Philosophy for Life

Navigating the Dating Maze: Building Healthy Relationships and Making Conscious Choices | Jonathon Aslay, Relationship Expert

• Darron Brown • Season 3 • Episode 10

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Ever wondered why women seem to receive some of the most terrible dating advice from their peers? Ever been curious about how patterns in choosing emotionally unavailable or narcissistic partners can link back to our upbringing? Well, this episode aims to tackle these questions and more. We traverse the landscape of relationships and dating, exploring the unique challenges that individuals face at different stages of life. You'll hear us dissecting the struggles that come with dating post-divorce and the confusion that can arise for those dating over 45.

Relationship expert, Johnathon Aslay, lends his unique insights to our discussion on building healthy relationships, particularly for those courting in midlife. We delve into the importance of compatibility, alignment in values, lifestyle, and emotional maturity. Uncover the significance of trust, the perils of rushing into commitments, and the imperative for emotional regulation. We aim to equip you with a broader understanding of how to approach dating and relationships with patience, realism, and empathy. 

To round off our enlightening conversation, we'll delve into the realm of arranged marriages and the importance of intentionality in dating. You'll discover how to evaluate a potential partner's character, and how our parents' traits can subtly influence our own. We also lay out the markers of good character and discuss ways to protect yourself and your partner from unnecessary emotional distress during the dating process. Whether you're navigating the dating scene or in a long-term relationship, this episode promises to enrich your knowledge of love and relationships. Tune in for a deep exploration of the dating game!

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Jonathon Aslay:

Women give terrible advice to women. Women expect everyone of their girlfriends to date Prince Charming. In other words, the guy has to be so stellar, perfect, okay. The challenge is, you know, there's no such thing as too perfectly aligned people. Sometimes we compromise our standards, sometimes we compromise our character. When we compromise our standards and our character, that's a recipe for a disaster. The number one emotional health wound facing most human beings is I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable and I'm not likable.

Darron Brown:

Hey, john thank you for being here, man. I've been watching a lot of your videos that you have on YouTube and you have some very just an interesting perspective when it comes to women, specifically in the dating game that are a little bit older. But I want to know I know that there are some similarities between, regardless of what your age is there are similarities between younger women and older women when it comes to dating. What do you think is the biggest problem that people face today when it comes to dating and relationships?

Jonathon Aslay:

Oh my God, that's such a loaded question. I mean, I can come up with 30 different problems One of the fundamental issues for most people, whether they're in their 20s. Well, you see, I do differentiate between people in their 20s and 30s versus 40s, 50s or 60s, and let me explain why. A significant percentage of people, 40 and older, are most likely divorced, whereas people in their 20s and 30s are not divorced. People in their 20s and 30s are oftentimes possibly thinking about making babies and starting a family, and for those in their 40s, 50s and even 60s, it's a whole different ballgame and for them, a lot of times they don't know what a relationship looks like outside of the container of a marriage. So I think, first and foremost, most everybody is rather confused as to what they want and, as I said a moment ago, the container of a relationship, of what they want.

Darron Brown:

Okay, so what do you? Well, let's break it down to different age groups, like what are people specifically looking for in the 20s, the 30s and the 40s and the 50s?

Jonathon Aslay:

Well, so the 20s and 30s, typically speaking, if they're intentional about wanting to start, make babies and start a family, then a man or woman is going to look for an appropriate spouse for them. That's what they're geared towards. If they're just merely want a relationship without that focus if you will then it becomes rather confusing. Usually they hyper focus on the attraction piece and not the containment of what a relationship looks like. So that's what 20 and 30 year olds, the 40, 50, and 60 year olds who are divorced I just lost you. No, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here who are divorced, excuse me, you know, a lot of times they want companionship, they want connection, they want sex, but not necessarily in the as I'm gonna keep repeating the word container, the container of a committed relationship. And a committed relationship has a lot more moving parts, it has some emotional responsibility, it has some requirements of regular contact with one another, and so, just to give you a few examples. So a lot of people are confused, coming back to what I said earlier as to what they want.

Darron Brown:

So do you believe that people in the older dating range they're looking for more casual relationships, would you say?

Jonathon Aslay:

Women typically like the idea of a serious, committed relationship. I mean, I think it's almost to some degree in their DNA. Now, I'm generally speaking here, just for the most part men enter into a relationship from a casual perspective and then they might make the decision if they want something committed after a period of time, because they don't want to commit emotionally to a relationship. But they will certainly commit to the sexual aspects of a relationship pretty much at the beginning of a first date, and I'm saying that a little tongue in cheek.

Darron Brown:

Okay, so I'm guessing the women who are more in the older range, they've already been married. Is this a group you're speaking with? Yeah, I'm gonna say roughly, oh, excuse me.

