Chat Live With Ralph (DSO)!

Where am I? Boom, there we go. Hey, all right, it says broadcaster's— okay, unmuted. Can you guys hear me okay? I just got an interesting little message. It looks like my audio is going through. Everything's cool here. Let me bring up my comments so I can see what's going on. Comments and reactions. There we go. All right, cool. Howdy do, everyone. Looks like people are starting to come in here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Give a few minutes for folks to show up so we can say hey, howdy properly. I am— I got a new backdrop. This, in case you guys weren't aware, if it's not too obvious, um, this is fake in the background. I have a green screen behind me, and I decided just to change it up a little bit. I like— I think I did a search for brick and loft. I don't know why I like that, but I do. I'm a lofty kind of guy, I guess. So, uh, if you're wondering— oh, and I am in Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I am in Texas all this week and next week. You'll be seeing this backdrop more. Welcome everyone. Um, if any of you are with me today, give me a hey howdy. Let me know where you're joining in from. Would love to hear it. Always love to see where everyone is from. If you are not aware, my name is Ralph Brewer. Raffalito, if you prefer to call me that, as my mother, my Spanish mother used to call me. You will also hear me go by the fake pen name of DSO, which stands for Dad Starting Over. I started a blog years ago called Dad Starting Over. I wrote books, one of which did really well, called The Dead Bedroom Fix, and I wrote that under the moniker of DSO. Sold a lot of copies, got a lot of people interested in my material, so much so that I started coaching, and then that led to a private men's group. We have hundreds of members in our private men's group from all over the world, US all the way to Australia and everything in between. We have 6 other gentlemen on the team who do coaching, and here recently we launched a new brand business. All of our business is now done under the brand of Help for Men, and you can learn more at help4men.com. Help for men dot com. And our private men's group is now known as the HFM Brotherhood. HFM stands for Help for Men. HFM Brotherhood used to be called the DSO Fraternity. Dad Starting Over is still going on. Obviously you're watching this probably on a Dad Starting Over channel and continue to pump out content. And I am going to be a content creator under the umbrella of Help for Men. Hopefully we will have more and more as time moves on. We are going to be launching here soon a partner program. So if you would like to help promote Help for Men and our private men's group, we do incentivize those who promote. And if people click on your link— we'll provide you with a custom link— they click on the link, you get a portion of the membership fee as a thank you. So a good way to spread the word. Basically, if you're familiar with the world of affiliates and so forth, it's kind of an affiliate program. So we are going to be launching that here soon. Hopefully hopefully, fingers crossed, tomorrow. We'll see. And we want to get some content creators on board. We already have one who has agreed to help promote us. I'm very excited. And, um, I'm sorry for laughing, but I'm sitting here talking and all of a sudden on my screen here a comment pops up. Has nothing to do at all with what we're talking about here, but man, this is Right out of the gate, uh, Mr. Fodzie, I apologize if I am mispronouncing, but, uh, hold on just one moment, I'll get to you here in a second. This is a good one in case you guys can't see on the replay here. Um, but anyway, helpformen.com, check it out. Uh, books, uh, our, our private group, you get access to all my books. And then Austin, he is a coach in our group, he wrote a book called called Why Sex Ends After Kids and How to Fix It. And that book is for free as well as all of my books, audiobook format for my books as well as PDF, PDF only for Austin's book, all for free to our members. But that's not all, you know, it doesn't just end with free books. You also get access to our private forums. These are all just for men only and members of the group, very active forums. They're active 24/7. We have live meetings that we conduct via Zoom. On average 2 to 3 meetings every week. Uh, we have over 700 of those meetings that are recorded that you can go back and listen to in the archives, and you can actually listen to them from your phone. Uh, we give you a link and it adds our meeting archive to your phone's podcast app. So you have 700+ hours of basically podcast material that's available only to our members, the meeting archive, as well as we have an, um, HFM Brotherhood podcast basically monologues by myself and others you can listen to. So now you have two audio feeds, and then you have a third audio feed of all my books in the audiobook format. All of those can be added to your phone. So if you're an audio guy and you like to take in audio material, self-help material, self-improvement material, it's a gold mine. You'll never run out of material if you're a member of our group. Uh, in addition to that, like I mentioned, the live meetings— we get together in person. We're about to have our fifth Is that right? When did a 5th conference gathering, annual gathering in the States next year in Charleston, South Carolina. That's going to be awesome. Right on the beach in Isle of Palms. Um, I believe we have 5 spots left for that open to our members only. So we have a coaching I mentioned that's available. And if you are a member of our HFM Brotherhood group, that coaching is about half off for you. So big discount on that. And courses, we're moving our courses over from the Dad Story and Overworld over to the HFM Be patient, it'll take a little bit, but we will bring those courses over. And once those are over, our members get access to them again for about half off the price. So a lot of incentives for joining, and we're going to keep adding the incentives as the membership grows. So, uh, check it out please, help4men.com. You can go, uh, you can scroll down and see the link to the Brotherhood, or go to help4men.com/join, or you could go to hfmbrotherhood.com. Get you all to the same place. Sales pitch over. How about that? So Fodzie, where are you from? Facebook. Fodzie from Facebook asks, what is wrong with middle-aged ladies? Why are they mean? Well, Fodzie, I mean, we have like this, the stereotype of the, well, crabby older man and crabby older lady, right? You say middle-aged, but I'm middle-aged. I'm gonna be 50 next year. Pause while I let that sink in. Oof. So I'm a middle-aged dude. We're not all cranky. Not all middle-aged women are cranky. So in other words, Fodzie, the middle-aged ladies that you run into are cranky. Well, I mean, let's be politically incorrect here at the moment. What happens, especially for the ladies, sorry ladies, I know coming from a dude, you don't like to hear this. What happens during middle age for most women, all women, let's be honest, the old menopause. Mother Nature's way of saying, your baby-making days are over, let me turn down this dial of this progesterone and this testosterone and this estrogen and everything else. And a lot of women don't feel too great during that process. God bless you, ladies. I don't know how you deal with it. You get the hot flashes and that this is hurting, that is hurting. Um, there's some sexual dysfunction can result of vaginal atrophy and other things. Lubrication for some