Episode 19: The 8 Rules of Love Hit Hard in Midlife

This week on The Midlife Mess, I’m talking about love—but not just the romantic kind.

After revisiting 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty, I found myself reflecting on something that hit even harder this time around: society teaches us to place romantic love at the top of the pyramid, while often overlooking the many other forms of love that shape our lives just as deeply.

As someone navigating singleness in midlife, this conversation felt personal.

I talk honestly about the tension between wanting partnership while also learning to love yourself more deeply. About how singleness can feel peaceful one day and painful the next. About the life you pictured versus the life you have now—and how to stop treating your current chapter like a waiting room.

We also get into:

• Why self-love is more about boundaries than bubble baths
• How we confuse chemistry with compatibility
• The patterns midlife helps us finally recognize
• Why peace matters more than potential now
• The love of friendship, children, family, pets, and community
• Building a richly loved life—even before romance arrives

If you’re single, partnered, healing, hopeful, or somewhere in between, this one is for you.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

And welcome to the Midlife Mess podcast. My name is Laura Thompson. I am a single, divorced, working mom. I'm 42 years old. And I just bought a house with my seven-year-old parents. Welcome to my midlife mess. Hi, and welcome to this episode of the Midlife Mess podcast. I am so sorry that I haven't been showing up in your feed every Wednesday like I promised. I missed a couple weeks ago when it was my daughter's spring break week and we went on a little trip, and then, you know, my friend had a tragedy, and my real estate work has been busier lately, and there's all these like things, right? And that's all part of the midlife mess. We have a lot of balls in the air. And I've also started working with a psychiatrist recently. I have ADHD, and I plan to do an episode on that at some point. It's a topic that gets a lot of conversation now. You know, it's just a much more accepted, uh less shameful diagnosis than it used to be. And I'm very thankful for that. I kind of self-diagnosed when I was in college, and then I went to see a neurologist, and I think I tried a couple of prescriptions then, but for the last several years, I've just been taking this like one type of medication. And I read recently that there are some, you know, newer, more sophisticated options for medication. And so I've seen a psychiatrist a couple of times now, and just we're trying some new things. And I think what I'm doing right now is not exactly working. The last couple of weeks, I've just kind of felt out of body, like I'm just floating through life, not caring enough to be motivated about any certain thing. So I'm explaining all of that more for myself, probably, than for you guys who are busy, and I'm so thankful that you listen to this podcast. And I only know of one friend that uh that listens to it routinely and would and is caught up on the episodes to know whether or not I've skipped a week or two or am not publishing on Wednesday like I said I was going to. And so I'm saying all of these reasons slash excuses, probably more for myself than for you guys, who it doesn't affect very much. But I guess I just felt like I wanted to put that out there. So yeah, I was feeling a little less than motivated the last couple of weeks, but I did, I kind of just went back to my original list of ideas for this podcast. And one of them was the book by Jay Shetty called The Eight Rules of Love. He wrote this book a couple of years ago, and I I read it pretty early on in my single life, my midlife, single life, so probably four years ago or so. And it was one of those that really helped put it all in perspective for me. And so it was one of those that I had, you know, made notes about along the way that this would be a good podcast episode. You know, when in doubt, go back to your original thoughts and you'll probably find something there that's worth doing. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Love, right? Light, breezy, uncomplicated topic. So one of the big lessons, well, I think every rule in his book has a great deal of value. The one that made the most impact on me at the time and was a good reminder going back to that now, is that before you go looking for love, you need to learn to love yourself first. And that sounds simple enough, right? Except I think that it's one of those phrases people say all the time that sounds obvious until you really sit with it. Because loving yourself isn't just spa days and positive affirmations and buying the expensive moisturizer, although I think all those things are okay. But the kind of loving yourself that we really need to get to is on a deeper level that might mean being honest about what you're chasing, what you're avoiding, what you believe you need in order to feel complete, and whether you actually know how to be fully on your own side. So this book hit me in a very current way, because I am single, and singleness is definitely a strange place to be in midlife, especially when your kids are young. You know, most they say that the divorce rate is still 50%, but not in this age group, not with like my contemporaries. Once my daughter's in middle school and high school, I think I'll start feeling that a lot more, but that's not where I am right now. Some days singleness can feel