Sometimes, the romanticized ideals of marriage collide head-on with the nitty-gritty of real life, and that’s exactly what Eddie Reece and Bill Courtright unpack in this insightful episode. We’re bringing our relationship series to a close (for now!) by tackling the often-misunderstood world of marriage—exploring its true nature, dismantling common myths, and even reimagining prenuptial agreements from something scary into a tool for clarity and connection. Eddie, drawing on his extensive experience as a therapist, guides us through the importance of self-awareness in choosing a partner, the significance of open communication, and the practical expectations that lay the foundation for a strong, lasting bond. We’re stripping away the Hollywood facade and getting real about what it means to commit to a lifelong partnership. Whether you’re engaged, married, considering either, or simply curious about the deeper dynamics of relationships, this episode offers valuable perspectives and honest discussions that are sure to spark reflection. Tune in as we journey through the complexities of modern marriage and relationships.
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Marriage Myths Unveiled: Finding Lasting Love In Reality
We have a very interesting conversation. Eddie and I are going to temporarily tie a bow on our series on relationships and talk a little bit about marriage. We’re going to talk about marriage, what it is, what it isn’t. We’re going to talk about prenuptial agreements and maybe reframe that in a way that doesn’t seem so scary and has nothing to do with whether or not you trust one another to stay faithful for the rest of your life, or who’s going to get the dog or the car, or the majority of the funds in the bank account. We realize all those are important, but when you hear Eddie talk about prenups, you may have a completely different opinion. Once again, this episode is going to be coming right at you. Stay tuned. Eddie, it’s good to see you again, my friend.
Yeah. What’s happening with you, Billy boy?
Hope springs eternal. I’m staring out my window. It’s beautiful. Blue skies. There are leaves on the trees. We’re both wearing golf shirts.
It’s happening.
Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming back and giving us some of your time. We are continuing the Couch Trip series on relationships.
If you remember, we’ve talked about love, we’ve talked about feeling, communication, relationship, understanding, vulnerability, relatability and it’s been a really interesting, and from my perspective, worthwhile and rewarding conversation that Eddie and I have been able to share with you, our audience. In continuing in that vein and what will likely be the final chapter in the relationship series for a moment. There are so many things I want to talk about.
There’s lots more.
Foundations Of Marriage: Myths, Self-Awareness & Daily Life
One of the things Eddie and I were just talking about is we were essentially talking about marriage and what it means. Where people might need some help to reframe what it is to what they envision it to be very consistent and congruent with our image of what love is and our place in a loving relationship. Where this marriage is when we get married and where it could go, and God forbid, where it may end up. How do we prepare, deal, and just navigate those waters if they get a little choppy?
Eddie, you and I were just having a really interesting conversation, and I said, “This is great stuff. Let’s hit record.” It was really about where folks are when they contemplate and ultimately decide to get married and what that vision is for them and where their heart may or may not be, and then what inevitably could occur.
You were really putting things into perspective I hadn’t heard before, and I found truly captivating. Let’s just start with that simple question. What do people consider and think about when they decide to get married, and what might they want to consider and think about when they decide to get married?
In so many ways, getting married is maybe the second biggest decision you might ever make. First is whether or not to have children. Most people put more thought into picking a house or a car than they do a partner. The reason it’s done that way is because, as you’ve heard me talk about numerous times here, it’s what we were trained to do. There’s this romantic ideal out there. It’s a bill of goods we’ve been sold that simply does not exist in real life. We’re supposed to go meet the right person, and there is no right person. We will just know that it’s the right person by some magical means. After X number of time, dates or months or whatever, you’re supposed to get married or you’re supposed to break up. Those are the only two choices.
I remember a scene in a movie and I have these snapshot memories of movies. I don’t remember what the movie was, what it was about. I just remember the scene. There are two brothers, one of them is married, and the character was played by the guy who played Niles, Frazier’s brother. His brother’s contemplating getting married. He says to his brother, “How did you guys know you should get married?” He says, “Just like everybody else, she told me we’re either getting married or breaking up.”
