00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 162, "My 90-Day Relationship." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my friends. How you doing? Hope everything's going great for you. I am in a good place and happy to be sharing things with you today. Thanks for joining me. If you are brand new, welcome to the podcast. I hope that you continue to come back and find things here that are helpful. If you are returning, thank you. Love it. And thank you so much for sharing this with people that you know and helping this to grow and get better. I think that we share some great stuff here that I think can help other people. So here we go. We're going to jump in today. 

00:54 

We're talking about my 90-Day Relationship. So by the time this comes out for me, it will have been about a month since my breakup. But for me right now, it's about a week and a half since that happened. But I wanted to share this with you because the premise of our relationship was really fascinating and very cool. And there were some things that I just wanted to share that I learned in this element. I haven't really talked much about, a few comments here and there about dating somebody. But if you get my email, which you can sign up for at tanyahale.com, I talked about it just last week. If you are on my Facebook page, which is Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching, that would be Facebook or Instagram. But I don't think I put this one on Instagram. I talked just a little bit about the pain of a breakup and how painful it was. 

01:53 

But let me tell you how this worked for us. So I had been listening to podcasts from Brooke Castillo. I got my life coach certification through a school called The Life Coach School and Brooke Castillo is the owner and mastermind behind that. Brilliant woman. Love her. And she started talking in January about having what she called a 90-Day Relationship. And basically you go into a relationship and you say "okay, we're gonna be fully committed all in for 90 days," barring anything super big, like you find out that he's a molester or something, right? But you go in say "look, for 90 days, we're gonna be all in." We're going to resolve all the concerns. We're not just gonna, you know, have things come up and just say "this is too big for me...I'm out of here." For 90 days, all in. Work through all the stuff and we get to set all the rules of what we wanted and how we thought it should work. And I thought that that sounded like a fascinating idea because I'm not really much of a game-player; I don't love the "is he gonna call, can I call him, can I text, is it too much?" I don't enjoy that aspect of beginning a relationship, I just like to kind of know how things are. "No frills" kind of person. 

03:03 

So I have been online for a couple of months on some online dating apps and, you know, as you do, you go out with a lot of people and you just don't feel a connection with many of them. But I went out beginning of March with a man I'm gonna call him Mr. B. Okay, so I went out with Mr. B on a Saturday and we Chatted and it was such an amazing, comfortable discussion. It was very easy back and forth between laughing and joking and just enjoyable "get to know you" conversation, and some really serious personal, like, "here's all my the crap from a 50 year old wife coming out." It was about a five hour date. Then we just chatted the whole time and it was so comfortable. And I was surprised how comfortable it was because I hadn't had that yet in any of the people that I had really gone out with, not at that level anyway. So we texted that night and decided to meet the next day as well. So the first day was a Saturday the next day was a Sunday. 

04:12 

So after church I drove and we went out on a hike. We live in Utah, so there's always beautiful places to be outside. So we went out and just hiked and drove around, and again, just some really really great conversation, good back and forth between easy and fun and joking and intellectual, deep, intimate discussion and shared some things that that are difficult to share sometimes, but it was a very comfortable space to do that. And so I was the whole time I'm thinking "okay, this guy I think I could do a 90-Day with him," because I could tell he was just a good person and it was so easy to be with him. After that second date, I decided to ask him about doing a 90-Day Relationship and we sat down and we talked about it. And here's, he was all in. He decided, "okay, we'll do this." So we had gone out twice. I know you're thinking, I'm either like super  crazy or super courageous, and I'm going to offer that it's probably a little bit of both. But Mr. B was like, "okay, let's do this." 

05:26 

And so we got started and what we did first of all was sit down and kind of discuss what do we want. And some of this had been discussed in the context of in the dates, the two previous days that we'd gone out. But we had talked about how we wanted to interact in a relationship and what we wanted. And so some of the things that we talked about was our communication in the relationship. We were not supposed to put anything on the back burner. If something was frustrating, if something was annoying, if something was bugging you, it had to be brought forth. We had to talk about it and we had to discuss it. However, there were guidelines about how to discuss it. So it wasn't just like you bring it up and say, "you're a freaking idiot because you're doing this," which can be easy to do. I think when you get in an established relationship, we decided that here's what we want. 

