FALLING IN LOVE: Is there really “the one” or is “the one” YOU?
November 2, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Hello listeners that we love so much. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I think we have an interesting show for you today. We’ll see. First of all, I want to tell you how we think of these topics that we’re going to discuss each week. Usually we just try to come up with ideas that drive us all nuts in our lives. Like what are the things that we all think about incessantly that we’re convinced if we just nail one way or another, our lives will be fixed? It’s never true, and yet here we are. And then what happens is I think usually, I’ve usually thought of something that I’ve been discussing with friends, or with, okay let’s tell the truth, with myself, or with Abby, and then I pitch it.
Abby Wambach:
Tell the truth because you don’t have friends?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I was like wait, what am I saying? On all my picnics with friends and all my coffee dates and get togethers and such. No, it’s what I’m thinking about by myself and then with Abby and reading about usually. And then I pitch the idea to sister and Abby and then we think about it for a few days, everybody goes and thinks. I only think, they do other things also. And then Abby and I usually go for a walk, we go for a thinking walk together. So this consists of me saying, “Okay, we’re going to go and we’re going to talk about,” let us say, falling in love, because that’s our topic for today, we’re going to talk about falling in love. What the hell is falling in love? What does it mean? What does it mean to fall out of love? What does it mean when we get to the phase after the wild falling in love part, which we’re calling on the pod landing in love? And what is this all even for in our lives, all of this drama and trauma and beauty? So we go for a walk, we did this last week.
Abby Wambach:
Tell them what happens when we’re on our walks almost every single time.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, this is the most meta fun wonderful thing is we have this path, okay, near our house and it’s a walking path. And so everyone in our area walks on this path every day. Some people roller skate, some people bike, some people are walking. So Abby and I are walking all the time and we’re preparing our pod, she’s talking, I’m taking notes while I walk, she’s guiding me so I don’t run into things. And every time, a group of women or two women or a woman stops us, sometimes someone points to us and gestures towards her ears to tell us that she’s listening to the podcast right now as we are passing her preparing the next podcast. The last time, babe, remember during the love one, a group of women stopped us and we’re like, “This is our pod squad, we’re talking about the pod right now.”
Amanda Doyle:
No way, really?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amanda Doyle:
That’s cool.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it was so awesome. So that always feels really cool. And then of course I get my, “Oh my god this is so stressful, it has to stay good.” Anyway, we’re letting that go. So we’re on our thinking walk about falling in love and I say to her, because Abby is, I don’t know anyone on earth, no one is a bigger romantic than Abby. Abby believes, she has believed her whole life in this idea that there is someone out there for her and that it was destined. She just, her favorite movies are, what?
Abby Wambach:
The Notebook.
Glennon Doyle:
The Notebook, and?
Abby Wambach:
Titanic.
Glennon Doyle:
Titanic.
Amanda Doyle:
She’s the Ted Lasso of love.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s the Ted Lasso of the world, she is. She really is.
Abby Wambach:
True believer here people.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s a true believer. And so I asked her what that was like and she kind of slowed down on the walk and she said, “You know, I don’t know. I just remember when I was little sitting outside in my back yard and looking up at the stars and just knowing that someone was out there for me. Like my soulmate.” And I just stopped walking because one of the earliest memories I have in my life is sitting outside in our back yard sissy, so that little brick patio that we had in the back, because I wouldn’t have actually gone into the yard. I actually used to get grounded outside.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh, that makes sense.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, if I got in trouble I was grounded outside of my room because inside is where I want to be. And I remember at night sitting outside looking up at the stars and knowing that something was out there for me. But it was never a person, I was always yearning for god, for this divine love. I know there’s a god somewhere out there for me. Which is so interesting that you were always yearning for romantic love, I was yearning for divine love. So babe, here’s what I want to know. This soulmate that you believed was out there for you as you stared up at the stars, what did you believe that this someone, this soulmate, was going to do for you? Like what was the point of them?
