How to Have a Better Marriage with Maggie Reyes

• The need to address relationship issues early and how to be proactive with them (27:49)
• The role gratitude plays in transforming relationships (30:13)
• How cultural differences can enrich, rather than divide, relationships (31:14)
• Societal expectations around the institution of marriage (44:09)

“Sometimes people come to me that are like, ‘I need to figure this out. I’m not sure how this is going to go. I love this person, but I really need to see what I can do to make this relationship better.’ And my philosophy on that is always to ask this question, what is the best relationship I can have with this person? And then, do I want that? So we could clean out your side of the table; like, is there anything to be forgiven? Is there anything to detach about? Is there anything to accept, like, all of the things we’ve been talking about? Is there, do I need to introduce them to my country or whatever it is? And then from there, what’s the best relationship we can have? And then, do I want that? And sometimes the answer is ‘yes, and it’s great. We’re off to the races.’ And sometimes the answer is, ‘oh, I love this person, but this no longer works for me.’”

“67% of relationships have unsolvable problems… the first step is we identify, ‘Is this a problem you solve or a problem you manage?’ Because so many of us go in circles trying to solve something that’s inherently unsolvable.”

“Friendship is the core; friendship is the foundation of a healthy, thriving relationship….My best friend, I met her second grade, and we’re still best friends and have evolved with each other over time. So you can evolve with people over time.”

“[Here’s] the difference between dependency and desire. If I depend on this person for my happiness and I can’t have any unless they have some, then that doesn’t feel good for me and it doesn’t feel good for them either. But if I just desire to be with this person and share my life with them and know about them and have adventures with them, that feels really good to me and really good to them.”

“So step one is just accepting where we are with whatever this pattern is. Very often, not always, but many of our patterns, for all of us, are habits. And when they’re habits, that’s the best news ever, because habits can be broken. So when we’re like, ‘oh, this is just how it’s been done all this time, let’s see how we break the habit.’”

“Imagine that your partner came from another planet, because when we are from different cultures, people will do things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, they don’t do that on my planet…. [it’s] a good place to go in your brain to stay in compassion and curiosity.”

NICOLE

Hello,  friends.  Welcome  back  to  the  School  of  Self-Worth.  I’m  your  host,  Nicole  Tsong, and  I  literally  could  not  be  any  more  excited  about  today’s  episode  because  we  get  to  talk  to  someone  who  does  work  that  I  seriously  love, and  she’s  also  just  the  best  human.  Today,  I  am  so  excited  to  introduce  you  all  to  Maggie  Reyes.  Maggie  is  a  marriage  coach  who  helps  women  improve  their  marriages,  to  have  the  relationship  that  they  have  always  desired, and  Maggie  is  the  real  deal.

We  recently  spent  time  together,  in  person,  and  there’s  something  about  her  that  makes  me  want  to  ask  her  all  the  questions  about  relationships, because  she  truly  knows  her  stuff. I  literally  could  have  talked  to  her  forever,  and  had  to  force  myself  to  stop  asking  her  questions,  but  I  promise  you  there  are  so  many  rich  nuggets  in  here.

I’m  also  so excited  to  be  featuring  remarkable  Asian  American  women  this  month,  for  the  Asian  American  Pacific  Islander  Heritage  Month.  I’m  so  happy  you  get  to  benefit  from  this  truly  amazing  conversation  with  Maggie.

Also,  if  you’re  an  Asian  American  woman  who  wants  to  know  how  to  work  five  hour  days,  while  still  getting  your  dream  promotion,  DM  me  Five,  and  I’ve  got  something  for  you.

Okay  friends,  let’s  get  into  this  epic  conversation.  Welcome  to  the  School  of  Self-Worth,  a  podcast  for  ambitious  women  who  know  they  are  worthy  of  an  astoundingly  great  life.  Join  us  weekly  as  we  get  on  the  right  side  of  your  intuition,  redefine  success,  and  reclaim  your  self -worth. I’m  your  host  Nicole  Tsong,  an  award -winning  journalist  who  left  it  all  behind  to  become  a  best -selling  author  of  three  books  and  work -life  balance  expert  helping  ambitious  women  unlock  their  intuition  and  step  into  a  life  of  fulfilment  and  radical  joy.

Every  single  week,  I  will  bring  you  diverse  and  meaningful  conversations  with  successful  women  from  all  walks  of  life  who  share  insight  about  what  it  takes  to  be  brave,  joyful  and  authentic  every  day.  Every  episode  is  thoughtfully  designed  to  leave  you  feeling  empowered  with  tangible  tips  and  advice  that  will  lead  you  to  your  next  breakthrough.

 Welcome everybody! I am so excited to have Maggie here. Maggie, welcome. Thank you so much, I can’t wait to dig in. Yes, I was laughing that we have a marriage coach on the podcast, and I just basically started writing down all my questions I have about marriage, but before we do that, because everyone will get so much insight into my marriage with all the questions I have, I would love to just have you share a little bit about your own journey to how you got to this place where you really support women on marriage?

