#584： How to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
Episode Stats
Summary
Why do people sometimes fall in love with someone who is all kinds of wrong for them? Their friends and family see lots of red flags about their partner, but they themselves miss these warnings entirely, sometimes to catastrophic consequences. My guest today argues that these kinds kinds of errors in relational decision making happen when someone lets his heart rule without also heating his head.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast why do people
00:00:11.340
sometimes fall in love with someone who is all kinds of wrong for them their friends and family
00:00:15.400
see lots of red flags about their partner but they themselves miss these warnings entirely
00:00:19.300
sometimes to catastrophic consequences my guest today argues that these kinds of errors in
00:00:23.840
relational decision making happen when someone lets his heart rule without also heating his head
00:00:28.160
his name is john van epp he's a counselor and the author of the book how to avoid falling in love
00:00:32.000
with a jerk we begin our conversation discussing what society's default template for creating a
00:00:35.920
successful relationship looks like and how it leads people astray john then defines what makes a jerk a
00:00:41.100
jerk and the signs you're dating jerk he then explains why it is that people so often miss
00:00:45.440
these signs by using a model of how attachment develops in a relationship and i think this
00:00:49.420
model is super useful in understanding relational dynamics and you don't want to miss it we then
00:00:53.440
discuss why men need to do a better job in helping pace relationships instead of only letting women
00:00:57.840
set the tempo and we enter conversation discussing the things you need to know about a person that
00:01:01.460
you're forming a relationship with including the relationship skills family life and values
00:01:05.560
before you escalate your commitment to them after the show's over check out our show notes at
00:01:09.660
aom.is love things all right john van epp welcome to the show it's very exciting thank you so much
00:01:27.480
for having me so you are a counselor and you've written a book called how to avoid falling in
00:01:32.760
love with a jerk old proof way to follow your heart without losing your mind so this book how to avoid
00:01:38.400
falling in love with a jerk it's based on a marriage program or a premarital program you developed called
00:01:42.760
pick what is pick and what issues are you trying to address in this program yeah so way back in the mid
00:01:50.760
90s i developed the concepts kind of worked it through and put it in a certification course where
00:01:58.000
people could get certified to actually go out get our workbooks get this training and facilitate it in
00:02:05.620
their own respective locations so that was kind of my multiplying my efforts so it's not me doing all
00:02:12.060
the work and it really took off we started to have singles organizations the military grabbed it
00:02:19.260
as we headed into the 2000s social agencies community initiatives that had federal and state grant
00:02:27.260
money and by the time we reached the end of of 2000s and hit 2010 11 we had over a million people
00:02:34.060
having gone through the program being taught by all these certified instructors and in the middle of
00:02:40.640
that mcgraw hill published the book so the content of the book and then the course itself has a lot of
00:02:47.420
overlap and with the pick program is this for people like couples who are thinking about getting
00:02:52.640
married or about to get married or even people who marriage isn't on the radar yet but it's a plan
00:02:57.760
later on in life well sure so i i think if if somebody is in a serious relationship i think this would be
00:03:04.660
really great material for them to go through but i really to be honest it was designed to go what i call
00:03:12.120
upstream i i wanted to reach pre-relational people people that were just maybe had been in a relationship
00:03:21.000
or young people even or divorced people that came out of relationship and they were just kind of saying
00:03:29.000
hey we need a better template of what to get to know about somebody and how to build a healthy relationship
00:03:36.200
because the template we've used or the template we've learned just isn't really effective or it's
00:03:41.880
not worked and so that was really my target audience and and it's been that way we've had
00:03:48.260
over a hundred thousand kids in public schools go through the pick program with with you know
00:03:53.940
instructors coming into the school systems and teaching it and that's been pretty cool so it's pretty
00:03:57.920
far upstream and then you know we've worked a lot with adult singles of all ages so i think that
00:04:06.180
that's really the primary place where i'd really like to see your listeners say hey let's look into
00:04:13.860
this even more you know i'm not interested in a serious relationship right now okay good you are the
00:04:19.640
very person that i want to look into this material and think about it and take it because now is the best
00:04:25.860
time pre-relationally well i think it's interesting you you you're teaching this stuff to high school
00:04:31.580
students because this is like important stuff like your your marriage your relationships like one of
00:04:36.560
the biggest things and have the biggest impact on your life yet we don't really talk we don't talk
00:04:42.160
we don't teach kids like what they should look for in a partner so you mentioned we have a template
00:04:45.520
that we kind of fall back to because we don't get this sort of intentional instruction what does that
00:04:50.120
template look like and why isn't it not effective yeah so the the template that people fall
00:04:55.580
back on is usually what i consider to be several different unanalyzed beliefs that tend to drive
00:05:06.180
the the culture at large one is intuition i'll know when i know you know when i'm when i'm in with
00:05:14.080
somebody it's kind of the click factor as soon as things click with me and this person and i just know
00:05:20.660
when i know i nobody needs to teach me anything i i just kind of figure it out and i know it
00:05:26.340
intuitively the second and that doesn't work there are some people that perhaps do have that innate
00:05:35.300
ability but the vast majority of people don't have that good of of judgment or or you might say they
00:05:44.200
haven't been trained to have their intuition function at such a high level of really knowing
00:05:51.520
and being able to predict long-term relationship potential of an individual that they have some
00:05:57.440
kind of chemistry or attraction to a second i would say template that's used is the belief that
00:06:04.340
relationships that are healthy or good or it's kind of a dichotomy it's either healthy or unhealthy
00:06:11.360
good or bad you know functional or dysfunctional and they have this dichotomy and they believe
00:06:16.460
that if it's on the positive side of the dichotomy they're good they're healthy they're functioning
00:06:21.740
then a relationship just runs itself you know if i have to work at it that must mean something's
