The push and pull of your relationships. A midlife reality check

Midlife is the perfect time to take a  look at your relationships. Studies show in your midlife your marital happiness is a better predictor of the length of your life than cholesterol or obesity.  

The relationships we have in our life can be transforming or debilitating.  In this episode I talk in depth about the ways in which we relate to our partners, how our childhood bonds with our caregivers can be a set up for successful or failures of our adult relationships and what to do about it. 
And no, its not finding a new partner, at least I hope not!  

Transcript

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I thought everything was going amazing, but apparently it was not because like in one phone call, it was completely over. Like just like that. And my brain could not even cope. To say that I was devastated is an absolute understatement. I mean, how was I gonna go on? I mean, after all, I was 15. I knew we were gonna get married, and I pined over him. I called him all the time, humiliating myself like over and over again. I also drove by his house just trying to catch a glimpse of him. This is the 40 as fuck podcast, where we have worthwhile, real as fuck conversations about midlife. What you're gonna 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. This is the second season of this podcast, and metaphorically, it's kind of the second season of our lives. If you are a midlifer, chances are you fall into one of these three categories. You might be one of those midlifers where you have stability and the predictability of your life. You've got the spouse, the good job, the house, and you're really looking around your life and you're feeling like not much needs to change in your life. But you might also be one of those midlifers that is looking around your life. And instead of feeling and being really content, you are finding ways to be content because you're afraid of change. The amazing Brene Brown, I think, said it best. There are too many people in the world who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointed. It's a great quote because change is hard and we want to hold on to what feels predictable. Why? Well, I think humans actually fear loss. Simply put, it is better not to lose$20 than it is to find$20 laying on the ground. This is actually a proven cognitive theory, and that says that the loss impacts us at two and a half times more than the reward of the gain. So even if the change will benefit us, we want to hold on to that familiarity. We want to hold on to that$20, even if we can pick up a brand new bill. This loss, adversion, or this predictability that we want in our life, it can significantly impact our decisions and it does lead to really bad decision making in our lives. And so that brings me to the third type of midlifer, which actually happens to be me. And these are the people that are looking around their life. They're the ones that are really ready to roll up their sleeves, look where change is needed and where change is due, and they're really willing to do the hard stuff. We're willing to step into the uncomfortableness. Now, I don't want to say like everything in my life is bad because that's not true. And it's not to say that I'm really unhappy with my entire life or that I want everything to change. It's just to say that there are parts of my life that I wish represented something different or maybe felt different. And most of it, most of these changes are internal and they're things that I'm needing to do. So they're not necessarily external circumstances like buying a Corvette or going and getting a boob job or anything like that. For us in this category, it's about the realization of going from young to old. And I think that we're starting to realize that we might be losing time for some of these opportunities to create that change. And we really don't want to waste any more time. When they survey people at the end of their lives and they ask them, what do you wish you had done more of and what do you wish you had done less of? The majority of these people pointed to their midlife. And what they regretted was the time they spent in worry and procrastination, not living a life that made them feel really alive. And for me, I definitely don't want to be surveyed in my 70s and 80s and have these same regrets. So this kind of got me thinking, though, I kind of wonder if those 70 and 80-year-olds were the kind of midlifers that found ways to rationalize the discontent in their lives because they were afraid of change. I don't know. It's a good question. So I'm at this point in my life and I'm really not willing to risk it. I have learned over the past two years that yes, change is really hard, but I see in my own life that it's been really necessary. And it's been necessary to create a life for me that has less regrets, and it also has opened the door for me to have a life that makes me feel more alive and not just going through the motions. In the last two years, I saw where my own need for comfort in my life kept me holding on to that predictability, like for dear life. I was always listening to that ever-present adult voice in my head as a way to rationalize these choices or as a way to avoid making change. Those two factors, I believe, were leading me down a path to have those same regrets that those 70 and 80-year-olds have. And for me, that's where these deep evaluative questions started to pop up. One of the questions that I frequently am asking myself is am I living a life that makes me feel authentic, kind of like a fuck yeah life? Or am I living a life that I just accept? Well, for me, the bad news is that the answer to these questions are not necessarily granting me this like instantaneous, fulfilling life. No, like the answers to these questions often lead to having to make change. They kind of open Pandora's box. The answers usually reveal traits about myself or my relationships or the situations that I'm in, or the things or the places that I've been hiding from, or the places that I