Abby Wambach:
Well, at the time, I didn’t have the words for it because I couldn’t conceive of the fact that I was broken. I just felt an unalignment that was happening inside my body, that was happening inside of me based on all of the, whatever you want to call it, siting in those pews as a kid and hating myself. Like all of my childhood stuff and just feeling like I was broken. So I thought maybe somebody out there could fix my, truly, truly. Because surely what was happening in my current life where I was sitting, I’ll never forget it, I was on my driveway looking up and just knowing. My friends, my high school friends were sitting around me and we were just talking about where that person is and that person is doing something right now. And I just have always been fascinated by it. I think that for me, I felt like somebody out there was going to help stop the hurt.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Okay. That is what I thought about this God I was yearning for. That I was jacked up in some way or another, that if I could just figure out this God and love this God the right way, I would have solved the puzzle of life, of myself. I thought those answers, like life was hard, and if I found this thing it would suddenly get easier, it would stop the earth. So I thought that the answers were in a God in the sky and you thought the answers were in a girl on the earth, right?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Glennon Doyle:
What about you sissy, how did you think about this idea of love or falling in love when you were younger?
Amanda Doyle:
I don’t think I really did, actually. I don’t remember day dreaming or fixating on anything like this. But I do think that I was thinking about me a lot, like I think that I was thinking about becoming a person that was unequivocally worthy of love, like the kind of person that was going to get all the things in life and be worthy of the kind of love that would be awesome to have. But I don’t remember thinking a lot about what the other person would be. And I also think you said the puzzle that’s going to fix you, and I think that based on some early starts there in my life that there were cases where I clearly somehow thought I was going to fix other people’s lives. Because the relationship was clearly not adding to mine.
Amanda Doyle:
So it was like kind of I was the missing puzzle piece that was going to come in and take the shambles of their lives and somehow make it right. If I’m being super honest, I think when it came right for me, like the times that I was like, “Yep, that’s it,” was when I felt like I kind of met my match. It’s kind of embarrassing to say, but not based on compatibility or tragically any kind of wellness associated with it, but someone that was unequivocally worthy of me and kind of a superhero way that made for a good story as I saw it, but not necessarily a great warm relationship.
Glennon Doyle:
Sometimes it can be a good story and not a good life.
Amanda Doyle:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s also so interesting this idea of either you’re the one who thinks you need to be fixed by love or you think that you’re the fixer in love. Even whether it’s romantic or divine, I either desperately need God or I am God.
Abby Wambach:
But don’t you think that romantic and divine love are almost the same?
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know, maybe it’s just different ways we think about what we need and metaphors. But when you said that sissy, it made me think of like, okay what’s the difference between neurotic and narcissistic love? And we throw these words around, narcissism and neurotic, those are actual things that have actual meaning. So as an aside, I one asked a friend who’s a therapist if I was a narcissist because there was this time when everyone was throwing that word around, so especially any woman who dared to talk about their lives publicly, we were all called narcissists for a while. Because if you’re a man who talks about the world, you’re a philosopher, but if you’re a woman who talks about the world you’re a narcissist. That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
So I actually asked my friend if I was a narcissist. And she was like, “Please don’t ever tell anyone this,” so here we go, “because this is not a clinical way of analyzing whether you’re a narcissist.” She said, “Do this little experiment. Okay Glennon, you send an email to somebody, okay, and it’s an important email to you and that person doesn’t respond to the email. What is your automatic go to assumption? A, you think you did something bad and that person is mad at you. B, you think that person is a jackass asshole who doesn’t respond to things.” Automatically 100% I think I’ve done something wrong, I hurt this person’s feelings, I stay up about it for five nights in a row, I go into a huge shame spiral. If you chose A, you have more neurotic tendencies than narcissistic tendencies. This is not clinical, which is why my friend asked me not to share this, which is [crosstalk 00:12:13]
Amanda Doyle:
Which is why I’m sharing it with millions of people now.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. So she said, “Glennon, you are not a narcissist. You are a full on neurotic.” That’s what she said to me. But we get back to this idea of do you tend towards neurotic love, “Oh my god, someone please save me, I’m broken.” Or, “Oh my god, here I am with my superhero cap, you’re broken, I choose you, you are my project.” Neither tend to end well, if everyone I know is a test case. Here’s what I want to know, actually from both of you okay, because this is the part that I’ve been looking forward to of this particular conversation, because my wife Abby is a hopeless romantic.
