Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom,

and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Here is love.

Relationships are tricky, especially the ones we've built the modern world around.

Monogamous, long-term, an equal partner in parenting and professional supports. Oh, and our partner

is supposed to be our best friend too. It's a lot to ask from someone. Harder still when you throw in the craziness of kids in the

current state of the world, but you deserve a partner like that, and they deserve a partner

like you. We deserve happiness and fulfillment and love together. It just may well be, as Anne

Mara Lindbergh writes in her beautiful book, a gift from the sea, which I've loved and raved about, and we carry

at the painted porch if you haven't read it yet. She says that perhaps the way to get that is by

relaxing these standards a little bit, not fully, but intermittently. When you love someone,

she writes, you do not love them all the time, all the time, in exactly the same way from moment to moment.

It is an impossibility.

It is a lie to even pretend to.

To do so is unfair.

It's to set yourself up for disappointment with your spouse.

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationship, she writes.

We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror, its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency,

on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible in life as in love is in growth, in

fluidity, in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free,

...