love

Relationship circles – The most important diagram of your life
Research shows that if you had to choose one variable that influences the quality of your life the most, it would be relationships. It’s not money or fame or good looks, it’s relationships.

People who are deeply connected to their friends, family, co-workers and even the local community live longer, are healthier, happier, more fulfilled and live a better life in general. The good life.

And it’s not the number of friends on social networks or the marital status; it’s the quality of relationships that counts the most. You can be married but completely lonely, you can have many acquaintances but no deep connections.

Although please keep in mind that having quality relationships doesn’t mean a complete absence of fights and disagreements. A perfect relationship doesn’t exist.

The idea of a quality relationship is more in building strong codependent bonds, being on a shared life mission, following common values and goals, cultivating a sense of trust, knowing that you can count on others and that they can count on you.

It’s about doing things together that lead to joyful moments. It’s about being fully accepted the way you are with all your positives and negatives.

If we all intuitively know that relationships are that important, then why don’t we invest more effort into building quality bonds with other people? The answer is quite simple: because it’s hard.

It’s as hard as following a healthy diet or regularly saving money. Relationships do bring color to life, but they are also fluid, messy and complicated. They are hard.

It takes courage, dedication and consistency to build a quality relationship. There are no shortcuts or pauses. The moment you stop investing in a relationship, it starts to wither.

On top of that, you must first build a great capacity for love, meaning that you must first love yourself before you can build deep relationships.

The reasons why you must first love yourself are at least the following:
- The more you truly accept yourself, the more you can accept other people
- The more you love yourself, the more forgiving you can be towards other people
- The better you understand emotions, the more constructively you can express them
- The stronger you are emotionally, the easier you can deal with disappointments and people’s imperfections
A balance between quality and quantity

When it comes to the quantity of relationships, we know the approximate limit. Dunbar’s number states that we have a biological limit of maintaining around 150 social interactions at the same time.

Among these 150, all six fundamental types (six pillars) of relationships should be included:
- Primary family – mother, father, siblings
- Secondary family – spouse, kids
- Friends
- Superiors
- Coworkers
- Mentors
All the pillars are important in maximizing the value that comes from relationships. It’s hard to understand your roots if you don’t have a good relationship at least with some members of your primary family.

Choosing the right spouse is one of the most important decisions in your life. Kids are the most important legacy you leave behind, and friends are the people you want to share your interests with.

On the other hand, it’s hard to live a happy life if you hate your job and don’t enjoy the company of your coworkers. One very important indicator of how well you feel at your job is whether you have a few good friends there. And if you do some kind of meaningful work.

The math is pretty simple. You spend at least 1/3 of your life at work – work is basically your second home.

That’s why the following career directions are very important: don’t choose a job, but a boss. A boss from whom you can learn, whom you respect and who knows how to bring out the best in you.

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And finding a good mentor or a coach can fast‑track your progress in any area of life. All these directions tackle business relationships.

Now let’s jump from quantity to quality.

The road to quality lies in a proactive approach to relationships

As with everything in life, being proactive pays dividends. Relationships are no exception to that.

In general terms, being proactive means that you don’t just react to whatever is happening in your life, but you systematically, deliberately and assertively respond and find the most constructive way to meet your goals and needs.

Being reactive in relationships means that you don’t put any conscious effort into relationships or interactions. You put your relationships and communication on autopilot.

You let a “greater force” dictate who you meet, you let every relationship run its course, and when a disagreement occurs, you react in kind – you let your feelings dictate the outcome of a disagreement.

On the other hand, if you’re proactive in relationships, you consciously decide who new you want to meet, with whom you want to spend more time, into which relationships you will put more effort and so on.

In communication, you don’t only react (bluntly express your feelings), rather you express your feelings in a constructive manner, which can only be done when you’re feeling and thinking at the same time. In other words, you’re being proactive.

A very good start to relationship proactivity is to map all the people who are present in your life.

Source: Inclusion Europe

List all the 150 or so people that interact with on a regular basis and then arrange them in four categories; actually, in four different types of circles, based on how close they are to you:
- The circle of intimacy – These are the people you can’t imagine your life without. They know your private self quite well, you spend a lot of time interacting with them – you usually live with them and you trust them the most.
- The circle of friendship – These are the people who are also close to you, but there is less intimacy involved. They don’t physically live with you, share a bathroom with you or support you financially. But you do share your dreams, good news and troubles with them.
- The circle of participation – Most coworkers, local community, acquaintances and other people that you interact with on a frequent basis (but are not your friends) fall into this category. All the friends you start neglecting can be quickly outcast into this circle.
- The circle of exchange – The last circle contains people with whom you do transactions. They can be your doctors, a hairdresser, home cleaner, maybe even a customer, and so on.
You can use two different colors for business and personal relationships.

In the next step, draw an arrow to each person. Indicate if you want to move them more inwards (build a closer relationship) or if you want to create more distance, maybe even cutting them off (if a person is an energy vampire).

The intimate relationships circle – the most important people in your life

It’s a fun exercise to draw the four relationship circles (intimacy, friendship, participation, exchange) and map all the people in your life into circles. Adding arrows next to each person can give you a very good insight into where to invest more effort and where less.

But you can even take the exercise a step further, drawing a new diagram. In the second diagram, you can zoom into the intimate relationship circle and analyze which people are really the closest to you in your life.

It’s not an easy exercise to do, but it is a very valuable one. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot in the center. You can write “me” above the dot. As you have probably figured out, the dot represents you.

Then around the dot, start drawing circles. The circle closest to the dot is the person who is closest to you in your life. The second circle represents the second closest person, and so on.

You can write a name for each circle. There can’t be two people equally close to you and that can lead to a few hard choices to make.

Nevertheless, you can get a really good overview of the people who contribute to the quality of your life the most. Try to draw up to 7 – 10 circles, and you will have a very good overview of which relationships have the greatest influence on your life.

You can add another dimension to the diagram – do not make the space between the circles equally wide. Draw a circle further from the dot if there is a greater distance involved in a relationship. Look at the graph below, representing five people with different levels of closeness to a person:

After drawing the intimate circles, you can analyze at least three things:
- How close did you draw the first circle? Is it too close to the dot, too far away, or just the right distance, illustrating secure attachment?
- If you draw such a diagram every year, you can observe how much closer you get with some people and more distant with others. That’s pretty normal, since relationships are a very fluid thing.
- Most importantly, you can be very proactive about which relationships you wish to put more effort in and bring closer to your center. You can draw an arrow of how close you want to move a certain relationship.
Narrowing the relationship gap based on the relationship circles analysis

Now that you’ve mapped all the relationships, including arrows pointing to the people with whom you want to build a better connection, another question comes to mind – how can you narrow the relationship gap between you and the chosen people? There are many ways how you can undertake this challenge.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Build multidimensional relationships

We tend to do the same things and open the same topics with the same people. To build new relationship dimensions, you must do new things and open new conversation topics with the same people.

Bring new touching points into a relationship and the bond will become stronger. It’s called building multidimensional relationships.

2. Replace screen time with people time

The best move you can make to improve your relationships is to turn off the TV and your mobile phone. Dedicate your full attention to people in your presence.

Eliminate all the distractions and dedicate your full heart to the person who sits next to you.

3. Make online communication an add-on to real communication

Interestingly, if you have only an online relationship with somebody, the connection can never be as good as in real life. But if you have a real-life relationship, opening new communication channels can deepen your relationship.

So, first meet people in real life often enough, and then make the online communication an add-on to personal interaction.

4. Do things together with people

People who do things together, stay together. Invite people on adventures, have hobbies and goals in common, do sports with people, offer them support, make time together meaningful and active.

Only gossiping over a cup of coffee is far from enough to build a good relationship.

5. Learn to properly regulate your emotions

How well you regulate your emotions is the greatest predictor of keeping a quality relationship in the long term. Expressing emotions in an unhealthy way (or stifling them, for that matter) builds tension that can quickly escalate and permanently damage a relationship.

Thus, learning to express negative emotions in a healthy way is one of the best relationship skills one can possess.

Relationships are too important to leave to chance. For sure, there must be spontaneity involved, but only if you combine it with proactivity can you truly build meaningful and quality relationships.

Stop neglecting your friends. Find a way through family disputes. Reach out to people you haven’t spoken to in years. Put real effort into relationships. Aim for new relationship depths that will lead to the most memorable moments of your life. It’s the best investment you can make.
Relationships track – number one resource for extraordinary relationship management
Relationship track – number one resource for extraordinary relationship management

Hi and welcome to the relationships track. If you don’t know what tracks are, please read more about them here. In short, tracks are the recommended order of blog posts you should read to really master the topic you selected. Following a track will help you acquire knowledge step by step in the fastest possible way. Now let’s get started.

If there is one single thing that has the biggest impact on your life, it is absolutely relationships. A single critique from your boss, a fight with your spouse or a friend not returning your calls can destroy your day or even weeks or months in a second. On the other hand, making love with the right person, going on a trip with close friends or creating something exciting with a team of people makes life priceless.

You become who you spend time with. You think like the people who are close to you. You overtake other people’s emotions and behaviors (identification). Your key relationships can stifle you or encourage you, people close to you can push you towards the stars or make your life a mess.

You have zero chances to thrive in life if you don’t have an encouraging environment, and people are right in the center of that. You can be on a dream island, but if you aren’t with the right people, it will be more like a horror island. Trust me, I’ve experienced that.

Even though relationships are super important, it’s really hard to properly manage them and keep their quality and health in check. Usually most relationships turn into relationsh*ts sooner or later. Two former lovers become the biggest of enemies, friends start to gossip about each other and families get into big fights that last for months.

You want to avoid that and all similar situations, because your life will turn to hell. Every second you have is too precious to waste on lousy relationships and unnecessary fights. You want to be extremely picky about the relationships in your life, you want to very carefully nurture the ones you choose, and on top of that, you want to become an extraordinary conflict solver.

This track will teach you all that – how to establish, build and grow awesome connections with many different people. The relationships track is divided into four sections:
Enjoy reading the relationships track and becoming a master of personal and business relationships.

General relationship management advice

Healthy relationships are what matters most in life – Relationships are heaven or hell on Earth. Good relationships can make your life really worth living, but crappy people in your life can make you suffer, really suffer and drown in misery. So you must forge your relationships very carefully; and make sure you only have healthy relationships in your life.

In this article, you will learn why relationships are heaven or hell on Earth, about different types of relationships and why they matter, what you should expect from them, how to choose who to spend time with, and how to find people who will support you in life.

The best relationship advice ever – I’m sure that by now you’re convinced that relationships are one of the most important aspects of your life. So let’s continue with the nine best pieces of relationship advice ever.

Implementing these will completely change how you see relationships and how you manage them. And here’s the thing, relationships aren’t really real, they are only a figment of your imagination.
- Always have the center on yourself
- Become the best version of yourself
- There is no ice to break
- There is no middle path, find your fit
- No zombies and bozos
- Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships
- Build multiple dimensions with superior communication
- Relationships are like bank accounts
- No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken
Relationships are like glass – but the glass is already broken – There are many versions of the story that symbolizes how relationships are like glass. The stories claim that relationships are fragile and easily broken. That after the damage is done, you can pick up the pieces and put them back together, but you rarely find every piece and the glass never looks the same again.

Well, these quotes are badly misleading. Because in real life, the glass is already broken. No relationship is perfect and there are always issues and challenges in every single relationship. If you want to have quality relationships in your life, you must have realistic expectations.

The real secrets to outstanding communication – The only path to outstanding relationships in your personal and professional life is outstanding communication. Consequently, excelling in communicational skills is absolutely one of the most important skills you can possess, if not skill number one.

