Why We Have Lousy Relationships

Today I want to talk about relationships. How to do relationships, how to be good at relationships, what happens when we get better at relationships.

Something hypothetical. I invent the questionnaire. It has 422 questions on it. I give it to 10,000 people. The questionnaire taps into: how emotionally healthy are you? I put people into three categories. Super healthy, average, not that healthy. Then I make another test, ability to do relationships. 396 questions. Same three groups. How much overlap will there be? If you score really well in emotional health, you're going to score really well in ability to do relationships. If you're not that good in emotional health, you're not going to do relationships really well.

Now a third test — capacity for intimacy. The ability to do relationships deeply, honestly, authentically. Same three groups. Tons of overlap. If you're in the bottom here, you're going to be in the bottom for all three. I'm isolating a factor — how good you'd do in relationships. Another way to put it: do you have your act together?

So in my practice, people come in complaining about their partner. My partner is not doing this, not giving enough, not present enough. They want me to side with them. I'll do that for a session or two, I'm a nice guy. But eventually I'm going to turn the focus back and say, what's your role in all this?

Because here's my experience. We end up with the kind of people that are in our exact same level. If I'm in the low category, there are only three kinds of women I'm going to end up with. If I meet someone in the middle, I may get her to go out with me three times or six times. But eventually, even if I have a nice car, a great job, I'm incredibly good-looking, I'm a great dancer — I cannot give her what I don't have. She's going to be lonely and she's going to say adios.

I recently ran across a woman. She said, me and Johnny are getting divorced. I said, you poor thing, that's terrible. She said, yeah, I know. And I said, you know he wasn't that great a husband to you, was he? She said, no, absolutely not. And then she said, you actually told me that. I said, I forgot I said that.

I once said to a therapist, I got this new theory. I explained the whole thing. He said, oh, I have a similar theory. I said, what's your theory? He said, if you want to know how healthy you are, look across the dinner table. I said — yours is much simpler than mine.