 Thank you for stopping by the show. Thank you for having me and tell our audience a little bit about what you've been doing over the last 14 years because it's exciting to have you on. Obviously, we bring a lot of our male perspective to our male audience and you've been working with women in the dating space for a very long time now. Yeah. I mean, I didn't start as a coach for women. That's the the rich irony of this. I was just 2003. I wrote a book about online dating that did well when online dating was first becoming mainstream. And suddenly, I was on CNN and USA Today. And I was like, I'm not making any money because books don't make money. I was kind of figure out something to do. So I started an online dating profile writing business called Esirno. Online dating profiles led to online dating coaching led to dating coaching. And so I was just a single dating coach in my early 30s. And after five years of it, I realized 80% of the people turning to me were women. I didn't ask for that. This is probably the wrong audience to say it to. But when I say it to women, I say, men need advice. Women are the ones who ask for the advice. So that's not necessarily always the case. Right. But in my experience, the the the there's something about men that's less likely to reach out, ask for help, be vulnerable. I always appreciated the guys who did, but it was a big minority of my listeners. So I rebranded and became a dating coach for smart, strong, successful women who were the people who were the most motivated to make big changes in their life. And so that's what I've been doing for the past 10 years. And it's, you know, I don't think what I do is brain surgery. I honestly think that most of your male listeners could do probably 80% of what I could. Women generally want to understand men. Men don't, in my experience, want to understand women. I've never met a husband. It's like, I really want to understand my wife better. Never heard that ever. But I've built an entire practice around women who's like, I just I know there's something I'm missing. Explain to me what he's thinking, what I'm missing, how he could see things differently than I can. And I just get to play myself as you do. So it's been a it's been a really nice journey. And I've probably been doing it longer than anybody else on the planet. Now, this is the relationship month. And it's interesting that you mentioned online dating, because when most people think about starting relationships right now, especially romantic relationships, they're grabbing their phone, they're hopping on a trap. And I feel like online dating has changed a lot. The landscape has changed since you've been coaching women. And what have you seen has been the biggest change? I did a TED talk once upon a time where I spent 20 minutes on this topic and how online dating is kind of broken. It's still, I think the best option we have, right, which is not to say that meeting someone in real life isn't better. It's certainly better. It's just most people don't have the opportunity organically to do it. So to supplement, I highly recommend online dating and online dating in a very specific way. The way people are doing it is that we've gone to the app model. And with the app model, they've taken an already shallow medium, like online dating, and made a shallow worth, they've taken away anything that resembles depth, they've taken away the profile and they've taken away the emails. So it's swipe right, you're hot, text me. And so it's been great for men in that it's level the playing field, you don't have to do any work, except it's entirely looks based. And that really makes for a frustrating experience for both men and women. Everybody becomes disposable. As we pointed out prior to getting here, everybody thinks they can do better because on paper they can. And so what you end up is 20 people on your cell phone that you're texting simultaneously, you have no investment in any of them, they haven't distinguished themselves. And what you're trying to do is essentially gamify dating. And the problem with dating is what the TED talk was about, is that is the very is the gamification. It's the depersonalization of something that should be personal that again, I'm old comparatively. But I remember before there was internet dating before I got on board of that train early, you'd go out and meet someone, you'd get a number and you bronze that thing like that was got a goddamn number. How awesome is that your friends? This is a big deal. A big night. I got a number. And you were all in on that person. Now, I think it's good that we have more, we flatten the playing field and everybody has more opportunity. But with that volume comes the desire for speed. And when you have more speed, everybody becomes disposable. And you have women, again, speaking for my women clients, who feel like a piece of meat. The cute guy texted me says he wants to meet me tonight. I'm not ready to do that. But I don't have the courage to teach him what I want. Because women in general don't want speed, they want comfort. They want to go out with a guy who's invested in them, they don't want to go out with a guy who's a creep or a serial rapist, which is a perfectly reasonable thing. So guys aren't worried about going on a date and having drinks with a stranger, but women have every right to worry about that. So I try to tell women how to slow down men in this instant gratification society. And ironically, a lot of women don't want to slow down either. They feel caught up in the roller coaster. Well, I don't want to waste time. I want to see if there's chemistry. So it's this sort of race to the bottom, where everybody's complaining about the flakes who are texting them and ghosting them. But no one's spending more time relationship building before the date. And so that