Esther Perel Answers Your Relationship Questions
November 11, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Hello loves, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I get so amazed and excited every time you come to this little party that we’re having. So thank you for coming, thank you for showing up at our We Can Do Hard Things party. Super excited today because we have the magical, wise, incredible Esther Perel back with us, and she is answering your questions today. And I don’t want to take up any extra time here, so let’s just jump right in.
Marissa:
Hi, Glennon and sister. My name is Marissa, and I’m a mom of two. My hard thing is my husband and I’s relationship does not have anything inherently wrong. We don’t have any major issues, and we fight very infrequently, but I find myself feeling very stagnant in the relationship. I recognize that he is an amazing provider, he gave me my two beautiful, amazing girls, and he is steady, he’s constant. He’s not going anywhere, he tells me that, but there’s no spark, there’s no pursuit, there’s no adventure, there’s no passion. And I used to try to make that for us, but it’s been kind of rejected and not received for so long, that now I’m finding that I’m not even trying anymore. And I feel so sad about that. My question is, what do you do when you feel like you wouldn’t have much of a relationship without your kids being there?
Esther Perel:
The last question kind of takes it in a different direction. So it’s which one do I want to answer? I would want to know, what did you try before? Did you say, “Let’s go to a club, let’s go dance. Let’s go take a walk together.”? Did you hold his hand and he took the hand out? Did you sit next to him on the couch, and he basically doesn’t notice if you’re there or not? Did you try to put your hand in his hair and his hand never comes on you? I mean, what did you try for which you say the response was such that, “I stopped trying and I basically closed in and basically shut myself down.”?
Esther Perel:
So there’s two ways to change it. You either restart certain things like that, and you see if there is a response. And then you basically depending on the response, you go to the partner, and that is a very scary conversation. Because it’s basically a conversation that says, “We have a infrastructure of a relationship, and that relationship gives us both a deep sense of stability and consistency and predictability, but there is very little intimacy between us. There’s very little closeness between us. I am lonely, are you?” And that is a scary conversation to have.
Esther Perel:
It’s not, “You don’t respond and there is no spark,” it’s, “I’m lonely. We are good productive providers together and we get things done, but that doesn’t feed my soul. That doesn’t make me feel that I am important to you, that I matter, that you are special to me. Does that matter to you? Do you ever have that need? Or do you think that because we go on Saturday night to dinner together that we have that? How do you see us? And can we ever talk about that? And I often find it very difficult, I’m afraid that you A, are going to shut down the conversation or that you’re not going to know what I’m talking about, which is going to make me feel even more lonely, or that things are actually fine for you and that at the end of the conversation, I’m really going to feel that once there is no kids there is nothing between us.”
Esther Perel:
I often think letter writing is very useful in situations like this because it gets people’s attention rather than sitting at a table and trying to get them to lift their heads from the phone. You actually write a note and you say, “This is a letter that I’ve been writing in my head many, many times to you. I’ve written versions.” To yourself you know that you’ve written versions that you won’t send, so the letter that is sent is not the first one you write. In which you say, “I was looking at us today and I saw this beautiful unit of people, but there is an empty space between them. I suffer from that empty space and I don’t know if you do too. When we met we used to be able to talk for hours, there was a real sense of we were curious about each other. I sometimes feel like I don’t really know what’s inside of you and what makes you tick, and I don’t feel that you have any idea of what happens inside of me.
Esther Perel:
And maybe that’s the marriage that you know. Maybe that’s what you grew up with. Maybe that’s how you saw your parents. I saw my parents that way too, but I promised myself that I would have better, I would have more. And here I am with you and I don’t have that. I want you to feel my longing. I hope you don’t just hear this as my criticism. I miss you. I miss us along. I’m lonely and I can’t imagine that if I feel this way, you can just think we’re having the best of times. Shall we meet somewhere?”
Glennon Doyle:
I love it. Focus on the longing and not the criticism. That’s so beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
That changed everything for me when I read that, that you said Esther behind every criticism is a longing, behind every anger is a hurt. Because if you could interpret all of my criticisms as a longing for more closeness to you as opposed to low-grade warfare on you, imagine what we would have.
