Butterflies Are Overrated

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Welcome back, thanks for making a little room for optimism in your week.

Love.

That's the topic this week.

I've been putting this one off for a while, mostly because it's a big word and I want to do it justice.

After sixteen years of marriage, preceded by a couple of heartbreaks (that taught me far more than I wished to absorb at the time) and a bunch of friendships I'd drop everything for, I feel ready.

And where I've landed looks nothing like the version we all grew up watching.

There's also a remarkable man from Chile with an idea so simple I'm a little annoyed I didn’t think of it sooner, an album I've been playing since I was a teenager and a subtle thing we do to the people closest to us without ever realising.

So grab your cuppa and thanks, as always, for reading along.

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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All you need is love …. duh duh da da da! 🎶

All you need is love …. duh duh da da da!

All you need is love …. love.

Love is all you need.

We use the word love for many things.

Our partner in life.

Family who’ve been present throug it all.

A friend we've had since our school days.

Friends we meet as an adult that make our heart sing.

Our kids, our parents, the dog, a beautiful day, sometimes even the sandwich we had for lunch.

It’s one word.

But it’s one word doing an enormous amount of work.

Yet, most of us have learned what it's ‘supposed’ to look like, from written stories, moves and TV.

That in itself, is a problem.

Movie love is loud.

Real love rarely needs to be.

I've devoted many years to mastering the meaning of this word.

I've loved, and been loved.

I've had my heart broken, properly.

I've been happily married for sixteen years.

And have numerous friends and family I'd reference using that same word without hesitation.

All of this has lead me to one truth.

That a love worth keeping isnt loud and lairy.

It’s quiet, steady and built on communication, trust and understanding.

Before I met my wife, I learned about love the expensive way.

By losing it.

In my younger years, I had a few longer term relationships and I want to be honest about the part I played in them.

I made mistakes.

Plenty.

Said things I'd take back instantly if it were ever an option.

Those lessons are carved into me now, and I've carried every one of them forward.

Each has helped improve the relationship that came after it.

But one of these lessons took far longer to land than it should have.

If a relationship has to be forced?

It isn't going to work.

It has to flow, and it has to run in both directions.

For a long time I thought effort was the answer.

That if I was patient enough, understanding enough, useful enough, the feeling would eventually even out on the other side.

It doesn't work that way.

You can love someone completely and still have absolutely no say in whether they love you back.

Once I finally accepted that, the question changed.

I stopped asking how to make someone love me.

I started noticing who already did.

Heartbreak is a brutal teacher.

It's also an honest one.

Mine taught me the difference between being admired and being chosen.

Admiration is easy.

It costs nothing to admire someone on their best day, telling their best stories.

Being chosen is a different thing entirely.

That's a regular morning.

That's the flu, the bad mood, the version of you that hasn't slept and isn't remotely charming.

Someone can admire you often and never actually choose you.

That lesson took me years to understand.

Because a relationship built solely on admiration feels like a performance without a final curtain.

You're always auditioning.

Always editing yourself, working to stay impressive enough to keep.

Real love ends the audition.

Real love lets you put the script down and just be a person.

And not just any person.

You.

People sometimes ask me what sixteen years of marriage feels like.

It feels ordinary.

Wonderfully, deliberately, predictably ordinary.

Somewhere along our journey, my wife and I have built our own language.

A fair chunk of it isn't even words.

Each morning, for instance, we wave at each other.

Not a normal wave.

The Forrest Gump wave.

You know the one, where he's up on the shrimp boat, arm swinging like a windmill, completely overjoyed to spot Lieutenant Dan standing on the dock.

That's the one.

It doesn't matter if one of us is still in bed or if we're meeting downstairs for the first time.

No words.

Just the wave.

Followed by a smile.

We've been doing it for years, and neither of us has shown any sign of stopping.

There's also a look my wife can give me across a room that carries an entire story, and I've never once misread it.

There are jokes we've been running so long neither of us could tell you where or how they started, yet we still commit to them fully.

