I bet you’ve never thought about relationships the way I’m about to show you.
The secret I give in this video isn’t one you’ll find in every book out there…
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What are the “Trash Cans” you want in your dream relationship? The day-to-day details and acts of support?
Matthew:
This isn’t fantasy. This isn’t building a castle in the sky. The idea of love. The idea of what we could be. The one day wager – I call it the one day wager. I’m making a wager that one day you’ll be what I want you to be. One day you’ll invest in me the way I want you to. One day you’ll change. The one day wager is the most dangerous wager you can possibly make in your love life. The real shit is what’s going on now. Is someone trying? Do they want to be here? Are they focused on the little shit? Not just the big shit, because anyone can go and have a… People say, “But when it’s great, it’s great.”
Lewis:
“It’s amazing.” Yeah.
Matthew:
“When we go out, we’ve been on some amazing dates.”
Lewis:
“We’re on vacation.”
Matthew:
Or “We did that vacation, we had the best time and it was amazing.” Of course, you were on fucking vacation. Anyone can go to Disney World and have a great time. It’s Disney World! That’s the job of the place, is to make sure you have a great time no matter who you’re with.
Lewis:
Right.
Matthew:
Right? You know what? When I was, I think I was 12 or 13, my parents took me to America for the first time and we came to Florida, and where do you think we went? We went to –
Lewis:
Disney World.
Matthew:
… Disney World and I was massively excited. I was so –
Lewis:
Pumped.
Matthew:
… excited. It was exciting to be in America. I was excited to see the things I’d seen on TV. Excited to see the references to movies I’d seen. Excited for the rides. We go into Disney World and I learned something very interesting about myself there. Because of course, I go in there, it’s magical. It’s, “Oh my God, this is crazy. It’s huge.”
Lewis:
And your photo with Mickey.
Matthew:
You go on Space Mountain.
Lewis:
Yeah.
Matthew:
Yeah, there’s Mickey there, there’s all these dazzling attractions. But it was something that stood out to me even more than Space Mountain, even more than the big ride. It was the trash cans.
Lewis:
Oh, yeah?
Matthew:
On some level that maybe I couldn’t fully articulate at that age, I saw the trash cans and I was moved by it. I said, “Someone cared enough about this place to theme the trash cans.” The trash can in Tomorrow Land is a futuristic trash can, the trash can in Indiana Jones Land or whatever it’s called is a Tiki bamboo trash can. The trash cans were different depending on where you were.
Lewis:
It’s amazing.
Matthew:
Someone cared so much about the detail of that world that they styled and themed the trash cans. It moved me. I’ve never forgotten that. The trash cans in life. And I’ve thought about that endlessly in my business. When I do a retreat – I just got back from my retreat, and I told this story on the retreat – someone came to me at the end of the retreat – because of all the little details we put on the retreat, you know, it’s not just a seminar, an event, we hold parties and inside there are –
Lewis:
It’s an experience, yeah.
Matthew:
It’s an immersive world. We like to think we’ve created the immersive theater of the self-development world. And someone came up to me at the end of this retreat and said, “You achieved trash can status.” And it –
Lewis:
That’s big.
Matthew:
The 13-year-old in me wanted to cry.
Lewis:
Wow, that’s amazing.
Matthew:
Right? And it moved me again and I thought, “That’s what I want.” And I thought about this even today as I was coming here and I was like, “You know what? This absolutely applies to relationships too.” Often in a breakup, often when people are going through difficult times with their partner or whatever, the thing they go back to is, “But we had that amazing trip, but we had those amazing times.” They go to these highlights, they go to the Space Mountain of their relationship and they go, “But remember when we met Mickey?” It’s that, right?
Lewis:
Yeah.
Matthew:
The meeting Mickey moment of their relationship. But relationships are about the trash cans, man. It’s the trash cans.
Lewis:
Yeah.