is just gone, natural lubrication. So it's not a fun thing for a lot of ladies, in addition to increased risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, and other things. Mother Nature is not nice, in case you didn't notice. Men and women both. But you poor ladies, you get the— you get the— you deal with the childbirth, and then once that's all over, Mother Nature says, hey, thanks, here's some menopause for you. Oh great, wonderful. So they may not be the happiest people in the world. Is there a remedy for this? Possibly. There's the old hormonal replacement therapy. The medical community has scared women half to death about that. Do your research, talk to people in the know, endocrinologists, people that deal with— there, there are, um, menopause— I'm trying to remember, there's a term for this, but doctors, there's a network of physicians all over the US and all over the world that deal with, help women with menopause. They're the ones to talk to about it. And basically they will say, um, you are a candidate for hormonal replacement therapy if you don't have the following medical conditions. Already, if you are not of a certain age already. So if it's an 80-year-old woman comes to them, they probably say, no sweetheart, you're past that point, we don't want to do that. Um, versus if you tell them, I have a, uh, a family history of breast cancer, um, uterine cancer, whatever it may be, the doctor's going to be like, oh, then those cancers sometimes are sensitive to excessive amounts of estrogen, so we don't want to supplement with more estrogen in your body. So maybe hormonal replacement therapy is not for you unless we want to do just this and this. And, uh, but for most women, from what I'm hearing from a lot of ladies that go through the process, if it's done right, it's a godsend for them. And they're not so mean, as you say, Fodzie. But this is a topic that, um, a lot of ladies don't like a man to talk about, to be quite honest with you. I'm not a physician. My wife is, but I'm not one. I'm not learned on the subject in any way, shape, or form other than a guy who does a lot of Googling and talks to a lot of women who have been through this. And I talk to my wife about it and everything else. My wife is now 42 years of age. Is that right? And— oh, 43. 43. And she's starting to notice symptoms of changing a bit. Perimenopause is what they call it. The early stages of menopause. She's starting to see a little bit of it. She went to the doctor. The doctor was like, your hormonal levels are down, but they're fine. They're within a range. She don't really need anything now, but she's being very proactive about it and saying, I know I may not need, but I want because I'm not enjoying this too much. So good for her, right? All right. Mr. Matt from Facebook says— thank you, Matt— move from— he says, move from all of my friends and family, from an area I greatly love with a lot of outdoor recs to an area with very little of each. Well, what'd you do that for? Here he goes. Made this move for my ex-wife and child to be closer to her family. Let me pause there. Holy shit, do I hear this all the time. By the way, my story as well. Uh, the marriage is over, but we currently split custody. How do I navigate the decisions of moving back to be more happy for myself, in turn, uh, being a better dad? This would obviously affect custody and it would potentially have me starting over with a career, or do I stay? There is about a 2.5-hour difference, or distance, I assume, the area, but living there obviously would give me a permanent residence and not having to worry about such. Well, Matt, good question, brother. Again, something I hear all the time. There's, you know, the phenomenon of picking up, pulling up roots and going across country for, often what I hear is for her family, to be closer to her family, often, She's the mother, she's the nurturer. Whether that's right or wrong, that's kind of the overall sentiment. And she has maybe the extended family, man does not. So let's go to extended family. We need grandmas and aunts and uncles and everybody else to help out with raising these children or child or whatever it may be. So mom wins and you pull up stakes and you move away from friends and you start over and everything. And a lot of men don't quite recover from that. They never quite start over effectively. And they're like, you know, Let's say you move from Illinois to California and you get to California, you're like, never quite made the same friend network like I had in Illinois, never made, um, same job connections, whatever it may be. And you feel kind of lost and it's not the same environment. And you used to love going hunting and in the snow in Illinois, but now in California there's none of that. And you just feel kind of lost and you never quite feel at home. If it sounds like I'm just rattling that off, a specific situation, pretty, uh easily. It's because that's kind of my situation. I moved from— it's not that big of a change to Illinois to California. That wasn't me, but it was Illinois to Kentucky. So it was, uh, Kentucky is its own, you know, culture and way of life, and not one that ever quite jived with. And, uh, family— no family there. And but ex-wife, all her family there. So I can totally relate to this, brother. But here's the thing, um, you're talking about basically, hey, wife, kids, see ya, dad's gonna go 2.5 hours away from here. Um, ouch. I— first of all, can you legally do that? Uh, I think your wife has every right to put in a divorce decree, neither of us will move away from the home base, which is— did you say where it's at? I'm going to play pretend here. I don't know if, Matt, you want to share where the location is. Let's say California, just You know, schätz und grüß. So she says, this place in San Diego, California, we cannot— neither of us can move more than X number of miles away from this one location. By the way, that's a very, very typical thing to put in a divorce decree or child custody agreement, whatever the verbiage is, is that neither of us will move away from this area because we need both of us to help raise this kiddo. And if you pull up stakes and say, I'm going 2.5 hours away, you may be in violation of said agreement. And you may have— I don't know what the repercussions are. They take you to court, they fine you, you lose all custody of your children. I don't know if it's fine, jail time. I don't know how it works. I'm not a legal expert, right? But are you maybe putting the cart before the horse here? Are you assuming that you're able to do that? You may not be able to do that, dude. I don't know. Maybe you have already gone through that and you've determined that she's like, if you want to go, go ahead and go. Should you? 2.5 hours away, it's not like you're cross-country. It's a jump in your car in the morning, you'll be there by lunch. But I mean, let's be honest here, you're gonna have a whole other life, a whole other everything over there. And I think seeing your kiddo— is kiddo or kiddos? Hmm, I'm looking here. If you said you had more than one child, um, you're not gonna see them that often. Are you cool with that? I mean, man to man here, those kiddos need their dad. And I know you made a big oopsie years ago and moved to be, uh, closer to her family, and you're like, I really don't feel at home here. Um, one kid, okay. So part of me says, dude, suck it up. 