That, to me, is just mind-blowing. That, that it has to come down to an all or nothing choice. If this is a person that you are so connected, attached, enamored to that you’re wanting to marry them, and if for whatever reason, they’re not too keen on the marriage thing, then you have to have nothing to do with them. This is an amazing human being in your life. They don’t come along. Even if you don’t get married, somebody this wonderful doesn’t come along that often, and you’re going to completely discard them for not marrying you. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Basically, everything we’re taught about how to go about it is just simply wrong.
The way that you would decide is, first of all, you have to have a tremendous amount of self-awareness. Meaning I know a lot about me, my likes, dislikes, preferences, ideas about the future, ideas about what love is, ideas about what marriage is. I’ve explored and done deep dives into this thing for a long time, and I really know who I am. Very few of us have much of a clue as to who we really are. I wrote a line a long time ago that said the lack of self-awareness in this culture is so bad that when most people masturbate, they’re having sex with a stranger.
The lack of self-awareness in this culture is so profound that when most people masturbate, they’re essentially having sex with a stranger, as we truly don’t know who we are.
We just don’t know really who we are. One of the things that happens in marriages that then will bring a couple into my office is the shock of who you actually wound up marrying, because in your mind, it was not the person that they were. They’ve changed. Of course, they changed. Everybody changes. Why is that a problem? “You and I like each other. I have this idea that I would like to get married.” “I do too.” Being married, what does that mean to you? What would being married to you look like? That’s a good start.
What I tell folks about that question, and it’s the same question, if you are going to go out and start dating and especially if you’re going to write up a profile on a dating app of some sort, don’t talk about, “I want somebody intelligent and attractive,” like some other person wants somebody who’s an idiot and ugly?
What does that mean? It’s wasted space. A good approach is, “Here is my day-to-day existence. I generally get up at this time of the day. I generally go to bed at this time of the day. Typical day, I spend my time doing this. I watch these shows. I do these activities. I spend time with these friends. Here’s what I do day to day. I’m really happy with that routine. Once a year, I’ll pick a trip somewhere for a couple of weeks, and that’ll be my vacation for the year. Other than that, I’m at home.”
Instead of saying, “I’m this really kind, loving person, and I’m really smart and active,” “If you lived with me, this is what you would be living with. I load the dishwasher this way, or I don’t even use the dishwasher. I wash all my dishes by hand, and the dishwasher just sits there. I just think that’s a waste. If you walk into my living space at any time, you would see that everything is put away, that the floors are dusted, there are pictures hanging on the wall, and they hang perfectly squared away.”
These are the things you’ve got to talk about. You’ve got to go, “Would that work for me? Could I live in that? I don’t really care where crap went to. I travel a lot. I take at least two long vacations every year, and I take probably 6 or 8 trips of 2, 3, 4 days here and there. I’m not at home that much. I’m out rock climbing and running marathons, and I don’t even exercise. I don’t see your point.” That’s what’s going to make your marriage, the day-to-day existence.
Defining Marriage Today: Expectations, Courtship, And Legalities
It sounds like what I’m hearing you say is if you’re authentically yourself through the courting process, whether that be on a dating app or anything else and really clear on how you choose or enjoy living your single life, you’re more likely to attract someone that would be complimentary to your existing life. Let’s say that that’s true, and I’d love to hear your opinion on that, but what do you say to couples that think they found Mr. or Mrs. Right and they’re at the point now where it’s either marriage or they’re contemplating?
They need help with that concept, because you’ve got to throw that away.
You certainly know that that’s true. That does happen.
It does happen, but it shouldn’t because really terrific people that you have a lot of love, kindness, respect for, admiration for, they don’t come along all the time. Here, you got one. You’re pretty good buddies, and you share things, and you got a history, and you’ve gone through some difficult times and you’ve gone through some exciting times. You’ve got lovely memories. If you had zero romantic interest in each other at all, you wouldn’t throw this person away because they didn’t marry you. You’d probably go, “This is one of my best friends.” If you don’t want to be married, then why not be best friends? Why not carry that part of the relationship out?