need to make changes or take accountability for. And even if the changes are hard, why do I want to hold on to those things if they're not making me feel truly alive? So as we get deeper into our 40s, we can all bring to the table a lot of awareness and honesty about ourselves. Though the answers aren't always what we want to know about our life, they do deliver some kind of tough love in a way to tell our overbearing, annoying adult voice in our head to shut up and to allow us to make changes to build this life that does actually deliver aliveness. The good news is these limitations can be changed. We know the qualities that we bring, good or bad, to any given situation. It's not necessarily we know why we bring these qualities to any situations, but we kind of know our own bullshit at this point. You'll see, for me personally, I'm not blowing up my life. I'm not scraping it all, but I am willing to look closely at how I am my own roadblock to living a life that makes me feel authentic and alive. Think about it for just a second. Are you the person that runs away or are you running towards a problem? Do you flake out on things or follow through on commitments? Do your actions support your words? Do you take your health for granted, or does your health take a priority in your life? Like for me, just to name a few things, and these are aspects of myself that I'm working on right now. I'm a procrastinator. So right now, I am treating my commitments that I make to myself as non-negotiable. I am not a huge fan of conflict. And with that, I'm learning to set boundaries and to walk away when my boundaries aren't honored. This is a huge one for me. In fact, I absolutely hate it, but I'm not willing to negotiate my own values and standards anymore because I accommodate way too much crap in my life. I have a really hard time saying no to certain things because I don't want to let people down. But in that, I've learned that I'm letting myself down by doing this. And my best quality of all, and I say this jokingly, is that I'm a master overthinker. I overthink pretty much everything in my life. This one is huge for me. I mean, this podcast is a perfect example of my perfectionism and overthinking. I mean, I have almost killed this project several times because of that, but I'm not gonna let that happen because that's where I want to make the most changes in my life. So taking accountability for our bullshit, I believe is fundamental to creating kind of this fuck yeah life. By not doing so, I think we become those midlifers who find ways to rationalize their general discontent, the ones with the regrets at the end of their life. But there is this one aspect of our life that I think should take absolute precedent no matter where you are. I see this as a fundamental route. And it's actually proven to be one of the most important determinants of happiness and health in our midlife and really beyond. And that is how we show up in relationships. And I'm not just talking romantic, but even our friendships and our family. Any connection to another person is a relationship. When I do the research for this podcast, I have found that no single factor is as influential for our emotional and physical health of our life than having those high quality relationships in our life. I mean, it's everywhere. And the research is really clear. It's not the fact that we just have people in our life, but it's the quality of the relationships that we have, the warmth and the safety and the trust and the connection and the respect that we have from the people in our lives, lifespan as well as our overall well-being, including our resistance to dementia and resistance to disease, and then our general overall happiness, they are impacted the most by the quality of the relationships we have. And what I think is really interesting is this notion that we have in our culture, that having endurance or how long we last in a relationship, especially ones that don't bring us the connection that we need, we use that as a barometer of how healthy your relationship is. If your relationships are not providing you what you need, that badge of honor, I think it could actually be damaging to your health. They say that loneliness, either in a relationship or outside of a relationship, has twice the unhealthy physical effects of obesity. That's huge. And sadly, a person's odds of death increase by 26% in any given year when they're experiencing loneliness. As humans, we are wired for connection and we're social creatures. We need that love, we need that connection, we need purpose with another. We need to feel respected, we need to feel seen. I think understanding how we engage in the relationships in our life is really important. And not numbing out or pretending it's okay when it's not or avoiding the conversations that we should be having, I don't think that that should be an option because it could actually physically harm you. It could shorten your life. But I don't want you guys to go blaming your partner yet, because I think when it comes to these connections, being really honest about ourselves seems to be the most integral part in creating these quality relationships to other people. I want to tell you guys the story about a friend of mine. We were talking the other day and he was telling me the story about one of his long-term relationships that he had. When he used to have an argument with his partner, he would retreat. He would give her the silent treatment. Now, from his perspective, as he explained it, he was actually doing his partner a favor. In his mind, he didn't want to make that conflict worse. But it wasn't until they were in couple therapy that the therapist pointed out to him, and he said she said it very bluntly, that by doing this, he was in a way punishing his partner for the disagreement. When he told me this, I could tell that he was really shocked by this. It really brought into the awareness his own pattern in their relationship. Now I know him, and I know his intention was never really to punish her with the silence. I mean, I really do