'Kiddos need their father.' Uh, 'Dad lives 2.5 hours away. I only get to see him, uh, every other weekend.' Are you personally cool with that? That's— that could go easily in that direction. I mean, you're not going to be involved in the day-to-day with the kid. You're not going to be there for this school function, that school function. You're not going to be here for this personal thing. A kid fell down and got hurt, and you're like, 'Oh shoot, I got a work thing, and I got this and this. I'll be there, you know, tomorrow morning.' And you're not there for whatever it may be. Things happen, life happens. And, uh, in Kentucky, I bounced between— uh, I'm talking here, I don't know if you know my personal story— I bounced between Kentucky and Texas. But in Kentucky, where my ex-wife and all my kiddos from marriage number one are, that the home I have there is literally 5 minutes from ex-wife. And then, uh, roughly half the time, a little less than half of the time, I, I get on an airplane and I fly to, uh Texas when they're with Mom. There have been times when they're with Mom and I'm in Texas and something happens and I go, all right, gotta get on a plane, head back. Kiddos always come first. And I see them, you know, like I say, over half the time I see my kiddos— more than that, really, be honest with you. Um, and sometimes they come with me to Texas and stuff. So it's worked out well. We've been doing this for a couple, few years now. Um, But I don't know, what do you want to do? Is life where you're at that much hell for you that you're considering cutting time with your children, a good chunk of time? Does this put your custody, so to speak, in jeopardy? Are you violating any kind of rules? I don't know, Matt, do you have any answers to any of these questions? Have you looked at this legally? Are you physically, legally able to do this? Is she gonna, is she well aware of your intentions? Hmm. Okay, all right. So Matt follows up with, she's entertaining another man from 2 hours away as well. So she has a long-distance boyfriend already. You're— which, that's a whole other complication in itself, right? So table that for now. The divorce decree does not say distance, but state law does. Interesting. She has honestly encouraged it, like, go, go back home, go 2.5 hours away, please, because she potentially wants to as well. Now, this introduces all kinds of questions. Here's home base, you're going 2.5 hours this way. Is she talking about joining you over here? Then what's the worry? Or is she talking about you go this way and she goes 2 hours this way? Then you got an even bigger deal. Now you got 4.5 hours between the two of you. You get what I'm saying? Um, a lot of complications here, dude. And then she has a man, you know. I assume when she's talking about possibly doing the same, she means living closer to the man. Smart. How long has she been with this dude, right? Is this her affair partner? Has she been with this guy for months, years? What are we talking here? And she's talking about potentially moving. I'm inferring a lot here. It's only so much you can put in the comments. Maybe you want to flesh this out further, Mr. Matt. Interesting, uh, situation though. Anybody have any, uh, anybody on this have anything to share with Matt? Any similar circumstances? Please do so in the comments. And while we pause here, help4men.com, check it out. Help4men.com and our private group for men only we call the HFM Brotherhood. You can learn more at help4men.com/join or hfmbrotherhood.com. Anything else there, Matt? But you're gonna see your kids a lot less. You're basically, I think in the eyes of the law and a lot of other people, you're basically handing the kiddos to mom and saying, home base is mom. Adios kids, I'll see you when I can see ya. It sounds very cold, but that's how a lot of the people will see it. So that opens you up to a lot of responsibilities. And what's the word I'm looking for? You're gonna have to pay probably a lot more than what you would if it was an even 50/50, I would assume. If mom's got the kiddos 80% of the time, 90% of the time, mom's got a lot of stuff due to her in terms of assets, money, all kinds of stuff. Who knows? I am not an attorney. Attorney will be able to answer all of this for you and tell you that you're potentially Painting yourself into a corner here, mister. Uh, how old's the kiddo? That's a good question. You know, if we're talking the kid's 19, that changes everything. If the kiddo's 2 years of age, um, I don't know. So questions for you. This is— we always have a little bit of an awkward pause here. This, this would be a good segment to put into a video, and I have a guy who helps me now with editing video. So Eric, this is— Eric, this is my video guy. This is a part where you would edit out this part. We want to keep it just boom, boom, boom with the information. So as we wait for potentially additional information from Matt, we will not include this in a recorded video. Um, so, all right, so you guys see a little behind the scenes there, but interesting situation there, Mr. Matt. Anybody else have anything to share? Where's everybody from? Matt, did you say where you are from? Technically, I don't believe you did. If you, uh, yeah, so many. And then Matt follows up with, yeah, so many complications. I've hit some of it on the head. Well, good. Pretty common thing, as you know. Interesting. Here's something, Matt, man to man. Is there another gal in the picture that's pulling you over back to location B, let's call it, that complicates things? Um, what I've seen— it's gonna sound like victimhood on my part, I'm whining or whatever, but this is just what I've seen, whether it's right or wrong. It's just my own personal perspective. Ultimately, that's all I have, is, uh, wife says, uh, I got potentially a new man, he's 2 hours away, that, hey kids, let's move over there. The law, the courts, whatever, your social group is just like, good for her, starting over. Man says, I got me a new young girlfriend, she's 2 hours away, I'm thinking about air bite. Oh dude, you want to see the fangs and the claws come out. People don't take kindly to that. That wasn't my situation, but I've seen that. And a lot of men say, what a double standard. It's what it is, man. What are you going to do, change society? Where a lot of us men are seen as that, well, he must have done something wrong to cause this breakup and this divorce, and who's he cheating with, and who's Oftentimes, no, he's done nothing wrong necessarily. At worst, from what I've seen for a lot of guys, just, you're just a boring husband. That's the worst thing you did. You know, I can't tell you how many people in my comments, most of them women, infer in my comments that, well, I'll tell you why this bad thing happened to this guy that in this story you're talking about. It's probably because he abused his wife. And he's probably— it's like, that's such an out-there thing, dude. Abuse in a relationship happens the minority of the time. I know that disrupts the worldview for a lot of people, but that's not as common as you think. And I have people in my comments say, no, the majority of women that are in marriages are in fact abused. Okay, I think we're in just totally different— two different planets here. But anyway, uh, does anybody else have anything? Don't want to sit here and just blab away to myself. I mean, I appreciate it. Appreciate you, Matt. Thank you very much for, uh, sharing your story and asking the question. That was a good one. Uh, anybody have anything else? Anyone? Anything? Anyone? We had a, um, a live member meeting yesterday that was open to the public. We have done that, I don't