I am 38 today. It's my birthday.

And it took me most of the years that I have been on this earth to learn what I hope to convey to you in just a few short minutes today.

And that truth is that great relationships are not found. they are built. There is a common.

There is a common idea about relationships that when you find the right person, you just know.

And I think this is a pretty dangerous idea.

Firstly, because it creates this unrealistic, sometimes impossible to achieve expectation of the level of certainty that you are supposed to experience when you encounter the right person.

But that idea also ignores another truth, which is that most of us have had a time in our lives, or maybe multiple experiences,

of feeling like we just knew about the complete wrong person.

One of the difficult things about our culture today is that the perception of how many

options there are and how easily and readily those options are presented

to us, especially on social media and dating apps, has us thinking that there might be someone

with a little bit more of what we need. There might be someone who's a bit more attractive.

There might be someone who has a bit more of this or a bit less of that, and

that that might make them even more optimal to create that feeling of certainty in us.

And I think that part of that lack of certainty we feel is about personal distrust.

We don't trust our own decisions. We're worried we're going to make the wrong

decision, especially on something as high stakes as who we're going to spend the rest of our lives with.

And so in not trusting our own gut, our own intuition, our inner voice, whatever you want to call it,

on who to choose in our life, what we look for is an external source of certainty that's so powerful,

a feeling that is so unwavering that it overwhelms our internal uncertainty. I don't think that we're

entitled to that in the beginning. And in fact, when we do feel that in the beginning, I think it's something that's more likely

we should distrust than trust.

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