thinking like what I was unable to get from the people who were tasked with looking after me when I was a kid. And what the most attractive thing that I find in a partner is their ability to give me that.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:54Simon Sinek?

  Okay, so wow, okay, tracking, got that part of it. But now I'm still left in the dynamic. I found the person who meets my needs, fulfilling the void that was left when I was a kid. Got it. But I'm still in the mindset now of that person meeting my needs and having that child mentality because it fills this childhood void. So now then, that's what makes me attracted to the person. That's what makes me fall for the person. But that's not what makes the relationship succeed.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  What we have to add here is the whole concept of the unconscious.

• 26:31Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  You are not in charge of the selecting process. You're just in charge of the after.

• 26:36Simon Sinek?

  I did swipe right, that I was in charge of swiping right.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  But what you have to bring into the, and this is, once you get this, this is easy to understand. That your unconscious mind, outside of your awareness, is going to pick the person that you're going to fall for. Because your unconscious mind has inside an image, I call it an imago. It's the core word in my intellectual system, an imago, an image, of this caretaker.

• 27:07Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And when somebody crosses your path.

• 27:11Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  That matches that picture, your brain is going to go, wow, look at that. But what it's looking at is I'm going to get my need met now.

• 27:21Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Because there's mommy or daddy, whichever one was the most active in my frustration. So the expectation is you are going to meet my needs, but you never make that conscious.

• 27:33Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  You just say, wow, how wonderful, how beautiful, let's go date and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll both go through the romantic stage with all kinds of things that are wonderful.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Until some difference shows up in which you had an expectation. And this is can come anywhere from the end of the honeymoon to 18 months later, which is about the range. It'll show up that the expectation now 18 months later is still not being met. Now you know you're with the right person. And this may sound paradoxical.

• 28:13Simon Sinek?

  What? So you're with the right person because you're attracted to them because they meet the need. But then 18 months later, they don't meet your need and that makes them right?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  The first 18 months is all fantasy.

• 28:24Simon Sinek?

  Right, that I that I've definitely lived that. It took me a lot less than 18 months.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  There's a kind of collusion.

• 28:29Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, yeah, I projected. I've projected on somebody. I I I handpicked the things about their personality that reinforced my narrative of what I wanted them to be. And then I projected that they were the perfect person for me because they met all these needs that I have, only to discover that they didn't. Like, I set them up to fail. It was a it's not fair.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 28:51Simon Sinek?

  And I think we do this to each other generally.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's pretty universal.

• 28:56Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  That you do pick it up, you create this person in your mind, and then you attach an expectation to them. And when they show up, they don't meet the expectation.

• 29:06Simon Sinek?

  Then, of course, that's when we break up. You're like, you didn't meet any of my needs that I projected on you that you would meet all of them.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  The person you projected on to and the real person are very different. But you gotta live with the fantasy, but this real person cannot live in your fantasy.

• 29:19Simon Sinek?

  I think this is the distinction between lust and love, right? Like, we fall in lust with, you know, and and I make the distinction that one is

• 29:30Simon Sinek?

  more superficial, one is more the falling in love with the projection, and the other is actually more grounded. And and I think very often we fall in lust, we fall in lust quite easily. But to fall in love, I think, actually is a little deeper and a little more complex, I hope.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I I think probably we all fall into lust and then move into something more serious like.

• 29:52Simon Sinek?

  Hopefully, hopefully.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  We really need to get this need met.

• 29:54Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  But the sexual attraction is one of nature's ways of getting you in bed together. There's one of nature's ways to getting you in a relationship to get the need met. You see, you have to have the tension of the polarity of the difference in order to activate the undeveloped part of yourself. So nature set this up, but it didn't give you a handbook when you got married. I guess that's why therapists were created or why books are written.

• 30:20Simon Sinek?

  Why God invented therapists?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Nature's trying to get it out.

• 30:23Simon Sinek?

  So how does this reconcile with the fact that dating as a concept is a relatively new experience invented in America in the industrial revolution? Where most relationships, if not all relationships and marriages were arranged by the family either for convenience or or for wealth or for what wealth exchange or power exchange? When the industrial revolution happened and people were leaving the home to go live by themselves in the urban centers. And when dating first started showing up, it took about 30 years for it to normalize because it was if you were walking down the street with a member of the opposite sex. Uh, and you weren't married.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Bad stuff.

• 31:00Simon Sinek?

  It was considered disgusting and accusations of prostitution. And so it took 30 years for that concept of choosing my own mate and walking down the street with somebody I'm not married to to be acculturated. So how does this? Because everything we're talking about here is a very modern conception of choice and unfulfilled needs. And yet and yet arranged marriages have much lower divorce rates than marriages of choice.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm not an expert in your question, but I have thought about it, read about it and have conclusions about it. One of the things that if you look at arranged marriages, while they look stable and are stable and they last longer. They have compensatory sidebar behaviors.

