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Have you ever been laying in bed at night and looked across the bed to the person next to you and thought to yourself, is this really who I'm supposed to be with? And trying to figure out, should I stay or should I go? Understand the difference between preferences and expectations might save your relationship. And that's why I made this video for you today. I'd like to offer you a new frame that comes from a place of empowerment rather than blame. There's a lot of content on the Internet that talks about being in a toxic relationship. Another person cannot be toxic. However, remaining in a relationship that makes you eventually hate yourself can certainly feel that way sometimes. I have a couple of friends, and what happened was, over time, they had one fight, and then a couple months later, another, and then a couple months later, another. And very quickly, it started escalating. And when it got to the peak, they were fighting every two weeks. And the cycle was the same. It's what I call the three Fs. You fight, you, you forgive. And that was the exact cycle they went through. I always knew it was happening because I would get texts from both of them just talking about each other. And so this cycle went on for about a year until finally the husband worked up the courage to understand that that relationship wasn't for him. And it was a lot of what we talked about. I think one of the first questions I asked him was, is this relationship helping you achieve your goals? And I think a lot of people don't really think about that when they enter a relationship, and instead they're thinking, oh, like, I like this person. I love this person. I like having sex with this person. But they're not thinking, is this person helping me achieve their goals? I'm not saying any person is inherently good or bad. They're neutral parties alone. But when they were together, it did not result in either of them driving their lives forward. Right. Instead, what it resulted in is both of them slowing down each other's lives. Instead of getting to their goals faster, they were deterring each other from reaching their goals. And so I asked him, I said, how much of your life have you wasted on this relationship for the last two years and of the time you could have put towards your goals has been stolen by the drama of this relationship. And I think a lot of people don't ask themselves those questions. The framework's gonna apply to whether you're starting a relationship or whether you're in one right now. And you haven't established a framework to start. But the first frame I'd like to give you is that your relationship should give you back time. When I married my husband, one of the first things we said was how much time we got back. Being married and being in a relationship actually allowed us to have more confidence. We were both healthier, we made more money together, we had more friends together. We got better at everything together. And we helped each other achieve our goals faster. So we actually gave each other time back. Whereas most relationships steal your most important resource, time, when they're not right for you. Here's the thing. Most people talk about how they hate their boyfriend, they hate their girlfriend, they hate their spouse, they hate their ex. Okay, I want to change the frame for this, which is you stay in a relationship that makes you hate yourself. What we need to do is there's so much content out there. Talking about people are toxic. I hate this person. They're a narcissist. They're this. All that does is steal your power. You've already let the relationship steal your time. Don't also let it steal your power or your ability to change. So here's what happens when people go through the 3F cycle. Fight, forgive is that is over time, each person in the relationship does the absolute minimum required to maintain the relationship. So what happens is the reason that you feel like you're confused if you should leave or not is you have lots of positive reinforcement and also lots of negative. So when you have a ton of negative and not much positive, then you leave. When you have a ton of positive and not much negative, you don't even think about leaving. You're like, of course I'm with this person. I love them. It's an amazing relationship. When you have equal amounts of positive and negative, that's when you feel confused, stuck, annoyed, irritated. This person's toxic. But I can't leave. It's when you feel those ways. And so what I want to explain is that what happens a lot of times in relationships when people are not upfront about what they need and their partner isn't either, is that you do a lot in the beginning to get the relationship. So let's imagine you take the girl on dates. You know, she's constantly wearing the lingerie. You're doing all these things that you don't normally do. And then what happens over time? Slowly, it might be one partner or the other starts to do less and less. Partner A does less for partner B. First you're taking her on dates, then you're just calling her. Then you're just going to Chipotle Then you're just doing nothing and staying at home, and all of a sudden, she barely gets a good morning text. Is this the guy's fault? I would argue no, because what did the girl do the whole time? When he stopped doing all those things, she stayed. She, with her actions, showed him that it's okay. She trained him to treat her worse. Everything that you tolerate with your partner, you train them, is acceptable in the relationship. And so when people say, this person's toxic, you have actually trained that person. You have reinforced the toxicity, the hate. Right? And I'm talking not about extreme cases. I'm just talking about, like, hey, he doesn't do what I want him to do. Hey, she doesn't do what I want her to do. Hey, she doesn't treat me as well as she used to. Hey, he doesn't treat me as well as he wants to. People say a lot of words in relationships. We should talk about this. What you've trained him is that he doesn't take you on a date. You complain about it. He says these words. You stop complaining for a few weeks, long enough that you forget about the fact that he hasn't taken you on a date until a month later you are reminded again, and then you bring it up again. He