8 Rules of Love & Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Them

more enthusiastic. Right now, I'm feeling so energized because for the first time ever, I get to announce my podcast that my new book, my second book, is ready for preorder. It's called The Eight Rules of Love. I cannot wait

for you to read this book. I have spent the last two years pouring my heart out into the process of creating this book, everything from learning from my clients, sitting down and researching cultures, looking at ancient wisdom, studying the modern science on dating, relationships, love breakups, and then trying my best to synthesize, simplify, connect the dots so

that you can find guidance on your path. So, whether you're single, whether you're dating, whether you just broke up, whether you're in a long term relationship, this book is for you, and I know thousands of you have already pre ordered the book or you've pre ordered the audiobook as well, which you can do right now, and I just want to say a massive thank you if you've already done that. If you haven't, you can go right

now to eight Rules of Love dot com. That's eight Rules of Love dot com and you will find a link to your country and you can preorder the audio version, the hardback, whatever you want. And when you preorder today, you'll get access to my tour dates earlier than anyone. So if you pre order, you'll get that access. Also, I am so excited to announce that our guest this upcoming Monday is none other than Kendall Jenna. It's an incredible interview, a great conversation with a new friend. I

really don't want you to miss this one. It's so powerful and I think you've really got to enjoy it. So let your friends know, mark the dates, save it, subscribe to the podcast today so that you don't miss out this Monday. Kendall Jenna. So what I'm going to do in today's episode is I'm going to answer the key questions you've been asking me about the book and the lessons inside those questions as well. So question number one that you've been asking me is why the number eight?

Why did I choose eight rules of love? Why not seven? Why not nine? Why not fifty two? Which, by the way, it was my original proposalblem editor thought that was too many, and I think you agree. Why eight rules? Now, there's lots of different reasons for this, lots of different levels and layers to this thought process. The first reason is that we all know that the number eight is the same symbol as infinity. And I think when we think about love, we think about it being unconditional, we think

about it being endless. We truly believe that true love, pure love, real love, is infinite, and so I thought the number eight would be a beautiful symbol for talking about That's the level of love I'm talking about in this book. In this book, I don't just talk about love that we kind of throw around as a word. I don't just talk about love as kind of like it's just something that we speak about randomly. I'm talking about the purest, deepest love and how to access it

within ourselves and within our relationships. Because when Harvard did their seventy five years study on human happiness. They found that the quality of our relationships was the key indicator for human happiness. And so this book is really dedicated to how can we actually experience that depth of love and depth of relationship in our lives now? As I dug deeper, I also discovered that the number eight is

a symbol of balance. Right It's one of the few numbers, or the only number that I can think of right now that's actually symmetrical in shape. And when we think about a healthy relationship, I think we're starting to understand that healthy relationships are ones where people who are equally individually doing the healing are actually coming together to connect. And so when you see that balance in the number eight, you see that symmetry in the number eight, it really

represents a healthy relationship. Even if you look at the number eight, you could see it as two whole circles coming together, right coming together to create something more beautiful,

coming together to create something more powerful. And then I was reading on numerology dot com and it talked about how in Chinese culture, the number eight is considered the luckiest number of all and has purposefully worked into wedding dates, birth dates, addresses, and finances numerology dot Com goes on to say that in the car makes sense in a spiritual sense. The number eight is all about giving back.

It realizes that its successes are not its alone, and will intentionally recognize and appreciate any help it has received, another key pillar to a healthy, powerful relationship that the book will of course dive deeper into as well. So that's why it chose the number eight. This is the first time I've ever talked about this, actually, and I don't explain this in the book either. So anyone who's listening to the podcast right now, you're getting the real,

behind the scenes thought process of how this all came together. Now, the second question I've been asked is why rules? Why do we need rules? Jay? Like, isn't lifeful about breaking rules? It isn't life about getting away from rules. Now, I consider myself a rule breaker. I consider myself someone who likes to rebel, who likes to bend the rules, break the rules. Like, That's definitely a part of my nature, my identity. I've always gone against the grain, I've always

done things differently. So why am I, at this point in my life writing a book about rules. Well, here's what I honestly learned. I've learned through life that you can be as innovative, rebellious, disruptive as you think, but there are certain universal rules, universal laws that you just can't break. It's kind of like trying to control the weather. Right, you can pack an umbrella, you can wear a coat, you can wear the right shoes, but you can't control

whether it rains, snows, sunshine, or a blizzard. Right. You have no control over that. And that's how these laws are. They're working off their own accord. They exist whether you believe in them or not. These rules are there whether you've seen them written down or not, and you see them across different types of relationships, different cultures, different backgrounds. So when I dive into these eight rules, we start to recognize that if they're broken, we keep making the

same mistakes again and again and again. When you look at relationships that succeed and you look at relationships that fail, it's because you see the ones that are successful of following the rules. And now I also want to define what I see as a successful relationship. I don't see successful relationships as relationships that last. I see successful relationships

as relationships that learn. So a successful relationship is not a relationship because it lasted ten, twenty, thirty fifty years, like, that's an arbitrary mark, that's a random number. It could have been the most painful, most unfulfilling relationship for forty years. Why are we just celebrating a number when in reality, a successful relationship is not a relationship that lasts long.