MAGGIE REYES

Okay, the edited version. Let’s see, I went through a ‘dark night of the soul’ when I used to work in human resources and I met my husband, then a good thing happened and a bad thing. Good thing was I felt this incredible sense of ‘rightness’. Some people feel that with a hobby or a passion. Maybe when you have kids or when you’re baking, you know you have this thing that you love doing that you just feel in the right place, at the right time and the right people – just an overwhelming sense of rightness – I felt that with him. And then it pointed out to me every part of my life that didn’t feel that way, and so that was the good thing with the bad thing. It was like I got some stuff to do. I literally went on a soul-searching chapter where I took aptitude tests, I did workshops, I just did a lot of things to try to figure out what would feel the same way as that felt, and that’s really how I landed very serendipitously into coaching.

Looking back, you know working in human resources I did a lot of mentoring and a lot of pieces of the things I do now, and the reason that I chose marriage as my specialty. Literally, my very first coach on stage at a workshop asked the question, “What could you talk about and never get bored of and never get bored of talking about?”  And I want to say this might have been in 2011 or 2012, like a long time ago, and I’m still talking about the same thing. I am not bored at all. I took coach training then I took continuing education. I totally am a relationship nerd. I love nerding out on different pieces of what makes relationships work and what doesn’t. That’s how I got here today with you.

NICOLE

Well, I’m going to take a side trip before we get into marriage, because you also shared some social media about how you used to work on this very high-end luxury ‘cruise’ ship. What is it? Could you just share a little about this, because it was just so fascinating.

MAGGIE REYES

Oh, so fun. Okay, so for 6 years I worked at a cruise line, a major cruise line, and then I left that job (and this actually kind of goes with the coaching story), because I thought I was going to leave and go coaching, but instead, I got poached by this company that does ultra luxury. It’s called ‘The World Residences at Sea’. It is the size of a cruise ship, but instead of having cabins on it, it has residences. It has 2 and 3-bedroom apartments just like you would have in a condo building or something like that. I like to compare it to like Ritz Carlton residences, except it’s at sea. So I worked in the corporate office, as a trying recruitment manager, which was super fun because our business cards would say ‘Trying Recruitment Manager of the World’, so they still laugh about that one. I got to really learn high-level service standards. I got to learn so many things that I actually apply some of those things now, and what I do now is I talk about having a 5-star relationship. And what is a 5 star relationship? A relationship that feels good most of the time. Because when you go to a rich college in our 4 seasons, even if they mess up your coffee order, you still feel good most of the time, and they fix it, right? Same idea. So yeah, it totally influences what I do now too.

NICOLE

Totally. Well I went down a little internet rabbit hole, because I was like “What is this?”, so I looked it up and read stories about it, and it’s fascinating. Cruises around the world, living in your luxury place and having relationships with your neighbors and the people on that ship.

MAGGIE REYES

Yeah, it’s so fun. For my very first trip to the ship, we were rolling out a compensation plan, as one does when one works in HR, and what one doesn’t normally do is the ship was in Bora Bora at the time, so they flew me and my boss from Miami to Bora Bora to do the compensation plan – helped the crew do all the stuff that we needed to do from the other side of things, so that made it really unique.

NICOLE

Yes, you know all about that super high-level service which is so cool, and that led you to the marriage piece. So let’s see, where do I want to start?  I mean I’m just really curious because I’ve been divorced and I’m in my second marriage, and we call it our beta – both of us. It’s interesting because there’s always some similarities,  I think, to commitment and being in a relationship, and then there’s so many vastly wild changes because of who he and I are together, and I’m curious if you could even just start to talk about whether it’s really around the people we are before we get married, and then the person you are and who you become within the marriage? Could you even talk about the evolution of us individually, because I think that’s a thing that sometimes feels, especially for people who got married younger or have been in really long-term relationships, like how do you navigate that? Because obviously like you and I both care very much about evolving and developing, and I would love to know a little bit more about how do you start to think about marriage, as we’re growing all the time and then you tie yourself to someone and expect them, for the fifty years that you’re together, to be totally aligned and happy – and that just seems like very far-fetched reality to me. So like how do we do that?

MAGGIE REYES

Okay, I have a few thoughts about that. So the first one I will say, is we decided as a society on the concept of ‘Till Death Do Us Part, when we got married at 17 and died at 30. Now, as a society, we have extensively prolonged our lifespan and not revisited any of the cultural narratives that we have about relationships and how long they should last, but they should be all of that piece right? Relative to history, marriage very much started out as a transaction – I’ll give you 2 cows. I want that farm. We’ll do this, we’ll do that. It’s relatively within modern history times, within the last hundred years or so, that marriage has been looked at as a place you come to because you love the person, versus as a transactional project that you carry out. So  to sort of give a little bit of frame around some of those thoughts about how marriage is evolving, and one of the things I do in my work is, I like to think about taking an institution where women were once property and then they own it – now how do I take ownership of this relationship? What do I want out of it? How do I want it to go? All those kinds of things. For the younger people listening to us, I’m 50. In 1973 when I was born, is when in the United States a woman could have a bank account and a credit card! It’s a very recent history that women weren’t dependent on their partners to exist as legal entities in the world, to move around the world freely. So that’s one side of it – the history side of it.