00:06:28.660
wrong with it and that concept anybody that has ever had a long-term relationship a friendship even
00:06:35.700
knows that unless you have some kind of concerted effort ongoing energy investment into the
00:06:44.460
relationship the relationship tends to start deflating and so but still we we believe this we
00:06:51.940
believe it more about a romantic relationship than any other i'll just know when i know the click factor
00:06:57.600
it's in my intuition and if it's really good it just kind of does its own thing it just goes at its
00:07:04.460
own pace and it runs itself and i don't have to have any kind of training information involvement
00:07:11.440
and you know it's kind of like asking people when do you feel is the right time to have sex a lot of
00:07:17.940
people just say well you know i'll just kind of know when i know and when it feels right and it's that
00:07:22.640
intuition and you know the relationship will just kind of go there when it's the right time to go there
00:07:29.000
as if the relationship is this thing outside of myself and the other person and i don't have any
00:07:37.040
involvement in pacing how this relationship develops those two things i found were extremely detrimental
00:07:43.920
and they left lots of burned crashed relationships in people's histories and actually then all of those
00:07:55.480
those hardship experiences get brought into the next relationship and complicate things even more so
00:08:02.020
we kind of came up with a different way of getting to know somebody and building a relationship and
00:08:09.600
actually being more informed and intentional and we found it to be way more successful of all ages by the
00:08:16.940
way so you mentioned that intuition can result in people if they're not lucky they might luck out but
00:08:22.960
typically they don't just rely on intuition lead to you to end up falling for a jerk so for definitions
00:08:29.440
how do you define a jerk what makes a jerk a jerk in a marriage or relationship well i i would let i think
00:08:36.780
the starting point brad is all of us at one time or another act like jerks right can you admit that as
00:08:43.260
well yes okay well you didn't elaborate on it you know we probably everybody would like to hear a story
00:08:49.920
too from you but we'll we'll go on i'm sure they would let you off the hook but i'll say for myself
00:08:54.040
you know i've made very jerk decisions over the i'm i'm in my 60s now and so been married for 40 years
00:09:02.020
and in my relationship with my kids my wife i mean we all make mistakes and errors so the word is not
00:09:09.460
trying to say first of all that you got to find a person that is perfect the second thing i would say
00:09:16.060
about what the word is not saying these are kind of disclaimers is that the word is not saying that
00:09:21.880
the word that the jerks are a particular gender we'll call it we we all gender neutral no matter what
00:09:29.440
you are or how you define yourself as a human being everybody can act like a jerk but i would say there is a
00:09:38.820
marked difference between acting like a jerk and what we will say is being a jerk so a couple things
00:09:47.600
first i'll just say some simple signs of jerkiness is lack of clear insight into how their behavior is
00:10:00.720
impacting other people that they're in a relationship with that makes people a little jerky
00:10:05.960
they can some people have that insight but they don't have any real care about how they're you
00:10:13.120
know they're like wow you know you made somebody really feel bad well that's their problem they you
00:10:17.900
know i'm not responsible for their feelings so there's either lack of insight or care about how
00:10:24.280
my words or my actions impact others i think a second kind of sign or warning flashing signal that
00:10:35.580
this person could be a bit jerky is if they're really lacking woefully lacking some relationship
00:10:43.800
skills like the skill of empathy or the skill of apology how to admit their you know their faults and
00:10:54.040
to talk things through woefully lacking communication or how to handle conflicts and so there's these warning
00:11:01.780
signals but i i would say we could probably spend this entire time making a list of all of the things
00:11:08.840
that people can do that would be you know throw them in a category of acting like a jerk but the bottom line
00:11:17.440
of being a jerk is they have a persistent resistance to addressing and actually changing whatever gets put on the
00:11:30.400
table is bothering others so in other words when you're in a relationship with somebody one of the key
00:11:39.840
areas to kind of look for it's a it's more i call it a global characteristic of a person is do they have the
00:11:48.820
change factor do they have the ability to have insight into themselves see something that kind of keeps repeating
00:11:58.560
as a pattern and bothering you and when it gets put on the table and you talk about it they actually
00:12:04.580
take it to heart they take responsibility and they do something to make a change that sounds simple
00:12:09.920
but there are a lot of people in relationships that are unwilling to address issues that a person's put on
00:12:18.920
the table or maybe multiple people put on the table that hey this is something about you that offends
00:12:24.160
others bothers others i really like to try to change this well and they have a defense resistance
00:12:31.080
to that so i would just start with a very kind of simple definition of the difference between acting
00:12:37.080
like a jerk versus being a jerk is whether a person has the change factor they have a willingness
00:12:42.940
to be open and receptive to something about themselves that that needs to be addressed and change and they put
00:12:50.720
in some concerted effort to do it well and the problem you highlight in the book is that people don't
00:12:56.420
typically realize they're in a relationship with a jerk someone who's you know has jerkiness qualities
00:13:01.740
till months in a year in and by then they're so entwining the relationship that it's like hard to get out
00:13:07.660
and you're like man how did i get into this like how did i miss this when i was first started dating
00:13:11.780
this person i um call it the head and the heart need to work together and accelerated bonds so when
00:13:20.660
you get into a relationship there's something that is attracting you there's it could be a kind of a
00:13:27.040
sexual chemistry you could be really attracted to the person if it's got some romantic aspect to it
00:13:33.160
then you would expect that there's some kind of a of attraction and hopefully it's mutual attraction
00:13:37.920
and that is like a magnet pulling you toward each other but then there are bonds major bonds that
00:13:46.640
i say exist in every relationship whether it's romantic or not that i put together in a tool that
00:13:55.340
we call the relationship attachment model it's it's this kind of graphic that's going to date me if i
00:14:00.920
call it a graphic equalizer but if it's if you think of a soundboard with sliders that go up and down
00:14:06.000
it is depicted these bonds that occur in all of our relationships are depicted as a slider and they
