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Transcript

Why You Keep Calling Safe Love Boring Even When It's What You Wanted · Toxic Girls Zone

0:03
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're in a good relationship right now or
0:07
Speaker 1: what looks like one from the outside and something in
0:09
Speaker 1: you is just off. You can't quite name it. He's fine.
0:13
Speaker 1: Everything's fine. And that word fine is doing a lot
0:16
Speaker 1: of heavy lifting and none of it good. I want
0:18
Speaker 1: to sit with you in that for a minute before
0:19
Speaker 1: we go anywhere else because I think a lot of
0:21
Speaker 1: you know exactly what I'm talking about and you've been
0:23
Speaker 1: a little afraid to say it out loud. I say
0:24
Speaker 1: this with so much love. I really do before I
0:27
Speaker 1: even tell you what this episode is about because what
0:29
Speaker 1: I'm about to get into is the kind of thing
0:30
Speaker 1: that's easy to hear as an attack. And I need
0:32
Speaker 1: you to know it's the opposite. It's more like a flashlight.
0:35
Speaker 1: We're talking about the secure partner who feels boring and
0:37
Speaker 1: why that feeling might be the most important data you've
0:39
Speaker 1: ever gotten. Just not for the reason you think. You
0:42
Speaker 1: know that thing where you've been craving something for weeks.
0:45
Speaker 1: You finally sit down with it and your appetite just vanishes.
0:48
Speaker 1: Like your body forgot why it wanted it. Boredom in
0:50
Speaker 1: a genuinely good relationship hits like that. You ordered the thing.
0:54
Speaker 1: It arrived exactly right. And now you're just kind of
0:56
Speaker 1: staring at it. That's not a verdict on the food, babe.
0:59
Speaker 1: That's something going on with you and it's worth looking at.
1:02
Speaker 1: So here's what we're doing today. We're taking apart the
1:04
Speaker 1: feeling of flatness in a stable relationship and finding out
1:07
Speaker 1: what's actually underneath it. I'm going to tell you some
1:09
Speaker 1: things about your nervous system. I'm going to tell you
1:11
Speaker 1: some embarrassing things about myself. And I'm going to give
1:13
Speaker 1: you four concrete moves to try before you do anything
1:16
Speaker 1: you can't undo. That's where we're going. Let's get into it. Okay,
1:21
Speaker 1: picture this. You've been with him for three months or
1:23
Speaker 1: eight months or two years. The timeline doesn't really matter.
1:27
Speaker 1: What matters is that he texts when he says he will.
1:29
Speaker 1: He doesn't vanish for three days and come back with
1:31
Speaker 1: a vague excuse and enough charm to make you forgive it.
1:34
Speaker 1: When you open his messages, there's no knot in your stomach,
1:36
Speaker 1: no little calculation running in the background about what his
1:38
Speaker 1: tone means. There's just like a message from a person
1:41
Speaker 1: who likes you. And somehow, somehow, that is the problem.
1:45
Speaker 1: You're scrolling back through the thread looking for the moment
1:47
Speaker 1: he excited you and the whole thing just looks pleasant, warm, consistent.
1:53
Speaker 1: You tell your friend it feels a little flat and
1:55
Speaker 1: she tilts her head and says he sounds really great.
1:57
Speaker 1: You say, yeah, I know, and you mean it, which
2:00
Speaker 1: somehow makes it worse. You're not making the flatness up, right?
2:03
Speaker 1: That's the first thing I want you to hear. The
2:06
Speaker 1: absence of a feeling is real. You're not being dramatic
2:08
Speaker 1: and you're not being ungrateful, at least not yet. When
2:11
Speaker 1: anxiety is gone, when the constant low hum of will he,
2:14
Speaker 1: when he goes quiet, the silence can genuinely feel like
2:17
Speaker 1: something left the room. You're used to a certain amount
2:19
Speaker 1: of noise and love, And now the noise is gone,
2:21
Speaker 1: and you're standing there in the quiet like, hello, is
2:23
Speaker 1: anyone home? That's real. I'm not dismissing it. But here's
2:28
Speaker 1: where I'm going to flip it on you, okay? What
2:30
Speaker 1: if the electricity you keep comparing this to was a passion?
2:33
Speaker 1: What if it was stress? What if your personal baseline
2:36
Speaker 1: for love, the thing you've been measuring every relationship against
2:39
Speaker 1: without even knowing it, is actually cortisol? The boredom you're
2:42
Speaker 1: feeling right now is data. Genuinely. It's telling you something true.
2:46
Speaker 1: It's just not telling you what you think it's telling you.
2:48
Speaker 1: It's not telling you he's wrong. It's telling you about
2:50
Speaker 1: your nervous system's map of what love is supposed to
2:52
Speaker 1: feel like, and that map might need a serious update.