Then you asked the question about who we are before we get married, and who we are when we’re married. How do you navigate that? What do you do with that? So I love the research from the Gottman Institute. They have been going for about 40 years or something. Knowing what makes relationships work and what doesn’t, and then creating interventions around all that, and they’re a heavy influence in my work. I love using sort of evidence-based things, mixed with intuitive things, and one of the things that they say, and that I believe wholeheartedly, is friendship is the core. Friendship is the foundation of a healthy thriving relationship. So we all have friends that maybe we had since high school, since college, or maybe since grade school. My best friend I met when I was in second grade or something, and we’re still best friends and have evolved with each other over time. So you can evolve with people over time. The key is to know that you’re going to evolve over time, and not expect people, like all our high school yearbooks say, ‘to stay the same, never change’ – so crazy. But that expectation that we’re going to change, and then just being open to seeing what that looks like, and then renegotiating what the marriage is about – what we’re focused on, how we want to do things together. It absolutely can be something that is a lifetime, but it doesn’t have to be, and if it isn’t, there’s no shame in that.

NICOLE

Even as you were talking, it was starting to come up for me, we definitely evolve with our friendships, but we also let go of some of those friendships over a time, because that happens. I am a very loyal person and my relationships have certainly evolved over the years right? So then it comes up and I think that brings up this thing where we’re so attached. I mean I’ve been through divorce So my worst case scenario happened in marriage and then I think that almost freed me a lot more around it, like we are just going to keep committing to this relationship working over and over again, instead of assuming that it will be okay on its own, because that assumption did not work in my previous experience. But how do you be okay with maybe this friendship could evolve out?  I feel like people probably come to you because they want to keep it together. Yeah?

MAGGIE REYES

Yeah, I would say that sometimes the highest and best outcome for a relationship is for it to end, and in our society we have a cultural narrative that says length is greater than quality like, “Oh, we’ve been together forty years, but we’ve been miserable 30 of those years”. We value length, instead of looking at like it was an amazing relationship. It lasted 10 years and then I decided I wanted to do whatever. We don’t have that as a cultural narrative so conversations like this is where I think we normalize. Stuff like that. That’s one thing I would say is, as we evolve, my personal stance when I think about my own husband is, I want his happiness. If his happiness ever wasn’t with me, it would break my heart. I’d cry for months, probably for years, but I would still want his happiness.

I think that detachment can be very, very healthy. It actually helps you relax. It takes the weight off of some of the things that happened in the relationship. You’re like, “I just want what’s best for you”. I want what’s best for me too obviously, as well. I want to collaborate as much as we can for what’s best for both of us. But I think about it like the difference between dependency and desire. If I depend on this person for my happiness and I can’t have any unless they have some, then that doesn’t feel good for me, and it doesn’t feel good for them either. But if I just desire to be with this person and share my life with them, and know about them, and have adventures with them that feels really good to me and really good to them.

NICOLE

I love that definition, and you also said one of my favorite words that I love to talk about with my own clients, and that  is detachment. It’s so interesting because we talk about detachment a lot around in terms of pursuing goals and things that they’re really wanting within their careers, or how they’re changing what they’re doing with their careers. But I find that dating is another topic I love to talk about when we work  within my course, and it’s that detachment I really had to do a lot with dating, you know like be very detached, and then use evidence to be like, is this the right person for me, and then it was a really weird way to date, I have to say, like I used to have a whole bunch of Podcasts about that dating process, because it was really different from when I was younger.  I was in the choose me, make me feel special, kind of experience. But I’m curious, going back to this detachment phase, because sometimes it’s so funny to put detachment onto somebody you have chosen in this big celebration, to say you’re going to love ”Till Death Do Us Part “…like how to balance that place of loving them so much, and then really wanting to hang on to it. Especially if you have kids and you want things to last for the happiness of everybody involved, like what is the art of detachment daily in marriage?

MAGGIE REYES

I Love that. I think it’s being present to what’s true for you in the moment, and being present, by being present. What I mean is a lot of us go on autopilot – myself included – I’ve had chapters or seasons in my life when I’ve been sort of on autopilot. Taking ourselves off autopilot, putting ourselves in manual where we’re flying the plane and when we’re paying attention to “Do I still love spending time with this person? What’s going On? Do I think that their happiness matters?”  These are very deep, but very simple questions. Their happiness matters, and if it wasn’t with me, how would I feel about that? Would I want to be with them at all costs. Even if they were wildly unhappy –  when you really get logical about, like playing it all out. That wouldn’t make any sense, right? So that’s how I sort of think about it now in the day to day. I enjoy me personally. I enjoy my husband’s company. I am very effusive and enthusiastic about his presence. I’m not thinking I must be detached, like in that moment I’m enjoying the moment, but sort of philosophically, how I look. The overarching part of the relationship is there’s something that’s really healthy for me around, ‘I don’t need this, I want this’, and when you remove the need, it removes the graspy energy. It removes some of the impulse to control how it goes or how it should be. I’m Cuban, I’m Alleo!  I could be controlling. I always talk about controlling as really a quest for safety whenever we want to really over-control something. We just really feel unsafe. And as soon as we know that, it also loosens the grip on the energy a little bit, and we can see what we need in order to feel safer. So that idea of “I want this, but I don’t need this”, allows me to show up with so much loving care. Even more loving care actually, because I think it’s more authentic. It’s more transparent. It’s more sort of distilled to its essence versus going through the cloudiness of “I need this and that’s why I’m doing the things that I’m doing”.

NICOLE

I love your definition, how you explain talking about wanting control, because I see that with my clients all the time too. It’s like we’re trying to control life or outcomes that are completely outside of our control, and then how do you get back to that place of feeling safe ?

