These are the most important insights on love, romance, and dating after 25 cohorts of the Deeper Dating® Intensive and 40 years as a psychotherapist!

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Listen For

• 03:36 – How do you redefine success in the search for love?
• 10:47 – Why is support important on the intimacy journey?
• 15:48 – How do you live authentically through your Core gifts?
• 22:05 – How do you build a future through conscious choices?

 

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My Biggest “AHAs” From Leading 25 Deeper Dating Intensives

These are the most important, and sometimes, surprising insights that I’ve learned after 40 years as a psychotherapist and running 25 cohorts of the Deeper Dating® Intensive. Stay tuned as I get to share them with you on this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

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Hello everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the best-selling book Deeper Dating, the creator of the Deeper Dating® Intensive, and your host in this podcast. And today, I’m going to talk about the greatest lessons I’ve learned about the search for love from doing 25 six-month Deeper Dating® Intensives, and I’m pausing doing the Intensives at this point.

So, after 25 Intensives, I want to share with you the things I have found most illuminating and most important from these years of doing this work. But before I jump in, I just want to say that if you are interested in the Deeper Dating® path to intimacy and connection, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. There, you can find transcripts of every episode. And if you join my mailing list, you can get a free eBook called the Five Keys to Deeper Intimacy, which captures some of the main points of this path. 

In this episode and in every episode, my commitment is to share with you the insights and the tools that I find most helpful and effective for helping you find love, and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy. And those skills of intimacy, of love, of self and others, the skills of connectedness, the skills of moving from rupture to repair, are the greatest skills of all for a happy, rich, and meaningful life.

So, if you just go to DeeperDatingGifts.com, you can pick up that eBook. And if you come to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, you can look at all of my, at this point, 233 episodes about all aspects of dating, love, intimacy, sex, etc. So I’m going to say a little bit more, a little bit later, about why I am stopping doing the Intensives and what I’m going to be doing instead because I think it’s pretty exciting. But now, I want to begin by talking about some of the most important things I’ve learned from doing these Intensives.

I’ve been a psychotherapist for 40-something years. I’ve run countless workshops and events and therapy groups, ongoing therapy groups as well. But there’s really been nothing like the Intensive to pinpoint what happens to people on their intimacy journey; where there’s growth, where there’s healing, where there are stuck places, how to get around those stuck places. And I just want to share some of the things that I have learned in this time.

Redefining Success In The Search For Love

So the first thing that I want to share is that we kind of need to let go of this grab the brass ring or the gold ring approach to finding love. Meaning, that the mark of success, which is our success as human beings, as intimate beings, is, “Am I in a relationship?” And more particularly, “Am I in a great relationship? Am I in a lasting relationship?”

So many of us are looking for that, and it is a great and beautiful goal. And I am a thousand percent for that being a goal, for not numbing your longing for that, your hunger for that, your desire for that. And I often say you’re longing for love, romantic level, life partnership is not weakness. It’s wisdom. So I am not saying that that’s not precious, that that’s not important, and that you shouldn’t kind of amp up to do whatever you can to make that happen if that’s something you want.

I think all those things. But I also think that when we measure our degree of success on our intimacy journey by, “Have we landed that relationship?” We get ourselves in huge trouble. We start marking ourselves as unsuccessful when that doesn’t happen. We get desperate. We start settling. We stop honoring ourselves.

 

The minute at the core and the center of our search, we are leaving the place of self-love, self-cherishing, what I call, embracement, then we are moving into the land of self-sabotage and self-doubt. So the self-treasuring comes before placing ultimate value on, “Have I found my partner or not?” Because I think that the search for love, in some ways, is in our hands.

There are wise actions that we can take where we can shift our circuitry, where we can refine our instrument in profound and real ways to speed our path to love and to ease our path to love. I believe all of that. I’ve devoted decades to articulating what that map is. But one thing it is not is a race to the finish line.

There is mystery to our being able to find love. This search for love is truly an adventure. And I mean that in the deepest sense, in the Lord of the Rings sense of what adventure is. That there is danger. That there are mountains to be scaled. There are risks to be taken, challenges to be met, learning to be had. That there is the real possibility of pain. That there’s the possibility of loss. But there is the possibility also of such wonderfulness. This is a true adventure. It is not about games. It is not about gimmicks. It’s about a very deep path.

And while we have our hand on the lever in some major ways that I’m going to be talking about, there is also a huge mystery here. And I want to read something to you that I wrote to my 25th Intensive, which is, like I said, the last one that I’m going to be doing for a while. Someone in the Intensive took some beautiful, simple steps at reaching out, being her authentic self, and taking a risk. And in sharing this story with the Intensive, I wrote this in response to her and to the rest of the Intensive. And it’s a message I just want to share.

“I think if we look at this journey simply as, ‘I’m going to find my partner,’ that might be fine for some people. But I think it is really helpful not to view the success of this journey solely on that at all. The bigger questions: ‘Am I seeing and embracing my Core Gifts? Am I living from the center of my being in the world? Am I letting myself be generous with the beauty of my Core Gifts and interacting with the world through them? And am I practicing discrimination, self-love, and self-honoring and trusting the beauty of this instrument,  my nervous system?’”