06:17 

So for example, if I had a problem with how Mr. B was loading the dishwasher, I would first of all have to acknowledge that that issue is my issue. There's nothing wrong with how he would be loading the dishwasher and this was not an issue that we had, just so that you know. But the issue lies with me. So I would have to own the fact that it was my issue of how he's loading the dishwasher. And so my job in this resolving of conflict is to approach him with the idea that "listen, I have some concerns about how the dishwasher is being loaded. I would like to chat with you about it." So I have to own 100% that it's my problem. Now his job then in the context of this example is to first of all, not get defensive. And second of all, show up with a lot of curiosity. So rather than saying, "oh, what? Why don't you just load the dishwasher yourself then?" If you've been in many relationships, it's so easy to get so defensive so quickly. But the rule was you can't get defensive. And so then instead of getting defensive, we were to say, "oh, really? Tell me all the things about what I'm doing wrong with the dishwasher." And if I say, "well, you're putting these glasses on the top and they really belong on the bottom," curiosity would say, "tell me why they belong on the bottom." And then maybe I would say, "well, when they're on the top, they get all that gritty stuff on the inside. And then we have to soak them and we have to wash it out by hand and then we have to re-wash them." So we would have these conversations, and so nothing on the back burner and everything brought forward. And what we were trying to do here was establish new, healthier patterns from the very beginning. 

08:11 

One of the biggest things we get to do in life is start to figure out what patterns in our life are creating the problems. And I know that for me I recognize that that piece of not being able to resolve concerns of getting defensive was a huge pattern in my previous marriage that caused a lot of issues that I didn't want to have to work through again. And so that was one of the things that we talked about. We talked about who's going to pay for what, because I didn't want him to have to pay for everything, just because we were in this 90 day. You know that that kind of stuff. And so we kind of discussed it all that first day, that we talked about doing the 90 day, kind of set the rules. And then of course that's going to evolve over time. But what was so fascinating was we also created this space where we said, "listen, part of our goal here is to learn the things that we need to learn that can only be learned in a relationship." I feel like I had done so much growing and progressing. And I felt like the next steps for me, the next things that I was going to see that I really needed to work on as a person, were going to be found in a relationship. And so part of the reason why I wanted to do this was so that I could see those things in me that I needed to see and have a place to work that out. 

09:35 

And so another part of what we decided was that, "listen, I'm going to bring all of my biggest issues to this relationship. I'm going to lay them all out on the table and then I'm going to work through them in the context of this relationship." So when I do that, his response to that just needs to be like, "OK, look, you've got these issues. Let me know how I can help you work through it." Rather than going, "whoa, whoa, whoa, girlfriend, that's way too big. I'm out of here." What the 90-day did was say, "listen, for 90 days, I'm going to be all in, regardless of what you bring out and lay out on the table." And I was doing the same for him. So he brought his biggest issues, put them all out on the table, and I got to grow myself. This was another brilliant part of this experiment that was so fascinating to me, was it would have been easy for me or for him to go, "you know what, this is a little too big. I'm not sure that I want to work through this with you. I'm out of here." But because we had made this 90 day contract, we said, "OK, listen, you bring your biggest stuff." And I just let it get put on the table. And I was like, "OK, let's take a look at it. You tell me what you need. How can I help you work through this? How can I help you figure this out?" And he was brilliant at doing the same for me. 

10:56 

And so I will tell you that within the first week of our 90-Day Relationship, we covered some pretty heavy topics. I remember the last person I dated a couple of years ago, we were hitting about six months into our relationship. And I remember thinking, "okay, so when do you have the sex talk?" And I'm a person who feels that the sexual relationship is a sacred thing. I want to only have sex within marriage. But at some point, you've got to have that discussion if you're dating someone. And yet with Mr. B, we had that discussion week one, because I had some concerns about that, that I wanted to lay on the table, and I wanted to discuss and work through myself. And so within the first week, we had covered some really, really big topics. And I was so amazed and so impressed at his ability to just stand back and give me the space to work through it and to figure it out and to help me in the ways that I needed help. And I was very impressed as well with my ability to do the same. I showed up in a way that I never have shown up in a relationship before. And I loved the context of planning for that and preparing for that and saying, "okay, look, this is how things are going to come out. This is how we want to respond. These are the patterns of behavior that we want to create in this relationship," which were very different patterns of behavior than I had had at least before. And I would guess him as well, but I don't really want to speak for him in this context. But it really presented me with an opportunity to create something new and to learn something. 