And then what would you say to the women who are listening and also the ones you work with, around if you don’t feel safe within there, what is it that will help you feel safe again in a relationship. I know that’s a broad question, because there’s so many things that could come into play, but what’s a way to start to feel that safety?

MAGGIE REYES

So I would say this. I like to preface a question like that which is like there’s nuance. Everybody’s situation is different, but I’ll say in most cases, most of the time, we want to go from an external sense of safety, like what my partner is doing is what makes me happier, makes me feel okay, to an internal sense of safety, which is I am okay, no matter what my partner is doing. I do cognitive work where we question our thoughts, we question how we’re thinking about the relationship. What our mindset is about it, and then we look for other stories or other narratives we can tell about what’s happening. So one of the first places that we go is okay, are you safe now, like right now I’m sitting in a room, you know I’m not in any imminent danger. We sort of look for different flavors of safety, instead of thinking of safety as an on/off switch,  like I either have it or I don’t. Maybe I’m not emotionally safe with this person. Maybe if I told them my deepest darkest secret, they would laugh at me, right? That could be a place where I don’t have emotional or psychological safety with that person. But I don’t have to tell them that right? And if I know ahead of time that that’s likely to happen, I could decide how I approach it, and I could look for which ways am I currently safe right now? That would be the place where I would start with something like that.

NICOLE

So, so helpful for anyone who’s listening. How do you find your own experience of that, and then start to address with your partner? I have so many questions for you Maggie. It can go in so many directions, because I feel like relationship is, over time, such a tangled web right? like we have all these patterns and things that start to come up in our relationships, and how do we start to break them, because sometimes my clients come to me with this too. They’re like, “Oh well he keeps doing this over and over again and this keeps happening over and over again”. When you are getting that from your clients as well, patterns that are happening in the relationship and they keep saying the other person is the cause of that. How do you help people start to break those patterns within the relationship?

MAGGIE REYES

So again, just prefacing that there’s nuance to these things. But when someone tells me the other person has to change, we first acknowledge that we cannot control the other person, but what is in our control is how we’re responding. How we’re reacting, how we’re leading, how we’re showing up to the situation. So a lot of the work that I do is really based on systems theory, which is when one element in a system changes the other elements’ response to that change. This is kind of like the 4-minute mile. Somebody ran a 4-minute, now we can all run a 4-minute mile. Our mind is sort of expanded by what’s possible, by what we see in front of us. So if someone says there’s something happening, that’s now a pattern that happens over and over and over again, there’s a couple of ways, like my first interventions and there could be others, right? But my first interventions are, ‘okay, so let’s accept this is how it is today. This is how they process the world. This is what they do whatever the thing is that’s going on’. So the first layer is not to argue with reality. There’s an author named Byron Katie, that says whenever you argue with reality you’re just going to lose, every time. So instead of arguing with reality, be like this is what’s happening today, we have to agree with it.

We don’t have to condone it. It’s not about that. It’s just saying like the sky is blue, but I want to take a picture, and I want the sky to be purple in my picture. I’m going to add a filter. I can’t do that. I can’t make any forward motion towards having a purple sky picture until I acknowledge that it’s blue, and then choose which filter I’m going to use for that picture. If I think but it should be purple, it’s sunset, why isn’t it purple? Like I never get the picture taken, like nothing happens. So step one is just accepting where we are with whatever this pattern is. Very often, many of our patterns for all of us are habits, and when they’re habits, it’s the best news ever, because habits can be broken. So when we’re like, “Oh this is just how it’s been done all this time”. Let’s see how we break the habit. What do we do to change the routine. How do we do it? We meet at a different time? Do we talk about it in a different way? Do we present some other piece of information, depending on what it is? That’s going on?

So the second thing is, is it a habit? Can it be broken? If it’s not a habit, sometimes our partners do things as we do as well, because of childhood trauma, because of issues we went through, because of something we have unhealed, that we’re walking around wounded with or something. Can we look at that person with compassion and say, “Damn, they’re having a really bad season in their life. How do we want to show up for that bad season that they’re having?” So that’s another place – like we’ve accepted it. We’ve checked if it’s a habit and now we have compassion for it. Is there any space for that here? Sometimes there isn’t, sometimes it’s just an injustice and it’s wrong. There’s no compassion. Great, so if that’s the case is there a place where we have not expressed our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ clearly? Like, I’m not available for this, I am available for that. I’m no longer available for the other. This is not going to work for me anymore. Something that I do coach on a lot, is helping my client just have the words. Very simple words to say ‘you know what I know, we did it this way for the last ten years, that no longer works for me, here’s what we can do, or these are some options, and then what are your options? or what’s coming up for you with the other person’. So that’s sort of like with nuance, that every situation is different, but those are just some places where people could start to sort of think through whatever their situation is.

NICOLE

Well I’m going to share something, because I feel like you talked about something that I did with my husband recently, and that it helped me because we were having an argument, as people do. We were traveling in Taiwan with my family, and I was the person translating everything, because I’m like doing the Chinese and he’s just  generally looking at where we’re going, and we ended up on the wrong train. I felt like he had really rushed me, and I was just mad, I was like kind of fuming because now we were going to be late. We were going the wrong way. And then I was sitting there and thinking, “Okay Nicole, like you could just be here and be mad at him and have a horrible rest of your evening, or you could figure this out”. Then I think I went back to him, and I was like look, this is what happened, and I need you to just not do that next time, don’t rush me, and he’s like okay, I’m sorry. Then he’s like, you need to tell me next time we’re getting on the wrong train. Because he’s just kind of ‘let’s go!’, and I got on the train, instead of being like ‘this is not our train’. So it was interesting, because I had this whole thing I was upset about, but he’s like you also did not communicate with me in that moment, and then it was over, right? And it was a very fast 10 minute turnaround, but it was an interesting. It was an interesting example of what I think you’re saying, where we both had to look at what we were doing, to just resolve and move on, instead of it being a fight all night.