that's a there's a lot of tension there between the way we're doing things, right, where we've come technologically dating apps are so addictive, we're a little dopamine spikes every time you swipe right, they're so addictive. But they're not good for you if and and we know it because everybody's complaining about it. Right. So how do we how do we put that genie back in the bottle? That's a big part of my job is is is getting women off of dating apps and away from texting, despite everybody's propensity to do so. Are there any apps doing it well in your mind? I've heard and and I got taken before there were dating apps and pretty much before this text and I've been with my wife for 12 years. So so there's a lot that I've learned about through coaching that I didn't get a chance to experience. I understand that hinge is doing a decent job because they've put a little bit more depth into it. Right. But I haven't experienced that most of my clients will use a Tinder or Bumble. And again, there's there's nothing wrong with them. It's that if you're doing something that's not bringing you joy and results, you have to rethink how you're doing it. Right. So I just ask people who to slow down a beat and say, hey, instead of texting, plan a phone call. Hey, driving home tonight at 7 30, give me a call. Can't wait to hear your voice. Something real simple that anybody want us to use the phone again. I really last I heard that the phone was like the number six use of the phone. Right. It's it's it's apps and games and texting and actually using the phone is a good thing because it's the closest thing to simulating a date before the date. So when I when I was single back in the in the 1940s, I would do I would if every other guy was going to zig, I was going to zag. So this dating advice that I give to women was advice that I created for men. Right. I called it the two to two rule. And it was like, hey, every guy's like, you're hot. Let's meet. You're hot. Let's meet. And she's being assaulted by hundreds of guys. Right. And she's attractive. She's being verbally assaulted by 100 guys who are demanding that she meet them right away so they could prove to them themselves that they're worthy before she disappears and finds another guy she likes better. So it's this race from a place of scarcity and fear. And I was like, I don't need to do that. If every other guy is demanding that she meet, I'm going to slow down. So I'd email her on the dating site, build some trust. And it's like meeting at a party. Same thing that you guys specialize in. Talk to someone at a party for 20 minutes. Hey, you want to step outside, grab a drink? Sure. Talk for an hour. Then get a number. You build trust. So getting the numbers a lot easier. Do the same thing online. Couple emails on the dating site. Build some trust. Hey, what's your regular email address? I'll write to you on Gmail. Send you a photo. We'll continue this while it works. So I don't log into match very often. Okay. Build trust on Gmail. All right. What's your phone number? What's a good time to reach you? All right. Schedule a phone call. Schedule. Not what's your number and start texting. We have a plan. All right. And then you live up to the plan. And I used to do this and it would drive people nuts in a good way. I'd have a phone conversation. I had a really great time meeting you. I'll give you a call later this week. And she'd be like, why aren't you asking me out yet? I was like, I don't know. Just getting to know you. All right. Talk about reversing the energy and who's got the power. Right. All right. So all I did was do something different than every other guy. Every other guy's in a rush. I'm going to slow down in my whole process. Right? Couple emails here, couple emails here, phone call. What does it take? Five days? Right. It's not exactly a glacial process. So I encourage men and women to realize that if men want speed and women want comfort, we have to find a point on the graph where both of them get their needs met. It can't just be women dragging their feet and doing a background check for a month because that's no fun. Right. And it can't be the guy who's like, you're hot. Let's meet. Come over with a bottle of wine. There's a point that works for both people. And the more we could get towards that point, the more we could enjoy dating. So I'm going to step back now because I know. Well, we talk about dating and relationships. The word that jumps to everyone's mind is chemistry. Yeah. And I feel that one, these apps have no ability to show true chemistry. And even the texting as we talked about before we started on the show here is a very impersonal way of communication. But that's what the apps want. They want you to stay in the app. They want your eyeballs in time there. So of course, we're defaulting to some of the worst strategies to actually build chemistry to see if there's chemistry even with someone else. That's right. And I described it. It's like a race to the bottom. We're going to do more things that are hurtful to our chances of finding a real connection because they're easy. Right. And that's what marketers do. How do we make this easy, simple, frictionless so you don't have to think? And what requires less thought than, you know, I'd sleep with her, I'd sleep with her, I'd sleep with her or just, again, game theory. I'll swipe right on everybody and we'll see who comes back. Right. So there's very little incentive for a guy to put in more energy. And I'm encouraging women to only go out with guys who put in energy and leave a small pool of men. And there's men who've said, but I put in energy. I do the things you're asking to do and women reject me anyway. Right. So then they become disincentivized to do so. They think the energy is the problem. Right. I've been courting women. I'm dunk courting women. I'm