12:46 

So one of the things that I learned in this was not to be so judgmental. The things that he laid on the table, my job was to not judge. My job was to just create a space for him, except that that's where he was, what he was going through, what he was struggling with, and support him and sustain him in that. And his job was to do the same. And I think that we both did a really, really brilliant job with that. So our relationship went on. Now, this is in the natural context of a relationship, you know, the first month, like you just don't sleep because you're so giddy and, you know, so much going on in your head and I would wake up like at two o 'clock in the morning and start thinking about him. And he was, he's such a great, great person. So grateful for that opportunity. 

13:35 

Month two, we found ourselves kind of moving into a place where we still really liked each other, but we're in a much more comfortable space. And then it was interesting, I think the thing that's brilliant about the 90-Day is that as we start creating, started coming in on probably, I don't know, I'm guessing about 65, 70 days, somewhere in there, we really start to make sense of what's going on and the challenges that each of us have and the difficulties and how that is going to start fitting in. You start seeing more of the reality of how all those things that they put on the table are going to play into a relationship and how all that's going to work and what's going to happen. Again though, we had created such a space of communication and connection that it wasn't a difficult thing, it wasn't a difficult place for me to move into and to think, "okay, I know how to manage my mind around the challenges that he has" and I think he had learned to do the same around the challenges that I had. 

14:41 

So this really was just such a beautiful relationship, unlike any relationship I've had. I was married for 24 years and I will say that in the three and a half months that Mr. B and I were together, we discussed things and had an intimacy in our communication that I don't know that I ever experienced with my ex-husband. It was just, it was so intentional the way that we went into it, in deciding how we wanted to respond, how we wanted to talk to each other, what we wanted to create, why we wanted to create it. We talked about the kinds of intimacy that we wanted and why we wanted that and how do we create that and what do we do. We had all these kinds of really great conversations. 

15:25 

Some of the things that I learned in the context of this relationship, one, this concept of making space for the other person, so brilliant. I was not good at that in my previous relationships, especially my marriage. I feel like I did a really good job here. Was I perfect? I'm absolutely positive that I was not and I'm sure that Mr. B would go, "yeah, well, not so good at this and not so good here," but overall, I think I did a good job of creating space for him to show up as he was with his strengths, with his weaknesses and saying, "listen, you're an adult. You get to figure out all of your stuff by yourself. However, I will be here to help you when needed, to support you, to have your back, to help you talk about it and discuss ideas and figure out things that you could do." He did the exact same for me. He was brilliant that way and so great. As I alluded to before, it really taught me how in a relationship to show up with less judgment and with more acceptance. Such a beautiful space. It really gave me some insight into how beautiful a relationship could be. 

16:42 

 I also learned to have some very difficult conversations. He was much more well-versed on that than I was coming into this, and learning how to talk about things that were very uncomfortable for me, learning how to voice it. One topic that I brought up, the first time I brought it up I was in so much shame that, oh gosh, I could hardly even discuss the topic. It was so hard for me to move into that space. And he was so brilliant in doing exactly what we talked about, creating space for me to have that. He was really terrific at accepting me where I was and creating a space for me to grow in that. And I did. And I learned things about myself in that particular area that were so great. And I learned that after that first initial really difficult conversation, it got easier to talk about not only that topic, but also other topics because I knew that I could bring up tough conversations, tough discussions, and he was going to create a space for me to have them and not get defensive with me. But he would get curious and he would create this safe space for me to work through my stuff. It was really really brilliant and I really tried to do the same for him. And I hope that, in retrospect, he looks back on this as well and says "yeah, you did that," because that was part of what we wanted to create. So for me, though learning to have difficult conversations, I was still a work in progress when the relationship ended. But I had come a long long way and I owe a lot of that to him and to him creating a place where I could show up as me. I don't know that I have really felt that before in a relationship and I appreciated that so much. 