That’s your relationship. This whole thing about do we get married or not is really a question of, “Do we make a legal agreement with each other?” Not, “Do we have a relationship or not?” We already have a relationship. It’s do we add a legal agreement to the relationship or not. The first question I would ask a couple if they’d come in for counseling, and usually, it’s called premarital counseling, which means they’ve already decided that they’re getting married.
The question of getting married or not really boils down to this: do we make a legal agreement with each other or not?
I tell them, “How far along in the wedding process are you guys?” “The invitations are sent out.” I go, “I really am not going to be able to help you a whole lot, because I would want to put you through a process of really exploring all of these things that we’ve been talking about and take a look if you’ve got the same ideas of what it is you’re actually doing. You’re not going to be open to hearing that’s going to cause some problems.”
“Let’s say we came across something like you come out of the place where you get married and you hop in the limo and you drive off headed towards your honeymoon, and there’s a tragic auto accident, and your partner becomes paraplegic and paraplegic in a way to where they’ll never have sex again. Will you stay married to them?”
“The vow is for life.” “You, the person who is able-bodied, is never going to have sex again. Is that okay with you?” “I love them.” “I’m not asking you if you love them. You’re never going to have sex again, ever. Is that okay? You’re going to stay married and you’re going to be a caretaker for somebody who’s paraplegic. That’s what you signed on for. Is that’s okay with you? You’re 23 years old, you’re going to spend another 60 years or so maybe taking care of this person, not having sex, not doing the things that you guys could do as easily as you did. You’ve got to travel, you’ve got to get the wheelchair going. You’ve got to make sure you carry all the medications and all those things. Does that sound all right with you?” “Yeah. If I knew that going in, I’d marry him anyway.” “Really? Would you?”
Those are the things that I want you to think about. Since the wedding train, not the marriage train, because a marriage is entirely different than a wedding, and you probably have never said, “I want to be married,” and pictured the day-to-day, in and out of a marriage. You pictured a wedding. You were really saying, “I want a wedding.” You weren’t saying, “I want a marriage.” Now you’ve got a marriage to a paraplegic. Is that okay?” Once you start exploring, those things seem different. The conversation could go anywhere. “I made a vow to be faithful, and so no, I just wouldn’t have sex anymore.” The person who’s paraplegic might go, “That’s just stupid. You love sex. I’d feel horrible if you gave up sex. We’ll work something out. You would think like that?”
You’ve clearly had these conversations.
Prenuptial Agreements: Reframing Marriage Contracts & Addressing Concerns
Yeah. It’s rare because most people just follow the protocol they were taught, and then they come in to my office 3 years later, or 5 years, 25 years later, we had to undo all of that. You want to sit down and look at the legal component of this. If you go buy a house, you are going to get a stack of papers like this to sign, covering all kinds of stuff. You should do exactly the same thing to get married.
That’s typically called a prenup. A better word for it is a marriage contract or a marital agreement, because what it really should be used for is, as you go through this conversation, “You become paraplegic on our wedding day,” you put this in writing. “Here’s what our agreement is.” You cover all the different things because if you can put that in a legal document and sign it, then you probably are at least pretty close to really meaning it. If your hormones are just going off and you’re thinking about the wedding dress, “Finally, I’m having a wedding,” and they say, “I would stay faithful to you, honey. Me, too.” You don’t know.
Do you often get couples or individuals who are planning to get married? Do you get the question about, “My husband, my fiancé, my soon to be wife is requesting a prenup. I’m not sure what should I do?”
Yeah.
How does that typically go?
That’s more common because they’re thinking prenup means it’s only about the money. First of all, they go, “I don’t want a prenup. The other one says, I’m not going to get married about a prenup.” The first thing I tell them is you don’t have a choice about whether they have a prenup or not. They go, “What do you mean?” I go, “When you go to the courthouse and get your marriage license, you’re signing a prenup written by the state of Georgia, a bunch of lawmakers, that capital wrote it, and they don’t show it to you.”
