How you fight is more important than how you love. Because, you know, that's that's a real sign of a good relationship. If you can fight well and if you can move forward from that in a in a really good way.

Oh, thank you, Iwona. And oh my god, your introduction has set up a really interesting conversation. I mean, I know we are going to get really deep into, you know, things that I know will help a lot of women out there. So thank you.

Oh, absolutely. Thank you. So a love alchemist is someone who takes your, you know, past relationship pain, your baggage, you know, all those heartbreaks and those painful experiences that you want to hide from and transforms it into actually something that's very powerful. I think a lot of us who have, you know, all of us women have some kind of past memories and baggage that we wanna, you know, we wanna avoid or we wanna hide from. But as a love alchemist, I show you how those experiences have made you who you are today, that you wouldn't be this amazing woman if it hadn't been for all those experiences. So I help women to actually transform past pain into power so that they can attract the right partner.

Yeah, absolutely. I see two things a lot. If they are single, then they're struggling with finding the right partner. They keep attracting like the wrong partner, wrong man, wrong relationship, and you know, they're they're just tired of it. The other thing I see all the time is betrayal. And betrayal, you know, if they're in a relationship, they've been deeply hurt by someone, whether it's cheating or some other form of betrayal. So those are the two things I see the most.

I think um, it's not that there are more people confused today than before. I think just more people today are expressing their confusion. I think in the past women felt confused, they just, you know, sucked it up, right? They just kind of dealt with it. It was it was how it was. But I think today because we see, you know, everyone's story on social media. We hear about everybody's breakups, right? So I think there's just a lot more noise about it than there was before.

I mean, we have to say modern love is extremely complicated. It is, I would say a lot harder for people um to find the right partner. I think women have a lot of them have chosen to pursue their career as they should, and because of that they put their love life on the back seat. And so you've got, you know, women who might be a little bit older and you've got men who are looking for younger partners. So that sometimes makes it difficult for for women to find the right one. I also think that standards have changed, and there are a lot a lot more different types of relationships today that we didn't see as much of before.

Ooh, that is a trick question. I think it makes it easier in many ways, more quantity, but I think it makes it harder because it's it's less what it's like harder to find the quality or the right person.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think the apps are, are, you know, responsible for that. They're, we have so many more choices and when you have more choices, it's actually harder to make a decision. Most people think if I have more choices, it'll be easier to find what I want, but it's the opposite. I think the human brain can handle about seven choices at one time and beyond that, it starts to get confused. So we are more confused with more choices available to us.

I don't think the problem is that women have high standards. I think that women have been hurt and disappointed so many times that I think it's harder for them to be more vulnerable and to let people in. And I think it's also very hard for people to trust. We know that across the board trust is at the lowest level of all time today, whether that's in, you know, in the government, at work, relationships. I mean, you name it, trust is something that's very difficult.

Yeah. So our brain looks for what's familiar. And many women have had very difficult childhoods. Maybe their parents fought all the time. Maybe their parents had they face some kind of betrayal or struggles. And so that becomes what's normal for us if we've grown up in that kind of an environment. And so what ends up happening for most women is they just repeat the patterns that they they saw growing up with what their parents experienced, or they had relationship patterns in their own life that they just kept repeating and weren't able to to break. So that is the reason why we keep attracting the same kind of lesson in different relationships.

And most of the time it is seen when it's way too late, right? After the fact. So there are a couple of, of really good signs. One, it always ends up the same way. Like it always, you know, the relationship ends the same way. That's a a pattern. Or you always feel the same emotions. Maybe you feel not chosen. Maybe you feel like your partner doesn't prioritize you. Maybe you feel like you're not good enough. So that's another sign is you feel the same emotions in every relationship. And the third sign is you attract the same challenge in your relationships. For example, your partner always disappoints you or your partner always betrays you, or you always feel like your partner finds other things more important than you. So it could be the pattern could show up in the partner, in how you feel or in how the relationship always ends.