A successful relationship is a relationship that learns long. If two people are learning from each other, if two people are learning about each other, if two people are learning about themselves, that's a phenomenal relationship. And I think we get so stuck on either lust like or love that we avoid the key thing that a relationship is trying to get us to do, which is learned. Your partners meant to be annoying. Your partners meant to get on

your nerves. Your partner is going to do things that irritate you, that agitate you in the process to help you grow and learn. There is no human on planet Earth that is not going to agitate you in some way. Because you're different people, you come from different backgrounds. So these rules that you'll learn in this book are rules that stop you from doing certain things or encourage you to only do certain things. They're not rules like in

a rule book. These are rules that are existing beyond our belief system, and when we practice them, we start to see the power of them. And when you practice them, you start to be able to use these rules to improve the love in your life. Now, the third question I get asked is all about the subtitle, because I had lots of different ideas for the subtitle. One of

them was how to manifest the relationship you want? And I started to go backwards on that because I realized that too many people have a prescribed version of who they want in their life. They have a long list, and they're told the more you manifest it, the more you think about it, the more you will attract that person. And what I've found more often than not is that relationships are about discovering someone as opposed to this siding

on someone beforehand. So a lot of people feel that if you decide on what you want, that's what you'll attract. And what I've discovered from meeting people is that actually, when you choose to discover a person, you can then decide whether they're the right person. If you try and decide whether someone's the right person or not based on a list, you could say no to someone who could

actually be a great partner for you. And so actually learning to discover people, learning to actually be curious, learning to actually learn about people, which is the one thing we don't want to do, actually allows us to gain so much more intimacy and connection with that individual. So the subtitle I chose was how to find It, keep it, and let it go? Because what I found is that love is so elusive to us. I mean, when you google the words will I ever, the predicted number one

search result is will I ever Find Love? And now I wrote in the subtitle, but in the book, I don't talk about finding love. I talk about creating love. I talk about building love. I think we're so stuck in the pursuit of looking, searching, seeking, finding that we don't build, create, work and put in effort. Right. The whole culture that we've been led to believe is find your passion, find your person right, find your whatever it

may be. And really it's not about finding, wishing, wanting, waiting. It's about building, creating, doing. And so in the book, I switch your perspective from finding to creating. And this is a mindset shift. This doesn't just apply to love, it applies to life. This is a mindset shift that I'm trying to create through this book that I want you to stop thinking about life in the pursuit of finding something, in the pursuit of hoping that it already exists,

and I'm going to find it. Actually it already exists because you're going to create it. And so that switch if you literally applied that to the rest of your week, if you said, I'm not going to find motivation, I'm not going to look for when I feel good. I'm going to create feeling good. I'm going to build feeling better about my life. I'm not going to look for it. I'm not going to hope for it. I'm not going to wish for it. That's a mindset shift in commitment

to how you live. Now I talk about keeping it. I think keeping it is really important because in our lives we sometimes find it easy to find that spark, or maybe we don't, but maybe you feel some connection, but then it wears away, you know, maybe it wears away in a couple of months, maybe a couple of years, maybe after ten years, maybe for some people after a couple of decades. Keeping something is a lot harder than

creating it, right, Creating is easier than keeping. If you look at the amount of businesses that are started versus the amount of businesses that last, there's more started than those that last. If you look at sports stars, athletes who make a name for themselves and then second season, third season, no one knows who they are anymore. If you look at musicians who have their one hit wonder, we have that statement one hit wonder because you have that one hit wonder, and then people don't know who

you are anymore. So starting something is hard, but keeping it going is harder. Maintenance is way harder. Right, you can build a beautiful building, but trying to keep it beautiful is so much harder. The amount of refurbishment it takes, the amount of revamping it takes, the redecorating it takes. So I place a lot of emphasis on this book, not just on finding and creating love, but on keeping it, on keeping it beautiful and keeping it wonderful, and keeping

it exciting. I think the mindset shift here is that we have this belief that everything should just stay the same. I loved how things were when we met. Our first date was incredible, Let's recreate it. Our wedding day was the best. I wish we were back there. Life becomes about reliving old memories rather than building new memories. And I think that's one of our biggest, biggest mistakes in life, is that we're so stuck in the nostalgia of the past.

We're so glued to how things used to be when they weren't even that great back then, that we elude ourselves to only trying to recreate memories, not create new ones. And that's why I wanted to talk about how to keep things fresh, how to keep things alive, and how to make things feel like they're organically growing. And that's the funny thing, right, things are only exciting when they're growing.