Jonathon Aslay:

So 75% and this is anecdotal stingles over 45 years old are most likely divorced. Okay, you have some widowers in that camp and you have some never married, but a significant percentage are divorced people and already that comes with a predisposition. It could come with a predisposition of bitterness, anger, jadedness. So it could be predisposition of setting the bar too high or maybe setting the bar too low. So a lot of people after 45 who are single in the dating marketplace there's a lot of confusion as to what they want.

Darron Brown:

I'm wondering because I know that from my age group.

Jonathon Aslay:

A lot of times people think of it in the 40,000 foot level of like candlelight walks on the beach holding hands, yadda yadda, instead of hey, I need some help, drive me to the airport and what? Can you pick up my dry cleaning, would you be? Are you integrating into my life or are we just companions with one another that just entertain one another?

Darron Brown:

Yeah, I see. I'm wondering for the women that you're working with that have been divorced. Do they typically date men like their ex-husband, or do they date men that they always kind of want to date but they're afraid of what their social group would think?

Jonathon Aslay:

You know the answer is yes, yes and yes. And let me explain. Oftentimes, what they definitely don't want is their ex-husband, but they end up with someone like their ex-husband because they have a pattern of choosing emotionally unavailable men. They have a pattern of choosing narcissistic men. So they may not want to date their ex-husband, but they have a pattern of choosing men like that. Most of the time, people are choosing people that are very similar to one or both of their parents. In other words, they choose patterning similar to maybe the way they were raised, because that's what they're familiar with. This is known as the Amago, and Harvelle Hendricks and Helen Hunt talk about this in the book Getting the Love you Want. Talk about the Amago I am A-G-O where we oftentimes choose people like one or both of our parents. This is subconsciously speaking, not consciously speaking.

Darron Brown:

And the reason I ask you that question? Because I know from my age group, specifically, I wanna say, when we're in grade school, when we're in high school, where, from the majority of us, I feel like at least I can speak for myself where are authentic selves. We are the person that God has made us to be, the universe has made us to be. We have no kind of social restrictions. We're free to just do what we wanna do.

Darron Brown:

But something happens when we get in our mid to late teens, even our 20s, we have an idea of who we are in relationship to our group, who we are in relation to our family and just who we are in relation to society, and because of that we kind of conform or change the way we behave to fit into a specific standard. And in fitting in that standard it actually it impacts who we choose as a partner. So I'm wondering like do people as they get older? Do they have a stronger sense of self? Do they know who they are? And, because our sense of self is stronger, they kind of let go of those shackles that society has pinned on them and they actually be having a little bit more freedom, or are they still haunted by the same shackles that they had in the past. So really quickly, how old are you? I'm 35.

Jonathon Aslay:

Okay, 35, just so I had some context. So what typically happens for someone like I'm of the baby boom Jen X period. I'm a tail end baby boomer and I was raised to go to college, get a job, meet a girl, get married, buy a house, start a family. That was the blueprint that I was raised with and I followed that blueprint, but I certainly didn't know how to be a husband when I got married. I really didn't know how to be a father. I was very I didn't even know myself at that age.

Jonathon Aslay:

Okay, so then for the next 12 to 13 years I'm in a marriage. It was rather unhappy for both of us. We split up. Now I had to unravel the tapestry of an old life and then reintegrate into myself. That took a couple of years and I was still very lost, because I was lost before I got married and I was rather lost after I got divorced. And for the next half decade or so I was really trying to find out who I was as a person.

Jonathon Aslay:

Quite frankly, now Alison Armstrong calls this period of time that men go through we'll call it midlife crisis as the tunnel, and that's kind of a period of time that can be a reawakening to who you are as a person and for some people that tunnel could be a couple of years and for some people it could be decades before they really know who they are.

Jonathon Aslay:

I will say it took me a decade or two to really get a sense of who I am as a person because, coming back to what you said earlier, I was raised with a blueprint. We had society that has a blueprint of what we're supposed to be like. We have cultural blueprints of how we're supposed to be like and trying to conform with people that very few people truly get a true sense of their own identity. And, more importantly, if you've had traumas in your life, whether they were childhood traumas I don't mean like you were beaten as a child type of thing, or sexual abuse, I'm talking garden variety traumas and then the trauma of divorce, particularly for that over 45 category it could take years to get a sense of who you are as a person.

Darron Brown:

Yeah. So what I'm wondering is do you need to know who you are before you even join into the dating game? Should you take time to do that self-discovery, or is it okay to date and discover yourself?

Jonathon Aslay:

You know, here's my belief system. I think most people are delusion to who they are, but that's a conversation I could talk about for hours. Sadly, the number one emotional health wound facing most human beings is I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable and I'm not likable. Usually they had childhood wounds or traumas that went unhealed and even though they might have a sense of purpose in their life, they might have a sense of direction, they might be able to pay their bills on time, most people onto some degree are suffering on the inside, and if you're suffering on the inside, you join up with someone else. They're gonna suffer with you.

