00:00 

Hey, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 321, "Clean Love and Relationships." 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. 

00:22 

Well, hello there, my friends, and welcome to the podcast today. I'm so glad to have you here. For those of you who are long-time listeners, or even short-time listeners, welcome back. So glad to have you and I'm glad that you are continuing to want to engage with this content and that you're finding it a useful space to understand better yourself your relationships and how to create something just really beautiful and intimate in your relationships. I think this is a great a great space and great information that I'm sharing. For those of you who are brand new, maybe this is your first podcast, welcome. So glad to have you here. And I hope that you will find here, as you peruse previous podcasts and look back and find stuff, that you will find information that is really helpful for you as well in cleaning up your relationships and creating the kind of life that you want to live. 

01:18 

Alright, so as we jump in just a quick reminder, I do have those three classes coming up. They will be starting in September. Keeping my fingers crossed, I'm recording this before this comes out, obviously hoping that those are up on my website, tanyahale.com, that you should be able to go to "group coaching" and get the contact information for those, and and find out if the days and times and all of that works for you. So the three classes I'm offering are "Emotional Intimacy for Couples." Super excited about that one. I've loved the couples that I've gotten to work with as I've just started introducing that into my coaching practice. I've had some great experiences and I love the opportunity that I've had to do there. So excited to do some group coaching with couples. 

02:08 

I'm doing one for singles called "Ready Set Date" or something similar to that. I'm going to talk about dating in midlife. I just hear a lot of people talk about how horrible it is and I just don't think it has to be that way. I think it can be kind of a fun and enjoyable process and that you can find a person who's a really good fit, but only if we're showing up honestly and openly ourselves. And so we're going to talk about that process, and how do we know what's open and honest, and then how do we show up that way, and how do we find somebody who wants to show up the same as us, and somebody who's a good want match for us. So how do we do that? We're going to talk about that. 

02:49 

And then the third class I'm doing is about how to stop going into one-up and one-down positioning, and how to show up as an equal in your relationships. And this is for anybody, married or single, who wants to be better at being an equal partner. And just super excited for all three of those classes. I've really enjoyed the group coaching I've done in the past, and excited to get some started again. So if you're interested in those, you can go to my website tanyahale.com, you can sign up for those. Or there is also a space, if you go to the "contact me" button at the top and scroll down just a bit, you can sign up for my "weekend win." And as soon as those classes are up and available, then I will send out an email that says these are ready, and you can check them out. So it should be a good time. 

03:38 

Alright, let's jump into today's topic. So last week I replayed for you episode number 92, which is called "Clean Love." And as a quick recap, clean love is love that has no agenda, no expectations. We love others just because love feels so darn good, because it is us showing up the way that we want to. And we don't expect that the other person will do anything with our love, that they will respond in any particular way to our love, or change anything about themselves because we love them. We just love because that's what we want to do. 

04:14 

So the biggest question I get after explaining clean love to someone is, "yes, but what about my marriage? Aren't there inherent expectations in marriage? Shouldn't I be able to have expectations that my spouse will not have an affair or throw us into bankruptcy?" Or maybe I'll hear, "in my relationship with my adult child, doesn't it seem fair that if I do certain things for them that they also should show gratitude or respond in some other way that not only acknowledges what I did, but also contributes to the relationship in a positive way?" And those are great questions. 

04:48 

What we want to start clarifying is that love and relationships are are two different things, although in our minds they are often very tightly connected. Love is what we choose to feel based on what we choose to think. Love is the personal side of how we are choosing to engage. It is our emotional engagement. Relationships are based on two people choosing, or not, to engage with each other and how they choose to do that. Relationships are the business side. This is the stuff that makes the interacting work. 

05:24 

Let's do a quick and fairly easy example pertaining to adult children. Let's say you have an adult child who rarely responds to your text messages. Generally, an expectation in relationships is that we reciprocate in our responses to each other. This mutual reciprocation can be interpreted by us as the other person being willing to invest time and energy into the relationship. We can make it mean that we are not alone, that the relationship is important to them. It's sort of an unspoken rule of relationships that there is reciprocity in engagement, that both people are investing in creating connection. And yet sometimes in some relationships the other person chooses not to respond. Their reasons can be varied from they just don't prioritize texting to they don't prioritize the relationship with you. 