just going to get laid. Yeah. Right. And I could understand and empathize with it. The thing that I would point out is that if you're trying to put in as little effort to get the most reward, that is the antithesis of what good dating is about. Right. Trying to think, going into the date with an agenda, what am I going to get out of it? How much action am I going to get for as little money as I can? Right. Right. That is backwards for someone who says they want a relationship. If you just want to get laid, then go ahead and there's no judgment. But you have to put in more to get more. And if you can text 20 women and one of them shows up at your house that night, she probably doesn't have very healthy self-esteem or healthy boundaries. You're probably not going to respect her. She's probably not your future wife. Right. Right. So that's what you get when you do things that way. And if you put in time, put in energy, make someone feel important, you're more likely to forge a real relationship where she can relax and be the best version of herself on the date because most men don't. So, again, look at what everybody else is doing and then do the opposite. It's funny how small things, we're not talking big things, can allow you to stand out in this space. And when we talk about chemistry, what jumps to my mind is this idea of switching from scarcity to abundance, where the apps give you a plethora of options and then you turn to social media and everyone's photoshopped and you're seeing their best selves. And then the second you actually get an opportunity to hang out with someone, you see a small flaw and then you're quick to write people off. And I feel that chemistry is idealized in modern media and what we see in Hollywood, that it's this instant spark and if you don't feel it, write this person off. And what we're seeing is more options, less time spent with one another, and then we're feeling lonely and not actually finding that chemistry that we're looking for. This is my whole, again, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole because this is your show, but this is, I don't know, 75% of my business is helping women and this is not specific to women, men need this too. Understand the ideal nexus of chemistry and compatibility or passion and comfort or however you want to make those axes, the point on the graph where relationships work. And the hard part is chemistry is a real thing, but as you know, it's a drug and that drug doesn't necessarily portend to happy relationship. Chemistry is necessary to start a relationship. Chemistry will not sustain a 40-year relationship. So it's, you should never be with someone where you're not attracted to them, where there's, you don't have a sex life, no one's talking to give up on all chemistry. The thing that people have a hard time intellectually realizing because of the, the effect of the drug, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, the reason that people have a hard time with it is, but I've had more chemistry with someone else. All right, so we get anchored to it. All right, but I've dated a 10. Yes, and she was crazy, so maybe you don't need another one. And this is what I tell women in return, yeah, but I've had that feeling. You know, and there was a guy, the last guy, I just knew that he was the one, but he was with you for three years and he verbally abused you and so maybe he wasn't the one. And that chemistry wasn't particularly telling. But how could I date anybody else if I don't have that chemistry? So we're anchoring to the highs, not realizing those highs or illusions and they don't sustain. So the model I try to teach, and again, people can understand it's gauche, but people can understand it, seven chemistry, 10 compatibility is a really happy relationship. That's what I teach in my Love You course. That's sort of my signature thing. All right, seven chemistry, 10 compatibility. That is a very, very happy life. Right. And if you, I was a public policy major, I know you have an interesting background too, but I was a public policy major and we used to make decision trees. And decision tree was what's the likelihood of an outcome occurring versus the quality of that outcome occurring. So what I do in my course, I was like, let's multiply those numbers together. Chemistry and compatibility, two basic cores of what you need in a relationship. Most people chase a 10 chemistry and accept a four compatibility and think, okay, relationships take work. I guess this is just going to be the rest of my life. It's not working. I'm not happy. I'm constantly anxious and we're constantly fighting, but boy, I'm in love. I guess this is what love is. All right. Instead of saying, maybe dial that down a bit. Nobody wants to dial on chemistry. Chemistry is great. Right. But maybe dial it down a bit, see someone a little bit clearer and have a really nice smooth ride for the rest of your life. And I think if you talk to, and maybe you could verify or not verify this, if you talk to most people who are happily married for a length of time, I don't know anybody who's married to the person that is the hottest person they've ever dated. Right. I mean, someone must, but my happily married friends have always been with someone who is more physically attractive, more intense chemistry, but they married them for other reasons. Right. It was not just relying on chemistry. Exactly. So again, chemistry is wonderful. We don't kill it. We don't deny it. I just don't think we need to have the most chemistry. Compatibility is actually what's going to sustain you in a healthier relationship. Like now we could bring in other relationships. Relationships, in my opinion, should be easy when they're not easy and they're not that good. Right. So if you're having a lot of friction with someone in your life, whether