18:48 

Another thing that I learned was how to let go of the defensiveness .Several weeks ago, I did a podcast on the benefits of being wrong, and a lot of that stemmed from my relationship with Mr. B, of learning to let go of the defensiveness and stepping into curiosity instead, and learning to say, "okay, tell me what you think." And we would approach conversations by saying, "okay, so my brain wants to tell me that this is what's happening," and acknowledging that "listen, I know that it's my brain. I know that it's just me freaking out. But I need to understand your point of view. I need to see what you are thinking and what your process was when you said this or when you did this." And we became really good at having those kinds of conversations. 

19:38 

So I will tell you that I am so thankful for this experience that I had with Mr. B. So thankful it has changed me at a very, very deep level. Let me just share with you two really quick experiences I had that for me were a little bit mind-boggling, and depending on where you are in your life, you may be going, "yeah, what's the big deal here?" But for me, having not had this kind of interaction before in a relationship, it was beautiful and both of these happened just in the last two weeks or so of our relationship. The first one: we were in my home and he was in the living room and I had gone into the kitchen and opened up the refrigerator. I had just cleaned it the day before and one of the shelves on the door, I had not gotten put in correctly. And so when I opened the door, the shelf fell down, things fell all over the floor. There was a mess. One of the jars had broken and there was glass all over. And, you know, he was in the living room and he's like "what was that?" And I said, "oh, one of the shelves fell," and I start to clean it up. I pick up the shelf, take it over to the sink, and rinse out the stuff that had spilled in it and get it cleaned up. And when I turned around, there was Mr. B on the ground, cleaning up stuff, helping to clean up the glass. I know that that's small for you. Maybe that's small for you, but that was huge for me, to realize that there are people out there who are willing to just have your back as well and to step in and help you. He didn't need to do that. I mean, and I was fine if he didn't because I know how to clean up messes. But the fact that that he just came in and just helped was huge for me. 

21:31 

And it made me realize that this is the kind of partnership that we can create. This is the kind of camaraderie that can exist in a marriage relationship. And I did not know that before. I know that sounds silly, but from my experience, that was huge and it helped me realize that "oh, look what we do for each other now." I would have done that in my marriage, I would have done that for my spouse, but that would not have been reciprocated and so having that done so freely was such a beautiful representation to me of what a marriage can be. The last weekend that we spent together, we drove up to Idaho and I had my water bottle with me. We were going in his car and he stopped to get a drink and I just stayed in the car, and he came out and he had three drinks. When he gets in the car and I see that he's got three drinks, there wasn't really space in the middle console for three drinks, so I took my water bottle and went to move it over to the side door. And he was like, "what are you doing? Put that back. There's space for you there." And I'm like, "well, you have three drinks." This is not word for word. I don't remember the exact words, but the basic contents was he said, something along the lines of "you have as much right to have space in this car as I do. Leave your drink there." And okay, again, I know that for many people, that's kind of like "what's the big deal there." But for me, I had spent so much time in previous relationships trying to clear the way, trying to move myself out of the way so that I didn't rock the boat so that things were as easy as possible, so that there  were as few contentious moments as possible. And the fact that he was so open to saying, "no, you deserve space. You deserve as much space as I do in this," was really beautiful. 

23:43 

And again, two small examples, but situations that really helped open up my eyes to what a relationship can be and what it needs to be. So I will tell you, like I said, I'm a week and a half off of the breakup, and a lot of pain when it ended. I know everybody's gonna want to know like "why did it end," and I'll just say that we decided that in in the context of things that he needed and things that I needed, we felt that our paths were diverging that they were going different directions and that it was time. But it was painful. It was really really hard to let go of something that was so beautiful for me and so fulfilling for me. I look back, though, and I will tell you on the three and a half months that we dated...So we hit our 90 days and then we went a couple of weeks before we kind of had this realization, but I will tell you that in those three and a half months, there is nothing negative in that relationship for me. Everything was positive. There was there was not one discussion that was not healthy and good. I mean, all of it was fabulous and brilliant and beautiful to me and I'm so thankful to have that. 