says these words, you say, okay, and then you maintain the relationship. Words don't mean anything. Action is everything. Actions not your words. The question is, what outcome do you want to have happen? That's the first piece. Is that what happens over time is that most people that are in relationships that they deem as toxic or that they don't like, it's that the partners have trained each other, do the minimum required to maintain the relationship. And the reason for that is because a lot of people confuse talking about something with taking committed action to change it. Talking about something does not mean that you have changed the situation. It's a temporary relief or a temporary source of reinforcement that then distracts you from the reality that no behavior has changed. The solution is we need a new frame to view relationships through that demands we take responsibility for our actions and that we leave with more respect for ourselves than we had to begin with. A lot of traditional advice about relationships leaves people feeling disempowered. It leaves people blaming others. It leaves people having less responsibility. And ultimately, it actually degrades people's confidence because they're thinking about it through the wrong lens. They're constantly looking at what's wrong with that person. Well, here's the news. That guy that doesn't take you on any dates, there's a girl that doesn't give a f Ck about going on a date. She'd be great for him. And so the reality is it's not that any one person is toxic, bad, a bad boyfriend, a bad girlfriend. It's that you are not a match. And a lot of the times we're sitting there playing the blame game when the reality is is that you just didn't take the time to be methodical about the person you're in a relationship with. Most people don't think about a relationship even as much as they think about taking a new job. Most people take more time to think about their career than than they do the person that they're going to live with. Every day they write a resume, they think about where am I going to apply, what are my strengths and weaknesses, what do I want? An organization. But you're not even going to think about the person that is literally in your life every single day that you sleep next to. Most people put more effort into their resume than they do the relationship. I want to reverse that so that we have a frame to go into relationships with. So here's the frame that I propose. I would like us to view relationships through a frame of self respect. People think that relationships and being discontent in them is about the other person. I am here to tell you it is about you. What is most important important is that you maintain a relationship that increases or maintains the respect you have for yourself. I want you to follow along and if you're in a relationship right now and you're trying to figure out if you want to stay or go, I want you to write down these questions I'm about to give you because these questions will help you determine. Does my self respect increase or decrease in this relationship? It is not about the person. It is about how you feel at the end of the day by yourself alone. How do you feel about yourself? And is this relationship making you feel better or worse? The first question I would pose, under what conditions do you gain, maintain and lose respect for yourself? For example, my marriage makes me respect myself more. Why? Because of the way that we treat each other. We make each other's lives better. Because of the fact that my husband empowers me, of course I gain more respect for myself. Why else do I gain respect for myself? Because I do the same for him. And so within our relationship, I feel I am a better version of myself. And my self respect grows. It grows not just because of how he treats me, but because of how I treat him. That person that you're with that you may be losing respect when you're in a relationship with them, there's somebody else out there who has different conditions under which they respect themselves. And though you may lose respect by being in a relationship with this person, they gain respect for themselves. I'll give you an example. Say there's a guy and he's with a girl and she's beautiful, but he loses respect for himself because she's not very intelligent. She doesn't contribute much to the household, she kind of just sits around and looks pretty. And he over time loses respect for himself because for him he gains respect. If he has a woman of high intelligence who he can have conversations with. Well, there's also a guy out there who all he would like to gain self respect is a woman who looks pretty and is on his arm at all the banquets and the galas he goes to, etc. That same woman, it's not about her. She doesn't need to change. She just needs somebody who gains respect when they are with her. There's nothing wrong with her. Just like there's nothing wrong with the person you're with. There's nothing wrong with you. What relationships do I have right now that make me like myself less? You can all think of that friend who maybe you've been friends with for a while, but they started to act kind of. Maybe they quit their job, they're kind of bumming around, they're not really going anywhere. Do you feel better or worse being a friend to them? The same goes for your significant other. The third question I want to pose to you, and we're going to break this one down. Does this person increase or decrease my stats? Essentially, this is a way to quantify if a person makes your life better or worse. There's a caveat here. You must have supporting evidence that they have increased or decreased your stats. The first one is health. Have you become healthier or less healthy since entering a relationship with this person? It could mean that you're eating better or it can mean that you're eating worse. Whatever it means to you, has being in the relationship made your health better or worse? The second one, wealth. Has being in the relationship made it easier or harder to achieve your wealth goals? Third one is happiness. Has being in that relationship made it easier or harder for you to be happy? The fourth one we're going to go with is career. Has being with that person made it easier or harder to achieve your career goals? If you have a separate