Dear Reader,
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Some years ago I read an essay in The New York Times by Amy Sutherland called "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage." She had spent time with the trainers who work with dolphins and killer whales... Then, she decided to take her cues from them and praise her husband for all the good things he did, too.
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A lil' experiment, so to speak.

Guess what. Their marriage turned around.

A dolphin keeps doing good things because of the praise and the clapping. As Amy praised and clapped, two things happened. She began to recognize the many good things about her spouse she had been ignoring or taking for granted. And, he finally felt recognized and appreciated.

So many of us do the opposite.

We are literally trained, in our brains, to see the negative. It's a survival skill. But it works against us in our relationships. We get disappointed that our partner is only a human instead of a demigod. Their flaws begin to outsize what first drew us to them.

Here's why this matters so much in my work.

But before I go there, I want to pause to put a pin in the fact that an affair is never caused by a spouse who forgot to clap. An affair is a choice one person makes, and our responses to stimuli can be vast. An affair is just one option.

But if you're the one in the affair, look at how your trained brain is working right now. At home, it's counting flaws. In the affair, it's clapping.

The pattern is that an affair makes a spouse compare a full human being, seen up close for years, with a person you see at their best, in the tension of an illicit relationship. That's one of the hugest blind spots that makes an affair create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Any human, given enough time and enough closeness, becomes a full human. The counting of the negatives starts again, in any relationship, because the brain doing the counting is yours. It's human nature.

Relationships aren't the solution to who we are. We are the solution to who we are. Better relationships require enough work on yourself to see where your internal state ends and another person begins. And that's the only place confident decisions about relationships come from.

If you were betrayed, please don't read this as a list of what you should have clapped for. It isn't. What you can use is this: a reminder that you need exactly what those dolphins did. Clap for yourself. Recognize the good in yourself that you've ignored or taken for granted.

If you're the affair partner, you're often being clapped for, but without tangible change in the relationship. It feels wonderful to be this beloved, but the dissonance around the relationship container is damaging.

Ultimately, we're really motivated by praise, admiration, and appreciation. We're de-motivated by criticism, complaint, and complacency.

So here's my question for the week. Who in your life are you counting flaws on? And what would happen if, for seven days, you clapped instead?

Hit reply and tell me who you're going to clap for. Maybe, it's you. We treat people on the outside of us the same way we treat ourselves; harshly, generously, patiently, impatiently.

Until next week,
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Lauren

P.S. If you're the one in the affair and you've found yourself counting the negatives instead of clapping, and you want to correct for it to trust your judgment enough to move toward a sound decision, that's what The Blindspot Blueprint is for.

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