believe that he thought he was doing her a favor, but he realized that the therapist was right. Over the years, he said he had learned that his silence in a relationship or in a conflict was actually kind of a power play, and it gave him the upper hand in the conflict. When we were talking about it, I actually asked him if he felt any resistance in being called out that way. And he was like, How could I deny it? That therapist was right. So that's what I mean. It's not always clear why we are the way that we are, but I think gaining the awareness of our own patterns and realizing that they might not be the most productive, that really helped my friend make changes in how he responded during conflict. And there are other tools too that can really help us gain this awareness. In our life, many of the relationships that we are attracted to can be explained by our particular attachment style. Now, I know this sounds so boring, but knowing this can literally explain more than half of the problems you're having in your relationships, like just personally, but it can also help explain your partner too. So if you've ever felt like you're not good at relationships, or your partner is impossible, or you seem to have the same fight over and over again, or you feel like you're always getting hurt in relationships, I want you guys to really listen to this because this could change your life and your relationship, no matter how long you've been in it. Our attachment style that we have was formed by the care we received as infants and children from our caregivers, like our moms and dads. And this is actually called attachment theory. And it's not actually just a theory, it's actually been demonstrated in neural mapping, where they're able to see these neural circuits that happen and are formed in infancy through imaging. The neural circuits, or if you think of them as roadmaps in the brain, are formed in infancy and childhood. And they remain mostly unchanged in adulthood without the awareness and some effort to make changes, kind of like my friend was able to do. But the attachments that we form in early infancy, I think this is one of the reasons that it's really important to know what your attachment style is, because left unchecked, in many ways, it will predict how you are going to respond in relationships in your adult lives. They also influence our fears and anxiety when it comes to connection with other people. Like, I don't know, do you have a hard time opening up or do you share too much? Are we anxious or needy in a relationship? When these attachment styles are formed in infancy, they also create a kind of roadmap in our nervous system. And I'm going to talk more about that later. I think for the vast majority of us, we're not even aware of this pattern. And we don't even know, at least I didn't, that we adopted this from infancy. And if you're gonna like me, I always believe that who I was attracted to or who I wanted in my life was somehow this luck of the draw. But the origination of that spark was formed from the bond I had with my caregivers, like my mom and my dad. Honestly, that's a little bit creepy. And I don't know, it sounds a little Freudian, but it's very valid. It's not necessarily going to be the only determinant of the quality of your relationship. But I think that you should know that this is a template and it's always running in the background of all of the relationships that you're drawn to, and it very much influences the repeated relationship problems that you might experience in your life. So I kind of figure that actually a lot of you are asking me, like, why does this matter now? Aren't my relationships like good enough at this point? I mean, we're 40, we're 40 something probably, and you have made it this far. That's all true. But the reason that understanding relationships and making adjustments now in our 40s is so important is because the research points unequivocally from a huge 80-year study done at Harvard, it showed that marital happiness at age 50 was a much better predictor of good physical health and how long we lived and what diseases we got and our overall emotional health. It was so much higher than other predictors like cholesterol and obesity and things like financial security. So even if you've been married 25 years and you have this amazing marriage, or you have a marriage that is filled with resentment and discontent, I think learning how we respond in relationships and taking pretty much total ownership for our own limitations and patterns, that alone can increase the connection and intimacy that we feel with our partners. So there's basically four styles of attachment. And I'm going to go through these pretty quickly because I think that you'll be able to identify pretty easily what yours is. So there's four styles: there's secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. And by the way, like this is not a diagnostic, and I think I'm supposed to say that, I'm not sure. But the mecca of all of the attachment styles, like the one that we should be working towards, and we can get there with a little awareness, I believe, are the people that are securely attached. Secure attachment says, I'm okay, you're okay. Like these people probably don't have things like um daddy issues or mommy issues. They're probably not all that needy, and they're really clear on what their needs are. They don't run or avoid conflict. These guys are okay with others, or they're okay to be alone. And for the most part, I don't think that they resist boundaries or they have a hard time setting them. When you're securely attached, you seek secure connection and can more easily in a relationship tolerate discomfort, but you are actually less willing to tolerate toxic or maladaptive behaviors from others. So they're just people are not willing to put up with bullshit from others. These guys are kind of amazing. They're like the enigma. They're not codependent, they're probably not passive aggressive, and they're not hostile. Secure attachment people actually are estimated to be about 50% of the