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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-02-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3fIZuW9P_M
when I was growing up there was a song the thing on the playgrounds and it went like that Casey and sell info sitting in a tree K. I. N. sense I N. G. first comes love then comes marriage then comes baby in a baby carriage and I'm like a little kid leave that fit that claimed the lives that they do relationship love marriage baby carriage cake
gotta and then we grew up and this is what my life turned out to be slightly more complicated write a love marriage to borders Dr battles love marriage co parent thing another man adds another deadline is you get the picture to do good in math and our past reader what you got there is that I've been married three times yeah three and divorced and what that's
supposed to mean is that I am a total failure and relations 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 no it's not that I didn't you know it's something I chose bad guys my first two husbands were amazing man who are now made wonderful women who aren't
me and my third husband well where friends on Facebook now so also well that ends well rate after the collapse of my third marriage in two thousand five 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 marry 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 wanna talk about inventing relations have and what I have found through a lot of trial and obviously many many many errors to me the thing that has transformed my life in la and that is this idea of marrying yourself so what does it mean to marry your style it's
a big idea that's his biggest marriage itself sat 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 bully and then you build a relationship with yourself to the point where you realize that your whole right now that there's no man woman job circumstance that
can happen to you that's gonna make you more whole because you already are in this changes your life so but I happened by now I'm sure at least some of you are wondering why you should be listening to a three time divorce say talk about marriage even though and I understand that and here's what I have to say about that is that what I've learned in
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 get if you do you're in their work economists say that again the places where you have your biggest challenges are the places where you have the most again so let me tell you a little bit about the person I actually needed to
marry myself I'm from Minneapolis %HESITATION will %HESITATION my mom was a prime you too ended an alcoholic she put me in foster care when I was three months old my dad was %HESITATION a criminal he was a drug dealer and a pan with a heart of gold actually they both have hearts of gold %HESITATION and he spent more less my whole life in prison and he
just got out of prison after his most recent sentence which twenty years and I spend you know until the age of nine hours and probably two dozen foster homes then the thing you need to know about the story exerting a lot of details obviously but I think you need to know is that I came out of that childhood with one along to never be laughed and
the way I was going to do that said 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 seventeen we got married a couple years later when I was nineteen he was a really good guy from the great family had an MBA I mean it
was so I no 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 sixteen year old son we have a we still have a wonderful relationship he's
a really good guy but after four years I left him to 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 he done so I'm not proud of that and then eight years later I got married again when I was fourteen and I was like well
came this feels right and if it let me tell you what felt right to a girl who within twenty four foster homes a guy who started to date after nine months of marriage essentially he started dating a twenty one year old girl what's here like okay imino would be funny if it weren't so tragic you have to have a sense that that's what you know we're
Facebook friends so here I am looking at this person that I just described at the terrible track record of relationships I mean 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 awhile and
see how it turns out you are going to do this till death do you part you're going to take the house so here the violence number one you're gonna marry yourself for richer for poorer this means you're going to love yourself right where you are you don't save yourself when you get to the corner of Hollywood and vine Anamaria you don't say when you lose ten
pounds then I'll let him and you don't say if you hadn't married that loser I would love you but since you then I'm sorry I think it's over when you marry yourself you lock yourself down that aisle exactly where you are and paradoxically I found that loving myself exactly where IBM is the only way to get where I'm going number two you're gonna merrier south for
better or for worse so what this means like most of us are willing to love ourselves for battered I mean share like I'm having a great hair day today I Love Me I've known I'm talking about I'm talking about per wears you know like the big life disappointments maybe you don't own a home you didn't get the career you wanted me beating graduate from college maybe
didn't get the relationship he wanted maybe it hasn't turned on the fight with your mom maybe 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 %HESITATION 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 ask for and you know the thing
is is that if you don't get it right the first time life will give it to you again ha ha ha bigger life is very generous about it's like I didn't get it the first time in the first marriage and I didn't get up if I can talk you know it's like okay maybe the third time I get it so inside that terrible experience of that
third marriage I learned something about in sickness and in how and what I learned is how to sit by my own bad side and how to hold my own hand and how to nurse my sound 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 south 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 him I had always been going through life like with the sense of lack I had I felt like I was kind of half a person in that I was missing something and I went into
my relationships hoping to solve this feeling that I have my entire life that I wasn't home unless someone Love Me and the truth was that I wasn't ever going to feel whole until I learned to love my sound those business of marrying yourself transforms every area of your life your business family relationships kid social relationships farms is 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 your sound and of course is what the world needs more on so when I married my self and I realize 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 now that's my new job because I don't need anything RD habit so when I take meetings it's all about like 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
discovered another person maybe for just one hour which of course brings a purple circle Xena could feel I that's about my love life you know they wanna know and that alone you know the answer is I'm still working on it aren't we all you know so this is where I am right now about three months ago I went on a first date in about thirty minutes
into the day I found myself %HESITATION paying attention not to whether he liked me but how I felt in his presence notice that I was like lighten happy in joking and as I reflected on the T. 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 like get someone
to like me you know I'm more interested in how I feel about me that how he feels about me not because I'm selfish but because the only relationship I'm ever gonna have another person is the one that I'm already having stop gonna have with them now so it turned out he liked me you know and %HESITATION where still together and it's cool and amazing you know
but like I've been married three times the slowdown yeah you know but the thing is I'm not trying to get security from him through marriage I'm and god forbid a baby carriage I am not only I'm 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
person like me I don't need to hear them from him because I've already heard them from myself in the way I see it it's like I took myself to the top of the mountain or maybe to the bottom of the ocean and I got down on one knee and I said I'll never leave it and now I'm married to the one person I really wanted to
