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Admit it: You’ve spent years suffering through relationships with the wrong men. You were afraid of breaking up. You were afraid of being alone. You were afraid you couldn’t do better. You were afraid of having to date again. Those fears are real and valid and I’m not going to deny you those feelings. What I will point out on today’s Love U Podcast is that there’s a big difference between wasting time and investing time in a man. Once costs you years of your life. The other gets you married. Stick around and I’ll explain.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Vr says
Definitely was this person and wising up now and paying more attention to what people reveal at the beginning (and hearing it) and how they act. I’m on the other end of the spectrum now 44 still wanting kids. What would you recommend to people like me where 2 years means maybe not being able to have kids however don’t want kids with the wrong person either! Can you share thoughts for this scenario? Thanks btw your online dating program has helped enormously with writing a profile and navigating what seemed really alien to me before!
James says
I’m glad you mentioned investing in the partner you want, something that is sorely lacking in today’s women. Women today want to “have fun” while they’re young and believe they can just pick a great man at the end. It doesn’t work like that, ladies.
Here’s why that strategy doesn’t work, when your younger and your best on the outside (physical beauty) and inside (mentally, emotionally). You women just want to have fun. Loyal, loving, empathetic is not high on your priority list for a mate you want a Good looking, charmer, with status that is above everything else exciting.
Those types of men you want in your younger years don’t want relationships because all the girls want those same guys and those guys know it. So you get damaged emotionally and mentally for years and sometimes decades chasing those types of men. As your chasing those men you’re getting older, less fit (at least not as fit as in your 20’s), and accumulating massive amounts of mental and emotional damage along the way.
Then when you get older and decide to focus on things like loyalty, empathy, loving, you want to then add on elements of the guys you chased in your younger year’s (exciting, status, money). You want these guys that had to be focused and driven there entire lives to then choose you. Those guys are thinking you’ve already had your fun, when they wanted a companion while they were building themselves up, women like you were partying it up. They are now ready to have the fun with women that still are not damaged emotionally and mentally.
It’s not hopeless for women, but you have to get realistic. The best man you could get, you most likely passed on him in your youth without a second thought. He wasn’t perfect, but he was the best deal you were going to get, you just didn’t realize it. If you put your ego aside you could still get a pretty good guy, but he won’t check all of your boxes.
Kitty says
James, if only it were that easy! The impression I get from your comment is that you perceive the male population to be neatly divided into relationship-oriented “nice guys” and players. Real life is more complicated than that. “Nice guys” also desire casual sex from time to time, and very few of even the most chronic players want to sleep around until the day they die. “Nice guys” also pursue casual sex, they just go about it in different way from the Machine Gun Kellys of the world. And just because a man is “nice” and wants to be in a committed relationship and get married doesn’t mean that he necessarily has good communication skills and the emotional maturity to be a good partner. This is true of commitment-minded women as well. And often two people with good relationship skills who want to settle down discover, during the course of a relationship, that they aren’t right for each other.
Also, I question the notion that single women over 35 are uniformly damaged by their breakups. Breakups certainly take a toll on women (and men) but not nearly as much as spending decades in bad relationships. Everyone’s heart gets broken along the way, but staying bitter, defensive and jaded is usually a choice on some level. A heartbroken woman or man may need to seek therapy and go on antidepressants for a while if the heartbreak is really ruinous, but humans are resilient. Advice like Evan’s helps a lot.
Evan is right on the money here. I’m 40, I got married at 39 having met my husband at 38 and I’ve seen a lot of women end up single and childless. Or unhappily married, with or without kids. Or single/divorced moms who are happy to be out of a bad relationship but wishing for an intact family with a suitable partner. Happily married with kids (and even without kids if that’s what she wants) is very hard to pull off. And the number one reason that I’ve seen over and over again that women end up unhappy is that they spend too much time with men who aren’t right for them. The two best things a woman can do for herself is to figure out she is and what sort of men work for her, and graciously cut men loose as soon as she realizes they are wrong for her. Easier said than done, but it usually works out well when it’s done right.
