This is pod Popular Podcast for the People, the Great Love Debate. It's the Great Love Debate.
The Great Love Debate. It's a Great Love Debase.
Hi, get everyone, It's Brian Howie. Welcome to The Great Love Debate, the world's number one dating and relationship podcast since twenty fifteen. We are here in the lovely studios of Pod Popular Podcasts for the People. We're at the one in Scottsdale, which I haven't been here in a while.
We are in the.
Heart of the Scott's dazzle here in old town. And if you check the etymology of the word Scottsdale, do you know what it translates to bottomless mimosis.
That's what scotts Stale means.
Fun fact for you kids kicking off. Thanks heer great Love listeners. Somebody the other day, for like the millionth time, said you call yourself a dating expert, and I said, no, I never have, I never will, I most certainly do not. There is no such thing as a dating expert. I
have been called a dating influencer. I have been called the dating influencer, and I like that, Moniker, because what we do around here is we try to push the conversation and raise the questions, sometimes in ways and places that we all don't really want to go. So we're definitely not offering you expertise. I'm not sure we're even really offering you advice. We are giving you opinion, and
I'm not just giving you my opinion. We are giving you the collective opinion of most of the men and women around the world, because we have heard from a whole lot of them, more than probably anyone else ever has. And so we sprinkle a little paprika on it, and we stick in the oven for a bit, and then we serve it up hot and fresh and spicy to you.
So do with this dish today, whatever you choose. I did an episode called Too Much and Never Enough, which touched on the give and take of a relationship and how we can properly balance and hopefully thread the needle on what you need and what you can give and hope to get.
And want to have with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, whatever.
And we did get a lot of feedback on that, and some was good and some was bad, and some was puzzled, and we got a whole lot of questions. And one of the questions that came up a lot. A bunch was around the concept of enough, which is a word, and which is something that I've dove into a few times in the past. So I did give the questions some thought and why it is important and how it manifests.
Itself in a relationship.
Which is why you get just me today, because I kind of want to go off on a little bit of a tangent about this. You can call it a rant if you want, but I want to talk about enough and some other things. So, as we said on the last episode, words are important, and feeling them and saying them and hearing them matters. And sometimes relationships can start off with one word Hi, Yes, maybe all those are good, those are all positive, and those are all hopeful.
And sometimes a relationship can start or evolve off two words I do, I believe we can?
Yes, please? Why not?
And those are all good? And sometimes and dreams have been written about three words. I love you, I got you, me, and you. Let's do this three words. But today I want to focus on or at least get things started with four words, and four words that can determine the fate of the rest of your life, or at least your relationship and the outcome of it as much as
any other. It can termine your future partnership, and it can determine the path of it all and which way you want to go with your partner and how long it will last. And I'm probably thinking you guys are probably thinking this is like wheel of fortune, And I'm asking you to guess the phrase I'm not, I'm not, and no. The four words are not will you marry me?
Although those are nice and they are important, and those are good four words, and hopefully when you say, you mean it and you want it, and hope it's a yes and a forever and happily ever after. But this show isn't about those four words. What I want to talk about is these four words. I have had enough. I have had enough enough of this, enough of you, enough of us. And when you say that and you believe it, it means you've drawn a line in the sand,
and nothing about this situation will continue. I don't like the way this is going, I don't like the way this makes me feel. I don't like the way you make me feel. I want this to end or change or whatever. But I do not want this enough, which is the flip side of the enough we've talked about before on the last podcast. On the podcast I referenced previously, it is not a you know, satisfied sufficient enough? Would you like another piece of pie?
God? No, I can barely walk. I've had enough. It's not that it's not good enough. It's not pie.
It's not I'm getting enough of what I need and enough of what I want enough from this relationship. It is I have had enough of this. I don't want it anymore. I won't take it anymore, and I'm not gonna be with you anymore. And you say, well, Brian Christopher Howie, you are always talking about happiness and hope and possibilities and rainbows around here. What is this you are throwing in this kettle, tossing in the stew.