Abby Wambach:
Hopeful.
Glennon Doyle:
See, she won’t even let me say a negative connotation of that, okay. She’s a hopeful romantic, she believes that we were predestined to find each other, that her whole life I was out there and that we found each other and that is why things are good. The one, she believes in the one. Sister, not so much. And I don’t know what the hell I think anymore. So babe, can you talk to us a little bit about your belief in the one?
Abby Wambach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Glennon Doyle:
And what that feels like to be that sort of person.
Abby Wambach:
Okay. So I have to start this off with making this claim, that I completely understand the absurdity of all of which I will say about how I feel and what I believe. But just, this is my body, this is my opinion, this is my choice. And the only way I can explain it is very similar to that experience of looking up at the stars. A lot of which people say they believe in God, I feel like this has been my experience. I’m a very optimistic person, just by nature. I see things happening well. I think part of my training in soccer, I experienced a lot of failure in my life and I was always able to figure out how to manage through that optimistically. And I think that that plays a big role and I think my personality plays a big role in me being able to actually believe in this idea of the one, because logically it doesn’t make any damn sense, it just doesn’t.
Amanda Doyle:
Is it that one in 7.6 billion thing that throws you off?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay, just wondering if that’s the logic part you’re referring to.
Abby Wambach:
Because I’ve also had relationships that have not continued on, that have ended. And some of those relationships I believed that those people were the one. But maybe they were the one at the time, I don’t know, I digress. I just feel like I’ve always felt like there was a person out there for me.
Glennon Doyle:
What I want to know is, what does it mean that you believe that there’s a one for you? Do you believe that there’s one person that’s predestined on the earth, if you could describe in a few lines your belief in the one, what is it?
Abby Wambach:
Well I think that of course I believe that you are the one.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, that’s what I’m trying to get it. [crosstalk 00:16:19]
Abby Wambach:
I believe that everything that I did in my life prior to meeting you led me to be able to see you and you able to see me at that exact moment. It’s like fate, it’s like there’s no reason behind it, there’s no facts, it’s just I know in my bones that the reason we met was because, I kind of also believe that we met in a past life, and so it was like a remembering like, “Oh, here you are again. Thank god, I’ve been looking for you this whole fucking time.” I mean, how many times in a week do I say, “Why did it take us so long to find each other?” Like why did I have to go through all of that suffering and learning to find you? It’s really how I feel. I understand.
Glennon Doyle:
Every couple days you say that, and she’s not joking. And also, at least once a day she looks at me and she goes, “I can’t believe you married me.”
Abby Wambach:
I did it last night right before bed. I actually cannot believe that you also, because you don’t really necessarily believe in the one other, that’s not like in your DNA and in your belief system. But here you are, you jumped right on in, and as a big believer also.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, it really surprised me. Do you think this is all just total horse shit sister? What do you say to Abby’s belief that it was fate, that there is one and she was spending her life trying to find it and when she found it she had some peace?
Amanda Doyle:
I honor and celebrate Abby’s belief about that. I really do, I think it’s wonderful. I also note that the entire time she talked about the one she was actually talking about herself and her view of the world. And for me, I think that when we set it up in the culture as there’s the one, it’s just a very uninteresting notion to me, it’s just an uninteresting way to live, because I think for me it’s very fear based. It sets up this whole scarcity panic life of like, “Will I find the one? How will I know if they’re the one? Did this person just do something that whoever my the one is wouldn’t do?” And I understand that people think that’s a romantic notion, but I don’t think it’s a romantic notion to think of your life as like do you happen to have now or will you ever find the one that holds these illusive keys to the kingdom?
