Reframing Love As Support and Self-care Rather Than Sacrifice | Facebook Walk With Reid
Reid: Hello Facebook it’s Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/ and my hair is horrible today because I wasn’t able to get my hair wet today because I really hit my head hard and bad and kind of split my….my head open from Intimacy Fest and as you’re signing in saying hi, say hi from wherever you’re at and then if you want to share like what’s the…the….the most inconvenient injury you’ve ever sustained?
I got here yesterday to Intimacy Fest and we’re in Southern California. I’m going to bring you over to where the swimming pool is but I was so excited to be back here because this is the third year of Intimacy Fest that I….I you know drop my bags off and immediately ran to the swimming pool which you will see in its luxurious. Climbed up onto the….the diving rock, dove in and then swam over to the slide the waterslide and went down the waterslide Superman style like face-first and conveniently forgetting that when I did that last year, there’s a dip in the bottom of the waterslide that basically had you smack your face into the waterslide and….and I was in a great Superman position so that I smacked my forehead and….and basically just split right open. So you know within eight minutes of being here, I was bleeding and….and now I have to wear a Band-Aid but let me show you this is…..we’re in the middle of the desert here. We’re like in a…Aguanga, or….or Argus, California but that’s the water, the pool behind us and it’s amazing and that right over there is the rock that I dove off of. Dove off of that way and then I’ll show you the waterslide. I’ll take you…it’s not on right now but I was I’m the cautionary tale and it looks like I will have a good….good new scar on my forehead which I wasn’t really excited about because I kind of liked my face the way it is but at the same time, I am really lucky I didn’t like crack my…my cheekbone or anything.
So, this is the waterslide right here and….and it was awesome. It just hurt like a mofo and I’ll give you a little view over here. It’s just beautiful. The sun’s starting to set. So what am I going to talk to you? You know what, we’re going to go to the bridge and I’ll talk to you about what I talked about recently to the Intimacy Fest folks and I just want to say thanks to Dave Booda and Paula who created Intimacy Fest and the…..and for having me back and I teach a bunch of my geeky relationship stuff and then teach some sexuality stuff as well.
But today we’re talking about relationships and this idea of love. There we go! Love as a form of sacrifice and relationships or trying to have a relationship kind of done from this perspective of being attractive like you have to you know have the right kind of job, say the right kind of things, have the right haircut, have the right kind of body to be attractive for potential mate or something like that and then what I was telling people to reconsider is the idea of rather than relationships being about attraction, fitting into the box that you’re taught or that everybody else has taught around culture you know so you fit in rather than trying to fit in and be attractive. This idea of living life and having relationships from the idea of self-expression like what…who is the Reid Mihalko that makes Reid Mihalko the happiest? Like me being more self-expressed and being me if that happens to not fit into culture’s prescribed box, me being the me that makes me happiest and see who’s attracted to me because of that and this is kind of the beginning of starting to figure out like dating your species like be the you that makes you happiest, figure out what your needs and boundaries are in relationships that are a good fit and then the people that are attracted to you because you’re being you and who also share you know those overlapping qualities that are a good fit like that’s kind of your…your species so to speak.
One of the things we were chatting about today during the afternoon lecture was the idea of reframing love not as sacrifice but as support and self-care and now some people you know had questions about you know what about like you know you have to sacrifice for your kids right and I’m like well think about it this way, this is kind of deep thinking and we’re going to head down to the labyrinth because they’ve got a labyrinth here. The deep thinking is, if you’re being the…you that makes you happiest and…and take all of what I have to say at you know for whatever it’s worth. If it doesn’t apply to you or you think it’s bullshit, just chuck it like you’re not broken. These are just ideas to consider but if you’re being the you that makes you happiest which means you want to be a parent, you want to have kids then going out of your way to raise tiny adults and here’s the labyrinth. I’m going out of your way to raise tiny human beings if that’s what you’ve always wanted or if that’s a part of you that you want you know to….to be you that makes you happy, then the work you have to do to show up, to be a parent is kind of fitting into your self-expression even if you have to cancel a date night because your kid is sick. Yeah, that’s inconvenient but that does not really sacrifice because you’ve aligned your…the life that you’re living or living by design. You’ve aligned it in such a way that it’s a that is part of what your goals are, what your priorities are and so when you’re doing something like that it doesn’t really occur as sacrifice. It’s just part of the situation where you have to work hard.