Jonathon Aslay:

So there's this phrase you have to love yourself before you love another. Now let me be clear about that. Loving yourself is an ongoing journey. You get full awareness two seconds before you die. I mean, it's an ongoing thing. So I think of are you loving on yourself? And if you have a capacity to love on yourself, this self love represents self worth, self esteem, self confidence, self reliance, a lot of those self words and you come with a cup that's at least partially full, then you can join up with someone else. Hopefully that's also come with a cup partially full, if you've got an empty cup and you meet someone else with an empty cup. Do you know what that's called?

Darron Brown:

I would say a relationship built for hell.

Jonathon Aslay:

Yeah, it's called drama.

Darron Brown:

That's what it's called drama.

Jonathon Aslay:

When two empty cups meet each other.

Darron Brown:

Okay, I hear you, so you said a lot and I understand where you're coming from, but I'm wondering, when it comes to self love and you communicating that self love, what role does boundaries play within relationships? Because I feel like when you set boundaries, that's the way you're showing self love.

Jonathon Aslay:

Go ahead. Yeah, I love the way Brene Brown describes boundaries. She says boundaries are what's okay and what's not okay for me. So let's start with a standard. In relationship, what is the standard you seek? Do you seek a standard where you speak to each other every day? Do you seek a standard where you see each other every other day or a couple of times a week? What is the standard you seek in the context of a? We'll use romantic relationships and the boundary is are they meeting up with those? So you have a standard. Then you get an agreement with another person as to whether or not what your standards are and my standards are, and when someone doesn't meet those standards, then the boundary comes in and it's a request to saying, hey, this is what we agree to. You're not agreeing this anymore. I'm setting a boundary. That that's not okay for me and if you wanna continue in this dynamic, I need you to adhere to the standard we agree to.

Darron Brown:

One of the things I see people are doing is that they kind of change who they are to make the relationship work and then, while they're in the relationship, this other side of them starts to show over time and it's like either them or the person they were dating. They become the person they really were in the first place, which kind of prevents a relationship from even growing or being authentic enough to actually survive the long run.

Jonathon Aslay:

No, I was gonna say. The challenge is there's no such thing as to perfectly align people. Relationships are gonna come with some degree of not compromise, and we also call this unconditional love or acceptance, because there isn't no such thing as a perfect person that's perfectly aligned to you. Sometimes we compromise our standards, sometimes we compromise our character. When we compromise our standards and our character, that's a recipe for a disaster. And when I say our character, we compromise in the area of integrity. We compromise in the area of trust, because we have something good over here and many people just hold so tight on this piece that they'll compromise some really critical areas like integrity. Trust and let me just say trust isn't just about fidelity. Trust is does this person truly have my best interest at heart? And sadly, many people are dating without even building solid trust in the relationship.

Darron Brown:

So what if you wanna build that strong kind of relationship? What kind of questions should you ask to actually build a healthy relationship before you jump into one?

Jonathon Aslay:

I do a whole coaching program on that. So first you have to identify your compatibility with someone and are you aligned in certain key areas of your life, particularly your values and everybody's values? Most people's values are somewhat similar, but to each person it could be slightly different. One of the most important things to consider, as if you're in midlife, is does your lifestyle fit into my lifestyle? Like people, typically by the time they get to 40, 50, or 60, they have lifestyles that are relatively cemented in, and so one of the questions you might wanna ask is are your lifestyles compatible?

Jonathon Aslay:

The really hard questions to find out about is someone's emotional maturity and their relationship skills, and this is usually.

Jonathon Aslay:

You have to find out about their past relationship experience, and you have to almost become a detective when you're listening to another person, and if you'd like, I'll give you an example of this.

Jonathon Aslay:

So you've met someone they're divorced, okay and you say, oh, what happened in your marriage? And let's say they literally throw their ex-partner under the bus. They're you can tell they're angry at this person. They're visibly upset, maybe they're jaded, maybe they're bitter. They take no ownership to what caused the ending of the relationship, and I'm not to suggest that it could be a 90, 90, 10, difference, but if you're hyper focused on that, then the question is has this person even healed from their past relationship? Are they really in a good place? If they have so much animosity about their past relationship, that is a gigantic red flag because they're gonna bring whatever wound they had in that past relationship, if they've gone unhealed, into any new relationship, and this is why second and third marriages end at rates 75% and higher, because they didn't heal the past, they just replaced it, which is replaced it for temporary joy and happiness. But they're gonna butt heads later on down the road, most likely speaking.

Darron Brown:

I'm glad you brought the maturity aspect of relationships. I was actually just I had a massage earlier today and I was telling my masseuse, I was telling him, you know, for me personally, I feel like the biggest issue that at least people in our age group make when it comes to dating relationships is that we qualify and we disqualify people way too fast. Like when we're young, we'll look at something that's kind of like something small or something that really you need to learn how to communicate. But when we look at something that's small and we'll just say, okay, that person not right for me, or we'll see somebody that just checks all of our boxes, we're super attracted to them, and then we let we let all these red flags pass, we let our boundaries get crossed and it's kind of like we don't, we're not, we don't ask the right questions, we don't communicate enough or take the time to really even build some kind of friendship before even taking the relationship to that direction.