Eric says
Clearly, you missed the point of what James wrote. You are one of those women that waited till the 11th hour to pick a man and got lucky. You are the exception not the rule, your advice will lead to far more women growing old alone.
Cathalei says
Eric,
Are you sure she didn’t pick a man before and later broke up? More often than not that’s what happens.
What she says is more practical than you seem to assume. There is a finite time for this endeavor as you implied with the “11th hour” remark and spending this time with those whom you can’t communicate well with usually ends in a breakup that would detract from this time. Just because someone is a “nice guy” doesn’t mean you’ll be nice together, just because someone is commitment oriented doesn’t mean what you want will necessarily match. Even erstwhile players get in serious relationships when they feel the time is right for them. Evan himself got with many women and could’ve been called one but he wanted to settle down eventually. No amount of niceness can take away the gulf created by conflicting values and desires.
Kitty says
Eric,
“You are one of those women that waited till the 11th hour to pick a man and got lucky.”
That entire statement is wrong.
First of all, I didn’t “wait until the 11th hour” to pick a man. I knew I wanted to get married, so I made the effort to meet men and date. I “picked” men to be boyfriends along the way and most of them were good men…..for other women but not me. Most of them are now happily married. If I’d married any of them I’d either be unhappily married or divorced at 40, instead of happily married at 40, because those men weren’t right for me.
Second, I didn’t “get lucky”. I was intentional and strategic in finding my husband. I challenged and changed my assumptions, let go of limiting beliefs, refined my dating techniques and I also pulled myself out of depression, all at the same time. I did my research, I got good advice (primarily from Evan, but from others as well). For a year I went to therapy once a week, a depression support group once a week, and on a date once a week. There was an amount of randomness in meeting the specific man that I married, but I “made my own luck” in two main ways. First, I once I realized that a man was wrong for me I removed him from my life. Sometimes this involved an actual break up but more often than not I just let men who weren’t that into me drift away. Secondly, I was persistent in meeting men even when I was sick and tired of it. I almost cancelled my first date with my husband because I was so exhausted from dating. But I didn’t and I reaped rewards of my hard work and persistence
Yet Another Guy says
While I agree with James and Eric, I can see where Kitty and Cathalei are coming from in their replies to this blog post. However, as informed Kitty and Cathalei may believe they are about men, they are wrong. Nice guys may want casual sex, but they rarely get sex outside of commitment. Most of the female casual sex partners accrue to the top 20% of the male population. The difference in sex partner count between a guy in the top 20% and a guy in the lower 80% can be ridiculous. I know because I have spent most of my life on the “cad” side of the equation in Patricia Draper terms, as Jeremy so eloquently informed me (Google “cads dads Draper”). The men that women label “players” are only players because they are part of the 20% of the male population on which 80% of the female population focuses their attention. If a woman is not in the top 20% of the female population looks and fitness-wise (status is a female mate selection primal trigger, not a male mate selection primal trigger), about the only thing she is going to get from one of these men is played because the average man would have sex with a pumpkin if he could figure out how to do it. In more direct terms, men routinely date down for sex; therefore, a top 20% man wanting to have sex with a woman is not an indication of where she ranks in the female social hierarchy from a male point of view.
I know from personal experience that guy in the top 20% does not have to treat women well because he always has a queue of willing women. I learned that lesson in my twenties and thirties. I have witnessed female behavior that would really upset a bunch of nice guys from my past such as women calling me for sex after being dropped off from a date by a guy who would have treated them like gold. That experience taught me that women who can be trusted are much rarer than most men and even many care to admit.