Yes. I think that people should definitely do everything they can to become more self-aware in before before relationships. I think that it is something that really determines how well you do in your relationship. So I think understanding yourself, understanding your patterns is very important. Learning to love yourself is very important. And the more complete you can show up in your relationship, the smoother your relationship will be. So most people come into their relationships with all their drama, all their baggage, all their unhealed traumas, and then of course you're gonna have conflict in the relationship.

Yes, absolutely. So, of course, people confuse self-love with self-care like, oh, but I get a massage. Oh my god, I do my nails. I'm like, no, that's self-care, which is very important. I'm not saying it's not. But I think self-love, I know self-love goes a lot deeper than that, Iwona, because self-love is being able to treat yourself the way you would someone you love. And unfortunately, most of the time we criticize ourselves, you know, we blame ourselves, we reject ourselves, and we're always like being so hard on ourselves. But the most loving thing you can do is to cheer yourself on. That's one way to love yourself. Another way is to give yourself whatever you need when you need it instead of, you know, abandoning yourself, neglecting yourself just to without feeling guilty, right? So it's it's about choosing yourself before anyone else. And I think we tend to do the opposite. We tend to make everyone else a priority and we forget ourselves. I like to say that we put ourselves last on our own list, and we should be right there on top.

Yes. Absolutely. We've all been conditioned by these gender roles. We've also grown up thinking that you have to be a good girl, a good wife, a good mother, a, you know, you have to be perfect at everything. You've got to hold the house together. And I think all that stress and pressure makes us feel like there's no room for for us, for our, you know, for me time. There's no room for all of that because there's always something more to do in order for you to be, you know, loved by everybody else or in order for you to to be a good whatever you're trying to be. So I think there's a lot of pressure we put on ourselves to fit into those roles. And I think with with men it's kind of like, well if that's what, you know, if that's important to you go for it, you know, it makes my life easier. So, you know, we end up feeling guilty about it and we just allow ourselves to end up, you know, feeling stressed and pressured. And so that's of our own doing.

You know, when I have a client who comes to me with something like that, I ask them, well, do you fit all of these things on the list? Like all these things that you want from your partner, can you say the same about yourself? Right? Because ultimately we attract who we are. You know, we attract someone on the same level.

I think the opposites attract maybe in, in, in traits and personalities, but ultimately energetically, we really attract who we are. So if we, and we won't necessarily, you know, attract someone who has the same issues as us, but almost we attract people whose issues complement ours, you know. So if you have a problem of low self-worth or low self-esteem, you'll attract a partner who'll make you feel worse about that. You know? And and it doesn't always show up immediately because you know there's the honeymoon phase and the honeymoon phase we're always putting the best foot forward, our best face forward. But overall I've noticed that with most women eventually sooner or later the very thing that is your challenge will be triggered by your partner. We can't run it. We can't outrun it.

Yes, and I think this is where the expectations is the problem. So from my point of view what I see is that we keep expecting other people to fulfill our expectations, our needs. But we don't do it for ourselves. You know, and I think that's the problem because we should be the ones fulfilling our own needs, our own expectations and that's what self-love is about. We aren't meant to be with partners for them to make us feel good about ourselves. We should be feeling good about out about ourselves and bring that into the relationship. So I think we're doing it all wrong. We expect our partner to make us feel loved, but we should be coming into the relationship feeling loved anyway and sharing our love with our partner. So a relationship is about sharing with each other, with it's about partnership with each other, not somebody else making you feel more complete or whole. And I think that's what causes a lot of, you know, conflict or a lot of breakups to happen.

Mm-hmm. I think it goes both ways. I think we definitely have relationships where both people are becoming more honest about, you know, what they're in the relationship for, whether it's it's giving them what they want. So I admire those people who can be more honest. But I also see the other thing happening, which is people give up very easily. Like I didn't get what I wanted here, you know, or he didn't do this or do that and so I'm I'm walking, I'm leaving. So I think you've got both things happening and overall what you do see is more people are breaking up than staying together. That's absolutely a fact.

