Chat LIVE with Ralph!

All right, it says I am live. Mm-hmm, let's see if I'm live, shall we? Well, that's not what I want. There we go. All right, welcome everyone. It's your boy Raffalito here, live for a rare Thursday afternoon, almost evening live. I have some time here before my next call, so I thought I would get on here to see if just anybody happens to be on and wants to chat with yours truly. Why not, right? Let me bring up the comment window here so I can see if anybody's joining me today. Refresh over here. Sorry for all the mouse noise. This is— that's really annoying, isn't it? Welcome everybody. Looks like, yeah, we got some people joining us today. Hey, if you could let me know where you were, um, joining us today, where from, we'd love to hear you. Uh, what's your name, where are you from? Be cool to, uh, see where everybody's at. We've done some of these before in the past and we've had people all the way from the United States to Australia and South Africa and the UK, all over the United States. So always interesting to see how we're reaching everyone all over the world. So if you could do that, that'd be cool. But welcome, my name is Ralph Brewer. For those that don't know me, and for whatever reason you just stumbled upon bald dude yapping away to a camera and a microphone for some weird reason, I've been doing the dad starting over thing for years now, over a decade now. After over, like, 12 years ago now, I endured a divorce that wasn't so nice, at least not for me. And, um, I blogged all about my experience there for a bit, got some attention, wrote a book, wrote several books. One of them really took off. That book was called The Dead Bedroom Fix. It was my thoughts on sex and marriage because that was such a popular topic that I wrote about on a blog. And that book took off and a lot of people found me as a result of that book. So if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people that read that book, welcome. I've been doing the Dad Starting Over thing for years, and as of early last year, we decided to broaden the scope and move all our business under the name of Help for Men. And you can learn more at help4men.com. Our members group is under Help for Men. You can buy all the books at Help for Men. There's articles, videos for free that you can read, watch on there, all kinds of good stuff, coaching courses. If you're a dude, help4men.com is a very good website for you, if I do say so myself. And, um, but obviously still doing stuff under Dad Starting Over and creating content under this name and put it out there for the masses. I've done, at this point, I don't know if it's safe to say thousands of videos, probably, um, whether it's long videos, whether it's short little videos, whether it's lives, probably in the thousands by now. And, uh, it used to be that the books were my number one way of reaching people, but now it seems like my number one way of reaching people is via these videos. So thank you, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and all the others. We got, uh, Mr. Nathan— is it Nathan? Um, my eyes are failing me. Not Nathan, but Nathan from Louisiana. Welcome, very cool. Um, got any guys in the left coast there from California? Um, hopefully nobody in LA getting hit by the old wildfires. That looks insane right now. So sorry you guys are going through that. That sucks. But, um, Wildfires and, and what's the other? Earthquakes. That's what you guys are known for, amongst a lot of other things. But hopefully you're doing well. If anybody has any questions for yours truly, other books that I have written include, uh, uh, Mention Dad, or pardon me, Mention Dead Bedroom, The Dead Bedroom Fix, my bestseller. And then another book is Real Talk: No Bullshit Life Advice for Young Men. That's my number 2 seller right now, believe it or not. A lot of people buying that book. I've heard people say anywhere from— it's a book for young men, by the way, in case the title didn't give it away. You know, if you've got a pubertal son living at home, young man, you're like, I don't think he's doing this relationship thing very well or whatever, that's the book for him. It's basically the book that said, why didn't somebody write a book like this for us when we were kids? Boom, there you go. Somebody did. It's called Real Talk. Check it out. You can learn more about that book and others. The other books include a very small Very quick read, uh, doesn't cost much at all, called Red Flags. All about the top 20 things to look out for when you're looking for Miss Right after divorce or never been married, whatever it may be. Um, what other book do I have? Divorce Panic, Divorce Panic, Red Flags, Real Talk, and The Dead Veteran Fix. I think that's it. 4 books total. And the, uh, the membership group that I mentioned, we call the Brotherhood, the Help for Men Brotherhood. And you can, again, you can learn all more about all of this at help4men.com. The Brotherhood is the, the pinnacle of what it is we do in this organization. Very cool stuff. We, uh, we