Sarah Yudkin, founder of You Love and You Learn, joins the show to discuss relationship anxiety. They explore healthy love, self-sabotage, recognizing healthy relationships, and the confusion between anxiety and excitement. They also discuss strategies for challenging relationship anxiety, overthinking, and spicing up relationships. Listen now!
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Quick takeaways
Prioritize personal growth and maintain connections outside of the relationship to prevent boredom and unrealistic expectations.
Recognize and communicate about relationship anxiety stemming from past experiences to navigate it in a healthy way.
Deep dives
Prioritizing Personal Growth and Connection
To ensure a fulfilling and healthy relationship, it is important to prioritize personal growth and maintain connections outside of the partnership. This means continuing to engage in activities, hobbies, and friendships that bring excitement and fulfillment. By nurturing one's own interests and social connections, it can prevent boredom and unrealistic expectations from being solely reliant on the relationship for fulfillment.
Understanding Relationship Anxiety
Relationship anxiety is a common experience that can arise when individuals have fears, doubts, or insecurities about their healthy and loving relationship. These anxieties often stem from past experiences, such as witnessing parental conflict or going through previous heartbreaks. It is important to recognize that these fears are valid and normal, but they need not define the entire relationship. Communicating openly with your partner and seeking support can help navigate relationship anxiety in a healthy way.
Differentiating Between Real Problems and the End of the Honeymoon Phase
As relationships progress, the intense passion of the honeymoon phase may naturally fade. However, it is crucial to discern whether the relationship is still healthy and aligned in values and goals. While feelings may fluctuate over time, shared values, acceptance, and mutual support are the foundations of a lasting and fulfilling relationship. Understanding that love evolves and embracing the journey of growth with your partner can help differentiate between a normal transition and signs that the relationship may not be right for you.
Challenging Boredom and Restoring Excitement
When boredom creeps into a relationship, it is essential to explore both individual and shared solutions. Taking responsibility for personal growth, pursuing new experiences or hobbies together, and rekindling the spark of intimacy can revive excitement and novelty. Avoiding the trap of expecting constant excitement like in the early stages and embracing the comfort of a committed and loving partnership is key. By actively nurturing a sense of adventure and introducing new elements into the relationship, boredom can be successfully challenged.
When we experience healthy love for the first time after years of unsettling, unhealthy, toxic relationships, one of the first reactions we can have is "why does this feel so boring?" Often we confuse safety with a lack of passion, or assume that just because this person doesn't activate our nervous system, we are missing the spark. This is often left over from past relationships where we have confused anxiety with excitement.
In this episode, we bring on Sarah Yudkin, the founder of You Love and You Learn to break down the relationship anxiety that comes with experiencing healthy love for the first time and how to dissect your relationship OCD, the unconscious ways we sabotage relationships and all that comes with it. Listen now.