This is hands down the best relationship book I have ever read! I have enjoyed John Kim’s other books, but this one is written along with his girlfriend, Vanessa Bennett. The view points are spot on and that makes sense because they are both therapists. 

We have learned that every relationship is different and have both learned and grown through many other failed relationships and are committed to putting that learning to work in our relationship with each other. 

It doesn’t matter what your relationship structure is or what it looks like from the outside. It’s more about how you want it to feel on the inside. 

Not being taught how to have healthy relationships, not knowing about attachment styles and their impact on relationships, having no clue about different love languages, codependency, and the importance of not repeating patterns- no one taught us many of these things. No one taught us that the lightning in the bottle may actually be dysfunction, not “chemistry”. We never learn how to create a safe space, communicate effectively, and fight without fighting. If we haven’t done any real work on ourselves, then we will continue to be in the nightmare. 

Many of us chased the dream instead of examining the blueprint underneath it. We loved hard and recklessly and learned that intensity and passion aren’t enough to build and sustain a relationship. We lost ourselves, but it wasn’t our fault. No one taught us how to have healthy relationships. We learned like everyone else: through what we saw growing up- advertising, movies- and through lots of pain. Through stuffing feelings down. Reacting instead of responding. Not having healthy boundaries or building a strong sense of self. Not knowing how to communicate. Not having the ability to take ownership or create safe spaces. Seeking validation and approval. 

We just don’t see marriage as something necessary at this stage of our lives. For both of us, marriage in the past felt like an arbitrary contract. One in which “I am committed to you forever and you are committed to me” didn’t mean “I’m going to grow, take care of myself, take responsibility, heal my old wounds, and work to build and foster something thriving and sustainable with you” Or marriage was something that the other person felt was what we “had” to do because it’s what everyone else did, or because it was what would make the other person feel that we were really committing to them and that it would somehow magically relieve their (or our) deep-rooted fear of abandonment and unlovability. 

Maybe it was about the importance of him coming into my life so I could finally face myself and decide I was worth choosing. 

Hearing what our gut is saying in the everyday, the mundane, is a life-long practice. Pay close attention to the time when you choose to say or not say something in order to not rock the boat. Notice what you swallow asking for something, or when you shy away from having a hard conversation, or when the narrative in your head says something like “It’s not worth it” or “What’s the point?” 

All the small moments like these that come up in a relationship are opportunities to choose yourself. In that one moment when you notice your fear but you say the thing anyway, you are turning up the volume on your intuition ever so slightly. You are telling yourself that you are worth choosing. It’s in those micro moments that your sense of worth and value as a person will start to grow and strengthen. 

At some point in our 30’s each of us woke up and realized that happily ever after was bullshit and relationships take a fuck ton of work. 

The idea of “the one” is a sickness that can act as a black light instead of a bridge.

If you are in perfect sync at every moment, someone isn’t being their true self. Being perfectly in sync also closes off your ability to grow and evolve, both as an individual and as a couple. One of the best ways to “sync up” with your partner is to accept that sometimes being in sync is being out of sync. 

The growth is in the realization that differences don’t make us incompatible. They make us two different people, and with our different needs, we have to speak up and ask for what we want or risk being disappointed and hurt, a lot. 

Our similarities were ones that were fundamental to what I wanted in a long-term partnership. 

We have often times come to the same conclusion- the stories that we are telling ourselves are not true. 

I never learned that conflict is part of a healthy relationship. 

Notice how all Disney movies end at the wedding? You don’t ever get to see the part where 5 years into their marriage Cinderella is yelling at Prince Charming to just “pick up your dirty socks and put them in the damn hamper”- for the hundredth time that week. Ending the story at the wedding keeps us from seeing the messy human reality of long-lasting relationships and the real work they take. 

The thing about “hard” is, no one likes hard. We’re not wired to like hard. Because hard means discomfort. Hard means breaking patterns, looking inward, taking ownership, doing things you’re not used to. Hard means you could be wrong. Hard means it’s no longer just about you. But hard is where substance and depth live. 

