Four Not So Easy Steps to Finding the Relationship You Always Wanted
What’s a good relationship?
Too many of us don’t know because we’ve never seen one in our entire life.
That’s right, never.
Instead of happy, healthy relationships filled with laughter and intimacy, we see broken relationships in our parents, families, our friend’s families and everywhere else we look. We certainly don’t see deep intimacy in the movies or on streaming TV.
In real life, we almost never experience couples who stay up all night talking just because they love spending time together. We don’t see people laughing all the time and supporting each other and lifting each other up. We rarely see people who can’t wait for their partner and best friend to come home every day.
Passionate sex lives? Cooking together? Taking walks and holding hands? Comforting each other?
Almost never.
Instead, all too often, we see sex lives that collapse after the first six months. We see cold and distant relationships; people tearing into each other; fiery emotional storms.; substance abuse; cheating; sadness. We see two people who stay together because they don’t have hope for anything better.
Growing up I saw fathers who worked all day so they didn’t have to spend time with their families. I saw mothers juggling jobs and kids, while they wondered when their husbands were coming home and resenting them for their “freedom.” I saw families that ate dinner together but not much else. They didn’t laugh and talk about anything that really matters.
I spent most of my life in relationships like this. My ex-wife and I sometimes wouldn’t talk for days and we hadn’t slept together in years. She wanted to do something more with her life but instead she’d spent all her time focusing on my dreams and sacrificing her own, leaving her bitter and resentful. We’d grown distant and didn’t have much in common anymore.
Meanwhile, I was overweight and drinking too much. I was angry all the time and I didn’t know why or how to stop. I had a lot of external success but inside I was a storm of doubt, depression, and confusion. I’d lost hope but I kept going.
I covered it up by spending all my time alone or running my businesses, anything so I didn’t have to spend time with her. When we did spend time together we had almost nothing to talk about because we’d stopped sharing most of our interests years ago. But we kept going because we loved each other.
It may seem strange to say I loved her because we’re divorced now but I loved her deeply. I loved her as best as I knew how. I want her to thrive the rest of her life and fall in love with the right person. But our relationship was like drifting through a gray fog. We couldn’t see what the other one wanted and couldn’t give it to each other no matter how hard we tried.
Before and after my wife, I dated fiery, passionate women. We had incredible, incandescent sex but no healthy emotional connections. All those relationships were highly combustible, and set to explode at any time. We yelled and screamed and wounded each other every chance we got. In the end, I was simply swapping one extreme for another.
Most folks say they want a happy, healthy relationship but the truth is they don’t.
What they really want is to suffer in familiar ways.
But we don’t call it suffering. We call it love.
We ingest all the pain we experience and twist it around and call it love because we’ve never seen the real thing. We learned the wrong pattern. It’s as if we looked up at the sky as kids and said, what’s that color? Someone told us red. Now everywhere we look we think blue is red and never know why we’re unhappy.
Today, I’m in a totally different kind of relationship with a woman who makes me happy every single day and who I love to make happy every day too. We’ve spent nearly every second of the past year together in the crazy world of 2020 and we’ve fought three or four times for a total of about an hour. We make passionate love, laugh together, lift each other up, encourage each other and often stay up talking in bed, even after having spent the whole day together.
What’s the difference? How did I get there?
How did I spend my entire life in exactly the wrong kind of relationships only to turn it around and find the right one?
Step One — Know There’s Something Better Out There
The first step is you’ve got to know there’s something better.
If you don’t know there’s something better out there or you don’t believe it, you’ll stay right where you are and never change.
But thinking there’s something better and believing it are two very different things. We might think there’s something better but we don’t really believe it’s possible. Why? Because when you’ve only seen broken love your whole life, how do you even know what to look for?
How do you know what real love looks like, when you’ve never seen or experienced it anywhere, ever?
The answer is you don’t. It’s a leap of faith.
When I shed my unhealthy relationships, I didn’t know for sure there was something better because I had nothing to go on. What I did know is I’d had enough. I refused to accept any more people who took advantage of me or who made me feel small or worthless. I knew I didn’t want broken, chaotic relationships anymore so they either fell away or I cut them loose.
