 Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm Jonathan Assey of JonathanAssey.com and I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today. Our topic, The Secret to a Long Distance Relationship. Real quickly, if you haven't subscribed to my channel, please click one of the buttons and click the bell so you can get notified. And certainly check out the links below because there's some great content there you might want to check out, including a free gift. OK, our topic, The Secret to a Successful Long Distance Relationship. Now, when we think of long distance relationship, let's break this out to a couple different types of relationships. Because in the reality of today's world, if you live more than 30 minutes from one another, you're practically in long distance relationship. And here in Los Angeles, where I live, someone could live 30 miles away and that could take literally an hour and a half to two hours to get to see each other. And certainly long distance, we could think of a plane ride away, a train ride away. There's various different types of long distance relationships. So let's think of some of the challenges with long distance relationships. A good, healthy relationship typically requires proximity for it to be successful. In other words, the closer you are together where you live, the more activities you can do, social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends. Those are the roots that develop a long term relationship as well as intimacy. So this is one of the challenges with the long distance relationships, is that if you have a fair amount of distance from one another, how are you going to build those roots for a successful relationship? So I want you to think about the secret to a long distance relationship is building the roots. And depending on if it's a plane ride away for your long distance, for some people it could be a completely different country, or is it just a 30-minute drive or an hour drive, that sort of thing. How are you going to build the roots to a successful relationship? And if you're not familiar with the work of John Gottman, I want to introduce you to a book that he wrote called Eight Dates. Eight Dates because he talks about the eight fundamentals for a successful relationship, which includes intimacy, spending time with family and friends, conflict resolution, that sort of thing. Because ultimately for a successful relationship to work out, you're going to have to navigate most likely the eventual challenges that you might face if you are eventually in a face-to-face relationship. So one of the most important things you should consider before you ever enter into a long distance relationship is do the two of you have a plan to take this from long distance to short distance? Short distance, let me make it that way. From long distance to short distance, do you have a plan? Has each one of you given thought to a plan of how you're going to take this distance and bring it closer together? Because sadly, naively, many women, and men too, but mostly women, think, oh, if we love each other, everything will just magically work out. And that's not the case. In fact, when John Gottlin wrote his book, it's because he recognized that love doesn't create a successful relationship. These eight fundamentals is what creates a successful relationship. So I highly recommend reading this book as a preparation to even consider a long distance relationship. In fact, to consider any relationship, it's good to have these fundamentals down. But the secret to a successful long distance relationship is having a mutual plan, how are you going to take this distance and bring it closer together? Or at least somewhere with all. Now, if the man you're talking to hasn't even considered it, is navigating just on this blind faith that if the two of you work out, I think you could be setting yourself up for failure, because the bodies are piled from here to the moon from women who thought the man knew what he was doing. In fact, most of you ladies really appreciate that you like the idea that the man is in charge and he's the leader of a relationship. And I'm here to say that the reality is there wouldn't be so many books written about commitment phobic men and emotionally unavailable men if they really did know this. So one of the things I encourage my clients to is to recognize that you are in charge of your relationship destiny and you are in charge of the container, the emotional container of the relationship, which is why I want you to begin to introduce personal development in your daily practice or your daily dating practice as well. By reading the books I recommend, if you've been following my channel, I recommend all kinds of books, including Getting the Love You Want by Harvelle Hendricks, Their Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. I mean, the list goes on and on to prepare you for a healthy, happy relationship. But ultimately, a successful long-distance relationship is if you want to be eventually living together, getting married, you're gonna have to figure out how to go from here to much closer here. And sometimes it's very dangerous when you choose to go from here to living together. That can be very problematic, but that's for another video. Okay, the secret, the success, to a successful long distance, having a plan, how you're gonna take that distance and shrink it to being much closer together. Okay, I hope you found value in this video. I'd like to hear your thoughts. Please post a comment below if this resonated with you. If there's something you wanna say, bring it up. Let's talk about this, hit the like button if you appreciated this. And again, there's a bunch of links here below if you'd like to schedule a one-on-one coaching call with me or find out about my group, Midlife Love Mastery. The link is there as well as a cop, my book, what the heck is self love and also a free gift. Okay, I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do, giving you a big, gigantic job and bear hug if I have your consent. Thank you, wishing you a wonderful day. Thanks so much, bye-bye now.