Be mindful of people who feel like home, when home wasn’t a safe place to be!

“THE STICKY”- the dysfunction between 2 people that gets mistaken for chemistry. The familiar smell from the rocky and chaotic upbringing we’re unconsciously trying to trace. The residue from our stories. There are many other terms for this feeling: “lightning in a bottle”, “love at first sight”, and “meant to be”. 

You can’t actually rely on other people to give you that “lightning in the bottle” feeling. Because when they do, there’s usually more going on than meets the eye, something beneath the surface. A larger force at play is drawing you toward each other. Patterns and programming are worth examining closely, but most of us never do it, because that initial “lightning in a bottle” feeling is amazing. You feel invincible. Like a missing piece of you has been found and clicked into place. It’s like how I imagine heroin feels the first time you try it. A warmth that spreads over you, taking away all of your pain, worry, fear, and emptiness. And that feeling is why we get addicted to love. Why we equate the lightning in a bottle with love. And why over 50% of long-term monogamous relationships fail. 

I still have to work hard at choosing myself. In understanding that choosing myself is my lightning in a bottle. 

The sticky can be coming from what Freud termed “repetition compulsion”, or what’s also called “compulsion to repeat”. In psychoanalytic theory, repetition compulsion is an unconscious need to reenact early traumas in an attempt to overcome or master them. Such traumas are repeated in a new situation symbolic of the repressed prototype. Repetition compulsion therapy is not to repeat but to remember the trauma and to see its relation to present behavior. 

Your soulmate is not someone who will come into your life peacefully. It will be the person who comes to make you question things, to change your reality. Someone who marks a before and after in your life. It will not be the idealized person you fantasized about, but an ordinary person who challenges you and makes you better. 

There are always 4 people in every relationship, not 2. There are our 2 conscious minds, and then there are our 2 unconscious minds. Our job is to attempt to be aware of our old patterns, our unconscious pulls, so that we show up in our relationship as present and conscious as we can be. For our sake and our partner’s. 

Feeling “triggered” is usually a good place to start. It takes time to develop the ability to notice when you have been triggered BEFORE you react, but if you can see that you are feeling an emotional to something, pause. Sit in the feeling for a moment and allow yourself to just feel it, deeply. Inspect it, turn it over, and look at it from all sides. Where do you feel this response in your body? What does the sensation feel like? Heat? Tightness in your throat? Dizziness? What’s the first reaction you have and want to express? Do you have an urge to get defensive? Do you want to verbally punch back and make the other person hurt? Do you have a desire to fun? To go hide and be alone? Are you on the verge of tears? Answering these questions will uncover some important information. 

Practicing knowing the why equates to a better understanding of self. The more you can do that, the more your behavior starts to change naturally. 

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. 

My brain is trying to help me, but it does it using old patterns and habits based on survival. Meanwhile, my body, my gut, and my soul are all trying to help me expand, to be present with the discomfort, because that’s the place where there’s growth and healing and the potential for the deepest connection I have ever known. This is the voice I choose to listen to more closely now, because ultimately I know it won’t steer me wrong. 

Cutting and running for that reason is usually coming from a place of fear, not from a place of connection and love. 

One of the biggest components of a codependent personality is a lack of trust in the Self, a lack of self-understanding and true self-knowledge. 

In the ocean, the breakers are the turbulent waves that come crashing onto the shore. Like the sunrise and sunset, they are consistent and never ending. The thing is, if you never swim past them, you will not know that most of the ocean is actually calm and peaceful. You will only know the ocean to be turbulent and chaotic. Relationships also have breakers. And if you never swim past them, you will not know calm and peace, nor will you be able to build a healthy and sustainable relationship. 

The breakers are anything that creates resistance. They may be surface things, like different love languages, communication styles, opinions, and definitions. Or they may be deeper issues, like your emotional reactions triggered by your partner and the relationship.

We don’t realize it’s less about the person and more about the relationship dynamic created by two people with unhealed wounds. Eventually one of them taps out. Eventually one of them has had enough. Eventually one of them wants to heal from their wounds. When this happens, the relationship starts to fall apart, since one person is now outgrowing the other. The unconscious bond stretches and eventually breaks. 