Matthew:
Because guess what? In a day at Disney, you ride Space Mountain once, maybe twice.
Lewis:
It’s a moment.
Matthew:
How many times do you use the trash cans?
Lewis:
Every day, all the time.
Matthew:
Every 20 minutes, every 30 minutes.
Lewis:
Yeah.
Matthew:
It’s the trash cans. What will define your relationship is the trash cans, not Space Mountain.
Lewis:
The lower moments, the messy moments.
Matthew:
The micro attractions. The moment where we do something sweet, where we think of our partner when we didn’t need to and we worry about the day they had or support them, or even just support them silently or in private, or support them by what we don’t bring to them. It’s that. It’s the detail. It’s the detail, and that’s what’s going to determine how great your life is. My concern is, and we’ve all been there, my concern is the number of people out there who are staying in the wrong thing because of the Space Mountain of the relationship.
Lewis:
The few moments that were magical.
Matthew:
Or they’re spending too much grieving the loss of the wrong thing because all they remember is Space Mountain.
Lewis:
Interesting.
Matthew:
But they don’t think of how shitty the trash cans were and the trash cans, that’s the stuff, that’s the day-to-day. How good was it day-to-day? There’s a difference between being in love and being happy.
Lewis:
What is the difference between love and happiness?
Matthew:
You can be in love and be really unhappy.
Lewis:
Be suffering inside and be in love.
Matthew:
You can be in love and be having a relationship that’s causing you constant anxiety, constant heartache, constant pain, feeling overlooked, not feeling important. You can be in love and all of those things still be true, how crazy is that? We think that love is this thing where it’s rational, like, “I’m going to be in love with this person who brings me joy.” Not true. We need to start worrying more about happiness because if someone isn’t building with you, if someone isn’t committing to actually building the castle with you, that’s the quality of your life, not how in love you are.
Lewis:
You might love certain things about them. You might’ve loved the date you went on, you might have loved the Space Mountain or –
Matthew:
Certain characteristics they had.
Lewis:
The sex was incredible.
Matthew:
How charming they were, how charismatic, how whatever. It doesn’t mean that you’re happy day-to-day, there’s a big difference.
Now I know the micro details of relationship, thank you for being an eye opener. I was stuck but thank you
Am not happy in my relationship
The most real thing i have read .Thanks for sharing
Thanks for again a great video, I love the trashcans, not just at Disney but in life. The end makes me wonder though, if what your saying means that being in love isn’t all its cracked up to be. Its not enough to be in love. But still that’s what people are (I am) looking for. That spark, the butterflies, the zazazoo.
I feel like your saying that because I am looking for more than someone who’s just fun to be around, I’m over thinking it, or asking to much from a guy.. Or am I just getting this wrong.
Thank you for this video. I appreciated hearing your trash can thoughts about how things are day to day not just the Disney experience…Your thoughts at the end regarding love. You can love someone and be a state of anxiety or stress, or lonely..,I so needed to hear that because I feel my significant other is not able to love me as I have expressed needing to be loved. They aren’t able to communicate with me and it has caused a huge rift between us.
Thank you again!
This! You always have a wonderful way of putting things into perspective.
That simple analogy was one of your best. I total agree to care about the simple things in a relationship now and always is key. Thank you Mathew for sharing that
With me.:-)
That’s so true! It’s also so easy to stay in something because you’ve already invested so much time that in your mind, it feels like a lot to give it all up after all that effort. Then the brainwave is that the relationship is not running on its own steam but being driven entirely by you. Despite the fact I realise this logically in my mind, I’m still prone to stay in an unsuitable relationship because I don’t want to give up trying. When I break up, which I did recently, I feel guilty for not trying harder.