In this blog post, you will learn these few core concepts that will make you a great communicator. Not only great, an outstanding communicator. If you decide to implement them in everyday life, your professional and personal relationships will start to blossom.

A simple trick to express negative emotions in a mature way – Every single person on the planet has to deal with negative emotions. Your goal is neither to suppress them nor to completely wipe them out.

Your ultimate goal is to learn to properly manage your emotions and make sure they aren’t doing the damage – that means (1) becoming aware of the negative emotions before reacting, (2) controlling your reactions and then (3) expressing them in the healthiest way possible. In this blog post you will learn how to achieve that.

Why you criticize other people and how to stop doing it – It’s so easy to criticize other people, and so hard to give a single honest compliment. It’s so easy to see yourself in a good light and at the same time focus on imperfections of other people.

But criticizing people is a complete lose-lose situation that only creates distance, spreads negative energies and causes tensions. Criticism is one of the worst kinds of negative thinking, talking and acting. In this blog post you will learn why you criticize other people and how to stop it once and for all.

Do not judge: observe, notice and learn – One extremely important skill in dealing with people is learning not to judge, but rather to love, observe, notice and learn. In psychology, there is a concept known as “the outer critic”, whose job is to criticize others to create distance and protect you from being hurt. That’s why we love to judge others.

But it makes much more sense to enjoy diverse relationships than to get isolated in a homogenous group of people where everybody thinks alike. So you have to learn how to manage your outer critic, and you do that in four steps.
- Let go of your ego
- Practice empathy and tolerance
- Have positive attitude towards people and operate on positive energies
- Put data before rhetoric and stay flexible in your convictions
When asking people for advice – Sharing advice is an important part of every relationship and communication. There’s one really important thing you should know when asking people for advice. In most cases, people will give you advice that justifies their past decisions or reflects their personal experience. It definitely makes sense to listen to what people have to say, but know that your experience will be different and you’ll have to find your own path.

The second important thing regarding advice-giving is that people usually ask for advice just to get outside confirmation or comfort, not because they really want a piece of advice. Take these rules into consideration when you are giving or receiving advice.

Personas – Know what you want – One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier you will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do from a very young age on, and have the talent to really do it.

The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. The same rule applies to relationships. Know what you want, and then you can get it.

Making personas is a technique where you make a prototype of different ideal relationships. You clarify what’s important to you and what isn’t, so you can more easily choose, select and go after the relationship you deserve.

Relationship circles – If you’re proactive in relationships, you consciously decide who new you want to meet, with whom you want to spend more time, into which relationships you will put more effort and so on. A very good start to relationship proactivity is to map all the people who are present in your life.

List all the 150 or so people that interact with on a regular basis and then arrange them in four categories; actually, in four different types of circles, based on how close they are to you: Circle of intimacy, friendship, participation or exchange.

When things in relationships don’t go as expected

How to successfully resolve conflicts – Every single relationship is a bit of a power struggle. Most often the struggle is very subtle and goes unnoticed. These are all the times when you are making small compromises, looking for common ground, gently testing the boundaries and exchanging superficial thoughts and opinions – selecting a place to eat, a movie to watch or gossiping about a third person. But from time to time the power struggle escalates.

At the end of the day, you can’t agree with everyone on everything and you can’t always find common ground. The bigger the differences in goals, opinions, beliefs, interests, values, ideas, motivations or desires, especially the ones that are very important to you, the fiercer the conflict usually is. That’s when you need extremely good conflict resolution skills.

Extremely good or bad times are real relationship tests – In normal, or even slightly good or bad times, anyone can be a good friend, a good business partner or a good spouse. Normal times never show the darkest part of a person’s character, unless the person is an asshole by default. Extremes do. Extremes show whose personality really is larger than life and whose character is lower than a snake’s belly.

Well, everyone makes a mistake or breaks from time to time, but if you consistently see atypical behavior in extreme times when interacting with someone, you can see deep into their soul. Extremely good or bad times are real relationship tests that show what kind of people really surround you.

How much relationship drama is just too much? – Every relationship is a dynamic mixture of two energies – positive and negative. Positive energies are the energies of connecting, sharing and loving. They bring people closer together. Negative energies (as the second dynamic) are thoughts, words and actions that bring distance and tension into relationships. Negative energies are the energies of disconnecting, excluding, hating and alienating.

They’re present in every single relationship. Nevertheless, there is a limit to how much negative energy is too much. There is a point when too many negative energies make the relationship a toxic one. Then the relationship becomes abusive, destructive and life destroying. In this article, you will learn where to draw the limit when it comes to relationship drama.

Emotional flashbacks: when your emotional response is out of proportion – Emotional flashbacks are one of the most frequent reasons why relationships get damaged. You experience an emotional flashback when a trigger in the environment (it can be talking to a person) reminds you of your childhood pain, suffering and traumatic situations. A subject, object, item, place, expression or any other kind of trigger reminds you of all the past events that caused you constant pain.

From a psychological point of view, an emotional flashback happens as a delayed response to childhood abuse. They are direct messages from your painful past, alerting you to how unfairly you were treated and how much pain you had to suffer. Learn how to manage emotional flashbacks to enjoy deeper and healthier relationships.

How social pressure really looks like – I am extremely picky about the people I spend my time with. I value time the most. I want to spend my time with smart enthusiastic people, people who constantly improve, develop their talents and want to contribute to the world. I police my every decision very carefully so that I don’t spend time with zombies or people who drag me down.

Because zombies and energy vampires have a devastating negative influence on your life. They can suck every single drop of optimism from you. Even with only carefully chosen relationships in my life, I interestingly still have to deal with social pressure a lot. And I also put a lot of social pressure on others. This article explains how social pressure really looks like and how to deal with it; and how not to do this stifling thing to others.

Haters gonna hate – We all have to deal with haters at some point in our life. Whether you like it or not, haters are the consequence of you standing up for something and even more so of you being successful. The more successful and firm you are, the more haters you’ll have to face in your life.

Crying about it won’t help, so let’s see why haters are gonna hate and what to do when you face irrational haters in your life. Because in the end, there will be haters, there will be doubters, there will be nonbelievers, and then there will be you, proving them wrong.

Proven ways to stop taking things personally – Sooner or later, somebody in your life will say something to you that you will take personally and you’ll have to deal with it somehow. Taking things personally is about emotions, not logic. When you take things personally, you’re emotionally hurt and offended.

What you have to do when such a situation happens is to dig a little bit deeper into your emotions and personality to uncover the source of why you’re really taking that specific situation personally. Only then can you detach yourself from the negative situation. Usually there are five main reasons why you take things personally. When you become aware of what’s really happening behind the scenes, you can stop taking things personally. Here are the five main reasons:
- Deep down, you agree with the critique
- You experience an emotional flashback
- You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation
- You may feel excluded
- You have unrealistic expectations
More than 100 signs of power – The more power you have in life, the bigger capacity you have for acting or doing something in a particular way that you want. You have greater control over your destiny and the people who surround you. With more power also comes greater ability to influence crowds as well as key relationships in your life., but with greater power also comes greater responsibility.

In this blog post you will find a list of more than 100 signs of power that might help you maximize your status. It’s okay to show how powerful you are, just make sure you’re using your power to do good – in relationships and in general to make the world a better place to live for all of us.

Family and intimate relationships

You need to love yourself first before you can truly love others – There’s a cliché saying that you have to love yourself first before you can deeply love other people, be it your spouse, family or friends. It’s a lovely saying for sure, but let’s try to analyze it and find the answer to why it’s so important to love yourself first, from a very practical point of view. Because no matter how cliché the saying is, loving yourself matters a lot in building quality relationships.

Multidimensional relationships – Relationships are always multidimensional and the more dimensions are present, the richer and more varied they are. You often experience or build relationships only on a few of the easiest and most obvious dimensions. But why stop at a certain point if life is offering so much more.

Only a greater awareness and a bigger investment into relationships can help you build newer and newer dimensions and thus an even stronger bond with someone over time. Learn how to build multidimensional relationships.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty – The four most important life areas for the majority of people are love, health, wealth and general happiness. If any of these life pillars collapse, the quality of life dramatically decreases. Out of these four, love is probably the trickiest one, since many factors are beyond your influence.

But here’s the thing. You can’t force somebody to fall in love with you, but you can definitely improve your odds. The book to go to if you want to improve your odds as a man dating women is Models: Attract Women Through Honesty written by Mark Manson. This article is the books summary.

No More Mr. Nice Guy – Why women don’t like nice guys (Book Summary) – There is a healthy form of being nice (something we should all do) and a very toxic one (fawning). And the toxic form is the one that backfires almost every time, because it’s nothing but a manipulation strategy.

Being a nice guy (the toxic form we’ll talk about from now on) is more or less only about seeking approval. What happens in the end is that a nice guy tries to please everyone, but he pleases nobody, not even himself.

All the possible theories why people fall in love with you – There are more than 7 billion people in the world, and then you insanely fall in love with one single person. It seems like a miracle. Several theories exist why that happens, and knowing them might give you a good idea of what are all the factors that have an influence on the attraction spark.

All the theories can definitely help you a lot in forming better and deeper relationships, become more attractive on the dating floor and to better understand yourself and your feelings.

The best sex of your life – Sex is, at the end of the day, one of the most important areas of life, for men as well as women. In this article, you will learn how to have the best sex of your life by applying lean and agile methodologies to your bed skills. I know it sounds crazy, but it works. The article might be a bit biased towards the male perspective, but overall I promise that there will be many new ideas and useful insights for both genders.

How not to raise a child – I have no idea how to raise children the right way. I don’t have them yet and I never write or preach about things I haven’t experienced on my own skin or somehow succeeded at. But I definitely know how not to raise a child. It always surprises me how parents most often don’t read even a single book about raising children. I don’t have a child and I read a few books on how to raise a child, just out of curiosity.

At the end, it’s not about being a perfect parent. It’s about not repeating mistakes and knowing how to say sorry. In this blog post, you will find 30+ toxic behaviors that can cause big damage to a child. One big thing or a repeating small toxic behavior, they can both have very devastating effects.

Relationships in business

How to find a mentor who will accelerate your success – I’ve seen it over and over again in professional and personal life – finding an outstanding mentor can save you years of hard work, of trying to figure out how things work, what to focus on and how you can achieve your goals as quickly as possible, hoping to enjoy success in younger years.

Many times, having a mentor makes all the difference between making it in life or not. Learn how to find yourself an outstanding mentor who will accelerate your success.

Kaizen rules for teams – Today, teams are the ones winning the most important battles in life, not individuals. Members of outstanding families have an outstanding emotional life, outstanding teams in the workplace achieve the best results in business, and so on.

You simply can’t succeed alone today, you need a team of people around you, supplementing your weaknesses and supporting you through tough times. But in order to have an outstanding team in an outstanding organization, be it company or family, you need to nurture outstanding culture. By following these Kaizen rules, you will definitely build yourself a dream team at work and home.

The next steps

This is the end of the relationship track. I’m sure you’ve acquired many ideas and insights into how to manage relationships better. But learning is never enough, you also have to apply the knowledge. Really apply it. It’s better to know one single concept and apply it than to know ten of them and apply none.

So I encourage you, take action. When you improve relationships, there are many other life areas where you can grow and shine. Check out the other tracks on this site and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter, so you’ll be the first to receive new quality blog posts; including new epiphanies and eye‑opening content on how to successfully manage relationships.

All the possible theories why people fall in love with you

There are more than 7 billion people in the world, and then you insanely fall in love with one single person. It seems like a miracle.

