The Psychology of Respect - Why Women Choose Strength Over Emotional Compliance

What actually builds respect within the context of a relationship? What allows a woman to build respect for you? This is a big question that a lot of men have, and as you've probably seen or experienced yourself firsthand, the more you try and get a woman to respect you, the more the adverse side effect of her not respecting you happens, and the harder it is for you to respect you. And so in this video, in this episode, I'm going to dive into the psychology of respect, what actually builds respect in a relationship, and why Women choose to be with men, women want to be with men that they respect, that have that strength instead of the man that's emotionally compliant. So let's dive straight in. Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button so that the algorithm, which is inundated with AI garbage, can actually deliver you some real people, some real content that you wanna see and can benefit from. All right, let's dive in. First things first. You cannot be respected and emotionally compliant or compliant all the time at the same time. So you can be one or the other. And the challenge for many of you is that if you're a nice guy, if you're a people pleaser, the likelihood that you grew up in a household that conditioned you to be overly compliant, to prioritize other people's needs, to put their desires ahead of your own, their needs ahead of your own, is very, very high. And if you watch a lot of social media content, especially content largely from women that are dating coaches, a lot of the times there's this inadvertent message to men that how you should behave and operate is very compliant. If you are just nice and you get along, go along with what she wants and what she says and what she desires, then you're going to be happy. She's gonna be happy. And you're gonna get along and everybody's gonna be hunky-dory. And that's just not how it works. Most men will spend years quietly erasing themselves in the relationship. They will walk on eggshells, they'll concede to whatever she wants, they'll watch the shows she wants, go to the restaurants she wants, do the things that she wants to do that he thinks is going to make her happy. Because in most men's brains, how they approach relationships, and maybe you've felt this, I certainly have in the past, I wanna make her happy, and so what should I do? Whatever she wants. This is a recipe for the breaking down of her respecting you, because at the core of it, one, she will not know what you really want, need, or desire. Two, your standards will not ever really enter into the relationship. And three, she won't trust you to set a boundary or a standard with her. So that can lead to the collapse of the relationship. And I've seen this so many times where guys will say, "I thought I did everything right. I was accommodating, I was agreeable, I kept the peace, I provided for her, I took her out where she wanted to go, I bought her the flowers that she wanted." And right there, right there is the misunderstanding that I want to dismantle today because it is costing you the relationship, the polarity, the intimacy, the connection that you're really wanting. And this video, to be clear, is not about being colder or being more, like, overly dominant or whatever it is. That's kind of the cheap version, in my opinion. It's not that it's incorrect, but this is what actually generates respect with a woman and why most men have been taught that they need to earn love, and that's exactly what destroys it. So we're going to get into the psychology of what builds respect between two people, how that ties into intimacy, what most men do to collapse it, and then I'm gonna give you specific tools and strategies so that you can begin to shift and build more respect in your relationship. So first, let's define terms honestly, okay? Because the words that we're talking about here, respect, strength, they usually get twisted. As soon as I say strength in a relationship, women like, men with strength, a whole bunch of women sometimes will come out of the woodwork and, you know, finger point at me and tell me that I'm part of the patriarchy and I'm part of the problem. When I say strength, I'm not talking about aggression, and I'm not talking about dominating the dynamic or the relationship and subjecting her to an experience where her desires, her autonomy, her independence, her individuality is crushed. We're not talking about suppressing her or repressing her, and we're not talking about suppressing or repressing yourself and your emotions and emotionally shutting down. That's not strength, right? That's avoidance, and that's what most of us have been taught. Most men have been taught, avoid the things that might cause you to be perceived as weak. And it's kind of like wearing a costume, which kills intimacy. And I remember working, there was a period of time where I worked with a whole bunch of men that had come out of the pickup artist community. And they're like, "Yeah, I had some success in the pickup artist community, but I could never make long-term relationships last." And I was like, "Yeah, of course you couldn't, because the pickup community is giving you certain behaviors, it's giving you certain strategies to become a kind of character and wear a kind of mask that might work in this very short-term interaction for sexual gratification, but it's not conducive for long-term intimacy and connection because those two strategies are often very, very different. And the problem is that most men, when they get into a long-term dynamic, end up moving towards emotional compliance. And emotional compliance is essentially self-abandonment. It's the habit of collapsing your own position, your own wants, your own needs, your own standards, your own reality to manage someone else's, to manage her emotional state, right? So I'm gonna negate what I want and just say yes to what she wants. I'm gonna ignore how I feel and just give her what she wants to settle things. It's