Jonathon Aslay:

That is so true. You know, we human beings are riddled with flaws. We're foible, we're imperfect. We make ridiculous decisions in our lives, particularly in the emotional area. I mean, some people do it in their physical world, but certainly in the emotional area. You know, humans make choices that you know will baffle any.

Jonathon Aslay:

You know human behavior scientists, because the fact is is most of us, most humans, don't truly know how to regulate their emotions. Number one we have a belief system centered around love that really is actually based on what's known as love attachment. And if you're not familiar with the book called Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, or the book Wired for Love by Dr Stan Tafkin, these two books are excellent resources to learn how we actually attach to another human being in an unhealthy way, just like I was talking earlier about the Amago. And then we find ourselves in relationships that don't bring us much joy and happiness or even just basic contentment, because most humans have a weak sense of their self, a weak sense of regulating emotions and, most importantly, most humans have really poor relationship skills. And I say this, you know it might sound like a pessimist, but our divorce rate and our breakup rate prove that number over and over and over again.

Darron Brown:

Yeah, I think the divorce rate is high is because of the expectations we put on people to be in a relationship and the expectations we have for ourselves. Like I said, a lot of people are going into relationships trying to fit into an image. They're playing a role and obviously this is coming from somebody in the 30s, but they're playing a role and that playing that role is just ultimately that mass cracks and you kind of you don't even know yourself, you don't know why you're in that relationship and then you know it's just a slow fall from there. One of the things that you that kind of I mean has me scratching my head.

Darron Brown:

In my age group I want to say people are typically in the hookup phase or they're getting out of the hookup phase and they're looking to build a strong relationship with somebody that they can actually build a life with. You know, getting serious, but the women that you're working with they have gotten out of divorces and they're not necessarily looking to get married right away. So for me that sounds like a casual relationship. So, but it's more serious than the average casual relationship. It's just not a hookup type of deal. They want to have somebody to spend time with, do things with and also have sex with. What I'm wondering is, because they're not dating to get married, what are the types of steps or the types of questions that somebody needs to ask before they actually enter into a sexual relationship? Does an older crowd just start having sex just like the younger crowd, or do they ask a series of different questions to build this casual relationship?

Jonathon Aslay:

Yeah, the challenge is this if you don't have the intent, like, you've just gotten a divorce and you're reluctant to get married, okay, so now you enter into a relationship with some, in other words, you met them, you have had a couple of dates, you like each other, you start to have a physical, intimate relationship with each other and you agree to monogamy and exclusivity okay, but you're like I don't know if I want to get married, okay, well, this creates a very confusing circumstance, because if you're, say, 50 years old, do you want to just be dating for the next 40 years of your life? Is that what you want? Like, so you know, like, and they'll say like, oh, no, no, I want to eventually get married. Okay, well then, is the person you're investing time with the person you want to get married with? Well, I don't know yet because I don't know them? Okay Now, okay, this is a lot of good questions. The challenge is when you're in a casual relationship, you can end it at any moment you want. You can just say I'm done, I can go, so I can disappear and, by the way, certainly that can happen in a marriage. But there's a lot more moving parts to people that either move in together or getting married, there's more commitment associated with that relationship.

Jonathon Aslay:

When two people live in two separate residents and all they have is a handshake of you know, monogamy and exclusivity, the real question becomes have they truly integrated into each other's lives? Have you really integrated? In other words, are you, you know? Do you spend time with family and friends? Do you travel together? Do you go to social gatherings together? Do you help each other out from personal and professional levels? Did I? I don't know if I mentioned travel, you know these are the things, along with emotional and physical intimacy, but there's a real integration. Well, what we see today is a lot of people that I say that they have most casual relationships. It's just a long drawn out version of friends with benefits. They occasionally have companionship, they occasionally have connection, they occasionally have sex, with very little integration into each other's lives, because that integration builds the deep roots of trust so you can go the distance, potentially, with this person, but if you don't integrate, then you can leave whenever you want, basically because you have nothing vested in it.

Jonathon Aslay:

Oh, I do want to bring up one point, though I meant to say this to you earlier. Why do arranged marriages have one of the highest success rates of most couples. Well, and I've spoken to a number of people and I mean, there's about this that arranged marriages have a higher rate of success. Well, why? Let me guess, let me guess, let me guess. Oh good, let's hear.

Darron Brown:

Let me guess so. Is it because when you have an arranged marriage, you're going into it with? You have a because your family already has already been at that person? You families know each other. You guys have some kind of similar. I want to say you have a similar culture and a similar belief system around family relationships in life. Is that in the right direction? Yeah, you're on the right path.

