Bela Gandhi

Because the brain is a pattern recognition machine.

And now, if your nervous system has grown acclimated to kind of being anxious all the time because you never know if one or both of your parents are going to show up, cook you dinner, get really angry for no reason, you live in this state of anxiety, which we call activation.

So this constant state of being hopped up starts to feel comfortable to us.

And so what happens when we get into the dating world without knowing this and understanding this?

When we meet somebody that might have red flags around them, that might feel good to us because that's what we're acclimated to.

It might feel like this person is exciting or it might feel comfortable because it feels like home.

No, I'm saying if you haven't been able to find the right partner, you're not broken.

Nobody's ever taught you how to do this.

And when people say, okay, my picker's broken, or I haven't been able to do this, I've been divorced three times, I've been never married, and I'm 61 years old.

The

The fact of the matter is it's not your fault.

These are the factors that are weighing into why we make the choices that we have.

So it's not like we need to do, you know, all this work.

I think that there is some work that you want to do to have sort of a meta awareness of yourself, like, OK, I think I might constantly be dating people that have a lot of red flags and have accolades.

Activated me and I'm really I've been chasing butterflies and anxiety and that hasn't been working for me.

But no, it's just to understand what are the factors that sometimes lead us to do the things that we do in romantic relationships.

There is so much softness when you're with the right person, but it's like anything in your life, right?

People will say, I mean, the Harvard grant study shows it.

Are you familiar with the study?

Yeah.