What Partner Are You? with Karina Daves

Hey, girl. Welcome to the get yout Guy coaching podcast. My name is Anwar White, but you can just call me your own personal dating and relationship coach. Each week you'll hear actionable advice, tips, and strategies that you can implement in your own love life. I'm talking about healing your heart, dating effectively, and understanding men so that you can, you guessed it, get your guy. Are you ready to level up your love life? All right, let's go.

I never felt the way I do without anyone but you.

Hello, my loves, and thank you so much for joining me on the get your Guide coaching podcast. We have a very special guest today. I'm actually super, super excited, and I know I say that about most of my podcast episodes, but I'm actually being serious this time. We have the amazing relationship coach Karina Daves here and she is going to break it down for us in terms of how we need to be thinking about how we can be our best partner. I'm so excited to get into this conversation because I know that if you're going to date well, you dating well is super important for you to be in a great relationship. But you have to understand who the hell you are and who you want to be in a relationship, and that will inform how you date. So, Karina, thank you so much for being here. Girl, how are you?

Yes. Like I said before, I'm so good and I'm so excited to finally chat with you.

Yes, girl, tell the listeners who you are and what the hell you do and how you got into it, please.

Yeah, okay. So my name is Karina F. Days. I'm a relationship coach and the podcast host of One Day at a Time. And I love helping women overcome their number one relationship issue because a better relationship begins with a better you at the end of the day. And so I got started. I'm actually a social worker. I was a social worker for about 14, 15 years. And I taught as a professor, women gender studies, women global leadership, and did a lot of mentorship with different type of age groups women and realize that, like, anybody can have strategy and anybody can have to do list and anybody can make all those things happen. But when we do the relationship work, when we do the identity work, what we value and what our standards are like, that just changes the game for the. I would say the type of relationship, whether it's romantic or not. And so I've had my business for about three years now and just loving my clientele, loving the content we're creating. And I just want to say yesterday I, I posted One of my first pieces of content in Spanish about relationships, and I hired a Spanish coach, and she's helping me through my confidence, which is interesting, because you would think she would be my coach for more linguistic, but it's actually more confidence, so I'm working on me too.

I love that. I absolutely love that. You know, it's really interesting. I am fluent in about five to six languages, and you take on a different Persona in that language and, like. But you have to build up your confidence in each of those languages to figure out who you are in that language. Right? I totally get that.

I get that. Yeah, yeah. It's the relationship with the language 100.

And yourself, as they said. Okay, so, girl, you. You said you help women with their number one thing. Girl, you're totally being a tease, and you've got to let us know what that number one thing is. Girl, you can't keep us hanging.

Okay, here we go. I can give you the top three relationship issues that I've seen.

Okay.

Numero no, numero uno. We settle. People settle. That's a conflict in and of itself. And the top reasons why people settle are they're either attached. So, like, they're attached to the identity of being in a relationship. You ever meet people that just, like, want to be in a relationship so they're attached to that identity. Others remain because they may be attached financially. Right. In that aspect. There's also a set of people that settle because of the investment in time.

Relationship. Yes. And so in their mind, they don't want to face what they think in their minds will happen, which is like, I waste. This was a waste of my time, which it actually wasn't. It was such a form of practice, such a form of lessons and surrender. Like, so many things are happening. And so that's one conflict people settle. Two, we have a group of people that are extremely controlling in their relationship. And when we hear this word, controlling, we think, like, you never let them go. Like, you're super mean, but you can be controlling and be really nice. And your kindness can be extremely manipulative. Like, it just is. And what happens in these situations, that is that the root of your control is usually because you're trying to have this relationship fill a void that you never had. Right. And so plenty of us, some of us may have grown up in, you know, separate households or have divorced parents. And so, like, you're trying to control this relationship because you don't want to end up divorced. And so those are, I would say, the top two Identity things. But in these two biggest conflicts, the main resolution is the identity work. When you know who you are, what you want and how you want it. So what I mean by that is your identity. That's who you are. What you want is your value. So let's take one of your values is respect. Right. And the third is your standard, how you want it. Right. If your value is respect in this relationship, you need to ask yourself what is the line that needs to be crossed when the value is no longer top tier? Like what is your standard for respect? Is it calling you out your name? Is it not remembering your birthday? You know, things like that? You have to figure out what your standard for your values are within your identity.

Yeah, I love that. So we're going to get into a little bit of each one of those because I think it's so important because like I was saying before, how you are in relationship is basically going to be how you are in dating. And you want to make sure that you get it right. And dating is the training ground for being in a relationship. I mean, that is why we do it. So I want to get into settling because I think it's so important. I think it's actually, you know, I work with smart and successful black and brown women and oftentimes they do date down or they relationship down because they want to be in a relationship. They want to have the wedding. They want to be, you know, in September. They want to be able to say, I'm taking, taking young, you know, Teddy to school. Right. They want to do those things and check the, the things off of the life milestones list. Yeah. So they will settle for a guy that is okay, but not necessarily one, you know, one that lights you up. But you talked about financial, right. You talked about time investment as well. Let's talk a little bit about financial because I think that's actually something that's really important, especially for women of color. And you know, if, if we grow up, some of us don't grow up wealthy or at least, you know, middle class that often we might come into our dating and relationship with some money wounds. Yeah. And I think it's, it's one of these topics that maybe isn't talked about so much that actually affects a significant way in which you will date and partner with someone. What have you seen in your work when it comes to women that are focused on a rich guy or a generous guy or what have you?