it's a boss or your sister, your business partner, right, the fact that there is friction is not indicative that there's a lot of love. You know, oh, there's no, love is the flip side of hate or something like that. No, it's indicative of the fact that there's something wrong with that relationship. And you should surround yourself by people where you have a lot less friction. And in your mind, this chemistry idea, and especially the way the apps and this like initial meetup, are we even given each other enough time to tell real chemistry or are we really rushing in and rushing out to the next option? Have you read the Paradox of Choice? I have not. Okay, that book got me married. Right, period. Right, so dating apps turn people into what Barry Schwartz, the author of that book, calls maximizers. I've got 95% of what I want, but someone probably has 97. I'm going to keep on looking for it, right, versus satisficers. This is good. Right, their satisficers are happier people. So there's an example. I'm not sure if he uses it or I use it. Someone who's like, I'm going to fly from Los Angeles to London. And I go on to Kayak and I set a flight alert and I'm trying to figure out the best time to buy a flight and the best layover and the perfect red eye and the cheapest price. So I'm really putting a lot of time into this. And I spend like four weeks researching it and tracking flights that you should buy on a Tuesday. And when all of a sudden done, I get my perfect flight to London. And I saved 45 minutes of flight time, right, and $72. But it took me 15 hours to do it, right. That's where this model flips over. And so it goes in dating where we spend so much time on the search thinking there's something better, better, better, better that we never stop to say, you know what, this is good. And the people who could do that, the people who can understand that every relationship involves compromise, not settling, but compromise. Just like every job involves compromising and every home you do, you're trading off something. Oh, well, I'm closer to the freeway, but I don't have a view and I have a view, but I'm not in a good school district or everything involves trade-offs and relationships do too. We just don't want to accept that. We think we should get only good qualities, no bad qualities. And in this day and age, we're now at a place where we rely on the apps, we're feeling burned out by the apps, we're leaning in our career spending a lot of time professionally trying to advance, especially, you know, top performers listening to the show realize this. And we're now finding ourselves in a place where we're falling for our coworkers. And this concept of propinquity being around someone long enough, spending enough time with someone, you start to find them more attractive. It's science. What are your thoughts and feelings on those relationships? I'm sympathetic. I haven't had a job for many years. I work from home. There's no temptation to cheat when you work in a home office. I'll tell you that. And I wouldn't rule them out as a matter of course. It's easy to say, you know, don't shit where you eat. Yeah, we've all heard that advice. Yeah, I mean, there's some wisdom in it because if it goes bad, now you're in a working situation where you're uncomfortable or one person feels forced to leave and there's definitely ramifications to get it wrong. And most of us are not good at truly calculating the downsides to these decisions. Of course. Of course. We're very much the forever optimist and chasing the chemistry that we're feeling. That's right. And we can't think about, well, hey, all of a sudden I'm sharing a cubicle with him and the boss knows and now our coworkers don't want to be around us because they have to choose sides. And again, I couldn't disagree with anything you just said. But here's the button. Here's why it's a more nuanced argument. It's hard to find connection and love. And by the way, I just want to circle back to your chemistry thing because this is relevant. Everybody's had the experience of falling for someone that they wouldn't have picked out of a lineup or on a dating app, right? Based on continued interaction, you develop feelings. Women do this all the time. Men do this all the time. It's, yes, we all care about looks and chemistry. But all of us had the feeling of falling for someone that we wouldn't have necessarily chosen. I know as an online dating advocate, I wouldn't have chosen my own wife on match.com. That's a message. Not that there's anything wrong with match.com. We were on there at the same time. Right. She wasn't looking for a Jewish guy. I wasn't looking for a woman three years older. And here we are 12 years later. So this, I think it's just important to tie it back, right? Right. As you pointed out, familiarity can breed a certain level of closeness, especially when you don't have many relationships outside of that. She's spending 10 hours a day at work, right? And for you, maybe online dating hasn't worked. You've never tried it my way, but it hasn't worked for you, right? If love is the most important thing in the world, and I think it is, I wouldn't rule that out if there's something special. Not that, you know, you fall in love with a married person, you fall in love with your boss and there's a weird paradigm. But if two people work closely together and the feelings are mutual, for me, I think it may be a risk worth taking despite the potential obvious downside. Because it is so hard to find someone that you can get along with. So I would say enter with caution. But I wouldn't make it a hard and fast rule to say never just because of how difficult it is to find someone that you connect with. And the science that we've looked at to start this month really spoke to this idea that most of us are going to end up with someone