“Does that make any sense to go sign a binding legal contract about how you’re supposed to behave in a marriage and how you’re going to divorce if you get a divorce without looking at it, written by probably a bunch of old White guys a zillion years ago?” You might want to look at it, and you don’t have to use it. You can write your own, which is what I’m suggesting here. You have the conversation to put the legal contract together, which is being very conscious about your marriage.
You are already doing the relationship. What about the marriage? That is a legal contract. If you sign that contract and you do get married, what most people never realize is that you will be legally bound to this person for the rest of your life. They go, “Of course, I want to be married the rest of my life.” I go, “No, that’s not what I mean. You are going to be legally bound to them either through that marital agreement or a divorce agreement.”
It doesn’t matter whether you stay married or not, you will be legally bound to that person for the rest of your life. You might want to put some time and effort into that legal agreement. That’s what a marriage is. A marriage is a legal agreement, a legal document. It has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. It has nothing to do with where you live together or not. It has nothing to do with having kids. That’s your relationship. You can make all sorts of decisions about your relationship, but what’s written at the courthouse will supersede some of that.
Why is it important, in your opinion, to have this conversation prior to getting married? What risk are you taking, regardless of what the state says? What typically happens that maybe a couple, young or otherwise, isn’t taking into consideration their mindset and what’s going to happen inevitably as this marriage matures?
Evolving Together: Navigating Change In Marriage
People change. You get married at virtually any age other than 60, 70, 80 years old, you are going to be very different as that marriage goes on. You’re going to be very different when you start purchasing things together, when you own a home together, and when you talk about what car to buy. “Honey, I need a new car.” “Yeah, you do need a new car.” “I’m thinking about one of those Maseratis.” “What? You’re going to spend that much money on a car?” “Yeah.”
“That’s not a family car. No. We’re going to go get a huge station wagon somewhere in good shape. That’s just a waste. You should have talked about that before.” The things like just your day-to-day. What time do you get up in the morning? What time do you go to bed at night? Are you a morning person or a night person? If those are really different, it can cause a lot of problems.
I’ve got to say, from that perspective, I’m hearing you say you really want to know what it’s going to be like to be married and have that conversation. In today’s day and age, do you find it’s more common that couples cohabitate or live together before they get engaged or are people still getting engaged, getting married and then moving in for the first time?
Both. Many years ago, I had a couple come in who had lived together for 25 years. They came in, “What can I do for you?” “We just got married six months ago,” or something. It wasn’t long. “We are fighting like cats and dogs. We’re just all over each other.” “What are the problems?” They had a litany of problems. I go, “When did all this start?” “While we were planning the wedding, the day of the wedding, the night of the wedding. We got along really well at 25 years.” I go, “What people don’t understand is when you get married, you have been brainwashed that marriage means this. If you don’t explore what that is, you’re going to be shocked.” It could be things like, we live together, so we behave like this, but if we got married, you wouldn’t be going out with your friends three nights a week.
You’ve been brainwashed that marriage means this. If you don’t explore what “this” is, you’re going to be shocked.
You’re not going to be spending that kind of money on that. Even a dating relationship to some degree, but certainly when you move into, “We’re going to be exclusive now,” part of the brainwashing involves, “I now have ownership. Now I can dictate how you will and will not behave.” That’s not going to work. People have no conscious knowledge that that’s the way it works, that that’s actually in there. If you sit down and write out this marital agreement, those kinds of things will come out, and you can actually learn what is in there and go, “I really think being married means this. I don’t really believe that.”
Did you help couples to draft their marital agreement?
First of all, it’s pretty rare that anybody’s going to come in to do premarital counseling.
It sounds like you think it’s a pretty good idea.
Absolutely. If they do come in, they’re thinking like, “We’re going to talk about how much we love each other, and then you’ll give us your blessing.” That’s what most people think really happens in premarital counseling. Now I’m going to put you through the wringer and help you explore what you really believe, what you really feel, what you really think, how you’re really going to behave and does that really fit? I’m going to start with, “Okay, so you guys won’t get married. Why?” That’s my first question. Anytime I’ve ever had the chance to ask somebody that, it stuns them because they don’t have an answer.