peaceful and freeing and full of possibility. And other days, it feels like everyone else got paired off and I missed a meeting. And I have spent years telling friends, and I do genuinely believe this, that they need to focus on themselves, be their truest self, build a life they love, heal what needs healing, become grounded in who they are because that is when the right person is most likely to be drawn to you. And I've said those words with conviction. And I have a couple of success stories to point to, actually. And then I read this book and thought, oh, maybe I need to take my own advice. And don't we learn that in a lot of different ways? It's so much easier to coach other people into patience than it is to live it yourself. It's so much easier to tell someone else, just focus on you than it is to sit in your own quiet house and wonder when love is coming. That tension is real because yes, we should build lives and know ourselves deeply and not act like a relationship is the only prize. But also, humans are wired for connection. We are meant for relationship. We're meant to love and be loved, to witness and be witnessed, to share life with people who know us. So wanting partnership is not weakness. It's not desperation, it's not failure to be evolved. It's human. Maybe the real answer is learning how to deeply love yourself while still honestly wanting love from someone else. Maybe it's holding both. I tend to think that about anything that true intelligence is when you can hold two ideas at the same time that may be on opposite ends. Maybe it's saying, I can want partnership without believing it completes me. I can long for connection without abandoning myself. I can be whole now and still hope for more later. That to me feels more honest than pretending none of it matters. This book opened up a lot of thoughts for me around that, around romantic love, self-love, friendship love, family love, and why society teaches us to treat one kind of love as the only kind that counts. Let's get into it. Another one of the most impactful ideas I got from this book is that society has placed romantic love at the very top of the pyramid. We act like if you have a partner, you've made it. If someone chooses you romantically, you're validated. If you have anniversaries and couple photos and somebody bringing you soup when you're sick, then congratulations, you've reached the highest tier. And if you don't have that, then people start treating singleness like a waiting room. Like you're between real life chapters. Like your actual life will begin once someone arrives. And gosh, that's been so hard for me. It's hard to rationalize how your life actually is and how you pictured it being, right? I pictured my daughter having a sibling. I pictured her seeing me pregnant. I pictured, you know, her coming to the hospital to meet the baby for the first time, and seeing her hold the baby for the first time, and and seeing how she would be such a good big sister. And, you know, all of that would have happened in the past like five years because, you know, she's eight now, and it's just that ship has sailed. And as much as life with an eight-year-old is busy, there's constant activities and play dates, and and if there isn't something constantly happening, then you know, she's asking me, what are we gonna do now? So it's so busy, and that makes the time go by quickly, but also I just feel like, and sometimes the routine of that adds to this feeling, I guess, that that once I have a romantic partner again, then we'll have a family again. And then we can not start making memories again because I think I do a good job of making memories with my daughter, but there is a certain pause button that I feel. And so doing this talk, I hope that I can just reinforce to myself to reject that idea that just because your life doesn't look how you thought it would look, that that life is not paused. I'm not in between real life chapters. We're just gonna try to reject that. Because there are so many forms of love that shape us just as deeply and sometimes more deeply than romantic love ever will. The love between a mother and a child. And it's this book talks about you know, all different kinds of love. Like that person could be a soulmate type love in, you know, soulmate as in the way that is like in in our popular vocabulary. I certainly feel like I certainly feel like a like a soulmate connection with my daughter, like that I've just always known her, and that somehow she's always been there and now she's just here in tiny human form. I have a soulmate connection with my best friend. We've gone through times in our life of not having much in common and not talking that often, but anytime that we do talk, you know, after those long periods of time, it's just immediate connection again. And I always love when I'm in, you know, when she is around with other current friends, and they'll just be like subtle things that we say, or just that I can tell that I don't have to give her the backstory on, or just the comfort of a person that is there that that truly sees your heart, and you know, and it's like you can you can have a bad day. You can say something out of character or say something that's a little bitchy, and you know, and Melissa would just probably be like, Are you okay? What's wrong with you? What's what what's happening today? And some people don't some people don't get that, and I get that. And some people don't have such a strong connection with their child, and I get that, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. There's, you