Esther Perel:
And imagine that you can say that. “I know I can sometimes sound critical, I know that I lose all elegance in the way that I say things, and I really want to own that because what I really would love for you to feel is how much I miss you. It’s not that I don’t like what you do, it’s that I used to love what we had.” Now it depends. Sometimes you have a person who really can hear it and then responds from that place, and sometimes you have a person who no matter which way you say it, is still going to react defensively. You have to be prepared for that. And basically just like you’re never happy. What else does it take for you? I do this and I do this and I do this, and no matter how much you’ve acknowledged everything they do, because then they are in their own scripts, “This is not any more marriage material, this is family of origin material.”
Glennon Doyle:
And sister, speaking of family of origin material, when she says that, I think we would say, “Why can’t they just interpret our criticism as-“
Amanda Doyle:
I know. That’s what I said.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s our responsibility to express it as longing. It’s not always their responsibility to listen to our criticism, translate it into their brain as longing, and we say, “Why the hell aren’t you interpreting?” We have to actually express it as longing. And that’s so vulnerable sister, and you don’t like to be vulnerable.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re going to go to Ashley right now.
Ashley:
My name is Ashley. I have had a very estranged relationship with my mother since I can remember. We’ve never gotten along, it’s been super rough. As an adult, I am a mother to five kids and I’m finding it very hard to connect with them because of the connection that I had with my mom. And I’m also finding it very hard to cope and deal with it. It’s been a skeleton in my closet for years, and I’m now trying to face it and I’m just so overwhelmed. Do you guys have any tips for me or anything that can help me with this? Thank you so much, and I’ve just started listening to your podcast and it has been amazing. It brought some tears to me though, but good tears. Thank you so much, and have a great day.
Esther Perel:
So Ashley, I’m going to just have a few minutes to talk to you, but this is a situation where I would say it could be really helpful to try some therapy with somebody who helps you parse out what happened in your relationship with your mother. Much of our early conflicts with our parents are often either because we got too much of something or too little of something. We either got intrusion or abandonment. We got the neglect or we got the suffocation. So I don’t really know what led you to be so cut off from your mom that it almost led you to cut off from the mom that is inside of you. And in order not to be like her, you can’t develop your own.
Esther Perel:
What you notice in a very beautiful way is how this is playing itself out with your children and you’ve connected the dots. You know that something is not allowing you maybe to hug them, to kiss them, to console them or to put limits to them, or whatever the challenges that you are feeling vis-à-vis them, because there is something in you that as the child that is being replayed, that makes it hard for you to then become your own mother, differentiate it from the one that you had. And this is not a quick fix. You have five kids, go get help. It’s a lot of people that would be affected by this.
Esther Perel:
And this is not irreversible. If you do want to start something on your own, I actually had the same thought, because I don’t know that you’re talking to your mother, so talk to your mother by writing to your mother, but to yourself. Handwritten, please, not computer. You want the emotion that comes through the hand, and just write. “Mum, it’s been so long since we had an exchange, and I realized that in fact, on the one hand I don’t talk to you, and on the other hand, I seem to be in conversations with you all day long. But it is a subverted conversation and I need to figure that out. So I’m going to just try to tell you what kinds of conversations I have with you everyday, even though we rarely see each other or rarely talk to each other.” And put it down.
Esther Perel:
If you want you can even put something, an object that represents her right in front of you so that when you lift your head, you can look at a picture of her, and you can really enact this kind of a conversation. What was missing in your experience with her? Was she the only one? Did you have siblings? Was there another parent? What was the context of how this kind of dissociative estrangement took place? What happened to you in your body? What happened to you in your heart, in your hands, etc? Then you’ll decide if you ever want to go and meet with her and say, “I wrote you something.” And then read it out loud to her. That will be much better than trying to have a conversation.
Esther Perel:
You may have a mother who doesn’t know what you’re talking about and is completely cut off too, and then we can go and deal with her mother, and see how many generations of this takes place. But in the meantime, do yourself and your five little ones the favor and get help on this. You don’t have to do this all alone.
Abby Wambach:
And I will just say, because I remember feeling early on when I stepped into the family with these three children that I was exhibiting some behaviors that my mom showed me that hurt me, that traumatized me. And just talking about it with you Glennon, and almost not like an accountability coach but somebody that I could just say, “I don’t want to be that mom. I want to be a different mom.” But some of this stuff is instinctually integrated into our DNA that we can work through with not only therapy, but bringing your partner along on this journey with you, I think can be super helpful. I know for me, it has allowed me the closeness that I crave to have not only for my mom, so it’s been a reparenting in some ways. Like my little childhood self has healed some of those childhood traumas through the reparenting of my own children.
