Tuesday Tea 10/12 - What is "In Love"

Hello, hello, hello, everyone. I hope everyone is doing well today. Happy Tuesday. Happy Tuesday, T. I'm so happy to see everyone. For those that don't know me, my name is Anwar White and I am the CEO and founder of get yout Guy Coaching. And so I help very highly educated black women.

Create a strategy around their dating and love life. And in that, help them meet amazing, high quality men and get into amazing relationships. So I want to thank you all for joining me tonight as I talk. Hello, speech. Orlando, good to see you. Good to hear from you.

Tonight I wanted to talk about something a little bit special. I wanted to talk about love. What is it? How can we really identify it.

Versus maybe some of the things that society programs us to think about it? Love specifically. So I'm hoping that this might be really helpful for you. I also just want to let you all know that my podcast is coming back at the beginning of November, November 4th, so I want you to watch out for that as well. I'm super excited about season three. It's going to be great. And if you haven't checked out any of my amazing podcasts, get yout Guy Coaching Podcast, I, Wanda, definitely encourage you to go and take a look and listen to that. We talk about a variety of different subjects that I think would be very, very interesting for all of you highly educated women out there, women of color. So let's talk about love and what it is. Why am I talking about this? I'm talking about this because I have a lot of women who I work with and we get to a certain point where they're in an amazing relationship and they want to talk through, well, what is love? What does this look like? What does it, what does this feel like? Right? And there's a reason why they do this. No one lets us know what love is, right? You know, if you ask your friends or your family, a lot of the answers that you will get will just be like, you know, they'll say something like, you just know.

Right? Let me know if you've ever talked to anyone about this and or seen it anywhere and someone says, you know, you'll just know when, when it's love. And although that is romantic and lovely and great, I don't think it really helps people understand what it is. So, you know, a lot of the work that I do isn't just coming from love, dating, relationships, from kind of a place. It's also coming from an intellectual place. So I do read a lot and I research and do read a lot of different research around Relationships and love. And one of the things that we have found, I found in the research is that there are four different kinds of loves, right, that people are really focused on. On. There is the fellowship love, right? Which is all about kind of just being a companion and like, within community. There is the. There's the support love, where you're really compassionate with someone and helping them through any sort of help that they need, right? There's also kind of the. The sexual love that is purely erotic and just sexual in nature. And then the fourth one is really about passionate love, which is about being aroused, right? Even to the point of being obsessed. So there's a variety of different loves out there. And I'm sure as you may be thinking about these loves, certain relationships will come to mind.

Perhaps even those sexual and passionate ones, that there are people that hop into your mind when you think about those things. There is. There are a variety of different loves out there. And I think it's helpful to just kind of, you know, put each of them and label them so that you get a sense that it's not just one. This one big L, O, V, E in capital letters. Love. There's a variety of different kinds of them, right? What the research says, though, is that love is actually a combination of liking and lust, right? What do I mean when I say liking? I'm talking about.

Kindness, fairness, and loyalty, right? So when I talk about kindness, I'm talking about being praised for your successes. I'm talking about moral support when maybe you've had a hard time or you've gone through failures, right? Or.

Generously giving to others. That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about kindness. When I'm talking about fairness, I'm talking about the fact that if I do something for you, you'll do something for me, right? That I have your back, you have my back. And there's this equal exchange when it comes to fairness. This is all part of the liking, right? We've talked about kindness. We've talked about fairness. I want to talk a little bit about loyalty as well. Loyalty is also about being steadfast and being trustworthy, right? So it's important to realize that, you know, being loyal is not just, I'm just gonna be here forever. It's also about the person can actually trust you with secrets, with anything else that they have in their lives, okay? So again, liking is the fairness, the kindness and the loyalty. This is the one part of being, quote, unquote, in love. The second part is the lust Right. This is all about the sexual desire.

What I found, which I think is really interesting when we think about lust, and maybe you all know this already, but, you know, I love really interesting tidbits like this, is that men actually lust and fantasize more so about, like, you know, sexual encounters and strangers, whereas women are more focused on people that they actually know and more romantic scenes. Right. And storylines. So men and women are thinking about lust very differently. Again, when we're talking about in love, we're talking about this liking piece and we're talking about the lust piece. And it's important to have both. Right. I'm sure you may know a ton of people out there that have a ton of liking. Not much lust or the opposite. Tons of lessons and not that much liking. And maybe you've actually been through that before. Right? Why are we talking about this? I'm talking about this because I think it's important for you to have a very clear understanding of the components that go into being in love so that you can start to categorize it in your head and how these men are stacking up to these different metrics or variables. The liking, the kindness, the fairness, the loyalty, and within the lust, the sexual desire. Those things should be at an 8 or above, right. I want you to be actually categorizing these things for the people that you're dating to figure out if you're in love or not. If some of your. If your partner is slipping in some of these categories.