population. So if secure attachment isn't you, it's okay, it's not me either. So we're gonna move on to the rest of us that are not securely attached. The avoidant types are kind of like the lone wolves. They say, I'm okay, but you're not okay or safe. And so what they do is they push away from relationships. They always have an exit strategy. They got one foot in the door and one foot out. They might actually crave a close connection and they will show up really strong at first, but they often push you away when that connection or that commitment gets too close for comfort. They may also do this when they are challenged emotionally in some way. Their instinct is kind of to retreat into isolation, and they do that as a protection mechanism, and they really don't want people to be too clingy or too close to them. I was trying to think of a good example of us, and the best example that I could come up with was Mr. Big in Sex in the City. Like he had an ambiguity, he had this intense self-reliance, and he was really emotionally distant or unavailable. The avoidant dismisses their partner in a way of kind of self-preservation, kind of like saying, you can't reject me if I reject you first. And what's really interesting about the avoidant types, and according to the theory and other researchers, they it they say that they do actually want that intimacy and connection. But for them, there's just so much risk. For the avoidant, it's likely that their caregivers were not showing up for them in the way that they needed. So that deeper emotional connection or intimacy is definitely harder for them because they learned that having dependence on others was really risky or dangerous. And so there's this protection of that self-reliance and freedom in this type. To them, they identify self as safe and others as like a big risk. What they learned in infancy is that their needs did not result in love and actually may have driven their caregivers away from them in some way. Now, the third type is the anxious style attachment. And these are the people that seek validation and reassurance from the relationship that they have in their lives. And they do this pretty much because they lack a knowing of their own self-worth. They doubt themselves. And for the most part, they're kind of reluctant to talk about certain issues in their relationship because they fear conflict and rejection, like cue the overthinking. So for many of us that are anxiously attached, and yeah, this is actually my attachment style, though I gotta give myself some credit because I have made a lot of progress. But I was actually the poster child for the anxious attachment. And I'm gonna tell you guys a story in a minute about how I absolutely humiliated myself during a breakup. But without the awareness, if you are anxiously attached, you are likely to jump into unhealthy or toxic relationships just because you want to be in a relationship, even if it's not good. When you're in a conflict with somebody that is anxiously attached, we want to fix it. We want to talk intensely about it. And this can be especially repelling if you are with somebody that is on that more avoidant attachment style. And honestly, there's a good chance that you are because the anxious types are attracted to the avoidance and vice versa, which is crazy because the anxious types are needy and we need this extra reassurance and we're extremely sensitive to re to rejection. So where the avoidance says, I'm okay, you're not okay, the anxious says, you're okay, I'm not okay. So in some sort of weird self-fulfilling prophecy, it's like the anxious and the avoidant fit each other like lock and key. And it becomes this very push-pull relationship. It's definitely not always healthy. And if you're like this, don't fault yourself. If you are described this way, you got here really honestly. It's just likely when you were an infant, your parents could have been overprotective or they maybe didn't let you self-soothe. You might have taken on the role of being the perfect kid, or maybe love in your life was conditional. And then there's the force style. And this is called disorganized attachment, which isn't very common. It's only about 5 to 10% of the population. But they are both anxious and avoidant. Relationships to them are not safe, but they do really crave connection at a very deep level. But to them, the risk is too great. They're damned if they do and they and they're damned if they don't. And so because of that, they live in the fantasy of relationships rather than the reality, and they avoid it. They're likely to be dependent on others, but they avoid the intimacy due to the fear of rejection. They probably have low self-esteem and they have an internal conflict that's going on, like love and hate. And they can be really unpredictable in their actions as well. I think that you should understand that research demonstrates that the goal of a relationship is not simply to be in one. Each of us in a relationship desires a sense of security as humans. And our bodies are wired for connection with others. I mean, beyond the psychological. Our biology demonstrates this to us. Connection to others in humans is as essential as water to the body. We live longer, we live with less disease and less health problems if we are in secure relationships, relationships where our needs are getting met. When we are stressed or we face difficulty, our body wants to move into this calm state or equilibrium. And this is actually our nervous system. Our nervous system kind of acts as this thermostat in our body, which has this set point. And this set point has been directly influenced from this attachment style that was set in infancy. So think the fight, flight, or balance. So if we are an anxious style, we become needy, we go towards, we want to fight, we want to fix. Whereas the avoidant wants to flee, he wants to run, he wants to get away. That's the flight. So you can see that how we handle stress is directly impacted by the blueprint that was set from this attachment style from infancy. When we feel seen and loved