Shadowing Practice: Divorced People Share Advice for Younger Self - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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What is one change that you've made that has dramatically improved the quality of your life?
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You want to say it together?
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Getting divorced.
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Divorced.
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Leaving their broke ass behind.
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I would have waited before getting married.
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I think I got married before I should have.
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I got married because I was compelled to do so, not because I wanted, and I overrode what I knew in my gut at the beginning.
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My husband asked for a divorce after 46 years of marriage.
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I thought I was done.
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I was completely broken.
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About a year later, I was able to write my ex-husband a letter and say, thank you for giving me my freedom.
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You're always looking for that piece of the jigsaw puzzle to complete you, when you should be complete to begin with.
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When the attraction is gone, what's left?
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What's left?
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Of more than 1,200 people that we have interviewed on this channel and asked about marriage, some stick out.
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And that is because of one single event that happens to a lot of people.
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Divorce.
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For some in this video, not just one time, but more than three different times.
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In this video, I'll be asking a series of divorced men
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and women about their biggest mistake and the lessons they have learned so that you can have a happy, long, and healthy marriage.
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Are you married?
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I am indeed, yes.
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I've been twice married.
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First marriage was a real catastrophe.
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It lasted about a year and a half.
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And this one is very solid, over 20 years.
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What's the biggest lesson that you learned from your first marriage and the divorce?
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I think you really need to love yourself and like your own company.
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Because otherwise, you're always looking for that piece of the jigsaw puzzle to complete you, when you should be complete to begin with.
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So no rushing into marriage.
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You know, and a lot of kids do because it's important to be in a couplehood situation.
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But there's no need to rush.
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I find today, people are getting together for the wrong reasons.
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We measure up people in terms of what they own, what they do for a living, how can they provide, how can they, you know, make my life easier.
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They don't ask the hard questions.
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Do you want children?
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Where do you want to live?
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Where do you aspire to be?
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You have to talk about that before you commit to see if it's really what you both want, because when you fall in love, you don't think things through very clearly.
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And there's a lot of, you know, infatuation involved, and there might be a physical attraction, but that's not what keeps people together.
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When the attraction is gone, what's left what's left what is one change that you've made
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that has dramatically improved the quality of your life uh you
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want to say together getting divorced leaving their broke ass behind
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that's the best thing okay we were thinking the same thing
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so yeah yeah can you tell me about that it's a decision
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that i should have made a long time prior to
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when i made it
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so it kind of felt like freeing at the point where i did it
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and never looked back and everything went up from there so You know what it is, is that you get married at a certain age and then you grow.
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You realize that the person you married isn't necessarily the one that you're going to age with.
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You're not aging the same way, you're not developing the same way.
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You have so many life experiences that affect how you mature emotionally, mentally, in your profession.
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That at some point, you know what, he was great when I was younger and then as I got older I needed something else.
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He just didn't fit my lifestyle anymore
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and sometimes women have a hard time except like you know we feel bad for the men's in our lives
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but you know they can improve themselves they can there's
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so many things that they can do to like help themselves
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and they don't when there's two people in the relationship
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and one of them levels up yeah
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and the other one doesn't follow it's kind of like doomed right what's the biggest lesson you would say
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or the biggest takeaway you have from each of those marriages a personal growth i needed to be in
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that relationship in order to propel myself at a a higher level.
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I would say listen to your intuition.
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When I made the decision to leave the marriage, I had a lot of naysayers saying, you'll never find better.
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Your life will not get better.
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This is what it is.
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Accept it.
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And I refused.
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And I listened to my gut, my intuition, and I'm in a much better place in every aspect.
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Just a sec.
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If you don't want to forget any of the advice
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that you hear in this video or any of the other interviews on our channel, we put together a free newsletter
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and we send it out to you every single week
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that condenses these interviews into five life lessons that will help you live a longer, happier, and healthier life.
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You can join by scanning the QR code or clicking the link in the description.
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All right, back to the video.
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How old were you at the time of the divorce?
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How old was I, John?
