How to have lasting love in your life
Hello my lovelies and welcome to the Moving Toward Better podcast. I’m your host, Karen Bemmes. I’m a business, relationship and life coach, and my superpower is helping you find your superpowers and use them to create a life and business you love that works for you. It won’t look like everyone else’s life, because you’re not like everyone else. Today we're talking about how to have lasting love in your life. I can already feel some of you rolling your eyes, but bear with me, because if you listen to this podcast regularly, you know I’m going to show you what lasting love means for you based on your personality type, not some hollywood ideal, which, let’s be honest, doesn’t exist, right? I decided to talk about this because on Friday of this week, I’ll be married 29 years to my favorite person on the planet, so this episode is a love letter to him and a roadmap for anyone who needs it to have more lasting love in your life no matter what your personality type.
Let’s kick this off with my favorite quote about marriage from Roberta Flack which says that “getting married is easy. Staying married is more difficult. Staying happily married for a lifetime is among the fine arts”, and as someone who had a failed marriage after 10 years of on and off dating and has now been with the same man for 30+ years, I can assure you that quote is one of the truer ones I’ve ever heard about marriage. I can 100% tell you that my work with personalities is the number one reason we have such a wonderful relationship after all these years.
For those who are new to the podcast, I use the DISC personality system to help people understand themselves and others better. The DISC behavior system includes the Driven, Inspired, Supportive and Cautious personalities, also known as D I S and C, and I use those terms interchangeably, so let's talk about how your personality affects your love life and how to make it even better than it already is.
To give some background, my personality type is IS/D. When I characterize myself, I always say that I want to be a badass, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings in the process. I don’t mind being the center of attention and crave it sometimes. My husband’s personality type is S/C which means he prefers to support from behind the scenes and wants to do that correctly. He never seeks out the spotlight and is actually uncomfortable there. I truly have no idea how happy we would be as a couple without knowing what we know about personalities because we have had some very difficult times and knowing what we know has helped us get through most of it. Why? Because we think and feel so differently.
One of the things I’ve learned about couples is that we usually marry someone who shares one of our personality traits, but if we’re a mix, like most of us are, that means that we also have opposite personality traits too. When we’re in balance, that is wonderful because we can work together and complement each other with our differing skills. When we’re out of balance or in conflict, that’s a whole different story, so let’s get to this.
The D personality is intense. They’re the type of people who see someone they like and zone right in. Women with the Driven personality type have no problem making the first move, and once they realize this is the person they want, they’re all in. That word “lasting” can be a challenge, though, because the D personality likes variety, so if life gets boring, they can start thinking about ending the relationship. The important thing to remember is that if you have the D personality, and you’re married to someone with the C or S personality, they don’t crave the variety that you do, so it’s your responsibility to bring that to the relationship, and before you get huffy about that, know that I’ll be saying the same thing to your counterpart about stability and routine. The other thing to understand is that you can have variety in so many areas of your life and infuse a mutually beneficial amount of variety into your primary relationship, which should be agreed upon by both of you. If you’re married to an I personality, that will be easy. If your partner is an S or a C, it will be more complicated.
For the I personality, life and love need to be fun. If you can make an I personality laugh, you immediately become more attractive. Help them to keep up with tasks they find boring, and you’re in for life, seriously. As I said, I am an I/SD, and when I was pregnant with our first child, who is now 28 years old, my husband and I were riding in the car, and I don’t even remember what the conversation was about, but he said something was total “bull hockey”, and I don’t know why, but it struck me funny even though he wasn’t trying to be particularly funny. Those of you who have been pregnant know that sometimes pregnancy hormones do weird things to you, but I laughed on and off for hours over that comment, and it still makes me smile today. In fact, my husband will occasionally pull that phrase out at the exact right time, and it still makes me laugh today. This is one of the many reasons I still love that man like no other human. Trust me, make the I personality laugh, and you are connected forever.
For the S personality, it’s all about stability and support. An S personality needs to feel supported and stable to feel loved. In balance, they give as much as they receive and they understand that other personalities don’t need the amount of support that other personalities need. I have a very high S and one of the things I’m not fond of is housework. For those of you who are in the same boat, listen up to this one. There was a time I was feeling really taken for granted because I was doing nearly all of the housework. If that’s you, you know that no one notices when you do the dishes, but they certainly notice when you don’t, and it got incredibly frustrating, so my husband and I devised a system that works really well for us. If I do something that was something I really didn’t want to do or I’m particularly proud of, I tell or show him and ask for praise. I know, that’s difficult for an S personality. You much prefer to keep things quiet, but when you get out of balance and people don’t notice your incredible contribution, you get passive aggressive, right? For those who don’t speak fluent S personality, they are the kings and queens of passive aggressiveness, which they often disguise in a question. Careful friends because it’s a trap!
