How to Pick the Right Partner For a Lifetime of Love | Relationship Theory

But I know who you are. Like, your core values as a person. You treat people well. You treated me well. You showed love and respect to my family. You always give me respect. You never try and shut me down. So, like, to me, that's what's important. It's not about where you come from or whether you have the same religious background or if you... At least for me, I would say, it didn't make a difference. It was like, are you a good person? Are you a good human being? Are you going to treat me well? We're going to do a very special episode for Valentine's Day and it's just, I've had 18 years of marriage with you and the lessons that we've learned along the way have just been so empowering and, like, enlightening. But I can only talk from my point of view. So I was like, you actually make the perfect guest. So I want to welcome you. And then also, I want to start with one of the things that you have always said is, like, the base and foundation to relationships. Selection matters. So that's where I want to start. Talk to me about selection matters, what you mean by that. So this is... I feel so bad because for a long time, it didn't dawn on me how important it was. And I just thought that I was, like, king ---- at relationships. And then I really started to think about the way that you are in the relationship and how would I be able to apply the things that I'm learning from reading books and all of that stuff about how to make a relationship work if you weren't so adept at, one, just being good at communicating. Two, you're so good at letting things go and realizing how much grace you were giving me in the relationship to make mistakes, to try things that didn't necessarily work or to just be plain young and stupid. I don't remember when it hit me, but I remember how it felt when I was like, wait a second, if I didn't have that, then all of the knowledge and tools and tactics wouldn't go anywhere. If you didn't have a growth mindset as well, then this would really be sort of dead in the water. And it really made me start to reflect on how much of this is actually that I have tools and tactics and how much of this is that I just really chose wisely and really began to realize you need both for sure. You need the tools, you need the tactics, you need communication, the hard work that you were talking about in the intro. All of that's real. But you really need to pick somebody that has certain sort of objective universal characteristics like either already a growth mindset or a willingness to pursue it. I mean, we got together so young. I know neither of us had a growth mindset, but we understood very early on that you either grow together or you grow apart. So we put equal energy into improving. And then there are things that are specific to you. There are certain things you're gonna like, not like the fact that we're not both just sort of alphas banging our heads together that we found a nice yin-yang balance like you were talking about. What do you think then about the yin and the yang? Because this is a question that I get asked a lot. People are surprised that we're actually very different. But sometimes I actually think that being too different can also be detrimental to the relationship. And for me and you, we talk very heavily on values. So when we first got together, talking about the values to our core, because even though we're different in personalities, I actually haven't found that that's been a problem. Well, it has actually been. It creates all of the issues in our marriage, 100%. Yeah, you're right. But you're absolutely correct about that narrow band of different but not too different. Yeah, where do you think that fine line is? So I think that you have personality, what I'll call the combination of inbred traits, just the way that you are, your default orientation. I don't think you've done anything over your life to have the default personality type that you have, nor do I feel like I've done anything from mine. But the values were added on. So your personality types, I think, are a yin-yang. Your values, though, I think need to be very similar, deadly similar, because if you really clash on something super important, and we talk about this, it's like when you're arguing, arguing, and arguing, you may have a base assumption misalignment, and it's like, oh, you think things are one way, I think things are another way. But once I understand your base assumption, oh, you think X, Y, Z, then it's like, okay, well, it's not a value. Now I understand where you're coming from, that perspective, I can adopt it easily. But if it comes down to, yo, we now understand what the base assumptions are, and I still think you're crazy because now we're talking about a value, the way things ought to be. And once you get to the way things ought to be, and you have a collision there, so I understand your position, you understand mine, but I think you're crazy, and you think I'm crazy, that's where it gets dangerous. You can have some, you will have some. But oh, if you have too many, and you don't know how to navigate, or compartmentalize, or say, hey, cool, we'll put that on the back burner, you're gonna have a real problem. Because I remember when we first met, one of the things that almost everybody universally told me that I knew was like. I know where this goes. You don't normally go after somebody like that. He's not your type. He's not your type, he's very different. And that was because I was brought up in North London, around a Greek and Turkish community, and so that was who I was around, that's who I dated. But everybody, so when I had said I had met this guy, and you had met my friends for the first time, a lot of people were like, he's so different from you. Like, how can you guys relate? So when you even went to my dad, and asked for his blessing to marry me, and he said no, a big part of his argument was, you guys come from different worlds, right? You come from America, I come from a very traditional Greek family in England, so our religions are completely, you weren't even christened, I came from a Greek Orthodox background. And so when I hear people talking about this type of thing, from the surface it may seem, you guys will never last. Like, how are you ever gonna agree on things? But I always went back to, but I know who you are. Like, your core values as a person, you treat people well, you treated me well. You showed love and respect to my family. You always give me respect, you never try and shut me down. So like, to me, that's what's important. It's not about where you come from, or whether you have the same religious background, or if you, at least for me, I would say, it didn't make a difference. It was like, are you a good person? Are you a good human being? Are you gonna treat me well? So I assessed what my values were, and then looked at yours, and saw how they aligned well. But from the outside, I think people can just look at how you were brought up, and that dictates who you are, but I actually don't agree with that. It can play out badly, there's no question. Like, so one, in a lot of things in our relationship, one of us is devoid