What if the messy parts of your midlife relationships are the key to understanding yourself better and improving your overall happiness? Together, we'll explore how these connections, as complicated as they may seem, are crucial for our health, happiness and longevity.
We'll be decoding how our attachment styles, crafted by our primary caregivers, influence our relationship dynamics and why understanding them in midlife is more important than ever. We'll also dive into the tricky territory of reacting to our partners' pain and creating a secure relationship amidst the chaos of our own issues and resentments.
Buckle up for an unfiltered conversation that'll challenge your notion that relationships are a matter of luck, and instead, enlighten you on the transformative power of understanding your role in them. Prepare for some serious midlife relationship real talk!
Book Referenced: In Each Others Care
What if the messy parts of your midlife relationships are the key to understanding yourself better and improving your overall happiness? Together, we'll explore how these connections, as complicated as they may seem, are crucial for our health, happiness and longevity.
We'll be decoding how our attachment styles, crafted by our primary caregivers, influence our relationship dynamics and why understanding them in midlife is more important than ever. We'll also dive into the tricky territory of reacting to our partners' pain and creating a secure relationship amidst the chaos of our own issues and resentments.
Buckle up for an unfiltered conversation that'll challenge your notion that relationships are a matter of luck, and instead, enlighten you on the transformative power of understanding your role in them. Prepare for some serious midlife relationship real talk!
Book Referenced: In Each Others Care
When my grandmother was in her 80s and 90s, she had a boyfriend named Jerry And they were a very cute couple, but Jerry used to call my grandmother his PETA, and it was P-I-T-A, and PETA stood for Pain in the Ass And of course, this term was used very endearingly and actually everybody, including my grandmother, smiled and laughed about it. But the truth is is he wasn't wrong. We are all a huge pain in the ass in some way And we bring that pain in the assness to our relationships that we have in our life. This is the 40 as fuck podcast, where we have worthwhile, real as fuck conversations about midlife. What you're going to hear on this podcast is not the fluff you see scrolling Instagram, it's the messy parts of midlife, because midlife feels a little different. I wouldn't say midlife is necessarily a crisis, but it's worth paying attention to. Hey guys, welcome back to the 40 as fuck podcast. I am Sid Moro and on this podcast we have real as fuck conversations about the shit that is midlife. No fluff, no filter.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to be talking all about relationships And if you are like me, you have learned one thing to this point, and that is that other people can be very difficult and seriously spending a lot of time with anyone, but especially our partners, if we're in a relationship. It is definitely not a fairy tale, and if you are actually still living in that fantasy, you are probably not actually listening to this podcast, because I think that we all just need to be honest and stop trying to be some Instagram perfect version of our relationships. I think when we do that, we can all admit that relationships, no matter how good or how bad they are, they do kind of have a way of making you just a little bit jaded, because there is nothing easy or perfect about relationships, especially if you've been in one from any length of time. And this is all really ironic because, if you guys remember, a few episodes ago I talked about how having the wrong relationships in our life and this is according to research can actually be bad for your health. It can actually lead to an early death, and it's the relationships that we have now in our midlife that is one of the greatest determinants of our overall happiness and our health and our longevity and really our outlook as we age in our life.
Speaker 1:In all the research that I have done, i have actually really started to question, though how is it that you define this quality relationship as they refer to? I am wondering, like how do you know if you have one and what do you do if you don't? Does that mean that you're doomed, or can you salvage a current relationship? And another question that I've also wondered is if you don't have one, are you better off single? These are all questions that I have been asking myself as I've gone through this research, but I think that it all starts under this premise that we all want love at least most of us do And we want to be loved.
Speaker 1:We want to feel accepted by someone, and as human beings, we know that we fundamentally need connection, and the research across the board backs this up. In an analysis of 148 studies, researchers found that your chance of survival, regardless of your age and your sex, or even your health status, it increased by 50%. Not having strong connections in your life, as in relationships, is at least as detrimental to our health as obesity and physical inactivity and smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's huge. That is our draw to relationships. It seems like at our core as human beings. It is dependent on our survival that we need connection, but if you have ever had a relationship that has gone south. You probably have asked yourself like how did this fairy tale, something you thought was really good, become this damn nightmare that I'm living in? And statistically you're not wrong 30% of married couples report feeling severely disconnected in the relationships that they have, and 43% of adults report feeling intense loneliness. And I wanna just say that, before you start thinking that having a life of singlehood is probably the best way to avoid all of these pitfall, i wanna just tell you that in an analysis of 90 studies and 500 million people I'm serious, 500 million people they found the risk of death for single men 32% higher And for women it was 23% higher. That translates to dying 15 to 17 years earlier than married people. That is really significant. So you can see that the research shows us that relationships have an amazing influence on our overall happiness in life, but they can also very much negatively influence our life as well Because, as we know, they can't just be any relationship.