through our social network. We're not going to end up with that Tinder app hookup. We're not going to end up with someone online. That number is growing, definitely. But most of us are going to find love through our network. Could I just add one thing to your science? Because I don't know your science, but I believe every bit of it. Because I've heard this before as an argument against online dating. Online dating counts for about one-third of relationships from what I call one-third of marriages. So that says two-thirds are not online dating. The difference is not everybody's dating online. The people who do it, it's a smaller percentage of people who are actively dating online, 5%, 10% at a time. So you've got 5% to 10% of people who are actively dating online accounting for one-third of relationships. You have a better chance of finding love if you date online because you're actively seeking out other single people instead of waiting for real life to happen. So, yes, everybody has a real life. Only a small percentage of people have an online life. A lot of times people say, well, I'm just going to rely on real life. Two-thirds of people meet in real life, you know. Well, yes, and you could supplement real life with any form of online and it will severely increase your odds of meeting someone just due to volume. And how to add to that? I think for a lot of us, dating is something we're not skilled at. So having more opportunities to go on those first dates and second dates and carry those conversations when they're dying and think of the right thing to say in those moments when someone of the opposite sex who you might be feeling chemistry with is having a conversation with you. So I do definitely agree that online dating raises a number of bonuses to the dating world. What I feel happens though is a lot of attention gets diverted in that direction and we don't spend enough time nurturing the relationships in our life that make us a dynamic person, make us more interesting on those dates and ultimately fulfill us outside of just this romantic obsession that we're chasing after. You are right and I think you're doing important work in helping people cultivate those relationships. And understanding that having a healthy social life makes you a better partner, a better option for someone on a dating app even. That's right. That's right. We talked about that neediness. No one wants to go out with a guy who's sitting at home on Tinder all day long. No one wants to go out with a girl who has 30 options on Tinder but doesn't have any girlfriends. Yeah. So this idea that we go whole hog on, okay, I just got to fix my romantic relationships. Well, let's look at the whole and let's work to improve ourselves and we'll find more options and we should be supplementing with all the tools given to us not just relying on one or the other. I think it's not different than anything else in the world. You come into a company as a consultant. Well, what are all the things that we're going to do to make it a better corporate culture, to make it more efficient, to cut top salaries, to invest in different software. There's always different things you should do. You should always look at the whole instead of just focusing on one piece of it. So I think there are important social skills, confidence that can be learned and applied cross-venue. My clients come to me for dating coaching specifically but I can't tell you how many of them are like, this has changed the way I interact with my mom. Like it's if you are, if you are confident, you're feeling good about yourself, you have healthy boundaries, you're better at communicating, that will transform every relationship you have. Yeah, and odds are, that pattern that you're seeing in your dating life is not just isolated to that side of you. That's right. That's bleeding over into your other relationships, which is another big why behind the art of charm. And we started in the dating space and grew and we still have clients who are single, who are looking for their skills in that area. But these social skills, these issues that we're having in our dating life with connection and chemistry, we're also seeing in our social life. We're also seeing with our coworkers not feeling that we're communicating effectively, we're having healthy boundaries, as you say. So working on yourself is why we do the art of charm, why we have the show and experts like you on. I think what a lot of us struggle with is the miscommunication aspect of relationships. When one side is attracted and the other side's not interested. And how do we manage that when we have two desired outcomes that aren't in alignment? We talk a lot about, okay, finding the one, going for magic outcomes. But there are going to be times where you have to tell people I'm not interested. It's not even there was going to be times. It is the vast majority of times. So it's funny it's not the right word. Every day, I will hear from a woman and again it could just as easily be a man if I coach man who tells me their unique dilemma. Every person I really like is an interest in me and every person is really interested in me. I don't like. What can I do? And I said you've just described what we call dating. That is the definition of dating is every single person that you've fallen for has dumped you and every person who's fallen for you you've dumped and you're single. And that unique condition describes every single person on the planet. All right. But we think that there's something wrong with the opposite sex. There's something wrong with us. And instead of understanding again I feel like you do similar stuff that I do in behavioral economics and how it applies to life. The default setting in dating is failure. It is. I went on 300 dates. That's how I became a dating coach. I was a slut. I went