and understood, like when we're in a secure attachment style, our nervous system allows for our body to withstand stress in a healthy way. And there's not this strong need for fight or flight response. And I think that through our own awareness, we can respond in ways that foster a sense of security for ourselves. If we're in a relationship, we can respond to our partner's attachment style so that they feel security. And the goal is that we have a partner that'll do the same for you, because ultimately the goal is a secure connection. Now, what I really love about neurobiology and psychological research is that most of the time, our behavior, especially our most unfavorable behaviors, can be explained by a biological or an instinctual response. So if you are not one of the lucky ones who are secure, which is going to be about half of us, don't hold any shame. You did not choose this. But you can definitely take this information and you can learn from it. Like for me, in a way, if I can find a way for an explanation for my behavior that is rooted in science, in a weird way, it allows me to be off the hook for some of the dumb and embarrassing things that I've done in the past. When they study attachment styles, they actually found that our attachment style can accurately predict our feelings and actions after a breakup. So I'm going to tell you guys a really incredibly embarrassing story about myself just to illustrate my point. So don't hold this against me. This is a long time ago, but I already told you guys that I fall more into that anxious attachment style. It was my sophomore year of high school, and my boyfriend broke up with me. We'd been together for a year. And he was my first love. And I at the time was everything the anxious attachment style was. And I thought, as we were having this relationship, I thought everything was going amazing. But apparently it was not because, like in one phone call, it was completely over. Like just like that. And my 15-year-old brain could not even cope. To say that I was devastated is an absolute understatement. I felt like my world ended. Me, it practically had. I mean, how was I gonna go on? I mean, after all, I was 15. I knew we were gonna get married, and I pined over him. I called him all the time, humiliating myself like over and over again. I also drove by his house just trying to catch a glimpse of him. But no luck. My efforts were for nothing. It was over. So once the sanity returned, which took a lot longer than I would like to admit, the shame of my behavior and my absolute lack of dignity also took over. I wish I would have known that my breakup behavior was predictable based on my attachment style. And this isn't to say that our attachment style should give us permissions for acting like this or having ill behaviors. But without knowing why we feel this need to respond accordingly, I think we hold a lot of judgment towards ourselves. When this was all said and done, I did vow that I would never ever resort to that level of, and I am proud to say that I did change my ways. And looking back, I can say that I was completely ill-equipped for that level of brokenheartedness with my anxious attachment style. And as embarrassing as that was, and it is definitely not one of my fighter moments, trust me, it did give me important information about myself. There's this saying that goes that we do the best we can until we know better and then we do better. So that is the goal. The goal is to take the info and do better. So just like in the case of my friend who realized that his pattern, which is more avoidant styled, his pattern to withdraw when emotions got intense, he was able to recognize his natural response. But now he uses that awareness to stay and remain physically and emotionally engaged in conflict rather than isolating himself. Not only does it benefit him, but it benefits his partner to be able to feel safe. And that helps her regulate her nervous system. And she begins to learn that conflict doesn't really equate to somebody going away. And I think that this is vitally important for somebody that falls more into that anxious or that needy attachment style. His awareness and making that small change, he was able to help them move more towards that secure attachment. When we're unhappy or we feel unsafe in a relationship, our nervous system goes into this kind of high alert state, remember that fight or flight, because our attachment style is on high alert. What's going to happen? We're hyper-vigilant. And we have a harder time bringing our nervous system back into equilibrium, which is always the body's goal, because that provides us that calmness. So when our relationships are uneasy or unsteady or unhappy, we may feel a lot of anxiety and depression and fear, or our lack of worth is triggered, or we have this desire to run. You've heard me talk about this in previous podcasts about numbing out and escape those uncomfortable feelings like the fear and the sadness and the anxiety, all those things that I just mentioned. Well, just like when my friend was withdrawing during conflict, it was the discomfort of the emotions that he was feeling which was causing him to want to walk away. It's the equivalent of numbing out. And because these attachment styles are so ingrained in us, it's easy to find ways to rationalize our knee-jerk responses, like for me becoming a stalker or my friend storming off. But doing so does not serve us or our partners. And ultimately, it keeps us stuck in these old patterns that basically we were born with. When we're in relationships with other people, we seem to like to focus on what we like and what we don't like about that person. But I think if we can shift our perspective, we can gain so much insight about ourselves. And personally, as an anxiously attached person, I have always had a really hard time realizing that my primary relationship should be with myself first. So with For me, I have always devoted so much to the people that I cared about. But doing so, this is exactly how I lost myself. I became who they needed me to