MAGGIE REYES

Yes, good, and when you’re able to do that and say, ‘hey, next time I’d love this’, and he’s able to say, ‘hey, next time I’d love this’. But that’s beautiful collaboration. That’s what friends do right? That’s why that core is friendship! Because in friendship you could talk to each other, you could make requests, you can make new plans, you can do something different. And then brilliant what you did, because most people would then argue the whole week about the thing that happened on the train on the first day, versus like, so it happened, and now we’re moving on.

NICOLE

Yeah, but I will point out that I was definitely stewing, and I had to like pull myself together, because I think that’s also part of it. You get into this mad and frustrated at a partner, like it’s very normal, it’s just part of your day-to-day, but then for me it was like not letting it take over. I had to actually tell myself , “Nicole, don’t”. Because now you’re going to go into this big family dinner and you’re going to be mad at him, and that’s not going to be great right? So get it together. What do you need? And it’s like I needed to tell him he didn’t apologize to me, and he’s like ‘okay’. So then next time I will, and then next time you tell me something else? Okay.

So I would love to take a slightly different tack. He and I have a lot of structure built into our relationship, which came out of me like really personally developing my way through dating and putting our relationship together, and I’m curious, do you do that with your clients, or do you recommend that building in certain types of conversations or ways of talking about your relationship, to help facilitate the friendship or where the relationship is going? We have weekly appreciations with each other where we acknowledge each other, and then we have quarterly check-ins on our marriage, where we just sit down and talk about how we’re feeling and what’s going on with us. Tell me what you mean by having a lot of structure?

MAGGIE REYES

Love it. That’s so good. Okay, great. So I really take a fingerprint approach. Everybody has them, but they’re all different, and so for some people they love having the quarterly meeting, and for some people they just continuously talk about what’s going on, so a quarterly meeting would be like overkill for that mark. Some people express appreciation all the time, and some people need to learn how to express appreciation. For example in the group program that I run, we do a 30 day appreciation challenge and a little pdf, where you get to check it off and have the dopamine hit of checking it off each day. With the gratitude challenge, what happens is a lot of people think they have to wait till every issue is resolved before they can express kindness, or gratitude, or appreciation, and we just nip that in the bud. It’s like the way you resolve issues, by cultivating the friendship, whatever that looks like. I don’t have a particular way. What I say is, what does friendship mean to you? What would it look like if you were thriving? Some people love to ride bikes together, other people love to have political intellectual discussions about things, so it could be so many different ways, but I would say the important core is, whenever I talk to someone who’s in distress in a relationship that really isn’t working well, I ask them how much together time do they have? Time without kids or family or other people, where they just enjoy each other’s company. And no-one, in the years that I’ve done this, has ever told me they have plenty of time – it’s always that they have very little time together, and the time they have together isn’t good.

So some kind of together time is really important, and sometimes we have to do some preliminary work for that time. If you’ve had strife, or it’s been challenging, especially if it’s been for a prolonged period of time, is why we introduced the gratitude challenge. It’s like, ”Hey, remember you married that person you thought they were a good idea, they have some qualities that you thought were okay, right?”

Let’s start looking for those again. Let’s start seeing what’s happening, and let’s do that proactively, intentionally, on purpose, and then let’s see how that helps you build some more rapport with that person.

NICOLE

Yeah, this is so great. So I saw this couple when we were out at dinner the other day, who were sitting next to each other, but apart, on their phones, but didn’t talk to each other. I was like, are they even here together? Eventually their food came, and they had some drinks, and then they started to engage. But it wasn’t even that they weren’t talking to each other, because sometimes my husband and I don’t talk either  while we’re sitting down, but it was just like this energy there, and I’m curious about  if that ever happens, how do we start to break it? And it sounds like what you’re saying is, gratitude and appreciation is one of the roads to really start to break that.

MAGGIE REYES

It’s one of the glues. It’s a total glue. I don’t have the exact quote with me, but there’s a journal of relationship science or something like that, that did a study that gratitude is so powerful, that if you have other issues in the relationship, but you have gratitude, it helps keep the relationship together.  It is such a powerful glue. Think about it. Gratitude = Appreciation. What is appreciation? Appreciation is love expressed. So cultivating it, expressing it on purpose, is so, so important.

NICOLE

Huge, amazing. So I’m in an interracial relationship, and I’m curious if you have anything that you support people with, particularly around navigating cultural differences, and I know every relationship has cultural differences, whether you’re the same race or not, because we all come from different families. But if there’s anything specifically that you can talk about, or help people with, when they’re navigating that? How do you experience that?