have a private discussion forum, men only, only members of the group can get in there, and guys talk about anything and everything in that group. And we've had tens of thousands of discussions started in that forum the years we've been doing this. And, uh, that's probably the most popular aspect of the group is the discussion forums. And then we do utilize Discord as well as Facebook private groups, uh, discussion groups. No one can see that you're a member of the group if you're in Facebook. No one can see what you type. Your wife can't see that you're in this group unless she logs in as you. And if Facebook scares you away, which it does for some men, we also have the Discord server, so check that out. Um, what else do we have in that? We also have live Zoom meetings. We get together via Zoom anywhere. Now it's like anywhere from like 6 to 8 times a week. We get together on Zoom and talk as a group. Not all of us, not, you know, 700+ members of us, usually around 20, 30 of us get together at a time. And for all the rest of you who miss the meetings, we record them and you can listen back to them. And we have over 1,000 hours of meetings recorded. Pretty cool stuff. You get all my books at no extra charge if you're a membership— if you're a member, excuse me. So you get the ebook version you can read on your phone, your computer, and or the audiobook version. No extra cost whatsoever, so free to the members. And what else do we have? Uh, we have coaching, one-on-one coaching or mentoring if you want to call it that, with myself and other guys on the team. For the general public, it costs this. For members, it costs like half as much. Pretty good deal. So I've had some people that have said to me, I want to book one-on-one time with you to talk about something. I say, you may want to consider doing the membership for a month or two to see if you like it. And the coaching, 'cause then it's cheaper than if you don't do the membership at all. Just kind of incentivizing people to join us, trying to help as many men as we can. And what we've seen over the years is the number one way to reach out and help dudes is by getting involved with other men. That's the biggest and best way to expedite real change in your life. You could read all the books, take all the courses, do everything. Real-time, real-world interaction with other men, bouncing ideas off each other, helping each other out. That's it, dude. That's everything. And Mr. Steve says he 1000% recommends joining the group. Well, thank you, Steve. There's Steve from the left coast, from, if I remember right, Oakland, San Fran area, if I remember right. Welcome. And, um, what else we got going on here, folks? I'm open to any questions, anything at all you guys have to share. I talk about a variety of things. If you notice, I have really ramped up on Facebook, Twitter, where else you gonna see, oh, YouTube. YouTube has a community section now where you can see posts just like all, you know, like on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. I really ramped up tweets or what do they call them now that it's x.com? Xs? That doesn't make any sense. What happened to tweets? We'll still call them tweets. I tweeted on X, that makes no sense. And then I will take a screen capture of that tweet and I will post it as an image on Facebook, YouTube, and so forth, Instagram. And I've really ramped those up. And at the beginning of the year, man, I had a few that just went viral. Why? I don't know, but they really touched a nerve. Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even in the millions, viewed those things. So it was very cool. So we saw a big spike in, in social media, uh, reach. So that was awesome. Um, so I've been doing those more frequently. And I try to do a theme every day, and today's theme is about our young men and trying to teach them helpful, real-life advice about the relationship game, about being a man, sex and marriage, and all that good stuff. And that goes along with my book Real Talk, which you can find at help4men.com. Go to help4men.com/books and you'll see all the books that are available to you, including— oh, we— I didn't mention we also have a book by Coach Austin. Austin is a coach and has been with the organization for a long time, for years now. He also works as coordinating our events. We have an annual conference for members in the States. He's the guy who helps put all that together. We have one coming up here in May next year in Charleston, South Carolina. So looking forward to that. And yes, sorry guys, all sold out. But Austin helps to organize that as well as he is a coach. I like— I've been using more of the term mentor because I think coach is so overdone. Like anybody could just say Me, coach? And it's like, no, in our group, all of these guys have their own little specialties, and they've been with the organization for years. They've earned a certain place of notoriety and respect within the group. And then we say, okay, now you can talk to this guy who's been here for a long-ass time, and