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70-something.
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What happened?
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Oh, he found somebody.
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At seven, in the 70s?
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Uh-huh.
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Wow.
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When my husband asked for a divorce after 46 years of marriage, I thought I was done.
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I was completely broken.
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I was in my car riding back from my office to an empty home except for my dog.
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And I thought, there's nothing more to live for because we had done so much together.
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We'd created the American Holistic Medical Association, had six kids and all this stuff.
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And then he asked for a divorce and I felt like I was just in limbo.
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How do you move forward?
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Oh, I was totally broken.
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I really didn't have any idea what I was going to do, but I knew that there was still work for me to do.
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When you find what it is that makes you excited and keeps your life force going, it keeps going.
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So I think the important thing is not to shut everything down.
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You know, I could have gone back in the car
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and shut the door and sat in the rest of my life being horribly broken,
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or I could keep that door open and see what else came up.
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And I didn't want to be broken about a year later.
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I was able to write my ex-husband a letter and say thank you for giving me my freedom.
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Because all of a sudden I was not billing Gladys like I had always been during our marriage.
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I was Dr. Gladys.
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So all of a sudden I had a new identity and I could use it.
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Are you married?
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No. Or were you?
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I was married once.
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I had one successful marriage.
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We're not married anymore, but we're real good friends.
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If you don't mind me asking...
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I mind.
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No, no, that's what you're gonna like.
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What was the reason why that relationship ended?
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Well, I got married because I was compelled to do so, not necessarily because I want it, and I overrode what I knew in my gut at the beginning.
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I succumbed to family pressures, quite honestly.
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And by the way, in retrospect, it was a mistake.
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It was the right thing to do.
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And there was a good chance it would work, but it didn't.
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Now we're both happier apart than we were together.
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Can you define the word love for me?
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The best definition of love I've ever heard came from a happiness researcher named Ed Diener.
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It was, I wanted to scrape off my wife's windshield before I wanted to scrape off my own windshield.
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So I think love is wanting to scrape off your partner's windshield before you scrape off your own.
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That's the best definition there is.
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I think.
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I love that.
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I totally agree.
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I love that.
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How long have you been married for?
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How long were you married for?
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I was married for 50 years. And yourself?
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Okay.
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There are a few.
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Oh yeah.
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I'm kind of like Henry VIII.
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But I've only had three.
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Okay.
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That's right.
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So I was divorced after 24 years of marriage.
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That was very tough.
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And then I had a relationship for about 21 years and
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that my husband died and had Alzheimer's so then my present husband I hope that's it.
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I think my last husband also lost his wife.
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We have been together now for 10 years.
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Wow.
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Yeah very lucky.
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We have this expression that we both have a lot of baggage when we met when we were 72 years old.
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So you're going to have a lot of baggage.
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So you give each other a generous baggage allowance.
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At all ages?
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Yes, of course, at all ages.
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It's not easy to share your life with a person.
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You're never going to have the exact same response to things, recognizing that your point of view may not be the other person's point of view.
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Yeah.
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A lot of tolerance.
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Right.
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Can you guys define the word love for me?
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Love to me is a commitment.
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It isn't just something that happens to you.
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You know, like pow, love it's something you work at it's something
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that you know you have to nourish yeah
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and you grow into a love relationship it's not a 30
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second like it doesn't happen at first sight yeah maybe lust happens at first sight
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but uh love is something that uh takes a while to really nourish so you've been married to Ron since when?
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Oh yeah, since 1992.
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I met him in 1990.
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1992, so that's 30...
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Damn!
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33 years.
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33 years.
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I'm glad you're good at math.
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That's my best subject.
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So not only is this like, you know, most obviously, you know, most marriages don't end up succeeding.
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You had three of them that didn't and one of them that has succeeded way beyond the average length.
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All them people are dead back then.
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All those people...
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The first three?
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All those people died.
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I was like...
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Your three husbands died?
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Yes, I would've been like...
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When you were with them?
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No. Now they're all dead.