Speaker 1:They have to be that quote unquote quality. And I wanna start and I wanna be really upfront with you guys, because I don't wanna come on this podcast and pretend that I am an expert on quality relationships. I wanna be really clear that I am not a therapist. It's only in the last few years that I have actually started to look at myself very seriously and looked at the roles that I have played in the relationships that I've had.
Speaker 1:I think we can all agree that we've been taught through various influences that we all came to this premise that the people that we were attracted to or that we had relationships with it was some kind of like this luck of the draw, like you met the right person at the right time and it was all meant to be And it was this love at first sight thing that we see in movies. But what I've actually learned is it's more about our own psychology and our own past experiences, really from our childhood. That is really the driving force into who you connect with. It's also a major influence in the problems and patterns that you will experience in the relationships that you have and also the way that your needs are met in the relationship. But what I've learned and a positive sense of this is that we can also heal a lot of this stuff through our relationships. I think it's really possible, and maybe even more significant, that we can heal through the relationships that we have that go south, and it's those relationships of our past where I think the most is revealed about our own psychology, because relationships can be one of the greatest teachers of what is going on inside of us. It's not always external.
Speaker 1:One of the most amazing things that has happened since I started this podcast is that a lot of people have come to me and reached out and shared their own experiences related to the content that I have published. So I have had this incredible opportunity to talk a lot about relationships, because it's often a topic And from my own research, it seems that feeling connected in our relationships is actually a very big issue in our midlife. For this episode, i actually asked a couple of my friends who I thought they looked from the outside like they had that quote unquote quality relationship. But what was so surprising to me is when I asked them about their quality relationships, i was met with answers and they were like Sid, no, i do not have a quality relationship. And some of them even shared with me that their relationships were barely hanging on by a thread. Some of these people that I asked had hope and some didn't have any hope at all When I asked them if they felt like their needs were getting met in their relationships. Most of them said no, and that actually really surprised me.
Speaker 1:I think part of the problem that we face is that very few of us, including myself, actually know or understand what a quality relationship looks or feels like. And I think that this is especially true if you come from some dysfunction in your family, like I do, because, let's face it, we weren't exactly modeled quality relationships growing up, especially growing up as Gen Xers. I think not having that strong foundation of what a quality relationship is prevents us from cultivating that in our own relationships. Largely the people that I talk to, they feel really frustrated in their relationships. Either it's communicating or the workload that one of them is carrying or getting their needs met or trying to get their needs met or even meeting their partner's needs. It seems to be a huge frustration.
Speaker 1:So I want to start and I want to define first for context that in this podcast today I'm speaking mostly into our adult and adult relationships, but it does seem like the patterns that we have in one of our relationships are the patterns that we have in many relationships. When I look at my own life, there is a pretty strong overlap. It's not 100%, but I do think that we tend to gravitate or we're pulled towards sameness in our attachment or what our relationships look like with others, and this is really the basis for attachment theory. We touched on this in a previous episode, so I'm not going to go into it too deeply. But the Cliffsnose version is that there's three different types of attachment style. There's anxious, avoidant and insecure, and then there's some subcategories in there too, but they're not exactly relevant to what we're talking about today. So I just want to do a really quick refresher, especially if you didn't listen to that previous episode.
Speaker 1:But if you are anxious, like I am, you probably tend to be more codependent. You probably have a tendency towards feeling abandoned in relationships and you might actually abandon yourself for others' needs in your relationships. You can also have a really hard time saying no or setting boundaries. You guys get the picture of what I'm talking about So like for me, for instance, i have a tendency to move towards people, even people that are pushing me away, but I'm doing that in a way to feel safe and connected to them. If you're avoidant, you probably move away, especially from emotional closeness in relationships. It's not that you don't want it, it's that emotions begin to feel really overwhelming to you, so you push away, so you might withdraw or suppress your emotions And in that you want to be alone for your safety. This is your attempt to satisfy your needs for safety.