25:04 

Because a year ago when I started thinking about dating I was like, "I don't know. Why would I want to mess up my life with a man? Like everything is going so well. I love where I am. I love, you know, all the things about my life. If I just bring in a man, I'm gonna have a lot of work to do and I'm gonna have to like start doing all the all this stuff and putting myself second again," was really kind of how I think I start would have had to go into. And then last fall, working with my life coach, she really helped me work through a lot of those ideas. And I remember telling her that once I'm like "well, I just don't want to have to do all the work. Like, why would I want to get married and be treated like that," and she kind of looked at me and she was like "You just don't choose somebody who's gonna treat you that way." Now, for me, I was like "what? I don't have to choose somebody who does that?" It was just all my brain knew, was feeling like I always had to put myself second. So reconnecting with a new idea that I get to choose somebody who's going to be very different than what I had before was kind of a brilliant concept for me. And she really helped me get to a place where by, you know, December-ish I was like, "okay. I think I can do the dating thing. I think that I do want a relationship. I think that I do want a wedding, to experience what that's like." And also I could see the benefit of being in it as far as my own personal growth and the places that I needed to go. 

26:44 

So I went into this 90-Day Relationship with Mr. B. in that space of thinking, "yes, I do want a relationship. Do I need one? No, do I want one? Yes. But I also want to learn all these things." Now that my relationship with Mr. B is over, I know for sure that I want a relationship. I mean, before it sounded nice, it sounded lovely. But now that I've had this experience with him, where I saw how easy and beautiful and comfortable a relationship can be. Before, when people would say relationships are a lot of work, I would go "darn right, they're a lot of work." And when I meant work, I meant exhausting white-knuckling, constantly having to manage my mind work. The work with Mr. B was work that was energizing because I wanted to engage in it. Leaning into those difficult conversations was beautiful work to me. And after the experience, I was like, "that was amazing." Like how can you be in such a space where you just understand one another? It's not war, it's more like a dance. Like we learned to dance together. And rather than going at war about things. And so the work of the relationship was something that I wanted to engage in so badly because it was so fulfilling for me. 

28:16 

So nothing negative about the relationship. In fact, even when we decided that it was time to part ways, that was a relationship where we sat and talked and held each other and both were crying and both were saying how much we appreciated the relationship. In fact, in the context of that, I told him that, you know, it's hard. It's a strange paradox to feel like my heart is breaking, but it's also so full and so grateful for the experience. And it was incredibly amazing to me. And so yeah, still a week and a half off, it's still a little bit fresh, but I don't look back at that relationship with one ounce of negativity. All of it was beautiful. Even the breakup was beautiful. And I'm just so thankful to have had that experience. 

29:19 

Another piece that I'm really thankful for is that going into this, I decided that, you know what? I am going all in 100%. I am not going to hold back at all. I'm going to learn how to love. I'm going to learn how to share, how to put it all in. Now, was I a perfect partner? Absolutely not, because I'm a human and I come with a lot of baggage, a lot of things that I'm still working through. But I will tell you that I worked really hard to show up 100%. And because of that, I really opened my heart early on and I will say that, that I was feeling love for him within probably three weeks. Now, not enough love to get married,  obviously, or you know, whatever. But I was feeling love for him fairly early on because that's why one reason that I was going into the relationship was to learn how to love, to learn how to open up. And so I was able to create that with him. And it was beautiful and it was amazing. 

30:33 

And so I think as the relationship has ended and I look back on that, I am just so proud of myself for giving it my all, for going all in. And I think that because I have no regrets, I think it's made the healing a little bit easier for me because I'm not looking back at all thinking, "oh, I should have, I wish I would have, what if this, what if that?" I don't have any of those in this relationship at all. I just feel like the whole thing was a brilliant, beautiful experience from beginning to end. And I'm so grateful for that. I have a niece that lives with me right now and we were chatting about this the other night and I shared that idea with her that this was just so beautiful. And she came up with an analogy that I thought was lovely. She said, you know what? If someone came up to me and said, "listen, Casey, I'm going to give you a three and a half-month trip to the Bahamas. And you can do whatever you want when you're there. You can go parasailing, you can go skydiving, you can go deep-sea fishing, you can go snorkeling, you can go scuba diving, you can all the things you can lay on the beach, you can read books, you can you can do whatever you want three and a half months.You're gonna have this amazing experience and when it's done I'm just you're gonna come home." I would be like, bam, right, of course I would take that and I know that it would be hard to come home and I know that I wouldn't want to come home. But I would and I wouldn't hate the three and a half months or feel bad about the three and a half months that I was in the Bahamas. And this is how this relationship feels to me. Like, I think sometimes we hesitate getting into relationships because we fear the end of the relationship, the completion of the relationship. 

