 Recently, one of our members posted a question about a man she's in relationship with. It's progressing very nicely. The intimacy seems to be growing, and they seem to get along really well, except occasionally they've had some minor disagreements or skirmishes, let's just say. I'm not laughing at that. I'm just saying that my faux pas is why I laugh. What she invited him to do is watch some videos, read some books, to help in their communication, and he rejected that, basically saying he doesn't need help. And I thought about this. A lot of men don't feel that they need help in their relationship. Now, I asked the question, what happened in his past relationships, and did he blame his exes for the problem in the relationship? And it's kind of interesting how my original thought was that he was going to have blamed his exes for the demise of their relationship, and it's quite interesting that he said he was the actual problem in the relationship. And yet he somehow thinks he's magically improved since this period of time. That's not his words. Those are my words. So I thought to myself, how can she best address this to enhance their relationship? What can she say to get him to consider exploring maybe the benefit of talking to a therapist, maybe the benefit of watching videos, maybe the benefit of reading a book together? And I think a lot of women find themselves in this situation with men who don't go out and actively seek help. Now I want you to think about this when it comes to men. Men traditionally aren't good at taking directions and men aren't typically good at asking for directions. Think about this. You're traveling with your boyfriend, you're going to a party. He roughly knows where the place is and all he knows is the address, but he didn't plug it into his GPS, he didn't pull out the Thomas Brother Guide, and all of a sudden he finds himself lost. Okay? I've had this happen to me before. I'm sure you've seen situations like this, and he's reluctant to pull over the gas station and ask for help. This is somewhat indicative of men. This isn't all men, but this is somewhat of a pattern within men that they're not good at asking for help. Now here's the thing. When a man genuinely cares about you, when a man genuinely feels a level of trust with you, when a man genuinely feels committed to you, and I say he genuinely feels these ways. Then your request to want to improve your relationship won't be met with too much resistance. The real question I have for this member is how solid is the trust in your relationship? How solid is the commitment in your relationship? The fact of the matter is these days, most people are in casual relationships. They're not in solid committed relationships. What I mean to say is there's an agreement of monogamy. There's an agreement of exclusivity. I know that you've agreed to these things, but there isn't really any more solid form of commitment. This gets tricky. What is real commitment? It used to be you had to get married if you wanted to have sex. That was a strong level of commitment. In my case, moving in together with my partner is at least one form of commitment. We signed a lease together. There is some roots to this commitment. But beyond that, where two people don't live together, they're not married, they've agreed to monogamy and exclusivity, what is commitment? Why I'm stressing on this, coming back to for the man who seeks help, is this relationship built on a foundation of, are we forging this union of the two of us together with some sort of destination? You shouldn't have to be waiting more than three months in a dating scenario to know where this relationship is going. The fact of the matter is, this is according to Jay Shetty. This isn't my verbiage. It takes about 40 hours to get to know someone face to face time. I've always said it takes about 100 hours of face to face time to just build the first layer of trust. Jay Shetty says it takes about 200 hours to build a good friendship. The question I ask for those who have accumulated those 100 and 200 hours, have they really built a friendship or has this been a casual encounter with one another? This true friendship is intimacy. True friendship is, if you and your friend say, hey, we need help with something, let's go here to get some help, your friend would say yes. So, has this true friendship been built? My suspicion is because commitment hasn't been a strong conversation right from the get-go. Look, we can criticize easy sex. That's one criticism that could be. What I mean to say is the hookup culture has created an ease of getting physical intimacy without any level of commitment. I truly believed swipe dating and texting has bastardized the human interaction process and then when you throw pornography in there, it's desensitized men to women. This is why doing a better job of vetting in the early stage and do a better job of screening to do a better job of filtering and more important to do a much better job of establishing your standards right from the get-go. Now, I know a lot of women struggle with this when I say standards because they don't know the type of relationship they're looking for. They all think they do. I say this in my private coaching. They come to me all saying they know what they want and then after going through my proprietary coaching program, they go, oh my God, you're absolutely right. I didn't get a real sense of what commitment means for me because these days, folks, I've said this in many occasion that we are seeing the dating process is merely just a strung out version of friends