If you don't protect yourself from that person, no one else can protect you,

and you'll be harming yourself, and when you harm yourself like that,

you diminish your ability to give love to other people.

Welcome everybody to the Love Life podcast, I am Matthew Hussie, and this is a clip from the archives

that I think is really going to help you today. Check it out, and I'll speak to you at the end

of the episode. Steve, there is a quite well-known Maya Angelou quote that struck me as being

extraordinarily important when it comes to relationships, and she was once famously speaking to Oprah,

and she said, when people show you who they are, believe them, they know themselves much better

than you do, and she was referring to those moments where people say, I'm a selfish person,

I'm not a kind person. I don't think of other people a lot. You know, when people, I'm a mean person,

when people say those things, and we shrug them off, I've had that on first date, so I've had people

go like, I'm just really mean, I can be just so nasty. Yeah, and that's a moment where you should

believe someone. It's not, when your brother or your sister or your son or your daughter says that

to you, your job is to see the best in them, your job is to see what they can be, your job is to

encourage them to be their best. That's what you do for family or for people you love, you see

the generous thing you can do for someone you love is to see the best in them, even when they don't

see it in themselves, so that they can be better through your love. Sometimes with family,

it's not always an equal exchange. With family, we do things for family because we love them,

and we're not trying to get anything. We just want to love them. That's the job, right? And if a

family is member is toxic or is truly detrimental or dangerous for your life, that's a different story,

and you have to decide how close you can keep that person. But that aside, you can love a family

member without expectation, without wanting something in return. The same is not true of romantic love.

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