• 31:46Simon Sinek?

  Oh.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  That the affair.

• 31:48Simon Sinek?

  So the king, the king had mistresses is what you're saying.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  The king had mistresses, the queen had mistresses.

• 31:54Simon Sinek?

  Courteires.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  In other words, this dynamic of romantic love of being attracted to somebody has been around forever.

• 32:02Simon Sinek?

  Got it, got it. So so the romantic love was sometimes found outside the relationship. I understand.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  And outside the relationship. It's like Romeo and Juliet. You know, they found love outside and it was forbidden love.

• 32:15Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  The natural dynamic that finally got culturized and cultured.

• 32:20Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Didn't come until about 150 years ago, but prior to that, nature dealt with the same thing. It just didn't have a cultural container for it, so it had to happen outside of.

• 32:30Simon Sinek?

  If we think this through, and again, these are two people with a lot of opinions who have done very little research on the subject, which is my favorite kind of conversation, which is when there's an arranged marriage, it sort of meets your standard, which is, okay, I'm gonna make this work. And that means I have to invest in meeting the other person's needs, otherwise this is gonna fail because I can't sit around going, you know, is this person gonna meet my needs? Because the interviews that I've seen of arranged marriages, there's a commitment to the relationship, which means there's a commitment to the other person, and it meets your standard to a T, which is I enter the relationship with a commitment to meet the other person's needs, because that's my job in this arranged marriage.

• 33:14Simon Sinek?

  Because the interviews that I've seen with arranged marriages, very, very happy, and the love came later, but the work started immediately, where I think for us, in our choice of relationships, the love may come sooner, the lust may come sooner, but the work starts later, usually when problems occur.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

• 33:34Simon Sinek?

  So we've made it more difficult for ourselves. And what an amazing concept, which is you can still have a relationship by choice, but to enter the relationship with the mindset of I'm gonna commit to seeing my partner's needs. And by the way, if they won't let me meet their needs, or they won't take the same commitment to me, then this is not a relationship that should survive, and we should both move on. It's a re-understanding of the word commitment, right? It's not commitment like a blind loyalty, which is often how we think about commitment. You know, you have commitment issues, you know, we usually mean that you don't have the intense loyalty that you're supposed to have to the relationship regardless of what's happening. I think that's sometimes how we use the term commitment.

• 34:16Simon Sinek?

  But here, the way we're using it is commitment to the work that needs to be done to see the other person's needs are met. And now, when you say somebody has commitment issues, they are unwilling to do the work that needs to be done to see the other person's needs met. And once met, I think is a very nice construction.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree with that. If you have commitment issues, which is why when we do work with couples, one of the first things we say is we call it a no exit decision. And the reason I do the no exit decision is I can tell you in advance that when we start working, you will start making progress. You will get more and more anxious about the progress you're making because it's violating your survival directive.

• 35:04Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Because your brain has been fine with survival without the needs being met. When the needs start getting met, it changes the survival directive. So you get more and more anxious and you'll want to stop therapy. And when you want to stop therapy is when I'm going to invite you to make a non-negotiable recommitment to the therapy process. Because in about three to five weeks, the anxiety will go away. Because your brain will discover it's not dangerous to receive stuff that you really want and need and are getting. But if you leave when you get anxious, that simply means your brain says, hey, I can't, I don't know how to operate and be safe with this system of stuff, good stuff coming in.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  I can't count on that. I can count on the bad stuff. Because that gives me security. So the brain is kind of crazy about that.

• 35:55Simon Sinek?

  I'm tracking this conversation. I like it. The one part where I disagree is I do think couples can do it without a therapist. It makes sense that you've never met a couple that couldn't do it without a therapist because you were their therapist.

• 36:08Simon Sinek?

  So that makes perfect sense to me.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Helen and I did without a therapist. We became.

• 36:13Simon Sinek?

  There you go. You see, you and your own wife did it without a therapist. So you have, you have empirical data to show that it can't be done without a therapist. You just both have to be self-aware and willing. Here's one thing that I think happens in a relationship, and I've definitely done this in mine, which is. The person is meeting my needs and I'm so afraid of losing that, that I shy away from total transparency for fear that I will somehow push them away or upset them, or they won't like, you know, all of me. And then I'm going to lose this person who's meeting my needs. But in so doing, they are now either forming a relationship with somebody they don't fully know,

• 36:54Simon Sinek?

  or worse, they always feel a little bit distant and like they can't get close. And that ultimately will be the undoing of the relationship. And the accusation is, it's like, I don't know you, you know, it's like your walls are up. Whatever the terminology and euphemisms are. Because I think to your point about this childhood getting our needs met, it's so seductive when you find it, or at least it's even seductive when you project it.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 37:21Simon Sinek?

