 You can hope you can just sit in your feminine energy and hope and hope and hope and be that broken clock and get lucky a couple of times. But if you don't address the traumas and wounds and in your life, then you're not going to be prepared to. All right. So many of you know I've met somebody a month ago. And it's a long distance dynamic and most you know I can't stand long distance. So I want to share why I despise long distance. I want to share the ingredients of making a long distance work. And in the process, I'm going to share a little bit about the person I met and where we're at at this moment in time. So why do I despise long distance relationships? Now this is a number I made up because 90% of the time they are fantasies for most women versus most men. Let me repeat that. It's a fantasy for most women versus most men. Why? Most men are emotionally immature and have terrible relationship skills and they're driven by their penis. So long distance relationships offer an opportunity to build a bit of rapport with someone, fly out, drive out, fly across the country, get laid. And let me just share with you. They can love bomb in the beginning over the phone. It's almost guaranteed sex upon arrival. So these are the faults within it. So this is why I despise them. Subtle love bombing over the phone, guaranteed sex on arrival. You can't see how their day-to-day life is because you're in a bubble. They could be hiding something in their life and you'll never know about it. There's an easy exit plan for the guy most of the time. The easy exit plan is I can't do long distance relationship. Or worse, you could be talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and never meet. People spend years talking on the phone in long distance relationships and what they find is that they're actually in a cyber relationship and not an actual relationship. As a coach, I've had women reach out to me, Jonathan, I need help in my relationship. I go, great. They go, it's long distance. How long have you been seeing each other? Nine months. And I go, well, how often do you see each other? And a woman will say, I've never met him. I'm like, and so what's the problem in the relationship? Well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you got to be fucking kidding me. That's not a relationship. That's a cyber relationship in the grown up world. For those of us who are grown up, a grown up relationship looks like this. Social activities, hobbies, mutual interest, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills, both in our personal and our professional lives. Intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy, leading towards either moving in together, getting married or something. That's a real relationship. Thank you, team. Really quickly. I want to thank that super sticker for $20. I appreciate it. So I've met someone. Now let me give you a little bit of the backstory. We met online literally 364 days before we actually met. She happened to be in Los Angeles. She lives in Chicago. She happened to be in. She said, I have a daughter lives in Los Angeles and I'm thinking about moving out to be with my daughter. So I was searching. This is match.com. And I was searching and I came across your profile and I loved what you said. Your profile had so much depth. And I wrote her back and said, you know, call me when you're here because I didn't want to engage. But we ended up getting on the phone and we talked on the phone. She's going to kill me for saying this now. And I didn't like our first phone conversation. You know, to spare her, I won't tell you why, but I didn't like it. So I reached her. So she reached out to me about 10 days later. This is again a year ago. And she said, hey, how's it going, blah, blah, blah. And I said, I'm going to be candid with you. I didn't like our first phone conversation for these reasons. And what happened next impressed me. She said, I've heard that before. So she, I was, I felt safe enough to tell her. And she didn't get triggered by me being honest with her, or at least my truth. So it actually led to a deeper conversation. We ended up having a four hour conversation. This was roughly a year ago. And we agreed to become Facebook friends and keep in touch. So every little once in a while, there'll be a Facebook post, I'd see her pop up, I'd send her a message. You know, we jumped on the phone a multiple times throughout the last year, maybe a half a dozen or so times, we'd have one of these conversations for a couple hours because we liked each other's profiles. And it got to the point where we were just joking. Well, if neither one of us find someone where we live, oh, and she hadn't made a plan to move to Los Angeles. So we said, if we don't find someone in six months, let's get married. It was like a joke or something like that. Well, it turns out I had a reason to go to Chicago and reached out to her and she agreed to meet me. And we went out to dinner. Great restaurant. It was one of those romantic kind of restaurants that was overlooking the river in Chicago. It was a beautiful evening that night. I got lucky. It was a perfect evening. She got a great table at the bar, high table at the bar. Minute we locked eyes. There was just this mutual attraction and she gave me a big gigantic kiss. And I share that because we had built rapport with one another. We built rapport with one another. And it was built on without an expectation. It wasn't me love bombing her. It wasn't me telling her, oh my God, you're so amazing. You're so amazing. You're so amazing. There was no like future rising or anything like that. I just was meeting a friend. But with something more. So we ended up spending, you know, being, you know, a ton of time together that first night. And then I invited her to the wedding I was going to. So we got to spend a little bit more time together. I found myself genuinely missing this person. I found myself appreciating this person. There was a strong bond between us. So what and I mean that initial chemical chemistry kind of bond that wasn't lust or limerence. It wasn't just that she's beautiful and attractive. There was something more. There was something like an energetic connection between us. Just for the record, I'll show a picture so you guys can all see. And here's a picture of the two of us at the wedding. Okay, you can see that. And this was our first night out. I'll just lift that up so you can see us out. She's dropped dead gorgeous. She's got a sweetheart. One of the ingredients was this strong connection. And I'm going to say there was a sexual