Jonathon Aslay:

You know the families, by the way. You're not just marrying a person, you're marrying into a family and the family supports the relationship beyond the two of us. Here in the United States, you know most people are just winging it. You know they're just winging it. They're like, and, by the way, given that most people don't even have a solid community around them, it makes for a very weak foundation when it's just two people having to hold the fort. If you will, versus. You know it takes a village kind of thing.

Darron Brown:

You know, I have a big. I was having a conversation with my friend about this about, say, a few months ago and I was we're talking about arranged marriages and I was telling him that now really didn't see a problem with it and he, you know, he pushed back and what I told him I was like, man, take a look at the women that were dating the women. A lot of times women won't date you unless their friends like you you know saying so. They're getting advice from somebody that has no dating or relationship experience, or very little, but at least, if it's their parents, it's somebody that's going to be in their life for the rest of their life and somebody who knows them on a way deeper level. A lot of times you exchange, you have some friendships last forever. Some let friendships last a few years, some last last a few months, months, and I feel like a lot of men and women people are because they're so afraid of making the wrong decision they make. They let other people make these. The wrong people make the decisions for them.

Jonathon Aslay:

That makes you know I have. I'm going to share a judgment. I'm going to own what I'm about to say. It's a bit of a projection or judgment. Women give terrible advice to women because women basically expect every, every one of their girlfriends to date Prince charming, in other words, the guy has to be so stellar, perfect, okay, and that doesn't. That person doesn't exist, because men are flawed human beings, and so I think a lot of times women give bad advice to women based on that narrative, and that's just a judgment on my part.

Darron Brown:

Thanks for sharing. I think I will have to say so too. It's funny. I want to put this out there because we're talking about families and relationships. I was telling some I was, I was on a somebody else's podcast and it was a group of us and they were talking about you know women?

Darron Brown:

What is a good woman? Oh, she has purple hair, green hair. She's not a good woman. And I told myself man, you're, you're delusional if you're going to judge a woman's value based off the color of her hair. I said if you really want to get to know a woman and see who she's going to be within the relationship, you get to know her parents, you get to know her mother, you see how her mother treats her father, how the women in her family treat men, just in general. But that'll give you the best idea of who she will be within that relationship, because we unconsciously take on the characteristics of our parents, like or not. You know that there are. There are first mentors. They teach us who we are, who we're supposed to be, in relationship to other people.

Jonathon Aslay:

So I just recorded a video this morning it's going to come out in a few days and I said what's the most important thing to evaluate within a person when it comes to choosing a life partner? And, and, and I and I started with the phrase of you know, have you ever heard what's the number one thing you look for when you buy a house? That you do. You know the answer to that.

Darron Brown:

I bought a house and I have no idea what the answer is.

Jonathon Aslay:

But it's always the same thing Location, location, location. That's the most important thing in buying a house.

Jonathon Aslay:

Okay, well, the important thing when it comes to choosing a life partner is character, character, character. The problem is most people don't really they know, really unpack that. So if you allow me a minute or two, I'll unpack that for your audience, because I like to take it a little bit deeper than just the word itself. Character. So character, actions, matching words, consistency you know now a person couldn't make a mistake. Hey, I'm supposed to. I'm going to call you tonight and I fell asleep. You know, we're all human, we're going to make mistakes, but there's consistent actions. Match their words.

Jonathon Aslay:

Another aspect of character is you've healed your past relationships. You don't bring the trauma and drama from a past relationship into a new relationship. To me, good character represents a person who's generous, who's kind. They come from that place of abundance and they don't come from a place of negativity, they come from a place of kindness. Person of good character, they communicate clearly without being right. In other words, it's not about being right. They communicate as a win-win type of communication. To me, that represents good character.

Jonathon Aslay:

They believe trust is paramount in relationship and, as I said earlier, trust isn't just about fidelity in relationship. Trust is your feelings matter to me as much as my own feelings matter to me. In other words, I am always looking out for your best interest. That's a fundamental in trust and for a person with good character, that's a paramount in their life. They don't use people. In other words, if they are not clear about commitment, then they don't engage in casual relationships. They only engage in relationships where there's a potential for going the distance. They're not in it for the hookups, the short runs, the situationships, the friends with benefits and again, this is my interpretation of good character. They have their act together. They're introspective, they do work on themselves and lastly amongst there's dozens more I could come up with they have a level of empathy they genuinely care about, they have empathy, humanity for others beyond themselves. They don't operate from a myopic, self-centric place, and that, to me, is the most important thing to consider when evaluating someone. Ah, I just said a mouthful.

Darron Brown:

Sounds like a very mature adult which we get to be at certain stages in our life. No not everybody.

Jonathon Aslay:

It's not age. By the way, I know 20-year-olds at far more adult than 60-year-olds.

Darron Brown:

Gotcha Me as well. How do you find this high-quality person? How do we find high-quality partners?

