Hey everybody, welcome to Marriage in Martinez, this is Danielle.

So if you listened to last week's episode, or if you've listened to pretty much any episode that we've done, you know that as much as I love my relationship with Adam, I have other relationships in my life that I just need to my core, people in my life, friends, my sister, you know, certain members of my family that I just absolutely feel like I would be incomplete if I didn't have

a real stake in these relationships, like if they weren't as intense as they are, and it brings something so amazing to my life. I've just always been sort of obsessed with these relationships, especially my relationships with women, and I feel like I always have had this passion for understanding what it is about these relationships that make them so amazing.

And I know a lot of you feel that way too, that you have relationships in your life other than your romantic partner who you really, really couldn't live without.

And I also know that there are a lot of us women, and maybe men also who feel like our partner maybe doesn't have the same connections with other people that we have.

And that can get a little bit overwhelming because when your partner doesn't have those other relationships, a lot of the burden falls onto us.

So today I spoke with Elizabeth Ernshaw, and what I love about Elizabeth Ernshaw is that she recognizes that as much as our partner is a huge part of our life or a significant other is a huge part of our life that we need other relationships.

But this idea that your other half quote unquote completes you is kind of bullshit. And she sort of calls it out and talks about all the reasons why that's just not the case.

And she has a new book out that's called I want this to work, and it's an inclusive and easy to digest relationship book for the modern age.

And she talks about conflict, healing and connection, creating space that makes it safe to connect, busting the romantic notion that our better half completes us growing up and growing out how both your early years and the social connections you make as an adult influences your relational beliefs, feelings, and patterns.

We talked about so much in this episode, and I absolutely love this conversation. We talked about if men actually need the same kind of emotional connections that women do.

How do men and women react differently to emotions? And why do we react differently to emotions? We talk about meta emotions, which is the term that I didn't even know.

I asked her about same sex couples, and I always have the idea that maybe if like a woman and a woman are together that maybe they're not dealing with these same kind of emotional conflicts because women just tend to deal with emotion differently.

So I ask her about that. And if that's true. And the imbalance of being in charge of all the things family related, even your husband's family, and how overwhelming that can be.

And she tells us how she got her husband to take over more responsibilities in their domestic life. And you are going to want to hear that because it was so eye opening.

So I love this book. I think everybody should read it. It's called I want this to work. And please enjoy this interview with Elizabeth Ernshaw.

Well, hi, Liz. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today.

And we just established that you are right outside of my sons, like most favorite city in the entire world, Philadelphia.

Yes.

My husband's favorite city too. They could talk sports together.

Okay. All right.

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