now he's an expert on fill in the blank. And for Austin, it's the, um, nice guy stuff, which is another word for codependent behavior. Austin's done a very good job of, over the years, whittling away at his own codependent behavior within his marriage and within his profession, whatever it may be. And he's created a formalized program for nice guys as well as just generalized coaching. And that has really taken off. Guys love that. So it's a very formalized, structured, with a plan program for overcoming your nice guy tendencies. That's with Coach Austin, and that is only available to the members of our group. And he has written a book. I'm mentioning him because he has written a book called Why Sex Ends After Kids. And how to fix it. So check it out, help4men.com website. Um, help4men.com website. Check it out on there with the books. And it's, again, it's available for free to our members. So I encourage all you guys, help4men.com/join, or go to help4men.com, go to the Brotherhood in the menu, or right there on the homepage, and you'll learn all about it. Mr. Steve says, hey from England, he's late here and work tomorrow. Just wanted to say love your content. Well, thank you, Steve. Uh, very nice of you. England, we got the West Coast, we got Louisiana, we're starting to plot some dots all over the map here. Very good. Welcome, guys. Ah, so, what else do we have going on? Previously I've done, I was talking about themes, I've done themes about, today's was the young men. We've done themes on the old sexless marriage, dead bedroom. Why that, man, that's still, by a long shot, I mean, I've talked about parenting, being a good father. I've talked about fitness and health. I've talked about finances in the past. I've talked about, oh, cultivating hobbies and, and dating and, oh, all kinds of good stuff. Nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the reaction I get, the reach I get in social media when I talk about— aimed at men, mind you— when I talk about sex and marriage. Or more specifically, the lack thereof for many, if not most, men who are in committed long-term monogamous marriages. That topic, out of all of them that I've ever spoken about, touches a nerve more than anything else. Curious for those in the comments why you think that may be. Uh, you say that to women, your average gal on the street, and they would probably say, really? Out of everything? To think about, you know, talking about raising kids right. That's something probably more so that is more prevalent for a lot of ladies, women especially, or after they have kids and marriage and everything else, they're very kid-focused, which is great, nothing wrong with that, sometimes to the detriment of other things in their life, such as the intimate connection with their husband. That goes very much on the back burner for a lot of, if not most, women. And so for them to hear a Men all over the world say, number one issue, sex, marriage. They were like, they kind of look down on us for that, to be quite honest with you. They kind of see us as kind of simpletons in that way. Neanderthals. Oh, there's Mr. Graham from, Graham, I remember, from Australia. Welcome, Graham. Long time, what would you call yourself? Fan, follower, contributor by virtue of your messages. We got Jay here, says 20 years married this year, sex once in 2023 and once in 2024. My life— here's the key, Mr. Jay, let's dissect this a little bit. My life, he says, is completely shattered. And I'm not judging you for that. Who wouldn't be shattered by such a disconnection from the person they love more than anything, right? But she, on the other hand, She's not concerned. So, Jay, my friend, not to beat you up, I know you're feeling horrible. He follows that up with another comment. Jay from YouTube says, sex is the number one issue for me. Again, he's, he's fleshing out what I just said about how that's so important to men. And he says, but my wife can't, can't understand that. All right, buddy. So we had all of 2023 and 2024, and probably If I'm guessing, Jay, I don't wanna put words in your mouth here, probably not the only 2 years of a so-so, well, that's not even so-so, those are disastrous years sex-wise with the relationship. But I bet you the years preceding that were at best probably like, eh, so-so, if not kind of like on the down. So usually it goes slope like this and then falls off a cliff, right? So I'm gonna assume that's what's going on with you here. So you've had at least, by virtue of your description here, 24 months, 24 months of evidence to show this is bad. And I— so many questions. What I've learned over the years of doing this, since writing the book and hearing so many stories, is it's way more complicated than what you may think. A lot of men jump to, she's cheating. No, most of the time No, a lot of men jump to, she hates you, you're so unattractive, you're gross, you're fat. Maybe, usually not the case. But so many questions here, Mr. J. Have you had the nice healthy sit-down talk with her? The healthy version of the