We all want relationships where we can feel good about ourselves and where we feel like we are with someone mature. Wondering why your relationship doesn’t have that spark it should have and why things aren’t going the way you expect?
These ted talks on relationships can help! They’ll challenge the way you think and inspire you to see things from a different perspective.
1. The Power Of Vulnerability – Brene Brown
Dr. Brene Brown, a well-known research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of social works, in her ted talks, describes vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure’.
It is that unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control. Your heart rates speed up, your palm grow sweaty, and you think, why in the world did I ever think I could do this?
And it makes you want to turn around and go home, where you can escape the potential judgment of others and your own fear of the unfamiliar. These vulnerable times are actually times of great courage.
What scares us is sometimes actually good for us, and if we can stomach it, vulnerability has the potential to transform itself into joy, love, belonging, courage, empathy, and creativity.
The fear of failing, making mistakes, not meeting people’s expectations, and being criticized keeps us outside the arena where healthy competition and striving unfolds. Therefore, what you should really be focused on is realizing excellence, the best version of yourself despite your flaws.
“You’re imperfect and you’re wired for struggle but you are worthy of love and belonging” – she says. What makes people more relatable? If they were perfect, would we care as much about them? See your whole self. Wholehearted living is about living with our lives from a place of worthiness.
It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s loving yourself. It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
By having the courage to be vulnerable and open up to ourselves and the world around us, we come directly in touch with our most authentic self. And in doing so, we can live a more fulfilling and happier life.
“Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness is when we will discover the infinite power of our light” – she says. This is one of the ted talks on relationships that help you embrace your imperfect self especially in your relationship.
2. A Better Way To Talk About Love – Mandy Len Catron
In love, we fall, we are struck, we’re crushed, we swoon, we burn with passion. Love makes us crazy and makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break.
Talking about love in this way fundamentally shapes how we experience it, says writer Mandy Catron as she gives powerful ted talks on relationships called ‘A Better Way to Talk About Love’.
The words we use to describe love are linked to the way we expect love to look, feel, and play out; like self-fulfilling prophecies, very interesting.
In this talk for anyone who’s ever felt crazy in love, Catron highlights a different metaphor for love that may help us find more joy and less suffering in it.
We assume that love is with great pain and suffering, we are victims of love, love is madness and we long to have dramatic love. We are in a passive while falling in love and we think that our happiness is how we are loved, and sadness how much we love.
However, the talk shifts to a resolution for this problem which is changing our metaphor about love and the author uses a specific metaphor “love [is] a collaborative work of art” she explains to the audience how this metaphor relates to love because in a work of art lots of factors go into it like “effort, compromise, patience, and shared goals”.
These things she says that relationships also depend on. The concept she is trying to say is that if we change our way we talk about love we can change the way we go into it. She reminds us that love is difficult and has its changes but this way of thinking will help love to be understood.
People will stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about what they can offer and create love with their lover more rather than talking of gaining or losing in the relationships. If you’re looking for ted talks on relationships about changing your perspectives on love, then this is it!
3. Love – You’re Doing It Wrong – Yann Dall’Aglio
French philosopher Yann Dall’Aglio ponders the true nature of love. Specifically, he addressed how you can connect more deeply with your partner in an age where social disconnection is the cultural norm.
In his ted talks on relationships, he defines love as the desire of being desired, and with that definition, he builds a new concept “sed#ction capital”.
In our modern capitalist societies, we humans that aspire to be desired by the largest number of people, accumulate a certain type of “capital” in order to approach a sort of ideal of “desirableness”.
All is in performance and appearances: appearing beautiful, intelligent, rich, perfect for someone that will desire you, and that you will desire because he or she also appears beautiful, intelligent, etc.
In consequence, love becomes an economic-like transaction that takes place in a sort of a free market with a dramatic “narcissistic competition” of own sed#ction capital optimization.