saying yes when you mean no. And it's adjusting your opinion, your perspective. It's hiding your opinion or your perspective mid-sentence because you saw a little tinge, a little flicker of disapproval, of disappointment, of frustration in her face. And it's apologizing for the things that you didn't actually do. It's apologizing for the things where you weren't actually wrong, just to make the tension stop, just to keep the peace. These are the things that so many men do to try and make the relationship work, and it absolutely destroys that woman's perspective of respect for you. Because what she continues to feel is that you're ejecting from yourself. You won't stand up to her. You won't stand up for yourself. You won't stand up for what you want and need. And eventually what happens is that she feels so superior or dominant in the relationship that she can't think of a good reason for staying. And in a clinical language, psychologists will call this the fawn response. It is, I'm going to appease you. I'm going to give you whatever you want in order to stay safe. And this is what nice guys learn. This is what people pleasers learn. So if you're watching this and you're like, man, this is hitting home for me, this really sounds like me. This is because you grew up in a family system where there's a sort of low differentiation. This is what in IFS, in Internal Family Systems, they would call low differentiation, which is the inability to hold onto yourself to differentiate from mom and dad, from brother and sister. So it's the ability to hold on to yourself when somebody you love is upset. Now, for many of you that are nice guys, that are people pleasers, that struggle with respect in the relationship, that don't feel respected by your girlfriend or your wife or the women that you date, oftentimes part of it is, of course, that you are maybe acting in ways that are disrespectful to yourself and to her and to the relationship. But the other side of it, if you fall into the category that I'm talking about right now, which is a lot of compliance, is that you have never been allowed to really have an identity that is differentiated from the people around you. I call this the chameleon identity, the chameleon effect, where you try and become whoever you think she wants you to be, whoever your wife and your girlfriend whoever you think she wants you to be, you try and become that, or you try and become more and more like her. And this was a survival strategy for you as a boy. This is what kept you safe, right? Maybe you grew up in an abusive environment, or there was a lot of neglect or abandonment, and so you used psychological compliance. I'm going to get myself to behave, to act, to feel, to talk in the way that my caregivers need so that I can feel safe. And it's a great adaptive survival strategy when you are a kid to maybe prevent abuse or to try and get love. Doesn't mean it necessarily worked when you're a kid, but it certainly does not work when you are adult because what ends up happening is that you delete, you eradicate who you actually are in the relationship. And for a lot of men that are people pleasers and nice guys, a lot of you, when I work with men like you, what ends up happening is you say, "I feel like I just can't take up space in the relationship. You know, what I want, what I need is that, you know, it just doesn't matter, or it's a threat to the relationship. She doesn't like to hear that. She's gonna get upset, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." And so this type of compliance, I'm gonna ignore what I want, I'm gonna ignore my standards, I'm just going to comply to what I think she wants and needs collapses respect. It burns respect. So why does it backfire? And then we'll get into what you do, what do you do? It backfires for 3 main reasons. And these are important to understand because they also tie into what you're going to be doing. Okay? So take a listen through that lens. Number 1, respect is really required in yourself in order for another to respect you, okay? You have to behave and operate in a way that you genuinely respect in order for it to be possible for admiration and respect to come from another person. And the challenge that a lot of men face who are, maybe this is you, that's in a marriage, in a relationship with a woman where you're like, "I don't feel respected," A lot of the times, a lot of the times it's because you are operating in a way that you don't respect. You're not standing up for your standards. You're not setting any expectations. You're not operating in a way day to day that you actually respect and admire. And there's a concept in psychology called the sociometer, sociometer. And it's the idea that people are kind of constantly, constantly unconsciously and consciously reading how much you value you, how much you value yourself, and calibrating how they're going to treat you based on matching how you value yourself. So another way of saying this is that— this is kind of a tough thing for a lot of guys to hear— people are going to respect you to the degree, to the degree that you respect yourself. People are going to value you to the degree that you value yourself, because the sociometer— we're constantly looking for subtle cues to get a gauge of, does this person actually value who they are? Do they value what they're saying? Do they respect their needs, their wants, their desires, their standards, the expectations? And so you don't get treated according to what you say you're worth or what you think you should be worth. You get treated according to how you treat yourself. You get the equivalency in respect to how you respect yourself. So when you chronically abandon yourself and you tell your girlfriend, you tell your wife, I'm going to get up at 6 a.m. and I'm going to go and work out, and then you snooze until 8 a.m. and then you bitch and complain about it, you erode respect in yourself. And then she matches that. When you constantly act infantile in your emotions and you blow up and you are whining