What would you consider a good answer?
Social Pressure Vs. Personal Choice: The Decision To Marry
A good answer is, “This is somebody that I would like to combine my day-to-day life with. I would like to combine things like my financial life, my purchasing life, the lifestyle I lead. It’s somebody that I would like to be there if I’m in the hospital, or I want to be there for them if they’re in the hospital.” If the two of you want children, “This is somebody that I want to be the mother, the father of my children. I want to go through the process of aging with them and what that entails.”
You would talk about all the stuff that’s in that legal agreement. “I believe this is someone that I could be legally bound to successfully. That’s why I want to get married because I think a married lifestyle makes more sense to me than a cohabitating lifestyle or a lifestyle of maybe dating the same person forever, but separate houses and things like that.” What I want to instill in people is you are grownups. You can do whatever you want to do.
You can get married, you can not get married. You can live together for the rest of your life and not get married. You can go draw up all kinds of legal agreements. That’s not a marriage. You can date for the rest of your life and live in your separate worlds. If you want to be sexually exclusive and do that, you can do that. You can do whatever you want to.
You don’t have to get married. There is such a cultural brainwashing that happens around marriage that involves just an enormous amount of pressure to conform. I didn’t get married until I was 46 years old. Not once did I meet somebody and that topic come up at any age over about maybe 30, to where somebody went, “You’re 30 and you’ve never been married?” Nobody ever said, “You’re 30 and you’ve never been married. God, that is awesome.”
There is such cultural brainwashing around marriage, involving just an enormous amount of pressure to control.
Not even been an unhappily married guy?
You’re a second-class citizen in our culture if you’re past a certain age and not married or divorced. That counts. That’s fine. If you’re 30 and divorced, that counts. You’re all right. Especially as I got to 40, 42. “You’re 43 years old and never been married?” They’re like, “Yeah.”
That comes from the societal norm of getting to a certain age, court, marry, and have kids.
Exactly, then you are legitimate. Sometimes, I would respond to that. I’d go, “Yeah, I’m 43. I’ve never been divorced. I figured out that the leading cause of divorce is marriage. It’s 100% correlation.” You’ve got to think about the statistics. If you get married, let’s just go with 50% of marriages ends in a divorce. You got a 50/50 shot to start with. The 50% that stay married, 100% of those end in death. That’s the outlook. What I tell people is let’s say you’re lucky enough to be the 50% that stay married the rest of your life. The research on that is that 50% generally, the things I’ve looked at over the years, maybe 30% of those people go, “Yeah, it’s a good marriage. Yeah, it works out for me.” Some 70% of the 50%, they’re not really happy. I don’t know.
I’m not good at math. I don’t know. Of the 100% of the people at the altar, what percentage really go, “Yeah, this worked for me.” It’s not good odds. That’s not because there’s something about getting married. People hear me talk about this, and they go, “You don’t seem to be real keen on marriage.” No, I’m married. I got nothing against marriage. I want you to do it right. That’s all. I want you to not follow the romantic ideal and expect that to work, because it will not work.
Communication Is Key: Navigating Differences In Marriage
Walk us through the process of what would give someone an increasingly more positive outlook on the marriage working.
You’ve done your research. You’ve done the conversations about the contractual agreement. You can work out the contractual agreement of your relationship, and that makes sense to you. In order to even be able to do that, you’ve got to be pretty good communicators, which most people aren’t, which is a big problem in the all relationships, all marriages. The people can’t really communicate very well with their partner. Just going through the process of putting that legal agreement together will show you things like, “We can’t have conversations about things we disagree on.”
Okay. That could be a problem. You might want to learn that and then come back to this. What I love about the idea of we’re going to put together a marital agreement is that you’re going to go through the process of exploring all these things that you should explore that you will not explore before you go, “Yeah, this is a good person for me to marry.” You’ll have a lot more confidence about it. You’ll know that the problems that you’re going to have, you are going to know about those early on. There’s not going to be any surprises down the road about, “My new car would be a top-of-the-line Maserati, completely decked out. That would be my new car, and I’m going to do that about every three years.” That’s not going to be a surprise.
