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Is feeling safe, heard, and understood enough for lasting love? In this Love U Podcast, I share two powerful coaching stories that reveal why a “good on paper” relationship isn’t always the right relationship. Learn the difference between healthy pacing and unhealthy pressure, and why chemistry still matters when building a life together. If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re settling or simply being smart, this episode will help you find clarity and trust your heart. Tune in now to get the relationship you truly deserve. What You’ll Hear: Evan shares why feeling safe, heard, and understood is essential but not sufficient for a successful relationship. Story of a client who found an amazing relationship after a decade of not dating but is now pushing her boyfriend to accelerate marriage and family plans, risking the relationship. The importance of allowing men to choose commitment on their own timeline rather than applying pressure. The crucial distinction between being empowered and being effective in dating. Hard truth: Men (and people in general) resist being told what to do, and forcing outcomes in relationships often backfires. Story of another client engaged to a good man but struggling with low attraction and fun levels, leading to doubts about the relationship’s long-term potential. Evan’s simple evaluation tool: Rate your relationship on comfort, fun, and attraction; ideally, you want a 10 in comfort and at least a 7 in fun and attraction. The danger of settling for a relationship that feels like a “B-minus” when you deserve an “A.” Personal story about Evan’s mother settling for a “nice guy” after Evan’s father passed away and how that choice ultimately left her unfulfilled. The nuanced balance: You need chemistry and a good person—you can’t thrive with just one or the other. Powerful reminder that millions of quality men exist; you don’t have to settle out of fear. Encouragement to trust your feelings and not override red flags for the sake of convenience or fear of starting over. Invitation to attend the next Extraordinary Love Series on “The Power of Feminine Energy” to inspire men to pursue you. Full Episode Transcript: Today’s topic excites me so very much that I’m going to tell you at the top of the episode, before I say all the other stuff that I normally say, to stick around for the rest of this episode. I’m telling two great stories today that you’re going to want to hear that are going to impact the way you look at dating and relationships. So please, for your sake, not mine, stick around to the end of this episode. My name is Evan Marc Katz. This is the LoveU Podcast, a place where you can learn everything there is to know about dating relationships, sex, and men from a man’s point of view and find a relationship that makes you feel safe, heard, and understood. And that is the topic of today’s conversation, is whether safe, heard, and understood is enough. And you might be surprised to hear me say that it is not enough. And I’m going to explain to you why before we dive in. I want to remind you to register for the next installment of my Extraordinary Love Series. I’ll be doing a Zoom call with a live Q&A on a very specific topic. This month’s topic is the power of feminine energy. How to inspire a man to pursue you. We had over 360 people registered last month. This month will be even bigger. Go to www.extraordinaryloveseries.com Put in your name and email address and I will see you there and answer all your questions about feminine energy. Who better to talk about feminine energy than a man mansplaining feminine energy to you. I tease myself. So today’s conversation comes off of two client calls that I did in the past week. And normally I work with people for six months minimum. Nobody wants to sign up for six months. Everybody wants the quick fix. Could I do one call? Generally, it’s like saying could I do one personal training session? I want to get healthy and turn my whole life around but I want to do one personal training session. So I generally only work with people who are committed to working with me for sometimes three but usually six months to a year. This week I took a conversation with an old client and I took on a conversation with someone new just for a one-off. The first one I want to talk about is a client of mine who I worked with in probably end of the pandemic and she hadn’t dated for 10 years and she’s lovely. She’s attractive and blonde and bright and very marriage and family oriented and it was a joy to work with her. And from our work together this woman who didn’t have a relationship for 10 years has an amazing relationship with a guy right now where she feels safe heard and understood and she and he both want to get married and start a family. The issue is that she is 39 and she’s starting to feel the pressure. She wants to kind of be married tomorrow and pregnant the next day, which if you’re in her shoes is not an unreasonable thing to want or to feel. I think the hard part that she’s struggling with and why she reached out to me for this one coaching session a few years after she graduated from Love You is that she’s feeling so much anxiety and pressure to lock it in with this guy that she’s pushing him really really hard to move in with her to propose to her, to