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s much more romantic to me to believe that you are the fucking kingdom, you can do this lifelong journey of diving into your fears and your pain and your dreams with yourself, or you probably, sorry Abby, a fair number of one of those 7.6 billion people. It’s not a magic person, it’s a magic journey, and that’s romantic to me. And I feel like so many of us are just making ourselves miserable searching for Oz when everything we’re looking for was right here with us all along. Like it really is us. And I think it has these other weird things that kind of, like we’re in it with someone and we’re trying to decide the whole time instead of being with them and seeing how we’re feeling and seeing how it’s going, we’re like, “Are they the one? Are they the one? Are they the one?” And we’re looking for this mystical distinction to fall upon us. And then when something does go wrong in our relationships we’re like, “Well, not the one. Onward with the search for the one.”
Amanda Doyle:
And then we never do an autopsy, we never figure out what the hell led us there, why we stayed there, how it ended. We’re just like, “Onward with the search,” as if we had nothing to do with that. As if the other person, their cardinal sin of being not the one, was solely responsible for that relationship. And it doesn’t make any sense. And for me, it also has this fucked up effect on our whole lives. It disassociates us from our whole experience, where it’s this singularity of the one that counts and that needs to be the one that lasts longest and ideally forever. And like Glennon, what if somebody told you that you had to pick one book that was the one for you?
Abby Wambach:
She would pick Forward, by Abby Wambach.
Amanda Doyle:
That feels absurd, right? That feels absurd. That feels insulting.
Glennon Doyle:
That feels sweaty.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, that feels sweaty. Because there are books that rocked you and comforted you and grew you exactly where you were exactly where you needed them. And Ramona Quimby was everything to you when you were eight, and are you supposed to just disavow Ramona Quimby just because right now you feel like not reading her at 45?
Glennon Doyle:
Never, she was the one for me.
Amanda Doyle:
She was the one for you.
Glennon Doyle:
Sister, I love this because she helped me know myself at age eight. Ramona Quimby age eight helped Glennon Doyle age, let’s be honest, probably three, because I was such a good reader so early. Know myself.
Amanda Doyle:
But that’s what I mean, that’s what I mean. And this one notion forces us to just dispose of some really great loves and some really wonderful times that we had with people. And they get thrown in the same compost pile with all of the assholes because they had the audacity to not be the one. And it’s actually not true. We get to claim all the loves, we really do. And if we’re lucky enough to have a lot of great loves, then we get to collect them all and keep them with us and not be threatening whoever we’re with now. And I think that’s a library of loves.
Glennon Doyle:
We get to have a library of loves.
Amanda Doyle:
We keep them all. And I just feel like that’s a more interesting way to live. And I just think it’s more interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
Babe, I know you’re the G.O.A.T., but I just feel like slightly sister won that one. Just a little bit.
Abby Wambach:
I knew before we got into this that she was going to win this. And it’s funny, because we actually didn’t talk about what sister was going to say. And I think after having a lot of days to think about this and talking to you, Glennon, I told you last night what I was thinking G. But I do think over the last five years of finding this person in you, Glennon, I have understood that I think that I wanted to go through life in this fairytale kind of way. Like that there was always this option, this thing out there. And so I’ve had loves, I’ve gone through them and they were not the one for me. Because I think I was still so afraid of myself.
Abby Wambach:
And so one thing that I’ve learned deeply about being with you is that you are the one that I have found that has made me not scared of myself to do the work internally that I think that I am supposed to be doing on this planet. I’ve been avoiding myself like the plague. This is why addiction was so prevalent in my life. And so I think that the one has everything to do with the journey you take to be able to find yourself, like you said sister. You said fear, like this is a fear of whatever. And I think that I could also flip that on you that maybe it’s a very scary for some people to surrender to the unseen order of things. And I think that love is so complicated and twisty and turny that we can’t put it in a box. And though we might have many loves, I just think that the one true love that we are all here to figure out is the one that we have with ourselves. I think that it’s confusing, and I know that I’m still ridiculous, but I still love The Notebook.
Glennon Doyle:
Well you said last night, you said some people need realism. And you said, “I need mysticism.”