of opinion, and the other feels very strongly. So I wasn't religious at all. And when we thought we were gonna have kids, you were like, look, our kids are going to be christened in the church. I had to get baptized to marry you in a Greek church. So if I had had very strong religious convictions in a different direction, that would have been problematic. But you did, in a sense of like, you were saying I don't believe in God, and here I was saying. I didn't believe, but I wasn't giving anything up in order to get baptized. So it was like, all of the traditions, and all of that stuff, which are wrapped around it, I didn't have any. So it was like, yes, I wasn't converting emotionally, I was doing it in order to give you what you wanted, to be able to get married in the church, and all of that. But it was easy, because I didn't feel like I was giving anything up. Like, if I was devout in another direction, that might have been a sticking point for me. Because then I would have said, okay, well sure, I'll do it to get married, but I don't want to raise our kids in that religion. I wanna raise them in this religion. So I think there are times where you can't BS yourself. Your dad wasn't barking up the wrong tree. He just didn't understand us well enough to know sort of where we were. You weren't actually doggedly religious. And so we sort of found an equilibrium there. We both have a sense of awe. We both know there's something bigger than ourselves. And at this point, neither of us sort of think of that in a traditional religious sense. So that was easy to overcome. Because I didn't have any trappings of religion that I felt like I was turning my back on in order to get baptized, that was easy to overcome. We both wanted to be around our families. So navigating things like that, it was like, of course you're gonna wanna be around your family. And you were like, of course I'm gonna wanna be around my family. So we would fly back and forth every holiday, even when we were poor. And it was painful, and we had to take the world's cheapest flights and do crazy layovers. And we would still go see both families at Christmastime. So it was like, there was no argument there. There was no like, why would we do that? And you weren't saying, well, we just saw your family at Thanksgiving, why can't we do Christmas at mine? We saw things so similarly that it just became easy to sort of, from a place of, like you're saying, mutual respect, it was easy to be like, yeah, I get why that would be important to you. So between sort of these, you feel strongly on something and I don't feel strongly, I feel strongly on something, you don't feel strongly, or then we shared things where we could give that mutual respect and understanding, it's worked out. And the thing that scares me about it is how much of that, we didn't really have the knowledge to like, put a finger on it when we fell in love. We didn't, but we always said to each other, we'd communicate, and from the beginning, I think you have to establish communication with your partner, even when you have to say the hard things because the amount of things that we've had to communicate and they've been hard, so that's actually one thing I really want to go deep on. And the other thing I actually want to talk about, just as you'd mentioned it, is not trying to change each other. So at the time, I was religious, it wasn't like I was pushing it on people, but I absolutely believed in God, very traditional and christened, and I really wanted to get married in a Greek church. So when I came to you and I asked you, and I said, hey, this is important, so language, I said, this is important, I want to get married in a Greek church, we had the communication where you said, okay, because it's important to you, that's fine, but I need you to know, this does not make me believe in God, I'm not gonna change my belief system. You had articulated all of that right from the beginning, and I didn't try and change you, I didn't try and convince you to believe in God, I didn't try and convince you to join my religion and to believe in it, I was like, okay, if that's who you are, I respect that. Now, if I tried to change that, I think that would've been a very difficult, I don't know if we would've been able to last because it would've been a fundamental difference in seeing the world and our beliefs. It's really interesting because you're right, that would've been a really dangerous one to try to change, but I would say that I don't even know who I am without you, and when I think about how young we were when we got together and how much we've shaped each other through reward and punishment, simple as, it's like I would be a very different person, and I like that, I don't have an interest in trying to extract who I would be if I didn't know you any more than I would try to extract myself from the other people who have contributed so meaningfully to my beliefs and to my values and being in a culture, even if that's a company, all that stuff really shapes you, so I'm very grateful for the contributions that you've made to who I am. So we very much have shaped each other, I would say with a high degree of intention. But don't you think there's a difference between change and influence? I don't know, I feel like you, there's such a common stigma around saying you don't wanna change somebody, and trust me, if you go into a relationship saying, oh, they're like this now, but I'm gonna change them, you're fucked, you are done, that is gonna end in absolute catastrophe. But now I'm gonna hold two competing ideas in my head because the other side of that is, yes, that's very true, but as I get into a relationship and go, ooh, when you do that, it really doesn't sit well with me, that's not something I can be involved in long term, then you do set out to shape each other. Now the one agreement that we had in the beginning was, we don't have a better word for this, maybe just influence, but it doesn't sound quite truthful. So the word we used was manipulate. I'm gonna manipulate you, and we talked about this. I'm gonna manipulate you, you're gonna manipulate me. The only thing I promised you was I'll never do it without telling you exactly what I'm doing. So it became very easy where it was like, if we wanted a change, be healthier, exercise more, push yourself in business. I was so lazy in the beginning, and you were very direct about, hey, you promised me that you were ambitious, you promised me that you were really gonna take a swing at this, but you're laying in bed for four and five hours a day. You were very clearly encouraging me, pushing me, both on a reward front and on a punishment front. So when I did something that was in alignment with what I had told you I was going to do with my life, that was going to push and propel us forward, you were just beyond encouraging, and it was so warm and so lovely. But then if I was being a lazy ****, you weren't afraid to be like, yo, what's going on? You didn't make me feel badly about myself, you were never talking down to me. I don't want people to get the wrong idea, but it is reward and punishment for sure. And it's been one of the most amazing guiding forces in our lives.