Several theories exist why that happens, and knowing them might give you a good idea of what are all the factors that have an influence on the attraction spark.

In general, we divide “why people fall in love” theories into (1) psychodynamic theories, and (2) selection process or filtering theories.

Psychodynamic theories focus on the influence of childhood on mate selection.
Process theories are, on the other hand, focused on filtering out potential mates who are not suitable since they don’t fit certain selection criteria, and then in the second step choosing the one that is the best fit.

If we divide these two approaches even further, there are many different biological, sociological, psychological, and cultural factors that influence mate selection. Based on that, several different theories have evolved.

Let’s dive now into the most popular theories to get the big picture of what are all the potential factors that have an influence on whether a person will fall in love with you or not. Knowing all these factors hopefully means that you can improve your odds by being more attractive.

Sociobiological theory (or evolutionary psychology)

Sociobiological theory is focused exclusively on offspring. In this regard, men seek young, healthy and attractive women, who will produce healthy children and take care of them (all that implies fertility). They also look for sexually conservative women, to mitigate the risk of raising another man’s offspring.

Women, on the other hand, look for healthy strong men who will protect her and the child, and ambitious men with high social and economic status (all that implies a good provider). The social and economic status represent the capacity of a man to invest resources in a child.

In summary, sociobiology says that men are attracted to younger beautiful women (symetrical face, broad hips, youthful features etc.) and women are attracted to men with money, status and masculine looks (broad shoulders, strong jaw, deep voice).

Real love

Theory of identification, parental image and ideal mate

Identification was first discussed by Sigmund Freud in his early writings. Identification is a psychological process where you unconsciously assimilate an aspect of another person. In simpler words, you want to become more like someone you like and admire.

In youth during the process of identification a child unconsciously adopts the characteristics of their parents. The important fact here is that identification is a form of emotional attachment.

Emotional attachment in the process of identification means that your parents are not only your role models for personality development, they also have a great influence who you will fall in love with later in life.

Namely, with emotional attachment, your parents present your first love object. The relationship you have with your first love object (usually mother), lays the foundations for your capacity for love and affection with other people in the adult age. The first love object also reflects to you how worthy of love you are.

Now we know two important categories – identification as a form of emotional attachment and first love object as a blueprint for our later intimate relationships. In the theory of identification, all that presents the basis of the kind of people you fall in love with, and there are two options:

Narcissistic identification: You fall in love with someone who is like you or how you were in the past. It can also be someone who has a characteristic you always longed for but never had.
Attachment identification: You fall in love with someone who reminds you of a person you loved and admired, usually your caretakers (mother or father).

The ideal mate

The Ideal Mate and Cold Reality

The Ideal Mate Theory is very similar to Parental Image Theory. It states that you have an unconscious image of an ideal mate based on the childhood experience.

The ideal mate image leads you to fall in love with someone because they respond quickly and totally to your set of needs. All these unconscious images (first love object, narcissistic, the ideal mate) also support love at first sight.

And now comes the painful love trick. You don’t fall in love with the actual person, but the image you have about that person and the image of how the person can make you feel good about yourself.

But when you encounter the real other and your illusions burst like a bubble, you can become pretty disappointed and hurt. The grater the gap, the stronger the pain.

Maybe you can’t choose with whom you fall in love, but you can definitely choose with whom you ought to stay.

Theory of complimentary needs – opposites attract

The theory of complimentary needs was developed by Robert Winch, and it suggests that people choose types of relationships in which their needs can be mutually satisfied.

In practical terms, that means you choose a partner whose needs are opposite and thus complimentary to yours. You assume that will lead to your maximum need gratification, because the other person can fill the need gap you have.

In practice, that means you fall in love with a person who has the opposite values from you. Examples are when a dominant person finds a submissive person and a nurturing person finds somebody who likes to be nurtured.

Homogamy and common social values – similarity attracts

The homogamy theory states that you tend to be attracted to people who have similar life circumstances as you have – age, race, religion, social class, education, values and other factors (including simliar looks). The more you have in common, the more attracted you are to a person.

Research also shows that couples who have more in common report higher satisfaction and the relationship lasts longer. There are lower divorce rates between couples who are together for several years before getting married and who share many similarities. Maybe opposites attract, but similarities keep people together.

Theory of Filters

The Theory of Filters says that you choose a partner based on several different types of filters that help you eliminate partners with low potential of a successful partnership. Filters that are used in the elimination process are:

Biological filters: Gender, relatives (you exclude them automatically), age, physical features (usually you look for features similar to yours).
Sociological filters: Social class, income level, race, religion etc. You thrive to find somebody with similar education, intelligence and status. Interestingly, religion is one of the most important filters.
Psychological filters: A set of conscious and unconscious needs that you have, especially based on your childhood experience. You tend to fall in love with somebody who is similar to your opposite sex parent (Freud’s theory, as we discussed).

Other common types of filters are:

Proximity: Geographical factors, social context and lifestyle that enables two people to spend time together and get to know each other.
Marital status: Single people tend to get together with other single people, divorced with divorced, widowed with widowed, and so on.
Mental health: People who have personality disorders tend to get together with people who have the same disorders.

Social Exchange Theory

In the Social Exchange Theory, you maintain and search for those kind of relationships in life where rewards exceed the costs, and intimate relationships are no exception to that. This theory suggests that social behavior is opportunistic, purposive and goal-oriented.

We could say that choosing a mate is a trade. You look for a mate who offers the greatest reward at the lowest cost. Only money and goods are replaced (or extended) by different benefits like financial stability, social status, positive personality traits, looks and other signs of power.

Rewards: Behaviors and resources that drive you to staying in a relationship (money, wealth, sweet words, warm feelings, positive personality traits etc.)
Costs: Unpleasant aspects of a relationship.
Rewards > Costs: The relationship can last, if there is no significantly better option (minding the transaction costs of breaking up a relationship and entering a new one).
Costs > Reward: You start looking for someone with better profit margin.
Control: The person who has the least interest in continuing the relationship controls the relationship.

Love is trade

Role Theory

The Role Theory in social psychology states that every person acts based on socially defined categories. These categories are a set of expectations, norms, behaviors, rights and duties a person must meet and fulfill. That means a person’s behavior is always contextual depending on the role and can thus be quite predictable.

Examples of roles are boyfriend, husband, teacher, mother, father etc. In life, you have to face many different roles and you have a set of expectations about what kind of a role other people should play in your life.

When it comes to intimate relationships, every person has expectations about what kind of a role their partner should play (as a boyfriend, husband, wife etc.). If the role expectations are met, then a relationship is formed.

When expectations aren’t met, it leads to interpersonal conflicts (and potentially to breakups). And if two of the roles are in internal conflict (mother, manager), it comes to an intrapersonal role conflict.

The Wheel Theory of Love

The Reiss’s Wheel Theory of Love says that two potential mates must go through four stages of a relationship for an intimate bond to develop. That means in this theory, a love relationship develops over time and only when one stage is met can the couple move to the next stage.

The four stages are:

Rapport: The two individuals must relate to each other and feel relaxed in each other’s company. In this stage, cultural and social variables are important.
Self-revelation: Revelation of personal feelings, where background of values and beliefs is extremely important and there must be a match.
Mutual Dependence: They become more dependent on each other, share the intimate aspects of life, and consequently develop reliance in a relationship. There must be mutual benefits.
Intimacy: There must be a fulfillment of each other’s personal needs to a great extent.

The wheel theory of love

Sequential Theory and SVR filtering

Sequential theory, as the last one mentioned, combines other theories in different stages of spouse selection from all the different aspects we’ve talked about. An example of sequential theory is SVR filtering, where SVR stands for stimulus-value-role. These are the three stages of spouse selection with three different sets of selection criteria.

The stimulus stage is about a person possessing the qualities that you find attractive, like physical attributes, social status, tone of voice etc. The second stage is the value comparison stage.

You compare your values with the other person with verbal interaction, and the relationship only develops further if there is value consensus. The last phase is seeking role consensus in a relationship for both individuals.

Types of love and the attachment theory

Now that we know all the different theories of choosing a partner and why people fall in love, let’s look at three more important elements of love – types of love, types of attachment, and undesirable characteristics when it comes to love.

Color Wheel Theory of Love

The essence of every intimate relationship is love. There are six styles of love according to John Lee, presented on the Color Wheel Theory of Love (not to be confused with The wheel theory of love mentioned before):

Eros – love of physical beauty, that is erotic and sensual love, based on touch
Mania – intense obsessive romantic love involving anxiety and sleepless nights
Ludus – playful love, where love is a game and not a serious thing
Agape – altruistic love with the desire to help others
Storge – love between two companions that slowly develops
Pragma – practical love, purely based on logic and benefits

Color wheel theory of love

The Triangular Theory of Love

The next important concept to know is The Triangular Theory of Love, which states that there are three important components of intimate love.

The first one is (1) passion, which deals with romance and sexual attraction, then we have (2) intimacy, which represents the bonding of two people, and the last one is (3) commitment, which is a firm decision from both sides that they want to stay in a relationship.

Liking = Intimacy
Companionate = Intimacy + Commitment
Empty love = Commitment
Fatuous love = Passion + Commitment
Infatuation = Passion
Romantic love = Passion + Intimacy
Consummate love = Passion + Intimacy + Commitment

Triangular theory of love

The attachment theory

The last important concept to know regarding love is the so-called attachment theory. In the attachment theory, all important relationships in your life are forms of attachments. The styles of attachment are formed in childhood and then carried into adulthood.

There are four types of attachment:

Secured attachment: In secured attachment, a child is confident about a caretaker’s (usually mother’s) love and protection. In adulthood, the person has no problem forming relationships; they feel that people like them and they aren’t afraid of being abandoned. Their love lives are balanced and they have realistic expectations in relationships with the center on themselves.
Anxious-ambivalent attachment: In the anxious attachment, a child doesn’t feel confident and secure about a caretaker’s love when they are not present. In adulthood, the person wants to merge with the other person, is extremely jealous, insecure and suffers from obsessive love. These people become preoccupied in relationships.
Anxious-avoidant attachment: In the avoidant attachment style, a child senses their caretaker’s rejection or some form of emotional detachment, and consequently avoids the caretaker and creates distance in a relationship. In adulthood, these people get scared when other people get too close to them. They assume that romantic love never lasts and have problems forming deep intimate relationships. They become fearful, avoidant personalities.
Disorganized attachment: When a caretaker is abusive to a child and acts emotionally or physically cruel, disorganized attachment forms. The person becomes confused. These children usually dissociate from themselves. In the adult years, they see the world as an unsafe place and have poor social and emotional regulation skills.

The attachement styles

Now that we know all different types of love and attachment, let’s look at love and relationship forming through one more dimension –undesirable personality characteristics and all the characteristics that decrease the probability of somebody falling in love with you.

Undesirable Personality Characteristics

There are many personality factors (inherited, acquired, or even developed) that increase your attraction (or sexual market value) as we have seen and thus your probability to be chosen as a mate,…

…and then there are several personality characteristics (you can influence many of them) that indicate lower attractiveness and even a higher probability of divorce later in relationships.

