Welcome back beautiful people to the Smart Couple Podcast where we deconstruct and

dismantle great relationships and undermine your attempts to blame your

partner or be cozy and secure. your who want to go for it in a relationship and see it as a path and a vehicle to evolution,

waking up, being more yourself, being more whole, being more free, etc.

And believe it or not, you can get what you want in a relationship

and it requires a lot of effort on your part. So this podcast really is also about busting fantasies and cutting through

the noise. There's a lot of noise out there around relationships and a lot of it promotes the fantasy.

So I vet out good people to that I think have a mature approach to intimacy, monogamy, marriage, parenting, etc.

So on this episode I'm really grateful to have one of my mentors Bruce Tift,

who's been a psychotherapist for decades here in Boulder,

Colorado, and I first met him when I was a graduate student at

Nropa University here in Boulder. He taught an evening class. He'd come in with his

large coffee with his wife who was his

TA and he had this giant coffee and the class started at like 7 p.m. I was like

who is this freak of nature and he would just undermine people's not only

their fantasies about relationship but their kind of drama stories about feeling bad in a relationship and one of his signature lines is,

well, how about you try on that for the rest of your life, you're going to feel that way?

And... you're going to feel that way.

And he had such a brilliant and poignant way

of getting right to the core of the matter.

And a lot of my friends and I that used to see Bruce once in a while I would say

because you only need to see Bruce like once a year and it was like dude bring your recorder

...