Esther Perel:
Yep. Did you allow yourself, because I think the piece in between here, and that’s a very important piece for all your listeners too, is the actual acceptance that we are bound to do and to repeat the very things that we promised ourselves we would never do. Let’s start with that.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. That was a tough pill to swallow.
Esther Perel:
Because it’s that which allows you to then find an accountability partner, is that you don’t… Because so often we hide it, we feel so ashamed about it. It’s like, “Oof, how could that be? I hear the thing come out of my mouth, or I hear the way I’ve responded or the coldness that suddenly takes over me or the sternness or whatever the piece is.” And I think the first thing is really to know in the name of what Glenn said at the beginning, you’re not alone with this. This is common. We do repeat what was done to us, and we learned it. Even when we know, “Oh, I cringe,” and so I want to hide, I don’t want to say it, and then we don’t want to talk about it to others. But if you accept it, you’ll have an easier time.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, and talk about it. I mean, I haven’t been able to change completely. I like the idea of just even acknowledging it, because we acknowledge it as a whole family. I decided I did not want to bring my hyperawareness of every social situation and controlling everything and being worried about everyone’s energy in the room into my family. So that’s what I do every damn day, Esther. And I haven’t been able to change it completely, but what we do do as a family is I say, I’m doing that thing where I’m making everybody nervous and ruining everyone’s social experience, because I’m worried that the social experience will be ruined. So I’m ruining it.
Glennon Doyle:
And the kids know. They know that’s the energy I got from my family of origin. They know when I’m doing it, they can see it. So it’s not that I’ve been able to change it, but just talking about it as a family, I think makes them a little bit freer from it. Because we’re not repeating the pattern, we’re pointing it out and saying, “Oh, mum’s doing that thing. Bless her heart.”
Esther Perel:
Yep. And when they get older, they can say to you too, “You’re doing that thing.” Which is what happens in my family is that they started to say to me, “You’re doing this thing,” and I would just say, “Oh God,” and I said, “Thank you.” At first, I’d be defensive, “No, it’s not the same thing. I’m not doing that thing.” But then over time, I just basically thought, “You know what? They’re doing you a favor.” So then I take it and just say, “You’re right. I’m stopping.” And so I don’t know how old the children are of Ashley, but it’s astounding how much we live in an echo chamber, and how much we bring this thing… It’s very disturbing.
Esther Perel:
It feels like we will never leave whichever the parent is that we’re trying to transcend. You’re just like, “You hold me prison. You live inside of me.” But in fact, we slowly put them out there, and that’s why the picture is very helpful. You put the person outside of you, you externalize or you’re talking to the part of you that identifies with your mom that has learned that piece, but you also are trying to take that part and look at it separately, because you have other parts inside of you. And it is those other parts inside of you that will help you make sure that this one doesn’t become the dominant one. That’s the piece, is that you do have that but you have other things that you do so differently from your mom.
Esther Perel:
This I say to Ashley too, you’re focused in on the part of you that is repeating. But you didn’t focus on the parts of you with those five children, those unique moments, even if they’re small, where you noticed that you had done something that you liked, and that went well. And you need that list too because otherwise you can’t address the other list.
Abby Wambach:
Perfect.
Lauren:
Hi Glennon, Amanda and Abby. My name is Lauren. I’m 23 years old and I have a hard thing. One of my best friends is going through what I would consider to be a toxic and really hard relationship. And I find it really hard to be a supportive friend through this kind of thing, and I would really like to figure out how to be a better friend, because I feel like I’m constantly battling between being supportive and burning someone’s house down. I would like to know, what advice do you have on loving someone through a bad relationship?
Esther Perel:
Have you ever been in such a situation?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, I think this defines Glennon and I’s the difference of personality that we are. Glennon wants to burn everybody’s house down and I’m usually pretty supportive of… Not that you’re not supportive, but I think that yeah, all of us have practically.
Glennon Doyle:
How I would frame it… So how Abby framed it is I burn, she supports. How I would say it is I tend to, Esther, err on the side of saying the thing, saying what I think is the truth, and Abby would err more on the side of supporting the person through their truth, no matter what she thinks. And I see beauty with both approaches.
Abby Wambach:
Although recently we have been in a situation where I actually went beyond myself and into… Because we choose partners that we wish should teach us things, and I said some really hard things to a wonderful friend recently-
Glennon Doyle:
About her relationship.