Undesirable personality characteristics in relationships are:

Low agreeableness: A partner who always finds something to argue about.
Poor impulse control: People who have anger issues and are prone to aggression and violence.
Hypersensitivity: Hypersensitivity happens when you are easily hurt or when emotional reactions are out of proportion in everyday situations. Hypersensitivity usually also leads to a lack of communication and to isolation from the partner. In other words, a person gets easily offended about small things and magnifies them.
Inflated ego: Loss of respect in a relationship for the other person. Consequently, one person dictates the rules and outcomes. Everything must be the way one person says.
Neuroticism and anxiety: Neuroticism and anxiety are based on an unrealistic desire for perfection in relationships and constant worry that something could go wrong.
Insecurities and desire to control other people: Insecure spouses tend to be jealous and overcontrolling; similarly, people who are controlled by others (family members, exes) are more prone to divorce and bad relationship habits.
Narcissism: Partners who are only focused on what they will get out of a relationship and don’t invest anything themselves. Narcissists are people who only take and blame all other people for their problems.
Substance abuse: Any kind of substance abuse (alcohol, drugs) usually leads to severe problems in relationships.

Below is a really nice table that clearly represents problematic personality traits and characteristics when it comes to choosing an intimate partner:

Type	Characteristics	Impact on you
Paranoid	Suspicious, distrustful, defensive, thin‑skinned	You are accused of everything
Schizoid	Cold, aloof, solitary, reclusive	Not capable of returning love
Borderline	Moody, unstable, volatile, unreliable, suicidal, impulsive	You never know when the dark personality comes out
Antisocial	Deceptive, untrustworthy, no conscience, remorseless	Cheating, lying, stealing without feeling any guilt
Narcissistic	Egoistical, demanding, greedy, selfish	They only take
Dependent	Helpless, weak, clingy, insecure	Jealousy, demand for full‑time attention
Obsessive-compulsive	Rigid, inflexible	Rigid ideas of how you should think and behave

Source: Choices in Relationships, David Knox

Why people fall in love

The main takeaways – why people fall in love and what you can do about it?

All the theories can definitely help you a lot in forming better and deeper relationships and to better understand yourself and your feelings. To summarize, there are a few main takeaways to remember and implement in everyday life:

The big seven power signs are – beauty, being fit, money, fame, rare titles, status and intriguing personality. Develop these characteristics as much as possible to increase your sexual market value. These selection criteria are written in our genes and consequently attraction isn’t a choice but an unconscious response. Fitness and fashion are the two fastest ways to increase your attractiveness.
Analyze the relationship with your parent of the opposite sex. What you liked and hated about them, how they influenced your image of the ideal mate (how your current spouse is and exes were different or alike). Make a persona of your ideal mate to become aware of as many factors of the image as possible.
Analyze what kind of similarities and opposites attract you in a potential spouse. In which regards are you looking for an opposite polarity (dominant-submissive, rich-poor, nurturant-nurtured, ambitious-non ambitious etc.) and which similarities are important to you (age, religion, status …).
Think of your filters and how they work – what are the deal breakers for you in a relationship. List them! They can be psychological, biological or social criteria.
Analyze what kind of benefits you are looking for in a relationship and what kind of things present costs to you. Don’t be naïve and think that love is not also a form of trade. Also think of what you have to offer in a relationship and where you are causing costs with destructive behavior. What is the best way for you to increase your profit margin?
Analyze what are your expectations about roles of the opposite sex when you interact in personal relationships. For a male/female partner, think about how he should be or behave as a lover, friend, partner, father/mother and in all other roles that are present in your life.
Define what kind of attachment is your primary one and whether you have any undesirable personality characteristics that you can improve with personal development to become more attractive.

Healthy relationships are what matters most in life
Do you have big plans and big goals for your life? Do you want to live the good life, the dream life and are prepared to fight for it? Excellent. If you really want to reach the stars, there is one very important fact you must know.

The culture of the environment you function in eats your visions, goals and strategy for breakfast. How you act and consequently also the potential you can achieve in life is always the result of your personality and your environment. So you must constantly improve yourself, but you must also make sure you choose the right environment for you to thrive.

Your success = the best version of you + the right environment (markets, relationships)

To prosper in life, you need to be a part of something that feels like home and natural to you, and enables you to flourish, develop and grow. You need an environment with ideal conditions for you go after the big goals you have in life.

You need an environment that supports you in achieving your goals, an environment where you fit in perfectly and that shoots you right among the stars.

There are many parts of your environment that have an influence on you, like your country, political stability, demographic trends, dominating religion, access to healthcare etc. (here are all of them listed) but there are two environmental factors with the strongest influence:
- the markets you choose and
- the relationships you form.
Markets always win. Markets can make you or break you. And people you let close in your life can make you or break you. Who knows what happens after death, but people can make your life heaven or hell on Earth for sure.

Relationships are heaven or hell on Earth. Good relationships can make your life really worth living, and crappy people in your life can make you suffer, really suffer and drown in misery. Thus you must forge your relationships very carefully; and make sure you only have healthy relationships in your life.

Good relationships can make your life really worth living, and crappy people in your life can make you suffer and drown in misery.

In this article you will learn:
- Why relationships are heaven or hell on Earth
- Different types of relationships and why they matter
- What you should expect from different relationships
- How to choose who to spend time with
- How to find people who will support you in life
What are healthy relationships

Let’s start with defining what a healthy relationship is. First of all, mistakes happen in every relationship, there is no such thing as a perfect relationship.

Nevertheless, a relationship can be deep and strong, or shallow and superficial. And even more importantly, a relationship can be a healthy or a toxic one.

Here are the signs of a healthy relationship:
1. Both people have the center on themselves and only then is a relationship formed
2. You share similar values and interests and you create, have fun and experience things together
3. There is a high level of tolerance, transparency, trust and respect
4. You listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs
5. There are always more dimensions present in a relationship
6. You encourage each other to constantly improve and achieve personal goals
7. The investment into the relationship is close to 1:1 from both sides
8. You communicate with active constructive responses 80 % of the time and you communicate a lot about the important things
9. You hold each other up when tough times come
10. In intimate relationships, there must be love and sexual attraction
Don’t just read the statements and agree with them. Ask yourself the right questions for every relationship you have in your life.

What kind of activities are you doing together? Are you treated as an equal and with dignity? Are you asked for your opinion about important life decisions that influence both parties? Are you being constantly criticized? Is there a high level of trust?

As mentioned, there are always errors in relationships. No relationship is perfect. But there is a limit when too many repeating errors make a relationship toxic.

If there are patterns like severe criticism, contempt, rudeness, meanness, jealousy, insulting, degrading, blaming, guilt-tripping, criticizing, physically acting out, the person constantly repeating themselves, a relationship is definitely toxic.

Now, a toxic or abusive relationship has many negative consequences. It can literately suck the soul out of you. It can make you a zombie. Misery loves company!

First of all, it takes a lot of energy, then it hinders your self-confidence, in abusive relationships there is always an absence of strong foundations of love and support to go after your goals, you become depressed, bitter, you start doubting yourself and sooner or later you start drowning in the victim mindset.

On the other hand, healthy relationships provide you with strong foundations and roots to go after your goals. With a healthy relationship, you know you have a place to go when things go wrong, you are always encouraged and supported.

With many healthy relationships, you feel strong, grateful and alive. It’s definitely the best thing you can have in life.

Different types of relationships

Now that we know what a healthy relationship is, let’s look at the most important relationships you will forge in your life. Love and work, that’s all there is. Consequently, we have personal and professional relationships.

There are, of course, also different levels of intimacy in every relationship, from professional, to being only acquaintances, to being friends, friends with benefits all the way to real intimate relationships. You can experience different types and levels of a relationship with the same person.

But you probably already know that from your own experience. All in all, what’s more important is that there are six relationships that shape your life the most:

Personal relationships
- Spouse
- Family (primary/secondary)
- Friends
Professional relationships
- Boss
- Coworkers / Co-founders
- Mentor / Mastermind group
The more ambitious you are, the more you need the right environment that supports your ambitions – professional and personal one; besides market trends supporting you (financial, job markets etc.), you especially need a lot of healthy relationships.

A person in a healthy environment and with healthy relationships flourishes, a person in a bad environment withers like an unwatered flower.

When it comes to personal relationships, you must always be aware of your personal power. You can choose most of these relationships in your life. You choose who you’ll spend time with and who doesn’t deserve a spot in your life. Only if you are proactive enough. Actually, you must be superproactive.

But at the end of the day, relationships are your choice. It’s not love’s fault or the HR department’s to reply to your job application or whoever. You should never blame anyone else for having crappy people in your life (authority figures in your youth are an exception, but more about that later).

You want to be in a position to know exactly what kind of relationships you want in life and then going after them. Making a persona of ideal relationships might help you with that. Now let’s do a deep dive into the six most important relationships in your life.

Personal relationships

In your personal life, there are three pillars of love and nurture that you need: love from your spouse, your family (primary, secondary) and your friends (community). To be happy, especially in the mature ages of life, you need all three pillars, building them as strong as possible, at least in some form.

Spouse

You may be single at the moment (and fool around), but you will end up in a serious relationship sooner or later. If not, you’re probably quite emotionally damaged and need to develop a deeper capacity for love and commitment.

It’s hard to get real value out of intimate relationships if you are unable to commit. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Now, the intimate partner you choose (they’re not brought to you by love or a greater force, you choose them) for the long-term relationship, will have one of the biggest influences on your life. Right after your parents. And I mean a really big influence on your life.

Your spouse can make you or break you. There is no third option. If you constantly fight, if you feel insecure and share no similar hobbies or values, your relationship will drain the energy out of you day by day before you eat breakfast.

Being in an abusive, boring or toxic intimate relationship is one of the most frequent ways to become a zombie (next to having an abusive boss).

So choose your spouse very carefully. Make sure you have similar values, but that there is also an opportunity to grow together. Make sure you have common hobbies and activities you both like, but also different perspectives that enrich you both.

Remember that couples who do things together, stay together. Make sure there is a physical fit, intellectual fit, emotional fit and spiritual fit. It must feel right. Make sure you encourage each other and provide emotional security when things go tough. And know that you have to constantly put effort into a relationship to develop a deeper and deeper bond.

We are all people; we all make mistakes in relationships. That’s normal. It’s not about the mistakes, it’s about a relationship being toxic or not; and whether you’re becoming a better version of yourself because of the intimate relationship you have.

It’s not easy to end a long-term relationship, but it’s often necessary for further personal development and happiness in life.

First of all, make sure your intimate relationship isn’t toxic and that you’re growing together all the time. If you have a hard time deciding whether you should stay together or not, there is a great book called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, written by Mira Kirshenbaum.

You may not choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose with whom you will stay.

There are 36 questions in the book that should help you decide if you should end a relationship or not. Here are the top questions from the mentioned book that I find important and may help you decide on the quality of your relationship:
1. Do you currently share goals and dreams for your life together?
2. Have you made a commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner?
3. Do you and your partner have even one positively pleasurable activity or interest (besides children) that you currently share and look forward to sharing in the future?
4. Does your relationship support your having fun together?
5. Would you say that to you, your partner is basically nice, reasonable intelligent, not too neurotic, okay to look at, and most of the time smells alright?
6. Do both you and your partner want to touch each other and look forward to touching each other and make efforts to touch each other?
7. Do you feel a unique sexual attraction to your partner?
8. Does your partner bombard you with difficulties when you try to get even the littlest thing you want; and is it your experience that almost any need you have gets obliterated?
9. Do you have a basic, recurring, never-completely-going-away feeling of humiliation or invisibility in your relationship?
10. Have you got to the point, when your partner says something, that you usually feel it’s more likely that he’s lying than that he’s telling the truth?
11. Do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to like you?
12. Is there something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in and that they acknowledge but they’re unwilling to do anything about?
13. In spite of all the ways you’re different, would you say that deep down your partner is someone just like you in a way you feel good about?
14. Do you feel that your partner, overall and more often than not, shows concrete support for and genuine interest in the things you’re trying to do that are important to you?
15. Would you lose anything important in your life if your partner were no longer your partner?
16. Is there a demonstrated capacity and mechanism for forgiveness in your relationship?
17. Has your partner violated what for you is a bottom line?
18. If God or some omniscient being said it was okay to leave, would you feel tremendously relieved and have a strong sense that finally you could end your relationship?
These are definitely tough and to-the-point questions that should help you to make the right decision. If you decide to break a long term-relationship or if you are single and want to really find the partner of your life, start building up your sexual market value (after taking time for recovery).