00:14:15.280
can have a very low level and they can move up to a very high level and what i say is there's somewhat
00:14:22.300
of a progression people don't realize which bonding you know factor which which aspect of the relationship
00:14:29.200
is going up is going up really high but they get into a relationship and some of those areas of
00:14:35.420
connection in the relationship what i call these bonds some of them go up super fast almost superficially
00:14:43.380
and they don't fully know the person so the the no is actually the first of the five sliders how
00:14:50.940
much i know this person or they know me and that might be actually very low but their trust or their
00:14:57.820
reliance or even their touch in terms of just attraction and so forth or even getting involved
00:15:04.000
sexually those things can go up super fast create premature feelings of bond and closeness why why are
00:15:13.300
they premature well they're premature because my my bond is greater than what i truly know about this
00:15:21.700
person so i don't know if they're a jerk or not a jerk i don't know what the patterns are of how
00:15:28.000
this person is going to act i know how they've treated me i know what we've experienced together
00:15:32.800
in the in the six weeks we've been seeing each other and now we're sleeping together and i'm kind
00:15:39.040
of like dropping my friends and i'm spending the bulk of my time so another slider in in this model i
00:15:45.100
developed is called rely how much i depend on this person or how much i've kind of put into
00:15:50.540
a sense of them depending on me or me depending on them how we're meeting each other's needs so
00:15:57.340
we're a lot of my needs are now all getting funneled into this relationship with this person of six weeks
00:16:04.820
and if you go to my trust which is another level that is like all the way up because i everything's
00:16:11.980
been good so far for six weeks everything's been good but my no is locked into actually time and you
00:16:22.500
can't get to know the patterns of a person until there's been enough time for certain things to
00:16:28.240
surface and then a pattern by definition is something that keeps repeating so there has to be
00:16:35.700
additional time beyond its surfacing for something to actually repeat well six weeks a lot of
00:16:41.940
times is not enough time for even somebody in a relationship to get mad at you so you don't
00:16:46.700
even know how they're going to treat you if they're mad at you so here you are sleeping with them
00:16:51.260
channeling a lot of your needs and the reliance and your belief in them your trust belief is way up
00:16:57.100
and yet your no is really low and that is the norm for how many many people today are building
00:17:05.680
relationships and it really is a recipe it's a it's a potential recipe for catastrophe because as
00:17:14.380
your no goes up a little more and you're around the corner of what we call the 90-day probation period
00:17:19.660
right when things are really starting to surface that didn't surface in the beginning and maybe some
00:17:26.720
things are starting to repeat so you're starting to see a few patterns all of a sudden you hit this
00:17:31.880
three-month mark this 90 day and all of a sudden you'd be like i thought i knew this person but i'm
00:17:37.380
really wondering do i really know them and people are shocked as if they thought they fully knew them
00:17:45.060
but their their knowing wasn't high on that level it was their trust it was their rely and dependence and
00:17:53.480
in meeting each other's needs and it was their touch was super high so i can explain that model a little
00:17:59.700
more in in kind of a more organized way but just answering your question why do people get involved
00:18:07.600
all of a sudden realize i thought i knew this person they seemed great but now they look like a jerk
00:18:13.800
it's because our definition of a jerk was they're not acting like a jerk 24 7 it's that there is a
00:18:23.500
repeating pattern that doesn't surface typically in the beginning of a relationship but over time
00:18:32.420
begins a surface and when addressed does not change and starts to have major defenses on it changing so
00:18:41.520
accelerated relationships are the norm they've been the norm for a long long time you know i i was
00:18:49.340
growing up in the 70s and accelerated relationships were happening when i was in high school back in
00:18:56.940
the 70s and so all over those decades ever since accelerated relationships have just become more and
00:19:04.180
more the norm but i think that they are a very unwise way in a very risky way that we do relationships and
00:19:12.760
we need to talk about guys for a minute so i'll let you keep asking questions but i do want to
00:19:18.340
kind of speak directly to guys as stepping up being pacemakers of relationships rather than
00:19:24.900
saying guys will just do whatever women let them do well yeah so i mean let's talk about sort of
00:19:29.740
summarize this relationship attachment model because i thought it was a very useful tool for people so
00:19:34.260
the idea is because there's these five sliders which you call bonding areas and the first one is no
00:19:39.500
then you said trust rely commit and touch and the way you talk about in the book is that in a relationship
00:19:46.340
you you have to go through these in a progression right you you can't go too fast like you said
00:19:51.140
you can't accelerate to touch before you get to know the person because that's just going to lead to
00:19:55.880
disaster or commit like there's a lot of people who end up living moving in with somebody but they don't
00:20:00.940
really know that and they find out the person has lots of debt and they're like oh my gosh
00:20:03.820
i didn't know you or like you've been in jail i did not know you've been in jail
00:20:07.420
and like and and so that's why you want to make sure you know and i think the big takeaway i got
00:20:12.720
from that is that you never want to go for further in one bonding area than you have gone in the
00:20:17.640
previous so like you never want to go say if you're still in the no period of a relationship
00:20:23.220
you don't want to over commit or over rely or over trust before you get to know that person better
00:20:30.140
that's a very very perfect description of it so if people are kind of imaginative they can imagine
00:20:38.700
in their mind this image of five sliders going up and down and what you just said is no starting from
00:20:46.200
the left it would be no and then trust and then rely and then commit and then touch and exactly what
00:20:54.060
you said they they're representative of a piece of the whole of what a relationship is a relationship
00:21:01.260
is the interaction of these five areas how much i know somebody what my know how it interacts with
00:21:08.420
how i trust them how that interacts with how they meet my needs or i meet their needs and how we rely
00:21:13.640
and these things are like two-way streets so you can get a little more complicated with the model and
00:21:17.940
say it's not just how i know them but how i have let them get to know me or how they trust me and i
00:21:25.660