Take all this with….with the caveat that I’m kind of approaching life from this perspective of choice and not everybody has a lot of choice in their lives. Some people had kids and didn’t really have a….you know as much of a choice as they feel maybe that they had around having kids or it was expected of them or whatever. The caveat is, I’m I know I’m saying big broad statements but if you imagine you had a choice and there wasn’t a penalty for saying no to something and you wanted to be a parent and have kids then your kid getting sick and you having to cancel date night well that’s just part of the that’s part of the plan like that happens sometimes. It’s inconvenient but it’s not sacrifice. Sacrifice to me tends to kind of come from this situation where everything’s not really so much in alignment and then you’re having to do or be somebody that you don’t really want to be or that doesn’t make you super happy and that’s different than having to show up and work hard at something or take care of business because you’re you…..you have a responsibility. So I hope I hope I was able to be articulate around how I’m defining sacrifice and so the idea using kids as the example is showing up for your kids when you really have a deep longing to be a parent. That’s just part of being a parent and….and then there’s like this word play now in my head of being a parent. It’s apparent that you’re a parent. I thought that was cute.
So this idea when you start to live your life from self-expression and you’re choosing it to get to not a have to what you want, we just walked through the labyrinth by the way. If it’s a…a…a get to not a have to then it kind of changes the idea of love. I think love is not so much about sacrifice. It’s really about supporting or supporting yourself because this is a thing that you want that’s important to you and so having kids being a parent getting to express that piece is actually a kind of self-care. You supporting your own self-expression and so we kind of went down that rabbit hole of talking about reframing love as a type of support and self-care. So you’re taking care of yourself and you support your loved ones, your partners in relationship in getting the support they need for their self-care which doesn’t mean it has to come from you and…and so you get to kind of be each other’s cheerleaders and encourage each other to put on your own you know oxygen mask first so to speak so that you have more resources to show up for each other for a relationship that you actually want to be in and then love doesn’t…..doesn’t become about sacrifice. Love becomes about support and being in service to this part of you that’s that makes you happy. That’s about self-expression and choice and….and then when living life isn’t about trying to be attractive but being yourself and the people that you’re sharing your life with want to be there too. They want to share it with you because they are also being themselves.
Then, the last piece that we talked about is not making relationships about duration. You’re not measuring the success of a relationship by how long you’ve been together, you measure the success of the relationship by how by rather than duration its depth. You….you measure how true and how real your being with each other. And….and those three things when you start to kind of look at life from what can be kind of a radical perspective, you’re actually being yourself which is….is vulnerable because then people if people don’t like you they really don’t like you. It’s…it’s your authentic you that they don’t like. So rejection can feel more vulnerable whereas if you’re just trying to fit in to the box of the world, the culture prescribes and they reject you, well they rejected you trying to fit in, they didn’t really reject you but unfortunately that doesn’t allow people to fall in love with you for who you really are and I just want to give you a sign that the gates here at the campground that we’re at and I think it’s Aguanga, California.
So, I hope that all made sense and I hope this was a nice little walk that you got to go on today and I’m excited that we actually had cellphone reception here and at the ranch that were at….at Club Martin also known as Short Ranch Branch or Short….Short Branch Ranch I guess. Although that might be an old…. Here we go. We’re back. I’m sorry I walked off the property far enough that we lost reception.
So, I’m going to leave it here. I’m going to bring it in for a landing. I just wanted to show you where I am today. Show you the beautiful desert sunset or it’s starting the sunset. It’s not really close yet. So leave your ideas. What do you think about….about these concepts? I’ve been teaching these concepts for several years now. Some of them appear in Neil Strauss’s book I just forgot the book. Shoot…shoot….shoot gosh darn it. Is it The Gift? Maybe. But….but yeah, these have been things I’ve been talking about for a while and talk about and date your species and whatnot but today especially we’re just kind of diving and talking about you know love as a form of support and self-care and I wanted to know what your thoughts are on that.
That’s going to be it. I’m going to leave you now with a quick little shot of the pool behind us and now I’m going to say goodbye. Bye!