None of this looks like much from the outside.

Nobody's making a film about two people who still find the same joke funny after sixteen years.

These are the things that hold a relationship together, though.

Along with everything sitting underneath it.

The trust that means we never have to wonder.

The values we never have to negotiate, because they were discussed at the start.

The two kids we're both utterly obsessed with.

And the fact that after all these years, when the day is finally done?

She's the person I want to spend it with.

This didn't all come together at once.

It accumulated over time through care, attention and shared experiences.

It's the little moments, the laughter and even the challenges that have strengthened our bond.

The perfect moments might make the photo albums but it’s the ordinary ones that make a marriage.

There's genuine science behind this too.

John Gottman has studied couples for more than four decades, and he found he could predict where a relationship was heading by watching something almost invisible.

He calls them bids for connection.

A bid is tiny.

Your partner says "hey, check out that bird" and you either turn towards them or you don't.

In Gottman's research, the couples that were still happily together years later, were those who turned towards the small bids around 86 percent of the time.

The couples who divorced?

Just 33 percent.

Not the way they show up for holidays and anniversaries.

But the bird out the window.

Gottman sums up his career worth of research in three simple words: Small things often.

Sixteen years into a marriage, I believe this completely.

Some mornings, that small thing is nothing more than a silly wave from the top of a shrimp boat.

So far this has all reflected romance.

But some of the deepest loves in my life have never involved a candlelit dinner.

I have friends that I love.

Fully and genuinely, true to the actual meaning of the word.

Some of them are twenty minutes away at any moment.

While others are on the other side of the world, in time zones that make a simple phone call a real act of planning.

None of these friendships happened by accident.

They require effort.

They were built over many years, by treating the relationship as a two-way street.

By making sure those people know I care about them, that I'm there if they need me, and that I want what's best for them.

Which sounds obvious when you write it down.

But sadly, this is rarer than it should be.

Because there's a layer to friendship that most never reach.

Plenty stay pleasant and easy and comfortably surface-level, and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

A handful go further and arrive somewhere that can only really be called love.

I'm so grateful for those that I have.

And then there’s family, of course.

The love that was present before I knew what is was and one I’ve written about plenty over the last two years.

As a global society, we’re a bit strange about the word love.

We ration it out as though there's a shortage.

We save it for romance, for funerals, for the butterflies in your stomach moments.

Despite this, the research suggests we've got it the wrong way round.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same people for more than 85 years, making it one of the longest studies of human life ever conducted.

Its director, Robert Waldinger, presents the central finding very plainly.

They compiled all the information they had on individuals at fifty years old and then looked at who remained healthy at eighty.

The strongest predictor wasn't what anyone expected.

It was how satisfied those people were with their close relationships.

It beat out cholesterol.

And what matters most?

Was the quality of those relationships, not the number of them.

Which means the friend who checks in on you every few weeks is doing more for your health than most things you'd happily pay money for.

A while back, I wrote about the weight a few simple words can carry in "I Love You and I Believe in You."

My point is, if you love your friends?

They should probably hear about it while it still matters.

Love is endless, boundless and is to be shared generously.

So how do you recognise when it’s the real thing?

Across every version of love I've known, romantic or otherwise, one signal keeps repeating.

The exhale.

Real connection tends to feel safe more than it feels exciting.

I know that's unfashionable.

We're taught to chase butterflies, and butterflies are bloody lovely.

But butterflies are also, technically speaking, your nervous system bracing for uncertainty.

Peace is much harder to come by.

Think about the people you love most.

My guess is they share a quality that rarely makes it into love songs.

They're calm to be around.

When they're wrong, they own it.

When you're struggling, they don't make your struggle about them.

That level of emotional maturity doesn't sound romantic.

But in practice it's magnetic, because it creates peace, and peace is what allows everything else to grow.

Respect works in much the same way.

You generally notice it by its absence.

Love with respect feels light, easy to carry.

Love without it becomes heavier every year, no matter how much passion you pour on top.

Catch a bid: When someone you love points out a bird (or whatever), turn towards them. Three seconds of your attention. Each time is an investment in your relationship.

Take an honest inventory: After time with the people closest to you, notice how you feel. Steadier or smaller? Rested or wrung out? Your nervous system keeps better records than your memory does.

Say the quiet part out loud: Tell a friend you love them. Out loud, or in writing if that's easier. It might feel awkward but it will also be remembered.

Stop performing: Somewhere in your life you're probably still auditioning. Try being unimpressive around that person once. The ones worth keeping will stick around.

Sixteen years of marriage, friendships that have crossed oceans, and heartbreaks that prepared me for real love.

Here's where all of it has seen me land.

Young me thought love was something that happened to you.

Lightning, luck, right place at the right time.

I don't think that anymore.

Love is something you build.

Mostly out of materials only the two of you have access to.

A silly wave.

Jokes and language you use so often that your kids start using them.

The tea brought upstairs without being asked.

The fireworks will fade, everyone knows that. What nobody tells you is that what's left behind is more rewarding and profound.

It's the enduring connection and the deep sense of understanding that brings lasting fulfillment.

It's light and it’s peaceful.

If you have this anywhere in your life, in a partner, a friend, a parent, a child, you're wealthier than most people will ever be.

So please tell them.

Not on an anniversary, and not when something has gone wrong.

Tell them on a normal day, when there's no occasion and nobody's watching.

Then notice what comes back to you.

If it's calm, hold on to it with both hands.

And spare a thought for the butterflies.

Most of them only live two or three weeks.

They’re beautiful but brief, and then gone.

Which is wonderful, if you happen to be a butterfly.

Just not much of a plan for a life.

Those butterflies were always overrated.

Want to go a bit deeper on this? Here's a short, sharp look at how the stories we grew up on quietly set us up to expect the wrong things from love, and what happens when real life doesn't match the script:

🐕 Sad or Afraid? Dogs May Be Able to Read Your Face - Fourteen family dogs trained to lie still inside an MRI scanner showed one pattern of brain activity for angry and sad human faces and a different one for fearful faces, the first sign that dogs can tell our darker moods apart from expression alone—no tone of voice, no body language, no words required. Read more → (Science News)

✨ Extraordinary Experiences Are More Common Than You Think - Brazilian researchers drew up a list of 38 experiences most of us assume are rare and put it to more than 5,000 people: three in four had felt déjà vu, roughly eight in ten had been floored by compassion for a stranger’s suffering, and most said the moment left them changed for the better. Read more → (Nautilus)

☀️ Why Did Childhood Summers Feel Endless? - Time researcher Marc Wittmann says the summers of your childhood felt longer because almost everything in them was a first, and his advice for slowing the years down again isn’t to cram your Saturdays full—it’s to wake up with no plan at all and see what the morning gives you. Read more → (Popular Science)

🛞 A 13-Year-Old Spent 300 Hours 3D Printing a Custom Wheelchair for a Toddler - Zac Waters of Lehi, Utah taught himself 3D printing on YouTube, then gave up 300 hours of his summer holidays to build a 21-month-old girl a chair with a removable tray, storage for her heavier medical gear and a headrest that adjusts as she grows—finished in pink, because pink is her favourite colour. Read more → (Sunny Skyz)

🌳 How Many Trees Exist on Earth? A Look at the Numbers Behind Our Forests - By stitching satellite imagery together with more than 400,000 ground measurements taken on every continent but Antarctica, ecologists landed on 3.04 trillion trees—roughly 390 for every person alive—and along the way learned that the boreal forests of northern Canada are the most tightly packed on the planet. Read more → (Interesting Engineering)

A referee reaches his hand deep into his pocket and everyone on the pitch goes still for a moment.

Somebody is about to be told off in front of their friends.

Then a card slowly appears.

But it's green.

Why?

A player stopped mid-game, turned around to help an opponent off the ground.

The card is for her.