I'm saying it's.
Important because it's where you can begin again. And when you say that, or when you think it, it's really when you can start to turn the page and find what you want and who you want it with. You find the life you want, the love you want. I'm not going to put up with that anymore. Enough, I'm not going to live like this anymore. Enough, I don't want to feel this way again enough, But how do you know when that is? And how do you know
what the last straw is? If you keep finding new straws, you know where you can't find new straws anymore.
Starbucks. It's no more straws or straws at Starbucks.
But anyway, you keep letting out a little more rope and a little longer leash and whatever metaphor you want to use to say I can take more, and I can keep going and this isn't going to break me. Well, you keep doing that, and you have not only I don't know, permanently stretched out the sweater, but you can never get it to fit the way you want it to. I just give you a shitload of mixed metaphors there, but I think you get it enough. No more of this,
no more of us. The only way you're ever going to get into the right relationship is to get out of the wrong one, which is often even harder to do.
I mean, it's sometimes harder to rid yourself of the wrong one than to find the right one, which is crazy because we always talk about how hard it is to find the right one, But you waste time and energy and effort and emotion until you're just broken, and even leaving doesn't always satisfy you because you're so glazed and buried under it all that you can't even fathom starting again with someone else. So the damage of that relationship tumbles forward into the new one in every.
Aspect of your life.
And then suddenly five years go by when you're sort of thinking about dating again or trying someone else, anyone else, but you have to and you have to try, and you need to breathe, and you just have to say this won't work for me. I have had enough. But again, it's hard to know when that is. So let me go back a bit into the time before enough and explain how to find I don't know the temporary from
the permanent, if that makes sense. Sort of the temporarily I have enough and we can change and work through it versus the permanent. This complete thing is done, so I want to get into that. Hopefully you haven't had enough of me or this, and you will stick with me after the break, because we're going to dive back
into that. It's a little complicated, we're gonna get back into it right after this, and we are back, So let's go back, not quite to the beginning, but maybe too a few months into the relationship.
Don't want to say the midpoint because you probably skew.
You know fairly soon that that three to six month make or break time in relationship where things are going okay but they aren't great and something's a little off and you want to write it out and see where it goes. But it's not quite one of those I'm feeling it in my gut things, especially that women say, don't always trust that you know or should do my gut is always right.
No, it's not.
If your gut was always right, you would never have gone out with any of these people. Sometimes as it's an indigestion or revisionist history or deja vu, so anyway, it's it's just you're in this point in relationship where you're like, I don't understand them or what we're doing and where we're going, and you're thinking, are we even
remotely on the same page? And that's hard in any relationship because you have two people, and you have two histories, and you have two viewpoints and two sets of emotions and two life experiences, two very big sets of baggage that come along with that, and we're all bringing that together and try and merge that. You're trying to match your your baggage up, trying to match your luggage up, which is even hard to do when you go on a vacation. And a lot of times emotion, good or
bad comes with secondary reactions. And anybody, any of you guys who've taken a college psychology course or googled around you've googled around the interwebs about college stuff, knows that there's primary emotions and there are secondary emotions, and the primary ones, which generally are accepted as fear, sadness, interest, Anger Joy discussed shame and surprise. Is that eight one two, fear, sadness, interest Anger Joy discussed shame and surprise.
That's eight.
So some can quibble with that, and they're like, no either six, No, there's nine.
We're gonna go with eight.
You heard me a couple episodes to talk about Pluto's not a planet anymore. Pluto's a fucking planet. I'll die on that hill. So there's eight primary emotions. Of those eight, if you break them down, five are generally processed by our brain as threats, as bad things, sadness, fear, anger, disgust.
And shame.
So five to the eight even a sixth surprise that can be a bad That could be a bad thing too. A bear jumps out surprise fucking threat sucks. So it's like five and a half of the eight are not necessarily good things of the way we're fundamentally wired.
That's not good.
So that leaves us with two and a half things that sort of have to overcome and bail out the five and a half that don't.
Joy which is on that list. Joy is good.