From then on, I was determined to spend as much time alone as possible until I found a relationship that made me and the person I was with happy every single day. That may sound lonely and at times it was lonely but often it was fun and exciting too. Deciding to be alone doesn’t mean you have to sit in your room by yourself all day, crying your eyes out.
It means getting out there. Dating. Meeting people. Talking to people. Seeing what happens. In 2020, that proved hard for a lot of people, but the world will open up again in 2021 and people will be back to spending time in cafes and riding bikes and going to the park.
Get out there. Be a part of life. Talk to people. Make friends. Don’t bother asking people out, just talk and have fun. It doesn’t need to be this big thing, “Will you go out with me?” That’s too much pressure. I just hung out with people and if I was interested after hanging out that first time, I started to let them know.
After finally shedding my old relationships I went on dozens of dates. Most of them I didn’t even call dates. We were just talking and having fun. I knew I found the women attractive but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to like them, to like talking with them, and to love listening to what they had to say. It wasn’t enough just to find them breathtaking. I wanted to actually enjoy my time with them.
Meet up with people and see where it goes. Don’t worry about it not working out because there are billions of people in the world. A lot of things won’t work out. I went on some truly horrible dates. I went on some boring ones. But I went on a lot of great ones too.
Whatever you do, move on as fast as possible when things don’t feel right or aren’t working out.
To find the right relationships you’ve got to clear the field. If you’re hanging on to old relationships, or sticking around with someone because you’re afraid to be alone, there’s no room for anyone else to come into your life.
The worst thing I’ve ever done is hang on to bad relationships because I wasn’t sure anything else would come along. I wasn’t sure I was good enough or that I deserved it. That’s classic opportunity cost. You try to hold onto something you know because it’s not all that bad and you end up missing out on the one thing you really wanted all along. It’s like eating McDonald’s your whole life because at least you know how it tastes, but then you never get to try a sizzling, pan-seared steak.
I had one relationship that I kept going back to after we broke up over and over. There was no chance to really start with someone else until that relationship imploded. Don’t keep old relationships on the line. Cut the line and start fresh.
You have to let go and “trust fall” into life to find what you really want. There’s no other way. If you’re hanging onto the wrong relationship there’s no room in there for anyone else to come into your life. I wasted decades of my life I’ll never get back. Still, I count myself lucky because some people never take a chance.
Too often we’re taught to persevere through all hardship, no matter what happens to us. Suffer. Struggle. Keep going. Keep pushing.
The answer is the exact opposite.
You’ve got to cut your losses and let your winners run.
The best thing you can do is get out of bad relationships as early as possible. The faster you can cut ties with the wrong person the sooner you can get back to finding the right person.
But if you managed to do what I did and stay in many of your wrong relationships way too long, there’s still hope. Until you’re dead, it’s not over. You can still shake off that sunken cost fallacy and get the hell out of that miserable relationship and start over. Sunken cost fallacy is when we hang onto the wrong thing because we already put in the time or money to get it. We know it’s wrong but we do it anyway.
Of course, the longer you’ve been in a relationship the harder it gets to leave it. Getting divorced for me wasn’t easy. It cost me a ton of money, incredible mental and emotional pain and a year of my life dealing with nasty lawyers. It cost me three cats that I loved more than most people.
And it was still worth it.
If I could go back and tell myself two things during that divorce, it would be this:
- You should have trusted your instinct and left a lot earlier.
- It will all be worth it, because better late than never.
Sticking through the relationship when I wasn’t happy didn’t make me noble or heroic. It just made me miserable and made me miss out on my full potential. So even if you’ve made mistakes, find the will to move on, no matter how long it’s been. It’s not getting any better and it never will.