Neither a yellow nor a red.

That was the brief these founders had set themselves.

To produce a card that couldn't punish anybody, only highlight the behaviours worth copying.

The first green card was shown in 2008, in a housing estate called Las Bandurrias in Huechuraba, on the northern edge of Santiago, Chile.

Four friends had started something.

Two of them, Guillermo Rolando and Rodrigo Abarzúa, were engineers out of the Pontificia Universidad Católica, which is far from the usual background for this kind of thing.

Las Bandurrias was one of five neighbourhoods they started in.

Attracting roughly three hundred children.

Abarzúa's account is that Rolando rang him one day and suggested doing something with football in the poblaciones.

A small window opened and he couldn't say no.

Rolando's reason for making that call is still the whole idea.

So they built a method on positive psychology rather than talent scouting.

Respect. Joy. Responsibility. Creativity. Teamwork.

Five plain words, applied consistently for eighteen years with little deviation.

It's a fair question.

Plenty of good intentions have poured onto a football pitch over the years and then run straight off the other side.

In 1955, a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner began following 698 babies born that year on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

Every single child born there that year.

She kept at it for four decades.

Many grew up with the odds against them and had more trouble with health, delinquency and family stability.

That part didn’t surprise anyone.

A third of those high-risk children turned out fine.

Better than fine.

Caring, competent, confident adults.

Werner spent years working out what protected them, and near the top of the list sat something unglamorous.

A strong bond with a steady adult who wasn't a parent.

A teacher. An aunt. A mentor or a community group.

Which is, more or less, the entire business model of a Fútbol Más session.

Show up to the same place, at the same time, every week, trained by pair of adults who know your name and are truly glad you came.

The cleverest part of this story took me a while to uncover.

The children can hand out green cards themselves.

An adult praising a child is still an adult rewarding a child.

A nine-year-old choosing to highlight the behaviour of a teammate, or even an opponent, is a completely different act.

You have to pay attention to people other than yourself.

At the 2015 Copa América in Chile, UNICEF asked the foundation to design something for the tournament, and they chose the green card.

When the Ecuadorian anthem played before Chile's opening match, a moment normally drowned in booing, the Estadio Nacional turned green instead.

They did this all tournament.

And Chile won the entire thing for the first time in their history.

Remarkable.

The card is now in use across the eleven countries where the foundation is active.

It reached Nairobi in 2017, and in July 2020, as the pandemic closed in, it went into Kakuma and Dadaab with UNHCR.

By May 2021 the foundation had counted 2,231 children impacted in Kakuma alone.

Children who had lost their homes, their countries and in many cases their families, were being handed a green card for kindness from another child.

Sport for development has a credibility problem, and much of it is deserved.

It's a field laced with photogenic children within it and not always much evidence underneath.

The other honest note is about Rolando himself.

The Laureus Sport for Good Award, which he collected in Madrid on 20 April 2026 alongside Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka, went to the foundation.

Not to him.

He was one of four founders and has remained deliberately hard to access, which is most likely why you've never heard of him.

And why this was such a hard story to research.

He's realistic about the hard stretches, too.

Neither the yellow nor the red.

That was the brief four friends set themselves, and I haven't been able to shake it since I first read it.

We are all fluent in the red one.

We can tell somebody precisely what they got wrong, at speed and with evidence.

Many of us will do it in traffic on the way home without even raising our heart rate.

But the green one?

That one we barely carry.

And the version I keep circling back to isn't for the people closest to you. It's the card you'd hold up for somebody who isn't yours.

That's what Werner kept finding in her study on Kauai.

The adults who made the biggest difference usually wasn't a parent.

There's no special occasion for that kind of love.

It isn’t accompanied by a cermony or a speech, in fact there may be nobody watching.

It also done by people who likely never find out that it worked.

Rolando's answer to this was to stop leaving it to chance.

He crafted a card dedicated to the art of noticing.

A simple yet profound gesture.

He then entrusted it to a group of nine-year-olds, embedding it into their everyday lives.

