Catherine: The thing I’ve been thinking about is that mature love is courageous love. Infatuation and validation trades don’t require courage. Loving like a grown-up does. Absolute safety is a childlike expectation of love. If you had very brave, very grown parents, you might start life feeling safe. Most of us didn’t. So we have to step into love without guarantees; the felt safety comes after growth and bravery, not before.James: I’ve thought of courage as feeling afraid and doing it anyway. I agree safety in relationships follows from building a solid self. “I don’t feel safe” is largely about me, not you. For me, a solid self means confidence that I can take care of myself—ultimately, that’s why I’m safe as an adult. Depending on a partner to “take care of me like a child” isn’t stable; even if it worked, I could lose them.Catherine: Exactly. You can’t love your spouse well until you could even handle losing them. Otherwise you grip the relationship like a child. Mature love rests on “I can also take care of me.”James: Love demands courage because love is bounded by time. Even in the best case, one of us dies first. If I’m operating from insecurity and abandonment fears, that dread never stops. The only viable answer to “Who will take care of me if they leave or die?” is “I will.”Catherine: Which is a hard adult shift—learning to trust yourself. One challenge of marrying young is you may never have had to build that confidence by taking care of yourself first. Pragmatics aren’t enough; can you build a thriving life and soothe your own pain?James: People ask how to “self-soothe.” It’s hard to reduce to steps. Some teachers say “soothe yourself,” but resist oversimplifying it.Catherine: He gets a bit more granular in Already Free–style thinking: feet on the floor, breathe, stay with intensity. For me, self-soothing usually starts with self-compassion—talking to myself kindly like I would with a hurting child. When my son broke his arm, I couldn’t remove the pain, but I stayed present and kind the whole drive. I try to do the same for myself.James: In Already Free (Buddhist meets Western therapy), the Western move is “reduce distress,” the Buddhist move is “change the meaning you give it.” I’ve been experimenting with “permission to feel” humiliation or embarrassment for the rest of my life—yielding to the reality that distress comes with loving and being loved, and reframing it.Catherine: I call that “dropping the argument with reality.” If we accept we’ll feel boredom, loneliness, insecurity off and on for decades, we can run experiments to hurt less or move through it faster—without the desperation that it must disappear now.James: Surrender reduces intensity by changing meaning. Known pain (a sunburn) hurts less than mysterious pain at 4 a.m. Likewise, expecting distress—especially if we pursue intimacy—makes it more workable. If I push people away, I reduce intensity but also lose intimacy.Catherine: Right. Closeness brings us into closer contact with old pain. If we reject that truth, we’ll be tempted to avoid people.James: Our culture often implies relationships should be pain-free. That’s false. Distress is part of the system. So the courage is choosing, repeatedly, to get closer to you knowing it brings me closer to pain. Sometimes it helps to rename “unpleasant” as simply “intense.”Catherine: Many meaningful pursuits are intense in a difficult way—climbing a mountain versus helicoptering up. We’re built for challenge; even our entertainment craves it. Acts of courage move us.James: In relationships my recurring courage task is revealing more of myself. I’m strategic about what I show and hide. Courage is letting myself be plainly seen.Catherine: One of the hardest things to reveal is something you know is a problem in yourself that you’re not sure you can stop yet. Owning “I can be mean” can feel like handing over ammo that could be used against you. But if I won’t own it, I can’t change it; secrecy blocks growth.James: Small example: I snapped at Molly about testing the cabin internet. She had no ill intent; I was irritated that she didn’t read my mind. I caught it and owned it, instead of framing her as wrong. That’s courage too—exposing my part instead of positioning myself as innocent.Catherine: Another aspect of courage is not pushing your partner’s buttons even when you know how. Button-pushing keeps the other person reactive, gives you control, and gets you off the hook from your own values.James: Yes. We all know our partner’s triggers and can keep them in a reactive, defensive loop. That’s control, not love.Catherine: The bigger the gap between where your relationship is and where you want it, the more courage it takes—especially if you grew up with coldness or harshness. You have to see what you didn’t get and then love in ways you weren’t loved.James: It’s hard to imagine “better” without examples. You almost need to see consistent care and courage to believe in it.Catherine: Fiction helps: families in literature, even a show like Ted Lasso, where people grow from suspicion into care and accountability.James: Improv has rules that map to families: assume competence, care about your scene partner, build a coherent world together, and act in ways that invite the best in the other. Ask: does this bring out your partner’s best, even if the first response is defensive?Catherine: “What are you inviting?” is the right question. Even saying “I already checked the internet” can be said in a way that invites warmth or invites a fight.James: My snap was the old, automatic pathway. You can’t always delete those pathways, but you can strengthen new ones until they become your default.Catherine: Under stress we regress to old routes. Part of the work is grieving the childhood we didn’t have—consistent warmth, a baseline of safe love. The season to legitimately receive more than we give is over; that’s something to grieve and accept.James: Parenting exposed this for me. My capacity to care well for my kids is the same skill as caring for myself. I missed how okay I was with them not thriving. Now I measure my willingness to work for their thriving—and mine.Catherine: Growth as a parent also brings sadness and regret. One of my sons brought up a six-year-old memory where I was overly harsh. I can have compassion for the stress I was under and also say, “That was not okay.” When I clearly took responsibility—telling him he’d done nothing wrong and that my reaction was on me—he relaxed. His brain didn’t need to keep inventing a way it was his fault. That’s love through courage: reveal, own impact, relieve the child of carrying your innocence.James: That also shows why “I did my best” is the wrong frame. The question isn’t “Was it my best?” but “What was my impact? What was I inviting in my child?” “I did my best” is often a smokescreen to dodge responsibility now.Catherine: In that moment my priority wasn’t my child’s felt safety; it was preserving my job. Understandable, but there were kinder ways to pursue that priority. Saying “I did my best” pressures others to reassure you you’re good enough instead of taking accountability and doing something meaningful now.James: Becoming a parent means surrendering “innocence.” We all get frustrated with newborns; we’re not innocent, and pretending otherwise blocks growth.Catherine: Love, at its best, grows you up. Parenting can grow you up too. I had kids young and remember realizing: “I can’t be a baby anymore—he’s the baby.” It demanded I build adult capacity.James: I’ve been thinking about courage versus discipline. Discipline is doing what I don’t want; courage is doing what I fear. Another facet is owning agency—choosing without guarantees and relinquishing innocence. Fear often drives us to run; going toward the fear is often the growth path in intimacy, with judgment about context and trust.Catherine: My take: in adult life, you rarely get better love from someone else than you can give yourself. If there’s no inner container for love, you’ll deflect or drain what others offer. That’s why partners tend to end up at similar levels of maturity.James: When one partner grows, proximity pulls the other forward (or the leader back). Treating someone very well makes it harder for them to treat you poorly. In good therapy or coaching, you’re treated well—including in conflict—so you can internalize it and rise to it. The “rubber band” moves you both.Catherine: Exactly: care personally and challenge directly. “Ruinous empathy” is caring without challenge; “casually cruel honesty” is challenge without care. Real love does both, inviting the best from the other.James: It’s not the words alone; it’s what I’m inviting. Can I confront and hold eye contact—stay in contact while I challenge? Looking away often hides contempt or self-abandonment. As Steve Gilligan said to me, “Every time you look away, you abandon the little one inside you.” Self-soothing is refusing to abandon that part while tolerating intensity. Am I inviting you to solve a problem with me—or inviting you to a fight?Catherine: In long power struggles, partners instinctively push each other’s old buttons—the ones parents used—because those get big reactions. Over time you can end up acting like your partner’s parents without ever meeting them.James: So why do all this hard work? To love and be loved—and to be okay. Most of us doubt we can be fully known and loved, by others or ourselves. The only helpful confrontation is with love: “I can see you and still hold you as lovable.” Who you are isn’t defined by the distress I feel in my body when I’m with you.Catherine: The happiest moments in life come from peaceful, close contact—with people and with the world—if we can tolerate the intensity of happiness. It’s available, but our inner agitation makes us look away, numb out, or check our phones. We need new neural pathways that can bear intensity so we can be present for the good stuff.James: Intelligence isn’t the measure of a healthy brain. The best single indicator might be the capacity to make contact: to know and love another person (and yourself), to be fully present, to offer something solid and appreciate what’s offered back.Catherine: And to accept that most of what makes life good—shared meals, sunlight, stretch, simple creaturely pleasures, loving because we’ve chosen to—doesn’t require us to be impressive. We love our specific cat or dog not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s ours. People are like that too. Choosing to love, and to keep showing up with courage, is the point.James: Should we wrap?Catherine: Yes—we have a dinner to enjoy.James: Thank you, Catherine.Catherine: Thank you.

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