I get it and some of Matthew’s philosophy to relationships is useful like improving yourself, growing as a person and finding someone who you want to make a life with etc. Every relationship is unique and while some of his advice are sensible, I prefer to trust my instinct as I already have trouble making friends, keeping a relationship (I have married the first man I dated), it seems that people struggle to accept me for me and while I have been working on it with help from my partner, it is extremely exhausting hearing every time that I am not ‘performing’ correctly to the unspoken social rules by having to control those ‘bad’ traits of mine such as my clothing, my way of saying things or conversing (not being rude at least not on purpose but I often say things that dont quite come across as how I intend), it always seems to overshadow my kind personality where I try to be as unjudgemental as possible ( i dont care how people dress, walk, laugh etc those should never be used as ways to diminish a person’s good qualities) I think I would prefer to be alone, no judgement, space to be myself (warts and all with space to improve what truly matters), so while other women may lap all of matthew’s advice up, maybe the key to happiness is to accept yourself and keep people (most are the wrong kind of people to be in a relationship with) at a very far distance.
Hi Matthew. I’m such a huge fan of your videos, and as someone who deeply values emotional intelligence, I find myself agreeing with everything you say, and still learning a lot of new slants on relationship psychology that really stick with me.
Most recently, your concept of the Disneyland ‘trashcan’ moments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnUb00mKNaE
My partner and I both live in the UK as actors/writers, which means we can have long periods of time apart (going off on theatre tours), followed by long periods of being together all day every day (and writing our novel together).
When we’re apart, there are plenty of ‘trashcan’ moments that we realise we miss. Like you say, it’s the little things. For me, it might be the simple physical sensation of sitting down next to him on our sofa, or the fact that he’s made a tradition of running over to hug me when I sneeze. For him, it might be the way I absent-mindedly pull his socks up for him, or tug on his earlobe when we’re watching TV. He always throws me a huge grin when I do that.
When we are able to have breakfast together, we make a little ceremony of it (even if we have just had breakfast together for the fiftieth time in a row). We call them ‘Happy Breakfasts’ and we put our milk in jugs and our cereal in jars and just eat at the table with no other distractions but each other and we are thrilled by it each and every time!
And we fully express the littlest joys we feel in the ordinary, and we constantly tell each other how happy we are with each other, how grateful we are that life put us together at the time that it did.
A few nights ago, we met some friends at a bar, and we got chatting to the waitress. She asked how long we had been together, and when we said it was almost five years, she said “And you’re STILL like that?!” delightfully shocked that we were still in the so-called ‘honeymoon’ period, and still looked at and laughed with each other in that way. Our goal is to always be like that, and be cute/gross fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty year olds together.
We certainly do like to remember the BIG memories, like the time he proposed to me on holiday in Mexico. But we far more frequently reminisce about the beautiful ‘trashcan’ memories.
I like to remind him of the time, early on in our relationship, that he said “You know what I’ve realised about you? You’re very sincere,” and I tell him that that might have been my single, favourite compliment I’ve ever received.
Or he might remind me of the time I revealed that I had bought him a tub of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in secret, because he wanted to try eating less chocolate but I knew he’d change his mind and wish he had some and get sad because he didn’t buy any. His reaction was priceless!
Matthew, you are SO right about these ‘trashcan’ moments. They are the extraordinary in the ordinary. The magic in the mundane. If you find as much happiness in the ‘trashcans’ as you do in the ‘space mountains,’ then you will live every day like you’re at Disneyland. Because we certainly feel that way when we’re together.
Watching your videos helps me find new ways of being grateful, and making logical sense out of love and happiness.
That makes total sense!!! I like the trash can theory. I’ve gone through a breakup and we have been trying to make it work so much in the past few years were we sat down one night and I ask him where do you see yourself in six months he automatically answered I’m taking it six months at a time as I don’t know where COVID is going to affect my business. Then I asked him where do you see us he responded I feel like we are flat mates. I agreed. As I love him but not in love with him as I couldn’t see any of the daily “trash can” between us. Just the big moments. I couldn’t see myself just living the big moments. I wanted the daily trash cans.