Abby Wambach:
About her relationship. And that was so out of my character, because I’d like to let people live their own lives and figure stuff out themselves. But I think that at the risk of our relationship, I said a hard thing because I thought it was the right thing that she needed to hear in support of her. And it went okay, it didn’t go great. But yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting that… I mean, it was really awkward for me to do it. I was sweating. I actually I’m sweating right now thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
So what are the guidelines of that, Esther? How do we know what to say and when to say what… How do we know how to support and also tell the truth?
Esther Perel:
So the reason I picked this question is also because Lauren is 23, and I had just been asked a very similar question by a young man who was in college, and was asking it about his friend. And I just thought, “These are such interesting questions and they differ at different developmental stages.” I think that I would respond differently if it’s me today with vis-à-vis some friends versus me when I’m not yet so sure about things, but I sense things. And I don’t want to upset you and I don’t want to lose you, but I also want you to not get hurt.
Esther Perel:
It’s very easy when you see your friend in a situation to want to blame the third person. They found somebody and that person is not nice to them, is offensive to them, is not respecting them, is living off their money, is exploiting them, has lied to them, is cheating on them. I mean, it’s a long list. And so the first thing we want to do is pull our friend away from that person. And the more sometimes we try to pull them away from that person, and the more they actually are going to get glued to that person. Or they’re going to stop telling us the truth, because they are embarrassed about what’s happening. They don’t want you to know that they get scratched on occasion, or not just on occasion.
Esther Perel:
They’re afraid, they’re ashamed, they’re embarrassed, etc. So this is really where the thing is, at this stage she’s your friend. And you first and foremost are going to be with her no matter what she’s going through. You’re not going to be the judge of it, and on occasion, you’re going to just say, “You seem to really be having a hard time.” Or you’re going to look for the places where she has doubts, where she wishes it was different. Because if you become the police of the problems, then she doesn’t have to see the problems and she can just focus on, “But afterwards he apologizes. But he was really nice this morning. But he was so nice when we went to visit my mother.” Of course after the visit, he shreds her apart.
Esther Perel:
Don’t polarize. Make sure to first get a sense, does your friend here and there think something here is off? Then when you get that, then you say, “Tell me more.” Don’t say, “Yes, now that you brought it up, let me tell you what I really think about how awful it is.” If you can, this is very hard to do and that’s why the experience of life here matters, then you say, “Tell me. Tell me more about off.” Get the full sense, and then start to feel where the dissonance lies.
Esther Perel:
And then go in and say, “This is a very good intuition on your part. What you think is off, I agree. It’s off. And I feel that maybe you don’t know how to get out of that. I’m here for you, and if you don’t have a place to stay, if you don’t have money, if you’re afraid of retaliation, if you think there’s a vindictive person there, if whatever the thing of this is toxic, if you are just going to get broke because you’re feeding his habit, or whatever the thing, or his bigger ideas that never amount to much of anything.” Whatever the ways in which you think there’s a fundamental imbalance in this relationship, then you say, “Come spend a few days with me. Just get out of this for a tiny bit.”
Esther Perel:
Don’t force anybody to go, but help them come, and then bring a few other girlfriends together or friends, no matter who. They, he, people, warm loving people. Come together. Because when you’re in a toxic relationship, parts of you are falling off, and you become a narrow version of yourself. Other people need to bring back a mirror of the multifaceted you, of the you who once could say no, of the you who used to have such strong opinions about things, of the you who could put limits, of the fuller, bigger you. That’s what you want to bring back to this person, because that’s where she will find the strength and the resilience to then make a decision towards this relationship. That’s the strategy.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s so beautiful. This is what I think. It’s this is who you are in a million different creative ways. That’s so-
Esther Perel:
And in this relationship, you are not the full version of you. I know you and this is just chopping, eroding major chunks of you, because whatever the thing is, she didn’t explain. Toxic is such a complex word at this moment. What is it that you’re sensing? What is the imbalance? What is the inequity and the indignity that you perceive is happening to your girlfriend? And then bring her back into a circle of people who see the whole of her.
Glennon Doyle:
Beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
And then she gets to be her own hero. She gets to be the one that says, “No, that’s not worthy of me.” Instead of being accepting or being pushed upon the other heroes who are saying, “We’re going to save you from this,” she can say, “I’m saving me from this, because-“
Esther Perel:
In any case, she will only go when she’s ready to go. It’s just a matter of time or the other person leaves. But it is only a matter… So the point is you’re absolutely right, she owns the story. And you bring back pieces to the story that have just kind of disappeared, because sometimes really people barely can remember their name.
Abby Wambach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. One last question for you, Esther.
