 Well, hello and welcome to understand men now, I'm Jonathan Astley of Jonathan Astley.com and I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today. Our topic, the one word to know about dating an anxious, avoidant man. One word. All right. Really quickly, if after this video, this content resonates with you and you need some support in your love life, check out the link to a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. All right. We're going to talk about this one word to know about dating an anxious, avoidant man. Now, before we get into that, if you're brand new to the idea of love attachment style, let me just give you the one second or not one second, but the one minute cliff note version of what this is. Love attachment style is what happens to us when we're children, how we bond with our caretakers. What's usually in those early years of child rearing is we learn how to bond with our caretakers and there's three predominant love attachment styles. There's anxious, avoidant and secure. Anxious avoidant and secure. So the anxious person tends to be a needy person. The avoidant person tends to be emotionally unavailable and the secure person is capable of leaning into love. They're capable of leaning into love. Now, you might be thinking, does that mean you have to have two secure people to be in relationship with one another? Not necessarily. Ideally if one person is secure, if the other person is anxious or avoidant, it takes time to build that level of trust, but in a healthy relationship, that person's going to be shifting from an anxious to or an avoidant to more of a secure attachment style. There are several variations within attachment style. There is dismissive avoidance. There's fearful avoidance, but today I want to talk about the anxious avoidant. This is one of the challenging types of relationships to be in with a person who's an anxious avoidant. I'm an anxious love attacher, so I'm a little bit familiar with what this feels like. But an anxious avoidant is there's a combination where if they're with someone who's avoidant, they become anxious or needy. However, the minute that avoidant person starts surrendering to love a little bit, that might make that person feel awkward and then they go the opposite direction and they become avoidant. That's one possible way that this works out. What happens is one minute they can be avoided and the next minute they can be anxious or vice versa. The one word that you need to know about this is if you're with an anxious avoidant person is whiplash, whiplash, whiplash because it's a constant back and forth, back and forth, back and forth for this person. Let me reframe that. Not a constant, but depending on whom they're with, it can feel like whiplash to them. This is why I'm such a big proponent of doing personal development, self-help and spiritual work. This is why I recommend my book, What the Heck is Self-Love Anyway, to begin that process of feeling good about oneself, loving on oneself, liking oneself because again, here's my book and by the way, there's a link below to get my book, What the Heck is Self-Love Anyway. In fact, there's a link for all my books under Jonathan recommends. Why this is so critically important? This is beginning a practice of self-help, personal development, self-help and spiritual work. But to go deeper might require reading the book attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. This gives it goes into more detail about love attachment stuff. But I want you to understand that not every, it's not always about love attachment. It's also about fulfilling our patterns that happen in childhood. And we oftentimes choose people that are much like our parents in relationship. And this is why you have to check out the book, Getting the Love You Want by Harvelle Hendricks and Helen Hunt. You've got to get this book to understand those patterns and ladies, you probably have repeated a pattern of choosing someone like your father on a regular basis. When you understand the amago, you're going to be better prepared to be in a relationship with an anxious avoidant type man. Or if you're anxious avoidant, reading these books is going to prepare you to shift from an anxious avoidant or anxious or avoidant, anxious and avoidant, anxious or avoidant, into more of a secure. Now I'm currently reading a brand new book that I want to introduce you to today. I'll be talking about this more often. But it's called Personality Isn't Permanent. Check out the link below to my Jonathan recommend books. Personality isn't permanent. Break free from the self-limiting beliefs and rewrite your story. Why I'm recommending, and I'm just starting to get into this, but why I'm recommending this book for understanding men is because ladies, I want you to start introducing the books I recommend to the men you're dating. Ladies, here's the thing. If you're going to have regular sex with a guy and I always say if the penis is going to go into the vagina, you have every right to ask for a building of a relationship. In other words, not this unconscious, men are supposed to lead and they're just going to claim you and all you have to do is sit back in your feminine energy and it's all going to work out. Absolutely not. Ladies, if you want to shift your narrative, take charge of your relationship destiny and start introducing books with a person that has potential because you want to co-create a relationship and not and what you don't want to do is leave it up to the guy because men are rather clueless when it comes to the mechanics of a healthy, happy relationship. This is true of 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. They're mostly clueless. Not because they want to be, it's just nobody has prepared us. Nobody has trained us how to be in a healthy, happy relationship. This is why so many people are in relationships that are weak. It's like putting your fingers together. It's so weak instead of relationships like this that are hard to break apart because you've done the work to prepare to be in a healthy, happy relationship. Is this sinking in? Please let me know if this is sinking in. Post a comment below. Have you ordered any of these books? Have you entered? By the way, I've had so many women say to me, Jonathan, I've been recommending to the books to the man I'm dating and it is helping our relationship out tremendously, tremendously. If you want to shift the narrative, listen, whiplash, it may happen. But if you want to shift it, you want to make a change in your life, start doing the work together to build a healthy, happy relationship. And the best way to do it is books. Look, you can go to therapy, that's another place you can go, but I highly recommend starting with these books to see if you're on the same page. And if you are, you have a great chance to improve your relationship very quickly. Okay, I hope this resonates with you. All right, I'm going to wrap up this video as I always do. First off, give myself a big gigantic Jonathan, bear a 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.