Like you know, when you were a kid, probably like maybe your parents had a measure to see how tall you were growing, or maybe you were one of those families where your parents allowed you to like scribble on the wall above your head, and then they watched you grow. And it's so exciting when you're getting a little bit taller, or you're growing in classes. And what I realized is that when most of us leave college, or if you didn't go to college and you quit before. From that

point on, there's no measurement anymore. Therefore we don't feel any growth anymore. That's why we don't feel we're moving forward. Up until eighteen or twenty one, or sixteen or eighteen or twenty one, whenever you dropped out of school sixteen, eighteen or twenty one, Up until that point, there was growth in your life. There was exams, there were tests, there were classes, there was a new year. Starting after twenty one, you practically lived the same life year after

year or after year. And so if you don't set growth, if you don't set new targets, if you don't set new organic milestones, that's why life becomes boring. And that's the same thing that happens after marriage. It's the same thing that happens after you move in with someone. It's like you lose the next milestone. When you lose the next external milestone, you have to set new internal milestones.

This is a huge mindset shift. I can't express this enough that keeping something is not about keeping it the same. Keeping something is about being open to change. Remember this, write it down. Keeping something is not about keeping it the same, Keeping something is about being open to change, open to change, creating change, choosing change. And in this book, I'll share with you how you can practically do that.

The book is filled with practical tools, insights, work areas, brainstorms, activities you can do on your own or with a partner if you have one. There's so many aspects to it. The third part of the subtile the people i'men asking about is how to let it go? I was like, Jay, how do you how do you let love go? Like? I don't want to let love go? Like? Or I do want to let love go and I don't know

how to. And I really thought it was important in this book to address this idea that there's a beautiful Arabic proverb that says, what is meant for you will never miss you, and what misses you was never meant for you. And to me, living with that faith, living with that confidence creates a whole new mindset again in our lives. So if you notice, the subtile focuses on three key mindset shifts in life that are required for us to have healthy relationships. Because sometimes someone comes into

our life teaches us a lesson, it moves on. Sometimes someone comes into our life gives us a blessing, it moves on. Sometimes someone comes into our life and messes it up and moves on right. And so whether it's a mess, a lesson, or a blessing, it's not something we can control. But recognizing the difference between someone give us a blessing, someone giving us a lesson, and someone giving us a mess allows us to recognize that each one was designed to help us learn a particular part

of that. So that's the insight on the subtitles, the title, the number of rules. And now I want to answer some questions which I think you're going to really enjoy that. I was asked recently about the book from all of you on Instagram as well. So one of the biggest questions was why have I written a book about love right now? And I'd say there are a million reasons. Over the last few years, all the podcasts I've done on love and relationships, all of you have listened to

them the most. The videos that I made on love and relationships for years, all of you have watched them the most. You've shown me through how you connect and resonate with the work I'm putting out that this is a issue in your life. When I talk to people, whether they are upcoming, successful entrepreneurs, whether they're established, whether you're just starting out, whether you're working at a company, the number one thing I hear from people is just

I'm dissatisfied with my relationship. I'm so unhappy that I haven't found someone like. This seems to be something that weighs on our generation differently. It hits differently. It's a gap in our lives. It's an inadequate feeling, it's an incomplete feeling that we experience when our relationships are not fulfilled.

And so I really believe that it was such an important topic to write about, and I honestly have learned so much more about love through writing this book that it has been an honor and a blessing in my life to have this opportunity. And American novelist Jamie McGuire said that love is the most overused word in the English dictionary. I believe it's the most underdefined. We yeah most of our messages about love from media, from movies, from music, from our parents, and lots of them are

either inaccurate or unhealthy, or at best, they're limited. And Tim Lomas a psychologist at Harvard analyzed fifty different languages and discovered fourteen types of love. I mean, most of us maybe think there are two or three kinds of love, like romantic love, family love, and maybe the way you love your dog or really good chocolate like me. But in all of it, we're missing a lot of what

love is really about. So I wrote this book because I wanted to share the eight rules that I've learned through different cultures, ancient wisdom and modern science that will help at any stage of your pursuit of love. So I want you to have your own definition of love when you read this book. I want you to actually understand what love means to you, because it means something very different to everyone else, and we've been using everyone else's poorly formed definitions of love to define our own.