Healthy relationships are usually non-stick. But if we have done little work on ourselves, we are usually attracted to sticky relationships and repelled by the non-stick. That’s why we must swim past the breakers, “the sticky”, to get to a healthy, non-stick relationship dynamic. And we must sit in the place were we find ourselves after we swim past the breakers. It will be uncomfortable there, maybe something we label as boring or lacking chemistry. We must sit in that place until it becomes the norm. Until we recondition our bodies and the relationship dynamic we are attracted to changes. Until we become repelled by the sticky instead of attracted to it. 

Try to understand before being understood.  If you’re trying to prove something or to express yourself before really listening to your partner, you are not creating a safe space. If, as I used to do (and sometimes still do), you interrupt your partner and think of a reply, an angle, a defense before fully understanding their position, perspective, and heart, there is no soil for communication. It’s like trying to grow vegetables in cement. 

Hard conversations can put us in our survival mode-the kid fighting to be heard. We either fight and scream to be heard or we shut down and don’t even try, depending on the patterns we saw when we were younger. The ways in which we communicate or don’t communicate are tracks that were laid from birth. 

Reconditioning the body to not panic when confronted. To create and explore a new space by breathing through the tug of the old-the need to be understood before understanding. While learning to sit and grow in the new- the trying to understand first. 

You train your nervous system to not react in the same way it was trained as a child. 

After many expired relationships and therapy sessions, I’ve learned that plastic wrap suffocates people and it’s NOT what healthy love and communication look like. Telling all and hiding nothing is a distorted idea about communication I’ve absorbed from my alcoholic father, who wore his emotions on both sleeves. There is responsibility in disclosure. You can’t just verbally vomit on people. That’s what children do. And that’s what I used to do. 

It does not come naturally for me to speak up. Avoiding conflict, not being clear and direct about my upsets and needs, downplaying what I’m feeling as not being worth speaking up over, feeling needy for having needs- these are my default behaviors, based on false beliefs, that have become the basis for my communication strategies. 

Are you someone who tends to share easily what’s going through your mind? What is yours to investigate, to own, to sit with and not place on your relationship? Are you using your partner to soothe your own anxiety rather than to build the skills to self-soothe? What is your hope in sharing the things you share? To change the other person? To be understood and accepted fully? To offload some of your heavy or anxious feelings onto the other person so you can feel a little better yourself?

Like many of us, you may interrupt with a “yeah, but” and argue or defend yourself while the other person is still talking. Or you may not be saying anything yet, but in your head you’re preparing your comeback. Or both. Set the intention to try to understand what the other person is saying first. Then take a breath. Wait until they are completely finished. Don’t interrupt. Finally, repeat back what you heard them saying. This is a practice that helps the other person feel seen, heard, and understood, and it is also a way for you to focus more on what they are saying because you have to listen closely enough to be able to repeat what they have said. 

Do you want them to hold something that doesn’t belong to them because it will make you feel better in the short term? Your practice is about getting really honest with yourself around your motives for communicating. 

Avoidants activate the anxious, who activate avoidants. These 2 attachment styles love each other. It’s an example of two very different personality types being unconsciously drawn to each other because of what they say they hate the most- their emotional responses. 

More recent research discusses attachment styles as more of a spectrum than a fixed set of 4, and it has shown that your style can change based on the type of relationship and person you are relating to. The research has also expanded to take some of the blame off of our parents. They may set the stage, but our attachment styles are formed through many relational experiences (and are continually developing throughout our lives). 

The anxious person struggles with the relationship taking over their life and typically becomes overly fixated on the other person-what they are doing, what their body language is communicating, what they might be thinking, etc. This person may struggle with boundaries and wonder constantly if their partner still wants them. They need constant validation and reassurance from their partner, and their feelings of self-worth are tied to the relationship. 

