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RELATIONSHIPS: MINDSETS IN LOVE (OR NOT)
W
hat  was  that  about  the  course  of  true  love  never  running  smooth?  Well,  the
course  to  true  love  isn’t  so  smooth,  either.  That  path  is  often  strewn  with
disappointments  and  heartbreaks.  Some  people  let  these  experiences  scar  them
and prevent them from forming satisfying relationships in the future. Others are
able to heal and move on. What separates them? To find out, we recruited more
than a hundred people and asked them to tell us about a terrible rejection.
When I first got to New York I was incredibly lonely. I didn’t know
a soul and I totally felt like I didn’t belong here. After about a year
of misery I met Jack. It’s almost an understatement to say that we
clicked  instantly,  we  felt  like  we  had  known  each  other  forever.  It
wasn’t  long  before  we  were  living  together  and  doing  everything
together.  I  thought  I  would  spend  my  whole  life  with  him  and  he
said he felt the same way. Two really happy years passed. Then one
day I came home and found a note. He said he had to leave, don’t
try to find him. He didn’t even sign it love. I never heard from him
again. Sometimes when the phone rings I still think maybe it’s him.
We  heard  a  variation  of  that  story  over  and  over  again.  People  with  both
mindsets told stories like this. Almost everyone, at one time or another, had been
in love and had been hurt. What differed—and differed dramatically—was how
they dealt with it.
After they told their stories, we asked them follow-up questions: What did this
mean to you? How did you handle it? What were you hoping for?
When  people  had  the  fixed  mindset,  they  felt  judged  and  labeled  by  the
rejection. Permanently labeled. It was as though a verdict had been handed down
and branded on their foreheads:
UNLOVABLE!
And they lashed out.

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Because  the  fixed  mindset  gives  them  no  recipe  for  healing  their  wound,  all
they could do was hope to wound the person who inflicted it. Lydia, the woman
in the story above, told us that she had lasting, intense feelings of bitterness: “I
would get back at him, hurt him any way I could if I got the chance. He deserves
it.”
In fact, for people with the fixed mindset, their number one goal came through
loud and clear. Revenge. As one man put it, “She took my worth with her when
she left. Not a day goes by I don’t think about how to make her pay.” During the
study,  I  asked  one  of  my  fixed-mindset  friends  about  her  divorce.  I’ll  never
forget what she said. “If I had to choose between me being happy and him being
miserable, I would definitely want him to be miserable.”
It had to be a person with the fixed mindset who coined the phrase “Revenge
is sweet”—the idea that with revenge comes your redemption—because people
with the growth mindset have little taste for it. The stories they told were every
bit as wrenching, but their reactions couldn’t have been more different.
For  them,  it  was  about  understanding,  forgiving,  and  moving  on.  Although
they  were  often  deeply  hurt  by  what  happened,  they  wanted  to  learn  from  it:
“That  relationship  and  how  it  ended  really  taught  me  the  importance  of
communicating. I used to think love conquers all, but now I know it needs a lot
of help.” This same man went on to say, “I also learned something about who’s
right for me. I guess every relationship teaches you more about who’s right for
you.”
There  is  a  French  expression:  “Tout  comprendre  c’est  tout  pardonner.”  To
understand all is to forgive all. Of course, this can be carried too far, but it’s a
good  place  to  start.  For  people  with  the  growth  mindset,  the  number  one  goal
was  forgiveness.  As  one  woman  said:  “I’m  no  saint,  but  I  knew  for  my  own
peace of mind that I had to forgive and forget. He hurt me but I had a whole life
waiting for me and I’ll be damned if I was going to live it in the past. One day I
just said, ‘Good luck to him and good luck to me.’
 ”
Because  of  their  growth  mindset,  they  did  not  feel  permanently  branded.
Because  of  it,  they  tried  to  learn  something  useful  about  themselves  and
relationships, something they could use toward having a better experience in the
future. And they knew how to move on and embrace that future.
My  cousin  Cathy  embodies  the  growth  mindset.  Several  years  ago,  after
twenty-three  years  of  marriage,  her  husband  left  her.  Then,  to  add  insult  to
injury,  she  was  in  an  accident  and  hurt  her  leg.  There  she  sat,  home  alone  one