2:55
Speaker 1: So the real question isn't, is he boring? I need
2:58
Speaker 1: you to hear that clearly. The question is not about him.
3:01
Speaker 1: The real question is, what has your nervous system been
3:03
Speaker 1: trained to recognize as love? That's not a trick question.
3:06
Speaker 1: It's a diagnostic one. Think about it for a second.
3:09
Speaker 1: Most of us didn't get handed a template of secure, consistent,
3:12
Speaker 1: warm love when we were young enough for it to
3:13
Speaker 1: become our default. What a lot of us got was inconsistency.
3:17
Speaker 1: Someone wonderful who was also sometimes gone, emotionally or literally.
3:21
Speaker 1: Someone who made you feel like everything when they were
3:22
Speaker 1: present and made you feel invisible when they weren't. And
3:25
Speaker 1: you adapted to that because you had to. You learned
3:27
Speaker 1: that the stomach drop, the waiting, the specific relief when
3:30
Speaker 1: he finally texts at midnight, you learned that that sequence
3:33
Speaker 1: is what love feels like in your body. So when
3:35
Speaker 1: love shows up without the drop, when there's no waiting,
3:38
Speaker 1: when the midnight message comes at eight because he's a
3:40
Speaker 1: person who communicates, your body goes quiet and then your
3:43
Speaker 1: body goes, something's missing. Here's the question I want you
3:47
Speaker 1: to actually sit with. Not just hear and move past.
3:51
Speaker 1: Is this boredom or is this safety? And you don't
3:53
Speaker 1: have the cells for it yet. Those are not the
3:56
Speaker 1: same thing. And the difference between them is everything. Let
3:59
Speaker 1: me paint you a picture. You're at dinner with him.
4:02
Speaker 1: The conversation is actually good. He's funny in a way
4:04
Speaker 1: that catches you off guard. He's asking you questions and
4:06
Speaker 1: listening to the answers. Nobody grabbed their phone unnecessarily. The
4:09
Speaker 1: food was fine. You split something for dessert. You drive
4:12
Speaker 1: home and you feel almost nothing and you genuinely don't
4:15
Speaker 1: understand why. You sit with it. And then almost without
4:17
Speaker 1: meaning to, you compare it to dinner with the guy
4:19
Speaker 1: two years ago. The one where every single meal felt
4:22
Speaker 1: charged because you never knew, you genuinely never knew if
4:25
Speaker 1: he was going to pull away that night. Whether you
4:27
Speaker 1: drive home laughing or drive home trying to figure out
4:29
Speaker 1: what you did wrong, you thought that charge was passion.
4:32
Speaker 1: You loved that charge. You're still a little in love
4:34
Speaker 1: with the memory of that charge. You're sitting there in
4:36
Speaker 1: your car after a perfectly lovely dinner and you're grieving
4:39
Speaker 1: a feeling that was actually just fear with good lighting.
4:42
Speaker 1: That's the boredom mistakeer doing its job. Your nervous system
4:46
Speaker 1: in a high alert relationship is running constantly, right? It's
4:48
Speaker 1: scanning the room, scanning his face, scanning the tone of
4:51
Speaker 1: that text for signs of danger. And then when the
4:53
Speaker 1: threat settles, when he finally calls, when he shows up,
4:56
Speaker 1: when the fight ends and he stays, your system floods
4:58
Speaker 1: with relief. And that cycle, threat, then relief, threat, then relief,
5:02
Speaker 1: it's been registering in your body as aliveness, as proof
5:05
Speaker 1: that something real is happening. When the threat disappears, your
5:08
Speaker 1: system doesn't immediately go, oh, wonderful, peace. It goes, wait,
5:11
Speaker 1: where's my cue? The loop has no signal to run
5:14
Speaker 1: and it interprets that silence as vacancy, as nothing going
5:16
Speaker 1: on here. So then you're in a good relationship and
5:19
Speaker 1: the textures of it start to feel like evidence against him.
5:22
Speaker 1: He remembers that you mentioned a thing three weeks ago
5:24
Speaker 1: and he brings it up because he was thinking about you.
5:27
Speaker 1: Somehow your brain files that under suspicious or suffocating. He
5:30
Speaker 1: doesn't punish you with silence when he's upset. He says
5:32
Speaker 1: what's actually going on. Your nervous system goes, that's too easy.
5:36
Speaker 1: Something's wrong. He means what he says and says what
5:38
Speaker 1: he means and you're waiting for the catch. Every single
5:40
Speaker 1: one of those things is the boredom, mistake, or inaction.