You may not be fully in love. Right. But whatever's coming up inside of you, those butterflies, which is really just hormone cortisol, you know, endorphins that are coming up, some dopamine as well, that. That might steer you in a direction that's not going to fully serve you. Right. So I want you to be categorizing these different, I'll call them in love metrics to make sure that this is something that is actually going to serve you not just in the short term, but obviously in the long term as well. Okay. So when we're talking about in love, like I said before, it's the liking and it's the lust. Both components are necessary for, you know, being in love. The important thing to think about, though, when we're thinking about being quote, unquote, in love, is also that the liking piece, like, okay, so everything is going to decrease with time, right? The liking and the lusting. When we're talking about being in love. The interesting part about this, though, is that the liking decreases about 3% per year. And the, and the lust piece actually decreases roughly around 10% a year. So when we're thinking about a love and dating investment strategy, we want to make sure that we are weighting the liking piece more than the lust piece. I tell my clients all the time, you know, chemistry, that shit fades within 18 months biologically, like pretty significantly. And if you're going down 10% every year within five years, and I'm sure you all have heard this seven year itch, it's going to go down pretty significantly. So we want to make sure that that liking piece is super solid when you're starting to date.

So that you can have a long term relationship. These are the things that I'm talking about when I'm with my clients and we're discussing does this person have.

Longevity in your love life or not? Right. These are the discussions that we have in the analysis that we sit down and create and analyze. These are important things. I know a lot of people out there are not doing that. And that's why we have divorce rates, you know, rates that are 50% and for, you know, especially for younger individuals, greater than that.

I think the statistic is that divorce happens roughly 70 to 80% of the time for people that are under 30 and closer to 20 to 30% that are over 30. Right. You hear this 50% kind of divorce rate all the time. But if you break it down in the age, it's actually quite different.

Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about.

Why we think about love in certain ways. Right. I think this is something that's really important. And I say that because, you know, I'm talking to women every day, and.

I'm just in this society every day. I don't know what else I can say. So I can see how we all get programmed in terms of trying to figure out what love is.

So the research says that, you know, the way in which we find out and learn about love is actually very different than we may think.

33% of people said that they find out about it from their mom, 17% said they find out about it with their friends. And 90% of people say that they find out about love through TV and movies.

Right? So media has a huge role that it's playing when it comes to teaching. I use quotation marks here, teaching about love, which is so, so insane. Right. And why am I talking about this? I'm talking about this because, you know, as we age, the media and TV actually looks different. So I want to go through that a Little bit. Because as a child, right, obviously, we watch our parents and how they interact to learn about love. So, you know, when I'm working with my clients, we talk about what that model is for them and how it reflects their current dating life. But.

When we are children, movies are huge, especially those Disney movies. And you know, the story, you know what it looks like, right? The heroic prince longs for the beautiful girl. The girl loves him, right? For his true self, not his public facade. You know, some. You know, the girl is caged by some sort of oppressive circumstance and can't help herself through some sort of evil that happens in the world, whether it's through a character or not. And then by magic or fate, they come together, right? And it is love at first sight, and it's happily ever after, right? Which obviously is lovely to watch as a child, but not realistic at all when it comes to real life and love. These characters are falling in love within minutes of each other. Then we never see what happens when they put on the screen happily ever after.

So that's what we're taught as children, and that shit stays with us for a long time. And you all might even be feeling that. That's the way love kind of goes now, right? I always tell my clients, I want you to create. I don't want you to wait. I don't want you to wait for this heroic prince that's supposed to be coming. Because in 2021, he probably won't.

Okay? So that is what the media looks like when you're a child. So now let's shift over when we're teenagers and adolescents, which I think is really important because there's a different thing that happens, whether it's Romeo and Juliet that most teenagers read or at least watch the amazing Romeo and Juliet. Juliet movies. Or Twilight. I see some of y' all laughing.

Or Twilight, right? And it's. It's a completely different kind of arc and storyline, right? It's all about romantic tragedies, right? Where, you know, girl sees boy oftentimes in the rain. He's generally emotionally unavailable. But she feels like, you know, this love between her and this unavailable man, boy, is based on fate. It has to happen, right? That love delivers you this soulmate, and you go through everything with this person, even if it is hard to connect with them emotionally, right?

It's interesting that that happens at the teenage level, right? And the teenage level is when the lust starts to kind of come in. Obviously, we all know that. And it can feel like. And I know these movies kind of do it. If I lose this person, if I lose this love, there will be nothing that will be ever able to replace it, right? That I will never be able to meet anyone again. That it is completely over for me when it comes to love. Why am I talking about this? I'm talking about this because some of us are still living with this mindset that, oh my God, I had this amazing boyfriend who was really good and you know, I believe that it was fate that we are supposed to be together. And now that we're not together, I just feel like I don't even think I should try. I don't really think that there's going to be anyone out there for me, which I hear all the time.

But that's part of how we've been programmed from adolescence to think about love based on TV and movies. Right?

Now I want to talk a little bit about kind of the grown up love story, right? The one that I was talking about before that's based on the like, right? The fairness, kindness and loyalty and the lust or the kind of sexual or erotic piece, right? Both are important, but we want to be prioritizing the liking as that is the one that's going to be stronger in the long term.