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Saturday night, when she said to herself, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here
and  feel  sorry  for  myself!”  (Perhaps  this  phrase  should  be  the  mantra  of  the
growth mindset.) Out she went to a dance (leg and all) where she met her future
husband.
The Contos family had pulled out all the stops. Nicole Contos, in her exquisite
wedding  dress,  arrived  at  the  church  in  a  Rolls-Royce.  The  archbishop  was
inside  waiting  to  perform  the  ceremony,  and  hundreds  of  friends  and  relatives
from all over the world were in attendance. Everything was perfect until the best
man  went  over  to  Nicole  and  told  her  the  news.  The  groom  would  not  be
coming. Can you imagine the shock, the pain?
The family, thinking of the hundreds of guests, decided to go through with the
reception  and  dinner.  Then,  rallying  around  Nicole,  they  asked  her  what  she
wanted  to  do.  In  an  act  of  great  courage,  she  changed  into  a  little  black  dress,
went to the party, and danced solo to “I Will Survive.” It was not the dance she
had anticipated, but it was one that made her an icon of gutsiness in the national
press the next day. Nicole was like the football player who ran the wrong way.
Here  was  an  event  that  could  have  defined  and  diminished  her.  Instead  it  was
one that enlarged her.
It’s  interesting.  Nicole  spoke  repeatedly  about  the  pain  and  trauma  of  being
stood  up  at  her  wedding,  but  she  never  used  the  word  humiliated.  If  she  had
judged herself, felt flawed and unworthy—humiliated—she would have run and
hidden. Instead, her good clean pain made her able to surround herself with the
love of her friends and relatives and begin the healing process.
What, by the way, had happened to the groom? As it turned out, he had gone
on the honeymoon, flying off to Tahiti on his own. What happened to Nicole? A
couple  of  years  later,  in  the  same  wedding  dress  and  the  same  church,  she
married a great guy. Was she scared? No, she says: “I knew he was going to be
there.”
When  you  think  about  how  rejection  wounds  and  inflames  people  with  the
fixed mindset, it will come as no surprise that kids with the fixed mindset are the
ones who react to taunting and bullying with thoughts of violent retaliation. I’ll
return to this later.
RELATIONSHIPS ARE DIFFERENT

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In  his  study  of  gifted  people,  Benjamin  Bloom  included  concert  pianists,
sculptors,  Olympic  swimmers,  tennis  players,  mathematicians,  and  research
neurologists.  But  not  people  who  were  gifted  in  interpersonal  relationships.  He
planned to. After all, there are so many professions in which interpersonal skills
play  a  key  role—teachers,  psychologists,  administrators,  diplomats.  But  no
matter  how  hard  Bloom  tried,  he  couldn’t  find  any  agreed-upon  way  of
measuring social ability.
Sometimes  we’re  not  even  sure  it’s  an  ability.  When  we  see  people  with
outstanding  interpersonal  skills,  we  don’t  really  think  of  them  as  gifted.  We
think of them as cool people or charming people. When we see a great marriage
relationship, we don’t say these people are brilliant relationship makers. We say
they’re fine people. Or they have chemistry. Meaning what?
Meaning  that  as  a  society,  we  don’t  understand  relationship  skills.  Yet
everything  is  at  stake  in  people’s  relationships.  Maybe  that’s  why  Daniel
Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence struck such a responsive chord. It said: There
are social-emotional skills and I can tell you what they are.
Mindsets  add  another  dimension.  They  help  us  understand  even  more  about
why  people  often  don’t  learn  the  skills  they  need  or  use  the  skills  they  have.
Why  people  throw  themselves  so  hopefully  into  new  relationships,  only  to
undermine themselves. Why love often turns into a battlefield where the carnage
is  staggering.  And,  most  important,  they  help  us  understand  why  some  people
are able to build lasting and satisfying relationships.
MINDSETS FALLING IN LOVE
So far, having a fixed mindset has meant believing your personal traits are fixed.
But  in  relationships,  two  more  things  enter  the  picture—your  partner  and  the
relationship  itself.  Now  you  can  have  a  fixed  mindset  about  three  things.  You
can believe that your qualities are fixed, your