MAGGIE REYES

Here’s the analogies that I like to use: Imagine that your partner came from another planet, because when we are from different cultures, people will do things that we have no form of reference for, like they don’t do that on my planet, so it’s like why do you do this? And the holidays? Or you celebrate this other thing that I’ve never heard of before, whatever the case may be, or sometimes the family customs. It’s not even necessarily interracial or intercultural. I remember a friend of mine told me this story that in her house, when she was growing up, when you got the last slice of bread, the baked part, everybody in the house loved it and looked forward to it, so you got like a special treat if you got the first or the last slice of the bread. And then the neighbor came over and they gave him the last slice of the bread, and in his house you always threw that slice away! So he was offended. He’s like why are they giving me the bad slice of the bread? You’re trying to honor the person, but that kind of thing can happen, no matter what cultural make up the relationship has. So a good place to go in your brain, to stay in compassion and curiosity, is imagine they’re from another planet. They have a whole different set of customs and ideas and when you have those little clashy moments, if you can have the presence of mind to take a minute to take a breath and say, “Hey, what does this mean in your culture when you were growing up?”  What was the story your family told about this thing, or “Hey, you know in my culture, we never do it this way because of this reason, would you be willing to do something this other way?” When we’re with my parents or when we’re at an official event or something like that, there’s also that element of collaboration,  of how do we honor each other’s cultures.

NICOLE

I love that example of the bread, because it’s so true, right?  My family likes the burned rice at the bottom of the rice pot, like it’s a big deal, and you like make it into a desserty thing, and most people say it’s burned rice, and we think it’s delicious.

MAGGIE REYES

Little things like that. ‘Oh, I’m going to need a little extra education to understand, or Oh, you’re honoring me by giving me the burnt rice that my family might throw away’, or whatever. it’s like that little extra piece of  education of, ‘Come into my world. Let me show you my planet. My planet’s amazing, right?’ You can use it as a way to connect as well, and that brings me to something I talk about a lot. Not even in inter- anything relationships, just in any relationship, I call it the microscopic truth. And I started calling it that, because there are these tiny things that really matter that we never tell our partners, and that when we start telling our partners these things, it sort of smooths the edges off things, and I’ll give you an example of that: So I’m a life coach, I often will talk to people when they’re in distress. I might have a day where everybody cries on my couch, right? It’s like for different reasons you know, and sometimes it’s me who cries from all the things, right? Then my husband will come home, and be like a little energizer bunny rabbit, ready to share the day, ready to talk about things, like ready to go! And I’ll be more like a lion who needs to sleep for 12 hours and recover, and it would be really weird right? If he just came home and I said nothing to him? So I started telling him that today was very emotional, and I had to just hold space and be present for a lot of emotions. and I’m going to need a break. Then we can hang out the microscopic truth of what was happening for me, so he doesn’t start making up a story. Or something has happened, or what did he do that he should be worried about, because I’m not excited, right? Those little microscopic things – and I just challenge everybody listening, whether it’s with a romantic partner or whether it’s with your cousin, or your friend, or co-worker… What is a little microscopic truth that you wouldn’t normally share, but that could be really useful for the other person to know?

NICOLE

I love that, and I think especially about friendships, usually we don’t see them enough that we might push through, because sometimes when you’re hanging with your friends, you’re like I’m going to push through and try to be my best, but with your partner, you don’t want to push through, ‘I’m exhausted, you live with me’, etc. Just saying like ‘I need this, because of this’, could make such a difference, such a profound impact. I’m curious now, when people come to you in terms of long-term sustaining of relationships and getting help for that, is it when their marriages are on the verge of divorce, or they’re really stressed out? What tends to be the type of person coming in?

MAGGIE REYES

Usually it’s people who deeply value their relationship. There’s still love for their partner. However, there’s some things happening, and if they keep happening, are not good. They need to find a way to work through what those things are, so I always say there’s a foundation of love. But maybe there’s a little bit of roommate syndrome. We haven’t really been intentional about the relationship. We’re sort of co-existing, but we want to really rekindle the spark. So Sometimes we’re just arguing about stupid stuff. You know we just have the habit of arguing, and we need to not do that anymore. Sometimes a deeper something has changed in your life, maybe empty nest or some new chapter. You have a different job, or a different business, or something’s going on where you sort of have to redraw the lines of, “Wait. What are we doing here? What does it look like in our next chapter of the relationship?” Sometimes people do come to me that are like, “I need to figure this out, I’m not sure how this is going to go. I love this person, but I really need to see what I can do to make this relationship better”. And my philosophy on that is always to ask this question:  What is the best relationship I can have with this person? And then, do I want that? So we could clean out your side of the table. We clean out like, is there anything to be forgiven? Is there anything to detach about? Is there anything to accept, like all of the things we’ve been talking about? Do I need to introduce them to my country, or whatever it is. And then from there, what’s the best relationship we can have, and that I want? And sometimes the answer is ‘yes, it’s great’. Sometimes the answer is ‘oh I love this person, but this no longer works for me’.

NICOLE

That’s super helpful, because I’m curious, do you believe then for people that we always need support in our relationships long-term, having a therapist or a coach or whoever it is?

MAGGIE REYES

I think always is a long time. To use ‘always’ in general absolutes, is something I am very sort of wary about. I think that most of us don’t learn how to be in relationship with people, and it’s really useful, whether we take a course, whether we do a coaching program, whether we get in a group and do a book club, do exercises together or whatever, whatever format calls to you. There are some things that will be so much easier when you have some kind of support. Whatever kind of support is meaningful to you. And I was thinking about this because I’m going to physical therapy for my knee, and I’ve been struggling with my knee for probably 3 years now, and at first I didn’t even know what was wrong. I went to the doctor and then the doctor’s like ‘Ooh, there’s like a little misalignment’ and I was so scared to go to physical therapy. That was basically resolved in twelve weeks, and I carried it around for 3 years, and I was like well, I’m so glad I’m doing this.