The Importance Of Self-Love And Self-Understanding
You said something earlier, and it really dawned on me, and you’ve fundamentally repeated it or basically repeated it a couple of times, and it was around self-awareness. You talked about knowing thyself, loving thyself. You even hinted to it when you talked about documenting what kind of life someone would want to have when you talked about the dating app. What I heard you say was, it’s important for an individual first to be aware of their, their own behavior, their own likes and dislikes, their own path in order to get someone else to coalesce or feather into their path in a congruent way, as opposed to two separate paths coexisting.
The Heartbreak Of Love & Loss: A Personal Reflection
Exactly. Everything we’ve talked about, that’s where it starts. It’s not only about having a satisfying romantic relationship, marriage. It is everything you do. The ability to enjoy yourself, to be satisfied with your life, all that will happen in your life. A lot of it is wonderful, and a lot of it just is horrifying. There’s a lot in between that for most people will bore them to death.
You have to have enough self-awareness, which doesn’t just mean, “I know this about me.” It says, “I know enough about myself that when tragedy strikes, I know how to take care of that within myself. I know to reach out and ask for help and take help. I know that I’m going to go through a process of deep guttural pain and heartache and heartbreak and I will heal from that.” There’s a book that I never read, but I mention the title all the time. The title is A Good Marriage Will Break Your Heart.
I expanded that to A Good Life Will Break Your Heart because at some point, using a marriage, one of you is probably going to bury the other. If it was a good marriage, that’s devastating. If it’s not devastating, then that wasn’t that good of a marriage. You’re like, “Yeah, she’s gone.” I tell the story of, I had a therapist early in my time in therapy die, and this guy was really well known, and I went to the funeral service. His wife, who I’d never met, was sitting up on the front row.
It is basically a Catholic service and a memorial service. It went on forever. I’d never experienced anything that being a good old born and raised Baptist guy. We were in out of there and getting to the food. Funerals are about a potluck. Anyway, I’m sitting there in the church, and from the moment the service began, from the moment his wife sat down until I left, along with everybody else, she wailed.
I mean, wailed. I never even thought of using that word until that moment when I told the story. That’s the word that came to me. It was constant. The priest is doing his thing, and the eulogies are being done, and she never stopped. Looking back at that, as I talk about things like this, it’s like, that is exactly the way you want it to be.
The message in that book, A Good Marriage Will Break Your Heart, is this. Most people have a mediocre marriage. I took this into most people have a mediocre life because they don’t have the emotional maturity and surety to love that deeply. Love that deeply means, “I am going to love with all of my being,” which is agreeing to, “I want to experience the absolute efficacy of our time together. Of my time on this planet, I want to experience pure ecstasy.”
Most people have a mediocre marriage because they don’t have the emotional maturity to love that deeply.
I know that the only way for that to happen is to experience the depth of pain and heartache and despair because in order to really experience anything on the spectrum of human emotion, you’ve got to be willing to do them all. If you just want to do one, you can’t do just one. That’s why a goal of I want to be, I want to be happy is not going to work out well for you because you’re going to then try to get rid of all the things that aren’t happy, and you’re going to have a mediocre life.
If you put your being into your life, into your work, into your relationships of all kinds, and especially the one with yourself, and you live your life to the fullest, then you will be devastated when it ends. That’s the only option if you live that way. Most people don’t know it consciously, but they know it, that if I go all in, it’s going to come to an end. I don’t want any part of that.
I experienced that firsthand as a philosophy when my beloved dog died. I can’t remember if I ever told the story of that in the show or not, but my dad brought animals home all the time. There was alligators, rabbits anything, any kind of animal, lizards. All of the animals were family pets. To shorten the story, I got a dog that was my dog.