know, maybe 6 or 7 times before with no problem. Usually have a pretty big turnout, get some new members out of it. It works out well. Well, this time, like, probably because my stuff's out there to more and more people Uh, thanks to you people, I have like 125,000 subscribers on YouTube. Cool. Um, 150,000 possibly, maybe around that on Facebook and on and on. Under 20-some thousand on TikTok. Well, you get in the six figures like that and you put your information out there and say, hey, join us. Stupid me, naive me, didn't think that we would have some yahoos get on there and just try to sabotage and act like assholes. Well, that's what happened yesterday during our meeting. For about a good 10-15 minutes we had to deal with some, it seemed to be some kids potentially on there. But we eventually got rid of them out of the meeting, then we had a good meeting. But that was a first, that was fun. That was kind of a wake-up call of, Ralph, you can't just, you know, it's just a small thing anymore. You can't just put a link out there and have 10 guys show up and that's it. No, so I don't think we're gonna do that anymore. No more open to the public meetings in that way. We'll have to figure out another way. Possibly people need to register and so forth, but I don't think that would really, You know, somebody's hell-bent on entering a meeting and causing chaos, they're gonna, they're gonna register, I assume, right? You can give a fake name, John Doe. Here, here I am giving ideas. But, um, anywho, so, uh, that was— thank you. If any of you watching this on the recording or live here now were in that meeting yesterday, sorry you had to put up with that, but thank you for sticking around if you did. So we ended up having a very good meeting. And those meetings that I I do typically once a week and the other guys on the team, they have theirs once a week. Uh, we cover just all kinds of cool topics. Yesterday we talked about divorce. We talked about dealing with a narcissistic ex who is making life hell. We talked, you know, all kinds of stuff, cheating, all kinds of interesting topics that us dudes in this relationship world, starting over world, however you want to call it, uh, face. And, um, it's good to talk to other men about those issues and show that you're not alone. And you're not unique in your pain and suffering. And some other people can be there and give you some tips and tricks and know-how and wisdom. And, uh, you know, think of it as just a group of hundreds and hundreds of mentors that you can learn from, and they can learn from you. So that's what our group's all about. HelpForMen.com, check it out. And the Help For Men Brotherhood. If there's nothing else, ladies and germs, I appreciate all of you. Thank you all so very much. So this will be a short one. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Mr. Charles, Mr. Charles from Facebook says, what is the deal with 55 and over women and this oversized sense of self, like a car with 200,000 miles advertised as new? Okay, so Charles, all kinds of questions here. Are you— so are you of that age range, I assume? There's just something you've noticed just in passing for another group. Um, okay, let's, let's assume that you're of that age range and maybe you're trying to date and you're getting to know these women and maybe you're noticing maybe the sense of oversized sense of self, the entitlement. So you're 62 years of age, very good. So you were trying to date gals 55 and over, sounds normal, right? And by the way, if you said you're trying to date 30-some-year-olds, I'd be like Good for you, dude. I, I'm not one of those that just gets instantly icked out by guys with younger gals, and especially when you're both, you know, 30+ years of age, it's whatever. Um, but anywho, so you've noticed with these guys 55— or gals, excuse me— 55 and over, uh, oversized sense of self. What does that mean exactly? You want to help us, Charles? Can you give us an example of a gal who is entitled or thinks too much of herself or whatever. Uh, do you have examples of, uh, how that plays out in real life? This always makes this difficult to have a conversation via text comments, but share what you can there, Charles. Maybe we can kind of hash this out. Entitlement, which— can you show me— can you give me an example of a woman who's entitled? I mean, I can think of a million different ways somebody's entitled. Like, do they show up to dinner with you and order the most expensive thing off the plate and then look at you and say, you better pay for this, mister, because I'm the woman? That's pretty like over-the-top entitlement. Um, do they, you know, say, I need you to pay me? You know, did they just meet you and say, if you want to go on a date with me, you got to pay my rent next month? That's pretty entitled. Um, those are pretty over-the-top versions or examples of entitlement. What have you seen that In your dating world. Excuse me. As we wait. You want to be treated like model status, dollar sign. They expect you to pay for everything. Maybe these are some old school gals, right? 55 and over, back their day, maybe they were married before husband died or divorced or whatever, and he paid for everything, right? They've been trained. So it seems to be you, you meet a certain gal that's kind of trained to think like, dude over here is going to pay for everything. Um, You know, so, and that really turns you off, and you're like, come on, gal. You know, that would turn me off as well if somebody just assumed based upon you're the dude, you pay for everything. Now, at the same time, maybe this is old school of me, if I'm the one like, hey, I got an idea for a date. You and me, we're going to, uh, gonna go, go catch a play, gonna go watch a play, and then I know an awesome dinner spot we're gonna go to, and then after that we're gonna go dancing. That woman's probably assuming he's got all this taken care of. So if you went on that said date and you showed up at the theater to watch the play and you go, one ticket for me, and she's paying for herself, she'd be like, what the hell? You're the one who invited me, dude. I don't think she's necessarily entitled in that way. You know, you go to— here's the awesome dinner place I picked out for us— and tell the waiter, we'll split the check, we're going Dutch here. She'd probably— it wouldn't be the most attractive thing in the world and socially awkward thing to do. Um, okay, so Charles says these are kept hottie women, so attractive older women not dealing with reality that time takes its toll. Well, Charles, buddy, you're kind of painting a picture of, you know, kind of shitty. Uh, I'm, I'm dating a gal who's 55 and older. She needs to recognize that she doesn't have that much value anymore. On a very admittedly shallow attraction level, right? And don't you ladies realize that you're not worthy of me paying for everything? Here's the question, Charles. Are you saying that if these gals were 25 years of age and super hot, would you be more apt to pay for their way? That's a question for you. You know, 25, she looks like a I'm showing my age here, a Playboy model, whatever it may be, the kind of gal when she walks into a room and everybody turns their head and looks at her, one of those. Are you going to be like, well, I guess I'm— okay, so you're saying you would be more apt to pay for everything. So the gal reaches a certain level of age and you're like, your value is sunk down. You were here at a younger age, now you're here, and because of your lower value, I don't pay for things. Are