As someone who leans more avoidant, when to I feel emotionally activated I shut down, withdraw, put up a wall and protect myself. I am hypersensitive to feeling like my independence is being taken away or questioned in any way, and I have a hard time with sustained intimate connection. It can feel draining and bring up intense resentment and a desire to be alone. I have begun to learn that my partner can be firm and clear about their need for connection and can also respect my autonomy and not take it personally when I need some space, I can begin to trust that I won’t be suffocated and can then connect more consistently. 

With Vanessa, I was in my own sleeping bag. But we were in the same tent, and I trusted that. The more I needed and expressed, the more Vanessa probably wanted to run. My anxious attachment (john) style was triggering her avoidant style. She expressed her own needs and that’s how I knew I was still anxiously attached. I saw it in how hard it was for me to give her the space she wanted and needed to feel safe, to be able to let her guard down, which would then allow her to give me more of what I wanted. It’s not that she didn’t love me or find me attractive. Being avoidant wasn’t her fault. She didn’t have the backing. I imagined her as a little girl doing the best to protect herself. This wasn’t about love. This was about learning to touch the stove again, even when you know it’s not on. This was about fear. That’s when I realized it was me, not her. 

Leaning into what feels uncomfortable goes against our wiring and the way we have been maneuvering in relationships our entire life. But it’s what flips that magnet back. It’s where you can stretch and grow. It’s what can get both the avoidant and the anxious to finally start swimming toward a secure attachment and healing wounds from the past. That’s the beauty of difficult relationships. They can heal us. The burden of being with someone with a different attachment style can also be the greatest gift. 

When it comes to romantic relationships, it’s about finding and fostering a connection with an equally self-aware partner who shows a commitment to understanding you as much as themselves and a desire to continue to learn and grow together. 

Here are some ways that have worked regarding when you are activated:

“I am sensing your anxiety and desire for me to respond, and that is also giving me anxiety because I’m feeling overwhelmed”. Then state what you need: “I am committed to this relationship, and I need an hour alone to just breathe. I promise to call you then and we can talk”. This response is information about their capacity to meet you at this point on your journey for inner growth. 

When your needs are being met in a relationship, your attachment style won’t be activated. Our nervous systems sometimes interpret this lack of drama as boredom and a lack of chemistry. It will take a lot of getting used to for your nervous system to register calm as healthy and to start to realize that in a secure attachment your needs are actually being met without a constant cycle of push-pull or highs and lows. 

If you don’t own your stuff, you don’t grow. 

Vanessa is the first partner I can honestly say I have apologized to for reals. Sure, I still explain myself. But I make sure I apologize for hurting her first. I end that apology with a period. Then, if it serves the relationship to understand where I was coming from, I offer the explanation. I notice how apologizing first and explaining later lowers our guards, letting us communicate from a place of love again. Instead of from our wounds. 

Pay attention to how a real apology makes you feel. And then cultivate the desire to give that feeling to another person. This practice takes the apology out of the place of your ego, or your pride, and into the place of wanting to make the person on the other side feel safe, seen, held, and loved. 

When two people apologize for reals- saying they’re sorry and then taking some kind of action- they begin to lay new tracks in the relationship. Old patterns can be broken. It’s one of the quickest ways to shift a relationship, and it sounds so simple. But our ego and our desire to always be right makes it hard to do. We’re not used to letting go of the tug-of-war rope. For most of us, defensiveness and self-protection is the only gear we know. 

What feelings does apologizing bring up? What thoughts start to race when you are faced with owning your part in something? It’s really important to pay attention to this in order to get to the root of your aversion to apologizing. Is it shame? Is it pride? Is it a feeling of worthlessness? Anger? There is a lot of shame tied up in apologizing for many of us. Saying “I’m sorry” brings up feelings of being “bad” or not enough. Whatever the feeling is, acknowledge it and seek to understand the source. And they say the words “I’m sorry” anyway, even if feelings of shame or defensiveness or embarrassment come along with them. You can’t get better at something without trying it again and again. 

There is no greater libido killer than feeling like your partner is your child or your parent. 