Go to the gym, eat healthy, develop social skills, read a lot and become an interesting person, improve your bed skills, learn how to approach, and so on. Don’t expect “love at first sight” to do it instead of you.

Family

This is a very easy one, if you were raised in a healthy family environment, and a very tricky one if you were raised in a toxic family and you don’t have a deep connection and shared values with your family members.

In any case, family is important and no matter how difficult the situation is, you have to maximize the love you can get from your family ties.

Family is important for many reasons. The early relationships with your mother, father and other authority figures in your youth become blueprints for all your relationships later in life.

Family also gives you the framework for your values; how well you were nurtured influences whether you developed hope, strong will, purpose and industry in life or you’ll be hindered by negative emotions as an emotional midget. Your upbringing also greatly influences your happiness levels.

You can never truly understand yourself without understanding your family roots.

Family should be the one that’s there for you in tragic situations, family should be the one helping you the most financially (inheritance) and it should be the greatest support you have in life.

Healthy relationships with the family

Healthy family presents foundations and roots in your life, so that you can fly high. Family is legacy handed over to you, and you are the one handing legacy down to your offspring, enriched or impoverished.

Now, errors are made in every family, there are always disagreements and differences in values. But there is a limit, where errors are normal and when the environment becomes toxic.

If you have a healthy family, it’s your duty make this pillar of love even stronger, by nurturing good relations with family members and enriching the legacy you will pass on. You have to be grateful, because being born in a healthy family is the greatest security and given advantage in life.

Toxic family

One of the hardest questions in life is what you should do if your family was (or is) toxic. Many of the following blog posts will be dedicated to this topic, but in summary it makes sense to put at least some effort into making things better.

Nevertheless, you have to accept that many things are out of your control and may hurt while giving you no positive outcome. It all depends on whether family members are prepared to see the damage they’ve done at least to some extent or not.

If you had a painful childhood, you first have to work hard on becoming more self-centered, assertive, letting go of the responsibility for painful events from your youth, and you have to work hard on your own life vision and goals and take full responsibility for your life. You must work hard on your autonomy and make sure you aren’t an extension of your parents.

Then, if you want to make your family relationships a little less toxic, setting some strict boundaries and a gentle confrontation are usually necessary. The purpose of the confrontation is not to punish family members and dump negative feelings on them, but to tell them the truth, face them and set relationship rules that are acceptable to you.

Many parents don’t even realize what they’ve done, because they were raised in a pretty similar way. Being honest with them may be a fresh start of the relationship. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. If it doesn’t, you don’t have to forgive. You have to work hard on making sure that your past stops controlling you and that you can focus on the positive things from your upbringing. In many cases, it even makes sense to go to therapy.

I suggest you read the book Toxic parents for more insights what you can do.

And usually there are at least some family members you have good relations with. Maybe you can enrich your relationship with them. If not, you can focus your positive efforts into making a much greater legacy for your secondary family, your kids and your grandkids.

If you manage to change negative behaviors that were transferred from generation to generation in your family, you’ll do a very important and noble job, and you will definitely positively influence the future.

I encourage you to find a way to build strong family foundations. Family is different than friends. It’s a circle where people really deeply care for one another, especially in tough situations, no matter the differences and misunderstandings.

And if you had a toxic family, work hard on improving yourself, read a lot about how to deal with your past and how you can maybe make things better. At the end of the day, you aren’t doing it for them, you’re doing it for yourself.

Friends (community)

The third pillar of love in your personal life are your friends. When we’re talking about friends, we must have quality and quantity in mind. Quality always comes first when we talk about relationships.

If you want to be happy in life, you need a few close friends you share interests with, the ones you can really trust and help each other go through life.

Isolation leads to depression and bitterness, so enough socialization with people you care about must be an important priority in your life.

Now, a very important fact is that your friends are a source of great joy in life, but they can also be the source of social pressure. You tend to spend time with people who have similar values and interests as you. When you grow and change, your friends may get scared of losing you and thus put pressure on you.

I’ve seen it many times. For example, you start to eat a healthy diet and they mock you because you don’t want to eat pizza with them. The same can happen if you decide to become a vegetarian or stop drinking alcohol. They may not believe in you if you want to start your own business, because they even don’t know how, being only employees all their life.

So make sure you surround yourself with friends who support you, encourage you, with whom you do productive activities and not just kill time and have fun together.

Fun is an important part of every relationship, but you should also have the privilege of growing when spending time with your friends. And if they are blocking you when you’re making changes in life, make sure you calm down their fears and negative feelings. If they still block you after that, it’s maybe time to find new friends.

Besides quality, quantity also somehow matters. I especially mean always meeting new people, spending time with completely different groups and types of individuals, so your relationships can really be varied and rich.

Remember you can learn from anyone, and more different types of people in your life only mean that they’ll enrich your personality. To achieve that, the number one relationship value you must have is tolerance.

Business relationships

We’ve covered love, so let’s now move to work. You spend almost 1/3 of your time at the job. There is a zero chance of you being successful and happy in life if you work a job you hate with people you despise.

In business relationships, you have even more room to choose than in personal ones, the only thing you really need is a high enough level of competences.

The three pillars of healthy business relationships that lead to success are an outstanding relationship with your boss, great relationship with your coworkers, and finding yourself a mentor or a mastermind group that helps you achieve your career goals faster.

You should consider which business environments would allow you to deliver the most value, develop your competences to the full in the long run, achieve the position and the renown you want and, of course, achieve your financial goals.

If your business environment doesn’t enable you that, you’ll have to either change it or lower your ambitions. And you don’t want to do the latter in the most cases.

Boss

Your boss can either skyrocket your career or make your life miserable. Thus there is an important rule that you should never work for a boss you don’t respect. With an abundance mindset, you must be aware that there are many jobs and many good bosses. You don’t want to work for an asshole or a bozo.

Never work for a boss you don’t respect.

If you’re constantly scared of your boss, if you’re being abused, stressed out and treated unfairly, you will never be happy in life; even more, your life will be a living hell.

If something like that is happening to you, analyze very clearly if you don’t choose to be abused because it’s something familiar to you (one of your parents was abusive towards you).

If the answer is yes, start working on yourself, develop your competences, set some boundaries and start looking for a new job if necessary.

Never assume and hope that things will get better by themselves. If you were in an abusive relationship with your parents, you will almost always attract bosses and partners who will somehow be abusive to you, until you set some boundaries and put the center on yourself.

On the other hand, a great boss can give you so much. They make sure your potential is being developed, they mentor you and coach you, they make sure you get promoted frequently for your hard work, you get paid fairly, they help you to develop your social network, and so on.

A great boss can really help you to thrive and develop your career potential to the maximum. So make sure you find someone you’ll be proud to work for and with.

The boss should sometimes be tough on you to get the best out of you, but make sure it’s tough love, not abuse. As mentioned many times before, deep down you know very well if a relationship is abusive or not and why you cling to it.

If you are self-employed or a business owner, your customers are your boss; and sometimes other stakeholders. Again, relationships are extremely important, only in a little bit different way – you have to make sure you provide enough value to the markets, you work for customers you really understand and respect, and that you constantly improve and develop together with markets. Everyone has their own boss.

Coworkers or cofounders

Much like your friends are important in your personal life, so are your coworkers in your professional life. Again, there is a simple rule. Work in a dream team.

Work with people you respect, admire, can learn from, and about whom you can really say “we are a f*cking dream team, we can achieve anything.” A dream team will elevate you to the stars, a bad team will make you into a zombie.

There are probably fewer than 20 % good teams, and fewer than 4 % of dream teams. It’s hard to find or build the dream team. But if you aren’t in one, bitching, whining or complaining won’t help. There are only two options you have. Either find the dream team and join it, or help build one where you currently are and work.

It’s often a tough decision whether you should help build a dream team or join a new one. It depends on your visions, mission, life goals and how much you are willing to invest into a company you work for.

Changing team culture is a tough and demanding process, it usually lasts years, but it’s also a rewarding one, and it definitely enables you to develop superior people skills. I think in most cases, it makes sense to give it a shot, but if there is no progress after a while, it’s probably better to move on.

Become an A-player

Anyway, the first rule of being a member of a dream team is that you are an A-player. Only A-players (or people who work like hell to become A-players) work with other A-players. If you aren’t one yet, start working on it.

Become a role model for others, mentor others and start fueling your team with positive emotions and constructive thoughts together with your boss. If you want to work in a dream team, your competence level must be high and you must know how to be a good team player and, if necessary, show that to others.

Psychological safety is the key factor in healthy relationships

Now, this is the most important part of what makes a team a dream team (even in personal life) – Google did big research on the best performing teams, and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

There were two indicators of that. Firstly, members of the team spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking.

Secondly, all the good teams have high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. Now ask yourself if you are that kind of a team member and if you work in such a team.

I worked in an outstanding team and in a bad team. I know that working in a bad team made me depressed, people were doing everything but work, they were gossiping, blocking each other, feeling nothing but anger, envy, disrespect and other negative feelings. After eight to ten hours of that kind of bullshit, you can’t come home with positive energies.

You’re always also a product of your environment, so make sure you choose people you work with very carefully. And make sure you’re a productive and constructive team player. It’s easy to criticize others, but we are usually very forgiving towards ourselves.

Start changing your work environment by changing yourself.

Mentor and mastermind group

The last really important type of a business relationship is having a mentor; or even more of them, a whole mastermind group. Having a mentor often makes all the difference between making it in life or not.

The best athletes and businessmen in the world have mentors. Why wouldn’t you?

Good mentors can help you develop different competences quickly, like business skills, life skills, understanding market insights, they can help you with their social networks, wisdom, by believing in you, showing you the way and bringing out the best in you.

You should know that doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will, and that mentors are by far the best doubt killers. You can find a mentor at your job, hire professional coaches, write directly to people you admire and ask if they are prepared to mentor you, or you can even hire specialists who help you advance in certain areas of life (therapists, personal trainers, etc.).

If there is one way to accelerate you career success, it’s by finding a mentor. So make sure you do that. Some people even take a step further and build themselves a group of people who challenge them, push them and support them in every way.

The concept is called a mastermind group. If you’re really ambitious, build yourself a group like that, and I guarantee you that your career will start to flourish at a much faster pace.

Homework

Start building healthy relationships today

Now it’s time to do your homework. It’s time that you change your life strategy from relationships “just happening” to you tactically forging relationships that will help you flourish and prosper in life. And ending those that only make your life miserable.

Make personas of your ideal relationship

The first step is to clarify what kind of relationships you really want in life. So make a persona of your ideal spouse, a few different friends, your boss, your mentor and coworkers.

While doing this fun exercise, also make a persona of your ideal self. For your primary family relationships, brainstorm 5 – 10 things you can realistically do to make them better, instead of outlining a persona.