Jonathon Aslay:

Well, it starts by being what you want to attract. It's not as if these people are hanging out at the street corner or something like that. So how do you find them? First, be what you want to attract, set the standard of what it is you want and eliminate people quickly that don't meet that standard. And the more you vibrate at that level of what you want to attract, you have a greater potential of attracting that into your life. But again, we're talking about to be a real emotional grown-up takes a lot of introspective and inner work, and most people are lazy. Here in the United States, we are one of the as much as we've accomplished and it's amazing what we've done. Human beings can be incredibly lazy too, particularly in their romantic life. There's this Disney narrative that it should be easy. No, it's going to require effort, herculean effort on some cases, but the reward is hopefully you find a partner that goes the distance with you.

Darron Brown:

Let's dive into that, because I was actually just watching a podcast and they were talking about relationships being difficult or being easy, and there were basically there's people who believe that, just like your, relationships are difficult, but it's supposed to be difficult, but it's two people who work on those problems and build a healthy relationship. And there's some people who believe that when you have chemistry, the vibe is strong between the two of you, then things will float easily within a relationship. Which one is correct Like what is the balance between the two?

Jonathon Aslay:

Well, I want to be clear about something. If I intimated this, then let me retract that. The work is not having to continually. If two people have friction and you're using sandpaper to smooth it out, I'm not remotely even suggesting that the work is always individual work. It's learning to catch yourself, to catch your triggers, to not act in a righteous manner, to not act with criticism, to not act with contempt, to not stonewall your partner and to not get defensive. So it's always inner work, two people doing inner work. Now, two people have done work. They're going to trigger each other.

Jonathon Aslay:

But if you're in a relationship where you're both all in we should talk about this a little bit more the concept of being all in, you're all in and you say okay, do we want to be right or do we want to be happy? And we might have a difference of opinion and sometimes it's okay to disagree. It's okay to agree to disagree, okay, that's okay too. But you listen to your partner's point of view, you acknowledge their point of view to them and you accept their point of view as being true for them, and you both do this for each other and you might hit an impasse, but that's okay if you listen, acknowledge and validate or the person's point of view. A lot of times it's usually I'm right, you're wrong.

Jonathon Aslay:

Most couples go into therapy, couples therapists, and it's always this it's their fault. No, it's their fault. It's their fault. You see, they're not looking in the mirror. So coming back to your question, people that approach relationship based on chemistry. Chemistry is great. There's nothing like it, you know, there's nothing like just feeling like off the charts connection with someone. But let me tell you, if you don't share the same values, if your lifestyles aren't blendable and you aren't with someone who's emotionally constipated, it's gonna be a lot more hell than the few moments of pleasure you get. So relationships in and of itself don't take work, except for the work you do within yourself. That's my point of view.

Darron Brown:

That's a great answer. Become the person you wanna attract. Yeah, I'm curious. I was reading a book by Henry Cloud. He wrote the book called Boundaries and he also has a book called Boundaries and Relationships. Okay, and in that book he always references God and Christians. One of the things that stood out in his book that I hear in a lot many different male dating books is that the importance of people dating more than one person. Now he says not to have sex. So he's not talking about having sex with more than one person, but he says you should date more than one person because a lot of times your ideal partner isn't the right partner for you and you really don't learn that unless you really build some kind of friendship. You date, you meet their friends, et cetera, the people that you work with. How do you typically teach them to go about dating? I know there's not a one size fits all, but what is?

Darron Brown:

the gap used just to them.

Jonathon Aslay:

Well, I think, just realistically speaking, you could go on a person could go on 10 first dates in the next 10 weeks and the chances are you're gonna have chemistry with all 10 of them is highly unlikely. In fact, you might only have chemistry with a few of them. So it's just a natural byproduct that you might be meeting a number of different people, okay. Now where I have a difficulty is, let's say, you begin dating one person, okay, and you like this person. You start investing time in this person. I'm not a big proponent of then dating another person and another person, another person. I just think that's disingenuous. I mean, unless you're both communicating that, you're dating multiple people. But it's like watering it all down. I'd rather look. You know it's interesting. I'm gonna put a pause button here for a second.

Jonathon Aslay:

There's a show I'm fascinated with called Love is Blind. It's a reality show and it's two people that connect in these pods and you have to. Basically, I'm gonna give you the Cliff Note version of the premise of the show. But basically, after a week or two of connecting with someone, you have to get engaged with one person. You get to actually meet them for the first time after you've got engaged and then you go on a mini vacation with that person for seven days and the other people there's a group of people have done this, and then you have to spend eight weeks living with that person and then you have to decide if you actually wanna marry this person.

Jonathon Aslay:

Okay, all right, put that in the box for a second. Why I brought this up is it's accelerating the process, but then you know for sure whether or not you wanna truly invest with this person. I'd like to think, if we devote our time and energy to one person in 10 dates, if you've gone on 10 dates with someone and you feel like you wanna explore a relationship with them, then explore a relationship. But if you're doing that with multiple people, it's gonna be watering down and convoluting. It's gonna be very convoluted. That's just my opinion anyway.