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I was like, man, if I'd been with them, they would've just been...
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Anyway.
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Yeah.
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So with Ron...
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So three that didn't work, and then statistically speaking, you're at an improbable congratulations, because your relationship is 33 years.
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And we're not gonna bust up.
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No. What do you think has contributed to 33 years together?
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And the way you talk about him, I'm assuming it's a happy marriage.
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He got me this spot.
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He lives in an apartment over where his studio is.
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I love that about us.
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It doesn't matter if I'm in the bed with him every night or not.
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We are husband and wife and we're going to ride it out that way.
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And I love that.
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I love that.
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And he, and he, cause he's like, sometimes I just need to be by myself.
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And I'm like, yeah, you know what?
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Me too.
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So it works for us.
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Can you define the word love for me?
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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Love.
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Love is knowing that just meeting you, I will give you a hug and not have a issue with that at all.
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Love is what we were created in and of, period.
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And loving self first.
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What is my intention for me?
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What do I desire for me?
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And I know that I have to first start with me before I can spread it to everybody else.
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But yeah, love to me is, love would make all of the weird stuff that's going on on our planet completely and totally disappear.
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Love would do that.
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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Love is everything.
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A lesson I have personally taken away from all of these interviews
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when it comes to relationships is you need to be patient.
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A lot of people seem to get into marriages and rush into relationships because of social pressures, to say the least.
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You are watching the video.
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You're listening to people answer some very important questions.
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But have you actually answered them yourself?
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What I decided to do, because honestly, I think if all of us can answer these questions,
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it will help us to get a lot of clarity that might save us from a lot of big mistakes later on.
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Using your phone or using a pen and a piece of paper, I created a one-page sheet that has a list of the most important self-reflection questions you see in this video,
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but also other ones on our channel.
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And you can download it for free, giving it just for you in this single video, clicking the link in the description or the QR code on screen.
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And you can fill out these questions and hopefully it saves you from a lot of possible regret down the line.
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Okay, back to the video.
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You said you've been married four times, married right now, but three didn't work out.
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If you're thinking back on those experiences, why did those not work out?
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In the beginning, I think because I was like, oh, if it's not my way, it's the highway.
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Also, I think living in New York, you feel like you're living in a candy store.
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That is the biggest problem with the dating world right now.
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It is.
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It is.
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But I got to tell you, all these things you think matter, they don't.
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I can tell you this for sure.
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The things that people, especially men, think are so important, they are not.
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Stop looking for this beautiful woman who you think is like the end-all be-all
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and get to know the person as a person.
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See what you have in common.
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The Bible talks about being equally yoked.
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Super important.
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Who's going to be your friend for a long time?
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That's what's important.
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It's not about the physical, like many people think.
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Like I used to think back in the day, it's not about that at all.
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It's really about having a real connection.
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Even when you don't believe the same thing, still having a great connection.
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Being able to talk about anything and everything.
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Those things are important.
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And you've been with your wife right now eight years?
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Eight years, but they did two years before that.
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It's the longest relationship in my life.
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Yeah, so this is, okay, so the longest relationship in your life.
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Can you define the word love for me?
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Oh, yes.
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Wow.
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loving the person whether they love you back
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or not it's very easy to love somebody when they're loving you
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and everything's perfect and wonderful but when love is tested
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if they hurt your feelings
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or go against what you think is your core will you stop loving
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that person and if you do is that really love Love is forgiving somebody over and over and over again.
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Love is letting the person do the things that they enjoy even though you may not.
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Love is...love is evolving all the time.
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And love is never giving up.
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I think you are better than Morgan Freeman.
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I think you would be a fantastic narrator.
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I don't know about all that.
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I just know, you know, the one thing of being through so many relationships in my life and chasing the wrong thing.
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I finally figured out that you have to let go of everything that you think that you want.
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And for me, it was asking, asking God to bring the person in my life that I need to be with and have faith.
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Faith's a funny thing because it's the one thing that people have a hard time with.
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You know, if you can't see something physically, you don't believe it.
