Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on Learning to Love Consciously
Eric opened with a question about body intelligence, which keeps gaining attention, and about something harder: what happens once the role models we grew up with fall away and we have to become our own. With divorce so common now, where does that leave us?
Gay took the question head on. Most people have heard the figure that half of marriages end, he said, but far fewer know the trend gets worse with each try. Roughly 57 percent of second marriages collapse, and by his count around 63 percent of third marriages do too. So the learning curve points the wrong way. People are not getting better at this the more they practice it. He offered one hopeful read on the numbers, though: some of that rise might simply mean people are walking away from bad relationships sooner than they used to, which would push the statistics up for a healthy reason.
What stays constant, he said, is how many people move through one partnership after another without ever picking up the basics. Commitment. Honesty. Owning your part. These are the things he wishes someone taught in kindergarten and first grade and junior high. He made it all the way through high school without a single class, not even a ten minute conversation, on how to get along with another person, how to work out a disagreement without casting the other one as the villain, or how to say something painful out loud. Skills that sound almost too plain to mention turn out to demand real work and real commitment before they become second nature.
That is why, Gay said, people keep coming to them for relationship work. He and Kathlyn encourage them to treat it as something they practice for life rather than a quick repair. A bad relationship is not a flat tire you patch and forget. He wants people to approach conscious loving the way they might approach meditation or yoga or their faith, as a spiritual practice they put their whole heart into, so they can actually enjoy the closeness that is available to them all the time.
Kathlyn picked up from there. What they have found, she said, is that there really is a map for building relationships that thrive. The two of them have treated their own marriage as a living laboratory across all their years together, and that experiment leaves her confident that anyone can learn to be genuinely present with another person.
She gave an example from their own life. When Gay feels angry, that used to throw her. She would absorb his anger as though it belonged to her, assume she had done something to cause it, and decide it was her job to make it go away.