be. And then I was expected to show up in a way that wasn't really authentic to me anymore. And doing so was really exhausting and my needs were not getting met. But this wasn't my partner's fault at the time, because I didn't even know what my needs were. But I did feel taken advantage of, and I was actually using my partner to gain my own validation because being important to them by fulfilling their needs, in some way that gave me the validation. But what I really needed to do was I needed to give the validation to myself. So by flipping the script, seeing who I was in that relationship, I saw I was living in the shadow kind of by choice, and I was not the victim. And it was then that I could start to understand my biology and my psychology. And in that process, I became really honest with the choices, what worked for me and what didn't, my fears and my desires. It's a discovery about what's really being revealed within our own inner makeup based on the relationships that we have in our life. And I just want to say one last thing about all of this. When we're not working towards the secure attachment in our relationships, I think what ends up happening is we create these no-win situations for our partners and ourselves. We end up feeling like failures or we end up causing our partners to feel like failures. I think that we tend to face the same challenges over and over and over again in our relationship. If you've ever had a long-term relationship, you know this. It's usually like the same argument spun a different way. It's like wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. So if we can set aside what our partner isn't doing for us and we can ask instead, what is it that I don't want to see about myself? Like for me, I felt taken advantage of by attaining that validation by being everything to everyone. We might be able to see where we need to take our own accountability. If we can actually let go of trying to change our partners, like for me, I was the one that actually needed to change. I needed to set boundaries. We can look and see what we can do to honor ourselves. Now, that does not mean that we don't get our needs met or that we tolerate crappy behaviors. But with some clarity about ourselves, or if we become aware that we are using them for our own validation. And this validation can be used positively or negatively to enforce how we feel about ourselves. Like, for instance, if you are an avoidant, you might feel like your partner's needs are too demanding. But could it be your own psychology or your own knee-jerk response from your attachment style? Remember, like I'm okay, you're not okay, or if you're anxious, do you not state your needs and set boundaries because you feel like something's wrong with you, or maybe you're not worth those needs? Again, you're okay, I'm not okay. So through understanding attachment, we can also gain this awareness about our partners. And for couples that tap into the emotions of their partners by practicing empathy or understanding each other, we're able to create more attachment with each other. This can have profound impacts on our relationships. In that 80-year study I had done at Harvard on happiness and health, when they asked men, when you're upset or emotionally sad or worried about something that's not related to your wife, what do you do? Well, their answers predicted their overall emotional and physical health as well as their happiness. Men who answered sounded something like, she's my confident, I don't keep it to myself, she makes me feel seen and understood. I can tell her anything, I don't feel judged, they fared far better in their life than the men that answered, like, I keep it to myself, or I tough it out, or it's not a big deal, or she doesn't need to be bothered with it. When our partners can match our feelings, we feel seen. If our partner wants to jump in and fix it, but we're not looking for a solution, we don't always feel seen by our partner. Or if our partner dismisses or deflects our feelings as not a big deal, we definitely don't feel heard. We can feel unseen and kind of in the shadow of a relationship when our partners are not there with us, or if we're choosing to not bring them along with us. And I think that this is hard for a lot of us because it is difficult to sit in the discomfort of ourselves in our own emotions. But it's really hard to do that in the in the presence of others and their emotions. So for myself, I have had the tendency in the past to want to fix situations because I'm a really great problem solver, because I'm a peacemaker. So I like to see people happy. But when somebody is feeling distressed, I have learned that it is not my job to fix their problem, nor do they always have to be happy and I don't always have to cheer them up. We can't escape the challenges and the stress of life. But who we partner with really does matter. Our partners truly should be our better half, as it's their presence and the way that we relate to them that has this incredible power in our life and our health and our longitivity. So I want to just finish this and I want to leave you guys with this quote by author Jeff Brown. He says, the most significant relationships are the ones that bring us restoration, restoration of our hope, our aliveness, of our missing pieces. When we encounter them, we feel ourselves returned to wholeness. These are the relationships that we need. I love that quote. So my final thought is just because we find these special people that can meet us where we're at, who are willing to do the work, to build that security in the relationship, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy. It doesn't mean that there's not going to need to be change. This was a huge one. This is a big one, but I do hope that it helps. And learning this has been so impactful for my life. So I hope it's impactful for you. And of course, I want to encourage all of you to not be a stranger and reach out if you want to talk about it or if you have anything to share about your own personal stories, about your attachment styles.