If you are doing these things, you are creating a web that contains magic and influences your whole future. And that’s the entire ground of what we’re doing here. That is the magic living from your magic and trusting and dignifying your deep self in your interactions. This is exactly what we are here for. Because when we do this, we create a new future in intimacy.

Those are the things we have control of. But when life is going to bring us our partner, there’s a magic there. There’s a deeper physics. But there’s also grace there. And we don’t know when it’s going to happen. Our job is not to know that. Our job is to find our wisdom messages. To find a path because this takes skill and technique. To find a path that teaches the skills and the techniques that ring true to our heart and soul. And don’t put us in a position of judging ourselves, changing ourselves, forcing ourselves into molds that don’t fit.

When life brings us our partner, there's a kind of magic. There's a deeper physics, and there's also grace. We don't know when it will happen, and that's not our job to figure out. Our job is to find the wisdom in the messages we receive. Share on X

And by the way,  one of the hugest ones is this masculine-feminine paradigm where people worry that they’re crossing lanes. ‘Oh no, I’m being too masculine. I’m not going to be able to attract an alpha male.’  ‘I’m being too feminine. I’m not going to attract the kind of woman I really want.’ ‘I’m being too masculine and feminine. I’m for queer people.’ It’s a whole other set of things, but that’s not a lane we want to follow. We want to follow the lane of authenticity. And in the guise of new age wisdom, we are told that we have to fit these paradigms of gender identity that limit us in profound ways that nobody speaks about.”

So I went off on a tangent there. But it’s something I really did want to mention because I think it’s a way that we tend to be deeply misguided and also a way that the queer community leads the way in saying, “It’s about authenticity. It is not about typical gender roles. It’s not about the tyranny of having to follow these electrified tripwires of who we are supposed to be.”

The Importance Of Support On The Intimacy Journey

So anyway, that was a side point. But this was one of the points that I wanted to make was that this really is an adventure of growth. So one of the steps is to follow a path that has wisdom. Another is to get support and not do this alone. It’s too hard to do alone without support. Without support, we fall back on our old circuitries. It’s like a giant mound of Jell-O®. And you pour hot water on that mound of Jell-O® and it creates a groove. The next time you pour water on that mound of Jell-O®, it’s gonna go down that groove unless there are ways to contain, change, address that.

That’s why we need support, and we also need support because it is hard. There are points of pain, points of bewilderment, points of disappointment. It’s just true. This is a journey. This is an epic journey for most of us. And when those hard points come, it makes all the difference in the world to not be alone with them and to get support. And when we come to crossroads, where we’re bewildered and not sure what to do, a friend who’s seeing things with more grace, with more encouragement, with more space.  A friend who tracks our journey and can point out our evolution makes all the difference in the world. 

Now, all these things I’m saying are not easy. You need to find a path you believe in. Then you need to do it with support. And by the way, in everything I teach, in all of my courses, my attractions course, my full Deeper Dating® course, in my book, and in my Intensives, always I have people join with learning partners  because it makes it more fun. It dulls the edge of the pain. It makes it more joyful. It speeds our path  and it uses intimacy as a pathway to finding intimacy.

Before moving on to some other points, I just want to say something about why I am stopping running the Intensives, at least temporarily, after doing 25 of them and having them be such rich and amazing experiences. The reason why is I feel that our country is at a turning point. And there are forces of the opposite of love, of racism, of sexism, of transphobia, of homophobia. And these things are kind of becoming a norm. There’s a loss of freedom happening. There’s a movement toward, one might say, fascism.

There’s this brutal, brutal, indescribable detaining of people in environments that are like concentration camps. And by the way, I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor. My father was in a concentration camp. My mom was a hidden child. The word concentration camp goes way back before even the Second World War. But what it speaks about is the robbing of rights of human beings and detaining and containing them in environments that are cruel. And God knows the detainment that’s happening is cruel.

And so I think half the country is horrified, and half of that population is single. And I think that the best way to meet people who share, the best way to meet people who you can love, is with environments,  with people who share your values and passions. So I’m going to be devoting the next year to creating events and environments for single people to meet, but with a special emphasis on single people who want to support justice, protection of the earth, protection of minorities, protection of vulnerable populations. And have them meet together in events and experiences that support healing and justice.

 

So I’m very excited about this. I think there’s a huge need and a huge population of people who need that, want that, and who will meet, and form friendships, and form community, and form love relationships. And I want to help facilitate that. So that’s what I’m going to be working on. And if you’re interested in being part of that and you’re on my mailing list, you will hear about it. If you’re not on my mailing list, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and join my mailing list so you get to hear about that. 

Okay, so now jumping back in. I speak a lot about this concept of Core Gifts. And Core Gifts are the part of us where we feel the most deeply. They’re like fingerprints in that they’re kind of basic to humanity. And they’re basic types, but they’re also individual to each one of us. And a lot of my work has, as its foundation, discovering and leading with your Core Gifts. 