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, that’s what moves me, that’s what keeps me going here.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And there are people that are comfortable in the mystery of things. And while sister’s points make so much sense to me, they also make sense to someone who prefers also, like me and sister, because then it’s all me inside me and there’s nothing to surrender to really between two people, it’s all the keys are inside me. But I do love the point, I think the idea of the one plays into this whole narrative that makes us think that any love that doesn’t last forever was a waste, was wasted. And that I think is the most dangerous, ridiculous, we used to talk about it as it’s like some loves are, which is the annual and perennial? Annuals, do they come up every year? That feels like that would be right. But then perennials-
Amanda Doyle:
I think it’s the opposite. It’s so tricky because it feels counterintuitive. I think the perennials are the ones that comes back every year, and the annuals are just one shot. The annuals are like Spring Break 2000, that was a nice annual.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so annoying when words don’t make sense. Just as an aside, yesterday I was finally going to be really healthy and take a vitamin. So I found this bottle of vitamins that was in my pantry probably for like 16 years and has made it through four moves, so I’m not sure it’s the most healthy vitamin at this point.
Abby Wambach:
The gummies are stuck together.
Glennon Doyle:
The gummies are all stuck together in one thing. And so I’m reading the freaking, all the directions to try to figure out how many to take. And I can’t find it, I can’t find it. I like at the whole front, it says, “One a day.” I’m like, “Oh, there we go, okay. It’s called one day, I’m supposed to take one a day.” Then I look in the small writing on the back of the thing and it says, “Chew two tablets a day.” I’m like, “Is this not some bullshit?” This is the story of my life, it’s called one a day. Small print, for sure take two a day. Back to the story. When people would call my previous marriage a failure, like, “How did it feel to go through all of that?” It always blew my mind because there’s no part of me that felt like that was a failure, that my marriage was a failure. I went into that marriage with Craig like totally busted up, absolutely, I’d been sober for a hot minute, he had his own stuff going on, we helped each other grow. We changed each other.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like some loves are those perennials and they just keep coming back and they keep growing and they’re long and long and long and last forever. And some are those annuals, where they just die out. But then what happens with those plants? All of those nutrients that they disintegrate into the soil, they become the soil beneath you. That love informs you, it decomposes and it goes back into your veins and your blood and it changes who you are for the next part of your life. It never leaves you. There is no friendship or love that is ever wasted. Just because it lasts for a short time doesn’t mean that it changes you any less. And maybe the point of love is not that it lasts forever, but maybe it is that it grows us and changes us.
Amanda Doyle:
Exactly. And that’s why I think this whole the one question out there with if everyone is spending all their time analyzing their relationship to figure out, “Are they the one? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.” And that’s where all the mental load is going. I’m just saying that I think that if that’s the line of inquiry we’re taking to our relationships, it just seems kind of wasteful. Because I feel like whatever relationship you’re in, you can do a lot of that digging and figuring out and figuring out where you are in it. Because really honestly, if people are being super honest, and it has nothing to do with logic, the only common denominator in all of your relationships isn’t the way they love you or the way you love them or whether they’re a good fit for you or whether it’s working out, it’s you. You are the only common denominator in any of your relationships. And so you get to figure out, “What am I reacting to here? What does this thing that’s happening actually have nothing to do with them? What has something to do with them?” There’s things you can figure out in any relationship you’re in that is much more interesting to me than just, “Is this the one and how do I determine it?” It’s like asking the wrong question in some ways.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, and it’s this idea also, the magic part of it babe. We can be forgiven for thinking of it as magic because that initial part of falling in love feels like such wild magic. Like can we talk about that for a minute, like the beginning of falling in love? Because we think of it, when we talked about the three of us. There’s two different parts here, there’s the falling in love part, which is when you lose your damn mind. And then there’s the landing in love, which is when your brain chemicals start to normalize and stabilize and you’re like, “Oh wait, this is just another person and I’m still me.” And so that magic part tricks us into thinking that this love is saving us, which is what we were kind of thinking with this magical thinking.
Amanda Doyle:
What we were hoping for, we were banking on.