on 300 dates until I found my wife. So I was a failure for 35 years and then an overnight success. Now obviously all of that amounted to something. All of those decisions helped to inform the choice that I ultimately made. But everybody is a failure until they're a success. What you can't do is internalize failure. I am not a failure. It's the Thomas Edison quote I haven't failed. That has found 10,000 ways that don't work. All right. So hopefully we have an opportunity to learn and see where we're the common denominator in our own failures and not to beat ourselves up about it and say well there's always something I could do differently. And for most people and this may be going a little far field from your original topic and you could bring us back. It is not so much who you are. Talk a lot about self-improvement. I think the way that's easier for people to elevate their love life choose different people. It's very hard to change one's personality if you're an introvert being an extrovert is hard. Right. For example. So I don't tell women to change very much. I say choose different people. The people who get you. That's your people. That's your pool. The people who aren't you. Not trying to convince someone who's not that they should be or trying to hold it together when it's clearly falling apart. Letting things go. Under the guise that good relationships are easy. If it requires so much work and tape and glue to make things work you're better off letting it go and finding someone who is just naturally into you however you are. However unique and quirky and different you are. That's a far better investment of your time than trying to fundamentally change who you are because I think those personality traits are deep inside of us. Any time I try to change for a relationship but again I don't know about you and your girlfriend but the reason I married my wife is she was the only person who never asked me to change. Everybody else was Evan I love you but you need to do this and this and this and this. I was like oh my god. I thought I was a pretty good guy but all these women have these problems with me. I just want one person who accepts me. All right so finding someone who accepts you is the holy grail of dating and we often devalue that. It's not as exciting to find someone who accepts you as the person who is more elusive. And how do we deal with the people that we don't accept? I find that a big epidemic is just ghosting and not letting people down easily or at least saying clearly here's my intention. New York Times piece about it yesterday. I mean when the New York Times is writing ghosting articles. Right it's a cultural phenomenon and it is the easiest option especially when you got this phone dialing up another hundred options for you to go on a date with. Well then then we could kind of get we could parse the definition of not the definition of ghosting but what do you owe to whom in what period of time. So texting with someone I don't believe you owe them an explanation if you've never met them. Right if you've gone on a date and again I'm anti texting but in my world if I went on a date with someone and I didn't feel it on the date and I would say the same thing whether you remain or won't. Email them the next day. Hey I had a really great time going out you AJ really appreciate you taking me out to dinner with fun conversation. Didn't feel the connection necessary to take things to the next level but you're a great guy I'm sure you're going to make someone really happy one day. Best of luck in your search. Clean classy direct declarative non-negotiable. Right that's what I tell women to do instead of disappearing on men and making them sit by their phones and wait for a response. So it's basically golden rule stuff treat people the way you want to be treated. You don't have to ghost anybody that you've met. Right and breaking that down you're speaking clearly you're not leaving gray areas or open loops that they can see as a window of opportunity and you're not wasting anyone's time. It's kind people think they're being cruel by rejecting someone they're being kind. All right so I help people separate the idea but I don't want to hurt anybody and I said well if you took a pen and stabbed him in the arm you'd be hurting him. All right that's actually actively hurting someone what you're doing is really it's no more than I don't think I could spend the rest of my entire life with you every day. That's really all you're saying when you're it's not really an insult. Right you're perfectly fine I just don't see myself spending every day for the rest of my life with you when you really get down to it. So when you reject someone they are feeling hurt they're entitled to feel hurt you are not hurting them. You are just saying I'm going to choose to utilize my energies elsewhere. All right so there's intention and intention matters. Are you doing something hurtful? Well then yeah you should feel guilty. Telling someone you don't spend you don't plan on spending your life with them is not inherently hurtful. People will move on. He's a big boy he's dealt with this before. So the better play is not the avoidant thing because people are conflict-diverse. It's easier to hide either ghost or do the slow fade and I'll text him a little bit less and less and less until it sort of dissipates. So I like the simple declarative and most people are not that direct or not that confident and not that clear because they think it's actually nicer. Right it's not. And if you've been on the other side of it when you're waiting for someone to get back to you you feel terrible. Yeah and you're wasting their time allow them to move on right because here's the thing all that time spent that waiting by the phone for you to respond is more investment in you on their part and that