we clear? I wonder if you said this to these ladies up front, how they would take that. Not very well, I would assume. Charles, not the nicest thing in the world, buddy. Um, so right off the bat, you're going into this, into these, uh, dates with a preconceived notion of this gal right away by virtue of her age, which by the way is right around your age, um, have a lower value. That's not very nice. And they're not worthy of pampering, I guess. They're not worthy of special treatment. But her younger friend over there sure is. I mean, you know, have some empathy here. That's not the nicest thing in the world. I'm just trying to think of, let's say, a perfectly nice, normal, got her head on straight, 55-year-old gal. Let's go out for drinks. She's been married before. Her husband passed away. She's been on a few dates. Culturally, she has been led to believe that when you go on a date with a gentleman, when he asks you out on a date, and you go to a bar to have some cocktails, he's going to pay. It's just a given thing. And here's you over there going, listen, Grandma, maybe 30 years ago, but now no, now we go Dutch. Not very nice of you, dude. I would be still, yeah, I'll pay for it. I mean, if I took my— put it this way, if I took my grandma out somewhere Or Linda, my 80-some-year-old neighbor who lives across the street, and said, Linda, wanna go down and get some drinks to the club over here? I'm paying. That's just an understood thing. Or, you know, don't even say I'm paying. We're just going out for drinks. I would think Linda's probably gonna be like, Ralph's gonna pay, 'cause I invited her along. I don't know. Yeah, right away, I'm just trying to take this, I'm not trying to take the side of ladies here, but I'm trying to empathize with their, point of view here. Number one, just because they're of older age doesn't mean they have less value necessarily. It's not the nicest thing in the world. We all age. I've done a video— pardon me, I did a video on this called, um, um, The Wall and how age comes for us all. Uh, this is a concept that you'll see a lot, mostly younger dudes, a lot of older dudes as well. There's this concept of when women hit a certain point in their life, and that's— it's a subjective thing. Um, they go from on this side of the wall it's sexy, on this side of the wall not so much. And, uh, men love to throw— especially when men that have been really, really hurt by women— and they love to throw in their face, you hit the wall, you are a post-wall woman, haha, you used to be attractive, now you're not, your value is next to nothing. It's just a way to really drop the atom bomb of insults on a person because women take that very, very Seriously, very personally, as they should. That's not a very nice thing to say. So we'd love to throw that in the face. Meanwhile, the majority of men that throw that in women's faces, if we want to keep with the wall analogy, those dudes hit that wall face first, 100 miles per hour, years ago. They're not the greatest looking dudes in the world. What those guys say is, oh yeah, well, look at this guy over here. He's got a hot bimbo on his arm and he's living it up and he's 60-some years of age with a pot belly. Yeah, but he also has a billion dollars in the bank, dude. And that's not you. I'm not talking to you necessarily, Charles, but just you in general, dudes who, you know, throw around this whole women have no value when they get older and stuff. Um, not the nicest thing in the world. Uh, Justin says, and Justin is a member, he's part of our HFM team, is a member of the, uh, brotherhood. He says, this is not me. I'm 100% happily married. Wife and I are a great team. I am helping a friend. I want him to hear this from someone with more experience. When a woman says she wants distance before working on the relationship, what does she really mean? I want distance before working on the relationship. Well, here's the thing. You don't come across as some know-it-all asshole speaking in platitudes. I'll tell you exactly what that means. All I can tell you is what I have seen a lot, not what this means 100% of the time, but what I have seen a lot in such cases, cases, pardon me, is, um, okay, so working on the relationship. So something has disrupted the relationship, we're pulled apart, and husband's over here saying, can we get together and please work on this? And wife says, maybe, but first I want us to be apart for a while. Right away, for your more anxious types, your thought pattern is must be somebody else in the, in the wings. Perhaps she wants to test the waters over here to see if— is it going to work with the dude over here? Uh, let me, let me test out the waters over here and see how it feels. And if it doesn't work out, then I got fallback guy over here with— which is current husband. I was going to say ex-husband, current husband. We can go back and try it here. But so I'm going to do what I can to set husband aside, say just, just wait a bit, all right? That's one scenario. Or one is that she's just sick and tired of being wife to this husband. She needs a freaking break. She needs to get away. She's tired of it all, dude. Maybe, but can I just have some space? That's a very normal take on all this. Who knows? So those are two scenarios I've seen. Um, I'm, I'm betting, Justin, based upon probably what you know of friend and his scenario, you probably can pick one of those two as far as what's going on. Uh, Charles says, why the double standard that men still have to pay for everything after the divorce? I dropped a million. Not reality or fair. Okay, well, you know, Charles, buddy, this is easily, um, handled. Hey, gal that I'm asking out on a date, just so we're cool, um, our first date we're gonna go Dutch, which means we split everything evenly. You cool with that? Um, what are they going to say? Are you saying, Charles, the majority of women will say go fuck yourself? Maybe. That's their problem. Why would they say that? Do they have an increased sense of entitlement and everything else? Possibly. Or they just— they've been trained to think that for their entire life. Their marriage, divorce, dating— people have paid for things. Whether that's a double standard and not fair It's just what they, you know, it's kind of like, um, and this has nothing to do with it, but I'm trying to flip the gender so maybe we can have an aha moment here. Um, I've mentioned this before in the past that I've talked to some men, this is a relatively small minority of men that I speak to, but it's, um, I, the guy will say, I was a super playboy player in the, in the past, like I just got women falling all over me. I, you know, wasn't uncommon for me to have sexual relations with 3 or 4 different women in a week, every week. And then I settle down with one gal, and it's fine, everything is great, we're hot and heavy with each other. And then we get married and we have kids, move in together, the whole nine yards, and everything just kind of starts fizzling out, and our sexual activity is next to nothing. And, um, I have as a result girlfriends, affairs, mistresses. And when wife comes to me and says, how could you dare do this? He says, what'd you expect? You know, you knew who I was before when we met at the club. I had like 100 girlfriends behind me. You expect me to deal with, you know, once a month sexual activity? I don't think so. Then she goes to friends, and what do the friends say? All men are dicks. All men are assholes. All men are selfish creatures. They're all like this. As soon as you shut off sex for