Advice on how to deal with conflict, from a Relationship Expert.
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00:00 with venom in his eyes and he says, "I hate you."
00:04 I'm one month pregnant and I'm having the biggest fight of my life with my husband.
00:09 And we are in it.
00:11 It's been going for an hour. He is livid. I am terrified.
00:15 And then he looks at me from across the room with venom in his eyes and he says, "I hate you."
00:22 And my heart stops and I'm convinced this is over.
00:28 But I learned something that day.
00:30 I learned that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
00:36 Love is not just full of happy, soothing, empowered emotions.
00:39 Love is full of dark, difficult, heart-breaking emotions.
00:43 And if you want to feel the game of true love, you have to be willing to open yourself to the full range of human experience.
00:49 And when your heart can hold that level of intensity, then you are available to true love.
00:53 And then you can hold that intensity from your partner.
00:56 And their emotions become safe with you.
01:00 So there I am, in the middle of this epic battle with my husband, with my baby in my belly,
01:05 and I'm convinced this is the end of the relationship.
01:08 And he looks at me and I start to crumple.
01:12 And he walks towards me and he says it to my face, "I do hate you.
01:17 But I love you more than I hate you."
01:22 And I could feel in that moment that it was true.
01:25 But we've been fighting for hours over an issue that had no real resolution.
01:28 And I was heartbroken and hopeless and I looked into his eyes and I said,
01:31 "I just don't know how we're ever going to get through this.
01:34 I'm hopeless. I'm in despair."
01:37 And he looked at me and he softened and he said, "I know. I don't know how we're going to get through this.
01:41 I'm in despair too. But maybe," he said,
01:48 "Maybe we could just hold each other in that despair."
01:51 And in that despair, together, we realized that our love and our desire to stand for the us
01:58 was bigger than that issue, bigger than that feeling.
02:01 And I learned that in love, when you have the capacity to feel every single emotion,
02:05 even the most terrifying, like the end of the relationship,
02:08 that anything is possible and you can find each other.
02:12 The heart is a muscle. And as we all know, every muscle, in order to build it,
02:16 has to rip, has to tear, has to break.
02:19 The more you are willing to feel and let your heart break, the bigger your heart becomes,
02:24 the wider its capacity, its strength and its ability to hold love.
02:28 And every little rip in your heart is a conflict.
02:32 A lot of people think conflict is not what should happen when you're in love.
02:36 This shouldn't be so difficult. This must mean we're not right for each other.
02:39 Well, let me tell you something as someone who's behind the scenes in conflict.
02:42 Conflict is absolutely normal and integral and important for a relationship to thrive.
02:47 The most powerful in love couples I have ever met fight more in the first two years than anyone else I know.
02:53 Why? Because they're two different people from two different worlds, different belief systems.
02:57 A fight, an argument, is always a misunderstanding.
03:01 It's "I don't feel loved, I don't feel seen, I don't feel honored right now."
03:06 Love is the easiest and the hardest thing you're ever going to do with your heart.
03:10 Love, it doesn't take a lot. It takes everything.
03:16 Believe in love as if your greatness depends on it.
03:21 Because it does.
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