attraction between the two of us. Number two. So we made a plan to visit again and she came and visited last weekend. That's why I've been off the grid for the last couple last five or six days. And she came to visit me to stay for a few days and I had an idea. And that was, I put, I don't know if you know what a back jack is, but it's a way to sit on the ground with like, it's like a little back support for your back. And we sat down in my living room overlooking the ocean. And we talked for 10 hours straight. We had what I call radical honesty, radical honesty. To include laying all the cards on the table. We laid all our cards on the table. We shared our values. We shared, we shared the nooks and crannies of our lives. And we just didn't do this for one day. We did this two days in a row. We just, it wasn't romantic dinners. It wasn't a bright bright on the beach. It wasn't anything fancy. We just sitting and genuinely getting to know each other warts and all the good, the bad, the ugly, the nooks and crannies. And the more we were communicating with each other, the safer and safer we began to feel. And we also leaned into our childhood wounds and traumas and our adult traumas, which includes our marriages. And we shared the pain that we experienced in our marriages. We shared the, in our, in our relationships. And I've had a half a dozen relationships in my lifetime and likewise for her. And we shared the individual challenges, taking ownership of our part in it. We weren't being a victim. We weren't blaming the other person. We were building genuine intimacy into me you see. And if you're not familiar with the book by Robert Masters, read the book Emotional Intimacy. And little by little we began feeling safer and safer. And we found each other. We found ourselves sharing some of our deepest secrets to each other. Because we felt safe because we were radically honest. We were vulnerable. We are authentic and we were transparent. And the reason why I think this might work is because we have a flexible lifestyle. She's retired. I can work from wherever I want. So we've already got our next visit planned. And we even have a trip. I mean, if it works out a trip to Mexico plan. But more importantly, we genuinely communicated our individual desire, our true desire for commitment and what commitment looks like for us. What does that look like? And so ladies, when you're speaking to guys, whether it's short distance or not, understanding what commitment looks like and what it means to a person is a critically important radical question that needs to be asked before the penis ever goes inside the vagina. And at the end, we agreed to my dating vows. And many of you know my dating vows. The dating vows go like this. We mutually said this to one another. We said, I agree to explore the process of getting to know you with the intent to declare something serious within the next three to six months. I agree to be monogamous sexually while we're having regular sex together. I agree not to actively seek to meet and date others while we're in the dating process, which includes taking down my dating profile. Again, we're mutually saying this to each other. We agree that if this isn't working, we're going to speak up instead of pulling back ghosting or disappearing. And lastly, we agree to invest regular time in the process to get to know one another. And we already find ourselves spending hours on each day talking on the phone. Folks, let me just tell you something. As a person who does spend most of his day talking on the phone professionally, the last thing I want to do is talk on the phone. And yet I find myself absolutely smitten by this person. I find myself feeling a sense of trust. I find myself with enthusiasm and I appreciate that she's showing up the same. So I want to share one more piece with you all, because the reality is, is I'm the expressive one in this relationship a little more so than her. I mean, I'm just more. That's because I've been doing this work over and over and over again. I've been reading these books like nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. I read all these books. And particularly I'm reading the book by Gary Zukoff, Spiritual Partnership. This is a great book to get into the meat and potatoes of what it takes to have genuine intimacy in the relationship. And I'm leading the process. But folks, I'm a unicorn because I do this for a living. Guys don't, they're not connected with their emotional side. So you have to lead this process to have any chance to have real intimacy. So whether it's distance or not, you need to have a strong bond right from the get go or it isn't going to work and not lust or limerence, because that's a, that's a, that's like, that's like crack cocaine. You need to have a connection beyond the physical. You need to be radically honest with one another because without it, you're not going to get to true intimacy with a partner and you need to be with an emotional grown up. She has done life spring. She's done personal development workshops. I've done the Hoffman process. I've done insight. I have over 3000 hours. I have a neuro linguistic programming certificate. I've done Reiki 3000 hours of workshops and trainings and videos. It's going to take some work to become empowered. If you need some additional help, go to the back of my book. I lay out all of the teachings right there. You can see all of the teachings I use to get to where I'm at. And I invite you to do the same because if you want to have that juicy, delicious, healthy relationship, ladies, you are the emotional leaders in container of the relationship, not the guy. You can hope, you can just sit in your feminine energy and hope and hope and hope and be that broken clock and get lucky a couple times. But if you don't address the traumas and wounds in your life, then you're not going to be prepared to hold space for somebody to do the same in their life. And because I've done this work and she's done this work, we're in a much greater chance of success. And while I'm not a big fan of long distance, I'll be candid with you. I'll be candid with you. I kind of like it because I like my alone time too. So anyways, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So I'll spend the last minute or two taking questions from anyone. We'll take a look at the questions. If you have a personal question to ask me about this, and again, please, I know I'm the guy that says long distance is bad and I explained why they're bad. And I also shared today why I think it's good. So we've got a question here from Ouija.