whatever reason— illness, sex, kids, whatever it is, um, that's what they do, they cheat. A lot of men would hear that and go, no, we don't, that's— he's a relative minority. Okay, why would that guy think that way? Why would he act in that way? Because that's his whole life, he's been that way. That's what he's used to. Now multiply that and let's say that is the majority of men. The majority of men have easy access to a lot of women and, you know, a lot of girlfriends and all this other stuff. They're going to be less apt to put up with a strict monogamous relationship that has ups and downs as far as sexual activity is concerned. Flip it back to the ladies. Why do ladies insist on men paying and think that they are owed even though they're 55, 60-year-old grandmas? Because that's, that's what they've seen their whole life. It takes the Charles and others of the world to say, welcome to 2024, we're splitting the check. What do you think about that? They may very well say F you, Charles. That's fine. If this is a sticking point for you, Charles, and you're very serious about this, put up the old proverbial boundaries here. Um, I'll make sure I'm not missing something here. Um, Mr. Something from Nothing, uh, from YouTube says, my wife is not affectionate and she will not sit by me in public. That's not good. At night she wants to read books and be left alone. Okay, I try to date her and not be focused on outcomes. That doesn't sound very nice. How long has this been going on for? This is, you know, in psychological terms— I am not a psychiatrist or a mental health— or psychologist, rather, or mental health professional of any kind, but I know enough to be dangerous. And one of the things I'm relatively well-versed on is the world of this theory of attachment theory. Psychologists and others, what they try to do, you know, categorize and to try and help understand certain behaviors and thought patterns within people, and one of the things somebody came up with is, you know, we've noticed that the way people attach to their parents in childhood kind of affects how they attach to their friends and romantic partners later in life. And your gal, by just a couple of short sentences here, is exhibiting what we call avoidant attachment. I don't like public displays of affection. I don't want to sit next to you. At night I'm reading my book, leave me alone. This is classic avoidant stuff. They don't make the best romantic partners at all. They don't make good, fair— they don't make— if somebody tells me I'm with a fiancé and these are the avoidant tendencies he or she is showing, I just say it ain't gonna work, dude or gal, because you're seeing them at their best, the honeymoon stage, the fiancé stage, the pre-marriage, pre-kid stage. It's all downhill from here with those people, big time. Um, so anywho, um Kind of an open-ended question. Hmm. Mysterio from YouTube says, what happened to Dr. Sam? You mean Dr. Samantha Rodman-White? She's there. He says, I don't see her on Facebook anymore. Oh, did she block you? Did you do something, Mysterio? No, she said— I see her on my feed all day, every day. Uh, Samantha's one of the most active people I've ever seen in social media, so if you ain't seeing her, something's up there. As an aside, um, I don't know, maybe she's not being shown to a lot of people for whatever reason. My material on Facebook has just fallen off a cliff as far as, uh, reach is concerned. I was doing really well, like, you know, adding a couple thousand people a month. At a peak, I was adding like 4,000 people a month as followers, subscribers, whatever term they use in Facebook. And now it's like next to nothing. It's like, what the hell happened? Um, Facebook, their little algorithm or whatever, has just decided that my stuff doesn't need to be seen by a lot of people. It'll probably go back up here eventually, but right now I'm in a lull and I'm putting out just as much material as I ever have. So I don't know what's going on. So maybe she's seeing something like that too. Mr. Thomas P. from Facebook, I'm not sure what your quote is referring to, mister. I'm sure it makes sense to others because I'm kind of dense. What are my other options? He puts in quotes, and then he says, or let's see. Oh, oh, is this in— is this in response to Mr. Justin's thing? Back to Mr. Justin's thing, uh, he says, friend says, wife says, uh, yeah, I'll work on this relationship, but I want some distance between us first. And Thomas is saying that could in turn translate to, what are my other options out there? Or let's see what work you're willing to do. That's one way of interpreting this whole thing. Let's just have some natural distance. You know, there are a lot of therapists and such that will say, you two need to get the hell away from each other. You go to mom's, you stay with the kiddos, whatever it is. The distance will help. You're just too much on top of each other. There's too much chaos, there's too much drama. Get the hell away from each other and then agree to come together for lunch on Wednesday or something like that. That's a very adult thing. So maybe something like that's going on. A very anxious thing to Justin's story, a very anxious take on it, is to always assume the worst. People that are anxious catastrophize everything. Think of the typical overly anxious, wildly insecure wife, for example. Husband is 10 minutes late coming home from work. He always comes home from work at 5:10 and he doesn't walk into the door until 5:20. And there's his wife with her arms crossed staring, and he's like What? And she says, what's her name? That's a very anxious, insecure take on it. And he's like, uh, it's called There Was an Accident on the Highway. Look, it's on the news. She's like, oh, whatever. Um, very insecure, very anxious. And we see a lot with our guys, same thing. My wife's acting a little funny, so I hacked into her phone to check it to make sure there was— she wasn't having an affair. It's like, okay, that's a bit of a A bit of a stretch there. Um, so I imagine Justin is your friend having similar thoughts, or are you having similar thoughts about your friend? You know your situation with your friend better than anyone, so you know what may be going on there. Um, here's how these things work. I was just about ready to wrap it up about 20 minutes ago, and we got some more questions, and back up we go again. The roller coaster of the live stream. Help4men.com. Check it out. Uh, oh, and you can follow Help for Men. We're starting to put some material out there on the social media. Um, look for the handle Real Help for Men. That's the handle, social media name, username, handle, whatever you want to call it. Facebook, uh, Twitter, or X. Um, we haven't put anything on TikTok yet or Instagram yet, but we're slowly but surely putting stuff out there. And I will start the Help for Men, um, pardon me as I hit the microphone, Help for Men podcast, which I'm going to set aside just for interviews with good, interesting, smart people. Uh, Dr. Robert Glover, No More Mr. Nice Guy, has already agreed to be on. And, uh, Samantha wants to be on, Dr. Samantha Rodman-Whiten. But, uh, it's a matter of just getting our schedules together. Everybody's so freaking busy these days. So, but we'll, uh, get around to getting some good, uh, good peeps on there for sure. So check it out, the Help for Men podcast. Nothing on there just yet, but there will be. So maybe go ahead and subscribe and sit back and wait for the goodness. All right folks, if there's nothing else, I will give, you know, a couple seconds here. Any— while I take a sip of coffee, if there are any other questions or comments, anything at all, stories to share, now's the time to do so. Well, we have a little bit of dead air here while I sip my coffee. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: the Holy Roman Empire was neither Roman or holy? I don't— it was a Saturday Night Live thing when I was a kid. Talk amongst yourselves. Anybody remember that? I got a like out of that one. Thank you. All right, ladies and germs, if there is nothing else— oh, holy— well, right when I'm about to stop, boom, comment from Justin. Follow-up to Justin's previous comment. Maybe Eric, who's editing these together for later, maybe you can splice this together with the previous Justin thing. Uh, but Justin, follow-up to his previous comment, he says, uh, his friend, his friend's wife, she has been in nursing school for years. No comment. He has been after her to spend time and work on things. She keeps pushing it off, made various comments, etc. What kind of comments? Either she puts in the work and prioritizes the relationship, or she doesn't. Yeah, that's right, you know, it's a wife, right? Here's a little, uh, tidbit of advice, and I didn't make this up. I don't want to rip it off from somebody and put it across as my own. I think it was Mark Manson, who I want to have on the podcast, by the way. I think he came up with a— when it comes to people that you're trying to work with, people that you want relationships with, uh, what you want out of them is, oh hell yes. What you don't want one of them is, I don't know, maybe, you know. You got an awesome business idea, you're talking to your friend about it, and you're all, you know, jazzed up about it, and you go to him and you go Why don't you come on board? You know, you can work 10 hours a week and I'll bring you in, no cost to you, and you can be my COO and da da da da da, and we can help grow this thing together and split the money 50/50. What do you say? And the guy goes, I don't know, yeah, I don't, you know, I'm doing this other thing, I've got my kids' baseball team. That's where you stop and go, forget I mentioned it, no hard feelings, dude, never mind. You know, let's just continue on with our conversation like that never happened. What you don't do is go, oh, come on, man, it'll be great, it'll be awesome. All you're doing is just beating down the guy to eventually he just goes, all right, fine, what do you need me to do? And you're like, yeah. No, that's not a yeah, that's a— that will never work out, that partnership with that guy. It's the same thing with relationships. Do you want to be my wife or not? I don't know, I need to think about it. Do you want to go talk to a counselor about it? I don't know if I think about counselors. 'Can we just talk about this later? Let's, you know, let's go our separate ways for a while. Maybe that'll help things. I don't know.' That's where you just wipe your hands of the person and say, 'Message received. I get it, sweetheart. I love you, but this ain't gonna work out. I think we both know writing's on the wall here.' Ironically, that strategy tends to be the best one to help bring you back together when one is willing to let you go. 'Okay, cool. I understand, you know. Love you, but I want the best for you. I certainly don't want to be with somebody who's just going to be like, you know, I don't know, I don't want, I don't know, I want, oh hell yes. So do your friend Justin. That's what you'd say to the dude. You want an oh hell yes. You don't want to keep chasing and pursuing and trying to convince this woman who seems like, I'm not sure about us. Okay, cool. I'll find somebody else who is. Hmm. Okay. So A follow-up to Something from Nothing, who described a pretty boilerplate avoidant wife. No public displays of affection, doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to do that, doesn't really want anything to do with her husband anymore. He asks, what strategies could work with someone who is avoidant? And then he says, she rates our marriage a 5 out of 10. What is that, like a C grade? And then she is unwilling to work to improve. Boom, the last part there, my friend. She's unwilling to work to improve. This goes perfectly hand in hand with the previous comment I made about Justin's friend. You want to— oh, hell yes! You want to, uh, marriage counseling? When? I'll be there. Just tell me when and I'll take off work. I don't want to lose my husband. Sure, what's the problem? What do you have in mind? That's what you want. You have somebody who is, in essence, dumped you. What was she doing still sticking around? Well, she's comfortable. She's got a nice little thing going here. She's got a husband to help out with stuff. The love, sexuality, romance, she's— that's not her. I'm willing to bet, dude, it's probably never been her, right? You look back on your honeymoon phase and you're probably like, it's okay, not great, not like other— you know, what I've heard from other people, or that they, they and their partner been going at it multiple times a day. We never had that, but it was alright. We were loving to each other, sorta, kinda. I was never really super happy with it, but good enough. Not a good way to start a relationship, because then as time moves on, you're like, oh, what, we don't even touch anymore? No hold hands, nothing? No hugging? No— what happened here? It's kind of where you're at right now. You made a big oopsie. The strategy is to help someone who's avoidant is that they have to go, I need some help here. I'm chasing away a good thing here, my man. I've had problems with my romantic relationships my whole life. If they have a history of relationships with others, um, I got a problem here. I got a problem with being vulnerable, being open and loving with others. I'm very constricted. I'm very guarded. I value my independence and everything over everything else. And by the way, if that sounds like a very masculine trait, that's for a reason. Avoidant people are usually men. Not always, as we've seen, as I've learned over the years of doing this, uh, in the Dad Starting Over world, now Help for Men world. Um, there are all kinds of avoidant women out there. Something happened to this gal in her childhood. I'm assuming a lot here, Mr. Know-it-all, but, um Something happened to this gal in her childhood which led her to be a cold, distant person. And ironically, 9 times out of 10, who do these people match up with? Mr. or Miss, uh, Anxious, the person who needs the exact opposite. Well then, why do they match up with each other? It's just one of, one of life's little, uh, little ironic jokes in the relationship world, of which there are many, by the way. The more you get into this relationship talk sphere, you realize there's so much irony and so much like, oh wow, that's— it's almost kind of funny. The anxious and the avoidant find each other. They sure do. And, um, uh, the avoidant just wants to be left alone, but they attracted somebody who just wants to touch all the time. The anxious just wants to touch and, and soothe and, and, and, and appease his— or, or lessen his anxiety over the health of the relationship. But the avoidant just like, can we just not? Can we just not talk about this? Can we just sit on the couch, watch TV? Um, They both have a point. They're both diametrically opposed from each other, and they both need to come to center to what we call the more secure attachment model. And that takes work for both. In, in defense of the anxious