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It's the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today we've got a candid, raw, insightful, useful, and often hilarious, seriously, genuinely hilarious, many, many belly laughs in the course of this conversation.

And it's all about how to maintain a healthy marriage or any other kind of romantic relationship.

We thought this was a good episode to drop as Valentine's Day rolls around.

You're about to hear me and my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris, in conversation with our old and very close friends,

Cotian Paley, Ellison, and Chodo Robert Campbell, a pair of married Zen priests. They are, in fact,

maybe the happiest couple I've ever met. Cotian and Choto run the New York Zen Center for Contemplative care, which does many things, including training people to be hospice volunteers.

Biaka and I actually took a nine-month course at the Zen Center where we trained to sit with dying people and by extension to sit with ourselves.

In this conversation, we talk about the role of early childhood trauma and how that shows up in your intimate relationships,

the importance of understanding your partner's operating manual and how to come up with some

rules of the road, the role of humor in relationships, how it can be used successfully and

unsuccessfully, why it's important to do your own work outside of your relationship,

and the value of learning to get uncomfortable together.

Just a few notes before we dive in. It is not a coincidence, as I mentioned earlier, that we're

dropping this episode around Valentine's Day. We've also posted a few other episodes in recent

days that might be of interest, including a quick solo pod where I sum up some of the lessons

that I have personally learned

about how not to torpedo your relationships.

Also want to say there's a quick mention at the top of this episode of somebody named Alexander.

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