Assess your current relationships

Now you know what kind of relationships you want in your life. In the next step, it’s time to make an assessment of how close your current relationships really are to what you want in life. Take a big piece of paper and:
- Horizontally, write numbers from 1 to 10.
- Vertically, list 5 – 10 important relationships in your life.
- Rate every relationship from 1 to 10.
- If you rated some relationships between 4 and 7, it means that you can’t decide if they work or not, and that tells you nothing.
- Rate them again, now only with 1, 2, 3 and 8, 9, 10 marks. This will show you whether a relationship really works or not.
- All the relationships marked with 1 – 3 clearly don’t work.
Decide what to do with current relationships

For the relationships that work (got 8,9, or 10), great. Enrich them even more, nurture them and be grateful for them. On the other hand, when it comes to the relationships that don’t work, there are only three options why.
1. A relationship isn’t your fit. Irreconcilable differences or whatever.
2. It may be that it’s time to let go, it’s time for the relationship to end.
3. Your partner, you or both aren’t investing enough into a relationship and you should start doing that.
Based on the analysis, you’ll have to decide which relationships do work and which ones don’t. There’s nothing wrong about ending a relationship in a decent and human way.

Only a few relationships are lifelong relationships. All things come to an end, and there is always the point where you have to move on. So don’t be burdened with guilt and shame when it’s time to move on.

Now you should know which relationships in your life work, which don’t, which to terminate and which to try to improve. Start working actively on that. And simultaneously start forging new relationships.

Start forging new relationships

Prepare a list of your potential mentors. Prepare a list of companies you want to work for. Join different clubs, hobby gatherings, meetups, and so on. Look at your personas and go where people you want in your life are going.

Brush up on your social skills, meet new people, open yourself up to opportunities. You can find people and form relationships that will make your life heaven on Earth. Constantly add new people in your life and always stay open to healthy relationships that can bring so much into your life.

And never forget that at the end of the day, you deserve to have only healthy relationships in your life. Even one toxic relationship is definitely too much. But if you have it in your life, it’s probably your choice. If that’s the case, try to figure out why.
The best relationship advice ever
Here’s some shocking news to start with. Relationships don’t even really exist. They simply don’t. If you don’t believe me, try to hold a relationship in your hand or move it from one place to another. You can’t. Because relationships only exist in your head.

Every relationship you have in your life is nothing but a collection of thoughts, including memories and different convictions about a person. Why is this such an important fact?

Well, because if relationships are only thoughts in your head and they don’t really exist, it can be easily manipulated how you see a specific relationship.

You know the feeling of being in love and seeing the other person with rose-tinted glasses and after two to three months, reality check comes? Or when you’re shocked if someone does something you never expected they could do? Or how because of the halo effect, you think famous actors have much better personalities than they actually do? (The latter is also why you should never meet your heroes.)

These kinds of errors happen exactly because of the fact that relationships don’t exist, but are only a construction in your head. There are so many such cognitive errors you can make, from projections, transference, stereotyping, the halo effect, perceptual set, Pollyanna principle, self-serving bias, selective perception, contrast effects, expectancy effect etc. The list of cognitive biases in relationships is endless.

That leads to a few important facts:
- Your image, including assumptions about any other person, are wrong, at least to a certain extent; and wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why the glass in relationships is already broken (more about this analogy later). Becoming aware of errors is painful, and that’s a part of life.
- The wrong assumptions you have also lead to unrealistic expectations about how a relationship will unfold, which only really leaves you one rational option – enjoy relationships while they last, in the present moment, now. Relax. Relationships are to be enjoyed, not controlled. That doesn’t mean you don’t plan your future with other people, but you should do it only in the agile and lean way.
- Since relationships are only thoughts in your head, you can avoid pain in a relationship by taking care of your own thoughts. You don’t even need the other person in a relationship to participate to solve any relationship issues (especially with troublesome parents or exes). Change yourself (your perspective) and you will change others.
- Relationships as individual constructions in your head are one of the best ways to better understand yourself and get to know yourself to the core. Because you will try to simulate your early relationship experiences with every relationship later on (abusive parent, abusive partner).
The bottom line is that relationships are easy or hard only because you make them as such in your head; and in every relationship, you try to seek and experience what is familiar to you. And what’s familiar to you are your early relationships with the authority figures from your youth. That’s how your image will be distorted.

Based on these facts, many people then conclude that no matter who you’re in a relationship with, you will always have pretty similar experiences. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if you make many cognitive errors in relationships, people are different and every relationship is a unique experience.

The false image you have about a person always exists, but there’s still also always an actual exchange of energies and actions (thoughts, touches, expressions, intentions etc.) that’s happening in a relationship. Despite the cognitive biases, the energy exchange with every single person is always a unique experience.

Your image of a person is always wrong, but your experience of a relationship is not. That’s why people remember the most how you make them feel.

In these terms, people bring out the best or the worst in you. In these terms, who you spend time with and what kind of a person they are matters a lot. Even if relationships don’t exist, we can say that there are positive experiences of a relationship and negative ones.

You can see relationship with the most rose-tinted glasses possible, but abusive, ignorant, passive‑aggressive or any other similar behavior in a relationship is still toxic. And deep down, you always know if a relationship is toxic or not (making an error is human, but there’s a limit to when a relationship becomes toxic). A passionate love-hate relationship is a toxic one, for example.

It’s extremely important whether a relationship is a healthy or a toxic one. I’ve seen it over and over again. A very damaged person in a healthy environment and with many healthy relationships starts to blossom. A promising, emotionally healthy and good person in damaging and abusive relationships gets broken and rots away.

I’ve been in both kind of situations, so I know the difference very well. This is why you have to choose very carefully who you spend time with. It’s one of the most important decisions in your life. There is no middle path; a relationship is either a toxic or a healthy one (as we will see later).

Before we go to relationship advice, there’s one more important angle to consider. People are animals. Social animals, to be more exact. That means that we compete, collaborate, conquer, make allies, have appetites, trade, pay attention to reputation, have sex, and so on.

So whether you want it or not, every relationship is a trade. There is no such thing as a free lunch and there are no exceptions. A few decades ago, people had children primary as an economical investment. You get something out of a relationship (or expect to get when you form it) and you have to give.

No matter how much in love you are, no matter how good of a person you met, it’s a trade. There must be value seen in you and you have to see value in others. The value can be sexual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material, social or any other type. No value equals no relationship, at least in the long term.

The best and most honest relationship advice

Now considering all three facts below, let’s look at the best relationship advice ever.
1. A relationship doesn’t exist, it’s only a combination of thoughts in your head, which is why you see every relationship with many errors and wrong judgments. So the only win-win situation is to enjoy relationships. Next to that, you always see a person as something familiar to your past experiences.
2. The tone of a relationship can only be a toxic or a healthy one, and this provides a very real experience of a relationship. No matter your internal image, this is the part of a relationship where you meet the objective truth. Everyone makes mistakes, but there is a limit when a relationship becomes toxic.
3. Every relationship is nothing but a trade. If you don’t provide value, it’s hard to form deep, lasting and interesting relationships. There are many different types of value you can provide, and by far the best one is your own uniqueness, together with the effort.
And now here it is, the best and most honest relationship advice:
1. Always have the center on yourself
2. Become the best version of yourself
3. There is no ice to break
4. There is no middle path, find your fit
5. No zombies and bozos
6. Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships
7. Build multiple dimensions with superior communication
8. Relationships are like bank accounts
9. No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken
Always have the center on yourself

No matter how much in love you are or how awesome of a relationship started in your life, personal or professional, always keep your center on yourself. The moment the center is on another person or the relationship itself, instead of you, the quality of a relationship starts to decline. Always.

First, you have to be an independent, emotionally healthy individual, with your own life, visions, missions, goals, hobbies and interests. Only then can you form healthy and deep relationships. There is no other way. Without having the center on yourself, relationships will always be toxic in some way.

Now, having the center on yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t care, don’t make any compromises and don’t invest in a relationship at all. If you don’t have center on yourself, it only means that you’re clinging to a relationship too much and stifling it without letting any freedom in it.

Signs of not having the center on yourself:
- Too fast commitment escalation (you think about marriage on the first date)
- You get mad if your message isn’t replied in a second
- You don’t like your partner’s hobbies and friends
- Everything you do, you want to do together with your partner
- Extreme jealousy
- If you need more ideas, go through overly attached girlfriend or boyfriend memes
It’s no different in business relationships or friendships, you may want to do everything together, you’re jelly of other people, and so on. In any case, the fact is that the more you pull someone towards yourself, the more they’ll try to back off.

If you want to improve the relationships in your life, start by having the center on yourself. Start building your own dream life, share your visions with other people, and they will love to join you on your journey. There are a few steps you can take to have the center on yourself:
- Set your own life vision, mission, goals and know that nobody can make you happy
- Build up your self-esteem and self-confidence
- Tackle negative thinking and cognitive distortions
- Develop an abundance mindset
- Don’t have only one intense relationship in your life
- Make sure your needs are met (in and out of a relationship)
- Become the best version of yourself (here is how)
Become the best version of yourself

You definitely are worthy and important as an individual, no matter what you do and what your position in life currently is. There is a very simple and crucial rule of healthy self-worth which goes: never place anyone’s head above your own. Your personal strength must come from this kind of a belief.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, every relationship is a trade. The better version of yourself that you are, the more you have to offer. A valuable consequence of constantly improving yourself is that your relationships get much better in general and you open yourself to completely new relationship opportunities.

There are many ways of how you can improve your value in a relationship. Here are a few examples:
- Fit and groomed body, good style, strength and endurance can bring more physical value
- Higher education, hobbies, interests, visions, etc. bring more intellectual value
- Many social connections, status, people skills, etc. bring more social value
- Common values, fighting for a good cause, being a good person can bring spiritual value
- Money and assets bring material value, and so on.
People spend time with people with common interests and subjects. People spend time with people they’re attracted to because of charisma (charisma comes from having a powerful why in your life). People spend time with people with whom they can exchange value. I know it sounds completely unromantic, but every relationship is a trade.

There is no ice to break

There are 7 billion people living on this planet. Many of them have the potential to really change your life forever with how they see life, with many of them you could experience completely unique adventures, and many of them could help you grow faster or create even more awesome things than you’re currently creating.

The only thing that’s preventing such a thing from happening is the absence of a fat penguin. What? Well the absence of someone who would break the ice for you. You have no idea how many opportunities you miss just because you’re afraid to say hello to a stranger.

There’s an eye-opening perspective about that. Assume there is no ice to break and that you’re already connected to all the people. We all share the same planet, we’re all made from the same material, we all face our own struggles and fights. Just show genuine interest in people and know that you’re already connected with everybody.

Just show genuine interest in someone and the relationship will start unfolding.

Always connect with new people and don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. There is no ice to break. The ice exists only in your head. That doesn’t mean that every opening will be a pleasant experience (especially in dating), but that has nothing to do with breaking the ice, it has to do with finding your fit.

Rejection is something that you can move on from. Regret will never leave you.

There is no middle path, find your fit

In every relationship, there is common ground (values, interests, etc.) and there are differences. If there is no common ground and only differences exist, relationships don’t form. On the other hand, the wider the common ground, the better your foundations for a relationship.

It’s called finding your fit. Now, the mistake people make is that they jump into a relationship too quickly, before they even know their preferences, and even less a person. Like in Hollywood movies, where you see someone fall in love at first sight and then live happily ever after.

Life doesn’t work that way. Irrational thinking and actions like that are based on the scarcity mentality – better safe than sorry and alone for the rest of your life. And then you commit to the first person who shows interest in spending time with you. I’ve seen so many people who settled too soon and then they’re too afraid to break up the relationship, staying unhappy forever.

In reality, it’s much better to take time and search before you commit. Meet people, talk to them, get to know what you like in other people, etc. You can even help yourself by making a persona of an ideal relationship. Put in the effort to find your true fit, someone with whom things really work well.