Of course, only you can really know if a relationship is worth keeping or leaving. Amazing relationships can hit a hard patch, through no fault of their own. Maybe something tragic happens or someone loses their job. I’m not saying that every time something goes wrong, or your partner puts on a little weight, or you don’t like their view on classic rock that you should cut and run. But I am saying if you’re feeling sad and depressed and miserable constantly, it’s time to start taking a hard look at that relationship. I’m saying if you’re pissed off all the time, there’s a reason.
Depression is a warning sign. It doesn’t just come from nowhere.
It’s there to say you’re on the wrong track and there’s still time to get off the wrong train and onto the right one.
Step Two — Figure Out What Something Better Even Means in the First Place
What exactly is better though?
That’s a great question.
What does a good relationship really look like anyway? What are you trying to get to? What’s the difference between that and every other relationship you’ve seen or experienced in your life?
It boils down to four key traits:
- No more mental chess
- Connecting naturally and easily
- Passion
- Little to no fighting
No More Mental Chess
How many times have you been in a relationship where you’re constantly thinking about what to say or do next?
If I say this will she get mad at me? Am I moving too fast? Does he like me as much as I like him? Why hasn’t he called? Should I call now or will she think I’m trying too hard now? If I don’t say this will he scream at me? Should I wait three days before I try again?
Everything you do or say is a potential mine field. Be careful where you step or it could blow up in your face.
I had a friend who was always worrying about the moves she was making with her boyfriend. Am I moving too fast? Did I say too much? Does he really like me? Should I try to be more open? Less open?
Eventually her boyfriend ghosted her. He just stopped calling or texting after six months of dating. She had no idea why and she spent days trying to figure out what she said or did wrong. She talked about it with her friends and family and couldn’t figure it out.
Here’s the thing, my friend didn’t do anything wrong. It was just another example of the same thing. She was with the wrong person, a person she had to constantly wonder about and think about and play mind games with all the time.
She asked me how I know if I’m moving too fast or too slow with my current partner?
I told her, I never have to think about it.
My partner and I dated and it was the exact right speed. We moved in together and questioned it for half a day before agreeing it was the right thing. In the right relationship those mental calculations disappear almost completely. You don’t have to try to control your thoughts, or run through pros and cons, or strategize and wonder if it’s the right thing to do. Those thoughts simply don’t enter your mind anymore.
You can recognize the right person by how they make you feel.
If your significant other consistently makes you stressed and afraid, or makes you feel worthless, or you constantly wonder what they’re thinking, or what to do or say next, then you should pay very close attention to that feeling because it’s a bright red warning sign that’s super easy to miss.
I know the old mantra that says “nobody can make you feel anything, you choose how you feel,” but it’s mostly nonsense. You can mentally choose to not feel angry but as soon as your partner starts accusing you of things unfairly and yelling at you, your face goes red hot and it’s hard to back down. We feel the rush and we’re ready for war. It’s not impossible to wrangle those terrible feeling under control, but who wants to live a life where you’re constantly having to keep your feelings in check because the other person is attacking you?
The truth is people have a massive effect on how we feel. Who you surround yourself with makes all the difference in the world.
Your partner is the person you spend the most time with in life. If you have to play emotional chess and think strategically about every other word that comes out of your mouth you’re in the wrong relationship. It’s as simple as that and it’s time to move on.
You’re not looking for the relationship where you get better at mental strategy and controlling yourself. That’s still mental chess.
The right relationship is the end of mental chess and guess work.
Connecting the Way You Want to Connect
The right partner always expresses love in the way you’re wired to understand it.
Some people express love through action, some through words, some through touch, some in a lot of different ways in a hybrid of all of those approaches. But yours needs to match your partner’s.
In pop terms people call this a “love language.”
My partner and I never knew why we always felt like we were starving for affection in past relationships. It was because we weren’t receiving love the way we were wired to understand it.
What do I mean by that?
The other night I couldn’t sleep.
I lay awake, my mind racing and filled with fear about the world and things going wrong in my life. I worried about money, and the pandemic, and whether I was really a success or just a fraud. It was all the useless chatter of fear and anxiety that sometimes flips on like a loud radio at a neighbor’s apartment in the middle of the night. It won’t shut off and you can’t go to sleep. I lay awake for hours trying to get the rational part of my brain to take control of the mental wheel.