32:34 

And yet, when I look at this and I look at all of the beauty that happened in that three and a half months, all the things that I learned, I will tell you I am so much better positioned to have a healthy relationship because of my experience with Mr. B. He was perfect for me in this particular situation and I'm so grateful for this entire experience. Painful at the end to let go? Absolutely. I've shed a lot of tears, probably more tears in the last week and a half than I have in the last year and a half. Just very painful to let go. But all of it is just coming from this place of so much gratitude for him and for the experience. So I think sometimes when we look at relationships, we hold back. I know that I have in the past, we hold back because we're afraid. We fear what could happen. And going into this with Mr. B, we talked about, "hey, listen, maybe this will work out. Maybe it won't," but at the end of 90 days, we will either decide that we want to go long term, and in which case we will have started a relationship with such a good foundation and with patterns of behavior that are going to give us a great relationship in the future, 0r if we decided at the end of 90 days that this isn't where we want to go long term. We both would have had an opportunity to explore and expand in an area of our lives in relationship and to learn things about relationships that we didn't learn before. So our decision here was that the relationship ended. But there, it was a win -win either way. And this was a definite 100% win for me to be in this particular situation that was so open and so honest and and so healthy. It just was beautiful. 

34:51 

And I just wanted to share this experience with you. I think that this piece of being more open, more honest, more understanding of what we want to create was so incredibly healthy. And I don't think you have to be single like me to experience this. I think even if you're married, you can sit down with your spouse and say, "listen, 90 days. What are we doing in our relationship that is not working? And what's the result that we would like to have in 90 days?" And then work yourself backwards. If this is what I want, if this is the result, what actions do I need to engage in? And then you work that in a thought model back, then, if these are the actions that I want to engage in, what feelings do we need to be having toward each other, and what thoughts do we need to be thinking? And just really process this and put yourself in a 90-Day Relationship in a space where you can create something that didn't exist before. 

35:52 

And if you're in a long-term relationship, if you've been married for 30 years, I still think that in 90 days you could be in a better space if you wanted to be. And if you were to implement the same concept, let's talk about what we want to create. We want to create a relationship...like for Mr. B and I, it was a relationship that is open and honest and intimate where we share things, where we don't leave things on the back burner, where we resolve conflicts in incredibly healthy ways, where we talk about all the tough stuff, where we create space for the other person to grow and to progress and to face their demons. It was a beautiful experience and I think that that's not available just to you if you're single. I think it's absolutely available to you as well if you're in a long-term relationship. 

36:43 

So my friends, there you go. It's a little bit longer today than usual, but I wanted to share with you the beauty of this relationship because it has impacted my life more than I can even express. I'm a completely different person now than I was three and a half months ago. And I cannot express enough gratitude to Mr. B for the space that he created for me to grow and to learn and to move into a better version of me. I loved myself before, but I'm even more in awe of me now of how I was able to show up in that space and what we were able to create together. Such a beautiful, beautiful experience, difficult, absolutely when it came to an end. Absolutely. But the whole process was an amazing, almost overwhelming experience and one that I would not trade for anything. Anything, just so you know, so grateful for it. Every aspect of it was positive and fulfilling and engaging. 

37:52 

So there you go. That's my 90-Day Relationship. If you want to talk about specifics of how to create something like that for you, let's chat. You can go to tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free consult and we can discuss. I can walk you through this process and help you to create something new and amazing in your life. So it was brilliant. Took a lot of courage, took a lot of guts, and I'll tell you what, I want to do it again. I want to do it again. And maybe another 90 days of something like that and I'll see if it'll end in heartbreak again, but you know what? So worth it to have the experience that I had during that time. Okay, have an awesome week my friends, and I will talk to you next time. Bye. 

38:43 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.