impregnate her as quickly as possible. And it started to backfire. And she was under the impression that well, this is what confident women do. The book Why Men Love Bitches, you know the book Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others. So she’s got this sort of empowered woman’s point of view, which again, I’m all about female empowerment. At the same time, good dating advice is not about just female empowerment. It’s about effective and ineffective. If you do this on a real life guy, will it work? If you’re with a confident masculine energy guy and we understand the very very basic principle that men don’t like to be directed or corrected, telling him what to do is probably going to be a losing strategy and it’s kind of what she’s been doing. She’s really been forcing the issue instead of allowing him to choose her. So she has a different timetable for marriage than he does and it’s not that she’s wrong. Again, we don’t talk about wrong. It’s that if she wants x and he wants y, he’s 50% of the equation here. His opinion matters whether she thinks it should matter, whether she disagrees with her or not, his opinion matters. So she and I spent, no joke, two hours on the phone. She paid for one hour, we spent two because that’s how important I feel this issue is to see the nuance in the situation and we all have a tendency to kind of put on our blinders and think that what we want on our terms is the only way to do it. So I had the deepest sympathy for her because she’s my client and she’s my friend and we know each other pretty well and I also had to point out that I was her boyfriend, you know, 15-20 years ago. I was the person who was dating a 39 year old who knew what her fertility was, who wanted to get married and have kids and I felt a tremendous amount of anxiety about making a decision that was accelerated, not exactly on my timetable and my girlfriend wasn’t pushing me at all and I felt that pressure. If she had pushed me, it would likely have pushed me away and that’s the piece that she wasn’t calculating. It’s why when she was posting in our private Love You Facebook group, you know, all the other women were telling her to take this hard stand. I said, I really want to get on the phone with her, right? Just on the principle that people don’t want to be forced to buy something, they want to choose to buy. Right, and that’s everything. That’s dating coaching. I don’t compel anybody to work with me. People come to me, they reach out, they book a conversation, at the end of the conversation, most of them sign up for dating coaching, but I should not have to pressure you to do this. You need to choose to do this by your own volition because it’s good for you. This man has to choose her as a wife, has to choose marriage, has to choose to want her to be the mother of his children. And what’s happening right now? Dating’s not fun for him. Relationships aren’t fun for him. All they’re doing is talking about them and what’s going to happen and her fear and her anxiety and her fertility. So, making him capitulate, which is what she’s trying to do, is going to be an ineffective dating strategy. It’s going to push him further away, even though they want the exact same thing. So, we have to come from a place of trust. If indeed, and I asked her, is he a good guy? If he’s a good guy and he, by his own volition, wants to get married and he also wants to start a family, he knows what’s at stake. She’s pressuring him to move in with her in June, right? And he’s like, let’s wait until September, until the end of the summer. And she’s almost making this a deal breaker. And again, I’m saying this with great sympathy to her. She’s, right, if she pushes to move things faster, he’s going to probably resist because, in general, nobody wants to be told what to do. Not just men. Women don’t want to be told what to do either. So, I said, let’s just let this guy draw the same conclusion that you’ve already drawn. It sounds like you’ve already established that he’s a good boyfriend. He’s a good partner, right? He’s given you a relationship that you’ve always wanted, the relationship you’ve always sought. So, if I’m evaluating their relationship, and the reason I’m telling this story first is really important, this is a good relationship. This is a relationship worth preserving with the guy who she’s on the same page with, who she wants to marry, who wants to marry her. He just needs a little more time to get there. So, blowing it up over a few months is probably not a great strategy. You’ve got to play the long game on this one. And I really encouraged her to give him the freedom to choose her, right? Not indefinitely, but establishing that they want the same things and just allowing him to get there. It’s going to work a lot better. And so, I contrast that with the other client that I talked to who has a relationship, which also she feels safe, heard, and understood. But, this is a big but, she’s been with her guy for three years. They recently got engaged, so they already pulled the trigger on that one, but she’s having second thoughts. And he’s a good guy, and he’s high integrity, and she never doubts where he stands. That’s why he proposed to her. But, nobody who’s really happy in the relationship calls the dating coach. So, I already knew that going in, that there’s some underlying problem. And