Yeah. So the honeymoon phase is when either you just start dating or you just got married. It's that beginning of a relationship where everything feels perfect. You'll do everything for your partner and you know, everything is just smooth and easy. And usually about a year into it, it's like real life hits. And suddenly you're not as accommodating. You're not as flexible. You suddenly have expectations. You suddenly, you know, you react and you get angry and you start fighting and all kinds of things happen to the relationship. And so it's really the the transition from everything feeling perfect and like everything is just ah, everything's great. Yeah, lovey-dovey. And then the real relationship begins after that honeymoon phase. That's when you have to kind of live with each other every day and you either grow together or you grow apart.

Yeah, you know, there's that thing of the whole seven-year itch. You know, so the you know, the saying is that after seven years people get a little antsy and that's when, you know, they start questioning the relationship, a lot of betrayal, infidelity happens at the seven-year mark. It's kind of like this, you know, it's an idea, it doesn't mean it happens to everybody, but I think every relationship goes through cycles of ups and downs. And I think that sometimes you are in a down phase of your relationship where things aren't as smooth or easy and maybe you're not connecting with each other, maybe one person is going through a difficult time and the other person can't really get through to the partner. So I think there are cycles in relationships. And I think how you handle those down phases will either make the relationship or break the relationship. And it happens to everyone, right? Sometimes it's when you start having kids. And suddenly there's no time for each other, right? Sometimes it's a career change or a financial challenge. So there are different, I would say cycles and it's important to honor where you are in the relationship. And maybe it might be a phase where things are just not, it doesn't feel as close or connected, but you can always work on it and you can bring that relationship back up to where it was.

Yeah, I think that commitment is the most, one of the most important things in the relationship, not just to your partner, but also to yourself, right? I think that I I take that attitude of this this this will pass. It's just a down phase. But I think what people miss is in those down phases, there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of possibility for your relationship to actually grow, for your relationship to maybe get closer together. It's in the hard moments that you grow the most, you learn the most, and I think you can be there for each other the most. So how you fight is more important than how you love. Because, you know, that's that's a real sign of a good relationship. If you can fight well and if you can move forward from that in a in a really good way.

I wonder, I wonder is it love or is it possession? Is it love or is it insecurity? So in relationships where there is a lot of toxic behavior and patterns, I I wonder, is that love or something else? And I find that when I work with people in those toxic relationships, what we find are a lot of unhealed trauma, unresolved maybe issues from the past. And when we heal it, the relationship improves. The toxicity, you know, is something that that essentially ceases to exist.

Yeah, absolutely. And the heartbreak can be really devastating and it can, you know, it can influence your life choices after that. There are some people who can never move on. There are some people who are afraid to to love again or let anyone in and you know trust and being vulnerable and all of those things. When I work with women who are going through heartbreak, what I do is I help them focus not on the negative things that happened, but what they learned from that relationship. And how that relationship actually made them better in some way and will help them to make better choices, right? Every relationship teaches us something that we can take into the next relationship. Yeah, it's like almost you have to find out what you don't want, right? Exactly. What you don't want or maybe is there a better way you could have handled the situation or, you know, is this a non-negotiable for you then that in the next relationship, you will make sure that this is something important to you. So I think we learn a lot about ourselves through our relationships and we should look at it that way that relationships, they help us discover who we are, they help us grow. You know, it's not just about having your heart broken, which I know is painful. But we can shift from the pain to the the learning, the growth, the lessons. And we can take that forward and we can honor, you know, the relationship and the pain that that you went through, but we can also let it go.