trust them so they they do have a little more complications we start thinking of them as two-way
00:21:31.680
streets but they they are pieces of the whole and when you think of a brand new relationship
00:21:40.240
any relationship there's just an intuitive wisdom to not let a level go higher or faster or develop
00:21:50.620
in a greater way than any of the levels to the left so you're right if the no is kind of low
00:21:59.920
then i shouldn't have my trust go significantly higher than what i know somebody if i'm trusting
00:22:07.680
somebody way beyond what i know them it definitely puts me at risk but even if my no is up a little
00:22:17.020
bit if my trust isn't fully developed and i step into like you said uh moving in with them that makes
00:22:23.700
my commitment really high we have lots of interesting research literally i i don't know if if everyone
00:22:30.880
knows this but there have been over a thousand research studies on moving in together outside
00:22:37.400
of marriage these are i'm talking about in academic journals they don't have any particular
00:22:43.100
you know religious they're almost always out of university settings but and then there are because
00:22:50.440
there's so many research studies that have been done there have been what they call um meta studies which
00:22:57.940
then take you know all of the research that was done from like 1980 to 2015 and let's take all of the
00:23:07.360
research and group it you know on cohabitation in unmarried relationships so unmarried people moving
00:23:14.960
in together let's take all of that research for those last 15 or 20 years whatever whatever the
00:23:20.520
meta studies looking at basically a summary of it confirms this logic this intuitive logic of my model
00:23:29.940
that the people that move in together are forming a reliance way higher than their trust typically
00:23:36.580
and way higher than what they know somebody so the no trust rely commit touch progression their rely is
00:23:43.460
really high their touch is really high their commitment is kind of skewed they they don't want
00:23:49.980
to go to a full commitment of marriage which truly is historically the greatest commitment it is it is
00:24:00.460
you know we are going to commit together to be together as a union for life that's been the historic
00:24:06.600
definition of what marriage is so it is the highest and they're not ready for that but their rely is
00:24:12.540
really high their commitment is is a little bit crooked you might say and mid-range their touch is all the
00:24:18.780
way to the top their trust is mid-range because they're not quite sure if they can believe everything
00:24:24.780
good about this person but they have enough to move in together and their no even though they might say
00:24:29.760
their no is really high there's a ton of things that they don't know about each other what all the
00:24:35.380
research in the meta-analysis as well as most of the individual studies you can't really find any good
00:24:44.200
research that says this approach of moving in and then eventually getting married is producing better
00:24:52.380
marriages but there is a lot of research that says the breakup rates are significantly higher than the
00:25:01.680
breakup rates in marriage and you might be like well that's good so they move in together they realize
00:25:06.320
it's not going to work out and they break up but we also find the after effects of those breakups
00:25:12.700
can be more similar to the after effects of divorce than ever realized and so people are thinking this
00:25:22.660
is like a no fault no risk approach to checking out a relationship and they move in and their hearts are
00:25:28.740
bonded and they're living together and their rely is really high and and maybe they see problems and
00:25:35.500
because their reliance is so high and and they bought a house together they're living together and
00:25:41.280
they both put money out and bought a house now their dependence their co interdependency has just moved
00:25:49.080
significantly up or they bought a dog together even that or in the millennial generation which is what
00:25:55.920
maybe 22 23 years old to 38 years old now having a having a kid when you're not married in that
00:26:03.980
generation is now over 50 percent it's 55 percent and just a quick stat they looked at these moms that
00:26:12.640
are having kids when they're not married and they asked them how many of you are going to eventually marry
00:26:21.060
the father of your child well it was around 70 percent said yeah you know we're going to marry the father
00:26:27.820
of our child they did a five-year follow-up with these millennial moms and only 16 percent five years
00:26:36.460
later had married the dads and over 50 it was actually 65 plus percent had moved on to another guy
00:26:45.440
so just think how complicated life is becoming so i i i am elaborating on what you said but there is an
00:26:55.720
intuitive logic that says as you get to know somebody and we can talk brett about what does it mean to get
00:27:02.780
to know somebody what are the key areas but as you get to know somebody let the ceiling of how much you
00:27:09.100
truly know them let that set the ceiling of your trust and as you are getting to know them and
00:27:17.660
you know checking out your trust based on that we call it the three t's by the way you got to talk
00:27:26.460
so that's good to get to know them and build trust but second t is you've got to be together in various
00:27:33.380
situations and moods and you know kind of states of life you know when they're stressed or when they're
00:27:40.300
angry or when they're we already said when they're mad at you this togetherness and diverse moods and
00:27:46.860
settings takes the third t it takes a lot of time so if you let your know set the ceiling for your
00:27:55.820
trust and how you know and believe in them as that's getting tested out you keep pulling back your
00:28:02.800
reliance to to keep a little bit of a balanced life not overly investing the same with your
00:28:09.840
commitment and if you pace it that way and then you do everything you can to hold your physical
00:28:16.580
involvement with them in check i i know everybody's like man just you gotta you gotta jump in the sack and
00:28:24.580
check things out right away but all research from biological to to psychological and social finds
00:28:33.680
that jumping in the sack with somebody even in a hookup creates chemicals in the brain that prompt a
00:28:42.920
sense of connection and bond and so we're creating bonds that don't match the other kind of areas of the
00:28:53.500
relationship and this skewed kind of like sense of i'm bonded to them i can't stop thinking about them
00:29:02.180
i'm spending my time with them but this other area is not fully developed like how much i know them
00:29:08.020
whether i can fully trust them these areas are not fully developed whether they really will meet my
00:29:14.760
needs in responsible ways or whether whether they will be kind of more self self-running and self-focused
00:29:22.100
and and i and i didn't realize that for the first few months doing a relationship with the logic of
00:29:28.780
the relationship attachment model that kind of intuitive logic don't let a level go higher than