talk. What it is not, is not sitting down going, why aren't we doing it? Don't you know that I have needs? Don't you know I'm losing my freaking marbles here? Don't you know I love you? Do you not love me anymore? Why don't you love me? Why aren't you showing me attention? Tears, sobbing, yeah, yeah. That's not gonna get the job done. And men typically gets to the boiling point, they get so crazy they do do that. The emotionality just explodes. A good healthy version of the talk might go something like this. Mr. J, wife, have a seat. Kids, go upstairs. Leave your mom and dad alone for a minute. All right, last time I'm going to mention this. What's going on here? This is weird. Um, it's officially gone from concerning to weird. Um, I love you, that's why I married you. Um, you're the love of my life, I want to grow old and die with you. Get that out of the way. But this between us, this ain't working, obviously. It's not normal for a couple to not want to touch each other. Um, I see your last two comments. Let me finish my spiel here, Jay. Uh, something's going on between us and I am willing to work on it. I'm willing to do the work to bring us closer together as a couple, emotionally, intellectually, physically, all, all the above. It's not just about sex, because if you wife right now, and this is KJ to say this, if you right now said, all right, fine, let's go to bed. I'm not gonna, no, we got a ways to go before we get there. I don't want all right, fine, whatever. I want you and us again, or you and me again, us, couple, date nights, going out together, talking, cuddling. We've lost that completely as a couple. We don't do any of that. And you certainly don't want to cross the threshold into the bedroom stuff either, obviously. I'm trying to figure out why, and I'm willing to work on that. Are you, wife, willing to work on that? Because if you say no, we're cool. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to go separate ways and find somebody else to better match my energy here, because I'm too good of a person and I'm working too hard on us to get this. This is officially weird and highly dysfunctional, which she should know, Mr. J, because you have followed up with— let's start with the second message here you just sent— she is a therapist. Pausing for dramatic effect. Here is a woman who helps other people, who is in at least a 2-year, 24-month sexless marriage. She knows the therapy talk. She knows the "you help me, I help you, let's get through this" talk. And she chooses not to. She says, "We can do it once we get emotionally closer." but she won't talk or open up or spend time with me. She sounds like I— you know, hey, let's be honest here, Jay. A lot of women watching this later will scream in the comments, so let me get this out of the way. We're only hearing one side of the story, Jay's side. Jay's like frustrated, 2 years, blah blah blah. We may sit the lady down, Miss Therapist, and go, what's going on with you? And she may have legit reason after legit reason for doing this. She may say, I've told him 100 times this, I have this underlying physical, emotional thing, whatever it may be. I don't know. In her mind, whether you, Jay, and all of us go, sounds like horseshit, may be legitimate in her mind. And frankly, that's all that matters. Her body, her brain, her whatever. She can do whatever she wants. Jay says, she says that all of her clients don't want to have sex with their husbands either. She says this is normal. Wow, your poor wife's clients. Jesus Christ, that's terrible, dude. No, it's not normal. It's wildly dysfunctional. Use her terms back at her. Wife, you come across as a very hyper-avoidant person, dismissive avoidant person. Use those terms. This is the attachment theory vernacular. What happened to you, wife, in your childhood that led you to this point to think that this is normal? Because, wife, I hope you're not telling your clients this because it's not. It's hell. Um, a little follow-up interesting thing. It depends on what study you read and so forth, but at the very least, we can say this conclusively: it is not unusual for the dismissive avoidant person in the relationship to have an extramarital affair. That blows a lot of people away. Like, this sexless, seemingly asexual, completely unemotional, I-don't-give-a-shit person runs off and does somebody else? Doesn't that point then that the problem is inherent in me as her anxious partner? She's really turned off by me. She just wants somebody else. Woe is me. I'm horrible. I'm terrible. No, no. Before you go down that road, no. What it's more indicative of is for these people— I'm inferring a lot, I'm assuming a lot, acting like a know-it-all here, just going by a few sentences here, but, but I see this so often that I can kind of speak in platitudes here. Um, this dismissive avoidant person in the honeymoon stage of the relationship, you're still getting to know each other, all the good chemicals are soaring through your body and brain and It makes you a horny creature, men and women alike, and