Speaker 1:A secure attachment style is just that You feel okay in relationships or you feel okay out of relationships. You have easier time setting boundaries, you are able to be emotionally present with others and yourself. Basically, you guys are like the golden children, but the characteristics that I just gave you they're all generalities and we're all gonna be on the spectrum of all of those in various parts of our relationships, because there are so many nuances in how we connect with others that were largely influenced in our childhood. But they are what make us feel seen and safe and secure and loved in the relationships that we have. Now, like I mentioned, no matter where you fall on that attachment style, what we have to realize is in the background of our minds we have this tape that is playing and that is this attachment style, because our attachment styles were formed by the way that our caregivers responded to our needs when we were little babies And it's informed us how we experienced the relationships in our life, our attachments to others is really the driving force in how our partner is connecting to us and how they satisfy those needs for us in feeling seen and safe and secure and really loved in our relationship. So you guys can really see that we kind of have this weird conflict between wanting love and connection and our attachment style which serves like as this referee. But what's crazy about it is we leave it to our partners to understand when we ourselves don't even really understand. Only the referee does, only our attachment style does, and when that ref is like it's a miss, we start telling ourselves the story about the experience When my grandmother was in her 80s and 90s, after her husband had passed away, she had a boyfriend named Jerry And they were a very cute couple.
Speaker 1:But Jerry used to call my grandmother his PETA, and it was P-I-T-A and PETA stood for pain in the ass And of course this term was used very endearingly and actually everybody, including my grandmother, smiled and laughed about it. But the truth is is he wasn't wrong. We are all a huge pain in the ass in some way And we bring that pain in the assness to our relationships that we have in our life. Our pain in the assness isn't necessarily our attachment style. It's more the way that we respond which is actually based on our attachment style, whether we shut down or we get defensive or we're needy or we push away. And I wanna be really clear like your, pain in the assness isn't necessarily wrong, but in certain relationships it can be really challenging for the other person. They're not operating from the same place, they have their own attachment styles And in that communication neither one of us feel very understood.
Speaker 1:And as we go through relationships, i think what happens is we start to carry some shame for our needs or attachment styles or even the way that we respond in the relationship, and our partners, I think, end up feeling really defeated and resentful and they get defensive because they don't understand what it is that their partner needs. So having this awareness, not only about your attachment style but the way in which you respond when you don't feel secure, is crucial. Equally, it's so important for your partner to understand this whole concept as well. I think it can actually be pretty transformative in your life. An attachment theory says that the people that we find ourselves attracted to in relationships it likely reminds us of one of our primary caregivers, and so if, for instance, you were raised by emotionally unavailable, anxious people, but they were also loving and charismatic to other people, it's likely that you're going to seek partners with similar traits.
Speaker 1:When we have this realization about ourselves, i think that is the point that we can really start to take some ownership and we can grow. And it's through that awareness that will allow us to make different choices in how we respond as well as how we communicate to our partners. And the issue becomes when we don't know how to express what it is and our partner starts throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and it feels like they continually seem to miss the mark and everybody feels frustrated and everybody feels defeated. Our partner's attempts at making us feel happy starts feeling like they're just going through the motions and their attempts can actually make us feel more disconnected because to us it feels that they don't actually understand. And I think of it in the terms of an iceberg. So if you think about it, at the very tip of the iceberg you have this very action-oriented space. Your partner attempts to make you happy And we have to believe that our partners actually do want to make us happy, but at the very tip of this iceberg. They're like hey look, i put the dishes in the dishwasher for you or I made date night just for you. Their intent is good But, as anyone knows, action doesn't always equate to connection, and I think that's what's missing in that action-oriented space.
Speaker 1:And so, in my research and talking to a lot of other people about their own experiences, the connection is what the partner is actually craving, because it's not about the dishes, it's not about the scheduled date. These are actions, they're mechanisms, but as partners we need to discover what that deeper wanting is. When we know what makes our partners feel secure, what story or what does that tap into from your early childhood Because, remember, all of this is written in our early childhood from our caregivers We begin to connect differently to each other. For instance, date night is nice, but what could it be that date night really means? Is it feeling like a sense of importance and priority to your partner, because they didn't feel like that with their relationship with their caregivers? When we have this understanding, we see that date night is one mechanism, but greater connection comes through the moments in our days where we can make our partner a priority. That's what's going to make them actually feel secure because they were missing that when they were kids.