00:29:34.320
the previous to the left that has saved a ton of people heartache and decisions and help them to kind of
00:29:42.980
use it as i call it a relationship gps system to help them navigate their relationship you know in a way that
00:29:50.780
is wise and safe and actually very rewarding we're gonna take a quick break for your word from our
00:29:56.600
sponsors and now back to the show so earlier you mentioned you want to talk about guys being kind of
00:30:05.180
taking taking charge and being a part of this pacing of it so talk to that why what role does a guy have
00:30:10.300
in a relationship in pacing the relationship yeah this is uh i mean this has been so i had a counseling
00:30:16.920
practice if i back up in northern ohio for 25 years and it was a it was something that just bothered me
00:30:26.940
so much and then after you know designing programs so we have a lot of programs now i don't have a
00:30:33.460
private practice anymore but we have a lot of programs that have been trying to do more preventative
00:30:39.300
than remedial work obviously a counseling practice does a lot of remedial work trying to fix something
00:30:44.080
that broke and like now i want to just help people try to avoid things breaking down by making better
00:30:51.400
decisions on the front end one of the things that always just kind of got me was this sense that
00:31:00.500
respecting what a woman wants and what she's willing to to do in our relationship
00:31:08.220
is the role of the man he is just to be thoughtful and respectful and not pressure her in any kind of
00:31:17.560
way and if he does that then that is enough to be you know an outstanding you know art of manliness guy
00:31:25.260
okay and and i'm like okay that is all good but that's not good enough the man should
00:31:34.000
he he he should be selective about who he's getting involved with he should have some criteria of what
00:31:40.800
he wants from a female and what he doesn't like in a female and he should definitely have some kind of
00:31:50.000
a value system about how to intentionally pace the acceleration of the relationship and if she is like
00:31:59.380
on the third time they're hanging out together she's like hey why don't you come up to my apartment
00:32:04.880
he he's like are you sure is that okay with you that's great with me that permission that she is
00:32:12.580
giving doesn't remove the responsibility he has of saying hey i'm pacing this relationship and i'm
00:32:21.820
going to tell her you know i think this is kind of early to be jumping in together and you know you know
00:32:27.860
i'd like to man i'm attracted to you i find it's an exciting conversation to even talk about this but
00:32:34.980
you know i'm going to hold back because i really think that if we do this relationship differently
00:32:40.160
we might be able to to either develop a really great relationship and see where it's going and
00:32:46.440
and that's going to be a totally it's just going to be a totally different landscape if we do this
00:32:51.460
relationship a little differently and i'd love to talk about why that's important to me
00:32:55.460
i just found even parents didn't teach their boys that this is a responsibility of a young man or an
00:33:07.320
older man a middle-aged man it doesn't matter this is a responsibility of the man in the relationship
00:33:12.720
not just the woman and so forever it seems like women were the gatekeepers of any kind of sexual
00:33:21.880
involvement and they were it went beyond that they were actually not just the gatekeepers but the
00:33:28.100
relationship managers this is a big problem in marriage a lot of wives want their husbands to join
00:33:37.600
with them and be relationship managers hey why don't you plan a date why don't you think about
00:33:41.320
something that'd be fun to do why don't you look at what we need in our relationship why don't you come
00:33:45.140
to me and say we got to improve our communication why am i always the one doing all this
00:33:49.500
well it goes all the way back to how boys are raised and boys are raised to not be relationship
00:33:56.380
managers and to not be the gatekeepers of the physical sexual area of a relationship and so i say
00:34:04.300
we've got to up the kind of the responsibility and the the empowerment of men in relationships men should
00:34:12.160
be much more engaged and they should be much more kind of positive about taking this on like hey this
00:34:20.260
is a this is a good thing i want to have some involvement when my wife and i dated back at the
00:34:27.360
end of the 70s we met in college and we dated in college before we got married for a couple years and
00:34:32.560
and you know i'm i'm thankful looking back i was very much a relationship manager
00:34:39.260
meaning what do i mean by that i i was thinking about hey what is going on in our relationship
00:34:45.500
where are we what are things we need to talk about i would bring up topics i would prompt things
00:34:51.040
it was a mutual you know we both did it but i can remember even as a 19 20 year old being very engaged
00:34:59.560
in that way and i definitely was thoughtful and we talked about what we were going to do in our
00:35:05.540
physical relationship and what boundaries where you're going to set and not do and that that helped
00:35:10.780
us to establish kind of a best friend relationship that has been foundational now for like i said over
00:35:18.200
40 years so i i just think that it's a it there's no way to get around that and if we help men develop
00:35:28.120
that sense of role in relationships it empowers men and gives them way more sense of thoughtfulness
00:35:37.420
and involvement than i think a lot of times they've had in the past and women will appreciate it too
00:35:42.380
i i think so and and what i would say if i mean if a guy's doing this well so we're not talking about
00:35:49.660
control freaks so just to put a couple disclaimers out there we're not talking about control freaks we're
00:35:54.220
not talking about interrogation we're not talking about talking about authoritarian approaches none
00:36:00.040
of those things i'm talking about i'm talking about just upping their involvement and being thoughtful
00:36:05.680
about the relationship and actually engaging in the relationship on a regular basis from the very
00:36:11.420
beginning all the way on into long-term committed relationships and absolutely the the partner will
00:36:18.180
be very very appreciative of it and if if not then that that guy ought to really step back and think about
00:36:26.380
what does this say about this partner that doesn't like me getting involved and taking some charge of
00:36:33.160
this whole arena of you know what we do together what we talk about and what our physical relationship
00:36:40.440
is like what what why is she like this you know what does that mean about her because i i would say
00:36:45.720
that's a red flag so yeah that idea that you know happy wife happy life that no that's not good it's
00:36:52.040
probably gonna lead to a lot of heartache and just not having a good time happy what well if that if that
00:37:00.540
is interpreted to be happy wife happy life so all that means is i can be totally passive if that's the
