 Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm Jonathan Asley of JonathanAsley.com and I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today. Our topic, we're going to talk about what's called false familiarity. False familiarity. I'm gonna do that again. Really quickly, if you're new to my YouTube channel, please hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you can be notified of new content. If you like this video, please hit that like button at the end so more people can see that you liked it. All right, we're going to talk about something I call false familiarity or false intimacy. So, one thing I've observed in the dating realm and this has been especially true since the invention of the internet is people in the dating realm are spending more time on their devices texting and messaging each other than they are spending face-to-face time. They're spending a lot of time connecting through the internet. In fact, if you look at your text messages with someone and it's just constant text messaging, text messaging, text messaging and you look back and you go, yeah, I see them once every couple weeks or I see them once a week, but we're spending more time on the phone than we are whether it's phone, face time. I mean, it's through an internet connectivity. Let me just set the stage for a moment versus real face-to-face, real belly-to-belly, real time doing things together. Then there's a chance you might be experiencing what's known as false intimacy or what I call false familiarity. Now, false familiarity is for those people that are beginning communicating with someone they haven't met. There can be this incessant communication, communication, communication with one another and you feel like you really know someone. That's false familiarity. False intimacy is once you've established that you're seeing someone you're spending more time on your phone than you are in person. And why this is so critically important and part of this is because of the pandemic, part of it is the nature of distance. The challenge today is if two people aren't spending face-to-face time together developing the roots to trust, the intimacy is going to be what I call false or very weak, very weak foundation. Now Esther Perrell and I've talked about her book called Mating Incaptivity. She talks about something that's frequently happens which is called stable ambiguity, stable ambiguity. What that means is people are in relationship where they're getting companionship, connection and sex and it's stable in that they're committed to one another but they're not really developing deeper intimacy. The ambiguous part is commitment. Let me do that. Commitment with one another. I want you to look at why I do commitment like this. A lot of people think they're in relationship of commitment like this but you see how easily that can come apart whereas when commitments like this it's harder to come apart because they've actually invested in developing the friendship, actually invested in developing the friendship. I'm just noticing my picture right there is my two oldest mates. I'm not from Australia but I'm going to say mates, my oldest friends and we've developed a lot of connection with one another because it's done face-to-face. We guys don't talk on the phone and share intimate things with each other. What we do is we spend time together experiencing life together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests together. That's how you develop friendship. Now a lot of many of you are walking in life on a very weak foundation, very weak foundation. That foundation is typically centered around I need a guy to love me for me to feel good about myself or a man I need somebody to love me for me to feel good about myself. In fact, the number one emotional health issue is I don't feel good enough. I feel unlovable. I feel unlikable. This is why I'm such a big proponent of self-love. It's why I wrote a book called What the Heck is Self-Love Anyway by Jonathan Asley. See the back cover? If you have a copy of my book please post a comment. Let me know you've gotten it. Why this is so critically important and why this is so important to understand where we fall into this trap of false familiarity and false intimacy is that when we develop a strong relationship within ourselves, when we're rooted in self-confidence, self-awareness, self-worth, self-reliance, self-esteem, we don't get sucked into this need for false familiarity in this false sense of intimacy. Now I'm not suggesting that you can't have an intimate conversation with your partner via phone, but on my phone, if I see more yellow than I do, in other words, if it's a lot of communication from them on my phone, it's text messaging is it's actually green, I should say. If I see a lot more green, meaning green is coming from them, okay, if it's a lot more green and mine is just very shallow, in other words, very limited, then it means that and I'm just suggesting ladies for you, if you're doing more of the communicating and he's doing very little or vice versa, he's doing very little of doing a lot and you're doing very little, it's not really developing those roots and those roots get established when you do social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, teamwork building and certainly maybe traveling together. Teamwork building relates to helping each other in your professional life and your personal life, doing it face to face. I want to encourage that if you want your relationship to go from being false intimacy or false familiarity to something deeper, then it has to be done face to face and this is why I'm a big proponent of establishing your standards very early on and that standard is what is it that you want a relationship to look like? It's so fascinating to me. How many women reach out to me professionally in my professional capacity going, I know what I want, I know what I want, I know what I want. Then they hire me, they go through, then they go through my proprietary program and I hear this every single time. Jonathan, I wished I learned this, I wished I learned this when I was in school, I wish my parents taught me, I wished I learned this 10 years ago. Ladies, part of the reason why we're getting sucked in this trap is because commitment to one another, especially at midlife seems so confusing and if you want help creating clarity, clarity breeds confidence and confidence breeds better choices and you want support, check out a link to a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. I'm going to turn you on to so much new material, you're going to feel so good about yourself that you don't need false intimacy to actually be in a happy relationship. All right, I'm going to wrap up this video as I always do, first giving myself a big gigantic Jonathan Bear hug 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 or a pet or a teddy bear or a pillow and give it a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love and we can all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now.