5:43
Speaker 1: It's looking for a threat it can respond to and
5:45
Speaker 1: coming up empty and calling that emptiness a problem. It's
5:47
Speaker 1: not a problem. It's what the absence of a threat
5:50
Speaker 1: actually feels like. And that's going to take some getting
5:52
Speaker 1: used to. Here's the part where I tell on myself, okay?
5:56
Speaker 1: Early in my current relationship, there was a Saturday afternoon.
5:59
Speaker 1: Nothing dramatic. No context. Just a regular day. My partner
6:02
Speaker 1: and I were home. No plans. Light coming through the
6:05
Speaker 1: window at that particular late afternoon angle. My partner was reading.
6:08
Speaker 1: I was on my phone. The room was quiet. And
6:10
Speaker 1: I felt this low, dull dread, like I had made
6:13
Speaker 1: a wrong turn somewhere and hadn't noticed it yet. I
6:16
Speaker 1: remember looking around the room, trying to locate the problem,
6:18
Speaker 1: and there was no problem. That was the problem. I
6:21
Speaker 1: didn't know yet, not fully, that I had spent years
6:23
Speaker 1: using anxiety as the proof that I was in love.
6:26
Speaker 1: My body had a very specific definition of what love
6:28
Speaker 1: felt like, and this quiet Saturday was nowhere in the index.
6:32
Speaker 1: And then I had this memory, completely unprompted. A specific
6:35
Speaker 1: Tuesday evening from my anxious 20s, I was waiting for
6:38
Speaker 1: a message from someone who kept me waiting habitually. It
6:41
Speaker 1: came at midnight. One line, very casual, no acknowledgement of
6:44
Speaker 1: the time. And I remember that rush when it came in.
6:47
Speaker 1: That particular kind of relief that felt electric. I sat
6:50
Speaker 1: on my couch that Saturday afternoon in my genuinely good
6:53
Speaker 1: relationship and I thought, honestly thought, that midnight message felt
6:56
Speaker 1: more like love than anything I was feeling right now.
6:58
Speaker 1: I held that comparison for a long time before it
7:00
Speaker 1: embarrassed me enough to actually look at it. The confession
7:04
Speaker 1: isn't cute, you know? It's not a charming little, oops.
7:07
Speaker 1: It's a pretty specific indictment of what I had trained
7:09
Speaker 1: myself to want. That guy wasn't giving me love on
7:12
Speaker 1: those Tuesday nights. He was giving me relief after withholding.
7:15
Speaker 1: He was creating the drought and then letting it rain,
7:17
Speaker 1: and I had decided that the rain was the most
7:19
Speaker 1: romantic thing I'd ever felt. I had rated that higher
7:22
Speaker 1: than this. Then warmth that just showed up without needing
7:24
Speaker 1: to be chased. That's a calibration problem. Not a character flaw,
7:28
Speaker 1: because I really do believe that, but a calibration problem
7:30
Speaker 1: is still something that needs to be fixed or you're
7:32
Speaker 1: going to keep measuring with a broken ruler. Now let
7:35
Speaker 1: me explain what's actually happening in your body when this
7:37
Speaker 1: goes on. Because once you understand the mechanism, it starts
7:40
Speaker 1: to feel less like a personal failing and more like, oh,
7:43
Speaker 1: that's a thing that happens, right? Your nervous system is
7:45
Speaker 1: an ancient system. It learned very early, like before you
7:48
Speaker 1: had words for any of it, what your environment meant,
7:51
Speaker 1: whether it was safe or unpredictable, whether love came with
7:54
Speaker 1: warmth or came with conditions. And it built a map.
7:56
Speaker 1: When early love included inconsistency, emotional unpredictability, the warmth that
8:01
Speaker 1: followed the cold, the system mapped those textures as what
8:03
Speaker 1: love is. Not consciously, just neurologically. That's the territory it
8:08
Speaker 1: learned to recognize. Safety, meaning consistent presence and warmth, has
8:11
Speaker 1: no existing map because it wasn't the landscape you were navigating.
8:15
Speaker 1: So when a safe person arrives, the brain doesn't go, wonderful,
8:18
Speaker 1: this is what I wanted. It goes, this doesn't match
8:20
Speaker 1: the map. Something's wrong. And here's where it gets really specific, babe.
8:25
Speaker 1: Your stress response, the one that fires in those uncertain
8:28
Speaker 1: attachment situations, the waiting, the wondering, the relief when contact
8:32
Speaker 1: finally comes, The hormones involved in that loop feel very
8:34
Speaker 1: similar in the body to excitement and desire. So over
8:37
Speaker 1: years and years of anxious attachment, those two things have
8:40
Speaker 1: become tangled up together. The felt sense of falling for
8:43
Speaker 1: someone and the felt sense of being slightly in distress
8:45
Speaker 1: became almost the same thing. So then a safe person
8:48
Speaker 1: arrives and the system has no stress loop to run.