investment can come home to roost in some very negative ways. And you see this in obviously stalkers and some of the more abusive situations but I think in general a lot of people their consideration and politeness doesn't come across in this idea of ghosting and leaving the other person in the lurch they do feel burned and jaded. What you see in and dating brings it out more than anything you see a lot of people doing things from an emotional place without thinking of the logical consequences of it. And I don't know if there's a way to police it but I think conversations like this can make people aware of it. I did a group coaching call last night for 15 women and I brought this very thing up. I mean you get questions from 16 women you're going to cover a lot of ground and this was sort of unsolicited. You're all going to be going on a day to week. That's what we do in this program. You go you go on at least one day to week right. Chances are he's not your future husband. I call it short-term pessimism and long-term optimism. Don't expect anything from the next person you go out with. Don't be terribly surprised that 90% of people off the bat are definitely not right for you. It's not surprising. It's not disappointing. It's not deflating. It is predictable. Like right and it's nothing on you. I mean that's exactly like it is like traffic at rush hour or cold and winter going on a date with someone who's probably not your future spouse is predictable. So let's not get too surprised by it. And if that person turns out to not be your future spouse let him know so he could spend his time and energy on someone else you could do the same and it's a nice clean break. And if he gets angry at you and sometimes women say I don't do that because I did that once and some guy wrote me something really nasty. That's what happens. And the guy gets rejected and she's the only person who's polite enough to say something and he takes out all his anger on her at all the women. Yeah all the ghosts have pent up anger. Right so he takes it out on her even though she was trying to do the right thing. Evan I did the right thing and this is the reward I get. All right well that's part of the process. Doing the right thing is not always the easy thing or the popular thing. It's just the right thing and I think it's objectively the right thing. And we can't focus on I'm doing the right thing because I want the right outcome. That's right. Doing the right thing because it's the golden rule. Yes. Very basic. Now you talked about course love you and I think what a lot of us struggle with is dealing with that idea of how do I take a relationship that has chemistry. I'm starting to feel compatibility to that next step of love. Again when I have this device dialing up my 96 my 97 oh there's a 98 around the corner. What I perceive to be a 98. Right based on their fancy photos and the watch they're displaying all of that fun stuff. How do we know that this relationship is progressing to love and how do we express that with the person we're most interested in. I think people are impatient and that's normal. I mean when I describe people I don't exclude myself from people because I'm making this observation. This is normal. In my book Why He Disappeared I explained to most women and this came up last night's call too. You want to read the last page of the book without reading the book. I just want to see how it ends. Is he a good guy? Is he saving for a future? Does he want to have kids? Like she's trying to figure all that out right there on the first date and it's too much too soon. So we have to have the patience to let the book unfold. No one they were asking for techniques. How can you tell from a guy's profile if he's a liar? Well if he just said I like hiking biking movies music and travel I'm looking for a best friend and lover and partner in crime. You can't tell. That's a universal truth. You can't tell. But everybody is looking for signs. How do I avoid getting hurt? How do I avoid wasting time? So there's always the human temptation to want to go to the end and make sure it's going to have a happy ending. What I tell people to do is sort of sit back and be an observer of your love life. You're not going to get caught in a 20 year relationship with someone that you don't want to be with accidentally. At any point in time you have the right to cut someone off. There's agency there. Yes. But a lot of people don't feel they have agency or they don't more importantly they don't trust their own judgment because they haven't gotten it right before. So if you just understand how things normally go and this isn't a rule this is just what we see. There's two people there's two ways that people fall for each other in general. One of them is instant chemistry. You feel it. Oh my god it's the first day I feel like you're my soulmate. Let's take down our profiles. Let's have sex. Let's see where this goes. It's not smart. But it's common. Right. I always say if you're driving 90 miles an hour on the freeway you're probably going to miss your exit. So that's what people do. I did it a bunch. And it sometimes leads to negative outcomes because we dive in so deeply we don't know that if there's even water in the pool. So that's one way people do it. Instant chemistry mutual. I think a healthier way to do it is to to watch how things develop over the course of about a month. All right. Does it happen organically? It may start off. He's texting 5, 10 people at once but he's following up and he's calling and he's emailing and he's texting and you go out once a week and then you go out twice a week and he says hey you want to hang out next week and I'm going away and you see how it starts to escalate or doesn't escalate. If you're the once a week girl for six weeks you're he's not you're not girl for material. He's