In marriage, that’s quoting Gottman’s again. They’ve done some research that most people wait six years struggling in their relationship, before they actually reach out to a coach or a counselor or get some kind of support, and just anecdotally, whenever I work with people and ask when the problems began, zero number of people have ever said, ‘yesterday!’  It’s never happened. They’re like, oh this has been going on for 12 years right, so anyone listening to us, you’re already ahead of the game because you’re listening to a podcast like this, you’re engaged with being intentional about your life  –  yay, you gold stars!  So yes, I think I believe wholeheartedly in support, and hopefully as soon as you feel a discomfort or that something’s not quite right, the sooner you get it – whether it’s physical or it’s emotional – the sooner the intervention, the sooner the recovery across the board.

NICOLE

Well, you also answered another question that was percolating a little for me around  7 years often being the time where relationships can tend to make it or break at that  happens to be around the time where people get really stressed out and then can’t handle it. But that also leads me to another question, because I also find too that the early years of having children can be very stressful on relationships, and I’m curious if those women tend to come to you because when you have a kid under 5, it can be like so much, so to also get support on top of it, but what do you find is needed more during that period for the relationship to sustain itself?

MAGGIE REYES

Listen, I have so many thoughts about this, so I’m just going to tell you my thoughts first, and then we’ll talk about the second part, because I think society just got it wrong – our little experiment of the way we have organized family in cities and how we live and all that. I love Star Trek and all those like sci-fi things, and I think we need to start thinking afresh about a new form of society, just like clean slate it. It is a huge stressor, especially that most of the time it falls to women to be the primary parent. It is a massively huge stress around the relationship in so many countless ways, and in so many ways we live in an infrastructure that we’re thrust into, “This is how it works”, so to speak. It really is overwhelming on so many levels for so many people, and I just want to acknowledge anybody who’s listening to us that feels that way. I think you are swimming in an ocean where you’re just doing the best you can, to keep afloat and keep going. But it’s not just you. It’s the context in which you were born. The society in which you live, sort of our Western Urbanized Developed Society, or whatever we want to call it. I think we got it wrong. Just as a baseline, that’s my philosophy about it.

So what are we doing? As for me, as a coach, I’m trying to solve an infrastructural problem individually, which is something that women do all the time, almost everywhere they go. I have so many clients that are doctors, and there’s such a health crisis, both on the patient side and the doctor’s side of things. The long hours they have, and how they don’t have a lot of time for charting and all these different stressors that they have to go through. That is just crazy. Another experiment that doesn’t work is the way we do health care, at least in the United States. It doesn’t work. It has failed. Can we solve the infrastructural problem, and the structural issue in a structural way? Maybe if we keep having conversations like this, and a bunch of really like smart people get together and say, “Hey, what if we tried this and then we start doing things differently, in the meantime we do what we can where we are with what we have”. And what I would say is creativity, resourcefulness, and patience is essential for every age, including with kids. That’s just like the philosophical side when someone comes to me and they’re in distress, and I do coach people that have kids of all ages, or no kids, or whatever. We look at what’s available to them right now – like what is in your control. What do I need to accept, what can I change. What can I renegotiate? We make it as simple as we possibly can and oftentimes as a coach, what I look for is just relief. If you’re overwhelmed. You’re overextended. You have all this going on. We’re not looking for the Fifth Nirvana of Happiness. At this point what would bring you relief? Let’s come back to baseline and then from there we can see what other things we can explore, who’s got the right answer, but I have a lot of thoughts about that one.

NICOLE

Well, I love what your thoughts are, because I feel like that’s the same thing in my experience of seeing relationships – like that’s such a big stressor for my clients too, right? They’re just overwhelmed by the child care situation. Expectations whether they’re earning enough, like there’s so much stuff that comes up for women, and then if they’re working, not having enough time with their kids, and then they don’t even really think about the partnership because they’re so consumed. I’m sure a marriage really can suffer during that period.

MAGGIE REYES

One of the things you mentioned is the ‘mom guilt rate’. The guilt of when I am working, then I feel bad, and all that. So one of the tools that I developed is called ‘internalized patriarchy relationship inventory’, where we take some assumptions and then we work through some areas of our life, and we look at the ways that living in a patriarchal society is affecting our marriage and our life, and in that inventory one of the things that I say is, okay we live in a society where if you say something like, ‘mom guilt’, everybody knows what you’re talking about. Now when was the last time Nicole, that you had a conversation with anyone about dad guilt?

NICOLE

I was just thinking that when you started saying like I wonder if this is true for dads – I mean I actually think that dads do have guilt. Yeah.

MAGGIE REYES

I do think they have it, but it’s not a thing that as a society we’re like worried about solving, right? So absolutely, there are amazing men in this world who love their kids, who miss their kids. I love men, and this is not about not loving them. This is about noticing the narratives that we have about what a mother should be, and it’s like if you said a woman had a baby, and decided to go part-time in her job, it would be so matter of fact, you wouldn’t even question it. We would just be like, “Oh….so what are we having for lunch?” And if you said 20 men had kids and all these 20 men decided to go part-time in their jobs, you’d be more like, “That’s what I’m talking about”.