Glennon Doyle:
But I’m not joking. The more I thought about this, this is why when we say falling in love, when I say lose my mind, I’m serious. My desire to escape my own self has been my greatest quest since I was 10 years old. Just like save me from living in this brain, save me from living in this body, save me from this intense discomfort I feel being myself. That’s why I reached for the booze, that’s why I reached for the binging, that’s why I reached for the drugs. I disappeared. It numbed me out, I disappeared, I was not in my mind anymore. My anxiety was gone, my depression was gone. I was in this place of fake peace, but it felt like peace. And that in retrospect is how I felt when I fell madly in love for the first time in my life, which is when I fell in love with Abby. It was an obliteration of self. I was gone. It was like being totally wasted.
Amanda Doyle:
It is like being totally wasted. The levels of dopamine in your system when you’re falling in love have the same effect on your brain as taking cocaine, literally. So you were high as a fucking kite that whole time.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us, just sweet listener, I just need you to know that when I fell in love with Abby and lost my mind and was high as a fucking kite, as sister would say, it happened to intersect with the weeks and months right before the biggest book I’d ever written was coming out called Love Warrior. And so sister’s job was to manage publicly a wasted person. And when I tell you, I actually, I don’t know if you guys remember this, but I did an IG live about Love Warrior and people wrote to us asking if I had fallen off the wagon. What was that?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, they were deeply concerned that you were drinking again because you did a couple of IG lives. And they wrote very concerned about that because well, you were clearly high and you were.
Abby Wambach:
You were high on love, let’s be clear.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, yes. But they wrote a lot of emails very concerned.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, that’s so sweet. Wow, well what was your experience of me at the time? Because I didn’t know. I knew that I felt different and I wanted to feel this way forever, the same way I did the first time I started drinking, the same way the first time I did drugs, I wanted to feel this way forever. I believe this starts in a really good place. It’s like that yearning for joy, for peace, for the divine, for the whatever. A lot of people feel that way that like the beginning of addiction is an earnest search for an escape from self. So what was your experience of us at that time?
Amanda Doyle:
So, I would say it was like a night out with your bestie and she is out of her head living her absolute best life, flailing wildly about on the dance floor. But you are the designated driver and you are doing everything you can to ensure that she doesn’t get kicked out of the club. But you’re also trying really hard not to mess with her buzz that’s she’s having. It was like that, but the club was a business meeting and it lasted for three straight months.
Glennon Doyle:
It was so public. I was on TV shows and then at tables with New York fancy people, and I did not give a shit.
Amanda Doyle:
You were just gone, you were out of your head. You were under the influence of euphoria. And it was like, John had an outpatient procedure recently and I had to pick him up because he had medication. And his discharge papers said, “This treatment may effect your judgment. In the immediate period, do not operate heavy machinery or make any life altering decisions.” That was like how I felt about you at the time. I just kept saying to you, “I’m so happy for you. This is so wonderful. I’m just so happy. And also, you are literally high right now and you have no idea that you are. And for the immediate period, I will be operating all of the heavy machinery. And we will be avoiding as many as possible life altering decisions. Thank you very much.” Because you were just [crosstalk 00:36:19]
Glennon Doyle:
But you couldn’t protect me from life altering decisions. So it was like, your drunk friend who’s wasted but then she has to go on Good Morning America.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s right. That’s exactly what it was like.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. This is what I want to circle us back to here, because if you are a person who is eight years old or 10 years old looking at the stars wishing that there was something out there that would save you from yourself, and then you find this falling in love situation that saves you from yourself, meaning you are gone, you are obliterated, you are no longer you. You are this us-ness, you are this we-ness that you’ve always been searching for, you are in a fugue state that is where all of your anxiety and your neurosis is gone and you are just in this love place. You basically don’t exist anymore. That is what you are looking for. And so you think you found the holy grail, and what I think is so interesting about you when we talked this through is that you said that the shadow side, one of the shadow sides of believing in the one and then having this falling in love experience, is that when that fugue state wore off, you would always end up in a break up right away. And that was because when the fugue state wears off you are back.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re chasing the high.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re chasing the high.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, this isn’t the one, this isn’t the one, they didn’t fix me, I don’t feel good. Also, where’s that high? They don’t treat me that good. Because when you’re in love too, you’re completely blinded to the realities of certain circumstances. And when it wears off it’s like, you know.
