 Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm your host, Jonathan Asley of JonathanAsley.com, and I'm so excited to be sharing this video with you today. Our topic, men are serious about relationships or serious about commitment when they do this, okay? Really quickly, if you have something to share regarding this video, let's get a conversation going. I literally read all the comments, and I respond to as many. So if you have some questions on this video, please post it so I can respond to them the best I can. So give me some latitude here. Okay, so let's talk about men who are serious about commitment. The reality is today, let's face it, men and women are engaging in the dating practice. They're going out on dates. They're having fun. It's leading towards sexual tension, which leads to having sex eventually. And for some, they enter into a brief relationship. And I use the word brief because oftentimes a lot of these relationships have some dysfunctionality in them, some real dysfunctionality with them. And oftentimes, especially for those folks in midlife, which is after baby making years and before retirement, they have a lot of adult traumas that have been percolating up in their life, and they haven't really done any healing around that. So I wanted to lean into, well, how do you differentiate between the guys who are real serious about commitment and the ones who are not? And I got to tell you ladies, many of you are giving men a pass for bad behavior. Let me repeat that. Many of you are giving a pass. You're letting them pass because of both their... When I use the word bad behavior, I mean their unconscious behavior, their myopic behavior of being somewhat selfish and not really leaning into the relationship. So in a few minutes, we're going to talk about how to differentiate between those men who are serious about commitment or not. But before I do, I want to share something with you because it just occurs to me that imagine before you go on a date. And I want you to imagine the date was old fashioned and the man showed up to your door, knocked on the door to meet you, but your big brother is standing at the door and he is big. I mean, your brother is a big football player, linebacker type of brother. And all his friends are over at the same time. Now I know it's hard to picture this if you're in midlife, but I just want you to picture this for a second. And the brother says, hey, come here, let's talk. Listen, don't mess with my sister. If you mess with my sister, I'm going to kick your ass. And I suspect that that guy who got a little bit of like beware of another which treat her with respect, treat her with kindness, treat her with compassion, treat her with a sense of awareness that a man would be more conscious in the dating process. And so that's what I am for many of you is I'm your big brother. And whether you're in midlife or you're in your 20s and 30s, that's the way I approach this. You literally need a big brother to protect you. And what I mean by protect, I don't mean physically protect, but I mean emotionally protect. Because as we've witnessed those adult traumas I've talked about and certainly childhood wounds that have not been healed, that have not been addressed, that have not processed those makes for a lot of problematic relationships. In fact, there are renowned therapists, Dr. John Gottman and certainly Harvelle Hendricks, I had to go grab this, talked about this in this book, Getting the Love You Want. I highly recommend checking this out because this gives you insight into why men and women are dysfunctional in the relationship process. Why they're dysfunctional and they're not doing it on a conscious basis. This is very unconscious dysfunctionality. Oftentimes because they have unresolved childhood wounds and traumas and certainly adult traumas as well. Adult traumas include a bad divorce. Adult trauma could include tension at work. Adult trauma could be a job loss and having to start over. Certainly economics and economy affects our well-being, our emotional well-being and cause many, many women to be rather dysfunctional in the relationship process because they haven't found their center. They haven't found their center. In fact, one of the reasons why I recommend my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway, is to help you gain your center, whether a man or woman, so you can come at the relationship process with a sense of consciousness, a sense of awareness, a sense of purposefulness, a sense of direction. And sadly, most people lack a sense of direction. So I said, how do you know a man is serious in relationship? Because he's going to do this one thing if you ask him. If you do this one thing and he says no, then chances are he isn't in a serious relationship. So for those of you watching this, or you're obviously watching this video, for those who follow my work, I'm a big proponent of studying Dr. John Gottman. Dr. John Gottman. And he has a fabulous book called Eight Dates. Eight Dates by Dr. John Gottman. And what this is all about, it's the eight most important fundamental aspects of a relationship. And the reason why it's called Eight Dates is what he did in this book is he's laid out in actual conversation terms how to talk about these important fundamentals, money, sex, family and friends, maybe even children certainly work in that sort of thing. He's laid it out to make it so easy to have the conversations. So many of you know, I'm here to encourage you to be more conscious and aware and intentional in the dating process. And before you allow a penis into a vagina, and I know that sounds rather crude for some of you, but before you go down the path of sexuality, sexuality, sexual, before you go down the path of passion and sex, you may want to see if he really wants a serious relationship. So you tell him, hey, I'm going to buy this book. I'm going to buy two copies of this book. One is for you and one is for me. And if we're going to explore a relationship together, I would like to use this book as a guide to help us along the way. Now you're going to get some feedback. You're going to get some flack for some guys. You're going to get some real flack from guys. But if you're getting flack from someone when you're saying, hey, I want to build a healthy, happy, juicy relationship with you. And if you're getting flack from someone, that's a man who probably isn't all that serious about being a relationship because what you're introducing is something healthy for your relationship. This is one of the why I'm a big proponent of having them do the five love languages test. The five love languages test by Gary Chapman. Go to his website. You can do the test. I would do this test. You can do the five love languages. If you're not familiar, go and Google it right now. Go take the test. It's how we emotionally connect with another human being. And I'm here to say, if a guy isn't willing to do this test to get laid, even, I mean, just, I'm sorry, I don't like to be crude about this, but if he's not willing to do some basic things, then he's probably not serious about relationship. And you're just going to say really simply, hey, there's something fun I want us to do together. I would like us to do something called the five love languages. And you tell them a little bit about it. You make it fun. You make it kind of a date in and of itself. And you take the test online to see how compatible you are. And as the relationship progresses, you introduce the book and say the eight dates book and say, hey, this is really going to help our relationship. Are you up for it? No, I'm not into it. That's a guy who's probably not emotionally mature, but an emotionally high quality emotionally mature man. Stepson says, yeah, I like you. I want to do this. Let's see what it's all about. He has a curious mind. That's what a high quality emotionally mature grown up is all about. And that's my invitation for you. How to differentiate between those guys who are just looky-loose and just need companionship because their life is in chaos or the ones who are grounded and are really set to explore a deeper emotional connection with another human being. And that's my invitation for you. And as your big brother, I want to invite you to really explore learning what the mechanics are to a healthy, happy relationship. Explore the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship because once you do, you're not going to be choosing the guys who have no clue what they want. And hopefully this little bit, this little tidbit of advice helps you out. Now, as I said before, I want to create some interaction here. So if you have some questions about this, post it. I read them. I'm going to interact with you on this video and most of my videos. And while I can't get to everyone, I really invite you to share your thoughts or questions. Again, if it resonates with you, if there's something I missed, please write it down. Also, if you're ready to hire a coach, check out my link below. You can schedule a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. Wow, that was a lot. All right, I'm really excited. I'm going to end my video, as I always do, giving you a big, gigantic Jonathan Bear hug if I have your consent. Thank you. Wishing you a super-duper, wonderful day. Thanks so much. Bye-bye now.