But nothing worked.
At one point, she woke up, realized I was tossing and turning and cradled me close. I could feel her warmth and her calming connection to me at all levels. In no time, my brain started to downshift and I felt my eyelids getting heavy and suddenly I drifted off into a soft and soundless sleep.
Here’s the funniest thing about that story. Before we got together, my partner and I both hated too much snuggling.
We would have sex with people in the past and then we wanted to be on our own side of the bed as quickly as possible. Snuggling too long left us uncomfortable. In no time we were secretly wondering how long we had to do it and feeling our arm cramp and wanting to just get to sleep.
At the same time, both of us felt badly unloved in our past relationships and we didn’t know why. My partner and I both craved the intimacy of touch but we could never seem to give or receive it properly.
We both ended up with people again and again who recoiled after too much physical closeness or who outright told us they hated too much of that kind of thing. I had a girlfriend who told me “I know you want to kiss and hold hands and all that shit but I don’t like that kind of crap.”
But when my current partner and I got together, we found ourselves laughing and touching all the time. It was organic and easy. There wasn’t any doubt. We felt comfortable with the laughing, teasing, hugging and kissing. Suddenly we were snuggling and lying in bed together for hours and even falling asleep together in each other arms, something that never happened before to either of us.
The reasons were simple. We’d both found someone who expressed love through touch and now neither of us were afraid to show it. We had a natural and easy attraction to each other and it showed all the time in the way both of our unconscious minds desperately wanted to express it.
There’s really no way to know ahead of time whether the person you’re dating expresses love the way you do. You can ask about it but you probably won’t get a good answer. Sometimes people read about love languages and they pick one that sounds good to them but it doesn’t make it true.
The only way to know for sure is with time.
Pay attention to the signs along the way as your relationship develops.
If you’re feeling lonely in love or feeling distant from your partner constantly or not wanting to be near them, it’s almost certainly because they’re not the right person for you. Too often we bury these feelings or reason them away. We try to reason our way through them but it can’t be done. You can’t reason your way to feeling differently.
Stop burying your doubts. They’re a warning.
The way you feel is the test. Feelings are binary and they don’t change by force of will.
Lust and Desire
Way too often, passion dies too fast in relationships.
Our sex life starts off strong and slowly withers down to nothing.
Worse, we pick a partner we’re not really physically attracted too. In today’s world that’s even seen as something noble, to love someone for their mind and spirit, but chemical attraction matters too. A lot.
It doesn’t mean your partner has to look like an underwear model or a fashion icon. All that matters is you fill up with love and lust as you look at each across the table.
I call the things that trigger our wildest desires: “clickers.” Those are the tiny little details that get you red hot fast. Clickers separate someone who’s generically attractive to you at a mental level with someone who your body screams out for as you get closer and closer to them.
It might be the curve of someone’s upper lip, or dimples, their style of dress, or their penchant for changing their hair color all the time, or the dazzling color of your lover’s eyes. It could be freckles, or curly hair, or beards, a willowy physique, or a broad chest. Usually it’s something that’s hard to explain and unconscious.
What matters is that your lover ignites you.
And you want your partner to feel the same powerful magnetism to you too. It can’t be one way or it just won’t work. It’s no fun to be the one person who’s always stoking the fire. A one-way attraction quickly burns out as your lover starts to lose interest in you that was never really there in the first place. Suddenly, you’re frustrated and losing hope as an essential part of you slowly dies.
My ex-wife and I loved each other but we never had a strong physical attraction in either direction. It shouldn’t have been a surprise when our sex life withered and then disappeared altogether late in our relationship. But it was a surprise because we were both under the illusion that the physical didn’t matter in love. The mind and spirit matter but so does physical attraction. You can’t will your way to physical attraction and trying will only make you miserable.
Of course, if your relationship is only built on the physical than it has no chance of surviving over the long haul. That’s obvious.