Living Authentically Through Core Gifts

The thing about Core Gifts are that this culture teaches us to hide our deepest sensitivities and our fiercest passions because they make us look too different, because they make us less appealing to the masses. But we don’t need the masses. We need one person. And when we live from our Core Gifts, a few things happen. 

One, by naming and understanding our Core Gifts, which is the first stage in this deeper dating path, we develop a kind of honoring of who we are. We start organizing ourselves around our authenticity as opposed to our protections and defenses. It is a brave way to live. And as we live that way, we develop dignity. We develop backbone. We develop flexibility. And we develop discrimination. It’s a brave journey. It’s a precious journey. It is a journey of authenticity. 

But as we do that, as we learn to treasure these parts of ourselves that maybe we thought were too intense for the world or too different from the world or too sensitive for the world, as we start championing those parts of ourselves, our world shifts. One of the amazing things that happens is that we start becoming more attracted to people who can treasure us for who we are. And we start becoming more magnetic to those people. This alone is probably the greatest miracle that I have seen in this work.

What I see is that as people start to share their Core Gifts, they come back to the Intensive and say, “Magical kind of things are happening. People are noticing me more. People are noticing me who are kinder, more decent, more available, and more attracted to who I really am.” And of course, that’s true. But the point here that I’m making is that there really is a magic that emanates when we start sharing our Core Gifts. 

It’s hard-won magic because it takes the bravery of being us. It’s hard-won magic also because it means we’re narrowing the field. But as we narrow the field, we are intensifying our magnetism. We don’t want anyone and everyone. We want someone who loves us for who we are. Someone who we look at each other and we’re seeing each other’s souls. 

We don't want just anyone. We want someone who loves us for who we are—someone with whom we can look into each other's eyes and truly see each other's souls. Share on X

When we’re trying to be anything other than who we are, we are in a path where we’re going to attract and be attracted to people who we have to change to love us for who we are. People who want us to change because they don’t love us for who we are. So this is another piece that I think is so important is this magic that emanates when we are brave enough to actually emanate who we are.

Another thing that happens that is kind of more bittersweet and challenging is that when we do this, we are really vulnerable. So we lead with our souls. And very often, we have this kind of quick thing that happens, that people become more attracted to us. They notice us, and it gets our hopes up. And we get excited, of course, as we should. But we’ve really shown tender parts of ourselves.

So at first, when we do that, we hope that the magic that happens attracts us right away to the right people. Often, though, there are stepping-stone relationships that happen as we come into ourselves.  That doesn’t mean that when you do this, the first relationship is not going to be the match. It might be. But often, there’s a bit of a journey. 

And this is another thing that I’ve only learned through doing the Intensives is that we are profoundly vulnerable after we share our Core Gifts. And stepping-stone relationships can hurt worse than we imagine. And so we need to give ourselves grace and space. There’s an in and out that happens.  Sometimes, after discovering our Core Gifts, we don’t want to date. We just want space to learn this whole new way of treasuring ourselves.

Sometimes, after disappointments, we do need to pull back and retrench and regroup and reorganize in a deeper way. These things are hard, and we don’t want them to be true. But they often are because this is a true adventure. And adventures include risks. And this is why we need our people, not to be alone when that happens.

So I’m realizing as I speak that there is going to need to be a part two if I’m going to be sharing all of the key ideas. So what I want to share now as a last insight, and I will continue in the next episode, because there’s so much more. And I don’t want to give it short shrift. So the last thing that I want to say is that there is a deeper physics to this process. There is a magic. There is a grace that happens. And this is what it comes from, as I understand it.

 

As we become organized around our heart, our humanity, and our authenticity, we beam something very precious. And when we do that, we attract different people. We create a different future. When we do that, and we learn to trust our nervous system, our hearts, and our souls, and we learn discrimination, we say no with bravery and clarity to relationships where we have to negotiate our worth. And we look only for relationships where there’s this deep and essential way where our soul is seen. 

Building A Future Through Conscious Choices

I guess that’s like kind of the heart of what I want to teach most of all. But as we do that, we make choices that are different. We say no at points when we might’ve said maybe. We say yes at points where we might’ve said no. And yes at points where we might have been wishy-washy or ambivalent. We change. We take steps that are more brave. We share our vulnerability more.

And as we do these things, and this is magical, each of those micro steps changes the weave of the tapestry of our future. We are adding in new threads and different threads that are going to form a different design. There is compounded interest to the choices we make in any direction. They grow a future for us. 

So it’s not just about the brass ring. As you make choices that really honor who you are, as you make the kind of choices I talked about, you are actually creating a blueprint for a deeper and different future that is going to grow in ways that you or I can’t even imagine yet. And it’s going to take on a life of its own because we are building a new fabric for our future.

So, as you take these lessons of authenticity, self-treasuring, self-honoring, deeper discrimination,  experiencing this journey as a wisdom journey, getting support. As you do those things, you will be crafting a whole new tapestry of your future, which is going to surprise you and take on a life of its own. And that’s the richness and the beauty of your precious intimacy journey. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

 

Important Links

• Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy
• Five Keys to Deeper Intimacy
• Deeper Dating Gifts
• Deeper Dating® Podcast