and you're complaining about how there's not enough sex and you're trying to criticize her and blame her and throw a tantrum to get more sex, you're eroding the respect in yourself. And so she's going to match that. Number 2, desire and respect requires two separate people. So just remember, going back to this concept of differentiation, there was a therapist named David Schnarch, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, but he spent his entire career basically studying long-term desire and what builds long-term desire. And his core finding was pretty simple. It was differentiation, which is what I was talking about before. And differentiation, what he found was, It's your ability to hold on to yourself while staying connected to your partner, especially in moments of hardship, of disagreement, of conflict. And this is the engine of lasting attraction. So if you can hold on to yourself in a moment of maybe disagreement, and not totally collapse in, oh, I should just, I should let go of what I want and need because she's upset and I just wanna make her happy. I just wanna give her what she wants. When you fuse, AKA when you become who you think she wants you to be, or you become who you think other people want you to be, or you just become more and more like her, when you fuse, you dissolve your sense of self and that person has no real differentiation between you and them. And then your moods become an extension of hers, and then your feelings and your wants and your needs, they all become an extension of hers. And that over time collapses desire, it collapses polarity. And Esther Perel, a friend of mine, says this in a bit of a different way. She says that desire needs distance. And it also needs psychological distance. It needs character difference. And so part of what makes a couple have a vibrant intimacy is that there's difference between you and her. And so what a lot of men do that are people pleasers and nice guys, a lot of men that especially are trying to earn respect, is that they are trying— and I can see, I know you guys, because I've been this guy and I've worked with so I've worked with so many men like this, you are constantly and chronically trying to figure out, what does she need me to do in order for her to respect me? What does she want me to say? What does she want me to do? What does she want me to choose? How does she want me to feel in order for her to like and respect me? And it's the wrong question, because it constantly puts your respect outside of yourself. Okay. Number 3, this constant capitulation of, I'm going to do whatever you want, I'm going to say whatever you want, I'm going to become whatever you want. This constant capitulation turns your partner into a parent. Okay. Because that's what you learned as a child. When a person is constantly managing the other's feelings, conceding to them, soothing them, over-functioning to try and take care of them, the relationship slowly starts to erode and slide into a parentified dynamic, into a parent-child dynamic. And this crushes intimacy and it crushes respect. And it's why you hear so many women say stuff like, you know, "We had 2 kids, but really I was taking care of 3." And they're undermining it, but what they're really saying is he was operating in a way where I constantly had to take care of him. Because when you are not differentiated, when you don't say, "Here's what I need, here's what I want, here's what I expect, that's not okay with me, here are the standards, here are the expectations that I have in the relationship, here's what I wanna go do, even if sometimes you're not okay with it," that puts her into a parentified role. And you are constantly saying, "Are you okay if I go do this? Are you gonna be all right? I won't go do it if you're not okay. I won't go do it if it's gonna cause you any distress. That is what a boy does to his mom. A boy will constantly try to scan to make sure that he's doing what his parents want him to do. So what can it actually look like to develop respect in the dynamic? All right. What does it actually look like? There's a couple of core pieces that I want you to filter into. Number 1, to earn respect. You have to know who you are and honor it. To earn respect, you have to act in a way where you respect you. So that means honoring your word. If you say you're gonna wake up at a time, wake up at that time. Not to impress her, but so that you get congruent, you get aligned with how you want to operate as a man. When you say, "I wanna go and save money, I wanna be better with money," Do that for you. Don't do it so that you get her praise and love and validation and that she maybe respects you more. You do it because that's going to help you build more respect. So number 1, what I want you to do is look at your life and really do an audit of what are the things that I'm doing, choosing, saying, and being that are building respect? And what are the things that I'm doing, choosing, saying, and being that are collapsing respect. And all of those things that are collapsing respect, those are things that you get to shift. What would it look like for you to engage with those things in a respectful manner where you're gonna feel proud about yourself, you're gonna respect yourself, you're going to feel more congruent and aligned, okay? Number 2, you have to know what you want and then communicate it. So you have to be willing to say, hey, "I'd really like to go check out this new restaurant in town. I'm gonna take you there for a date on Friday night. Are you free? And if so, let's— well, I made a reservation for 7 o'clock." You have to be able to know what you want and then communicate it. And last, you have to have standards and you actually have to uphold them. So you have to be able to be willing to face the discomfort of her being disappointed, of her being upset with you saying, "You know, I spent, you know, 3 nights with you this week and I had so much fun. And on Saturday I'm going golfing with my buddies, or I'm gonna go play hockey, or I'm going