get a lot of loving done. A lot of love yous and I love you forevers and sex and all this other good stuff happens, right? And then things get real. You marry and men notice it goes, "Huh." And then you move in together, "Huh." And you have kids, "Huh." And he's like, "Where'd the love, where'd the affection, where'd all that go?" As soon as you get real, that requires a level of vulnerability, of intertwining your two lives together, all that good stuff that we all want within a marriage, right? Unless you're an avoidant person, and that's the last goddamn thing you want. You don't want to be intertwined with another person. You value your independence and everything more than anything else. If that sounds kind of like a masculine trait, most avoidant people are men, but there's a lot of avoidant women out there too, which I have learned over the years because I have this group, the HFM Brotherhood, and I've put out all this material, and I see in the comments we have a lot of anxious men married to very avoidant women. And I can again speak in platitudes as well to say these avoidant people do not make good long-term romantic partner prospects. One-night stands, short-term girlfriend, sure, sure. As soon as it gets real though, buddy, it don't work. I think that's probably what you're seeing with her. And they will find every piece of evidence to show that, nah dude, this is normal, get off my back. And the next thing you know, you catch her banging some dude at the office. And they're often the most cold about it. Yeah, I did. So what? What you gonna do about it? Yeah, it's divorce, whatever. It's really no skin off their back. They look at that and go, oh, I get to break free from this anxious person. Great. I prefer to be alone anyway. I'm worried that she refuses physical intimacy because she's terrified of emotional intimacy. Says Jay. That's the avoidant thing, my friend. She hates opening up. You're laying the bricks here, buddy. You're, you're building a temple of avoidance in your wife. Your wife needs a lot of help, but your wife's already a therapist. You're not going to be the one to tell her she needs a lot of help. She ain't going to listen to you, buddy. Jay, my friend, this is probably not going to get any better on its own. Here's the big question, my friend. Play pretend. You know her probably better than anybody on the planet, right? If you went to her today and said, this weird, this sucks, this is abnormal, I'm going to leave, wife. What is her reaction, Mr. J? I hate this conversing back and forth because I'm waiting on a comment and he's typing or he's distracted. He went to get a cup of coffee, went to take a whiz or whatever, so we can't have a live conversation here. I will answer for J. What I hear from most men— well, I should say what I hear from most men is, you know, Ralph, I really don't know. If you asked me yesterday, I would have thought this, but now I'm kind of thinking this. And so that they eventually do— they had— they're like, shit, I'm done with this shit, I'm— I can't do it anymore. And they have the, I'm sick of this shit, we need to work on this talk, or I'm out of here. What a lot of them are very surprised about is how quickly the wife jumps on the I'm out of here option and just says, cool, let's do it. That guy's like, seriously? Been married 15, 20-plus years, whatever, and you're ready just to quit like that? No, you're the one who brought it up. It's like, yeah, but I was hoping you would say, okay, let's not— let's avoid that and let's work on this. That's the whole point. No, I found me an apartment across town anyway. I was looking at them anyway already. And the guy's like, geez, that was fast. They detach. They don't have that— they don't have that mechanism at play that allows them to attach in a nice, vulnerable, healthy, normal human way, the way that is basically required, again, for a long-term marriage. They don't have a successful long-term marriage. They don't have those tools in their toolbox. And here you are going, you wanna? And they're like, I don't, I don't know how to do what you're talking about. So no, I don't wanna. I'd rather go to option B. Like, really? You're willing to throw away all this, the family? Like, yeah. It's kind of surprising, which I think maybe a lot of men innately know, which is precisely why they don't bring that option to the wife. They don't want to hear it. The men are really stuck in there like a tick. It's a very codependent kind of nasty, uh, relationship they're in. Um, and Jay says you've been at couples therapy for 6 months and zero improvement, physical or emotional. What is it you hope to get out of this, Jay? Um, Oh, and then you say she touched your hand in bed and it caused such a rush of emotion and pain in you. You are so far apart. That's sad, dude. Um, it always breaks my heart when I hear these poor guys, like in my group and so forth, guys, I have great news. Last night the wife touched my leg when we were next to each other watching TV, and you're like, oh, this poor