Interest is good because it piques your curiosity. Those are the possibilities. Joy and interest are the possibilities. That's where the hope lies. And surprise gets a half because sometimes it's a present, or a party or or a ring surprise. But mostly our emotions, all of our emotions are our default is wired at best on guard and at worst fucking basket cases.
Okay, you know.
We're all sort of wired in a weird way that is like riddled with angst. And you say, wait, now you're missing some What about jealousy, what about guilt? What about love? Well, those are secondary things. Jealousy comes usually from a deep rooted place of anger. Why do they have it.
When I don't. Why is it always her? Why can't it be me?
And that might start when you're four years old and your sister got the bigger room. You know, I don't know, but it comes from somewhere else. That leads to jealousy it's them, not me. And guilt it usually comes from shame. I didn't feel worthy, I don't deserve this, I'm not good enough.
I wish I didn't do that. Why did that happen? Not good? None of those are good.
So then you're like, well, let's talk about love. Love is a fundamental feeling or a primary one, and you're like, and it's really not. And love is the hardest defined because it's subjective and it's usually elusive unless you're, you know, throwing around like I love potato chips, you know, But if you're really getting to the essence of what love is, it's hard. So you feel safe when you love, feel safe in the situation and hopefully in the environment and
preferbly with the person. And safe is what is absent about most of those five and a half bad things that I talked about. Love, if it's done right, it won't make you angry. And love has few prizes. It's steady and love doesn't mean jealousy, and love won't bring you disgust or shame or sadness again hopefully, And you're like, Jesus, we have to take two people and try to analyze sixteen emotions between us, and a total of eleven of those are bad, five and a half from each. He
was eleven, o's are bad. No wonder we don't ever get together or it's rarely right. I don't understand how this can work, and you know, you can look at it as a good thing. We rarely get together or it's really right, because when you do then it means something. But you're like, I don't understand how any of this can work. But it does start there, and you're like, where did he go with all this? Because he talked about enough. This is before you get to enough, and
this is how you avoid the downside of enough. You start with do I understand? And I bring up this psychology stuff and the knee jerk in reaction and relationship when it comes to our partner is to go down that road and try and analyze them. I'm gonna figure this out. I want to know what I'm dealing with here, and that's good and that's fine, and that's normal. But that's not your job, and that's not necessarily healthy. You're not a shrink and you shouldn't play shrink on your partner.
It's just not who you are, nor should you be. What you are trying to do, or what you should be trying to do, is understand, understand them, learn them, know them so long before you go down that road and you get to enough, you need to know and learn and understand what they do and like and need and what are their triggers. We have enough trouble understanding our own triggers. It's important to try and figure out theirs too. Why do they raise their voice sometimes? Do
they drink so much? Why do they fail to get out of bed on time? Why do they get so jealous? So you have to try and again, not figure out, but understand what causes their fear. And it's not easy to get at this stuff because the person you're trying to get it from doesn't know most of the time either. Most people have never done the deep work or found the right outlet or mechanism.
To dig all this shit up because it's scary shit.
You know is the easy answer and the most likely answer. Does it all come from childhood? Sure, of course probably, But asking somebody where they grew up on a first date or what they did for fun, you know that rarely answers your questions about what went on in the you know, in their childhood that caused them to get to this point. But asking the questions that require you or them to go to the dark places that they're
trying to probably escape, that's no job for amateurs. And we're all sort of amateurs trying to figure this stuff out. So you know, I know you're listening to this and you're like, so, wait, are you telling us to break up or stay together? And I'm like, I'm telling you you need to take a look to try and understand all of it, all three elements you, them and the
relationship and know when to stay in it. And you got to know or at least try and figure out when it's worth working towards and most importantly no when to pull the choote and get out, know when you have had enough, Because you can't make someone feel a certain way or do a certain thing, but you can try to understand why they feel a certain way. Or do a certain thing. You're just trying to understand. So
what's the answer? And again, no expert, I'm not sure I have the answer, but I think before it gets to enough, you have to ask the questions. So you, as their partner and as half of the relationship, you have to make them feel safe enough and judgment free enough and liberated enough with you to go down there to you know, take their hand and go down the rabbit hole to find out what it is they're lacking or needing that prevents them from giving you what you
are wanting and needing. And you can say, well, if this relationship ever gets to the point where I've had enough, well you know enough is enough and there was never point in the first place. And that might be true too, but I'm trying to stop it from getting there. If it gets there, oh well say the words pack the bags, hit the road, onto the next But what can you
do before enough? So don't ask them how I can help ask how stuff makes them feel, because usually the feeling will be one of those secondary emotions remorse, revenge, resentment, even relief. What is their outlet and why is that? Why do they do this or why do they say that or why do they feel this.