know, and that exists in like all forms of family and all forms of friends. The love of people who consistently care for you without needing anything back. So, I mean, some of the greatest love stories of our lives may never be romantic ones. And, you know, I think midlife teaches that in a way that youth certainly does not. You know, now we know that romance can be beautiful, it can be healing, it can be thrilling, but it can also be temporary and disappointing and confusing and kind of overrated when it's the wrong person, right? Meanwhile, a good friend can carry you through grief. A child can crack your heart open in ways you didn't know were possible. And we don't celebrate those loves the same way. We don't throw parties for 10 years of friendship, we don't post tribute captions for the friend who helped us survive divorce. Well, sometimes you do, and that's good. But, you know, it's just not, we don't, we don't mark anniversaries for the people who quietly, consistently loved us well. Maybe we should. You know, Facebook does us the the favor of, you know, telling us whenever we have a memory to look back on. I always laugh when Facebook tells me that I've been friends with my best friend Melissa for I think the last one that I saw was like 18 years or something, you know, and I always, and I think we have before reposted that or whatever and said, 18 years, ha. That's just the age of Facebook. That's not how long we've been friends. We've been friends at this point for more than 30 years. Definitely more than 30 years. So I think that's I give all those examples because if we only recognize romantic love, then we're overlooking how loved we already are. So let's come back to self-love, because that's where it gets real. When people say love yourself first, I used to hear that almost as like a step in a formula, like love yourself, heal yourself, then partner appears, like it's a recipe. I mean, obviously it works that way sometimes, but self-love is less glamorous and more practical than that. It's boundaries and not begging for clarity from inconsistent people. Self-love is noticing when you're shrinking to be chosen. Self-love is not abandoning your standards because you're lonely. Self-love is being honest about what hurts, is keeping promises to yourself. Self-love is letting yourself want more. I do think that I've made big improvements in this category ever since I haven't really been like trying to date. I think I've said before, but when people ask me, Am I dating? I say passively, because if someone wants to step up to the plate, then maybe, you know. But I'm not I'm not really on the apps anymore. And I mean, yeah, when I'm like gonna go out with my friends, I want to look nice, but I don't know. I mean, women don't dress for men anyway, right? Women dress for other women, so but I can I can just definitely feel that I kind of drew a line in the sand for myself and said I don't need to be validated in this way of having a man choose me anymore. Because when it's a bunch of the wrong men choosing you, that doesn't really even validate you as much as you need, you know? But then the other way that so on the other side of that line in the sand is like after you've been single for a little while, you you know, there's so much space to let in the thoughts of am I too much? Am I too independent, too picky, too old, too guarded? Did I miss my chance? And what I need to learn, and what I'm here to say today, is that's where self-love matters most. Because self-love says, no, your value is not on trial because your relationship status changed. Self-love says, you are not late, your life is happening now. Self-love says, don't let longing become self-rejection. Wanting love is natural, but sometimes when it doesn't happen on our timeline, we turn against ourselves. We make it mean something is wrong with us. And that's where the real heartbreak can begin. Another idea this book made me think about is how often we confuse chemistry with compatibility. I mean, younger me definitely thought sparks were everything. Butterflies, amazing. Obsessive thoughts, must be destiny. But sometimes those butterflies are just anxiety. And, you know, like why would you need obsessive thoughts if someone was being consistent with you? Compatibility is communication, consistency, shared values, mutual effort, emotional maturity. I used to think that intensity met depth. I specifically remember thinking with my first husband that, you know, it's like I feel like some couples could say, like, we don't fight, and we fought. And I all I like spun that in my head to be a good thing. That, like, well, at least we're not repressing our feelings and that we're, you know, communicating, but we didn't fight in a healthy way. And then it's funny, I've I have had the other end of that spectrum where. With my second husband, we didn't fight. And we would, I would tell people that. You know, I used to think that that people that didn't fight was, you know, that that was kind of sus. And it is. It is. I see for my future that I wouldn't call I wouldn't say that we fight, but that we're not afraid to have hard conversations. That was what didn't happen in my second marriage. He just always agreed with me and then went and did whatever he wanted to do anyway. That didn't end well. So the third chapter of this book that I'll talk about today is that another lesson that I think is particularly interesting to digest in midlife because you can look back and see patterns. You know, I mean, we're not starting from scratch