Mhm. The first step is definitely to become aware of it. The second step is to take responsibility or ownership. I think many people get stuck blaming the other person for whatever challenge they're facing in their love life. And I always show my clients that this isn't really the other person that it's not about them, it's about what you're attracting. Why is this happening to you every single time? You know, it's your story, it's your pattern, it's not them. And I think that's the hardest step for most people is because it's so much easier to say it's the other person's fault, you know, they screwed up, that's why we're not together or, you know, they did this and that's why I had to walk out, you know. It's so much easier to blame the other person. But to take responsibility and ownership for what's going on in your relationships, that's the hardest thing. And yet that is the most empowering thing. Because if you take responsibility, then you can actually do something about it, right? You can make a different choice. You can heal it. You can forgive. I mean, there's so many ways to move on stronger, better and, you know, more healed from from that. So um I definitely uh really encourage people to become aware of their patterns, taking responsibility for them. And then the next step after that would be, well, why is it that way? You know, where did that come from? Where did you learn this? How how is this situation perhaps serving you in some way? So these are kind of ways that I dig into these patterns and where they come from. And then once we figure that out, then it's all about breaking them, shifting them, changing them, doing the healing or the inner work that's required for that pattern to to essentially stop, stop being the theme in your life. And I notice that when my clients go through that process, they start first of all understanding themselves better. They make better choices and they attract completely different people.

Absolutely. So I'll give you an example in my own life. I would watch when my parents would fight with each other. My mom would express anger by not talking to my dad. She would just go silent and she would like essentially like ignore him. That's the way she expressed her anger. So I started to do that in my relationships. If I was angry, I would just not talk to my partner. And I did that in other other aspects of my life with friends, I would do that with my parents, that's how I expressed my anger and that's what made me feel more powerful or more in control like I'm not gonna talk to you anymore. You know, but then all that did was make the distance wider. The gap bigger between me and my, you know, the different relationships I was in. So it didn't actually help the relationship, it actually pushed us further away. And I had to learn that it's not about shutting them out or shutting down myself, but it's about communicating because a good relationship is based on good communication. And that was something I had to learn because I've never seen that. You know, that's not how my parents did things. So I had to learn communication skills in relationships which was very new to me. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way doing things the way I learned, right? And today, I'm a very big communicator. I teach my children things like, well how do you feel right now? Go ahead and say it. I feel angry. You know, mama, I feel angry because you won't let me have candy. And that's okay, but just express it and acknowledge that that's how you feel and let the other person know because I've now learned, you know, how important that is and now I teach that to my children so they can bring it into their relationships.

Absolutely. You know, I'm working with um, a couple and they actually don't have I would say major issues. But they are separated because both of them cannot communicate with each other. And they both have personal issues, their own issues as individuals and they can't communicate or share that with each other, which is why the marriage fell apart, okay? And they don't really have, I would say a strong enough reason not to be together. They can't express, they can't talk, they can't communicate. And that's the problem. So that's where I'm coming in now to kind of help them with that. So it really is skills, relationship skills that many of us never learned because our parents didn't have them either. And I think today it's really about changing those generational patterns and not repeating them so that we can teach our children to be better at relationships than than we were.

Ooh, healthy love to me, it's about feeling safe to be yourself. You know, it's feeling safe to say how you feel not needing to filter anything, knowing that, you know, your your partner will not judge you, will not reject you if you tell them how you feel. You can be vulnerable with them. You're almost like a child. You know, I think two people in a relationship they almost go back to being carefree children. They're just themselves. And that to me is really healthy love. You just like to be with each other and there's no there's no pressure, no stress, no judgment.

