Friday, December 2, 2016

How to pick your life partner

marriage quality
marriage and divorce rate
The marriage quality is more important than the marriage status**
People in unhappy relationships have a 3-step to-do list
  1. go through a soul-crushing break-up
  2. emotionally recover
  3. find a great relationship
The divorce rate is 50%, but 86% of young people assume their marriage will last forever.
choose a life partner means choosing a lot of things: parenting partner, eating companion or 20,000 meals, travel companion for 100 vacations, leisure time and retirement friend, career therapist,…

people tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship

You don’t get good at something until you’ve done it bunch of time. However, there’s just not enough time.

Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice.

  1. society encourage us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide
  2. society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. our current opportunities wins over our preferences. people end up picking from the whatever pool options they have. So the suggestion is to broaden the candidate pool by doing a lot of online dating, speed dating and other systems, instead of hoping for the dumb luck.
  3. society rushes us.

several unhappy relationships

  • overly romantic. he repeatedly ignores the little voice during the constant fight, shutting down the voice with thoughts like “everything happens for a reason”, “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”
  • fear driven. fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, fear of being judged or talked about, which lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. However, the only rational fear we should fee is the fear of spending the 2/3 of life unhappily.
  • Externally- influenced. It may look great from the outside, but not actually great from the inside. He listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.
  • Shallow. A strongly ego-driven person is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it.
  • Selfish. Wants to keep her single life and the benefit of having someone. Self-absorbed without returning anything. never compromise.

What makes a happy life partnership?

To succeed at something big, is to break it into its tinniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.
Marriage isn’t the honeymoon, isn’t Valentine’s Day. It’s Forgettable Wednesday

Traffic Test

why they’re my friends?
I enjoy spending time with them!
If you stuck in a traffic, who do you want to spend time with?
The ability to extract fun out of unfun situations.
A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. If you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t care that much what they have to say about it.
A decent number of common interests, activities and people-preferences.
In such friendship, you have endless room to deepen and grow richer.

Most comfortable position in a chair for 12 hours

You know even the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture.
  • secrets are poison to a relationship, because they build an invisible wall.
  • If I am with someone with a different wavelength, I soon becomes exhausted.
  • Human have flaws. The worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws.
  • John Gottman,
    positive/negative interaction should be at least 5:1

Expect to put great effort in relationship

  1. learn the good, consistent communication style
  2. Mental equality. If one person dictates the mood, needs or opinions over others, in a way they’d need stand for being treated themselve, it’s not going to last long.
  3. Every relationship is flaw, don’t make things even harder than they need to be.

Tame your mammoth

Mammoth

meet your mammoth

When I was in 2nd grade, I told the truth that I loved a pretty girl… This horrifying experience taught me a hard lesson: it can be mortally dangerous to be yourself.
Your Great^{2000} Grandfaterh knows socially acceptance is critical to survival in a small tribe. This obsession can be called a human’s social survival mammoth.
Civilization has dramatically changed. But our social structure and biology evolved at a snail’s pace.
Romantic rejection is a nightmare for a mammoth, but caution in today’s world only makes you a coward.
Mammoth’s fear of soical disapproval makes you feel weird about going to a restaurant or a movie alone, makes you go to a more lucrative career you’re lukewarm about, marry to a person you’re not in love with.
The Mammoth needs to feel calm and safe, also needs to be fed with praise, approval, and feeling of being on the right side of any social or moral norm.
Prestige is something used to incentivize people to do meaningless jobs.
Mammoth focus on winning the approval of a Puppet Master in your life. It can be a parent, your significant other, group leader or an alpha member.
When we get to the toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, his presence hangs over our entire decision-making process.

Authentic Voice

AV knows how you feel deep down about things like money, family and marriage. It knows which kinds of people, topics of interests, and types of activities you truly enjoy, and which you don’t.
AV is someone the mammoth tends to ignore entirely. Mammoth has the ability to quickly adapt the environment, then AV starts to feel itself irrelevant, which makes AV shrink, fade and lose motivation.
When you don’t know who you are, you make decision based on the crude, outdated needs and emotions of your mammoth. You don’t dip deep into the foggy center of what you really believe in to find clarity, you look for the strongest opinions around you.
Losing touch with your AV also makes you fragile, because when your identity is built on the approval of others, being criticized or rejected by others really hurts. A bad break-up is painful for everyone, but it stings in a much deeper place for a mammoth-run person than for a person with a strong AV. A strong AV makes a stable core, and after a break-up, that core is still holding firm—but since the acceptance of others is all a mammoth-run person has, being dumped by a person who knows you well is a far more shattering experience.
Likewise, you know those people who react to being criticized by coming back with a nasty low-blow? Those tend to be severely mammoth-run people, and criticism makes them so mad because mammoths cannot handle criticism.

Taming the Mammoth

The only way to take our lives back is to override the wiring of our brain and tame the mammoth.

get to know your AV

1st step: a clear and honest assessment of what’s going on in your head.
soul-searching, finding yourself:How does your gut really feel about your job and relationship status? Do you pretend to care about something?
Step out of your ordinary life and think. start being proud of whoever your authentic voice is.

figure out where the mammoth is hiding

When a mammoth is in control, the person is not really aware of it.
1st hiding place: fear. where are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? what part of life is a dreadful,sinking feeling washes over you? Which part of you life would clearly need a change?
2nd hiding place: good feeling you get from feeling accepted. Are you trying to please others at work or in your relationship? Are you terrified of disappointing Puppet Master and choose making them proud over aiming to gratify yourself? Do you get too excited about being associated with prestigious things? Do you care too much about status?
3rd hiding place: don’t fee comfortable making a decision without approval from others

Decide specific areas the mammoth needs to be ousted

The mammoth is alway with you. What you need to do is to carve out a sacred areas only for AV without mamonth influence

Mammoth has a low IQ

Everyone is talking about me and my life and just think how much everyone will be talking about it if I do this risky or weird thing.
No one really cares that much about what you’re doing. People are highly self-absorbed.
If I try really hard, I can please everyone.
Yes, maybe in a 40-person tribe with a unified culture. But in today’s world, no matter who you are, a bunch of people will like you and a bunch of other people won’t.
Being disapproved of or looked down upon or shit-talked about has real consequences in my life.
Anyone who disapproves of who you’re being or what you’re doing isn’t even in the same room with you 99.7% of the time.
Really judgy people matter.
Here’s how judgy people function: They’re highly mammoth-controlled and become good friends withand date other judgy people who are also highly mammoth-controlled. One of the primary activitiesthey do together is talk shit about whoever’s not with them.
When people shit-talk, they set up a category division of which they’re always on the right side.
I’m a bad person if I disappoint or offend the person/people who love me and have invested so much in me.
No. You’re not a bad person for being whoever your Authentic Voice is in your one life. It’s simple— if they truly selflessly love you, they will for sure come around and accept everything once they see that you’re happy. Otherwise, they care about more themselves than me.
The earth is surrounded by 99.999% of eternal emptiness.
You life is only a blink of the entire time frame.

mammoth’s efforts are counterproductive

  • AV is interesting because it’s unique, complex. Mammoth are boring, only do what they are supposed to do.
  • AV lead, they draw their thoughts and opinions from an original place. Mammoth follow, they try so hard to be the status quo. They don’t want to change.
  • AV is more attractive, because they have the strength of character to tame their mammoth.

start being yourself

That takes more than reflection— it takes some courage.