And when you find your fit, know that it only means that you’ve found something that holds true potential. You’ve found something you can build upon and look forward to. It is then that you pass on from searching to hard work in a relationship, and growing and learning together from the differences.

Now, here’s the main catch in the whole story. You either find a fit or you don’t. A relationship either works or it doesn’t (in a certain moment). There is no other way.

Homework

Here’s a very easy task you can do to find out where you stand in your relationships. Take a piece of paper and follow the next steps:
- Horizontally, write numbers from 1 to 10.
- Vertically, list 5 – 10 important relationships in your life.
- Rate every relationship from 1 to 10.
- For the relationships that you rated between 4 and 7, it means you can’t decide if they work or not, and that tells you nothing.
- Rate them again, now only with 1, 2, 3 and 8, 9, 10 marks. This will show you if a relationship really works or not.
All the relationships marked with 1 – 3 clearly don’t work. There are only three options why.

The first one is that they aren’t your fit. Irreconcilable differences or whatever. The second reason may be that it’s time to let go, it’s time for the relationship to end. The third reason may be that too much was withdrawn from the relationship bank account and it’s time to heavily invest back (more about that soon).

Know that there’s nothing wrong about ending a relationship in a decent and human way, if the relationship doesn’t work anymore. All things come to an end, and there is always the point when you have to move on. Only a few relationships are lifelong relationships. So don’t be burdened with guilt and shame when it’s time to move on.

No zombies and bozos

People will make you or break you. Healthy and deep relationships will make your life on Earth heaven, and toxic people will make it living hell. So you must choose every relationship extremely carefully.

Here are the rules:
- Don’t spend any time with energy vampires and zombies
- Don’t work with bozos
- Don’t deal with crappy people at all
- Ignore the haters
There are many reasons why people will try to make your life miserable, from clashes of interest, different values and the desire to preserve the status quo, to envy and simply having shitty personalities. Don’t even bother, just understand and then move on.

When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig likes it. So completely ignore the evil people. Don’t think about them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t write to them. Don’t give them advice. Never gossip about them. It’s you who’s looking for the drama.

Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships

Let me emphasize again: who you spend time with matters a lot. You have to find people who fit into your life, and you have to find people who love you, support you, mentor you, believe in you, push you, help you to focus, encourage you, and so on. And you must do the same for other people.

To achieve the universal relationship balance, there is an important formula to follow:
- Spend 33 % of your time with people who are less competent than you (and mentor them)
- 33 % of time with people who are on the same level as you
- 33 % of time with people who are much more successful than you
- Still, try to learn from everyone you spend time with.
Next to that, although you have to find your fit to enjoy relationships, don’t spend time only with one type of people who think and act like you. Spend time with as many different people as possible, that’s the only way your relationship experience will be the richest. Never let your ego block you from learning or meeting someone new. I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, scientists, writers, athletes, many different people.

This rule goes for personal and professional life. Science shows that half of the difference in career success (promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to one variable: being in an open network instead of a closed one. So network with many different people.

Build multiple dimensions with superior communication

Relationships are always multidimensional, and the more dimensions are present, the richer and the more varied they are. So when you spend time with people, try to engage as many dimensions as possible.

Examples of relationship dimensions are touch, intellectual stimulation, emotional encouragement, sharing economic resources, working towards common goals, having fun together etc. When you’re spending time with someone, you should try to activate as many dimensions as possible. The best way to engage more dimensions in a relationship is to “put down your mobile phone” and listen.

Want to prolong the battery life on your iPhone? Put it the fuck away when you’re talking to me.

Yes, the key to outstanding relationships is outstanding communication. In order for every relationship to work, you have to really communicate (in person) and you want to communicate a lot. Put down your phone, look people in the eye and start listening with full attention. Something magical will happen in every one of your relationships.

And outstanding communication isn’t that hard. You have four types of communication:
- Active constructive response (80 %)
- Passive constructive response (10 %)
- Active destructive response
- Passive destructive response
Just make sure you apply the active constructive response 80 % of times in communication with other people, next to really listening to them and showing genuine interest. Oh, and one more important rule I almost forgot. Make the compliment to critique ratio at least 5 to 1. Yes, for every critique, five compliments must follow.

Relationships are like bank accounts

Every relationship is like a mutual bank account. By doing something good for the relationship – like offering a massage, listening presently, spending quality time together, sending a loving message, doing hobbies together, etc. you put money in the bank account.

By doing something bad for the relationship, like being ignorant, passive-aggressive, abusive or disconnected in any other way, you withdraw money from the relationship bank account. The more damaging acts you do, the more money gets withdrawn.

Every relationship bank account can be full of money, barely above water, in negative numbers or even bankrupt. A lot of “money” means relationship happiness, low numbers mean nothing but low quality of the relationship.

If everyone is only withdrawing, a relationship will sooner or later go bankrupt. That means a relationship gets terminated. If you do extremely damaging acts like cheating or beating, the bank account will probably go bankrupt immediately, even if it was full before.

On the other hand, if you’re regularly depositing money, the bank account will be full and your relationship will blossom. The moment you start withdrawing, the relationship starts withering away.

In the relationship bank account, the same rule applies as it does to the money one – it’s so easy to spend money and it’s so hard to save it. But at the end of the day, that’s what makes the difference between rich and poor people in whichever context, the money or the relationship one.

Talking about mutual bank accounts, there is one more important rule. Make sure you invest into relationships as much as you get out of them. The investment ratio in every relationship should be as close to 1:1 as possible from both parties. If there is no balance, people get frustrated and even the most beautiful relationship can get in trouble.

No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken

Last but not least, don’t look at any relationship with rose-tinted glasses. Nothing special is going on in your life. You aren’t experiencing anything so unique that other people would be deprived of.

Remember, you definitely are unique, just like everybody else is. Just like everybody else is. Don’t look at relationships like a fragile glass that can be broken, but like a glass that’s already broken.

We are all only people with flaws and sins. People will lie to you, disappoint you and sometimes betray you. Rarely intentionally, but sometimes even that can happen. But this is part of relationships and life. Accept it, enjoy relationships while they last.

Why such a tough reality? Well, it takes a lot of hard work and wisdom to find the right balance between id (animal instincts) and superego (doing the right thing). Even when you do find the balance, periods of life come when you’re thrown off-kilter.

Before you find this magical balance with enough wisdom and even once you do but are forcibly thrown out of it, id may do a stupid thing. That’s what makes us human. That’s what you do to other people and what other people do to you from time to time.

When that happens, it may hurt, but if you have the center on yourself (like the first rule dictates), you survive and move on if necessary. Remember, when it comes to life and relationships, the glass is already broken. There is nothing to break, because there is no perfection in life.

Much like there is no ice to break, there is no glass to break. And at the end of the day, forgive, but never forget. We function based on patterns and so does every relationship.

And for the end, do you want to know what real relationship tests are? Extremely good and extremely bad life situations. Now knowing the best relationship advice ever, good luck with them in your life. And please share this article with people you love.
Relationships are like glass – but the glass is already broken
There are many versions of the story symbolizing how relationships are like glass. Relationships are fragile and easily broken. After the damage, you can pick up the pieces and put them back together, but you rarely find every piece and the glass never looks the same again.

Then the advice continues that the real question is deciding whether it’s worth piecing the broken glass back together or whether you should throw it away and move on; and that many times, it’s better to leave the pieces broken on the floor rather than to cut yourself trying to put them back together.

Well, these quotes are badly misleading.

They assume relationships should be perfect and that there’s no room for human error; that even the slightest human mistake can crush the glass into pieces.

But all people make errors, with zero exceptions. We’ve all unintentionally broken a glass in the past; and we’ve all (un)intentionally hurt people in our relationships before and other people hurt you. Because there are two apes within us, fighting, and one ape is always eager to break the glass.

The story of the two apes

Two apes reside in all of us. One ape is selfish, egocentric, brutally competitive, constantly wants to have sex and fulfill other biological, materialistic and status desires, wishes and needs, no matter who gets hurt and what is the price.

Such an ape exists in all of us, and this ape doesn’t care about the glass. This ape only cares about instinctive impulses, primal appetites and instant gratification. In some people, this ape is very strong, in others not so much. In psychology, this is called id.

The other ape is the complete opposite. The other ape cares about others, doesn’t want to hurt people, has empathy and knows when to draw the line and curb instant gratification for the greater good. This ape takes care of other people, especially loved ones, and always takes them in consideration when making decisions.

The second ape cares about the glass; it wants to protect the glass, nurture it, polish it and take care of it. This ape knows how bad it feels when the glass is broken.

Therefore, it puts breaks on all the behaviors that are toxic to relationships and pays careful attention to not break any relationship agreements and rules. This ape is something we would describe as superego.

But it’s not the only ape living in every individual. In some, the second ape may be strong and knows how to tame the first ape with guilt and shame, but it’s never strong enough to always overpower the first ape. Nor should it.

Because a life without the first ape wouldn’t be passionate, competitive and satisfactory at all. Without the primal ape, you would never strive to fulfill your needs and you would never strive for progress in life.

You’d just agree with everyone and exist, without living. And every once in a while, you would snap and go crazy because you were repressing all your needs. The key lies, of course, in a healthy balance. Fulfilling all the needs you have in a healthy assertive way without hurting others.

You can fulfill your needs either by going after your goals in a healthy manner or with the sublimation of needs you can’t fulfill, and in that way you transform the raw impulses into higher levels of energy, be it humor, art or any other value creation.

Following that kind of recipe, keeping the highest possible integrity on the one hand and not hurting yourself with guilt and shame on the other hand, is the middle path everyone should find in life.

But not many people can easily achieve this kind of a balance. It’s not easy to consider both apes equally and manage them properly when they go wild.

Usually, one ape is just too strong compared to the others and it takes many life experiences and high levels of wisdom to tame one of the beast, or sometime even both of them if they’re brutally fighting (internal conflicts).

One of the apes will break the glass sooner or later

It takes a lot of hard work and wisdom to find the right balance between id and superego. Even when you find it, periods of life come when you’re thrown out of balance.

After you develop enough life wisdom to deal with both apes, there are still two types of life situations when you’re most often thrown out of balance and apes go crazy – when things go really shitty and when things go really well in your life.

Extremely good times and extremely bad times are actually real relationship tests; in extremely good and bad times, apes start playing with the glass. And most people fail to keep it in one piece.

When one person in the relationship is thrown out of balance, the other party is usually also automatically thrown out of balance – no matter if it’s friendship, an intimate relationship or a business relationship.

When an extreme is met, all apes just go crazy. It’s hard to keep a rational frame of mind when the people dearest to you threaten the relationship you have with them.

Here are a few examples of tough life situations that throw people (both individuals in a relationship) out of balance and cause the apes to go crazy:
- Death of a loved one
- Job loss
- Accidents
- Bankruptcy
- Addictions
- Being completely unsatisfied with life
- Depression etc.
And examples of flourishing life situations that throw people (both individuals in a relationship) out of balance and the apes, again, can’t keep their cool:
- Large sums of money on the table
- Fame
- Entering new influential social circles
- Other types of winning
When extremes happen and apes start to go crazy, there are only two options. Either you manage to tame the beasts with calm self-awareness and that usually straightens the relationship even more, or the relationship goes south. If apes aren’t tamed in extremes, then cheating, stealing, fighting, manipulating, hurting, etc. come into play.

This kind of craziness can either happen as one big crazy act to let the primal ape blow off steam (you get too aggressive, you cheat, etc.), or it can be a painful and long-lasting decay of a relationship (you are constantly too critical or passive aggressive, etc.). In any case, this is when the glass gets broken.