bastard. Like, they're so starved for just normal love and affection, which there's nothing wrong with. Which is everything normal about, healthy about, that when they get something like you say, touched my hand while you're in bed, even like an incidental, they roll over, flop over half asleep and touch you, and the man's just like, oh, Susanna, I'm so starved for this love. What's interesting is, um, when combined with a lot of, uh, self-improvement, like going to the gym is the most generic obvious version of this. Some big promotion at work, now he feels like a big shot, something that pumps up his confidence quite a bit. Um, those super anxious guys that used to be so attached and so starved for affection— I'm not going to leave this woman, whatever— those guys have like affairs like that. And part of you says, dude, what the f— the other part of you goes, I get it. After being starved for attention for so long and trying like hell to reach across the table to the woman and say, don't you love me like I love you, and getting dejected, dejected, and finally somebody comes along, goes, I I see all your improvements, I like you. And you're like, hot damn, let's do this. Pretty common. So Jay, be careful, that's what I'm trying to say. But, um, if you'd like to chat with me one-on-one about this, you can certainly do so. HelpForMen.com, go to coaching in the menu. Better yet, join our group, the Brotherhood. Let me put it in the comments here. This will show up in the chat on YouTube. Pardon me while I bump the microphone here. All right, so we got, uh, Alright, so, help for, I think I misspelled something. Let me try that again, shall I? Try that again one more time. HelpForMen.com, if I'm, looks like I'm squinting, it's 'cause I am, I can't read. HelpForMen.com/join, not oin. I don't know what, where oin will take you, probably to an error page. Join, HelpForMen.com/join. And that'll get you to our men's group support community. Mr. J, so many men have been there and done that. You're not alone. It's— it goes right back to the beginning of this live. I don't know if you saw that where I say, um, out of all the topics that I've ever talked about on here for the years, decade plus that I've been doing this, no other topic compares to men being unhappy about the level of sexual intimacy within their marriage. Number one by a long shot. And when I started all this, that was not the, the focus. That was a topic of many topics, dozens of topics that I talked about. I just was hitting the computer like fitness and health and finances, like I say, parenting and starting over and dating and then sex and marriage. And finally people took notice going, I like that. That I can relate to. Sex and marriage. Tell me more. Wrote a book about it and the rest is history. And here we go in the comments, guys like Jay sharing their story. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Check it out, help4men.com. Uh, check out the community, help4men.com/join. We would love to have you try it out for a month or two. If you're like, this ain't for me, you just cancel. You don't get charged again and again and again or anything like that. Yes, there is a fee involved, uh, starts at $27 a month. Half of it, $14 a month if you are a veteran. So if you're a military veteran and you have ID to prove it from wherever in the world, we have a system for looking that up. You just give us a, like, a picture of your ID, and then we can look it up to verify that you are who you say you are and everything else. And then boom, you get your membership at half the cost. And, but $27 a month, it comes out to less than a dollar a day, and you get all those benefits I talked about. Talk to all these guys, hundreds of dudes, and you get to support our community, and we can help out more and more men. We try to keep it as low cost as humanly possible. We also have an annual fee if you want to pay for a year up front. That comes out to even less. What's that come out to do— to be? I don't know, 70 cents a day, 60 cents a day, something like that. And then we have a lifetime plan. You pay once and don't worry about paying anymore ever. In fact, almost 3/4 of our membership in the HFM Brotherhood are lifetime members. That says a lot about our group. That's highly unusual for a member group, by the way. And, um, Our attrition rate, the rate at which we lose men every month, is extremely low. We're very proud of that group and what we do. Mr. Matthew here. Matthew says he thinks I'm missing a big part of the, uh, of this, this being Jay's issue, irrespective of how she I got some misspellings here, brother. I'm trying to work— I guess defends herself. She deals with other people's problems day in and day out. It's not surprising if he gets tarred because of it. It is surprising that a theorist can't see it through. So in very blunt terms, dude, your, your wife is a therapist, as you mentioned. Not sure exactly what kind of therapist. She's a therapist. She's overwhelmed by having to be basically empathetic, sympathetic to all