Sed#ction is an art, one that’s all too often twisted by players on the hunt for heartless hookups. These selfish “pickup artists” have it all wrong, French philosopher Yann Dall’ Aglio points out in his 10 – minute dissection of love. They squander their “sed#ction capital”, that elusive ability to make others desire us.
In this surprisingly convincing talk, he explains how acknowledging our uselessness could be the key to sustaining healthy relationships, “this uselessness is easily demonstrated because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don’t have any inherent value.
We all pretend to have an idol, we all pretend to be an idol for someone else, but we are all imposters, a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him.
Becoming aware of this general imposter that concerns all of us would ease our love relationship.
In contrast to the sed#ction hysteria, he called upon tenderness – love as tenderness which means to accept the loved one’s weakness, stating that there’s plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness. This is one of the ted talks on relationships that is great for couples who think they are missing something.
4. Being Wrong – Kathryn Schulz
“We all wind up traveling through life trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything, says the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error”.
How much conflict in both our personal and professional lives could be avoided if we simply admitted our mistakes? In this ted talks on relationships, Kathryn Schulz says no one is perfect.
We all make mistakes, and we hate to admit it. She gives us an insight of what it means to err and why we, as humans tend to implicitly assume that we are correct about almost everything.
At the heart of why we hate being wrong, Schulz says, is that “we’re terrified of feeling out of control. We’re terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than to make our peace with the fact that we really don’t know”.
And when we finally realize we’re wrong, she says, “we want to fall into a hole in the ground or we want to disappear. We want to die”.
Our distaste for error and our appetite for being right tends to be rough on relationships. So, she recommends not just accepting our mistakes but embracing them. She also encourages us to see errors as a gift, a mechanism for learning which provides the platform for improvement.
This is one of the ted talks on relationships that is good for those couples who think they know it all, as it will help change our perspective on being wrong. Here are 50 Great Apology Messages To Send When You Are Wrong.
5. What You Don’t Know About Marriage – Jenna McCarthy
The blunt truth: Marriage is hard, and it takes work. A lot of work “if it was easy, they’d call the whole damn thing a honeymoon” she says.
Marriage is something you work at, every single day in the hopes of getting better and better at it. Because no matter how much you love your partner, you are both still independent unique people with different needs going on at all times.
She urges rather than looking for what’s wrong, always find the good in each other. It may be hard on some days but celebrate the little things. She says research suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives (This is one of the ted talks on relationships that will fascinate couples who get turned on by stats).
For example, the happy wife instead of pointing out her husband’s growing gut or suggesting he go for a run, she might say, “wow, honey, thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner”.
Basically, through all the ups and downs of marriages, you’ll find that the thing that is going to make the biggest difference, what essentially will keep your marriage together is going to be how kind you are to your partner.
How much you can remember that they are human too, that they are just as tired, frustrated, stressed, as you are, and at the end of the day are simply looking for a warm hug, a kind word, a long embrace – something that tells them it’s going to be ok, you are in this together, and the reason you are in this together is because of love.
6. Alone Together – Sherry Turkle
Author of ‘Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other”, says our devices are not only changing the way we communicate and interact with each other, but also who we are as human beings.
She describes how technology is taking place of true, meaningful human interactions. In this sense, we have developed an intimate relationship with technology that has caused us to be afraid of actual, real-life conversations.
Underlying Turkle’s central argument is the fact that the technological development which has most contributed to the rise of inter-connectivity has at the same time bolstered a sense of alienation between people.
Online Connections brings so many bounties. But our lives of continual connection also leave us vulnerable. Often we are too busy communicating to think.
Too busy communicating to create, too busy communicating to really connect with the people we are with, in the ways that would really count. In continual contact, we’re alone together. Here we use technology to dial down human contact.
She advocates that we restart those necessary (physical) face to face conversation for a better relationship. This is among the ted talks on relationships that I personally enjoyed.
7. Dare To Disagree – Margaret Heffernan
Good relationships aren’t built on constantly agreeing with each other, as Heffernan, serial entrepreneur and author explains.