Yes, there are two options:
- An ape can just throw the glass to the floor with all its force and completely break it
- An ape can be slowly breaking down the glass piece by piece
Interestingly, sometimes you don’t even need an extreme for the apes to go crazy. Because some people are just crappy people or really have no idea how to deal with apes.

Your wrong expectations about relationships

We people love to wear rose-tinted glasses when it comes to relationships, looking at them from a very naïve perspective.

Those rose-tinted glasses are the main reason why we see relationships as so fragile. Like a beautiful piece of glass that should never be broken; and once it gets broken, all is lost and we suffer in pain.

In an exaggerated example, if you’re a perfectionist with naïve rose-tinted relationship glasses, you may want to find a partner who’s good looking, smart, faithful, meets every one of your expectations and never makes a mistake.

As a perfectionist with rose-tinted glasses and many cognitive distortions, you build completely unrealistic expectations in your head and leave no room for any error. A fart is inexcusable and anything else is just unimaginable in this perfect picture.

But then when a mistake happens, relationship suddenly goes from everything to nothing.

Then you wonder how unlucky you are and why this always happens to you; but all there is to it are completely wrong expectations. You expect other people to deliver something that even you can’t. Because you’re also mortal, you aren’t perfect and you are no exception to the fight of the two apes within you.

Therefore, you must take off your rose-tinted glasses and have a more realistic perspective on relationships and realize that they aren’t a piece of glass. In reality, relationships are a piece of glass that’s already broken. The apes already broke it.

“The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway

Relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken

People are hell or heaven on Earth. Relationships are hell or heaven on Earth. That’s why we like to see them as fragile as glass. But guess what, the glass is already broken. The apes fighting inside us broke the glass a long time ago.

Becoming aware of this is the only way you can really detach yourself from perfection and enjoy relationships to the full.

I know it can be a little confusing, so here’s the broken glass story from Buddhism, to better understand this piece of wisdom:

Two monks are talking: “Do you see this glass? I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully.

But when the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground I say of course. But when I know that the glass is already broken every minute with it is precious.”

Or maybe you heard for Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

When the traditional Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with precious metal. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.

This kind of act is about embracing of the flawed or imperfect and shows fully existence within the moment, in a state of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions.

“Why be broken when you can be gold?”

The lesson of the both storise is very simple:
- There is no perfect form
- There is no flawless human
- There is no ideal piece of art
- There is no flawless body
- There is no absolute good
- There is no unmarred glass
- There is no bulletproof relationship
- Especially with time passing by, life challenges and all extreme life situations
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

Don’t expect any relationship to be perfect. Don’t expect from yourself to be perfection personified in any relationship and don’t have that kind of expectations toward others. There are apes battling in every one of us. When we are thrown out of balance, apes go mad and the relationship gets put to the test. That’s just how it is, that’s reality.

Ironically, people often hurt other people only because they’re hurting themselves. And even more ironically, they usually hurt the people they love the most. When apes go crazy, there isn’t any logic anymore, only madness. But again, that’s part of reality.

People often hurt other people only because they’re hurting themselves.

So in any kind of relationship, you will sooner or later encounter one of the behaviors listed below indicating that the apes are going crazy. Sometimes they go only a little crazy, sometimes they go completely mad. It’s a very unpredictable thing.
- Lying
- Hiding the truth
- Stealing
- Cheating
- Controlling
- Verbally abusing
- Physically abusing
- Humiliating
- Manipulating
- Betraying
- Gossiping
- Being passive-aggressive
- Ignoring
These are all the things that happen in a relationship. They aren’t an exception; they are rather a rule. And strangers aren’t the ones doing them.

It’s the people closest to you who can hurt you the most. If you assume a relationship is like unbroken glass, you bet against human nature. You bet against the wild apes. Never bet against human nature.

Never bet against the markets and never bet against human nature.

There are, as always, exceptions, but your odds are similar to playing the lottery. If an exception happens to you, excellent, I’m extremely happy for you. But don’t have the expectation that relationships in your life will be an exception.

Superior relationship strategy

There are three important rules you must always follow in life.
- Never go against the markets. Markets always win.
- Never go against the human nature. You never know when the apes will go wild. They’re just too unpredictable.
- Never go to war, especially not with yourself.
These are the foundations on which you should build your superior relationship. Based on that, below are the general elements of a superior relationship strategy that make much more sense than feeling sorry for yourself after a disappointment, only because you were wearing rose-tinted glasses and you can’t put the glass back together as it was in the beginning.
1. Your greatest power is that you always have the option to walk away from a relationship, if you want to. When a person becomes a zombie, if they stop investing in the relationship as much as you do, if they cross the boundaries, you can always walk away. It’s not a thing to be misused, or threatened with in a relationship. If you do that, you are obviously out of the center.
2. Always have a center on yourself and never on any other person or a relationship.
3. Become the best version of yourself. With higher awareness, more knowledge, health, and other resources, you can provide more value to relationships. Constantly improve yourself and constantly strive to improve relationships. The more value you provide in your relationships, the more stable they will be.
4. Bring out the best in people in your life, empower them, encourage them, mentor them and help them become the best versions of themselves. Expect a similar approach in return.
5. Have an abundance mindset, there are so many relationships you can form in life. Never assume there’s only one person you can have a really good relationship with.
6. Set strict rules and boundaries in a relationship and take them seriously.
7. Legally protect yourself if necessary (prenup, shareholders’ agreement etc.), especially when it comes to business relationships. Contracts are nothing bad. They are written for bad, not good times. And as you know now, bad times will come.
8. Know and expect that things will go wrong, especially in long-term relationships that last for years. So know which things are deal-breakers and which things can be forgiven. When the lines and boundaries are crossed, take action.
9. Don’t do things to a partner in a relationship you don’t want to experience. Don’t have double standards. Be fair.
10. Forgive, but never forget; behavioral patterns always repeat themselves. What you have experienced once, you will probably experience again soon.
11. The investment and reward from a relationship should be approximately 1:1 from both people involved in the relationship. If you invest 10 units of energy into a relationship, you should also expect the same from the other party. The interest to form a new relationship should be approximately 1:1 as well. If you chase people, they will never respect you enough to keep a healthy long-term relationship.
12. Never stop investing in a relationship and make sure it’s always growing but, as mentioned, both parties should be committed and invest into growth. When a relationship stops growing, apes start to go crazy.
13. Communicate and communicate a lot, especially when you find yourself in extremely good times or extremely bad times.
14. Know when it’s time to try harder and when it’s time to let go. All good things come to an end. It’s one of the hardest things to accept in life.
15. Enjoy life and enjoy relationships in the present moment. It’s the only moment you’ve got. When you love, love with all your heart, knowing that there’s nothing to be really broken.
When you follow these rules, you can enjoy relationships much more. You can be committed, show integrity, have serious and best intentions at heart, but you know that things will probably go wrong at some point.

And when things go wrong, then you’ll be hurt, then you’ll have to work harder to fix relationships as well as to find and build new ones from time to time. But that’s how reality works.

The fact that the glass is already broken is primal human nature, something nobody can run away from. It’s something you have to accept if you want to live life to the full. When it happens remember:

When the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground I say of course. Accept it and let go.

See the beauty of life and relationships in all its imperfections. When you know the glass is broken, every minute of every relationship is that more precious and meaningful. Because you feel much safer and you know that nothing can go wrong. Because the glass is already broken.

Broken glass doesn’t give you the right to be mean

You can easily misinterpret the whole story. If the glass is already broken, then I can abuse relationships and hurt other people without any moral constraints. If other people hurt me, why wouldn’t I hurt other people. If the glass is already broken, why not break it even more. Who cares.

Well, that’s an entirely wrong perspective. The idea of the story is not to become angrier, more frustrated and bitter, but to let go and free yourself from unrealistic expectations. The lesson of the story is to have a stronger center on yourself. The idea is to enjoy relationships to the full without being scared about what will happen in the next moment.

You absolutely must give your best in relationships and demand the same in return. It’s the only way to have deep, healthy and meaningful relationships.

Without mutual investments, there is no depth and there is no quality. Without quality relationships, there is no happiness in life. People are the ones making your life on Earth heaven or hell. You don’t want to intentionally make it hell.

So you absolutely mustn’t hurt people on purpose. There is zero benefit in that. First of all, if you’re intentionally hurting others, it only means that you are either hurting a lot or you are a psychopath (literally), which I hope not.

Then it brings drama, fights and severe negative consequences into your life. Not to mention all the karma points you lose.

Your action should be the opposite. You should invest a lot into being a happy person with a center on yourself, managing both apes properly and not having unrealistic expectations towards the people in your life.

Only on rare occasions it may happen that you get to lose control, because at the end of the day, you’re only human like the rest of us. And when it happens, you do everything possible to fix the damage and forgive yourself.

Even though your apes may go crazy from time to time, always make sure that the apes don’t go too wild and really do something stupid that would permanently damage your life.

Making one big stupid decision (stealing, cheating, using violence …) or several small ones (constantly hiding the truth, flirting with others, being passive-aggressive etc.) in relationships is one of the most common ways of how people mess up their lives; sometimes for years.

So no matter how wild the apes go, make sure you know where to draw the line. You must always keep a long-term perspective and no matter how strong the temptation is, make sure that instant gratification doesn’t bring you just a moment of delight and then long period of suffering and bitterness.

Man is still good. We break things, tear them down, but we can rebuild. We can be better, we have to be.

love

Relationship circles – The most important diagram of your life

A balance between quality and quantity

The road to quality lies in a proactive approach to relationships

The intimate relationships circle – the most important people in your life

Narrowing the relationship gap based on the relationship circles analysis

1. Build multidimensional relationships

2. Replace screen time with people time

3. Make online communication an add-on to real communication

4. Do things together with people

5. Learn to properly regulate your emotions

Relationships track – number one resource for extraordinary relationship management

Relationship track – number one resource for extraordinary relationship management

General relationship management advice

When things in relationships don’t go as expected

Family and intimate relationships

Relationships in business

The next steps

All the possible theories why people fall in love with you

Sociobiological theory (or evolutionary psychology)

Theory of identification, parental image and ideal mate

The Ideal Mate and Cold Reality

Theory of complimentary needs – opposites attract

Homogamy and common social values – similarity attracts

Theory of Filters

Social Exchange Theory

Role Theory

The Wheel Theory of Love

Sequential Theory and SVR filtering

Types of love and the attachment theory

Color Wheel Theory of Love

The Triangular Theory of Love

The attachment theory

Undesirable Personality Characteristics

The main takeaways – why people fall in love and what you can do about it?

Healthy relationships are what matters most in life

What are healthy relationships

Different types of relationships

Personal relationships

Spouse

Family

Healthy relationships with the family

Toxic family

Friends (community)

Business relationships

Boss

Coworkers or cofounders

Become an A-player

Psychological safety is the key factor in healthy relationships

Mentor and mastermind group

Start building healthy relationships today

Make personas of your ideal relationship

Assess your current relationships

Decide what to do with current relationships

Start forging new relationships

The best relationship advice ever

The best and most honest relationship advice

Always have the center on yourself

Become the best version of yourself

There is no ice to break

There is no middle path, find your fit

No zombies and bozos

Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships

Build multiple dimensions with superior communication

Relationships are like bank accounts

No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken

Relationships are like glass – but the glass is already broken

The story of the two apes

One of the apes will break the glass sooner or later

Your wrong expectations about relationships

Relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken

Superior relationship strategy

Broken glass doesn’t give you the right to be mean