You know, um, my approach to these kind of things is it really depends on the person, you know. Sometimes they say I know. I know, but I just can't help it. Yes. So what I find and this is how I'm trained as a a coach and a healer is never to tell people what to do because they're gonna either do it anyway or they're gonna hate you for saying something that they don't want to hear. Right? If they knew better they wouldn't be in that relationship, right? And so everyone needs to kind of go through the process of learning from their experiences and which is why when I work with my clients, I'll never say don't do this, don't do that, but I will show them what they're creating or I will show them through the the process of of I call it digging and and healing and clearing what they're creating or what's happening in their relationship. So I do find that it tends to backfire when you tell people the truth and most people have to learn and figure it out for themselves. But I think the role of a friend sometimes is just to be there even when they screw up, right? You're just there to to support them and pick up the pieces when it doesn't, you know, go well. And you know, sometimes saying I told you so is is not not the best thing to say even though you might have been right all all all along. So.

Oh, and that is a lot of women out there. I mean, it is frustrating when you've been doing it over and over again and you aren't really moving forward. When you're in that situation, what you need to understand is you are just in a loop, you are in a pattern and the pattern keeps repeating. And you need to do something different. So I always recommend working with someone whose experience or expertise is in that area of helping you clear whatever are those blocks, emotional blocks, energetic blocks that are putting you in that situation to feel frustrated or, you know, like giving up and so on. Because there's always something in the way if you aren't getting what you want.

Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a place for matchmaking. I think it can be very helpful for people. But I do think that matchmaking doesn't guarantee relationship success. But I think if you do the inner work and you clear your blocks and you clear your past relationship trauma or childhood trauma, then I think you have a greater chance of succeeding at any relationship. And I think sometimes, you know, when you've done that inner work and then you go see a matchmaker, you're more likely to end up in a match that's going to be just perfect for you. So I think it it's not wrong or right, it's just, you know, both things have to be kind of checked off, you know. You have to be complete enough for a relationship, complete, ready, but and and you have to be open to maybe getting set up if you want if you want to go that way. And both of those things together can get you where you want to go.

Yes, you know, um, it's like all relationships, some will work out and some won't. I think, you know, love is blind and a lot of these reality TV shows, I mean at the end of the day the goal is entertainment. It's not to get two people together. Yes, yes, you know, so I guess my opinion is that it is those kind of reality TV shows are made for entertainment. They're not made to get, you know, people together. In fact, the more drama, the the better the ratings, right? So I'm not sure that's the best platform to meet the love of your life, you know, but yeah, it it does what it what it does. It's entertaining for people. And sometimes it makes people feel better. That's actually, I have I have a couple of friends who are obsessed with these kind of shows. And they just, they tell me, you know what, Sanaiyah, what we love is it makes us feel better about our own lives. Yeah, and I think that's the main goal and that's why you watch it in the end.

I mean, in the Indian culture and a lot of Asian cultures, that's how people got married, right? They didn't see each other. They didn't even get to talk to each other. And they, you know, they got together that way. And a lot of marriages have lasted on those foundations.

I think it's just, you know, when you go into a marriage like that, it's about the mindset. You're already trained to say that um I'm not expecting, you know, I have very different expectations or I have a very different approach to to the relationship, so.

Ooh, that's a good question. Somebody else needs to complete you. Yeah. I think a lot of people look for the perfect partner to make their life feel, you know, like they've they've found the one, you know, they're they're complete as if the partner is going to do that for them. And I think that's the one thing if we let go of that and instead we focus on building a relationship with ourselves, I think we would show up completely differently in our relationships.

That's another really good one. Yeah. That having a child is not going to fix the relationship. It's not going to keep you together and it's not going to solve your problems.

Love to me is freedom.

Yeah, love is freedom to be who you are, you know, without any limitations, without any judgment, stress, it's just freedom to be who you are.

Yeah, I think that's self-love and I think that's also love with a partner.

Um, I will write next. I do a lot of writing now. I have a blog on Substack and...

Yes, I put a lot of heart and soul into, you know, writing my weekly newsletter to my audience and I just love writing. And I think there's so much that I can share through my words. So that is that is my next step. It's my dream is to to write.

There is a book coming. There's more than one book coming.

Iwona, thank you. This was such a fun episode. Our conversation was great. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much. Okay, see you guys next week.