For more than fifty years I have been helping men and women find their dream partner and have a passionately joyful relationships that gets better through the ages. Too many people I’ve worked with felt they were failures at love. I helped them and I can help you. But first I had to help myself.
When people visit my website they see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” Going through the end of a relationship can be painful for anyone, but even more so if you make your living helping others succeed at something you failed to achieve. The good news is that I got the help I needed, worked out what I had been doing wrong, met and married Carlin. We have been joyfully married for 46 years.
I have written seventeen books, including the international best-seller Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Overcoming Romantic and Sexual Addictions. In preparing this article I did a Google search on “Looking for Love in All the Right Places.” The only result I was given was “Looking for Love (in All the Wrong Places)” is a famous 1980 country song recorded by Johnny Lee.
I learned some things I didn’t know and found very interesting. The song was written by Wanda Mallette, Bob Morrison and Patti Ryan, and was released in June 1980 as part of the soundtrack to the film Urban Cowboy. The memorable lyrics are ones most people have experienced at some time in their lives:
I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places
Lookin’ for love in too many faces
Searchin’ their eyes, lookin’ for traces
Of what I’m dreamin’ of
Hoping to find a friend and a lover
I’ll bless the day I discover
Another heart lookin’ for love
In my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best Is Still to Come, I said,
“Currently, our culture focuses a great deal of attention on finding the right partner. There are hundreds of websites that will help you find Mr. or Ms. Right. But there’s much less focus on our internal love map. If our map is wrong, we’re not likely to find the right person.”
I go on to say, “Further, as difficult as it is to find a good mate, that turns out to be the easy part. Much more difficult is to make a good marriage that lasts and enhances the well-being of the couple.”
The book describes and guides people through the following five stages:
Stage 1: Falling in Love
Stage 2: Becoming a Couple
Stage 3: Disillusionment
Stage 4: Creating Real Lasting Love
Stage 5: Find Your Calling as a Couple
The Hidden Secret of Why So Many Fail at Love
Earlier this year I learned about the work of Dr. Kyra Bobinet who has passionately pursued and studied the truth about behavior change for nearly three decades. She is an MD who received her degree at UCSF School of Medicine and a MPH from Harvard University. In her book, Unstoppable Brain: The Neuroscience That Frees Us From Failure, Eases Our Stress, and Creates Lasting Change, she shares the secret at the center of our failure to find love.
I interviewed Dr. Bobinet and wrote an article describing her findings.
“There’s a newly discovered, but little known, secret to your brain that is robbing you of your freedom and the power to live the life you long for. It’s causing you to lose your motivation to do what you know is best for you or others, leaving you stuck.”
It is the secret for our continued failure at love and in so many other areas of our lives.
“What is this secret?” Dr. Bobinet asks. “It is the habenula, an area of the brain that has two superpowers over your behavior. First, it acts as a failure detector anytime you think you failed, even in some tiny way, even subconsciously without your knowing. Second, and more impactful, it is a kill switch for your motivation. This means that whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep doing it.”
Why would we have a part of our brain that that looks out for failure and has a kill switch for our motivation? The simple answer is that throughout our evolutionary history it helped keep us alive. If we failed at something — whether it was finding the right food to eat or finding the right partner — keeping us from repeating a mistake could be life-saving.
Brain scientist Rick Hanson helps us understand this negativity bias. Finding the right food or the right partner is a good thing, but making a mistake of eating a poisonous berry or a partner that abuses us could be deadly. In his book, Hardwiring Happiness, he says,
“Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”
How I Found the Love of My Life and How You Can Too
After my first marriage ended, I felt wounded and angry. I vowed I could never make the same mistake again. I nursed my resentments but got on with my life. I put all my energies into my work and being a good father to my children. But eventually I got lonely and went looking for love. I wanted to find the right person, but I was afraid of making a mistake. I didn’t know about my habenula’s kill switch. It was like trying to drive a car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. I didn’t get very far. I did manage to get myself into a rebound-marriage that didn’t last long and almost killed me (that’s another story for another time).
I was definitely not looking for love when I met Carlin. The year before we met I had done some serious therapy. I was able to deal with a lot of wounding from my childhood and to look honestly at my two relationships without seeing them as failures, but as life-lessons that were teaching me what wasn’t working and how to enjoy life more fully. I began to feel that I was OK just the way I was and that I didn’t need a woman to complete me. That was a new experience for me.
I also read a book that changed my life. It was called The Hazards of Being Male by psychologist Herb Goldberg. He said,
“The male has paid a heavy price for his masculine ‘privilege’ and power. He is out of touch with his emotions and his body. He is playing by the rules of the male game plan and with lemming-like purpose he is destroying himself — emotionally, psychologically and physically.”
This led to my joining a men’s group and finding a group of brothers that I never had. The group continues meeting. Carlin says she believes that one of the main reasons she and I have a successful marriage that has lasted forty-six years is because I have been in a men’s group that has lasted forty-seven years.
Dr. Bobinet would tell you, as she does in Chapter 7, that “Iterators Never Fail.” Instead of seeing dating and mating as a performance that is a “win-lose” proposition, see it is an adventure to be enjoyed and learned from.
“At all costs,” says Dr. Bobinet, “Don’t believe you failed. And if you do, neutralize that failure as quickly as possible, get back in the saddle ASAP and keep trying.”
I tell my clients:
“Forget about what the romantic notion that ‘there is one right partner’ for you.”
Movies and myths will tell you, with appropriate music playing in the background, that you will see a stranger across a crowded room and you will know that he/she is the one. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack and guarantees failure. I say, only partially with tongue in cheek, there are 5,283 perfect partners for you. You can’t fail to find one. Enjoy the adventure of getting to know some interesting people along the way. I found my Carlin and you will find your own perfect partner, with a little help from your friends.
Let me know if I can help. I look forward to hearing from you. Email me: [email protected] and put “help with love” in the subject line.
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Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by healthlydays.
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