Another question I got recently was if I just got married, J, what's your best advice for me? So if I was to offer one piece of advice, I'd say, expect your relationship to change, and hope for it to change, and even work to make sure it changes. We tend to have this idea that our wedding day is a finish line. We found the one and the reality is that it's

a starting line, not a finish line. And the thing is, with a regular run, like in a marathon, you'd know the course, but with marriage and any relationship, you have no idea what you'll encounter. So there's a lot of learning and growth that needs to take place so you can navigate it together and get better ready as you go. And so instead of getting married and having a hope or expectation that you and your partner and your relationship will always stay the same, expect to be challenged, expect

to fail, and try and embrace those experiences. If you always orient yourself towards growth, even your stumbles will become ways to move forward. So I find that again another life mindset shift. We kind of get to this place where we're like, Okay, from today, everything's going to be good. Like from today, I'm going to eat healthy every day. From today, I'm going to meditate the best every day. From today, everything's going to be amazing. And the reality is, sure,

that's a nice cute mindset to have. The reality is I will fail, things will go wrong. So if I know that, then I'll be able to pivot and readjust again. But if I believe everything's going to be perfect. I'm actually setting myself up for a greater downfall. Okay, this question was really powerful, Jay. What if I just like being alone. I don't want to be in love. I don't believe in it. So I'd say that you actually

have an interesting view of love. So when I was a monk, and when I became a monk, I thought I'd be one for the rest of my life. And I definitely do not believe that you have to have a romantic partner to experience love. I experience so much love living as a monk within and with my fellow monks, that it wasn't something that I now have an issue about. Like I think, for a long time, we're made to believe that if you're not with someone, then you can't

experience love. So, in fact, one of the greatest forms of love and the most foundational, is love for ourself. And what I've realized is love for ourself doesn't come through confidence or self esteem or self love. It comes from self respect. Right. You'll learn to love yourself when you respect yourself, and you'll learn to respect yourself when you follow up with what you commit to. If you

do challenging things. If you try something new, if you follow up with a commitment, you will start to respect yourself. And when you start to respect yourself, you will start to love yourself. Love starts with respect. Psychologist Karen Aunt

says being alone well is an art form. Sadly, as we grow up, we're taught only other people can provide the love we're looking for, and that's one of the biggest reasons so many of us feel lonely or Ja did about love when people don't live up to our expectations, we feel let down. Instead, we can learn the art of being alone, and that includes learning how to provide that love to ourselves. So someone said to me, Joe,

what am I going to learn from this book? There are some really practical tools inside this book with questionnaires with quizzes that are going to help you understand unique parts of yourself and your partner. So this includes your fight style, your learning style, how you like to receive love, your values, your purpose. All of that is packed into this book to help you gain insights on that. Now, another question I got asked is, Joe, what do you

think about apps? Like, what do you think about the online world? Now? It comes to dating apps, I agree that they can be problematic, but I don't think it's the app that's problematic. It's how we use it and how we think about it that causes a challenge. So one study showed that more than half of online data

is lied in their profiles. Also, having so many options that our fingertips can lead to a phenomenon researchers called relation shopping, where we can be more critical of potential partners or put less into relationships because of this perception

that we can just swipe to find someone else. So several studies show that we make worse decisions when we have more choice, and that's where we have to start understanding that it's less about how many can I get through, and it's more about how deeply can I learn about someone. I think when we look at it as like swipe left, swipe right, when we look at it just moving on, when we look at it like oh, there's more options, we actually stop ourselves from creating the investment that's required

to see a benefit. So that said pretty much all technology. I think it's more about the user than the technology, And yes, we have to work harder to use technology to our favor, but there are absolutely ways to use dating apps that are way more healthy, and I talk about them in the book. And it requires a clear intention, openness, and a high tolerance for rejection. And I think that last part is what is actually stopping us. Our ego is so scared of being rejected that we're scared of

putting ourselves out there. And I think for me, I grew up with a lot of rejection when I was younger, so I got used to it and that really helped me recognize how it was a normal part of life. And I think we think of rejection as something's going wrong. In reality, everyone you look up to, everyone you admire, even people who you see in successful relationships, have experienced rejection in their own way. And so I really truly believe that being open to hearing no allows us to

find that one yes that actually makes a difference. And I want to end on one last question, which was you know, what's something that might surprise you about the book or where the book goes or the direction that it turns in. And I'd say it's that we so often talk about love like it's so hard to find, but in reality, it's truly everywhere. Romance is only one type of love. The reality is that opportunities to experience it are endless, and one of the easiest ways to

experience love is to share it. Hold a door for someone or for a smarter stranger, bring a sick person soup, walk dogs at the shelter. Love is always right here waiting for you. You're not waiting for it. Thank you everyone for listening to today. I am so grateful that you spend this time with me. I really hope that you're going to go in pre order my second book, my new book, Eight Rules of Love. All you have to do is go to eight Rules Oflove dot com.

I know thousands of you've already ordered it. Thank you so much for I'll Let Love. But I am so excited for you to read this book. I promise you it's going to be a game changer. I have so much faith and belief in the work and the research we did to put this book together, and I can't wait for you to have in your hands. I know it's not out till thirty five to January, but please do preorder it right now. I'm so excited to read it with you when it's out. Thank you