Speaker 9:
Hi, Glennon and sister, I have a question on love. I don’t know that you get many males to call into this podcast, but I recently ended things with my girlfriend or she ended things with me, and then it’s caused a lot of self-reflection, self-discovery and self-love. We have both expressed that we will always love each other no matter what. And I guess my question is, when and how do you know that it’s time to move on from that love, even knowing that that love will still always be there? Thank you so much for your podcast, and thank you for all that you do.
Esther Perel:
You may decide that this relationship was a beautiful love story, but it will not remain a life story. You don’t have to squash the love in order to move on. You may just say, “This love is precious, I will hold it dearly, but it is not going to be my life.” That’s the first thing. And then I actually think that in situations like yours, that there are beautiful rituals of conscious uncoupling. I love the term, I think it really is so rich. To say goodbye in a nice way, you will be in tears. I’ve sat with people who do this in my office, I’m in tears with them. And it starts with, “This is what I wish for you. I’m here to say goodbye.”
Esther Perel:
Sometimes I make people write it and then they bring it to the session and they read it out loud. “When I think of us, these are some of the main images, memories, associations that I will have.” And people just basically recount their story. “I think of this bar, I think of this restaurant, I think of this beach, I think of this club, this band.” You name it. It’s all the things that we shared that I take with me, and that I hope you will take with you. “And so what I wish for you, what I hope that you take with you from me is…”
Esther Perel:
And maybe sometimes people can also say, the advice that I would like to give you as your friend, I will hope that you will do the things that you really have always said that you wanted to do, that you will find the confidence, that you won’t just do what you think is what people expect. Whatever the thing is, but people have beautiful advice that they can give to each other in situations like that. “What I take from you, what I will carry with me from the years that we were together, from the relationship that we had. Where I wish I had been different, the things that I take responsibility for that I did or did not do.”
Esther Perel:
And you will share the sadness of the loss together and you take it with you. And then after that, you don’t stay in touch for a while, so that you don’t feed on this all the time. You hold it. When you think it, you can go and read it, you can read it again, you can weep, you can cry. You’ll mourn, you’ll grieve and you’ll slowly over time make new space for love to enter again. And at that point, you can if you want to stay in touch and develop a friendship together, you can do so.
Esther Perel:
I believe that many beautiful relationships can transform into friendships. But not in the moment of separation, because people are not always exactly at the same place. Either, you say she broke up, you broke up, it’s not sure. Maybe you made it so that she would break up so that you wouldn’t have to do it or vice versa. I mean, but the main thing is, it’s very important to say goodbye, to have rituals for the end. Relationships are filled with rituals from the beginning, and they often end up just in some freaking cold courtroom. Or with a text or with a ghosting of a person. And the way you end and the way you take with you what that was, will do everything for what will follow.
Amanda Doyle:
Can I say one thing about that, Esther? Because when you were saying that about the rituals, I was married and basically had a 10-minute conversation that was supposed to encapsulate the entirety of our marriage and literally haven’t spoken or heard or seen him in those years since then. So it was that. And what I want to say is that I think what you said that that can be done by yourself too. I really think those rituals, the writing, the talking, it’s that, because so many of us have grieved so heavily not being able to do that, not being able to hear from our person. But I think saying what it was to us is important because the world will try to tell you that was a sham or that wasn’t really love, because how could it have ended that way if it was really love? And so I love the idea of doing that for yourself, even by yourself if you need to.
Esther Perel:
Great, great, great.
Abby Wambach:
And I’m not mature enough to be able to do it myself. I know that about myself, that I don’t want to have contact with people from my past in my present. That’s something I have to know about myself. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but that’s like what works for me. That’s how I get closure is, “Okay, that’s done and dusted and I’m moving in a different direction.” Sorry [crosstalk 00:33:19].
Esther Perel:
I really don’t think there’s a right… In the past, we had none of these issues. We couldn’t decide. You had one relationship, it was the first person you had sex with, he was the person you married and it was for life and there was no exit, and that was that. So having the opportunity to have more than one love relationship in your life, and to then say goodbye, to end it well or let well, or to just say, “I don’t need you as a friend. You were my partner, you were a lover but I have friends. I want other people as friends. You’re not the person I would choose as a friend.” Totally fine.