Glennon Doyle:
Here I am again.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t want to be with me anymore.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s also chemical. When you’re falling in love in that state, it turns off the part of the brain that activates negative judgment. So you literally are incapable of making negative, I.e. accurate assessments of the person during that initial period. So when it wears off, then you’re like, “Wait, have you been like this the whole time.” And they have, by the way, been like that the whole time.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s the stage where you’re seeing red flags and you’re just taking your big green marker and you’re just coloring all those red flags bright green.
Abby Wambach:
Well Glennon, tell them what I actually told you during just about the end of that falling in love stage.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, you were so pissed Glennon, you were so pissed.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So imagine you’re sitting on the couch, you’ve been wasted in love for like a few months.
Abby Wambach:
And Glennon’s never fallen in love before.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I thought I was fixed. I thought I had found the thing that would make me gone forever.
Abby Wambach:
And so I’m getting anxiety.
Glennon Doyle:
I wrote a poem about it in Untamed, it was like, “I’ve always been midnight blue and you were this pearl color and then now we were just sky blue mixed together forever.” And I was never going to have to be midnight blue every again, my midnight was gone. I was just going to live in this sky blue place forever, I was gone. And then a few months in, or I don’t know how long honey, I’m not trying to pinpoint it, it was like slowly becoming midnight blue again and being like, “Shit.” It was like the high wearing off, coming down.
Abby Wambach:
And I could see it happening on you and I had to actually step in and be like, “Listen,” because I’ve had experience of falling in love before and I was terrified of the come down for you, that you would then be like, “I’m out of here. I can’t do this anymore.” So I started preparing you.
Glennon Doyle:
You did. It was almost like you would see me suddenly look at you and be like, “Are you still fucking chewing ice on [crosstalk 00:40:26]?” Like, “Is this for real?”
Abby Wambach:
The love wasn’t covering up my little idiosyncrasies.
Glennon Doyle:
This no longer feels like crystals shining in the ether. This feels like somebody who’s choosing to chew ice next to me. It was like the daggers you’d see from my eyes and then you started talking to me about this next phase. You said, “There’s going to be this fugue state, whatever it is. This is going to wear off and we’re going to be in a new place.” And I remember saying to you, “Wait a minute.” I was mad at you because first of all I felt panicky like I don’t want to be myself again. And also, are you telling me that we’re going to go into this next phase where we’re going to love each other less? Like that’s what I felt like you were telling me. And you said, “No, we’re going to go into this next phase where we are going to have to love each other more than we do now because it’s not going to all be just serotonin or whatever is happening in our brain, it’s going to have to be our choice to stay in this and love each other.” And that was so upsetting to me. I felt like we were wasted at a club and you were like, “So we’re going to have to do our taxes now.” Like I felt like you were just bringing me down and I didn’t like it.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, you were pissed at me for sure.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re just going to have to be like all these raggedy other people that are just doing it off of sheer will.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. Actually sister, that’s a point of it, like I felt like we were different. We were magic, we were every Disney movie. We were the thing, we weren’t like normal people who chew ice and get annoyed with each other on the couch. But in fact, we were. And this is why it feels to me like you cannot ever have real love if you are not someone who can be alone with yourself. If you are not someone who can be with your midnight blue, or whatever color you are, then you can never actually land in love with someone else, because you are only using the other person to protect you from your own loneliness. And the other person can always sense that desperation, and that other person can sense that it’s not personal, it’s not about them. It’s about you not being alone.
Abby Wambach:
You literally explained every relationship I had before you, every single one.
Glennon Doyle:
Really?
Abby Wambach:
That like I just couldn’t be alone with myself and I was using this other person so that I didn’t have to be alone with myself. And then when I met you, and if you can see yourself in my story in any way, listener, know this also, that I didn’t get fixed and then met Glennon. I met Glennon, and then as our love progressed, the falling in love stage went into the landing in love stage, I started to believe that I was worthy and that I wasn’t actually in fact broken. And I didn’t do the work beforehand, necessarily, I was doing it while we were starting, while we were falling in love.
