Date Your Species Teaser
Sex and relationship expert Reid Mihalko shares Why Falling In Love With a Good Person is no longer enough to make a relationship last today, How Relationships Are Like Starting A Music Band, Why Knowing Your Bottom Lines And Win-Wins Is Important, and How YOU Can Figure Out What Species You Are!
Reid: Hello everybody, it’s Reid Mihalko from http://ReidAboutSex.com. Today I’m going to give you a little teaser about dating your species which is one of my workshops and lectures that I give to talk about and discuss how relationships have changed. Why people are basically falling in love with really good people who are horrible fits for them and how to change that. This whole idea around dating your species, whether you ever come to a workshop of mine or not or you want to come to the workshop and can’t get to it, you can check out my store at http://ReidAboutSex.com/store and purchase the video for the workshop, whether you get to a workshop or watch the video ever.
The basic idea is that relationships and why we stay in them have changed dramatically over the last couple of generations and it used to be that our great grandparents you are lucky if you fell in love with or married, didn’t have to do with love, got a setup with somebody who was a good person. If you were married or in a relationship with somebody who didn’t drink away the family fortune, who didn’t ruin your reputation in the community and at the PTA meetings, if you guys able to have healthy children and then stayed together to watch them have healthy children so that you can enjoy your grandchildren, you won at the game of life.
Nowadays, “modern relationships” it’s not the people that aren’t less committed than other generations. What’s going on now is we have cultural permission so to speak to get out of relationships if we’re not happy. Happiness is now become part of the relationship equation. Whereas a couple of generations ago, if you just married a good person you stuck with them forever, you tough that out so to speak and happiness wasn’t such a part of the equation. If you guys happen to be happy that was just a bonus and you did your best to stay in the relationship, you did your best not to rock the boat. Now what’s happened that has changed, happiness is a part of the equation but we’re still measuring success in relationships by duration, how long we stayed together and not depth. How honest, how transparent, how intimate are we in relationships.
Basically, if you’re walking around trying to figure out how to be attractive to somebody, you’re spending a lot of bandwidth, lot of energy on dressing right, on saying the right things, on doing the right things to make somebody happy so that they will be attracted to you so that they will never leave you. You end up… it’s like death by paper cuts. You end up cutting away this little pieces of yourself in service of trying to do and be more attractive rather than actually being yourself. When you have two people doing the same thing, running the same program so to speak, what you end up doing is you create a relationship where there’s a lot of attraction in the beginning certainly if you fall in love. There’s a lot of blood chemistry that’s also helping you guys be attracted but you’re not really a good fit for each other.
So there basically a lot of people who were falling in love with really good people who are horrible fits for them in the relationship. You end up not being happy and then you end up having the relationship crash and burn. You try to stay together as long as possible so you have proof that you did your best and then when you have big enough trainwreck, when there’s enough built up resentments going on in the relationship, when you have that crash and burn that’s big enough, you both can walk away because now you have proof that you tried your best and look it still crash and burn.
So my solution for this and it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll stay in relationships longer but hopefully you’ll be in relationships in a more happy way is rather than attraction you should be dealing with self-expression. You should be doing the things that make you happy as a human being. The person that you want to be, not the person you think somebody else wants you to be. While you’re being self-expressed you should see who’s attracted to you as that. As you start to work from a place of self-expression, you’re starting to step in being whatever species you happen to be and the other pieces you start dropping into this equation is giving yourself permission to have the relationship you’ve always wanted. The relationship that may not necessarily be the relationship that’s culturally approved. You start figuring out how the music of intimacy and relatedness in relationship moves through you so you just don’t have to be a classical musician because you want to conservatory, you could be a jazz musician or country musician or speed death metal or punk, whatever that is for you. When you figure out what your species is, how the music of relationship and love move through you then my advice is you start a band with people who like playing the same kind of music.
Again, you’re being transparent and self-expressed. If you decide to continue staying together, you stay together but hopefully you’re more happy because you’re now dating people who are your species and you have a better shot at having a relationship that makes you happy rather than working really hard to stay attracted to somebody who’s not really who they are in the first place.
Lastly, in this little quick teaser, the way you start figuring out what your species is, is you start looking at in your relationships in the past. What really killed your relationships? What put an expiration date, a shelf life of those relationships? What didn’t work for you? You start making a list and those things will probably some of those things will start to become bottom lines. Things for yourself that you should never allow in your relationships because it’s automatically going to put an expiration date on those. You start looking at your win-wins. What were the things that when they were present in the relationship really made it run and hum smoothly? Sometimes these bottom lines and these win-wins aren’t politically cracked.
Be real with yourself and let yourself know what things for you are true. They might not necessarily be nice, they might not necessarily like that about yourself but you need to start being honest so you can start being honest with other people as well.
Last but not least, start looking at places in your life or kind of what I call your 3 strikes area. Those things that they don’t have to be perfect for the relationship to run well but they have to be improving. What are those areas in your life?
Then, last but not least, where the wiggle room? What are those things that aren’t your preference? As long as everything else is in alignment, you have enough win-wins and you’re not crossing any bottom lines. Those things they are not your preference but there’s lot of wiggle room. They don’t really bother you so much. Classic example for me, in my relationship is my partner will sometimes leave our clothes and socks and things like that on the bedroom floor. Not my preference but that doesn’t really bother me when everything else is going smoothly and where wiggle room is really important in on this. With wiggle room, when the wiggle room stuff is really bugging you, that’s like you’re canary in a coal mine. That’s your signal that something else is up, something else is bothering you that you haven’t noticed because the wiggle room really doesn’t not at you unless something else is out of alignment.
That’s just a little teaser about what I talk about in dating your species. I look forward to meeting you at some point at a workshop or getting an email from you letting you know how the videos and some of my other products in my store… how you like them?
This is Reid Mihalko from http://ReidAboutSex.com signing off. Bye.