There’s also no question that a person’s mind and spirit are more important than their physical form as a relationship progresses over time. If you’ve got nothing to talk about as you both get older and your physical body degenerates, it’s not going to work out. Of all the things about us that change with time, our youthful good looks fade the fastest so there better be something else there.
But just because physical attraction is only one aspect of a relationship, doesn’t mean it’s not important.
A powerful attraction to another person gives a big boost to your time together. It’s like having a best friend you can make love to and there’s nothing like it. Great sex releases a flurry of happy chemicals in the body and mind that no drug cocktail on the market, legal or illegal, can ever touch. There’s nothing like looking into the eyes of someone you’re deeply in love with as your bodies pulse together to release all the pain and stress of everyday life.
Your attraction and passion will change with time. That’s natural and organic, but the fuel of deep physical attraction helps you build the foundation of a relationship that really lasts, as long as it’s supported by the mind and spirit too.
Little to No Fighting
My partner and I had our first fight in months the other day.
It lasted five minutes.
She got testy over how slow I was making dinner and went into “producer” mode to try to make it go faster. I don’t respond well to orders from anyone and let her know I didn’t need any damn help cooking dinner. It got heated for a minute as the anger caught us in a loop and we went on the attack.
We went back and forth for a few minutes, getting hot and heated.
And then we just stopped. We broke the loop.
I backed down and she backed down. Neither of us like saying things we regret later. We don’t let ourselves get too caught up in the spiral of rage. Anger has its own momentum and we rarely feel it strongly towards each other. We’re both willing to back down. That’s the key.
When two people feel the need to win at all costs, the result is disaster.
I’ve been there. I lived through multiple relationships where every fight turned into a war. Every fight brought the claws out. Every fight brought out the old laundry list of past sins. You did this. You always do that. You never think of me. Remember when you left me standing in the rain ten years ago!
It was ridiculous. And it was my fault and my old lover’s faults in equal parts.
It’s not enough for you to learn to back down. You need a partner who’s learned it too.
If one person is a fire storm it won’t matter if you know how to deescalate. If you live in a firestorm you’re going to get burned. You need two people who back down and see the other person’s perspective as quickly as possible.
I dated several super fiery women who sparked tremendous passion in me, but our days ended in screaming matches as often as they ended in explosive orgasms. There’s no way to play with fire and not get burned. Those hedonistic affairs were filled with great and terrible stories, tremendous highs and tremendous lows. They were exciting, ecstatic adventures but in the end they were better seen as addictions, not love.
Addictive relationships are a constant war. Fiery, passionate relationships are a war. And nobody ever backs down in a war. It’s all about being the alpha in relationships like that, a constant push-pull of submission and domination instead of a tender exchange between two people.
And once the shooting starts in a war, it’s hard to stop. There’s too much resentment, too much pain. It’s a vicious cycle. You say things you regret and you can’t them take back. They pile up and get dredged up again and again. The more bloodshed, the more both sides want payback and it just keeps escalating until both sides are exhausted and the bad blood runs so deep that it’s a river.
When I think back to what ruined so many of my relationships it was the perpetual war. It was digging up the past over and over. Nothing could ever stay buried. Nothing could ever rest and that just left us both hating each other. Eventually you have so many emotional wounds and scars that they never heal.
You don’t want that relationship. You want a relationship where you rarely fight.
You want one where you have open discussions about things that matter and where you’re both quick to back down and stop the dark spiral of rage and resentment when things get heated.
You want someone who understands that winning at all costs means losing.
Step Three — Reflections of You
Now that you know the four keys to a good relationship you’re probably wondering how do you find one? The first step is answering the most important question in life.
What do you want?
It’s a simple question. Most people don’t have an answer.
They think they do, but they really don’t because they’ve never slowed down long enough to ask. They did some quick, unconscious thought about what they want that’s mostly generic nonsense like this: I want someone good looking, funny, “down to Earth” (whatever the hell that even means) and some other bullet point stand-ins for real reflection.
But what kind of people do you really want in your life?
Smart? What kind of smart? Great with numbers? Strategic? An encyclopedic knowledge of Vampire romance novels?