00:37:11.160
interpretation then i agree that that's not a good but if happy wife means hey if i do if i engage if
00:37:18.020
i've involved if i'm helping to pace the relationship if i'm managing it in in a mutual way if i'm thinking
00:37:24.800
about what she needs as well as what i need and we're putting those things on the table and i'm and
00:37:30.060
i'm an initiator not just a responder and if i am doing those things i would say you're going to have a
00:37:37.020
much happier wife and a happier life as well because those are the things if you read all the
00:37:42.720
books they'll all be saying the same thing guys need to step into that kind of involvement and i'm
00:37:51.240
just putting it upstream at the very beginning of a relationship guys need to be stepping in and they
00:37:57.300
need to be told this is a good thing for you to do so let's talk about uh kind of delve deep into the
00:38:03.180
the no factor because in the book you spend a lot of time in this no area of bonding because i think
00:38:09.340
it's hard in the in the the dating arena today oftentimes people are dating complete strangers
00:38:15.080
like they meet at college they're from you know their potential partners from detroit they're from
00:38:20.300
california it used to be like way back in the 19th century like you grew up in the same hometown
00:38:25.400
families knew each other generations like you you knew the person not so anymore so what does it
00:38:31.320
mean to to know somebody in a relationship yeah you're so you're so right i i came across this
00:38:36.940
book written right on the edge of the 1950s so it was kind of coming out of the 40s which was if you
00:38:42.040
think back to history that's you know world war ii and we came out of the depression and all those
00:38:46.760
things and it was also the era where we had not quite yet stepped into the 1950s of suburbs right
00:38:55.260
people lived in the cities and anyway it's a it was the by burgess the leading sociologist of that
00:39:03.980
time period and it was a book on called i think love marriage and courtship it was a great little
00:39:09.600
book i found and i came across this study that in the 70 percentile remember exactly if it's 73 or 74
00:39:17.540
but of the people in a study in the city of philadelphia people that got married married somebody
00:39:24.240
that they had lived within six blocks of so 70 we'll say that we'll go up at the 75 so three out
00:39:32.100
of four people were marrying somebody that was in their neighborhood and you're absolutely right that
00:39:36.540
is not really what's going on in this day and age people are meeting online and building long you know
00:39:44.580
long distance relationships on a very very regular basis and meeting in different settings where
00:39:51.580
they have come from you know backgrounds that are very diverse and the diversity is great i love
00:40:00.240
diversity but understand diversity makes figuring out compatibility much more complicated it's not
00:40:09.200
that relationships have become simpler they become more complicated and yet the relationship information
00:40:16.180
for what we're talking about being upstream has i think really been depleted so you know the people
00:40:25.340
guiding the process and friends and relatives and family you know it's just kind of all dropped off
00:40:31.860
and people are marrying much later so they're more independent and on their own and they almost become
00:40:38.720
dependent on you know like assessments online like i'll take e-harmony and then i'll do this
00:40:46.060
assessment and it will start helping me connect with people and and okay so this is this is where
00:40:52.340
wisdom is found is in some kind of an online assessment and i i like things like that but i think we need to
00:41:00.720
go way way beyond that so empowering singles with key target areas to explore and talk about in their
00:41:09.720
relationship these are the most important areas to get to know and we want you to understand them to have some
00:41:17.900
in-depth kind of information about them because you are the one running your relationship not some online
00:41:25.440
assessment you're the one that is ultimately making decisions not some algorithm and so we want you to be
00:41:33.800
empowered with this so you can go into it this really came out of brett when i was in my private practice in the
00:41:41.260
mid-90s i was also teaching marriage and family coursework and graduate school and i came across some research
00:41:47.460
that had to do with characteristics of people before marriage and how they predict some kind of outcome
00:41:58.240
after marriage so they some of them were individual characteristics some of them were kind of relationship
00:42:04.900
characteristics but they were things basically that you could get to know about somebody before
00:42:10.660
marriage that predicted how that person seemed to function after marriage and what the outcomes would
00:42:16.960
be and i thought i wonder how many research studies have been conducted on something about a person
00:42:24.520
you know like unmarried characteristics that predict marriage outcomes so i set myself and that's really
00:42:32.960
how this book came about i set myself on the journey of collecting all of the research i could find
00:42:40.600
that was about that and i found hundreds of research studies that nobody had ever organized or cataloged and i
00:42:49.520
began to put them in categories and found that there were really five key areas that covered the the vast
00:42:58.140
majority almost all of this research and so i put them in a little acronym and they became five core chapters of
00:43:07.620
my book so and they are also in the the pick program and we have an online version so people can they don't have
00:43:16.080
to go to a live class i could just jump online we call it head meets heart and it goes through the same
00:43:21.080
areas goes through that relationship attachment model we've talked about goes more in depth into those
00:43:26.000
five areas and then it goes very in depth into the five key areas to get to know about somebody that
00:43:32.420
we're talking about right now and what are those five key areas just as a summary okay so i'll put them
00:43:39.440
in the order of the book so they're a little different order in in the programs but in the book
00:43:45.660
they they they start with kind of what i thought would be the logic like you meet somebody and you
00:43:53.160
and you and you start hanging out together you know we we use the word dating as we've been talking but
00:43:59.080
i don't know who who uses that word anymore relationships have become so undefined which is like a whole
00:44:04.880
another topic but when i go on college campuses now and everything they they say if if somebody is
00:44:11.680
dating they don't call it dating more they call talking so what do you guys do and we're talking
00:44:15.840
so that's what it is so i just tried to be like okay what would be the logical progression of these
00:44:22.160
five areas and they're not you know it's not cut in stone and they're not like finish one and go to
00:44:27.540
the other but usually the first thing that you begin to see is what i call compatibility potential