If you’re an overfunctioner: then you need to go inward. Get in touch with the feeling, emotions, and the things you are trying to bypass by doing, doing, doing. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed and resentful, pay close attention to when those feelings bubble up and ask yourself, simply put: What are you doing that you should not be doing? The bottom line is that if you stay in an over and under functioning dance, neither of you can ever grow or reach your full potential in the relationship. There will always be a power differential where one person feels parental and the other feels childlike. And this dynamic simply cannot exist in healthy romantic relationships. 

Here is the definition that we use when discussing codependency: “If you’re good, I’m good. If you’re not good, I’m not good”. Codependents LOVE to be needed. You also find your sense of self and sense of worth in someone else. Codependent behaviors develop in childhood as a way to defend against the potential for rejection and abandonment. You didn’t have to suffer physical abuse or grow up with an addicted parent to develop codependent tendencies (thought of course that helps), but having your emotions dismissed or belittled, being told that you and your emotions were too much, having a parent whose go-to was the cold shoulder, having a parent who hovered and did everything for you, never allowing you to fail or screw up- these are all examples of how seemingly small behaviors add up over a lifetime to what might be called developmental traumas. 

Codependent behaviors don’t disappear. We slowly get better and better at being in the discomfort of showing up fully and asking for what we need regardless of our fear of how the other person might respond. And we get better and better at it through doing it.

Since codependent behaviors are deeply rooted in a fear of abandonment, the questions we need to ask ourselves and the answers we need to try to understand are around what we are trying to avoid feeling or experiencing by not showing up authentically. The practice for codependency recovery begins with taking baby steps into that uncomfortable pool of feelings. You do have to do things that don’t feel natural to you, and you have to sit with the feelings, process them, breathe into them, journal about and through them. And then repeat. It’s only through the process of doing the thing that doesn’t feel natural over and over and over again that we can train our nervous system, our brain, and our attachment system to understand that we can do something like express a need and not die. 

Money is one of the top things couples fight about. When they do, thought, it’s not usually about the money. It’s about their relationship with money and how that translates into security and safety. It’s about how they were raised, with or without money. 

We didn’t have the tools to communicate, explore, and compromise. We didn’t have the ability to understand each other better by examining our stories. Instead, we just held tight to our side of the tug-of-war rope. 

I tell myself we have grown apart and that it’s unfixable. It’s a way of hiding and not facing hard things. 

The greatest thing I’ve learned about relationships is that they are meant to have turbulence. One of the most common misconceptions about love is that it’s supposed to be easy. And that if it’s not, you’re with the wrong person. The truth is that relationships are hard. They’re supposed to be. That’s how we learn, grown, and evolve. There must be a journey. You have to go somewhere and come back. 

Loving someone brings up things in us we may not want to look at. Building a relationship with that person is not just a decision. It’s a journey that requires patience, dissolving of ego, and a break with patterns that are wired deep in us. To love someone requires continually doing a self-inventory. If we don’t do that work, it won’t be healthy love. It will be two people bouncing on and off each other instead of evolving with each other. 

No matter how many times you fight, you will always fight fair. That will be the non-negotiable. And you will be together knowing that you are choosing to be together. Not because of logic or loneliness or a ticking clock. Not because you’ve already committed to the relationship. Not because you don’t want to be alone. But because you believe in what you are building and you’re making a choice, every single day, to be in this and love each other the best way you both know how. Your relationship will not be built on fear, as many are, but on courage and transparency. And like any other relationship, there will be no guarantee. 

You and your partner will sharpen each other; you will make him feel beautiful, and he will make you feel invincible and vice versa. The only thing you can promise is to be honest and to love as hard as you can. Without losing yourself. You will each take responsibility for your own shit, but together you will also settle for nothing less than creating a space for magic. The more people commit to going inward, practicing self-compassion and challenging themselves to love in the best and most expansive way they possibly can, it is only natural that they dynamic of the world will change too. 

Be aware of you thought patterns and question what’s truth, what’s  a distortion, and what’s residue from your past. 

Vanessa and John each wrote a letter to their exes. In Vanessa’s I loved how she wrote: My unexamined attachment wounds caused me to withdraw and emotionally abandon you every time I was overwhelmed or afraid. 

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