these people day in and day out, hearing their problems. And she comes home and here's hubby going, I got— I want, I want. And she's like, I've had enough, dude. It's common for women to talk about, I've been with kids all day, I'm all touched out, don't touch me. Um, so I can certainly see where a therapist would say, I'm all therapied out, no more therapy, no more connecting with another individual. Well then Regardless of how she gets there, it still shows that the tool is not in her toolbox to connect to hubby. She's still supposed to connect to hubby. She could be a person who works all day, um, you know, um, I don't know, a police officer who sees like an inner city, who sees death and crime and everything else all day long and so stressed. And she comes home and hubby's like, Would you like to sit down and watch a movie together? She's like, no, leave me alone. You know, day after day after day, 2 years later, and he's like, we don't touch anymore, wife. What, she just gonna go, I'm a police officer, I see murder every day. He's gonna say, well then you're not wife material, see you, goodbye, love you, but this ain't gonna work. Regardless if she's all therapied out or if she's perimenopausal or whatever it may be, some of it may completely not be at her fault at all. That's the tricky one, isn't it? Like, what if it's some kind of mental or physical disorder or something like that? Regardless, the end result is old Jay here is like, this ain't working for me. That's it. Um, ah, here's Dwayne asking, Dwayne from Facebook, as a father, what come— and I'm a father of 4, by the way— what coming-of-age ritual would you see as a good option in the modern era? It seems like they've been lost over time for boys growing into men. Oh, good coming-of-age ritual. So meaning like, like some Some cultures, more so in the olden days, would have a thing like, you're a man now, so now we do this. What, go on a long hunt? Go, I don't know, some kind of ritualistic thing to take you from little boy, pull you away from mother, so to speak. Sometimes in some of these cultures, they very overtly pull kid away from mother and say, you're a man now, now you're with us men, now we go do man things, and all this other good stuff. Today's day and age, we really don't have much of that anymore, other than some really physical things I can think of. And it's kind of telling that I go with the physical side, isn't it? Sports seem to be a big thing. This seems to be for a lot of kids involving in physical sport, combat sport, that kind of thing. Takes you from kid to learning things that— how to move your body and how to stress yourself and strain yourself and so forth. And How much of that is to win the favor of the females in your life? Probably a lot, if we're being quite honest, if we boil it down to a very animalistic thing. So no, we don't have much in the way of really formalized, "You are a man now," type of stuff. And I certainly don't in my family, and I have two boys. I didn't go, "You're this now," other than just really overt talking like, "You're 13 now, no more this and this and this." 'Now you— this is this. Now I'm trusting you to leave me alone at the house longer periods of time. You're a big boy, you don't need me to tell you how to do this anymore. You're a man now, pick your stuff up, okay? I don't want to see it here anymore.' That kind of talk. Beyond that, I don't have any kind of formalized anything. And my phone is blowing up as we are on here, making sure there's not an emergency. Uh, making sure. I think we're all good here. Uh, nope, all good. Okay, so anything else, folks? I do need to wrap her up here soon. I have a call here in a few minutes, uh, with a new member wanting to chat. By member, I mean the Brotherhood. Check it out, help4men.com, the HFM Brotherhood, our membership group. That's where we do a lot of work behind the scenes. That's where all the real stuff is done. You see me doing all these lives and videos and articles and so forth is to basically help out dudes. And the best way in which we do is to bring them into our private community, the Brotherhood. And, uh, as, uh, oh, who was it earlier who said— Steve earlier said that he's a member, loves it, recommends it highly. So I'm a little biased. I think it's a really good group, probably one of, if not the best, going such group on the internet today. So check it out, the HFR Brotherhood at help4men.com, and get better, do better. Jay, We would love to see you, brother. Reach out to me. You can email me at Ralph.B, as in boy, Ralph.B@help4men.com, or message me on Facebook. Can you message on YouTube? I don't think you can. Maybe, I don't know. There's links on my videos on how to get in touch with me, but I would love to chat with you about your situation further. But ladies and germs, thank you all so very much for joining me this Thursday afternoon. I greatly appreciate it. I try to do these more often as time allows, but I wish you guys all the best. Thank you again, and hope you have a good one. À tout à l'heure!