So the research says that adults still believe, 88% of adults still believe in a. Like a soulmate, right? Which is amazing and great. But what that also means is that a lot of people don't feel like they have to work to get a relationship or to sustain one. And that couldn't be hard for far further from the truth, right?

Life unfortunately is not a fairy tale, although I don't even wish that it were because some of these fairy tales are jacked up. But that's another story.

I want us to be thinking about love like a mystery, with curiosity, with this investigator cap looking at clues, using your investigative skills, your analysis skills and your intuition to solve these, I'll call them Love investigations. Right? I don't want us to be trying to find love. I want us to be trying to find the truth and find ourselves within love, which is quite different, right? And this is something that I work with my clients on quite a bit, right? That without this knowledge of self and actually love for self, it's going to be hard to truly understand what being in love means to you. Because all of those liking and lusting factors are going to hit and feel different for every single individual based on their experiences, right? So I want us to be having more of a grown up love story story versus an adolescent or Child way of thinking about love and being in love. Okay, Alrighty. Well, I hope that was really helpful. As we start to think about love, as we start to think about how to categorize it, how to think about it versus just a feeling that we have that we can't really explain. Because here's the thing, your body has a ton of chemicals and, and it's going to tell you a variety of different things, but it doesn't necessarily mean that how you're feeling is something that's actually factually happening. I actually had to talk to my client the other day because she's dating this guy, this amazing guy, and she was coming up with all of these different feelings based on just how her body was reacting to certain conversations that they had. And I challenged her and I pushed back and I said, but girl, is this accurate?

And she had to come back and be like, no, you know what, you're right, this isn't accurate. And like it snapped herself out of this. And sometimes we need that. I think that's the value added the dating and relationship coach. But I say all that to say, you know, there are different ways in which we are influenced thinking about love and being in love. And I want to offer to you that there are. Beyond the media programming, there are other ways to be thinking about this with a hat of curiosity. Right? To be focused on investigating.

Love with each individual person that you're interacting with. This requires a lot of analysis. But I think it's worthy and helpful in the long run to make sure that you are partnering and coupling with someone that is actually going to serve you. Not in the short term, but in the long term. Okay, awesome.

Yes. How to. Curiosity. That's what this is all about, right? And not just. And I just want to be very clear about that. When I'm talking about curiosity, I'm not talking about.

Being super curious about the guy. Right. And making everything about him focus on him. Curiosity is about you. Right? Again, you have to be self centered in this love game. Curiosity being, why am I thinking that? Why am I feeling that? What thoughts am I having around this? How are my feelings or reactions connected with some past experiences or trauma that I may have? Right. When I'm talking about curiosity, that's what I'm talking about. And I want to make sure that we're focused on that. A lot of women will be focusing on him, what he's done or what he hasn't done and getting into a tizzy based on that. And that's not what this is about because he's going to do whatever the hell he wants to do. He's a grown ass person and he has his own agency. We can't control other people. All we can do is focus on ourselves and figure out how to really take the reins of your own love life so that that you're in complete power and you're able to actually manage your mind and your heart, which is definitely very doable and possible. Okay, good. I hope that was helpful. If anyone has any questions, I am totally open to answer any. So let me have it. Let me know what is really going on in your love lives, your dating, dating, men, relationships, all of the above. If you have any questions, I want, I want to make sure that I'm hearing them so that I can help you so I can answer them. Let me know.

It's warm this week in Montreal so I don't have my jacket like I did the last live. No one's talking about me this live. Thank God.

Well, it seems like there aren't many questions this time around which works for me too. Again, I'm hoping that you are starting to.

Think about love and being in love in a different way with with metrics to be analyzing and to be thinking about this because this is how we're going to that this is how I have seen and experienced successful dating and relationships. Okay, I want to let you know that I am launching a group program in the new year but enrollment is going to happen in after Thanksgiving and before Christmas. So if this is something that is of interest to you, reach out to me. Send me a DM here on IG or PM on Facebook and we can talk a little bit about it and we can even hop on the phone and have a consultation. My consultation link to book a free consultation is www.getyourguycoaching.com apply and we'll talk a little bit about your love life and also talk about the potential group program that I'm having. It's going to be amazing. I am also I've also opened up a new program because I have so many clients that are in relationships right now and it is called get yout Ring. And get yout Ring is a program where if you've been in a relationship for four to six months you can potentially enter into this year long program to help you move from dating to potential engagement. Because there are a variety of different conversations that need to be had that also some self exploration within a relationship that needs to be had as well. And also you know in this program we talk about sex and how to optimize it. We talk about other the other person's family, how to engage with that, especially that first impression, which is really do or die. We talk about moving in conversations. We talk about I love you, all of that, and how to get to those different places. It's all really important. That has been really helpful for a lot of my clients. I've just formalized it in an actual program, so you can also DM or PM me about that as well.

All right, my loves, I hope that this was helpful again. Please reach out. I'm here to help, to serve you when it comes to your love and your dating and relationships. And I hope you have a good evening.

Bye. Bye.

You missed my podcast. Thank you. It's coming back, beginning of November.

Bye.