on the phone with her, I tried to get to the root of the problem in the shortest period of time. So, I asked her these two questions. And if you’re in a relationship right now, I would ask the same questions of you. And you’ve heard me say some version of this on previous podcasts, if you’re a regular listener. On a one to ten scale, ask yourself about your guy. Where do you stand if you’re rating him on comfort, fun, and attraction, which are all about feelings? If you’re rating him on comfort, fun, and attraction, where does he stand? And in general, I like to hear seven chemistry, ten compatibility, something like that, which is that comfort would be close to a ten. And then chemistry, which is the fun and attraction piece, would be above a seven, ideally. She told me the comfort was indeed a ten. She’s very comfortable with him. She could let down her guard with him. She could be herself. She knows where she stands. But she said the attraction was less than a five, and the fun was probably a five. Hold on now. When asked, and I didn’t even ask her for this, she gave her relationship a grade. She gave it a B minus. So he might be an A plus person, but her feelings about the relationship were a B minus. To use more metaphors, it would be like playing blackjack and saying, I’ve got a 16, maybe even a 15. I’m going to stand. I’m going to stick on this hand. So why would someone like that stay? It’s because of sunk costs. She’s put in three years. She knows what’s out there. She knows dating apps are rough. She knows it’s difficult to find someone new. She too is in her late 30s and doesn’t want to start over. And she might want a family. She’s not completely sold on it. So here she is, maybe 37 if I’m recalling properly, and she’s got this boyfriend and he’s not at her level. Again, I’m not trying to put him down. I’m just relaying the information she conveyed to me. This guy is not at my level. He’s not as wise, worldly, fun, mature, witty, whatever it is. He’s just a really, really good guy who treats her well. And that’s no small thing. So then I asked a second question. I said, if nothing else changed in your relationship, would you be happy in this relationship for the rest of your life? Assuming this is it. Like what you’ve seen for the past three years, this is it. He’ll be this way in five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. If I told you this is it, would you stay? That generally hits people pretty hard because everybody’s sort of hoping, expecting that he’s going to change, that he’s going to get better. I don’t think people’s core personality changes very much. But she’s still stuck. Last episode we talked about fear. Fear of starting over, fear of dating, fear that you can’t do better than this one situation. But if she says her boyfriend is less than a five on chemistry and that a relationship is a B+, isn’t this the textbook definition of settling? Women think I’m telling them to settle. No, no, no. I’m asking you to raise your standards for what you come to expect. Not be bound by fear. Come from a place of confidence. Know you can do better than a relationship where you feel like you’re settling. She deserves more. He deserves more. He deserves a partner who’s all in on him. So this is her fear, there’s the word again, of thinking she can’t do any better. The irony is that in having a conversation with her, she told me she has done better before. She dated a couple guys in her 20s that she was more excited about. She wasn’t really ready for a lifetime commitment at that point in time. So those didn’t work out, but she’s already has proof of concept that she could have a relationship that has a little more chemistry where the guy is more of her equal. So she’s already proven that the relationship she’s looking for exists. And yet here she is stuck and paralyzed because she’s put three years into this really, really nice guy. Who proposed to her and because she was afraid and conflict-averse, she said yes. So how could she spend her entire life with a guy whose primary quality is that he’s a good person? That almost comes from the place that there are no quality guys who are good people and that’s simply not true. And so I have a deep understanding of this because I have seen this story play out a million times. I’ve seen it play out in my family. My mom, I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but my mom was married to my dad for 30 years. It was a good but not great marriage, but there was definitely chemistry. They had some friction because they were not great communicators as is typical of marriages that started in the 1960s. And so when my dad passed away after 30 years, my mom started over. She over-corrected and chose a guy who was extremely nice. Gentle man, carry the heavy grocery bag, open the car door, cook dinner, do the dishes. He was a sweet sensitive guy. And I walked her down the aisle and I knew when I was walking her down the aisle that she was making a mistake. Even though I preached character, kindness, consistency, communication, safe, heard, and understood, the guy was genuinely a good guy. The problem was, and I knew this and she kind of knew it but didn’t want to admit it, she wasn’t attracted to him. He didn’t make her laugh. She didn’t respect him. So, okay, h…
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