Do they like to dance and discover new things? Are they upbeat and happy? Pranksters? Full of dry humor and sarcasm? Quick with a blue joke or to pour a drink? More reserved and careful?
How do they dress? Are they good cooks, or great at eating out, or great at eating you out?
Do they love jazz crooners from the 1930s or punk bands from the 70s? Are they kind? Slow to anger? Do they like odd gifts from second hand stores?
Make a list. Write it all out in exhaustive detail. Everything you’ve ever wanted, no matter how big or how small. Be as specific as possible.
There are a million variations of people and they’re all out there. Our pool of potential lovers and friends is vaster and wider than ever before in history. We can meet people in real life and online with dating apps that have 100s of millions of people. In the past you’d be lucky to have a few dozen people to choose from in your home town or at the local church gathering.
If I can think of anything that really made a difference in finding the right partner, it was finally stepping back after yet another bad breakup and taking time to reflect.
What kind of person did I want in my life? What didn’t I want in my life? What flaws would I accept? What were my flaws and could I do anything about them?
When I finally got determined to find the right person for me, I wrote down everything that I wanted in a partner, everything from the way she sounded, to what she believed, to the way she thought about the world. I stumbled across that post by chance while searching for something else recently and I was amazed that my current partner matches 95% of it and the other 5% seemed totally irrelevant and surface-y upon further reflection.
The key to life is understanding what you want and then asking for it.
But there’s a second key. It’s making the hard changes in yourself first.
Step Four — Leveling Up Your Own Character
I wasn’t just spending time thinking about what I could get from a partner, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could give. To find someone amazing you have to make yourself someone amazing too. You can’t expect to exchange gold for sawdust.
That doesn’t mean you have to turn yourself into a super model or become the richest person on Earth. But it does mean becoming the person you imagined yourself to be, whether that’s a great piano player, or someone who’s emotionally mature and balanced, or a person who’s fearless about improv comedy, or a tremendous ice skater who can skate backwards, or a mixer of fine drinks, a fantastic cook who can look in a fridge and make something incredible out of whatever is in there, or a world traveler got lost in lands near and far.
Late in my marriage and after my marriage I spent a lot of time working on myself. Some of the work I could do while I was still in a relationship, but some of that work I couldn’t start until I was out of a relationship. The point is to start that work now. It’s never the wrong time to work on yourself.
But what does that even mean, work on yourself?
I can tell you it’s got nothing to do with hustle culture bullshit and working 100 hour weeks and buying $3000 jackets and handbags.
It means spending time on the things that I loved, reading, thinking, taking walks, spending time with friends, writing and really working through what kind of person would make me proud to look in the mirror?
I knew I wanted to travel more, write great articles and books, learn to cook and more. I wanted to shed my anger and sadness and live life joyously most of the time. I wanted to stop feeling depressed and hopeless half the time. I did all that and more. Slowly but surely, I did it.
Sometimes, I did it well, sometimes I made more mistakes and screwed my life up worse, but I was always moving forward, rounding the spiral staircase towards becoming the person I wanted to be, not a “better” person, but someone who was proud of himself.
Along the way, I wrote a book, called Mastering Depression and Living the Life You Were Meant to Live, about the journey to change my life. I hope it helps others change their lives too. The good news is we can change our life. I did it and you can too.
I went out with a friend the other day and I was talking about my partner, who she hadn’t met yet. After a few minutes she said, “I can’t wait to meet the woman who changed your life.”
I said, “No, that’s not the way it works. I changed my life and she changed her life and then we found each other. That’s the way it works and it never works the other way around.”
If you want to find the person of your dreams, first make yourself the person of your own dreams.
Then one day you’ll look up and see the smiling face in the crowd who sets your heart on fire.
And you’ll realize you couldn’t see that person before because you hadn’t yet transformed into the person you were always meant to be.
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I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster, public speaker. My upcoming book, Mastering Depression and Living the Life You Were Meant to Live tells the story of how I battle depression and still live a big, bold and beautiful life that I’m proud of every day.
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