career from the person that you're in a relationship with? The question is, are they supporting you in a way that makes it easier or harder to achieve those career goals? Are they constantly cheering you on or are they constantly telling you that what you're trying to do is impossible? Are they supporting the fact that you have to sacrifice time in the relationship to achieve those goals? Are they constantly nagging you and saying, I wish you would spend more time with me relationships? Has this person made it easier or harder for you to have good relationships with other people outside of them? Have they been a supporter of the relationships you want? Have they been like, hey, I don't know about relationships. You don't want. They support what you want out of other relationships in your life, or do they make it harder for you? And then the last one would be social standing. Is this relationship making it easier or harder for me to achieve my social goals? Social standing is essentially status in society. I don't know, sounds shallow, but I think that it is reality, which is a lot of people factor in social standing and how their significant other or the person in the relationship with or just the relationship optics increase or decrease their social standing. If you're in a relationship with somebody and you're constantly fighting and everybody knows, does that increase or decrease your social standing? Probably decreases it. Now here's the thing. Every person has different preferences as to what's important to them. So you could go through that list and you'd be like, oh my gosh, they've only increased two areas of my life. But it might be that those two areas are more important to you than all the other areas combined. And so what I would do is I would go through and I would star the areas that are most important to you. Which of those areas are the absolute most important to you? Maybe you don't give a about the financial or maybe you don't give a shit about the social standing. Part is the most important is that after you go through and say, have they increased or decreased? Which ones are the most important to you? If you look at relationships, people say they want this huge array of things, but when you really get down to it, people have like two things that are really important to them and everything else you kind of forget. We're not going to expect that every single relationship is going to like increase off the charts all of somebody's stats. But what is important is that does being in that relationship make the stats go up in the one or two areas that are really important to you? I think that the end of the day Relationship comes down to expectations. And a lot of people don't express the expectations they have to their partner until those expectations are no longer being met. And so if you're, if you're not there yet, I would say if you have expectations that your partner is unaware of, make them aware of what those are. And the way that I look at an expectation is this is what I would like out of a relationship. Is that something that you can commit to? Now, me personally, I actually would keep my expectations very low. I like to have high expectations of myself, low expectations of my partner, and honestly of other people. In general, I don't think it's fair to put very high expectations on others. And I also believe that we can have preferences rather than expectations, like beyond deal breaking expectations. I think that it is about remaining flexible and remembering that expectations and preferences are different. I can prefer that my husband does something and he can do something different. That doesn't mean I need to be in a bad mood or I need to break up with him or I need to hate him for it just means that we have different preferences. And I think that a lot of the times people conflate their preferences with standards or expectations and it kind of just looks like controlling. And so for me, I think what's always helped me the most is I just recognize that I have preferences. And I also recognize that things don't always go my way. And that's okay, you know, because I think at the end of the day, you go through that list, the few things that you star, those are the most important things that you stand by. And I think everything else, what, like they. They don't brush their teeth when they want you want them to. They, like, sometimes wake you up when they get out of bed, they leave clothes on the floor. Maybe they don't hang out with the kids as much as you want them to. Like, is that really going to be a deal breaker? You know, do you really want to exert that kind of authority over somebody else's life and make them feel like they're being controlled? I think not. Let's say someone is bouncing from relationship to relationship each time they're like, this person wasn't a fit, this person wasn't a fit. Ever find someone who's like, actually, maybe you're the problem when they are constantly bouncing from relationship to relationship and saying that the other person is the issue. There's either one of two things, in my opinion, which would be either that they do not know how to express their expectations to the person that they're in the relationship with or it's that they are unaware of their own deficits and how that's affecting the relationship. And so because of their lack of awareness, they're never fixing those things which make it very hard for anybody else to be in a relationship with them. The bottom line is this. A lot of people stay in relationships that make them hate themselves. It's not the person that makes you hate yourself. It's the fact that you maintain and stay in the relationship and tolerate it. The reason I wanted to make this video is because people ask me all day, every day, should I stay in this relationship or not. I have no feelings towards somebody's significant other. You know that story I was telling you about my friends? I don't have any feelings specifically towards the man or the woman. I just want them both to be the best version of themselves. And I want that. For anybody that's watching this content, I feel very blessed that I have found somebody that I truly feel like we both make each other better, increase each other's self respect because of the relationship that we've created.