The reality is that women have two different sets of needs that often cannot be satisfied by one man. The first set of needs is comfort needs. Women tend to list male comfort attributes on their online dating profiles. For example, a man having a good sense of humor is a comfort attribute because humor puts a woman at ease with a man and a woman’s most basic primal need is to feel safe and secure. From personal experience, players are usually acutely aware of this phenomenon and use it to their advantage to quickly gain a woman’s trust.
With that said, there is another set of needs that most women never list on a dating profile; namely, arousal needs. In fact, many women never reach the level of maturity necessary to realize that they are making poor long-term mate selection choices based arousal needs. A few of these women realize that chasing their arousal needs is recipe for relationship disaster later in life. They find themselves having to do the full-court press for a comfort guy with whom to settle down and raise a family in their late thirties/early forties. These are the women to whom James and Eric are referring. From my viewpoint, they are also the women who make up a large percentage of Evan’s clients. A lot of what Evan teaches is focused on getting women to look past their arousal needs long enough to find a guy who is high comfort while being high enough in the arousal department. That is part of his seven out of ten chemistry, ten of ten in compatibility approach to mate selection. It is definitely a good approach for any women who wants a relationship with a guy who will stick around and treat her well.
The only downside is that every guy wants to feel like he is high arousal and that is just not true. Status is only part of the equation for those guys who spent a long time building successful careers hoping to land the “one.” Guys should never lose focus of the reality that status is a comfort attribute, not an arousal attribute. Arousal attributes are mostly physical, but displaying confidence and boundaries around women without being arrogant can go a long way towards offsetting not being taller than average and/or displaying signs of high testosterone such as being broad shouldered and muscular for one’s age. Remember, arousal for women is the same thing as it is for men; namely, displaying visual signs of breeding fitness. That is why all men are drawn to twenty-something women. It is also what drives older men to become delusional and believe that they actually stand a chance of finding a twenty-something woman who is interested in more than their status.
Kitty says
YAG,
Depends on your definition of “commitment” and “nice guy”. Many men who aren’t particularly successful in the casual sex market as you describe it get into monogamous relationships with women they don’t really care about exclusively to get sex. Or sometimes such men get into relationships with good intentions and then discover sometime along they don’t want to marry these particular women. But these “nice guys” often don’t tell the women that. They are non-confrontational by nature, don’t want to cause a scene and don’t want to hurt the women’s feelings. And of course they don’t want to give up regular, reliable sex. Instead, they mentally slide those women into their “disposable” box and go through the motions of being in a committed relationship without truly loving them, being upfront with them and (of course) without ever buying an engagement ring.
I’ve known men who’ve dated and even lived with women for years with no intention of marrying them. Sometimes they throw out a little fine print “disclaimer” in the beginning to cover their behinds in case their girlfriends pressure them about marriage, and sometimes they don’t. Regardless, they do lots of “couple things” like go on vacation together and even spend the holidays together. These are the guys who shut down like buggy computers the minute their girlfriends of 2 or 3 years try to discuss their futures. The ones I’ve known all consider themselves “nice guys” because they’re polite, gainfully employed and not violent. But “nice guys” who waste the best years of women’s lives aren’t as “nice” as they think they are.
Sex with a woman who’s been grudgingly granted the “girlfriend” label when the man doesn’t value her and intends to discard her may not fit the Websters’ definition of “casual sex”. But it is certainly not how a marriage-minded woman wants to spend her time. And it does throw a wrench in this black and white thinking idea that men are either loving, commitment seeking betas or promiscuous alphas.
Emily, to says
Kitty,
“And it does throw a wrench in this black and white thinking idea that men are either loving, commitment seeking betas or promiscuous alphas.”
Yeah, I agree. And not every short-term situation is going to trigger deeper feelings in a woman to want more. Women are just as capable of assigning men to short-term and long-term categories as men are. It’s not just a matter of one not offering commitment and one offering it. It’s a matter of who she feels has the qualities she wants to commit to.
jo says
YAG wrote ‘I have witnessed female behavior… such as women calling me for sex after being dropped off from a date by a guy who would have treated them like gold. That experience taught me that women who can be trusted are much rarer than most men and even many care to admit.’
