Mark Manson knows a thing or two about shelling out advice. He’s a best-selling author (you’ll no doubt have heard of his smash hit The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life) and it turns out, he also has a piece of relationship advice you need to hear…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
Mark Manson couldn’t have known just how big his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life would be.
Following its release in 2015, it quickly became a bestseller with it’s no-nonsense advice on living well.
Since then, Manson, 40, has launched a podcast of the same name and written a follow up, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, another bestseller.
It’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about life, covering topics such as careers, friendship and family.
The American author is just one of those people who can’t help but ponder life and how we live, who sees patterns in our choices and offers suggestions that may lead to increased happiness.
It was during a self-reflective trip around the world that he met his wife, Brazilian wellness influencer Fernanda Neute.
The couple married in 2016. True love proved to be a game-changer for Manson, who now offers relationship advice as well.
Speaking to 9honey during his recent tour Down Under, Manson shared his advice and explained it further.
“Good relationships get easier, bad relationships get harder. The cliches of, like, marriage takes work and relationships are hard … those things are true,” he said.
“I think when people hear those things and they kind of use it to like justify a lot of the stuff that they’re struggling with that, maybe they shouldn’t be.
“And what I’ve found is that good relationships will get easier the more you work on them, and bad relationships get harder the more you work on them.
“I always think of it as like pushing a rock up a hill versus pushing a rock down the hill … a good relationship feels like pushing a rock downhill.”
You’d think Manson would be pumped for this sort of gold during every social event, but Manson said the opposite is true.
“It’s funny because, actually, I think people avoid asking me questions and life advice because I think … they understand it’s my job and so they don’t want me to feel like I’m suddenly working at a dinner party or something,” he said.
“I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen more, but people are very shy about it.”
Or perhaps they don’t ask because they know Manson’s advice will be honest, and direct.
“Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think a lot of people know that I will say the unpleasant thing, and so, yeah, they definitely are afraid of that as well,” he admits.
The questions he are asked are typically about the same things.
“Humans really only have, like, four or five problems over and over again,” Manson said.
“It’s just the context changes every time because everybody’s different, their life history is different, they live in a different culture, have a different family. So it’s the details that get shifted around and make it interesting.”
They are “relationship problems, boundary problems, finding a sense of purpose and meaning, worrying too much about stuff that they shouldn’t be worrying about.”
“It really is just permutations of the same few things over and over again,” Manson said, adding he finds it “strangely soothing because it just shows that like we’re all … struggling with the same stuff.”
“Nobody has it figured out. There’s no perfection. There’s no, no amount of money, there’s no culture or government … they all have the same problems.”
Manson says his core ideas about how to live well haven’t changed over the past decade, but he says he has “become more aware of my own bullshit.”
“I wrote Subtle Art around age 30. I think philosophically it’s correct, but I don’t think I totally knew how to live up to those principles at the time,” he said.
“The first book is applying those principles internally and individually and then the second book is kind of turning outward and seeing how those principles apply to the world,” he explains.
That’s why he enjoys the podcast so much, because he gets to discuss and explore these ideas.
“A podcast is great because it’s almost like you get to play with the ideas as you discuss them,” he says.
“When you write a book or an article, once it’s published, it’s published.”
This article was reproduced with permission from 9Honey. To read the original article, click here.
