| : Ευχαριστούμε! Ευχαριστούμε! Ευχαριστούμε! Όταν ήμουν παιδιά, υπήρχε μια τραγούδια που έκαναμε να τραγουδήσουμε στο παγκόσμιο. Και έγινε έτσι... Tracey & so-and-so sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. And I'm like, okay, that's it, that's how you do life, that's how you do a relationship. Love, marriage, baby carriage. Okay, got it. And then I grew up, and this is what my life turned out to be. Slightly more complicated. Right? Love, marriage, divorce, dry spells. Love, marriage, co-parenting. Another marriage, another divorce. You get the picture. So if you're good at math and or a fast reader, what you got there is that I've been married three times. Yep, three. And divorced. And what that's supposed to mean is that I am a total failure at relationships. And that is one way to look at it, but not the only way. Because what I think really happened is that I kept marrying the wrong person. Now it's not that I didn't, you know, it's not that I chose bad guys. My first two husbands were amazing men who are now married to wonderful women who aren't me. And my third husband, well, we're friends on Facebook now. So all's well that ends well, right? After the collapse of my third marriage in 2005, I realized that I had been marrying everyone in sight except the one person that I really needed to marry in order to have a great relationship. And that once I married that person, all of my relationships would be successes, even the failures. The so-called failures, actually. So since we're talking today about women inventing, I want to talk about inventing relationships. And what I have found through a lot of trial and obviously many, many, many errors to be the thing that has transformed my life and love. And that is this idea of marrying yourself. So what does it mean to marry yourself? It's a big idea. It's as big as marriage itself, except if I could just summarize it, it would be that you enter into a relationship with yourself and then you put a ring on it. In other words, you commit to yourself fully. And then you build a relationship with yourself to the point where you realize that you're whole right now. That there's no man, woman, job, circumstance that can happen to you that's going to make you more whole because you already are. And this changes your life. So by now I'm sure at least some of you are wondering why you should be listening to a three-time divorcee talk about marriage, even to herself. And I understand that. And here's what I have to say about that. Is that what I've learned and my experience is, is that the places where you have the biggest challenges in your life become the places where you have the most to give if you do your inner work. I kind of want to say that again. The places where you have your biggest challenges are the places where you have the most to give. So let me tell you a little bit about the person I truly needed to marry myself. I'm from Minneapolis. Woo! My mom was a prostitute and an alcoholic. She put me in foster care when I was three months old. My dad was a criminal. He was a drug dealer and a pimp with a heart of gold. Actually they both had hearts of gold. And he spent more or less my whole life in prison. And he just got out of prison after his most recent sentence, which was 20 years. And I spent, you know, until the age of nine I was in probably two dozen foster homes. And the thing you need to know about this story, because there's like a lot of details, obviously, but the thing you need to know is that I came out of that childhood with one goal. To never be left. And the way I was going to do that is that I was going to get married. That was the way I was going to accomplish that goal. So I got married the first time to a guy I met when I was 17. We got married a couple years later. When I was 19 he was a really good guy from a great family. He had an MBA. I mean, it was like, you know, it was like marriage material. And, you know, I was thrilled. I was like, I have a family. I belong somewhere. This is wonderful. And then after five years I left him. And then ten years later I got married again to another wonderful guy who's the father of my now 16-year-old son. We still have a wonderful relationship. He's a really good guy. But after four years I left him too. And I'm not proud to say that I did that, but in order to really marry yourself you have to get sometimes very painfully honest with yourself about what it is that you've done. So I'm not proud of that. And then eight years later I got married again when I was 40. And I was like, okay, this feels right. Okay. Let me tell you what felt right to a girl who was in 24 foster homes. A guy who started to date after nine months of marriage. Essentially he started dating a 21-year-old girl. Which you're like, okay, I mean it would be funny if it weren't so tragic. You have to have a sense. That's why, you know, we're Facebook friends. So here I am looking at this person that I just described with the terrible track record of relationships. And I'm like, I'm supposed to marry her? Like this is the woman you want me to marry? And the answer is yes. Because here's the deal. The thing about marrying yourself is that it's not just like cohabitating. You're not just going to date for a while and see how it turns out. You are going to do this till death do you part. You're going to take vows. So here are the vows. Number one, you're going to marry yourself for richer or for poorer. This means you're going to love yourself right where you are. You don't say to yourself, when you get to the corner of Hollywood and Vine, then I'll marry you. You don't say, when you lose 10 pounds, then I'll love you. And you don't say, if you hadn't married that loser, I would love you, but since you did, I'm sorry. I think it's over. When you marry yourself, you walk yourself down that aisle exactly where you are. And paradoxically, I've found that loving myself exactly where I am is the only way to get where I'm going. Number two, you're going to marry yourself for better or for worse. So what this means, it's like most of us are willing to love ourselves for better. Like, I'm having a great hair day today. I love me. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about for worse, you know, like the big life disappointments. Maybe you don't own a home. You didn't get the career you wanted. Maybe you didn't graduate from college. Maybe you didn't get the relationship you wanted. Maybe it hasn't turned out. Maybe you fight with your mom. Maybe you watch too much reality TV. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because when you marry yourself, you agree to stay with you no matter what. So third, you marry yourself in sickness and in health. So what this means is that you forgive yourself for your mistakes. A mistake isn't actually a failure unless you don't learn from it and unless you don't grow. There's a saying, you ask for patience and what you get is a line at the bank. And what that means is that life does not give you what you asked for. It gives you the people, places and situations that allow you to develop what you asked for. And you know, the thing is that if you don't get it right the first time, life will give it to you again. Because life is very generous that way. It's like, I didn't get it the first time in the first marriage and I didn't get it the second time. You know, it's like, okay, maybe the third time I'll get it. So inside that terrible experience of that third marriage, I learned something about in sickness and in health. And what I learned is how to sit by my own bedside and how to hold my own hand and how to nurse myself. And how to comfort myself. And what I learned is that I am a person that I can count on. Last but not least, you marry yourself. When you marry yourself, it's to have and to hold yourself. So what does it mean to have and to hold? Well, I think it means that you love yourself the way you want someone else to love you. I had always been going through life with this sense of lack. I felt like I was kind of half a person and that I was missing something. And I went into my relationships hoping to solve this feeling that I'd had my entire life. That I wasn't whole unless someone loved me. But the truth was is that I wasn't ever going to feel whole until I learned to love myself. So this business of marrying yourself transforms every area of your life. Your business, family relationships, kids, social relationships, friends. Because when you marry yourself, this huge thing happens. You become able to love in this whole new way. You become able to love other people right where they are for who they are. The same way you're already loving yourself. And then, of course, this is what the world needs more of. So when I married myself and I realized that I already had everything I needed, I started seeing it as my job to basically just light up my little corner of the world. That's my new job. Because I don't need anything. I already have it. So when I take meetings, it's all about how can I help this person achieve her goal? And when I'm in my social communities, it's like, what can I bring to this that only I can bring? And when I go on dates, it's like, how can I just discover another person maybe for just one hour? Which, of course, brings me full circle. Because people always ask me about my love life. They want to know. And the answer is, I'm still working on it, aren't we all? So this is where I am right now. About three months ago, I went on a first date. And about 30 minutes into the date, I found myself paying attention not to whether he liked me, but how I felt in his presence. I noticed that I was light and happy and joking. And as I reflected on the date afterward, I was like, wow, I got really excited. I'm like, look, this is how committed I am to myself. I'm not even on this date trying to get someone to like me. I'm more interested in how I feel about me than how he feels about me. Not because I'm selfish, but because the only relationship I'm ever going to have with another person is the one that I'm already having with myself. I'm just going to have it with them now. So it turned out he liked me. And we're still together. And it's cool and amazing. But I've been married three times, so slow down. The thing is I'm not trying to get security from him through marriage. And God forbid, a baby carriage. I'm only here to just be in relationship. I'm not dying to hear the words, will you marry me? Because even though those words are very powerful and very powerful to a person like me, I don't need to hear them from him because I've already heard them from myself. And the way I see it, it's like I took myself to the top of a mountain or maybe to the bottom of the ocean. And I got down on one knee and I said, I'll never leave you. And now I'm married to the one person I really wanted to be with all along, myself. . |