Oh please. What hypocrisy. If you were participating in the act with these women, then what does that say about you? More of the tired ‘top 20%’ braggadocio – women cannot be trusted, but you are without blame and may treat them poorly and judge them harshly. Not to mention: if they were coming back from just dates, that hardly means that they owed those ‘nice guys’ monogamy, or even sex in the first place.
Whether you realise it or not, your double-standard mindset for what men and women may or may not do comes across loud and clear. It would have been fine if you had left it at that women find only a small percentage of men highly arousing – truth. But then you placed judgment on women by calling them untrustworthy for indulging in that arousal, though they didn’t ‘owe’ sex or monogamy to anyone else.
However arousing a man might otherwise be, gender-based discrimination is a turnoff. It just makes a woman feel repulsed. Maybe something good for men to understand.
Mrs Happy says
Dear Kitty @#8,
Re “But “nice guys” who waste the best years of women’s lives aren’t as “nice” as they think they are.”
I understand what you are alluding to, but it doesn’t sit right with me that one adult should be responsible for another’s wants and life timeline, and the problem solving needed thereof.
If Person A does not want marriage, and their partner might someday, or does soon or now, I don’t think it is up to Person A to break up with their partner so as to not “waste” their partner’s time. In fact it’s slightly presumptuous to do so; it assumes Person A knows what is best for their partner. I think taking the necessary steps to solve that problem (breaking up) is largely on their partner.
I think this ethically (i.e. to have autonomy and make serious decisions about one’s life oneself is the correct thing for an adult to do), and practically (i.e. it’s what happens – people largely suit themselves and stay in relationships as long as they themselves choose to and such is good for them).
James says
Do women not see how they have subconsciously found away to villanize good men as “nice guys” that waste their time and are ultimately bad for long term relationships. The women who have responded have put good loyal men in the same category as the men that would sleep with them and never speak to them again. The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the men believe as the reason for what happens. Women don’t pick those men anyway. Women have no problem turning away and rejecting good men. Look to the majority of dating advice for women, it’s always some version of dealing with behavior only the players display.
Kitty says
Dear Mrs. Happy #11,
“I understand what you are alluding to, but it doesn’t sit right with me that one adult should be responsible for another’s wants and life timeline, and the problem solving needed thereof.”
I agree with you. The real issue in these situations is that women who wind up in these endless, dead end relationships with men who don’t want to marry them typically don’t realize that’s what happening. I don’t know about Sydney, but here in the Acela Corridor in the US most marriage minded women and girls date with the purpose of finding a husband. And while they may have the occasional short term fling with a guy who isn’t marriage material, such women won’t spend more than a few months on men they consider poor long-term prospects. Because of their own mentality most of these women default to assuming (especially after a year) “If he didn’t want to marry me he’d break up with me.” They make excuses for the men’s emotional distance and inconsiderate behavior, project all sorts of emotional complexes onto the men and will imagine anything except that the men are just using them as place holders.
So usually these women just have to realize that men can and often do date women with no real purpose and then decide what they want to do. Women do have to take ownership of their lives and remove men who aren’t giving them what they want.
That said, I find it hard to let men who keep women around for years with no intention of marrying them off the hook entirely. On some level, after a year or more of dating, most men realize if their girlfriends take the relationship more seriously than they do and they know if their girlfriends want to get married even if those guys do twist themselves into pretzels to avoid talking about it. And since women’s time to marry and have kids is much shorter than men’s wasting her time on purpose is uniquely injuring. In these situations both partners have a responsibility: the man to clearly admit that he doesn’t see a future with the woman, and the woman to decide if she wants to put more and more time into a dead relationship. But of the two I’d only expect the woman to make the move because it is in her interest to do so. From the man’s perspective, he gains nothing by losing a reliable sex source, especially if he (erroneously) thinks that he can get younger women no matter how old he gets.