8:51
Speaker 1: It's quiet. And the brain, which is very confident and
8:54
Speaker 1: very frequently wrong, interprets that quiet as the absence of attraction.
8:58
Speaker 1: It says you're not into him. What it means is,
9:01
Speaker 1: I don't have a protocol for this. So let me
9:03
Speaker 1: break it down into three parts really quickly. First, the
9:06
Speaker 1: familiar loop. You meet someone, your system starts scanning, the
9:10
Speaker 1: uncertainty fires the stress response, relief comes in waves, and
9:13
Speaker 1: the whole thing feels electric. That's the loop you know. Second,
9:16
Speaker 1: the misfiring. Safe person arrives, system looks for the loop.
9:19
Speaker 1: Loop doesn't start, system reports. Flat, boring, wrong. Third, the
9:24
Speaker 1: revelation that hits once you actually see this clearly. The
9:26
Speaker 1: boredom is the loop searching for a signal that isn't coming,
9:29
Speaker 1: and the signal isn't coming because it isn't needed. You're
9:31
Speaker 1: not bored. Your threat detector is unemployed, and it's filing complaints.
9:35
Speaker 1: The genuinely good news is that this is not permanent.
9:37
Speaker 1: The system can be updated. It takes time, and it
9:39
Speaker 1: takes repetitions of safety being safe, over and over, until
9:42
Speaker 1: the body starts to build a new map. But it
9:44
Speaker 1: can happen. I'm evidence of that. Imperfect and still catching myself.
9:48
Speaker 1: But evidence. The nervous system, honestly, it has the confidence
9:53
Speaker 1: of someone who has been wrong. for 15 years and
9:56
Speaker 1: is still absolutely certain. Like zero self-reflection. fully committed to
10:00
Speaker 1: the misread. That's what we're working with. And here's what
10:04
Speaker 1: I need you to sit with before we go any further.
10:06
Speaker 1: If your nervous system built this map, if it learned
10:09
Speaker 1: love from a specific environment and then applied that learning
10:11
Speaker 1: to every relationship after, where exactly did it build it from?
10:15
Speaker 1: And does the person you were chasing in your 20s,
10:17
Speaker 1: the one who made you feel so alive, Does that
10:19
Speaker 1: person remind you of someone you knew long before them?
10:22
Speaker 1: Hold that question right there because that's exactly where we're
10:24
Speaker 1: going next. So let me tell you what happened on
10:27
Speaker 1: a therapy couch one specific afternoon. I was in my
10:29
Speaker 1: healing era, books everywhere, journaling, the whole thing, doing the work.
10:33
Speaker 1: And my therapist asked me to describe what love felt
10:35
Speaker 1: like growing up at home. I gave her a short answer.
10:38
Speaker 1: She waited. I gave a longer one. And what came
10:40
Speaker 1: out of me slowly, like something I hadn't let myself
10:42
Speaker 1: look at directly, was that love at home was conditional
10:45
Speaker 1: on mood. Sometimes warm, sometimes just gone. And the warmest moments,
10:49
Speaker 1: the really tender ones, they came right after the coldest ones.
10:52
Speaker 1: I thought that contrast was depth. I thought that was
10:54
Speaker 1: what love had texture. I sat there on that couch
10:57
Speaker 1: and realized I had spent my entire 20s recreating that
10:59
Speaker 1: exact dynamic with every single person I chased. The guy
11:03
Speaker 1: I thought was the love of my life, the one
11:05
Speaker 1: where the breakup broke me open, his warmth always followed
11:07
Speaker 1: a withdrawal. He would go quiet, I would panic, he
11:10
Speaker 1: would come back tender, and I would feel so chosen.
11:12
Speaker 1: I thought that cycle was passion. That afternoon, I understood
11:15
Speaker 1: I had been dating my earliest template over and over
11:18
Speaker 1: with different faces, and the most disorienting part wasn't the realization.
11:22
Speaker 1: It was that I didn't pick those men consciously. I
11:24
Speaker 1: picked them because they felt like home. Right, because the
11:26
Speaker 1: nervous system doesn't know home is painful. It just knows home.
11:30
Speaker 1: So when I ask you who that reminds you of,
11:32
Speaker 1: I want you to know I'm not accusing you of anything.
11:35
Speaker 1: I'm not saying your childhood was a disaster or that
11:37
Speaker 1: you're broken. I'm saying you learned to read love in
11:39
Speaker 1: a specific environment, and then you applied that reading everywhere.
11:42
Speaker 1: It's like learning to read in one font, and then
11:44
Speaker 1: assuming every font is wrong. You're not wrong, babe. You
11:47
Speaker 1: just need more fonts. The border mistaker wasn't invented in
11:50
Speaker 1: your last relationship. It was formed much earlier and then
11:53
Speaker 1: brought along like a carry-on that somehow fits in every
11:55
Speaker 1: overhead compartment. Sit with this question for a second. Where
11:59
Speaker 1: was consistent and warm and present actually modeled for you?
12:02
Speaker 1: Not perfectly, just reliably. Where did you see someone show
12:05
Speaker 1: up the same way on the hard days as on
12:07
Speaker 1: the easy ones? Don't force an answer. If it comes quickly,
12:10
Speaker 1: let it. If it doesn't, that's data too. Because what
12:12
Speaker 1: I found and what I hear over and over is
12:14
Speaker 1: that most people trace this not to someone absent or cruel,
12:17
Speaker 1: but to someone who was wonderful and just not reliably there.
12:20
Speaker 1: Maybe they were stressed or distracted or their own emotional
12:23
Speaker 1: world was loud. Not bad people, just slightly inconsistent. And
12:27
Speaker 1: that slight inconsistency, that small gap between warm and sometimes gone,
12:31
Speaker 1: that is enough. That is all it takes to wire
12:33
Speaker 1: the loop. And now I want to go a layer
12:36
Speaker 1: deeper because the nervous system piece is real and important,
12:38
Speaker 1: but it's not the whole story. there's something underneath the
12:41
Speaker 1: border mistaker that's a little harder to look at. The shadow.
12:44
Speaker 1: The parts of ourselves we don't really advertise. The parts
12:47
Speaker 1: we've never fully admitted out loud. In love specifically, the
12:50
Speaker 1: shadow often holds something like this. The hunger for intensity.
12:54
Speaker 1: The part of you that found a kind of power
12:55
Speaker 1: in surviving hard relationships. The part that built an identity
12:58
Speaker 1: around being the woman who could handle complicated people, who
13:01
Speaker 1: understood emotional depth, who was never naive, who knew that
13:04
Speaker 1: real love was never simple. You know what I mean?
13:08
Speaker 1: That identity is not nothing. She earned her stripes. She
13:11
Speaker 1: sat through some genuinely painful nights and came out still standing.
13:15
Speaker 1: But here's what she didn't account for. A stable partner
13:17
Speaker 1: threatens to make her story ordinary. If there's no fight
13:20
Speaker 1: to win, no chase to endure, no cold withdrawal to weather,
13:23
Speaker 1: then what exactly is she surviving? The shadow whispers, if
13:27
Speaker 1: I don't have to work for this, am I even interesting?
13:29
Speaker 1: And babe, that whisper is so quiet and so confident
13:31
Speaker 1: that it can pass for intuition. It doesn't announce itself
13:34
Speaker 1: as fear. It says, I'm just not feeling it. The
13:38
Speaker 1: boredom is partly grief, yeah? It's grief for an identity
13:41
Speaker 1: that felt powerful even while it was costing you everything.
13:44
Speaker 1: And that grief is real. I'm not going to tell
13:45
Speaker 1: you to dismiss it. What I'm going to tell you
13:47
Speaker 1: is that it is worth naming out loud, to yourself,
13:50
Speaker 1: not in a spiral, just honestly. I used to feel
13:52
Speaker 1: like a main character in a complicated love story. And
13:55
Speaker 1: now I'm in a story where someone remembers what I
13:56
Speaker 1: said about my mom three conversations ago and asks how
13:59
Speaker 1: it's going. It's quieter. And for a while, quiet felt
14:02
Speaker 1: like a demotion. It took me a while to understand
14:05
Speaker 1: it was actually an arrival. You know what I mean?
14:08
Speaker 1: Some women specifically, and I was one of them, fear
14:11
Speaker 1: being easy to keep. Like if he's not working for it,
14:13
Speaker 1: if there's no tension holding the whole thing taut, then
14:15
Speaker 1: maybe she's just not that special. Maybe she's the comfortable choice,
14:19
Speaker 1: not the chosen one. And I want to pull that
14:20
Speaker 1: apart for a second because it is sneaky. The idea
14:23
Speaker 1: that being easy to love is somehow a lesser version
14:25
Speaker 1: of being loved, that is not humility. That is the
14:28
Speaker 1: boredom mistake of convincing you that you only count when
14:30
Speaker 1: someone is struggling to reach you. Your worth is not
14:32
Speaker 1: located in someone else's effort to pin you down. It
14:35
Speaker 1: never was. Being chosen quietly and consistently is not the
14:39
Speaker 1: consolation prize. Some part of me missed the drama the
14:42
Speaker 1: way you miss a bad tooth after it's pulled. Like,
14:45
Speaker 1: technically you're better off. Objectively, your mouth is healthier. But
14:48
Speaker 1: there's this weird phantom feeling in the gap, this absence
14:51
Speaker 1: where the thing used to be. That's what the early
14:53
Speaker 1: months of safety can feel like. You know something's gone.
14:56
Speaker 1: You're not sure yet what you have instead. Okay, so
15:00
Speaker 1: let's talk about what this actually costs. Not in theory,
15:03
Speaker 1: in your life. The boredom mistake would cost you good
15:05
Speaker 1: relationships because the quiet lands as a verdict. You don't
15:08
Speaker 1: leave because anything is wrong. You leave because nothing is wrong.
15:11
Speaker 1: And that reads as something missing. And meanwhile, you stay
15:14
Speaker 1: in the charge painful ones longer than you should because
15:16
Speaker 1: the intensity registers as proof. He kept me guessing, you say.
15:19
Speaker 1: There was so much passion. Right, the passion was stress hormones.
15:23
Speaker 1: The proof was anxiety completing its loop. Your current partner
15:26
Speaker 1: can't compete with that because your partner is a person
15:28
Speaker 1: and what you're comparing them to is a feeling that
15:29
Speaker 1: was basically a drug. Over time, and this is the
15:33
Speaker 1: part that's hardest to sit with, This pattern means you
15:35
Speaker 1: only feel in love when you're slightly destabilized, when there's
15:38
Speaker 1: something slightly unresolved, when you can't fully settle. And because
15:42
Speaker 1: you've been there before and survived, it feels like aliveness.
15:44
Speaker 1: It feels like you. The cost is not just this relationship.
15:47
Speaker 1: It's the accumulation of leaving safety over and over, three times,
15:51
Speaker 1: four times, looking back later and seeing the pattern clearly
15:54
Speaker 1: only in hindsight. Some people do this for a decade
15:56
Speaker 1: before they catch it. I almost did. And the thing is,
15:59
Speaker 1: each time you leave a secure relationship because it felt flat,
16:02
Speaker 1: you confirm the false belief. You go back to the
16:04
Speaker 1: charge thing, it ends painfully, and your nervous system logs
16:07
Speaker 1: that as more evidence that love is supposed to hurt.
16:10
Speaker 1: Now here's the hard truth. I'm just going to say
16:12
Speaker 1: it plainly. The feeling you're waiting for might not come
16:15
Speaker 1: with a secure partner. Not at first. Not the way
16:18
Speaker 1: you knew it before. The butterflies you remember, the electricity,
16:21
Speaker 1: the way your whole day reorganized around whether he texted,
16:24
Speaker 1: that might not show up. And that is not evidence
16:26
Speaker 1: the relationship is wrong. That is evidence that you need
16:28
Speaker 1: to update the system. The boredom mistaker is telling you
16:31
Speaker 1: chemistry is missing. What's actually missing is chaos. And if
16:34
Speaker 1: you've been in chaos long enough, you know it never
16:36
Speaker 1: delivered what it promised. It felt like passion, but it
16:39
Speaker 1: didn't build anything. It felt like depth, but it was
16:41
Speaker 1: just turbulence. Yeah? I'll say it bluntly because I think
16:45
Speaker 1: you can take it. If you wouldn't leave a job
16:47
Speaker 1: because things are going well, don't leave a relationship because
16:50
Speaker 1: it's not stressing you. That's the thing. Stability at work
16:53
Speaker 1: reads as success. Stability in love reads as stagnation. We
16:56
Speaker 1: need to close that gap. And I want to be clear.
16:58
Speaker 1: I'm not saying stay in something dead. I'm not saying
17:01
Speaker 1: ignore your instincts forever. I'm saying, learn the difference between
17:04
Speaker 1: dead and unfamiliar. Because right now they feel identical, and
17:07
Speaker 1: they are not the same thing at all. Picture this.
17:11
Speaker 1: You're on your couch. Maybe it's late, maybe it's not.
17:13
Speaker 1: You pick up your phone. You're thinking about opening an app.
17:16
Speaker 1: Or you're composing a text in your head to someone
17:18
Speaker 1: from before, someone who made you feel something. Or you're
17:21
Speaker 1: drafting the conversation in your mind where you tell your
17:23
Speaker 1: friend you just don't think you're feeling it with him anymore.
17:26
Speaker 1: You know how you feel in that moment. That low restlessness,
17:28
Speaker 1: that almost convincing yourself. Pause right there. Just pause. Because
17:32
Speaker 1: that moment is exactly where the boredom mistake earns its name.
17:35
Speaker 1: It sounds most like your own voice right before it
17:37
Speaker 1: costs you the most. So what does the other side
17:40
Speaker 1: actually feel like? And how do you get there? That's
17:42
Speaker 1: where we're going now. And I don't want you to
17:44
Speaker 1: skip this part because this is the part that changes something. Okay,
17:48
Speaker 1: so let's talk about what the other side actually feels like.
17:51
Speaker 1: Because I think there's a version of this you've been
17:52
Speaker 1: sold that is just wrong. The other side does not
17:55
Speaker 1: look like fireworks that last forever or some cinematic moment
17:58
Speaker 1: where your nervous system finally surrenders. It looks quieter than that.
18:02
Speaker 1: Way quieter. And that's exactly why the boredom mistaker keeps
18:05
Speaker 1: telling you you're missing something. There's a concept I want
18:09
Speaker 1: to walk you through called earned security. And I know
18:11
Speaker 1: that sounds like something you'd read on a self-help website
18:13
Speaker 1: at two in the morning, but stay with me. Earned
18:15
Speaker 1: security is what happens when your nervous system learns through
18:18
Speaker 1: actual repeated experience that safety is real. Not because you
18:21
Speaker 1: decided to believe in it. Not because you journaled your
18:23
Speaker 1: way there. But because it happened enough times that your
18:26
Speaker 1: body started to lower its watch. It's not a switch.
18:28
Speaker 1: You don't flip it. It's more like water finding its level.
18:31
Speaker 1: Slow and then suddenly there. And here's where it shows
18:34
Speaker 1: up inside the story we've been telling. Every time he
18:36
Speaker 1: texted when he said he would. Every dinner that ended
18:38
Speaker 1: without the low hum of dread. Every time you braced
18:41
Speaker 1: for the cold front and it didn't come. That was
18:43
Speaker 1: a deposit. Your body just didn't know what account it
18:45
Speaker 1: was going into yet. Here's what earned security feels like
18:49
Speaker 1: in real life, right? Eye contact that doesn't make you
18:51
Speaker 1: run a calculation in your head about what he's thinking.
18:54
Speaker 1: A disagreement that ends, actually ends, without anyone going cold
18:57
Speaker 1: or disappearing for 24 hours. Your phone across the room
19:00
Speaker 1: and you don't feel the pull because you don't need
19:01
Speaker 1: to check. Someone knowing something unflattering about you. Not the
19:04
Speaker 1: pretty version of you. The tired version. The scared version.
19:07
Speaker 1: The version that cried over the wrong thing. And they're
19:09
Speaker 1: still just there on Thursday. Still texting. Still asking what
19:13
Speaker 1: you want for dinner. Still showing up. That's not boring.
19:16
Speaker 1: That's what the boredom mistaker has been calling boring to
19:17
Speaker 1: protect the loop it already knows how to run. And
19:19
Speaker 1: I want to say once, clearly, this is true regardless
19:23
Speaker 1: of who your partner is. Any partner who shows up
19:25
Speaker 1: consistently is giving your nervous system the raw material it
19:28
Speaker 1: needs to build this. The question is whether you're letting
19:30
Speaker 1: the deposits land. Okay, so four moves. Concrete ones. I'm
19:35
Speaker 1: not giving you affirmations, I'm giving you actions, right? First one.
19:38
Speaker 1: When the boredom hits, and it will hit, put one
19:40
Speaker 1: hand on your sternum, right in the center of your chest,
19:42
Speaker 1: and ask your body out loud, am I bored or
19:44
Speaker 1: am I waiting for a signal that isn't coming? Say
19:46
Speaker 1: it out loud. I know that feels a little weird,
19:48
Speaker 1: but the out loud part matters. It interrupts the spiral
19:51
Speaker 1: before it becomes a conclusion. Your nervous system has been
19:53
Speaker 1: running a loop, and you just introduce a pause into
19:55
Speaker 1: the middle of it. That pauses everything. Second, write down
20:00
Speaker 1: what you're actually comparing this relationship to. Not a fantasy,
20:04
Speaker 1: not some hypothetical better man somewhere. An actual past relationship
20:07
Speaker 1: or a specific feeling from one. Describe it in writing, honestly,
20:11
Speaker 1: including what it costs you. The waiting. The way your
20:14
Speaker 1: stomach felt on Sunday nights. The version of yourself you
20:17
Speaker 1: became in that relationship. Look at that list before you
20:19
Speaker 1: act on the boredom. Because what you're comparing your current
20:22
Speaker 1: partner to is not a higher standard. It's an old wound.
20:24
Speaker 1: And those two things are not the same thing. Yeah. Third,
20:28
Speaker 1: pick one moment this week, just one, where your partner
20:31
Speaker 1: was consistent. He followed through. He said something kind without
20:34
Speaker 1: an angle. He was just there. Name it out loud,
20:36
Speaker 1: not to them, just to yourself. Say something like, This
20:39
Speaker 1: is what safe looks like. It sounds simple. It is simple.
20:42
Speaker 1: But you're doing something specific. When you do that, you're
20:44
Speaker 1: training the recognition. You're building a new map, one data
20:47
Speaker 1: point at a time. The nervous system learns through repetition,
20:50
Speaker 1: not through resolve. You can't think your way into feeling safe.
20:53
Speaker 1: You have to notice safe things often enough that they
20:54
Speaker 1: start to register as real. Fourth, and this one requires patience.
20:59
Speaker 1: Give it at least eight weeks of consciously naming safe
21:01
Speaker 1: moments before you make a decision based on the feeling
21:03
Speaker 1: of flatness. Eight weeks. That's it. That's not forever. That's
21:07
Speaker 1: just enough repetitions for the system to get curious instead
21:09
Speaker 1: of panicked. If after genuine presence and real effort on
21:12
Speaker 1: both sides, the flatness is still there, that's different data, okay?
21:16
Speaker 1: That's worth looking at. A therapist or counselor can help
21:18
Speaker 1: you tell the difference between a nervous system that needs
21:20
Speaker 1: time and a relationship that actually isn't right. But most
21:23
Speaker 1: of us haven't given it eight weeks of conscious noticing.
21:25
Speaker 1: We've given it a vibe check and an app download.
21:27
Speaker 1: Those are different things. Now, who do you need to become?
21:32
Speaker 1: And I don't mean that in a hustle culture way
21:33
Speaker 1: where I'm asking you to optimize yourself. I mean it specifically.
21:37
Speaker 1: The woman on the other side of this pattern, what
21:39
Speaker 1: does she look like in an ordinary moment? She's sitting
21:41
Speaker 1: in a quiet room with someone who loves her and
21:44
Speaker 1: she feels that as enough. She doesn't need a story
21:46
Speaker 1: of survival to feel like she earned the love. She
21:49
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be in recovery from a relationship to
21:51
Speaker 1: feel interesting. She sends a text and she's not already
21:54
Speaker 1: composing the backup plan while she waits for a reply.
21:57
Speaker 1: She knows what her body is doing when it gets restless.
21:59
Speaker 1: She can name it and she can offer it something different.
22:01
Speaker 1: She knows the difference between her peace and a problem.
22:04
Speaker 1: Becoming her is not a betrayal of the woman who
22:06
Speaker 1: survived the hot-cold relationships, the midnight texts, the breakup that
22:09
Speaker 1: broke you. It's not a betrayal at all. That woman
22:12
Speaker 1: did the work to get you here. Becoming this version
22:15
Speaker 1: is what she was surviving toward. You don't leave her behind.
22:18
Speaker 1: You just stop needing what she needed. So, my loves,
22:22
Speaker 1: here's where I want to land with you. The boredom
22:24
Speaker 1: mistaker is not a character flaw. It's not ingratitude. It's
22:27
Speaker 1: not you being too difficult or too much or not
22:29
Speaker 1: capable of love. It's a very understandable response to a
22:32
Speaker 1: very specific kind of learning. When you were taught that
22:35
Speaker 1: love feels like waiting and relief, of course calm feels
22:37
Speaker 1: like nothing. Of course consistency feels suspicious. Of course you
22:41
Speaker 1: keep reaching for something with more voltage. Naming that pattern,
22:44
Speaker 1: seeing it clearly, that is the whole first step. Not
22:47
Speaker 1: fixing it overnight, not never feeling it again, just being
22:49
Speaker 1: able to say, oh, that's the boredom mistaker, and pausing
22:52
Speaker 1: before you let it make your decisions for you. So
22:55
Speaker 1: here's the question I want you to sit with. And,
22:57
Speaker 1: I mean, really sit with it, not just nod and
22:59
Speaker 1: move on. Are you bored? Or are you finally safe
23:02
Speaker 1: and your body just doesn't know what to do with
23:03
Speaker 1: that yet? I'd love to know where you land with that.
23:06
Speaker 1: Drop your answer. Think it through. Write it down. Say
23:08
Speaker 1: it in the shower. Whatever works. And if you've got
23:10
Speaker 1: a friend who's in a good relationship right now and
23:12
Speaker 1: keeps saying she doesn't know if she feels it anymore,
23:14
Speaker 1: send this to her. Send it today. She needs to
23:17
Speaker 1: hear it more than she needs to hear herself talk
23:18
Speaker 1: herself out of something real. And if this episode is
23:21
Speaker 1: your kind of thing, follow along so you don't miss
23:24
Speaker 1: what's coming next. I'm really glad you were here for
23:26
Speaker 1: this one. Take good care of yourself, babe. This show
23:30
Speaker 1: is made by Oboe Media.