Deeply Connected Relationships - Gay Hendricks

I wanted to explain, actually before we got started, why I'm so interested in this stuff now, and it maybe sort of frames it in the broader context of what I've been interested in over the last sort of three or four years. So, I got kind of interested in mating dynamics, um, probably about four years ago or so, and I started off where lots of people do, which is macro trends, so, uh, rates of coupling, birth rates, uh, sat- levels of satisfaction, uh, what's happening socioeconomically, how many people are single, so on and so forth. It's these sort of big trends, right? It's the big stuff that's happening up top. And as soon as you've found out that, wow, there's some real changes going on here and it seems like we're in a, uh, a- a turbulent time, you then ask, "Okay, well, what are the sort of underlying principles that drive human attraction?" And that led me down the path of evolutionary psychology. So, what are we looking at from a- a- a- an adaptive standpoint? We're looking at hypergamy and mate guarding and jealousy and male parental uncertainty and intrasexual competition and kind of that suite of things, which I guess are kind of some of our psychological source code. And then the next stage that I went on to was, okay, well, modern culture. How is the macro trend and the underlying sort of ancestral programming, how is that... What- what's happening in the modern world, changes that have happened that have sort of led us to some of this- this turbulence maybe occurring? So you're talking about sexual revolution and- and the creation of the pill and dating apps and- and technology and distraction and so on and so forth. And all of that was really interesting, and it kind of starts to form a- a perspective, right, about the world. But what I've sort of... This is my current working theory. I... All of that stuff's very interesting, but every person's actual day-to-day, the mechanism with which they interact with their relationship, is none of those things, right? They are all very highly contributing background noise. The mechanism that everybody's experience of their relationship is mediated through is how they relate. It is the way that they show up. It's their emotional state when there is a disagreement. It's how they communicate with their partner. It's whether they have unspoken expectations and premeditated resentments. So, for all of this stuff, I'm kind of like the worst Sherlock Holmes in history, looking around at all of these different places. "Oh, it's the trends. Oh, it's the ancestral programming. Oh, it might be the sexual revolution and what's happening with dating apps." But ultimately, everybody's experience of their relationship is how they show up, how consciously they are, what the sort of commitments and agreements are that they make. Like, what- what are the nuts and bolts and the- the mechanism through which their entire relationship is mediated? And, um, that has sort of led me to get interested in your work, in, uh, people like Stan Tatkin as well, uh, in an attempt to try and understand the actual mechanism of relating. And I just thought that might be, uh, a- a- an interesting little story arc to give you some- some background and lore to- to me and how I arrived at this stuff.