NICOLE

Totally, and then that’s not something that you can resolve. But then how can you help the women who are in that situation, to figure out what’s best for them, but also remembering the context that they’re existing in?

MAGGIE REYES

The context that you’re in, and one of my favorite tools that I use a lot when I’m coaching, which exactly precisely helps with something that feels as heavy as this can feel, is really inspired by another piece of research from the Gottman’s, which is that 67% of relationships have unsolvable problems, so spenders marry savers, night owls marry early risers, people with checklists marry the messy people, like all of that kind of stuff, that’s not going to change. So 67% of people have unsolvable problems. So I was thinking about this, and wait, when we’re troubleshooting, when we’re trying to figure out how to find relief like we’ve been talking about, what if the first step is to identify if this is a problem you solve, or a problem you manage?

Many of us go in circles trying to solve something that’s inherently unsolvable and we make no progress, and feel awful. But when we’re able to say, wait, this isn’t solvable, what I need to do is manage this. Okay, I am a night owl, I married an early riser. What are we going to do, are we going to see each other? Okay, we’ll have lunch together from now on, or whatever it is, versus needing to get this person who is never up at midnight, to stay up until midnight? Well, that’s never going to happen and then I’ll be all upset about it. That idea of, is this a problem I solve, or is this a problem I manage –  I just invite everyone to take that into your week and just play with it, and just see what happens.

NICOLE

I love that statistically 67% of relationship issues are not solvable, and I’m going to bring that forward into any conversation I have with my husband about stuff that’s going on. It’s like, how do you understand them. I will say one thing I’ve really learned, and obviously we’re newlyweds, married less than year at the time of this taping, but I feel one of the things from what I’ve read and lots of influences from it, is to be curious about your partner, be curious about that human, and what you don’t know about them and what you can discover about them, or if something is going on like how can I be curious about his history, or something that happened in his life, or how he thinks about things, and to not just be mad about it. Just to say okay, like how can we move ourselves through this conversation as like a learning, versus ‘you know I’m right, you’re wrong’, kind of a deal.

Well Maggie, what a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing all of your thoughts, and it’s time now for our rapid fire questions. Are you ready?

MAGGIE REYES

Yes, a hundred percent. I am ready, this sounds fun.

NICOLE

First one is, what was the last thing you watched on TV?

MAGGIE REYES

Oh my goodness. What was the last thing I watched on TV, ah the pressure. I watched ‘So help me Todd’. It’s a lawyers show on CBS with a mom and her son who’s a private Investigator and it’s a dramedy kind of thing, they have funny things that happen. Very nice show.

NICOLE

Awesome! Thank you, I guess this is how I get all my TV recommendations, with this pod. Okay, second question, what is on your nightstand?

MAGGIE REYES

Many things. There’s a lamp. There’s a clock. There’s probably 2 cups there right now, because I’m a cup collector and I use a cup for every single day. What are those things called …. eye covers. Yeah, and I have a sleep apnoea, so there’s a sleep machine, yeah.

NICOLE

Beautiful. Thank you! Okay when is the last time you tried something new, and what was it?

MAGGIE REYES

The last time I tried something new? Well this show, ‘So help me Todd’. We just started watching it two days ago, so that comes to mind. I am pretty sure last night at dinner, I tried something I have never tasted before.

NICOLE

I love that new food thing. Okay, and then the last one, what are your top 3 most used emojis on your phone?.

MAGGIE REYES

Oh wait, let me pull out my phone and get the official answer. Okay, I just accidentally sent you an emoji because I did it wrong, so here we go. I have the heart, I have the face with the 3 little hearts around it, and I have the cracking up face.

NICOLE

Oh I love it. Those are some of my favorites as well.

Amazing. Well Maggie, what a joy to have you on. What’s the best way people can find out more about you, or get something from you. What’s the best way to reach you?

MAGGIE REYES

So definitely my website, maggiereyes.com. Whatever I’m up to will definitely be there. I also wrote a book called ‘The Questions for Couples Journal’. It’s on Amazon, and  I’m so proud that it has over three thousand reviews –  and it’s about getting to know your partner better. So just like this fun interchange that we had that made us both laugh. It was so beautiful, I love questions – so you can go to Amazon and get ‘The Questions for Couples Journal’, and that would be amazing too.

NICOLE

Yes, go check that out. I’m going to pick that up because I love all couples’ relationship things.

So Maggie thank you so much for being here. What an honor and a joy to have you on the podcast. We’re so happy to have you here.

MAGGIE REYES

Awesome! Thank you, Bye everyone.

NICOLE

Thank  you  so  much  for  tuning  into  today’s  episode.  Before  you  go,  don’t  forget  if  you  are  a  high- achieving  woman  who  wants  to  uncover  your  biggest  blind  spots,  preventing  fast,  intuitive  decisions,  I’ve  got  a  72- second  assessment  for  you.

So  make  sure  to  DM  me  quiz  at @nicoletsong on Instagram.  Thank  you  for  being  here  and  for  listening.  We  read  every  note  that  we  get  from  you  about  how  the  podcast  is  making  a  difference  in  your  life.

Please  know  how  much  we  appreciate  each  and  every  one  of  you.  Until  next  time,  I’m  Nicole  Tsong,  and  this  is  the  School  of  Self -Worth.