06:17 

Now, to be fair, adult children, especially younger adult children, often have a lot of priorities other than their parents. They can be very myopic with their lives and only focus on what's immediately benefiting them. That can be pretty typical young adult behavior. For us as the parent, our hearts are all wound up in their lives and we just love them so much and we want to be involved in their lives. For the adult child, they are stepping into their independence. They are focused on getting their lives heading in a direction they want and figuring out who they are and the kind of person they want to be. And they are learning to create connected relationships outside of their family. And we've always been there, sort of like a background to their lives. And it can be easy for them to believe that we will always be there when they need us. So it can be easy for them to overlook our overtures. Not because they're spiteful or angry or don't like us, but because they're super involved in their own lives. 

07:20 

So in this type of situation, we still get to choose how to show up loving if we want. We get to love without expectation. We get to feel the benefits of loving and letting go of our manual for how they should behave and show up. Notice as soon as we say the word "should," how they "should" show up, it's an indication that we have a manual for them or rules for them. But remember, though relationships can have manuals, clean love doesn't have a manual. So, in this instance, clean love is just choosing to love them, to show up the way that we want to, and not withholding because we are separating out our love from the relationship. This is the personal part of relationships. We choose to love, we choose to engage, and drop expectations on whether we love them or not. The love, clean love, doesn't have expectations. 

08:21 

Relationships, however, get to have expectations. And in the business of relationships, we get to make requests, which are often a reflection of our expectations. We can request that when we text them that they respond, but that request is not tied to our love for them. They are two different things. And being the adults that they are, they get to respond to that request however they choose. They can step up and put forth more effort to respond to our text messages or they can continue with not responding. They get to be the person they want to be in the relationship. They get to put forth the amount of effort that they choose. Our job then is to learn to respect their agency to engage or not engage, but it doesn't have to impact our love for them. We can absolutely go into drama response if they choose to continue to not reply to our text, or we can accept that they get to interact how they choose to, and then focus on how we want to respond. 

09:26 

Do you want to be an engaged parent who continues to reach out with love and kindness, who doesn't throw small jabs and passive aggressive comments into the mix, because that's completely available to you if you want. You can love them even if they don't respond positively to your request. It may mean that you don't get the relationship you wish you had with them, but you can still love them. And to me, that always feels better when I separate out my love for them from my relationship expectations with them. 

09:59 

Let's take a look at a very different and more difficult situation. Let's say your spouse has an affair. Where do clean love and relationship expectations land on this? You can absolutely choose to continue loving this person. After all, love feels so much better than hate and animosity. You can love and you can also have very clear boundaries about what is okay and what is not okay in the relationship. I think it can be easy to think that if we love, we have to accept all the behavior and trust them. And this is just not so. This was a mistake that I made in my previous marriage. I thought that if I chose to love and forgive, that that also meant I put them back into the same level of trust as before. Not so. Remember, "love" and "relationship" are two different things. So let's make sure to separate them out. Having an affair may very well not be okay with you. It may cross every boundary you have about what is expected in the relationship and you can choose to leave the relationship because of the affair, or you can choose to put some very clear boundaries into place regarding the next steps if you and they want to stay and work on the marriage. 

11:12 

So we can have expectations in a relationship and it doesn't have to affect our love and our showing up with love. And I realize that the affair example can be a really tough one to separate out the "love" from the "relationship" because there is so much emotion mixed in with the situation of affair. There's such a feeling of betrayal that it's hard, but figuring out how to how to continue to separate out the love from the relationship will also make every other decision in a situation like this so much easier. Many people think that if they choose to love that then they have to stay. And that is just not the case. Choosing to love in this instance is not a decision about what action is appropriate in response to their behavior. It has nothing to do with retribution. It has everything to do with how we choose to be, how we choose to show up, how we choose to feel. Just because you choose love doesn't mean you choose to stay married to them. 

12:13 

You don't have to marry or stay married to someone that you love. You may find in the process of relationship that you're not a good fit. What we would call you're not a "good want match." You may want different things and things that are so different with regards to your values that it makes the relationship untenable. For many people an affair would fit this category. It's a non-negotiable that makes the marriage undesirable. And for many people it's much more complicated than "if you have an affair I'm out of here," and so they choose to stay and figure it out if possible. It can be super complicated decision with children and finances and house payments and dividing up Christmas decorations, right? But whether the relationship is a stop or a go doesn't have to impact if you choose to show up with clean love or not. You can still choose to be loving for your own sake, for the reason that it feels so much better to love. And you will be more clear-headed when you're in a loving space than when you're in a place of judgment and anger and spite and resentment and hatred. Shocking but true, okay? 