This was my best friend. That dog died a horrible death. He was ripped apart. It was a chihuahua, one the bigger chihuahuas. He thought he was a German shepherd. He got ripped apart by a bunch of other dogs. When he was missing, I went out looking for him, and I found him and his pieces and I had to bring that home. I got devastated because I put everything into loving that dog. The point of the story is that the heartache, the devastation at that I was early teen maybe was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I didn’t even know anything like that existed.
My snapshot memory is of me sitting on my front porch alone and just gutturally, bodily sobbing. In one way, that was wonderful that I could express that. In another way, it was incredibly damaging that no one was there for me, because I learned that lesson. Nobody’s ever going to be there for me if things are really bad. The other lesson I learned is, if I love something that much, it’s going to hurt this bad. As that young teenager, I actually remember the conscious thought that I will never love anything again.
My journey in therapy, if not my whole life, was undoing that because that’s not the way you want to live. How different my life would’ve been if someone had sat with me on that porch while I went through that devastation and gave me the message of, “You cry as much as you need. I see how devastated you are.” In no way, shape, or form try to make anything better because you can’t. My beloved’s gone. You can’t make that better. If they had been there and witnessed that, I would’ve learned the lesson that in my worst moments, somebody will be there with me.
They’re not going to fix it. They’re not going to make it better. They’re not going to rescue me from this, but they are going to be there. I don’t ever have to go through this alone, which is what the real damage of any trauma is. It doesn’t matter what your trauma is, if you go through it alone, there’s the damage we’ve got to fix. My whole life would’ve been different if I had learned that lesson.
I would’ve learned the lesson that I don’t have to be alone in the worst times. I don’t have to be so afraid of being devastated, which means I don’t have to be afraid of loving like that. My life’s going to be a whole lot more full because I’m not going to avoid risk and being involved and caring and loving and losing, which you will always do. Every day, I lose. I lose the day. The end of the day, I say I’m grateful for the day. That day’s gone. I’m another day closer to death. That day’s gone. I’m never getting it back. Grieve.
The Therapist’s Empathy: Connection And Understanding
I’m reminded that the greater the trauma, the greater the calling. I have heard this story before. I don’t know if we shared it with the readers, and I’m super grateful that you did. What I hear is that Eddie Reece, the therapist, is the therapist that he is, which I’m biased, but I think he’s a pretty badass therapist. The reason, or one of the reasons or part and partial to why and how you’re so great is because of the empathy that you have for people, regardless of their circumstance, coming from a place of knowing firsthand.
I’ll say it one way or another to clients, because whatever it is they’re coming in that have shared with me, they’re sure I’ve never heard this story before. I’ve never had a client that was this bad. Through the process of it, I let them know, “I know this neighborhood you’re in, and therapy is about walking you through that neighborhood and showing it to you in a different light. It’s not the scary, awful place you think it is. T’s another aspect of being human. You don’t have to avoid it but you want to go there with somebody who knows the territory. You don’t want to go there by yourself. That’s what I was doing on that porch. I was in that neighborhood by myself. It’s not a good thing to do.
Go with somebody. All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten. That book had some basic guidelines. One is to hold hands when you cross the street. You want to do that deep dive. Back to our subject matter, the way to do that deep dive is to go this way first. Always, there’s so much to explore in here. I don’t run out of things to explore in here. Do that first. You really have something you can share that is really valuable, really awesome, and you want to find another person. You will if you are that person, because those got to be binary. You find that person and they go, “Yeah, my idea of relationship is it’s a deep dive into who we are and exploring because I get it, how trying to achieve deeper and deeper intimacy brings your crap up.”
That’s the best way to bring your crap up is to get in. If you really want to know yourself, go fall in love. Go through that. If you really want to know yourself, have kids because they will point out every single thing that you have never worked on and show you all of that mess inside of you that needs some work. That’s how kids love you. They go, “Mom, dad, I know this about you. You really need to take care of that. That’s why I’m behaving this way. You’ll see it. You got some issues.” That’s what a good, loving romantic partner will do for you, too.