According to her, it’s only human to avoid disagreement and conflict, but she shows us that good disagreement is central to progress and that constructive conflict is the basis of creative thinking.
Margaret challenge and encourage us to push against our comfort zones for the sake of sparking important conversations and inciting positive change. In her ted talk, she discusses why inviting objection can be a game-changer while we are biologically drawn to people who think like us.
She further points to the fact that “we have to be prepared to change our minds”. Part of seeking out opposition is being open to accepting it. Growth stems from listening to conflicting viewpoints and the flaws that they may highlight in our own arguments. Learn how to stop fighting here.
8. The Difference Between Healthy And Unhealthy Love – Katie Hood
In this ted talks on relationships, Katie Hood in her efforts to educate young people about healthy love, reveals the five signs you might be in an unhealthy relationship, with a romantic partner, a friend, a family member, and shares the little ways we can all improve our ability to love better.
She further shares things you can do every day to love with respect, kindness, and joy. “While love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can build and improve on overtime”, she says.
9. How To Love And Be Loved – Billy Ward
We mean different things and misunderstand each other when we say, “I love you”. Our personal journeys and growth in love may begin with attraction, emotional and physical but it must grow beyond this in order to last.
It is warmth and affection, compassion, and care. In this best ted talks about love, Billy Ward, a licensed professional counselor says that we are on earth to love and be loved and that once you begin to open yourself to love, you will learn to see it everywhere, creating a peace, a freedom and a truth that will shift your overall, entire experience.
Love is light he says, and believes that the light that’s inside of us can shine and it’s through this light that our love can illuminate our relationships. If we can begin to make an effort to love and be loved without any conditions, we will bring a whole new level of meaning to our relationships and to our experience” he says.
10. How To Increase Love In Your Relationship – Jonathan Lungqvisjt
Jonathan Ljungqvist, in his ted talks on relationships, “How to Increase Love in Your Relationship”, explains how daily practical use of the “oxytocin technique” can benefit a relationship.
These oxytocin techniques include hugging and touching, gratitude meditation (which means focusing on memories you are grateful for in your relationship), and communication under which he talks about the use of eye contact, daring to share your emotions, and talking about relationship fears.
11. The Surprising Key To Building A Healthy Relationship That Lasts – Maya Diamond
Relationships that thrive and last have one thing in common, says Maya, as she gives ted talks on relationships. She explains the concept of “Emotional Responsiveness” in building a lasting relationship.
By this, we mean how well partners respond to each other’s feelings and needs. According to Maya, Emotional Responsiveness contains three crucial elements, ’accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement’.
It entails being available for your partner always, fully present and involved in discussions with your partner, it involves feeling your partner’s emotion and offering help on hard days, and treating your partner as the priority.
12. 5 Ways To Create Stronger Connection – Robert Reffkin
“Technology has changed the way we relate; we send emails not letters, text messages and not calls, all in the name of efficiency”, Robert says.
According to him, technology has made it easier to communicate but not to connect with other human beings. He, therefore, propounded five ways to create a stronger connection. I think these ways are more suitable when you and your partner are apart, maybe at work, travels, etc.
The first he talked about was to “write a letter”. By writing letters, you show how genuinely your emotions are towards your partner. For example, letters of gratitude. You could thank your partner specifically for always being there, and then tell your partner of how that makes you feel specially loved.
Secondly, he explains that it is necessary to “pick up the phone and dial”. This helps to have a true talk with your partner. “Ask interesting and meaningful questions” was the third.
By this, you show concern and you are able to build a deeper conversation, and that we should “answer questions with honesty rather than abstraction” (which was the fourth). If you want to connect with people then you have to be open, he says. Lastly, he recommends that you “turn the video on”.
Doing so is like a focusing mechanism to be in the moment and that’s when you can see the real person come out, he says.
Thanks for joining me on this ride. I hope with these 12 ted talks on relationships your love life would get better. Check out How To Be A Better Wife and 20 Marriage Lessons From My First Year for more goodies. Don’t forget to leave a comment in the box below. I care about you!
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