Glennon Doyle:
And before because you had gotten sober.
Abby Wambach:
Right. I think what’s really important is, if you out there, listener, see yourself in my story, that you’ve used somebody else as a way to find out who you are or to fix something that’s broken inside of you, it is okay that you’ve done that, number one. But the truth is, and the freedom will come when you understand that you are not broken, that nobody out there can fix the world that’s living inside of you. And if you are in a relationship right now, you can start doing the work right now to free yourself from the belief, first of all. Because it’s a belief system that we think that we’re broken individually.
Glennon Doyle:
That we need fixing at all.
Abby Wambach:
That we need fixing at all. And also, it takes a while. Look, we’re almost five years into our marriage, six years into our relationship Glennon, and I’m just now starting to scratch the surface of my own internal interior world that has terrified me my entire life. And sister, maybe you would think that I’ve been using love as a way of avoiding myself, and I would agree, I would absolutely agree with you.
Glennon Doyle:
Babe, me too.
Abby Wambach:
But finding you Glennon though, finding you, what I really think is so important is that I have had loves before, but I have never had a love that gave me the space and honored who I was with all of my current imperfections so that the mirror that you’ve shown me has been safe for me to actually go, “Oh, okay. Maybe it’s time that I start this work. Maybe it’s time that I start doing this.” You can believe in love and also work on yourself, because I do think, sister, you’re right. I think that this is all about loving ourselves as much as we possibly can and then that love and sharing that journey with somebody else. And Glennon, I actually don’t think that I could find myself the way that I have without you. And so that’s why I also believe, I think maybe both can be true, I’m not sure.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I think it’s interesting that we both have had sort of rock bottom moments. In your romantic search you’ve had rock bottoms, in my divine search I’ve had rock bottoms, and they have both been parallel in that this belief that the answer is out there, because then you end up giving away every bit of your power, of your intuition, of your whatever to the chase. And you did that with humans, and I did that with religion. The shadow side of believing the answer is out there is that you can find yourself in a freaking cult, like you really can. And those people that get lost in those things, it starts with a beautiful desire for this divine connection, for this deep, deep thing. But what I have figured out is that this divine thing that I’ve been searching for all the time my whole life was real and was beautiful, but it is inside of me, which is that exact same thing that you have discovered at the end of this romantic search of, “It’s out there, it’s out there, it’s out there.” I think you’re both right, there is one. The one is real and the one is you.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
For me, the most interesting way to think about it is just, because I think so many people are waiting to start their story until they find the one or they’re throwing away old drafts because they’re like, “Well, that wasn’t the one.” And I think it’s just so interesting to think of your whole life as a love story and all of the chapters in it. It’s your family, it’s all of these beautiful chapters that make up your whole life. And then it’s like if loves come and they were great and loves come and they were real hard, the way you got through all of them and they way you showed up and the way you continue to survive, that’s your story. No one else gets to own it, and no one else gets to disavow it. It’s all your story and it’s okay no matter what is happening next month or next year in your life that none of us know what it is. If you just believe that your life is a love story and you don’t know how it’s going to end and that’s fine, because let’s be really fucking honest, nobody knows how any of this is going to end for any of us. I mean except for you Abby and your past lives and your future lives that you clearly already have figured out.
Amanda Doyle:
But I feel like it just gives us a reframing of our whole lives that is just more interesting and satisfying to me than this idea that we just wait and search.
Glennon Doyle:
No, that is a beautiful thing. Let us let that be our next right thing, that we are just going to consider our entire lives from beginning to now as a love story. And at the end of the day, the love story isn’t really a group project. The love story of your life is just an autobiography and it will stop at different places and intersect with people’s stories at different places. And no love is wasted. And this idea that romantic love is the only love that is worth is so ridiculous, all three of us on this pod have had some of the most life changing relationships with friends, with children, with dogs, with dogs.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you. Your life is a love story, you are the sole writer of it. When life gets hard this week, don’t forget that we can do hard things. We’ll see you soon. I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlile.
Speaker 4:
(singing)
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, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure