We'll thrive more, we'll grow more, we'll be happy, we'll be healthier, if we fight more and more for the relationships that we sometimes too easily let go of.

Welcome to spiritually hungry.

The poet William Blake said it's easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

What strikes me about this quote is that it is sadly true.

Today we're going to cover why that is.

Our most important relationships are often our most complicated, familial relationships like parent-child, siblings, best friends, and partners. It feels easier to ignore that infuriating

co-workers stop inviting a competitive acquaintance to a social gathering because the stakes are lower.

But when relationships that matter are broken, they can feel excruciating.

It hurts because we have loved them.

Probably still do.

We have a rich shared history.

And I think for those reasons and more, we expect even more from them.

We expect that the love or the relationship will last forever.

And often it doesn't. So I don't know if you know, there's a phenomenon called the pursuer,

distancer, dynamic. Yes. You do not. Yeah. So Dr. John Gottman talks about this extensively.

It's common in marital relationships when one partner is the pursuer, meaning they desire more connection and closeness, and the other partner is the distancer as they start to pull away.

And research at the Gottman Institute has found that when this dynamic happens in new marriages, they have an 80% likelihood of ending in divorce.

Well, in new marriages, it hope that doesn't happen.

Actually, I just met with a couple recently that he said he felt this shortly before they got married, and for sure six months after that's when he began.

That he was pursuing she was distancing?

Yeah.

That's a problem.

...