for a solo hike. And to let her be, maybe just say, oh, you know, I really wanted to go to that yoga class with you. I get it, babe. I, you know, I love you. I love spending time with you. And I really, this is what I need right now. So you have your own needs, wants, and desires, and you communicate them and you have your own standards. Hey, when you spoke to me like that at the dinner, that actually wasn't okay. That's not the type of communication I want us to have in our relationship. So you set standards, you have standards, you have expectations in the relationship, and you begin to communicate it. So what does real strength actually look like in the relationship? Strength really is, and this is the way, this is the tool, the path that starts to build respect, and I'm going to give you a couple more pieces that are going to help you build respect, is the ability to stay connected to her, what she's feeling, what she's thinking, what she's wanting, if she's disappointed, all those other types of stuff, and stay connected to yourself at the same time, to hold on to a sense of, this is who I am, this is what I value, this is how I want to operate, this is how I want to behave, this is what I believe in. This is what I know to be true. This is what is real for me and important for me and what I want to prioritize. It's about holding your center even when she's upset without you caving or collapsing or trying to pursue some solution where it completely dissolves how she's feeling or punishing her for being upset. It's about holding your center and saying, it's okay that you're upset. Whether she's upset with you or something else. So it can sound like, I'm gonna give you some phrases and you might wanna write these down, 'cause sometimes guys are like, "Give me the things that I can say." It might sound something like, "Hey, I can see you're frustrated and I get it. My answer is still no for this one and I'm still right here and I love you." I can see you're frustrated or I can see you're disappointed. I understand. It's still not a yes for me on Saturday, but I'm right here and I still love you. And you can— that whole— that sentence is really the whole thing. It's warmth, it's love, it's spine all in one breath. Strength all in one breath. You're not abandoning her, but you're also not abandoning you. And this is what builds respect. It's that type of groundedness and strength that most women are really looking for, right? You're not abandoning yourself. You're creating that differentiation. You are allowed, right? She is allowed to be disappointed or frustrated or sad or a little upset, and you can still be okay, and you can still say, "This is what I want to go do." Now, I will put the little caveat, and this is probably not for most of you guys that are the big people pleasers and nice guys, That can also go to an extreme, okay, where you're only choosing what you want to do incessantly and you're never engaging. There's no compromise to connect with her. So sometimes the pendulum can swing too far in the one direction. And so you want to make sure that there's some balance there, right? That you're choosing connection, which, you know, sometimes is going to come at the cost of, of a compromise. But more often than not, you want to ensure that you are living your values, you're living the things that you said you're going to do that are going to build respect for you within yourself. And last but not least, self-abandonment. What I wanna say here, because I think this is an important piece, self-abandonment is not intimacy. Self-abandonment cannot produce intimacy. Self-abandonment collapses respect and trust and safety and polarity. So when you abandon yourself, which is what so many guys try and do to get respect in the relationship, to get praise, to get validation— I'll do this for her, I'll, I'll avoid doing this so that she's not upset— what that actually does is collapse the possibility for her to respect you. And another— the last way I want to say this is that sometimes you actually have to disappoint her for her to respect you. You have to be willing to stand on your values, to stand on your word, to do the things and operate in the way that you in your core respect, and that will bring respect in return. You cannot prove that you are worthy of respect. You cannot try and do things to get her to respect you. That will always collapse it. So that path feels a lot easier. It feels less confronting. It feels less challenging in a lot of ways. But the path that I'm talking about, which I know is harder, is the path that will build respect because you will turn yourself into a man, into a partner, into a husband, into a father that you ultimately respect. And as you do that, respect will start to grow, trust will start to grow, or it'll signal the end of the relationship because for some women, and this is the hard part, for some women, they have their own wounding around men. And for some women, they've been hurt by men in a way where they fundamentally do not trust men and they do not respect men, period. And so no matter the amount of respect that you have, her unresolved issues, pain with men— maybe it's her ex, maybe it's her dad, maybe it's a previous version of you, right? Maybe it's how you operated. 2 years ago. That pain, she also has to be willing to confront it. But here's the thing, as you begin to operate in a way that you respect, that you trust, that will create the opportunity for who— her to face that wounding and face that pain. And that will create the opportunity for her to make the choice to either forgive and let go and move through that pain, or it will mean the collapse of the relationship. And sometimes that's okay, right? Sometimes we have to let go of a dynamic where respect is never going to be possible, where love and intimacy in the way that we want is not going to be possible. So return to yourself, operate in a way that you respect and respect will be possible. Thanks for joining. Don't forget to man it forward. I'll see you next week.