Therapy, Understanding & Building Better Relationships
This has been an outstanding episode. Our tagline Being Therapy for Everyday Life was quite accurately exemplified in this episode. We started talking about relationships. We started talking about marriage. We started talking about self-awareness and a real mature view of what marriage is and what it isn’t. We talked about what couples might want to do or endeavor to do in order to really see, “Is this what I want? Do I really want to be married to this individual or perhaps, do I just want a wedding? Do I just want someone to witness my life?”
Regardless, what I took from this episode, even before we got into how marriage, which is a significant part of what makes up a life in for so many of us, but the way you contextualize what makes a good life, and again, the entirety of the human experience as exemplified in the terribly traumatic story of losing your dog as an early teenager.
It reminded me of the Mother Teresa quote, which is, “Love until it hurts.” Love the more because the entirety of the human experience wrapped around that four-letter word followed and accompanied by maturity, self-awareness, and again, empathy. The vulnerability that you demonstrated on this episode, it truly is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved before. So many of us are going through without the light on, and hopefully, our conversations can shed a little light for those folks.
That’s very much my hope. Through these episodes, folks can pick up something here and there to help them find out who they really are so that they can learn to really live. The other thought I had, as I was listening to you, we talked about marriage a lot, but for substitute, long-term, committed relationship, it doesn’t have to be called a marriage. If you get to the point of, “I want to be romantically involved with you, and I want us to see if we can stay together,” that’s the same thing. All this same stuff applies.
In any kind of relationship where romance is involved, everything is different. Here’s another thought. Here’s the difference between a romantic relationship and the rest of our relationships, because when I talk about all the things, let’s do a deep dive, anything that people talk about, they want to make a commitment. It’s all about commitment. “I wanted you to commit.”
We have all kinds of long-term relationships in our lives. I got friends that I’ve known for 50 years, not once, that either of us sit down and go, “We need to talk. Where’s this relationship going? Are you going to be with me forever?” I honestly think if we treated romantic relationships the way we treated those friendships, you would never have to talk about it. It would just happen.
It would be, “I’ve been thinking about this idea of being legally bound to each other. You don’t even have to call it married. What do you think of that idea, that we put a legal contract between us?” That would be a better way to do it. You don’t need an engagement. It’s not like, “Will you marry me?” Will you enter into a legal agreement with me for the rest of our lives, whether it’s marriage or divorce? Would you do that with me?
I don’t know if that’s how they want the to end The Bachelor, but we’ll see.
It doesn’t have to be marriage. You can go to an attorney and drop all kinds of legal agreements. “We’re going to buy a house together and this is how the proceeds are going to work, and this is the way we’re going to treat the house. Neither party can just decide to up and sell it without discussion of the other.” You’re going to buy some furniture together. You can throw together a little legal agreement about that. You don’t have to get married.
Yeah, and yet we do.
Yeah, we do. There’s no research on this, but I really do believe that the vast majority of people who are married are married because they’re supposed to be. It’s how you gain legitimacy in our culture. Unmarried people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, they don’t have the same legitimacy in our culture as married or divorced people. That’s just so damaging, because it keeps you from going, “I’m more this way. I want my romantic relationships to be more like this.” You’re not allowed to do that in this culture.
This was a good one.
Thanks. This is my idea of a good time.
It is. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for sticking with us until the end. If you’re finding this content valuable or relaxing or informative, or you just feel better after spending time with Eddie and myself, do us a favor. Like and subscribe. Tell us what you think of the episodes. Give us a question we can answer on air. Give us something to talk about, either through the blog or as a subject of a future episode.
Perhaps you’d like to join us in our community and get on our email list and find out where we’re going to be because one of the things Eddie and I want to do is actually take these episodes and turn it into a curriculum that we can share with individuals who are interested in knowing themselves a little better, perhaps being a better partner, perhaps being a better person or perhaps live in a more complete life, which Eddie is so eloquent at describing. We’re very grateful for your time and attention. We’ll keep doing this. Hopefully, you keep coming back, and if you’re enjoying it, don’t keep us a secret.
Thanks, Billy.
My pleasure.
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