here. We are starting from experience. We can see those patterns. We may chase unavailable people because it feels familiar. We may overgive because being needed once felt like being loved. We may tolerate confusion because chaos was normalized somewhere along the way. We may keep trying to earn love instead of receiving it. And that's hard to admit. But it's powerful to notice, and you need some space to let your mind calm enough to look back and see these patterns. But once you can name it, you don't have to keep doing it. You can choose differently. You can pause sooner. You can leave sooner. You can ask better questions. Trust your actions more than words. You can stop romanticizing what keeps hurting you. That is healing. And healing, unfortunately, is less cinematic than heartbreak. Healing often looks like boredom. It looks like saying no. It looks like not texting back the person who thrives on confusion or just stokes your fire. It looks like sitting with loneliness instead of running back to the wrong thing. And that wrong thing may be a person, or it might be just the pursuit of a person. So I want to say, books about love can sometimes sound very neat and tidy and linear. Do these steps, become whole, meet person, live happily ever after. We know real life is messier than that. Timing matters, kids matter, exes matter, trauma matters, money, schedules, burnouts, geography. Sometimes two good people meet at the wrong time. And sometimes someone is kind but not capable. Sometimes and still isn't enough. And sometimes you need peace more than potential. That's real life. And I think one of the gifts of midlife is that while it can humble you, it can also give the most clarity. Clarity that lets you clearly see what matters. Peace, consistency, kindness, accountability, emotional regulation. At this point, we're not, you know, getting into a relationship for potential, right? If you haven't got some results to show at this point, then, you know, we're past. Your ship has sailed, sir. No more, you know, you're just not going to suffer fools. You're not gonna waste time decoding people. You know, I want honesty and I want it out there. You know, I've said before that I really don't regret anything in my life. I am just thankful for the clarity. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned about myself is that I am pretty susceptible to gestures, words. And so I fall fast. And I'm really thankful that for the last couple of years, I think, you know, God, the universe, all the things have kept me alone romantically, but that also has saved me a lot of heartache that I see my friends go through. And I'm really thankful for that. I would much rather wait for the right person than get my hopes up ten times and be let down. So if you're single, remember that. And, you know, live with both of the things. Remain open without becoming available for nonsense. And, you know, build your full life now, not later. And appreciate every kind of love that already exists around you. Maybe the goal of life is not just one romantic love story. Maybe the goal is more like a richly loved life that includes friendship and family and children and community and purpose and pets. I mean, I know I've had a soul dog, and just that romantic love, we welcome it, but it's not the only crown jewel. It's just a beautiful part of a bigger picture. So if you're single right now, like me, maybe this is your reminder that singleness is not a deficiency, it's a season, it is a reality. It's sometimes painful, sometimes peaceful, often both. And it doesn't erase or define your worth. And if you're partnered, maybe this is your reminder to cherish all the loves in your life, not just the romantic one. Tell your friends you love them. Thank the people that show up, celebrate the quiet loves. So I hope you guys will read Jay Shetty's book. I've really enjoyed revisiting the topics that he covers this week as I looked back on it. And I know I say at the end in uh in the outro that, you know, please share and comment and all the things, but I just especially wanted to say thank you to everyone that consistently listens and thank you if this is the first episode that you're listening to. You know, go back and start from the beginning, and all the things will probably make a little more sense. So if you are listening and you appreciated my take on life and love, please share this episode and and the podcast with someone that you think would like my perspective as well, because it just really fuels me. And that's why I'm doing it. This is I'm trying to look at this as just my creative outlet, but I also want to just drive the conversation about this and provide a place for people that they feel seen and I want that to grow. So grow with me. Alright. Thanks, guys, and I will see you next time. I hope I'll get back into my schedule of showing up every week on Wednesdays, but for now, I am just gonna promise that I will show up again. Thanks. Bye guys. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Midlife Mess. If something in this episode resonated with you, please share with your family and friends and subscribe so you won't miss new episodes every Wednesday. Please also go to my website, themidlifemass.com, where you can connect with me and find out more about how you can support the show and get some cool discount. And of course, you can follow along on Facebook and Instagram at the midlife mess odd. And please rate and review the show on your streaming platform of choice. Thank you guys so much. That'll be your best man. I'm gonna