00:44:32.540
so you see like you're talking to somebody and are we it's that click factor that i mentioned
00:44:39.540
earlier it's that sense of chemistry it's some commonality and so i define three major areas
00:44:47.580
of compatibility that i think go a lot deeper than just that initial but i think that's kind of it you
00:44:53.840
know do we do we feel a little bit compatible with this person and then the second major area
00:45:01.220
is relationship skills and so you kind of figure that out you know how does the person talk how does
00:45:08.960
the person handle themselves with me how do they interact with me in terms of their skill level
00:45:14.960
if you think of a relationship skill if we wanted to find that just think in relationships there are
00:45:22.840
activities that we do we talk we share open up that's all parts of talking we plan things to do together so there's
00:45:34.960
activities whether it's recreation whether it's a project whether it's work we support each other we make
00:45:43.840
make priorities we meet each other's needs that takes a lot we can figure out what the person needs
00:45:51.560
i call being a connoisseur of another person you know how how much am i an expert on what this other
00:45:57.020
person needs right so these are activities the proficiency of how good you are at a particular
00:46:04.040
activity is your skill level so skills are not some separate category of the activities that make up
00:46:12.940
what we do in relationships skills are just the measure of proficiency that we have at doing that so
00:46:20.340
how good am i at talking and listening would start to fall into what we call a communication skill
00:46:26.300
so obviously you start hanging with somebody you not only initially see this first category
00:46:33.500
they said it's how are we clicking what's our compatibility what's our chemistry but then you also
00:46:39.580
are doing activities together and you start to see how good they are at these particular activities
00:46:46.420
those two things by the way are not enough to really tell you what this person is like
00:46:52.880
there are important areas but there are other areas that don't surface so quickly and the third one
00:47:02.980
is what i called a relationship scripts how a person treats everybody else like what forget about how
00:47:13.580
they treat you think about how they treat a co-worker or an authority figure or uh you know their family
00:47:20.620
or extended family or or how they treated an ex or how they broke up with that ex or how they talk about
00:47:26.880
people you know a lot of times how they're treating me doesn't really match how they treat some other
00:47:34.540
significant people in their life even maybe a stranger or somebody that is you know a waiter or waitress you
00:47:42.260
know a service person sometimes how they treat these other people in other arenas is starkly different
00:47:51.320
than how they treat me but i like how they treat me but you know so that's their business but
00:47:58.380
a lot of times those scripts over time start to get turned into the relationship and they start
00:48:07.240
surfacing in the relationship so they they're not a good friend they don't like pay a lot of attention
00:48:13.440
to a person that they're quote friends with or maybe certain family members they kind of tune them out
00:48:19.060
they don't look very conscientious toward those people and and they never like pursue like shouldn't
00:48:25.080
you call your brother or yeah whatever or your friend you know your friend always reaches out to
00:48:30.600
you but you never really reach out to them and you see this kind of passivity and how they treat others
00:48:37.000
but that they're so involved with me and they're constantly with me and they're constantly talking to me
00:48:42.360
and we've been together now two and a half months and man i don't even pay attention to
00:48:47.240
their relationship scripts with others huge red flag because it's really likely that as you round
00:48:57.820
the corner from three months into maybe 13 months passing your first year all of a sudden or maybe
00:49:05.100
even second year you start to see some of those relationship scripts are starting to become normative
00:49:11.140
in how they relate to me and that was i could see it in the first couple months of our relationship
00:49:18.680
but i i minimized it because i didn't think it had any significance compatibility their actual skill
00:49:27.260
level of relationship activities and things that they do the scripts of how they treat others their
00:49:34.660
relationship patterns with others that's number three now we start to get into the really deep
00:49:40.140
stuff what they learned the fourth one is what they learned and have taken out of their family
00:49:46.580
upbringing this is not easy to get to know in the beginning of a relationship because usually if we
00:49:54.280
hear anything about family we just hear some easygoing stories about families but you have to look
00:50:01.180
really hard family upbringing whether it was adopted family about you know biological parent family a single
00:50:09.280
parent family whether it whether it was an institutional a foster family or or they group home whatever
00:50:17.920
everybody grew up and during those you know 18 years whatever period of time you want to say
00:50:26.200
they were growing up they were in they were experiencing and internalizing things from those family dynamics
00:50:35.240
from how the family related how they were treated and they become some of the strongest predictors of what
00:50:41.560
they're going to then take out and you know re-establish in the families they establish or the relationships
00:50:49.260
that they establish in their adulthood so the the fourth area is what i would say what they
00:50:55.960
learned and took out of their family it's not always what happened but it's what they took out
00:51:01.680
and the final one which is extremely important and i haven't found anybody to talk about it but me
00:51:09.520
and that's the conscience people have a conscience it's it's the dynamic value system that operates in
00:51:20.140
them but there is there's a relationship conscience there is a sense of of not just right and wrong but
00:51:27.720
empathy is prompted by the conscience the conscience is like that internal voice that monitors you as you
00:51:36.280
are living life it tells you stop slow down don't do that if um i'll just mention a show you know a lot of
00:51:46.040
people at when seinfeld was on and now they watch all the reruns but going to some of the writer not
00:51:53.500
just jerry seinfeld but then larry david and then the larry david show well if you if you want to see
00:51:59.580
someone that depicts what good old sigmund freud called a swiss cheese conscience i think larry david is
00:52:08.840
like the perfect example where sometimes he's super conscientious and then other times he's like so
00:52:13.780
in your space he's so inappropriate with somebody but we all laugh at it but you know if you like
00:52:20.640
the show if you don't like the show please don't be offended but you know there's a lot of humor there
00:52:25.060
but he is showing kind of that that conscience that some things stick some things just go right through