  That I think very often we become afraid, so afraid of losing it, that we, we choose not to be our full selves, which if we take the commitment to see the other person's needs met, one of the needs they have is to know who they're dating.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:35Simon Sinek?

  And so there's sort of the requirement to be honest and transparent. That doesn't mean necessarily on day one, you don't need to tell everybody everything on day one. But, but to go through, go through the process of gently opening up and, and taking risks and discovering that the person still likes you. I think a lot of relationships fail because they're never true. They're more open with their friends sometimes than they are with their, with the person they're supposedly getting married to.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And so let me just add on to what you just said. That part of it is that if I really become vulnerable and let it in, that I might lose it.

• 38:12Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  The other side of that is that if I take it, I will violate a directive in my mind.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So I have to reject what I get, which is what I want in order to honor a directive in my mind, usually coming from some message from your caretakers early in childhood.

• 38:33Simon Sinek?

  Are you talking about sabotage?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yep. I'll sabotage what I want in order to maintain the status quo.

• 38:41Simon Sinek?

  In other words, I like being in the state of seeking it because in some twisted way that makes me feel like, I don't know what that makes me feel.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Not quite. Let me give you an example. We wrote a book called Receiving Love.

• 38:55Simon Sinek?

  And I had to learn that.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  This couple, they were not even a neurotic couple. They were, you know, like they had really deep childhood needs to work through before they could even get to their relational needs. They owned a store. It was a, I don't know what, there's a store where they sold paper and pencils and all that sort of stuff. And it wasn't a big store, so they were the primary people in it. I think she would come to work at like nine o'clock, would leave at three to go home and make dinner. He would have one or two other staff people managing that. Then he would come home at six o'clock to eat dinner. And so their pattern was, I go to work with you at nine, I leave at three, you stay till six, I go home at three to

• 39:39Speaker 01

  cook dinner, you come home and then we have dinner. And so then now then the office with me, and what is the complaint? And she said, well, you never thanked me for fixing dinner. Well, this is not a pathological complaint. This is, I work with you all day, I go home and do another job, and you come home. And he said to her, well, I don't think people should get compliments for what their job is. That's, that's what your job is in our relationship. My job is to stay there from nine to six. Your job is to come home at three and fix dinner. And then I come home, you get, you get three hours from three to six. And well, it's like, you know, some parents say to their kids, you know, don't complain about having to take out the trash. That's what you're supposed to do. You just

• 40:24Speaker 01

  do that without being complimented. That's your job in the family. So he had that. And he said, you know, I'm not going to thank you for what you're supposed to do.

• 40:32Simon Sinek?

  Right, right.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  So, and so that made sense. So I said to him, Peter, would you just stop and let Mary tell you what she wants?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And so she said, um, well, what I would like is when you come into the door, that you would come find me, I'll be in the kitchen. And you spin me around and hug me. And tell me how grateful you are that I came home and fixed dinner.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  I said, do you think you could do that? She just said that, that he said, well, sure, I can do that. So I said, let's enact it then. So you move up from thinking to enacting. So he did. First time he did it sort of clumsily.

• 41:16Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So we did it about the third time. He got it down. And he was having fun doing it and was appreciating it. And she said, no, no, don't, don't, don't hug me anymore. I don't, I don't want anymore. You don't mean it. You just don't mean it. I was watching him. He did it perfectly.

• 41:35Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  His tone of voice was warm and loving. And he was apologetic for not having done it before. He saw this could really be fun. He would really like to make that a part of their life. And the more he said, the more she said, no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. So I had this gut thing. And I said to her, Mary, would you tell me? What would happen if you accepted his appreciation now?

• 42:01Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And she said,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  oh, my God, my mother would tell me that you don't deserve that. And if you get that, you should be ashamed of yourself for asking.

• 42:12Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So a voice from her hippocampus showed up.

• 42:18Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  And she said, I, my God, I didn't even know that was back there. And she just broke down and cried.

• 42:25Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I didn't know. I can't even receive what I want. Because if I do, I'll disappoint my mother and my mother's dead. How crazy is this? Well, it's not crazy. It's normal, human stuff that gets triggered.

• 42:41Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Around the critical issues. Then I said, okay, well, now that you've got this clear. Would you be willing now to let, you know, Peter come over and really hug you? And she said, please do.