keeping busy. I tell women to cut men off. Right. If he hasn't stepped up in six weeks. So with people who are either experienced or mature or not sure or you know men look for sex and fine love in the process while he's pursuing getting some action he's deciding oh what I really like her platonically too. I didn't see that coming. That's that's good and you will see in his efforts to follow through. Now then you have a relationship boyfriend girlfriend sexually exclusive at five weeks, six weeks. Now you have two and a half three years to figure out if you're lifetime compatible because the way we said chemistry is necessary for a relationship but it's not sufficient. The same with love. Every every couple that's ever been together for any length of time has been in love. Most of them didn't last. So chemistry isn't enough. Love isn't enough. The thing you have to figure out is whether you have compatibility and people use the raw metrics for compatibility as well. They think oh I'm Catholic he's Catholic I like skiing he likes skiing that's not commonalities common interests. That's not that's not compatibility. There's no evidence that two people who like skiing are more happily married than people where he likes skiing and she likes running. All right so compatibility without getting into a whole unit of my love you course is if we strip away all the noise how well do we get along and manage conflict? Can we agree 95% of the time? So the 5% is negotiable and we just we figure things out because if you're only during half the time you're fighting half the time. It's not a happy marriage even if there's chemistry even if there's love that's not a happy marriage. So I just look at how can you take a road trip with this person for 10 hours and not want to kill each other? These are the ways we determine long-term relationships. Short-term is always driven by chemistry it's just not very telling that's why we keep on driving into those chemistry traps. Thank you for that lovely answer I feel like a lot of us get hung up on even the definition of what we're looking for in love and we pay far more attention to the chemical feelings than actually what's going on mentally and the compatibility in conflict is a huge one and we know that it is the end of relationships most relationships that end are ending due to conflict. Well but conflict is the big umbrella then there's the things about which we can conflict money, sex, religion, politics, children, family, introversion, extroversion, how much you go out picking up on each other's social cues being sensitive to each other's needs and habits, being there for someone when they're down. So there's all forms of conflict and you're either going to come together with a couple and say hey we're problem solvers it's a we, we're going to make this work or your finger pointers you did this no you did this no you did this so in a good business partnership in a good marriage people come together to say what are we going to do to get past this friction all right and the friction itself never threatens to break you up my wife and I aren't perfect we're a very happily married couple we're 95% easy my wife is a really happy easy going person there's always going to be some things about which we'll disagree we'll continue to disagree with them about the rest of our life but it never threatens the stability of the relationship that's solid as the table that we're sitting by and so if you don't have that you're signing on to something for a long time that doesn't make you happy and I can't tell you how many women are in unhappy relationships with a guy for two years, three years, five years and they hire me how can I get him to marry me you're miserable like how can I sign on to buy this house that's collapsing how can I make this mind and put a million dollars into the house that's collapsing that's what it is when someone's fighting so hard for love chemistry or the ring they lose sight of their own emotions all right they're just it's the sunk costs I've been in it so I'm not going to let it go because I don't want to be single I don't want to start over I don't think I could do better I have series of videos about you know the reasons people stay in the wrong relationships and again that's not gender specific this is what people do last night I had a client how many times should you try to get back together with your ex I said none but I tried like five times you know I just feel like this time it might be different I was like I don't even know what to all right so that's that's the human condition is there's what's familiar to us and we'll do everything we can to preserve it even if it's not working for us and I preach unlike anybody that I know in this space where we know a lot of mutual people all right the opposite of everybody else's business model everybody says relationships take work oh relationships are easy good relationships are easy right you've really found the right one if your relationship takes a lot of work go find another relationship because there is something better than what you're anchoring yourself to and you deserve that you deserve to have work and life is a struggle it's hard enough when you come home you should have something safe and easy and joyous supportive absolutely thank you for joining us Evan it was a pleasure where can our listeners find more about love you and your amazing group coaching thank you my name is Evan Mark Katz my website is www.EvanMarkKatz.com E-V-A-N-M-A-R-C-K-A-T-Z I've been doing this for a really long time so I have I don't know 1500 blog posts for free 100 podcasts you could read and learn and get yourself a world-class education without spending a dollar and if you like this stuff give me a email address I'll send you even better stuff thank you again thank you my pleasure