with benefits. It's a situation ship. It's casual. There's no real roots to it. The bottom line is this, having radical honesty questions right from the very get-go, right from the early stages before you become intimate with someone, laying your cards on the table, getting a true sense of how do they feel about commitment and do they want a commitment because the reality is when a man, as I said earlier, is in a committed relationship and I don't mean just the agreement of monogamy and exclusivity. I mean, he's really committed to forging a partnership with this person. If you simply ask for some help saying, sweetheart, I need your help. I feel like I don't have the tools to properly communicate to you and I would like us to both read books, watch some videos, or maybe go to a therapist so I can improve. Now, you're taking the onus on you because if you point at him, he's going to most likely get defensive but truly a grown-up male, if you're with an emotional grown-up, he'll recognize that your request makes sense for him too. It's a benefit and ultimately what you really want to convey is the mutual benefit of seeking help. What's the benefit of seeking help? I'm going to become a better partner to you. Now, if he dismisses that and say, you're a perfect partner, you can just bring up that recent misunderstanding as an example to say, I would like us to even be better than this. I would like us to improve beyond this. I want to co-create something deeper. Look it. I know it's a real struggle out there, roughly 20% and this is not a fact. This is merely opinion. 20% of people out there in the single realm have clinical issues, emotional issues, real clinical kind of emotional issues, whether it's NPD, whether it's borderline, whether it's bipolar. It doesn't mean they're not capable of a relationship but are they actually doing some healing on it or are they unaware? Then I say roughly about 60% are rather dysfunctional. They have childhood wounds and traumas and adult traumas that have gone unhealed. And while there might be a percentage of them that are waking up to the healing, those who have done interpersonal work, those who have looked inside and they say, I've been the root of my problems, I want to heal this and more importantly, I know the most important decision I make in my life is the partner I choose. So I'm going to be vetting you as well. When a man says that, and this is true of men and women alike, when they've done introspective work, when they're fully committed and they say, I'm going to do a better job of vetting, screening and filtering because I want commitment, then you would most likely welcome a real value of help. And when I think of the word help, I'm really talking about being taught how to be better, how to improve, how to grow. The reality is, is most relationships after the honeymoon phase become stale. There's no, and we talk about date nights as a way to revitalize it, okay, certainly that is a benefit. But ultimately, if you want to grow as a partnership, then seeking some help, some counseling, some therapy, some, you know, even part of a group really enhances your relationship. The best part of it is, it helps your relationship become better. So in this particular case, ask yourself how deeply committed or in this particular case with this client, are you truly committed to one another? Have you expressed your long term desires? Is it based on a real desire to move in together, get married sometime? You know, I like the way, you know, if you've watched the Indian matchmaker on Netflix, I like the way Indian cultures have their family part of the decision making process to determine if this union of two people makes sense. We here in the United States do nothing like that. We just hook up and pray, well, let me reframe that. We hook up and then we hope that magic fairy dust is going to change the scenario because there's a lack of intentionality with dating today. Why am I yelling? Why am I so passionate about this? Because I want to shake the screen and wake you up. I'm here to be a wake up call to shifting perspective. And if you need some support on that, you know, schedule a discovery call with me. Schedule, you know, a time to chat to learn how you can actually improve your love life. Is this making sense? Is this resonating with you? Please let me know. So coming back to this member of ours, my invitation for you is to really ask yourself, is there real trust built in this relationship? Is there a real commitment here? And if there is, then you can simply make a request of why this would benefit your relationship. And if he boxed at that, you may want to, you know, lean into yourself, take a step, you know, away from the relationship, lean into yourself and really ask yourself, is this person on the same page as me? That's my invitation for you. All right. I think that covers a lot here. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Please post a comment below. If you find value in the group, please tell your friends about midlife love mastery. Send them to my website, jonathanasley.com. Have them click the group coaching button so they can join our fantastic group or you can hit that private coaching button if you want to speak to me directly. All right. To wrap up this video, as I always do first off, giving myself a big gigantic Jonathan Barrack of self-love. I'm going to reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm going to ask you to turn to someone, a pat, a teddy bear pillow and give Iter them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now. Bye.