• 42:55Simon Sinek?

  That's delightful.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  So the breakthrough, see, she could not receive what she wanted.

• 43:00Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Now, the reason I wrote a book on that was I had 20 couples in the same impasse. And I didn't know how to get them through it because I didn't know that they had an unconscious rejection of their wishes.

• 43:13Simon Sinek?

  Yeah. So my, my experience was I dated an amazing woman who, her love language was acts of service. And she loved to make me dinner, right? And which was very nice and she's a better cook than me and it was, it was a wonderful thing. But she wouldn't let me do the dishes. I always wanted to do the dishes. If she cooked me dinner, which I was super grateful for, I wanted to contribute and I wanted to do the dishes. So it was egalitarian in, in the construction. And she always refused. She goes, no, no, no, I'm making you dinner and I'm doing the dishes. That's part of dinner. And it was very uncomfortable for me. And where I had to learn to receive love is I had to learn to put my own sort of desire aside and be like, well, this is how this person wants to express her love for me, I have to learn to receive it.

• 43:56Simon Sinek?

  And I did, I always was uncomfortable with it, but I learned to accept the love rather than being secure about that I wasn't contributing. The relationship didn't survive and we took a long break where we didn't talk for a long time. And then when we got together again, we sort of reconnected and she said to me, I owe you an apology. And I said, what, what happened? She goes, in this time that I've had to think about our relationship. She said, I was so hell bent on taking care of you and giving you my love that I didn't give you the space to show me love back. Cause you wanted to do the dishes as your expression of love, your act of service, and I denied you that opportunity.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:40Simon Sinek?

  And, and it goes to the original theory of helping the other person have their needs met. It was such a beautiful, genuine place of wanting to love me. And I'm sure it's fulfilling some, some unmet need as, you know, whatever it was going back to your, to your, your point. I was so struck by it. It was so meaningful for her to recognize that she, she was allowed to receive love as well. And she was somehow denying herself, like, maybe that she felt unworthy of receiving love and recognized that it, it bummed me out, you know? And it was this beautiful, beautiful reconciliation. And it's to your point of wanting to do the thing that made the other person have their needs met, which is to give love, to give service.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. That's a perfect example of something in her unconscious.

• 45:28Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Prevented her from receiving.

• 45:30Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  So she had to, in a sense, then deprive you of what you wanted to do, which was to give. So that the reciprocity, which is beautiful in a relationship, couldn't happen.

• 45:43Simon Sinek?

  It raises a nice, interesting point. You know, successful relationships are not equal. They're egalitarian. And, and I think people sort of, it's really important to make the distinction because equal is, I cook, you cook, I clean, you clean, I take out the garbage, you take out the garbage. That's equal. Egalitarian is, I'll cook, you do the dishes. Egalitarian is, I'll put the kids to bed, you take the garbage out. Where both parties, they both feel whole because they feel like the other person is contributing, even though the, the acts of contribution aren't exactly the same, which is nice because you get to do the things that sometimes you want to do that you actually prefer doing. And the other person feels that you're doing the thing I don't want to do. Boy, this is a great relationship. But healthy relationships are egalitarian, they're not equal.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  I like, I like that distinction. I hadn't thought about that. I use the word equality a lot, but I can see how egalitarian makes it a kind of team ship.

• 46:37Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Rather than a transaction.

• 46:40Simon Sinek?

  You've been doing this for a long time and, and.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Only about 50 years.

• 46:44Simon Sinek?

  Only about 50 years. You said something early in the, in the, in our conversation, which really, I think was so accurate and so right. I can't remember the exact words, but that dating is constructed around the norms of the day or the culture of the day.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:58Simon Sinek?

  And so it does change and it changes from city to city, country to country. It changes in with time because it is a construction of its time. It is not some deep biological, normal thing, this thing called dating.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:11Simon Sinek?

  I'm very curious, over the course of 50 years. How have you seen dating change for better? And how have you seen dating change for worse?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  So I don't think I have a terribly sophisticated answer to that. So let me just qualify what I'm going to say with it. I think dating, paradoxically, was better when people met physically, face to face, long ago. Sort of like I did. You can't meet on the telephone. You can meet on a Zoom or you can meet on a dating site. There were no dating sites as I grew up. We all are noticing of the separation of the personal as the rise of technology has increasingly contributed to more and more indirect

• 48:04Speaker 01

  attempts to meet people through some technological encounter rather than through a personal experience.

• 48:12Simon Sinek?