Darron Brown:

Well, it's gonna be really difficult to do it. When you have a job and activities like we have, it's hard to balance.

Jonathon Aslay:

But you know what's interesting commentary Is? You really don't get to know a person until you live with them. I've known people that have dated for three years. They moved in together and it imploded within three months. Wouldn't you rather have known that three years sooner? You're like I mean, I'm just putting it out there. Maybe what we should be doing is accelerating the process, instead of this long drawn out friends with benefits version of dating that we currently is our current dating model.

Jonathon Aslay:

You know, just a hypothesis by the way, I have experience I wanna share.

Darron Brown:

I feel like people need to be intentional in their dating. I think that I had a really good friendship with a woman for a decade. We were I will speak at least once a week or once every two weeks. We spoke pretty frequently. We both have relationships, know her from college. We slept in the same bed before I've dated her friends Never did anything, never touched this woman, never did anything other such, but went to go visit her in Germany.

Darron Brown:

And then she fell in love with me. Okay, nothing wrong with that. We had a good, we had a great friendship. But the thing was is that I didn't know that she had fallen in love with me and she started treating me the way she treats her crushes, which, unfortunately, isn't healthy.

Darron Brown:

It's very argumentative, really name calling nasty, and I had no idea what was going on and I'm just like what in the hell? And she told me after I returned back to the States, like hey, you know I have these feelings for you, yada yada. But she couldn't break out a character because she hadn't done the work that she, she hadn't done the internal work to handle the insecurity she had around relationships, which is why she's acting that way. I say that to say this is that I feel like if people, if people went into a situation not only building that type of friendship but also letting that person know like hey, I like you, I want to build a relationship which you might want to take the time to get to know you, being intentional is going to help expose those different, those different traits of that person early on in the dating, so that situations like that happened to me or the situations that happened to the person that you just gave and that example of them moving in, they kind of they learned that a lot sooner than later.

Jonathon Aslay:

Yeah, I mean, realistically speaking, what I'm proposing is not logistically viable, but it's just a hypothesis I have is that we would. Maybe we'd be better served accelerating the process. But, most importantly, what I'm really saying is being intentional and being mindful being mindful of your words, being mindful of your actions, that our actions have emotional consequences to another human being. You know, when I shoot my videos, I tell my audience that I'm your big brother. If I could be there on a first date, I'd have a shotgun pointed at the guy's face and I'd say what's your intentions with my little sister? The reference there is that your actions has consequence to someone I care about. And if you're going to be disingenuous, if you're gonna be manipulative, if you're going to be insensitive, I'm gonna shoot you in the ass for that, okay. But what that does is it forces someone to be mindful. Today, there are no consequences for bad behavior. There are no consequences for leading someone on, there are no consequences for ghosting someone, and yet the emotional ripple effect of that can be quite devastating to someone's emotional wellbeing. Now, you're not responsible for someone's emotional wellbeing, but isn't a person of good character? Actually, they take care of the people around them If the minute they engage with someone, aren't they going to have a level of treating people with respect? And so I'm a big advocate of being intentional, and that means having more difficult conversations early on, talking about sex before you have sex in other words, not engage in it and then try to figure it out.

Jonathon Aslay:

Have a few conversations about what sex means to you. Does it mean like? For me, it means if I'm gonna be physically intimate with someone and I want to explore a relationship, I would like us to both agree to monogamy and exclusivity. In other words, monogamy don't sleep with anyone else, and exclusivity mean don't engage with talking to other people while we're in this, and that's a conversation. That's being intentional. Commitment might mean hey, you know what? Let's make sure we talk to each other once a day to check in. If we don't physically see each other, that's demonstrating a level of commitment to the relationship. These are the things that should be talked about, but today, younger people are ridiculously cavalier. I mean, they have no conversations whatsoever and for the demographic I speak to, they've been indoctrinated that men are the leaders of the relationship, so they have to follow the man's lead, and I'm like you're giving the job to the wrong person. Your relationship destiny is not in someone else's hands. It's in your own hands.

Darron Brown:

I the last statement that you made was really powerful, because there's a lot of guys on the internet. There's a lot of guys on the internet right now talking about like a man is made to lead, women are made to follow, and I actually had a guy on my the red pill community.

Jonathon Aslay:

Huh, the red pill community.

Darron Brown:

Yeah, and I had a guy on my show and it's somebody that I look up to. I'll see him as a mentor of mine. He kind of he basically agreed with that statement. One of the things I mentioned to him was that, you know, if you take a look at ancient societies the Greeks for example they had a variety of different archetypes for women. They had the woman that was like the queen of love, the goddess of love, and then they had the woman that was the goddess of war, but they had the counterpart, male god, which was the god of the god of war. You had Athena, the goddess of war. Then you had I can't remember the god of war and Greek mythology oh.