When that happens.
And that's about just curiosity and trying to understand what you're dealing with long before you get to the point where you're like, that's it. Check please, I'm out enough. So I produce a lot of podcasts for people besides this one.
I don't even produce this one. I don't produce my own, but I produce others for people those who can't teach.
And one thing I always tell the podcasters is that a great podcast comes from the intersection of passion and curiosity. It is It is rarely information that drives a good podcast. The information comes from those two things. The passion, the curiosity have a baby, and from that comes the information and the information that you want to get from your partner and out of the relationship is exactly the same. Do I want it to work? Do I care enough about them? Do I care enough about us?
I do? I? Do I do?
That's the passion the curiosity part. It's how can I learn them? How can we heal and be in a healthy place? How can I serve them? How can they serve me? And how can we best together serve this this thing we have the things we want. And we've done so many episodes about the importance of all of this, trying to find out the where why how? So you kind of have to start with asking all these things of yourself before you were in a relationship, while you're in it, and after you were in it, Why did
I think that? How come I acted this way? What do I do in this situation?
And that?
So everything you want to know of your partner is also everything you want to know of yourself. So it takes a little bit of self scouting and analysis here, and you need to know these things. You have to understand you before you understand them. I understand myself way better than I did fifteen years ago. Part of that was the help of the process of asking a lot of questions of myself and others.
Part of that was some therapy.
But does that make me a complete product? No, but I understand there's work to do, and even that probably of yourself. When you ask these questions and you try to understand yourself, you're going to lead to I have had enough of my behavior of making these choices, of missing out on opportunities because of this and that and the other, and mostly I have had enough of being unhappy. I have had enough of being alone. What causes me to feel this way? Why is the same thinking happening?
Why is my reaction always the same? On and on and on. So when you do that, and you go down that road and you ask the questions and you get help with that, and you do all the work, then you can bring it to your partner and to the relationship you are either in or want to be. So to take this circuitous route back to where we started, I have had enough. Those words are important, but those
words start with you. So you have to make the changes for you, and you have to decide what is right and missing and desired for you by you, and then move it to them and then bring it into this relationship. Can I get the answers? Will they make the changes? Do they even want to? And then you kind of get to the point where you're like, where can we go? And do really really want to go there?
And if not, then all the questions and the conversations and the answers you know that they're either fulfilling and they're healing, or you have your final solution. Four words, I have had enough. So are there some mixed messages in this and you're like, is that good or bad? Maybe I think we give up on the good relationships too quick and we stay too long in the bad ones. So you know, the answer is sort of in there somewhere.
You got to fight through the ick sometimes to get where you want to go, and sometimes there's too much ick and you got to go somewhere else. And sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. And that's the point of this, all of this, what I'm talking about today and what I talk about all the time, is to try and understand yourself, them, me, this podcast, love the universe, and you know what we ultimately need enough of. So did I just end that on a preposition English major?
Goddamn right? I did.
Great Love Debate at gmail dot com. If you have questions, thoughts, or you just want to say, what the fuck did he just talk about? Send that along to me. Most importantly, as always, like, share, follow, and please review this podcast. Your reviews mean a lot in the podcasting ecosystem because, as always at The Great Love Debate, we never stop making love.
See you next time.
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