Speaker 1:It's like a wound, which is actually exactly how Dr Stan Tattkin, an expert on attachment theory, explains it. He says that we have a bite that fits each other's wounds, which, in essence, acts as magnets. These wounds were created when we were little babies. What we essentially want is other people that we have in our adult life to heal these wounds. We seek them out. Our adult relationships are there to solve the issues of the past. The people in our adult relationships. They didn't have anything to do with those wounds. We're just bringing them into our life to help us solve those old experiences. When they don't respond to us in the way that we need them to, we react, and we respond to them in many ways the same way we did when we were children. So we may withdraw or we may get clingy or we may get needy. Whatever your default was as a kid, it's likely you're still responding in a similar way.
Speaker 1:Dr Stan Tattkin says that the underlying principle in a quality relationship is understanding each other's early wounds and responding in a way that makes them feel secure in the relationship. So if you've ever heard somebody say that they don't feel seen, i believe it's this deep understanding of another person. I think that is actually what people mean when they say they don't feel seen or known. And to understand this and to be able to go that deep in a way, we've got to see them as that child that's needing to feel secure. So we're going to have to really work to go beyond our own need. It's this understanding that is especially important. And again, dr Stan Takin says that secure, functioning couples orientate themselves to be in each other's care, which I think is just the most beautiful way to say that.
Speaker 1:And because relationships are not only just the way that we feel secure, but they also are like a mirror and they inform us and tell us if we are worthy of getting our needs met. So when, for example, when our partner doesn't understand that need of wanting to be a priority because we weren't a priority in our childhood, we will likely tell ourselves a story about why we're not actually worthy, and our partner's inability to understand what we need to heal from this will actually affirm this narrative that we've told ourselves for many years that we're not worthy. And when those needs are not met, it continues to feed that experience and that story, and this alone is why forming secure relationships is so important, because the quality of the relationships that we have in our life. They affect our health and our happiness, but they also affect our self-esteem and the influence our self-confidence. It is fundamental to our survival as humans to feel safe in this world with the people that we are closest to.
Speaker 1:Dr Sam Tatkin has a great way of illustrating how we respond to our partners. So in the book he lays out two examples, but I think that they pointed out perfectly. He says consider the following scenario I step hard on your toe in a room full of people. Now consider the things I could say to you immediately after. Number one I didn't see your foot. Number two it wasn't my fault, somebody pushed me. Number three watch where you're going. Number four your foot is just too big. Number five oh no, i'm sorry, are you okay? You can see how the difference when we respond to something like that makes a huge difference And you can probably pick up either where you feel that from your partner or even how you respond to your own partner.
Speaker 1:Now he gives one more scenario that I think illustrates it quite perfectly. I tell you how sorry I am for leaving this morning without saying goodbye to you. I admit that it was rude and it was inconsiderate, despite the reason for doing so. Your response options might be number one why did you do that? Number two yes, it was rude and you do it all the time. Number three and you want me to be loving to you, but you do this. Number four I'm angry for a whole lot of reasons and this is just one. Or number five thank you for saying you're sorry.
Speaker 1:So I think these are two great illustrations of how we can respond to our partner's pain in a stressful moment and largely see them in the wound without bringing our own stuff into that moment of recognizing pain. But I want to be perfectly honest with you guys, because I hate it when people are like just do this and your relationship will be perfect, because we got to be real. This could be all well and good, but it is really hard to apply because our path to bliss has become probably a traffic jam filled with resentment and unsolved issues and unfairness, and it's just like those traffic jams, like those attempts. We cannot move forward. We've come to a complete stop because it's really tough to put that stuff aside. So I just want to say that I know that relationships are not easy, and putting this into action is a lot easier said than done, but I think, just even coming at it from having the awareness of this information, this has really helped me and I really hope that in some way it can help you too.
Speaker 1:Knowing that my midlife relationships are foundational to my overall happiness and health as I get older, it's actually given me a different motivation to look at this stuff. So remember that each of these styles influences our response and our relationships, and our roles in our relationships are really in defining a secure relationship to one another, helping each other to truly feel seen and understood through understanding our bite wounds and what our responses are to them, because we really are in each other's care, and I don't think that this idea should be taken lightly. So with that, you guys, i hope you guys have enjoyed this. I hope you guys have found this helpful. It has been extremely mind-opening for me to understand what quality relationships are, and I hope it is for you too. I will talk to you guys next time, take care.