Now, without any need for prompting, they pass it among themselves.

Turning the act of noticing into a delightful, shared ritual.

So, now I’ll hand it over to you.

Who could you be that steady adult for?

If you want to hear a little from Guillermo himself, check out this short video where he gratefully accepts the Laureus Sport for Good Award:

Some albums find you at exactly the right age.

When Ten was released?

I was a teenager in regional Australia, fully immersed in music, dedicating large chunks of my free time to it.

I'd lie on the floor in front of the stereo with the CD playing and the cover open in my hands, reading the lyrics line by line as they came.

That's how I met this record.

Absorbed by the sound, the lyrics, the energy and the angst.

Someone had finally put words to a wave of feelings I hadn't learned how to identify yet.

It’s never left my rotation since, and not due to nostalgia either.

It's still that good.

Ten was released on 27 August 1991, so it turns thirty-five this month.

It was born out of grief.

Andrew Wood, the singer of Mother Love Bone, had died the year before, and the two men left holding the pieces, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, started again from nothing.

A demo tape found its way to a petrol station attendant in San Diego named Eddie Vedder.

He wrote out the lyrics, recorded his vocals and then posted the tape back.

They then cut the album within a month at London Bridge Studios in Seattle.

At this point, still calling themselves Mookie Blaylock after the basketball player.

Ten being his jersey number.

And then, nothing really happened.

The album sold slowly.

It didn't crack the Billboard top ten until nine months after release, and when it finally reached number two the record keeping it off the top was Billy Ray Cyrus.

I find that oddly reassuring.

The album that ended up defining a decade spent its first year being largely ignored.

It has since appeared on Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums chart a whopping 194 separate times.

Track five is Black, and it might just be my favourite song ever written.

Gossard wrote the music first, as an instrumental demo he'd named E Ballad.

Vedder wrote the lyrics while on his way to Seattle.

It's a song about a first love ending, and about how badly you can want someone to be happy while you're still in pieces about it.

It's a sad song.

And without doubt one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know.

Almost six minutes that you can disappear into completely.

Their label, Epic Records, wanted it released as a single but the band said no.

And kept saying no.

Vedder didn't want a video attached to it, even calling radio programmers himself to stop it being pushed out as a single.

"Fragile songs get crushed by the business," he said.

"I don't want to be a part of it."

It managed to reach number three on the US Mainstream Rock chart anyway.

Without ever being released.

And now it's back in the charts.

It debuted at number twenty-four on Billboard's Hard Rock Streaming Songs chart, only the second time the band has ever appeared on that list.

And it's now been sitting there about a month, dragging the album up the charts with it.

The reason is TikTok, of all places.

Young women have been posting the lyrics to draw a line between how Vedder wrote about heartbreak in 1991 and what turns up in their messages now.

I can't think of a better endorsement than a generation using a song you love as the standard everything else gets measured against.

The rest of the album more than holds up.

Once, Even Flow, Alive, Why Go, Black, Jeremy, Oceans, Porch, Garden, Deep, Release.

Bangers, start to finish.

Here’s a few ways to get the most out of this one:

Play it in order: Ten was sequenced as an experience, and the run from Once through to Release has a shape that shuffle destroys. Many people bail around track eight. Release is always worth waiting for.

Give Black your full attention once: No driving, no dishes, no scrolling. Headphones on, nothing else happening. Vedder was right to protect this song. It’s phenomenal.

Don't stop after the singles: Alive, Even Flow and Jeremy are the tracks most will recognise. They're not the best songs on the record.

Read the lyrics while you listen: You can find them in about four seconds and they’ll change the way you view each song and the band behind them.

It took Ten the better part of a year to reach its first audience, then thirty-five years to find its latest one.

That's a wild concept to think about.

Nobody in that studio in 1991 was building a legacy.

They were simply four blokes with a new singer they'd barely met, making the only record they knew how to make.

Then, they simply outlasted everyone's opinion of them.

Somewhere tonight there's a fifteen-year-old listening to Black for the first time.

Probably not on a bedroom floor with the album cover open, the way I did it.

More likely on a phone, halfway through something else but reading the lyrics on the screen.

I have no doubt it’ll reach them the same way it did me.

I've spent most of my life telling others about this song.

Turns out it never needed me, it just needed time to reach them.

P.S. The album Ten goes to some dark places. During Once, Why Go and Jeremy in particular, Vedder isn't writing in metaphor. The angst I felt as a teenager was more ordinary, while parts of this record are well past that. If any of it lands somewhere tender, please talk to someone you trust, or your doctor, or a crisis line where you live. You don't have to be in crisis to be worth helping.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

Go and stay at your parents' place for a few days, or sit down with people you went to school with.

Ten minutes in and it’s like you're fifteen again.

The same jokes fly back and forth and it runs the other way too.

Some people bring out a version of you that's funnier and braver and more generous than you often believe you have in you.

Michelangelo often talked about carving as freeing a figure that was already inside the block of marble.

Simply waiting for someone to chisel the stone away.

Psychologists have borrowed that same image and named an effect after him.

Because the people closest to you are the ones holding the chisel.

In 1999, a team led by Stephen Drigotas and Caryl Rusbult went looking for proof this effect actually happens between people.

They called it the Michelangelo phenomenon.

The way they went about it was simple enough.

They asked people what they were trying to become.

More patient, more organised, better with money, whatever the case for that individual.

Then they looked at how each person's partner saw them and treated them.

Then they checked whether the person had actually moved any closer to the behaviour they were aiming for.

Four studies, each with different groups and different ways of measuring.

The same pattern emerged every time.

Those whose partners already treated them as the person they were trying to be?

They were the ones who got there.

And the strongest element was behaviour.

What a partner truly believes about you matters far less than how they actually act around you.

Now, this type of research shows two things travelling together, rather than proving one caused the other.

But four studies is four studies, and the pattern is very consistent.

Because it cuts both ways.

If you can chisel their way toward the person you're trying to become, you can just as easily chisel toward the one you left behind years ago.

Every time you're treated as someone you used to be?

A chunk of marble comes off in the wrong place.

What’s interesting and worth taking note of is that you're not just on the receiving end of this.

You're also doing it to others, probably today.

Say it out loud, once: Identify the version of themselves that someone close to you is aiming for. The specific thing, not just encouragement in general. Most people will go years without ever hearing it said plainly out loud.

Check which edition you're carrying: We update our opinion of strangers instantly, then leave the people we love defined as who they were in 2019. Refresh and update their current status.

Ask what they see in you: Put the question to someone who knows you well and let them describe you back. You'll usually hear something you may have stopped believing.

Personally, I got this wrong earlier this summer.

My son is almost thirteen, and he’s practically lived on his bike throughout this summer.

Racing down to the pool, over to the park, a friend’s house, then back again.

Somewhere along the way he told us he doesn't love wearing his helmet.

Because it doesn't look cool and half his mates ride without theirs.

So, we did what parents tend to do.

We made the case.

Stating clearly why you wear one and what it's actually for.

I also mentioned a fall I’d had a couple of months back, and my gratitude for the work my helmet did in that moment.

And then we kept reminding him.

Long after he stopped pushing back.

What I hadn't noticed is that he'd already made up his mind.

My wife and I have both spotted him around the neighbourhood since, before he knew we’d seen him.

Helmet on, every time.

Sometimes with a mate beside him riding without one.

He'd sorted this out on his own, and I was still arguing a case that had been won weeks earlier.

Following through when nobody's checking is harder than it sounds at thirteen, so I'm proud of him for it.

Familiarity might feel like accuracy.

But when we've been around someone for years, we tend to assume we're working from a current picture.

Often we're not.

And we don't find out until they show us or tell us.

So this week, ask yourself who you're treating those close to you as?

And more importantly, whether they'd still recognise that description.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

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