13:22 

So let's say an affair happens and that is a non-negotiable for you. For sure there will be a lot of pain, there will be a lot of anguish, and you will spend time in victim mentality as you figuratively put your hands on your knees, try to catch your breath, wrap your head around what's happened, and feel all of the feels that are going to come with that. And you won't process all of this in a matter of days most likely unless you were already completely checked out and waiting for a good reason to leave. But for most people, an affair is a shock and a surprise and a very painful realization and it can take some time to process the painful emotions and that is to be expected. Take the time to do that. And when you feel that small nudge to get moving again, take your hands off your knees, stand up, and slowly start a step at a time figuring things out and progressing forward. 

14:16 

If you choose to move into a space of love here you will do all of this more quickly and with more clarity. That is a benefit of love. It brings clarity of mind and you will see more clearly the direction you want to go and how to get there. In contrast lots of difficulty motions keep our prefrontal cortex flooded and in overwhelm and that makes it difficult to make sense of what we want and why and to figure out what to do next. So, this is an amazing side benefit of choosing to step into clean love. It can help us figure out our relationships. And you get to decide what is okay and what is not okay and what boundaries you  want to set. 

15:03 

And there is no right or wrong in any decision like this, just decisions that will take you down different paths and create different experiences. Choosing to love doesn't mean you step back into full-fledged relationship. It may mean that you also choose to go. The goal is to learn how to be loving before you choose to leave. This learning how to be our better selves, our clean loving selves, is a superpower if we do choose to leave. Because we aren't leaving from anger or hatred. We aren't fed up and frustrated. We aren't feeling powerful in our decision because of strong negative emotions. But rather, we are feeling strong and powerful because of our love, because the driving force is love for ourselves, respecting ourselves enough to behave in alignment with the person that we really want to be. Being loving will sustain us when things get difficult in a relationship, much longer and also with more energy than relying on anger or hatred. Those emotions are exhausting and depleting our energy while love creates energy. Doing the work within ourselves to learn to love before we leave is powerful work, difficult work, and work worth doing for sure. And choosing to love is an important place if you choose to stay and work through the fallout of an affair or whatever else the marital challenge may be. 

16:33 

I know that I've used an affair as an example, but this could be any marital challenge in the relationship. But this doesn't mean you don't need to work through things. In fact, it means that although you are responding from a place of love, you also get to be very clear on what is okay and not okay, on what the way forward looks like, and on the relationship expectations that you have. Remember, clean love doesn't have expectations, but the relationship will have expectations. So learn to love cleanly, learn to love unconditionally, and also learn to have healthy boundaries that protect you from abuse or mistreatment of any kind, and that allow you to have wants and needs in the relationship, because your wants and needs are a thing, and that's a piece of having expectations in relationships. 

17:25 

Now, ultimately, we are each responsible for meeting our own wants and needs, and sometimes one way we can choose to seek to have them met is to include another person in fulfilling them. So yes, it is entirely appropriate to make requests, to ask the other person in our life to consider our wants and needs. However, they don't have to accommodate them. That is their agency as another adult in relationship. Some of these wants and needs they don't want to address. And we can just go, "okay, I can live with that." For example, I could put the want on the table for Sione to give me a 30 minute back rub every single night. Now, he could say yes to that and he could say no to that, because that's his right as an adult, right? And then I get to choose. Is that a non-negotiable request or is it negotiable? 

18:22 

So personally, for me, if he said no, I would decide that it was negotiable, right? That's a want or an expectation that I can decide he doesn't need to meet and then I would be responsible for figuring out something else if I felt that that was something that really had to happen every night, right? I could go to a massage place every night. I could do whatever in whatever way that that looks for me. But I could also put an expectation on the table that Sione never engaged in an emotional or physical affair with another person. And I also get to decide if that is negotiable or not. If that line were ever crossed, I would get to choose how to respond. And if I decided that it was non-negotiable and he did engage in that type of relationship, I could decide to leave the marriage and I could still maintain a space of clean love, a place where I could still love him, find compassion for his choices and still adhere to my boundary of that being a non-negotiable expectation. And just FYI, that's just not even a thing here in this relationship. Just don't want anybody to worry. 