Darron Brown:

Aries. Aries, the point that I'm making is that each man and woman had these feminine and masculine archetypes that they can live up to, and it seems like in today's society women only have one archetype man is above. Man are represented, you know, we're represented as the kings were at the top, and women are our servants. And, just from my experience, there are women who make great leaders and there are men who make great leaders and there are men who can't leave for shit and they need somebody to hold their hand, and it's the same thing for some women. So I'm not sure if it's a one size fits all or we're supposed to play these certain roles, but I think it falls down to back to what you said originally is that you have to really know yourself and know what kind of relationship you fit into.

Jonathon Aslay:

Well, you know, when we look in history, you know women, you know it's been quite a patriarchal society for the most part, and quite frankly, for the most part, women in many cases were treated like property, like chattel, like second class citizens. So it plays into a narrative the man is above and the woman is below and the woman must submit to a man. You know I'm an advocate of personal empowerment. I'm an advocate of individual empowerment. The fact is we have a divorce rate of first marriages at 50%, second and third marriages at 75%. We see a lot of men who are rather broken in the dating marketplace. They're rather clueless. So as and I'm an advocate for women I wouldn't wanna give the job of leadership to a person that A you don't trust yet okay, that hasn't actually earned it and actually is capable of the job.

Jonathon Aslay:

So if we start with that narrative from the very first date, you're possibly setting yourself up for failure and what that does is it sets someone up for narcissism. If they're in charge, then it's my way, or the highway is the potential pathway. I'm not saying always, but potential. I'm a big proponent of co-creating a relationship of two people, you know, equally investing into the relationship, equally making choices within the relationship, how it relates to the relationship, equally making agreements, and some people you know there are certain people. You have to use their strengths and weaknesses. If one person's strength is maybe driving the car, then let them drive the car. If another person's strength is cleaning the house, then let them do that, or you do it together, type of thing. But the point is is some people, some people think within a relationship you should leverage your strengths for the betterment of the relationship, but not in a one up, one down submit. I'm not a big proponent of that.

Darron Brown:

Agreed, agreed. I was reading I can't remember the name of the book, but I was reading a book and I was stating that the importance of roles in relationship, and by roles it doesn't mean like sticking to traditional gender roles, but it's important to know how you fit, what your contribution is in the relationship and how that person's fit. You said that you gave the example of maybe we both clean. We both do this. I know growing up I had to clean up everything. My mom she felt like when she had kids we became her servants, we had to do everything and she was gonna chill out. So that's how my household was. I have you for five more minutes. I wanna make sure I ask you a few more questions. Sure, how do you know you should? When do you know you should end the relationship or stay in it and keep trying?

Jonathon Aslay:

You know that's a tough one. I think what's most important, if two people are not happy with each other, then have a conversation about what is causing the unhappiness and see if you can't find a way to resolve that together. I think it's important to constantly make adjustments in your relationship. I think healthy relationships are okay. Let me. I was just thinking about something a moment ago. I was thinking about two lawyers that partner together and two good lawyers that partner together and we're gonna be the kick-ass law firm, okay, and they each week have a weekly meeting about the health of the partnership and not the two of them, but the agency within the context of who they're serving. And they have these weekly meetings and they make adjustments for one another.

Jonathon Aslay:

It's the same in a romantic relationship have a state of a union within your relationship, can make adjustments along the way, because oftentimes they wait till something is so almost past the deadline of saving it, you know, and then making last-ditch efforts when, if maybe, people went into the early stage of the relationship having the tough conversations talking about sex, talking about money, talking about the importance of keeping your physical health up for the health of the relationship, talking about the things that might trigger you. Talk about your past relationship so it doesn't bleed into a relationship. If you have residue from the past relationship, have these conversations and then be intentional about integrating into each other's lives and have regular state of the union meetings with each other. That's what I'd rather people do waiting versus waiting till the last minute to try to resurrect something that's probably past its deadline, if you will.

Darron Brown:

Okay, jonathan, thank you for doing the show with me. I'm gonna have to end it here. I apologize for having the technical difficulties I had to be getting. I had no idea what was going on. I just have another meeting like right after this, so that's why. But we're gonna have to do it again sometime in the future and I can really finish my list of questions. But is there any kind of close? I got one for you. If you had to give any kind of advice, what would be your philosophy when it comes to life?

Jonathon Aslay:

I'm a big. I wrote a book you can see it behind me called what the Heck is Self Love. Anyway, it's a journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work. I'm a big proponent of individuals looking, being introspective, maybe seeking therapy, doing personal development, doing spiritual work to find a way to inner peace, to self, you know, to contentment, and do whatever it takes to get there. I'm a big proponent of doing work because the beauty of it is. I think you have a happier life when you do individual work and I'm a big proponent of that.

Darron Brown:

Agreed, jonathan, thanks for having you and I'll catch you next time. Man, have a good one.

Jonathon Aslay:

Bye, have a good one.

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