James #12,
Do you really think that good men are angels who would never, ever put their own needs ahead of a random woman’s best interests? One of life’s most important rules is that even good people will use you if you let them. That is, unless you establish good boundaries and advocate for yourself. I’m a good person but if someone gave me a diamond necklace for free I’d take it.
Mrs Happy says
Dear James @ #12,
you’re hypothesising false dichotomies.
I and many others do not view the world as divided into “good” or “bad” groupings of people based on what an individual’s current relationship or sexual wants are. I spent decades not ever intending to marry or have children, and fully enjoying my sex life, and believe me, I’m not a “bad” person; I simply did not want to be anyone’s spouse or mother for many of my young adult years.
Furthermore, people are poor contenders for long term relationships for all sorts of reasons, “good” and “bad” (and we can debate what those terms even mean) usually having little to do with it. Some people are selfish, greedy, political or cause extremists, bizarre, religiously weird, violent, sexually hopeless, extremely physically unattractive to their target market, socially uncouth, have serious health problems, are not good at understanding a partner’s emotional wants, are lacking empathy, have little discretionary time, etc. etc. None of these necessarily make a person “bad,” they are simply massive disadvantages when competing on the open dating market.
Sometimes people with these attributes are only able to partner at all because others in their target market are so restricted (e.g. small religious communities with limited age-appropriate options, or misogynistic societies in which females have no power of choice, e.g. cults in which teenage brides are married to polygamist older men, or even just cultural groups which require virginity until marriage for social acceptance).
Your statement “… good loyal men in the same category as the men that would sleep with them and never speak to them again” makes little sense to me. It seems to presume that all a person need do to be cast as “good” or “loyal,” is want a long term relationship, and not have casual sex, which I think is an erroneous understanding of the idea of a “good” person. Murderous dictators want long term relationships. Narcissistic domestic violence perpetrators want long term relationships. It also mistakenly presumes there aren’t “good” or “nice” people who occasionally want to have sex outside relationships with few strings attached.
Simply wanting a relationship doesn’t make anyone “good.”
People aren’t turned away from long term relationships because they are “good,” they are turned away because they don’t have enough of the characteristics their target market want in a partner.
There is no cognitive dissonance at all.
Cathalei says
@jo
Well, maybe what YAG says about the women who are clients of Evan is true; maybe not. I cannot relate to this wide gap of arousal and comfort for example. There is a great deal of overlap between the two for me.
That being said, every woman’s 20% will differ. YAG did not say those women owed their dates a relationship or sex, but they apparently chose to do so with him. Wondering about the reason is valid. Also, if we reverse the sexes; we would talk about how those men used these women. So didn’t these women use their dates for whatever reason? Nobody owes anyone sex or relationship, but honesty about intentions is absolutely owed. People are not toys to build our self-esteem, “score” better with others etc. Casual sex and long term relationships are usually based on different attributes. For example, while attitudes about money matter in a LTR, they are irrelevant in a casual sex partner. So if YAG thought them as untrustworthy based on what they allegedly did, I don’t fault him. I wouldn’t trust a married man who promised to divorce to lure another woman into his bed either, does that mean I hold a double-standard? Absolutely not. What you wouldn’t mind in a casual sex partner may very well be a problem in a LTR.
“However arousing a man might otherwise be, gender-based discrimination is a turnoff. It just makes a woman feel repulsed. Maybe something good for men to understand.”
It’s a generalized statement. I don’t assume what turns me off turns any woman off. Our experiences are not universal, if we go by the indications that plenty of such types have partners indeed. Being partnered does not signal moral wholesomeness about either gender.
Time is a finite resource and someone who dangles false hopes to extract benefits while not caring about your expectations is acting in a selfish way. As Kitty described, it’s not nice at all when men do it, no matter how they may claim to be so. It’s not within integrity when women do it either.