Esther Perel:
But in this instance because I think that, when and how do you know when it’s time to move on from that love, even knowing that the love will stay? It’s like how do you end? How do you leave? And sometimes you need to stage the actual goodbye, and sometimes the goodbye is done with the person present, and sometimes the goodbye is done with the person that you carry inside of you. But you need the ritual. Rituals help us transition. They frame the intention. They elevate the meaning. They say, “This is over.” We’ve spent months coming together, we’ve spent years coming together, we’ve blended our stuff, dah-dah-dit, dah-dah-dah, and now we disentangle and we part.
Glennon Doyle:
Speaking of parting, tragically it is time to wind down. Esther, I just have such deep admiration and respect and love for you as a person, but for the work that you do. The number of my friends whose relationships and lives you have changed and touched, I just… I don’t know if you go to bed thinking about the effect that your work has had on the world, but it’s profound. And I’m deeply grateful.
Esther Perel:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
And I love even this theme of these two episodes, which maybe I’m just hearing as a raging introvert, but there’s so much of what we’ve talked about that is work that has to be done on our own. That is relational but like even the bringing the erotic back, even awakening that part of ourselves that’s personal. The relationship you’re talking about with the mother and she has to do that personally first. The saying goodbye sometimes has to be done alone. So much of this has to do with reckoning with ourselves. You all, we’re going to put everything that Esther’s ever done in the show notes so that you can order her books. And if you’re not a big reader, get the game. Oh my gosh. It’s just-
Abby Wambach:
Listen to the podcast.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And the game is like little [crosstalk 00:36:10]-
Esther Perel:
Do you have episodes that you love? Are there episodes that kind of have stayed with you from-
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I mean, I’ve listened to every single episode of Where Should We Begin? I used to lay in my… I have this little infrared sauna. I mean, Abby knows. There’s several episodes I’ve listened to two or three times, which I know I wouldn’t be able to tell you specifically right now.
Abby Wambach:
Well, you’d walk in from your sauna and you’d say, “So what do you think about dah-dah-dah?” And I’m like, “You were listening to Where Should We Begin again?” “Yes.” “I mean, what episode? Let me listen to it, and then we can talk a little bit later.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. So helpful for us, because we would listen to your episodes, and then we would talk about them as a couple. Or we’d be at dinner, and there was an entire six months where all we said to each other was, I would say at dinner, “So what has Esther said today?” And she would go, “What Dax said today.” So it was like she was listening to Dax, I was listening to Esther, and I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you a favorite because I’ve listened to every single one.
Esther Perel:
So it’s interesting because we took Where Should We Begin, the podcast, and we turned it into Where Should We Begin, the card game, because that way, you don’t have to necessarily listen to everything. I give you the prompt right away.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Esther Perel:
You can go directly to it.
Abby Wambach:
I mean and listen, Esther, the game, like Glennon was saying, her mom was here and we had this gorgeous, intense and vulnerable conversation. I shared some personal stuff with my kids like family, trauma, stuff with my own children that they were like-
Esther Perel:
They’re not going to want to play because it’s-
Glennon Doyle:
No, they do.
Abby Wambach:
I know but like I knew they’re old enough that they can handle it, but it’s just for my kids to know me, and know an embarrassment or know a vulnerability, like they are witnessing us do that, so they themselves get permission to be that and to feel that they can express themselves and their vulnerabilities or their embarrassment. So I just think that this game is so awesome.
Glennon Doyle:
And Esther, at first we took out the sex questions, but now we are strategically leaving in some sex questions, not like scary ones, but ones where we’re like, “No, we’re going to talk about this stuff with our kids.” And they act all uncomfortable but then they do talk about it. So it’s great. It’s just like it’s this little set of keys that you can sit on your coffee table and you just unlock each other with the cards. It’s just a beautiful thing. Can we play our pod squadder of the week so that we can let poor Esther go? We’ve kept her long and she has the world to save out there, so.
Cindy:
Hello, my name is Cindy. I love your podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. I just was listening to the one about quitting this morning as I was on my walk. And one thing that I thought of was, “I am so grateful for all the hard things that have come my way and that I’ve lived through, and that I’ve quit, and everything because it’s gotten me to who I am now, and I really, really like myself now. So I’ve been through two marriages, both of them I left, and they’ve been my greatest teachers. Those relationships have been great, great teachers, and I’m still learning. So I just wanted to share that. Thank you for listening. Take care and have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Abby Wambach:
Got to love Cindy.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. May we all at one day be able to say, “I really like myself right now.” You all, when life gets hard this week, don’t forget, we can do hard things and we’ll see you back here soon.
Esther Perel:
Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audacy, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it, it’s fine.