For the C personality, while you are reserved and task oriented, you are often the most sensitive to others’ criticism, especially when someone criticizes your work. The C personality is hands down the most critical of themselves because they are perfectionists. In balance, they are able to understand that others don’t see how much effort they have put into their work, whether on the job or at home. One of the best examples of that is my wedding cake. I got married in the time of multiple tiers and fountains, and that’s what my sister in law made for me. I absolutely loved my cake in every way. It looked amazing and tasted even better. My sister in law, who made my cake, would roll her eyes every time I talked about it, and I finally asked her what the problem was, and she said, “The icing ran”. I looked at her with my I/SD naivety and asked her who in the world would know that, and she named a mutual friend of ours. Then it was my turn to roll my eyes. A few weeks later, I had my wedding album at an event where all three of us happened to be. The other woman was looking at the album, looked at my sister in law and said, “You’re icing ran.” As I sat there with my mouth hanging open, my sister in law looked at me and said, “See? I told you!”. So I have to be honest here and say this all happened before I knew about personality types, and I had a one word thought that rhymes with witch, but I did say something. I told her to shut up because I loved my cake so much, and it truly hurt my heart to think that something I cherished so much made my sister in law think so poorly about herself, and for those of you who like a bit of petty payback, I have a story for that too.
The year after our wedding, my sister in law’s brother got married. My sister in law was in the wedding party and didn’t want to make the shower cake, so the aforementioned friend made it instead. We were all in the car when the friend got in the car with the shower cake and my sister in law said, “One of your columns is upside down” which totally freaked her friend out because she couldn’t fix it. Unfortunately, I burst out laughing, which didn’t go over well, but paybacks, y’all. The thing is that I would never have noticed any of it, but to the C personality those things are important.
So what does that have to do with lasting love? I’ve learned over the years that the C personality struggles to love themselves, so they struggle to give and receive that love from others, but they quietly appreciate people who love them exactly how they are. I guarantee that whatever you compliment them on, they’ll tell you all the mistakes involved, but they truly relish that people love them and what they produce, and some day, they may actually tell you that.
Not everyone knows that I was married before to my high school sweetheart. I always say that we were best friends who loved each other who made the mistake of thinking we were in love with each other. We dated 10 years off and on before our messed up three year marriage, but when we split up, he asked me a profound question. He asked me what I thought he should do differently to make it last the next time, and I gave what I now think is a profound answer. I told him that he needed to decide that he could live with all the things he thought were wrong with his future partner he could live with the rest of his life.
That’s what DISC has done for my marriage, my parenting, my friendships, my business and my life. It’s why I’m still madly in love with a man who is incredibly different than me and why I appreciate him more than I ever would have without this knowledge. I understand why he backs off from confrontation and reads a book and why I move and get something accomplished. It’s what helped us raise children that were very different and also very much like us.
If you want that in your life, and who wouldn’t, get yourself an assessment asap. To take that next step, go to the Moving Toward Better homepage and click the Request a Session button. That’s the starting point, but if you want to take your life beyond a simple understanding of yourself and others, I double dog dare you to sign up for the Moving Toward Better DISCover Better Retreat in September. That’s where we take everything you learn about your personality and super charge it in ways you can’t even imagine. If you sign up for the upgraded ticket, your personal assessment and follow up is included with your ticket purchase.
At the retreat, we'll take everything you learn in your assessment and teach you how to make every area of your life and business work in tandem WITH your personality rather than against it. Trust me, when you do that, you’ll live better than you ever dreamed you could. This will be a weekend to get away from the grind and absolutely crush it when you get back. You'll learn strategies you can implement instantly to make positive changes in your life and business. You'll have fun and learn how to support those you love in ways that are meaningful to them and you. You'll learn how to get the best from yourself and others by genuinely speaking "their language" without denying or burying yours. Tickets are limited, so reserve your spot today at https://www.movingtowardbetter.com/2022-september-retreat .
It’s going to be a great time to recharge, reinvigorate and return to your life feeling amazing and better equipped to deal with everything in your world, so sign up today.
To see all the ways you can learn more about your personality and how to live better because of it, check out https://www.movingtowardbetter.com and get started on the best life for you and those you love most. Finally, if you know someone this episode can help, please share with them. We all deserve to have lasting love in our lives, so get on that today. Subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re listening to so you know when a new episode drops.
It is truly my mission to help people upgrade their life, feel better in their own skin and create a life that they love, whatever that means for them, so until next time, keep moving toward better with your unique and amazing personality. Love you all, and I’ll see you soon.
Links mentioned in this show:
Moving Toward Better Website
September Retreat
Intro and Outro music licensed from Melody Loops.