19:33 

So clean love is not a space where we allow ourselves to be walked all over and where we put ourselves in a one-down position. Clean love is actually a space of equality, a place where we see our wants and needs as being just as important as the other person's and we show up in alignment with the type of person we really want to be making choices from this space. And it's also a place where we recognize the other person is a person of the same equality as us. So of course we will have expectations of our relationships, ideas of what is okay and not okay in these relationships and we get to learn how to separate out our love from the relationship. 

20:16 

It can be tricky for sure and I love to look to God and Christ for example in these types of things. I'm sure that when Judas Iscariot was plotting his betrayal of Christ that Christ knew of it and that he would be and that would be a challenge for the relationship, and yet Christ did not waver in his love for Judas. He allowed Judas the agency to make his own decision and Christ made his decision. Now, had Judas' decision not helped bring about the death of Christ, and Judas had betrayed him and Christ had not died, I can see Christ severing the intimate relationship of Judas being one of the Twelve and letting Judas know that what he did was not okay for the relationship. But it would not have been done in anger or malice. It would have been done with love and kindness. Christ would have clear boundaries on what was okay or not okay to stay in close relationship with him. 

21:16 

And I see God as being the same with us. I don't think He really gets disappointed in us because He doesn't have unmet expectations of us. And disappointment comes from unmet expectations. And being all-knowing, He knows the choices we will make, and thus He can't be disappointed in us. He doesn't have expectations that He knows we won't fulfill. His love for us is unwavering. It is a clean love that He offers to us without expectation that we behave or feel any particular way. God doesn't expect anything from us in order to love us. And yet to be in relationship with Him requires that we engage with Him in helpful ways. His love will always be there, although the relationship may not be if we don't invest in it. God is always there waiting for relationship, as we do with our adult children, right? We're always generally saying, "hey, listen, I'm here. I'm waiting. I'm ready to invest." But sometimes our children are not. And I'm sure it's kind of the same thing with God, right? God will always be there available for relationship when we're ready. But He doesn't force it on us. He waits patiently for when we are ready to step into it. 

22:33 

And this is how it can be in relationship with our people. When I look at adult children, they may not currently place a high value on our relationship. They are busy and focused on other things, their own lives. We get to continue to love them and also keep a space open for them for a time that they may be more interested in having a relationship with us. Today may not be that time that they want to invest time and energy but maybe later down the road they will decide that this relationship is something they desire and then they will start to engage. We can continue to feed our clean love for them. Continue to show up ready and willing for a relationship and then when or even if they are ever ready for it we are prepared to step into it with them. We can't control whether they or anyone else wants to be in relationship with us. We can only control how we show up in our half of the relationship. And this applies to adult children, spouses, siblings, stepchildren, people at work or church or the neighborhood or our friends. We can only control us. 

23:44 

And for me, I work really hard to clean up my love, to drop the expectations and just love because it feels so much better than continually being at angst with others because they aren't showing up the way that I would prefer. Learning to honor their agency to engage how they choose and learning to honor my agency to engage how I choose. And also realizing and accepting that these two wants may be very different. That's a big part of growing up into adulthood. Being able to separate out your clean love from the relationship will help you find more peace with where things are and to be super proud of the person that you're choosing to be. 

24:31 

I love growing up, don't you? Such an amazing space. 

24:36 

Alright, my friends, if you are interested in doing some one-on-one coaching with me, you can go to my website tanyahale.com. You can go to the top where it says "free consultation" and click on that button and you will have access to my calendar. You can get on my calendar and find a time that works for you. And let's have a chat. I am currently doing 90 minute consults now. I don't want that to freak you out if you're a little bit nervous, but I want you to realize that that is going to give us time to do some great coaching for you, which is what I love to do. It's going to give you an idea of what coaching looks like and feels like and how it can benefit you, which has got to be part of your decision-making process if you're going to invest money and time and energy in getting to work and in deciding whether I'm the coach that you want to work with. So, you can go there and sign up for that and let's get to work. 

25:34 

This is work. I promise you, it is hard, but at some point in our life, we decide that we're either going to have hard in our situation or we're going to have hard in figuring it out, and I would rather have hard in solution mode than hard in problem and victim mode, for sure. But that's me. It may not be you. But if you want to move into solution mode, if you want to move into figuring this out and getting into hero mode and get out of victim mode, let's have a chat. Contact me at tanyahale.com  and let's get to work. Have an awesome, awesome week, my friends, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

26:15 

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.