  Right, I think that's a fair statement.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And I think it'd be great to have dating sites in which, after you scour the field, but to move, once there is a connection of some kind, to move into the personal immediately rather than, you know, spend some time getting acquainted with or even going to Zoom or doing all that sort of stuff. The more impersonal, the fewer cues you have. I know the technology is really not the problem. It's our use of technology that's the problem. There are things you can't pick up.

• 48:46Simon Sinek?

  Yep.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Except face to face.

• 48:49Simon Sinek?

  You're just advocating IRL in real life.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Advocating what?

• 48:55Simon Sinek?

  In real life. Telephones, you know, FaceTimes, they're perfectly valid ways of meeting somebody. They're perfectly valid ways of fostering relationships you're already in. But what you're saying is nothing can ever replace. The magic of face to face when in in courtship and getting to know someone because so much is revealed that is subconscious when we are with someone that eventually will show up if we find ourselves in a relationship.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  You're in an energy field. Right now, you're in an energy field. If you and I were in the same room, our energy field would be entertaining and we would be feeling each other in different ways from the way we are now. We're still feeling each other, but this mediated through this distance of the screen. So it's not as informative.

• 49:40Simon Sinek?

  It's not as rich.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  And not as rich.

• 49:42Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  But but it's okay. I mean, it's just different ways, but the realm of intimacy is a realm of intimacy. And that requires seeing, touching, holding, feeling, and that I'm fine for people to scour the world to find the right person, but then go see them, get together and smell them and touch them and all the kinds of things.

• 50:05Simon Sinek?

  You heard it here first. The next time you go on a date, make sure to smell the person you're with.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. Smell them.

• 50:11Simon Sinek?

  Harville, my favorite guests are people who teach me something, you know, and I love to have people on here who know stuff that I don't know and I get and help me think through things. I so appreciate you letting me go through with you. I have definitely smarter and richer about relationships now. And you're giving me so many good thoughts about even how I want to approach my own relationships moving forward and the construction that my commitment to the relationship, assuming that I think someone is worth it and they think I'm worth it, because it is a lot of work to commit yourself to see that the other person's wants, needs and desires are met, is a beautiful, beautiful thought. And I hope that I and everybody else finds the person that they want to make that commitment to.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be wonderful.

• 50:52Simon Sinek?

  And you clearly did.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Clearly did. Took me a while to work through the anxiety and and my mind was working through the anxiety of vulnerability and my biggest need was visibility, but my biggest defense was vulnerability, which made visibility impossible. So I was a saboteur to my own journey and we had to talk long enough until we felt safe enough in the conversation for the defenses to drop. And I think that is nonnegotiable, that you have to be safe enough with the other person to be the real you. And now Helen and I, we don't have any struggle. We walk around playing and kidding. I don't have a sense of a need. She doesn't have a sense of a need. We may have a want to like,

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I'd like to go for a walk, or I'd like to go out to dinner, or I'd like our pizza for dinner. But we don't have needs.

• 51:46Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  The needs were cut off with the gratitude. And so all that's left is just our diversity and our difference, which becomes negotiable. We can say, oh, so you want X, like the bedroom at the temperature every night is a conversation. But it's a fun conversation.

• 52:03Simon Sinek?

  I like that.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  If this heater would just work for us better.

• 52:07Simon Sinek?

  I love, I love, I love this, Harville. I love this. And I'm thinking my, I've done the same thing where I desperately seek being seen, but don't give people insight enough to see the thing I want seen. So I'm clearly sabotaging. I'm clearly not going to get the thing that I want because I won't show them the thing that I want to be seen. It's such a beautiful, magical paradox. I love, love, love the idea that you have no needs left. It's only just once. And how wonderful is that? We should all aspire to have a relationship where our needs are completely met and all we have left is once. Beautiful. Harville, I'm so glad you said yes. I, I really, I think you're the best.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I'm so glad that you asked me. I never have an idea of being interviewed by you. But just so I met you at TED and it's like, I met Simon Sinek, the guy that I admire so much.

• 52:57Simon Sinek?

  Ah, you're too kind.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Now I got to spend a whole hour with you. So that's.

• 53:01Simon Sinek?

  All my needs are met.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  All your needs.

• 53:06Simon Sinek?

  I hope to see you soon and maybe, maybe we can do this one day in person.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I would love that. I would love that. And I'm available anytime.

• 53:13Simon Sinek?

  And I'll, and we'll get to smell each other.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  This is the most fun conversation I can remember having.

• 53:18Simon Sinek?

  Oh, thank you so much.

• 53:25Simon Sinek?

  As always, thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, please do remember to subscribe to A Bit of Optimism wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. And remember, new episodes drop every Tuesday. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company, lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devon Johnson. And if you want more cool stuff or just to find out what I'm up to, visit simonsinek.com. Until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other.