Yeah. So it's interesting that I, that you asked that question because that ask of a guy Is only to fulfill a void is only to ensure safety. So one of the reasons why we also settle is security, is we feel like this person can fulfill that void of feeling secure. And what happens is money tends to be a topic where we do have some wounds. Like, I know I have some money wounds, but what I found is a solution, and it's super simple, but it's difficult to do is you got to lay it out. You got to lay it out. Listen, with my particular marriage with my husband, we rarely fight about money. And it's because we talk about it. Like, we actually talk about it. I remember when we got married, it was. I was straight up, like, how much debt do you have?

Yeah.

And he was like, I have this. And I was like, he's like, what do you have? I'm like, I have this. But listen, this I have a plan for, you know, this is my student loans. And this. I was like, what's your plan? And coming from a place of, like, this is teamwork now, right? Like, how are we going to do this? And I think even for the dating scene, plenty of us are like, how do you talk about money when you're dating? And I'm like, if it's that important to you, you should talk about it.

100.

Just like kids. Y' all want to talk about kids, but not want to talk about money. Kids is a lifetime commitment. Like, you can't give those things back. Money and debt is also the same way. But we can get rid of debt. We can figure out a plan, right? So, like, we should. As openly as we are talking about, do you want to have kids? We also got to talk about the money aspect. And from a place of less judgment and more so about, hey, listen, these are my values when it comes to money. I'm not saying you need to be a millionaire, but I believe that we should have security. I believe that we should have a system. And if it's not something that you have, would you be open to it? Because that's what I need, right? So, like, having those open conversations. What do you think?

Super important. Super important. I'm of the mindset that, like, when we are dating, like, I tell my clients all the time, I don't want you in their wallet because it's not there. It's not your business. If he's courting you, you will see it through the actions. It is not until we get into an exclusive relationship and there's a level of responsibility that is different than the courtship phase that we can. Obviously, I want Us to have those conversations while we're being courted, but in a more serious way, getting to a level of specificity and detail around, how do I think about this? How do I. How am I going to manage this? What is my plan? When you're being courted, your job is just to figure out how you feel. And if it feels good, I want us to continue. If it doesn't, I want us to step away. Right. But, like, the way that he courts will tell you a lot about the money that he has and how he manages it and how he thinks about it. Yeah. So my understanding is really being. Observing or observing observant of that more so than anything else. But, you know, to your point, you know, many of my clients get into relationships, and I do have, like, a secondary relationship coaching program. We have a lot of different questions that we ask as it pertains to. And this is specifically. Right, like, I want to say about three to six months before moving in together. Right. Where we need to figure out, well, what do you consider an expensive pair of shoes? Or how much would you spend on a new sofa? Right. To get a sense of not only spending habits, but also, like, well, that's the time in which we talk about, here's my debt. When we start to combine the finances or potentially thinking about what that looks like and thinking about joint accounts and things like that, that is when we start to have that conversation. So, you know, we, for me, we ease into it. But definitely a super important conversation. The settling thing, so, so prevalent, especially for black and women. And I was just having a conversation about this with my clients. This as we talk about maybe some beliefs that we received from our. From our fathers. And one of the things that I was saying or we were discussing was that often because many of our parents got together in, like, the 80s, and that was a very hard time for everyone. But specifically for black and brown individuals that, you know, we were in a recession. We were in, for many of us, you know, a drug epidemic of sorts. And so a lot of our fathers were not in places where they needed to be. And that actually created a model in which we were forgiving of things where men were not fully showing up. And that becomes a bonding pattern and something where a lot of women will be okay with, okay, well, he's not doing this, but I'm just gonna give him a chance because that's what I saw my mom do or that's what I had to do. And I saw my father not showing up, But I had to settle because I didn't have the agency to step away from a relationship that didn't fully serve me. So, I mean, I think it's multifaceted and I, you know, I always look at the lens from, you know, what does this look like for a black or brown. Because it's a different experience than maybe a white woman who hasn't had the same lived experience. Especially as it pertains to settling. Sometimes I think more so white women will settle for maybe not as attractive, but less so about the financial piece and whereas black and brown women will settle for more the financial piece or the less emotional perspective.

I love this conversation because it reminds me of how much we marry potential and not patterns straight up. We will marry the potential to the max and then get upset when we're in the relationship. But there were patterns way before that. You would much rather settle in a relationship that you deem as comfortable rather than being fulfilled. Right. And it reminds me of a quote that says, like, I would much rather stay in my known hell then open up the doors to unknown heavens. Like, plenty of us do that in relationships as well.

Yeah, 100%. Okay. So we talked about settling, which is such an interesting concept. And then the second, the second biggest conflict that you talked about was.

Control. Let's talk about control for a second. What is that? What does that look like? And I think, you know, this is, I think, especially interesting for black and brown women. So what, when you say control, what does that look like in the everyday of a relationship?

Okay, so it doesn't look the way we think it looks, which is like somebody being very mean. It literally is you trying to control your partner and the narrative of your relationship rather than just allowing your partner to be them, their true selves. So plenty of times I've seen many of my clients be in relationships where they are unhappy and they're like, I just wish they got it together. All they need to do is listen to me and do X and Y and Z and you can tell that they are very in, very much in their, like, alpha energy. And they want to make sure that things go a certain way. And they're, they're very organized and their thought stream is very clear. But at the end of the day, they're frustrated because.