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But faith is that, believing what you can't see and truly trusting.
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Were kids ever on the table for you?
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Is that a regret?
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Yeah, it is.
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I think when I was much younger, for sure, I was like, oh, yeah, one day, one day, one day.
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And I always put it off.
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And then when I met my wife now, we were both older and it was off the table.
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I feel like all these things happen for a reason.
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So I don't question them.
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How do you recommend someone in this day and age find true love?
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We idealize the other person, especially when we're first dating and it's so exciting.
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But you need to spend time with that person to really get to understand also their peccadilloes, their idiosyncrasies, their shortcomings.
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And then you have to ask yourself, can I live with all that?
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sometimes some people say yes i can i can overlook that
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because i really love that person he has other qualities
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or she has other qualities
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and then other people will say no it's the perfect excuse
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to call it quits you need to take your time get to know
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that person it is so important to know
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that you could be with someone for a long time
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and grow together i helped my husband now raise his children from his first marriage then we had our own
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and we started changing diapers in our mid-40s i mean
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that was quite a change of pace for us
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but that's what we wanted and we worked together as a team to achieve it.
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What would you say is your best advice for someone trying to find real love today?
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Be authentic, like true to yourself.
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Because if you put on a mask, at one point, you know, they're going to see through it or like something is going to bound to happen
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that it's not going to be your true self.
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So just be yourself and you're going to find the right person eventually.
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I'd have to say the best advice I could give is if he's interested in you, he'll call you.
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If he's not calling, he's not interested.
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Would you agree with that as a man?
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Yeah, I would say it goes both ways probably too, right?
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For women, sometimes we always see a project and we're like, we're going to fix them.
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We're going to help them.
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And you guys got to help themselves.
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If he wanted to, he would.
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Yeah, exactly.
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It goes back to if he wanted to, he would.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Cool.
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Thank you guys.
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Lessons from Divorced Individuals: A Window into Real-Life English Dialogue
The video features candid conversations with divorced men and women sharing insights from their experiences, making it a rich resource for learn english with youtube. The dialogue is casual yet reflective, offering natural phrases and emotional tone that mirror real-world communication—ideal for IELTS speaking practice or everyday conversational skills.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "compelled to do so": Expresses feeling forced into an action (e.g., "I was compelled to take the job, even though I didn't want it").
- "overrode what I knew in my gut": Ignored intuition (e.g., "She overrode her gut feeling and bought the car, which broke down soon after").
- "jigsaw puzzle to complete you": A metaphor for seeking someone to fill a personal void (e.g., "Don't look for a partner as a jigsaw puzzle piece—be whole on your own").
- "measure up people in terms of": Judge others based on specific criteria (e.g., "Employers often measure up candidates in terms of experience").
- "never looked back": Moved on without regret (e.g., "After quitting, she never looked back and started a successful business").
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video
Shadowing—repeating phrases immediately after the speaker—is key to improving pronunciation and fluency. Here's how to use this video effectively, even with its emotional depth:
- Listen for tone: Notice how speakers shift from sadness ("completely broken") to relief ("thank you for giving me my freedom"). Mimic these shifts to master emotional expression, critical for shadowspeak.
- Break down long sentences: Phrases like "I overrode what I knew in my gut at the beginning" can be split into chunks. Repeat each chunk slowly, then combine, using a shadowing app to compare your rhythm to the speaker's.
- Focus on connected speech: The video uses contractions ("it's," "don't") and elisions ("what's left" instead of "what is left"). Practice these to sound more natural, a must for improve english pronunciation.
- Role-play reflections: After shadowing, summarize a speaker's lesson in your own words (e.g., "One person learned not to rush into marriage"). This builds both speaking and comprehension skills, perfect for IELTS prep.
By engaging with this video's authentic dialogue, you'll not only learn practical phrases but also refine the nuance needed for meaningful communication.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if I'd been with them, they would · if he's interested in you, he'll call · If he wanted to, he would |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've made · have interviewed · have learned |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was compelled · was done · be broken |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.