The Four Pursuits (Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha)
Sort purpose and stability before you go looking for love, because the order is the whole point.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
The Vedas describe four pursuits of life in a deliberate sequence: Dharma (purpose and who you are), Artha (economic development and stability), Kama (pleasure, love and connection) and Moksha (liberation, service, giving back). Shetty translates them into four decisions everyone makes: how I feel about myself, what I do to make money, who I choose to love and receive love from, and how I choose to serve the world. The ordering is the mechanism: love sits third, not first, because a person who does not know their own values, likes and goals brings that unresolved work into the relationship and makes their partner carry it. Skipping the first two stages does not remove the work, it just relocates it into a relationship that will probably be damaged by it. Reach for this when you feel behind on love, or when relationship after relationship reproduces the same insecurity.
Origin
Shetty took the framework from the Vedas, the umbrella spiritual texts he studied as a monk, and rebuilt it in plain language while writing '8 Rules of Love' and coaching couples over the preceding few years.
Core principles
- 01Purpose comes before partnership, not after it.
- 02You cannot skip a stage, you can only postpone it onto someone else.
- 03Connection feels like an easier solve than purpose, which is exactly why people reach for it first.
- 04Knowing yourself is not the same as being perfectly happy.
- 05The right person reduces drama; the wrong person, met from an unhealed place, increases trauma.
How to run it
- 1
Dharma — decide how you feel about yourself
Work out your purpose and who you are: what you like and dislike about yourself and about life, what your values are right now, and what your goals are right now. Shetty is explicit that these will change and evolve, so the aim is a current, articulable answer rather than a permanent one.
Pro tip This is not a decade-long project. Shetty says you could do it in three months if you wanted to; you do not have to become a monk or go to a mountaintop.
Watch out Do not confuse this with journalling affirmations or self-talk in a mirror. Shetty explicitly says self-worth does not come from that.
- 2
Artha — build stability
Work towards stability across finances, health, self-development and personal growth. This is the 'fill your own bottle' stage: the resources, skills, network and reputation that let you contribute to a relationship rather than draw from it.
Pro tip Treat the bottle as broader than money — Shetty counts skills, knowledge, network and reputation as part of what has to be filled.
Watch out Stability is not the same as wealth. The point is a base to give from, not a number to hit before you are allowed to date.
- 3
Kama — choose who you love and receive love from
Only now enter connection. Arriving with a known set of values, likes and goals means you can communicate them, notice a mismatch early, and avoid pushing away someone who was genuinely right for you.
Pro tip Knowing your values makes selection faster: you spend time in places you actually like, and friends can introduce you to people who share your values because they share them too.
Watch out Entering from insecurity after being hurt does not just risk a bad match, it can ruin a relationship with the safest, most secure person you could have been with.
- 4
Moksha — decide how you serve the world
The final pursuit is liberation through service and ultimate giving: how you choose to impact the world beyond yourself and your relationship. Shetty places it last because it is what a filled bottle and a stable partnership make possible.
Pro tip Serving together is also the highest rung of intimacy in Shetty's ladder, so this stage feeds back into the relationship rather than competing with it.
In the wild
Bartlett describes a conversation an hour before the interview with a friend in her mid-thirties struggling with dating, convinced the fix is a new haircut or a Soho House membership. Shetty's answer is that all that stress and insecurity is the wrong decision-making profile: it pushes you toward settling for someone who merely texts back.
→ Shetty redirects her to three answerable questions about herself — likes and dislikes, current values, current goals — as a three-month piece of work that speeds up and simplifies partner selection rather than delaying it.
Shetty compares skipping Dharma and Artha to using a cheat code to jump to level ten of a game without playing levels one to nine. The Game of Life, as he puts it, then pushes you back to learn the lesson you skipped: you enter a relationship out of insecurity, it ends, you are insecure again, and the cycle repeats.
→ The insecurity keeps returning until it is dealt with alone, at which point a person can tell whether a partner is right and can make it work if they are.
Common mistakes
Treating a partner as the solution to your unhealed wounds
Shetty calls this the mistake: hoping someone will heal your wounds without doing the work yourself. Two people who each do not know their purpose, values or goals mesh into confusion, broken hearts and, at the extreme, manipulation and control.
Believing self-sacrifice makes you a better partner
Sacrificing your purpose does not make you a better partner, it makes you more resentful, guilty and upset. Shetty has sat with people who gave up their dreams for decades and only looked back in their fifties and sixties, once the kids left, to wish they had not.
Confusing 'know yourself' with 'be perfectly happy first'
Shetty caveats this himself: he is not saying you must be perfectly happy before meeting someone. Waiting for perfect happiness is a different and unachievable bar than knowing your values and goals as they currently stand.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who keeps repeating the same relationship pattern, or who feels a clock ticking and is tempted to skip straight to finding a partner.
Not ideal for
People already in a stable long-term partnership looking for tactical repair — the sequencing argument is about entry, not maintenance.
From the transcript
“I believe that there are four important decisions that we all get to make in life the first one is how I feel about myself…”
“you skip step one you've skipped Dharma and you've leaned into Karma because you don't want to sort Dharma”
“the work that you skip in step one and two you're gonna have to do with another person”
“we live in a world where we think sacrificing our purpose makes us a better partner”
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