00:52:33.620
and he seems so uninsightful unempathetic and so forth this doesn't always reveal itself right away
00:52:42.740
these five areas how you and i click together the key areas of our compatibility how skilled you are
00:52:51.340
in some of the most important areas of relationship activities like communication problem solving
00:52:57.780
conflict empathy apologies things like that the third is is how do you treat other people because
00:53:05.500
that's such a strong predictor of how you act in relationships in general and it's probably going
00:53:12.560
to come into our relationship and then let's get deeper into our family stuff what did you take out
00:53:18.060
of your family and then finally deep inside of you what is the maturity and the functioning of that
00:53:26.400
conscience that is such a strong influence on how you live your life and then how you're going to
00:53:33.600
ultimately relate to me in a relationship and this like you said it takes talking it takes being
00:53:38.860
together and it takes time a lot of time a lot more time than you think it's going to take
00:53:43.240
it does and if i put those five areas back into that relationship attachment model going from left to
00:53:51.640
right is no and then as a drop down box just think about these five areas what am i getting to know
00:53:58.700
about compatibility what am i getting to know about skills what am i getting to know about
00:54:03.360
their relationship scripts what am i getting to know on a deeper level about their family and what
00:54:07.980
they took out of it and how those experiences have shaped them and what am i getting to ultimately know
00:54:13.020
about their character and conscience and this this inner side and as i get to know those key areas
00:54:19.340
which definitely take time you can't sit down with somebody and pull out a you know 101 questions
00:54:26.740
and say while we're while we're waiting for uh dinner to come i thought i would just kind of
00:54:31.940
you know ask some questions here that came from this uh podcast that was really interesting on how to
00:54:37.620
avoid getting involved with a jerk now i'm not saying you're a jerk but let's let's go through these
00:54:41.840
questions i have 20 for each of five categories so you can't do that at that point larry david would do
00:54:47.700
that larry david would do that of course but but if you know these areas and in my book i do have
00:54:54.060
about 20 25 questions for each of these five areas so over 100 questions if you know the question if
00:54:58.880
you know the target areas and the questions then as time goes on and it feels comfortable
00:55:04.600
these things can just become part of the fabric of how you're talking together and as your no
00:55:10.800
slowly goes up it tells you how you can trust and believe in them and it tells you how much you can
00:55:18.720
look to them and depend on them and these three actually all interact how they meet my needs how
00:55:24.860
i trust them how they come through for me what they share what we talk about and as they interact
00:55:30.960
they inform how invested i should become in my commitment and where i should set some boundaries
00:55:37.660
in our physical relationship to touch well john we've talked about a lot right now but there's so
00:55:44.180
much more we could talk about i think we got to have you back on the show to discuss this more but
00:55:48.520
in the meantime where can people go to learn more about the book and your work oh that'd be great well
00:55:53.440
first of all i would love to come back on anytime just let me know i'd be i'd be glad to and um we have
00:55:59.040
some free things and then we have some things that can be purchased and so let me just start with
00:56:03.640
the book so i mean they can just jump on amazon and and find the book that way that's no problem
00:56:09.080
again it's published by mcgraw hill and it's called how to avoid falling in love with a jerk
00:56:15.180
but if they also go to my love thinks like love l-o-v-e thinks t-h-i-n-k-s not stinks but and it's my
00:56:25.900
you know my love thinks because we say love should think it shouldn't not just be intuitive the head and
00:56:31.900
the heart should work together so if they go to my love things they can get a lot of free resources we
00:56:38.120
have a whole library of free resources and we have a blog that's free that is always giving
00:56:42.300
information there is also we have online courses and right there from my love things they can click
00:56:48.980
online courses and if they use the code art of man a-r-t-o-f-m-a-n art of man they can get a 20
00:56:59.800
discount on any of our online courses and the online course that goes with the content we've been
00:57:06.020
talking about it's called head needs heart so it's about the head and heart working together
00:57:11.220
obviously and then finally dr morgan cutlip who happens to be my daughter we work closely together
00:57:17.300
she's very involved in all this she has an instagram my love thinks where she puts out daily relationship
00:57:24.680
tips she also does the blog that i mentioned on my love things but if you go to add my love things
00:57:29.760
on instagram you can sign in and get these you know free resources just from her kind of daily
00:57:37.020
tips and they're and they really are good i think they're helpful she kind of goes through the
00:57:41.300
spectrum of singles on into committed relationships and marriage well fantastic well john van epp thanks
00:57:46.800
for your time it's been a pleasure it's been great talking to you my guest is john van epp he's the
00:57:51.600
author of the book how to avoid falling in love with the jerk it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:57:55.780
everywhere you can find out more information about his work at his website love thinks.com not
00:58:00.160
love stinks.com love thinks.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash love thinks where you
00:58:05.800
find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of
00:58:17.220
the aom podcast check out our website at art of manless.com where you can find our podcast archives
00:58:21.460
as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years a lot of things about relationships on there
00:58:25.020
check that out and if you'd like to enjoy ad free episodes of the aom podcast you can do so in
00:58:28.900
stitcher premium head over to stitcher premium.com sign up use code manliness at checkout to get a
00:58:33.660
free trial of stitcher premium once you're signed up download the stitcher app on android or ios and
00:58:38.300
you can start enjoying ad free episodes the aom podcast and if you haven't done so already i'd
00:58:41.940
appreciate if you take one minute to give us your view on apple podcast or stitcher whatever platform
00:58:45.700
you use to listen to the podcast and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the
00:58:49.820
show with a friend or family member who would think we get something out of it shoot him a text as always
00:58:53.620
thank you for the continued support until next time this is brett mckay telling you not only listen
00:58:57.140
to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action