person, of which I'm going to assume you are, Mr. Something from Nothing, you're willing to put in the work, and you've probably done a lot of it on your own. YouTube, podcast, books, video courses, joining groups like ours. The HFM Brotherhood, helpformen.com. I'm getting better at this plug thing. And, um, the avoidant though tends to be like, no, I'm not going to no counseling. No, I don't want to do that. Why the hell would I do that? No. Often what it takes is the divorce papers going across the table. Well, if you know, I put together this agreement, I think you'll find it's fair. Like, wait, you're serious about this? It's like, yeah, why wouldn't I be? Who would want to be in a relationship like this? Sure. So 'And you know have your attorney look it over or— you know look it over yourself and sign here and blah blah blah.' '60 days we'll be divorced,' and they're like whoa! No! What is? You talked about going to counseling; is that tomorrow? When is that? Next week? When? What time? And then you're like oh now you wake up. Even then dude even if you're like it's not your eureka woohoo it's over no. That's the very beginning of a very long process. Of therapy together, separate, of you're going to have bad weeks, like, oh shit, she's back to her old avoidant self. And then you'll have good weeks, good months, and then a bad month, and then another good month, and then a really bad day, and you go back to the attorney again. What I've seen, it's this. What I've seen for most of these cases is, and a lot of therapists won't like me saying this, but what I've seen for most of these cases is the, uh, you know, we talked about the anxious avoidant on opposite ends. They need come to center to secure. What I've seen is that Mr. Anxious comes to secure and Avoidant still stays over here. And I'm using the Mr. and Ms. from your example, something for nothing because you're the dude. And then Anxious Dude says, you know, now that I'm more secure and I'm looking over here at the Ms. Avoidant, I don't want her anymore. I finally woke up to the fact, like, what the eff was I thinking? Being with this person for so many years. This is nuts. Wow. Adiós, woman. That can come sooner than what you think. You know, knocking her off the proverbial pedestal. That's what I've seen more often than not. But that doesn't mean the Mr. Anxious is out of the water either. He still has work to do because what happens for those guys is they take that Mr. Anxious energy and they dump avoidant wife And they go back out in the dating market and they're like, I have a void to fill, no pun intended, and I want to find a new gal. She'll make me feel better and everything will be fine. And woohoo, I found one and she's amazing and everything's great. And oh my God, I just married— or not married, I met my ex-wife all over again. What is it about me that is attracted to these type of people? Another one who's Miss career, type A, not the most feminine. She's nice enough, she's like one of the guys, a lot of guys say, um, very low drama, but not the most loving person in the world. Doesn't like to hold hands, kiss public. What have I done? I've done it again. You got some work to do on yourself up here. So that's what I've seen. And then those guys, takes a lot of time. And work. And that's why I say, guys, just take a break from the ladies. Give it like a year post-divorce of no ladies. Just work on yourself. So that's what I would say to you, Mr. Something from Nothing. But, uh, good scenario and a common one. If you can't tell, I talk about this shit all the time, this avoidant anxious thing of anxious dudes. That's, that's my audience, basically, anxious dudes. Uh, I put a book out there called The Dead Bedroom Fix, which is all about if you're, um 'Your married sex life is substandard. Here are some things you can do.' And who reads that kind of material? Anxious dudes. They ate it up, and then they joined my group. And now we have a group of mostly anxious guys working on their problems, trying to figure out how to come more to center. And we see over and over again, a lot of them go, 'Yeah, wife and I just decided to separate.' Separate. It's unfortunate. I'm not a big fan of divorce. If you can avoid that, please do so. And if you have a good person on your hands— this avoidant anxious stuff, it kind of exists on a spectrum. You could be avoidant, a little avoidant, you know, yeah, we hold hands and we cuddle and stuff, but she needs her alone time. And, you know, sometimes a week goes by we don't do anything in the bedroom, but other times it's great. You know, on a scale of 1 to 10, she's probably a 3 out of 10. Well, a woman who's a 10 out of 10, oof. That's a little bit tougher. Same thing for the anxious side of things. But what we've seen is we have those guys that are— the woman's a 10 out of 10, and we're all reading a story going, oh boy, this doesn't sound good. Those marriages tend not to last. We've seen quite a few of them end, and the guys come out smelling pretty good in the end. They lose a lot of money, uh, they lose time with their children, but they will report, you know, relationship with children actually improved. Money situation actually improved. Love life definitely improved. We've heard it again and again. Works well for them. And then others have done well about turning things around, probably because their wife was a 3 out of 10 on the ol' avoidant scale. And that's not a— don't go to any psychologist saying, where's my wife on the avoidant scale? They'll say, huh, what? That's just— I'm just illustrating a point. It's not an actual thing in the psychology world. I keep hitting the microphone with my chin. Um, anything else, ladies and germs? It's been about an hour, right at an hour. Uh, if not, I'm going to say thank you all so very much for joining me today. I greatly appreciate all of you. Please do me a favor, check out help4men.com. If you don't mind, I'm going to put this in the comments here. Easier to click it than it is to type it out in your little browser, probably on your phone. There we go. Check that out if you could please. I would really appreciate it. And the, um, you can see the link to our Brotherhood, which is our private group for men only there on helpformen.com. And I, uh, try it out for a month, two months. If you don't like it, you cancel. Not gonna hurt my feelings. The group's not for everybody.. But for those that it's, you know, the guys need some mentoring, a good tribe of dudes to hang with and exchange stories with and all that other good stuff. It's a godsend for them. And they're like, I don't plan. And then they buy the lifetime plan because like, why would I pay month to month? Financially it doesn't make any sense. Here's lump sum and then done with it. We get a lot of those dudes. It's 70% of our membership, I believe. Justin, I think, ran the numbers here recently. He's in our group. Um, is our, uh, lifetimers. Almost 3/4 are lifetimers. That says a lot. So, uh, check it out, help4men.com and the Help for Men Brotherhood. All right, ladies and germs, thank you all so much. Wow, thank you all so very much once again. Greatly appreciate all of you. And, uh, oh cool, pause. Tyler, he's from Australia and he's going to join. We have our guys there that are members of our group. They get together once a year in Australia and they call it Mate Fest, and we call it Over here in the States, we call it Bro Fest. So bro and mate. And Tyler there is going to be going to Mate Fest in October. Wonderful. Love it. Love it. Thank you, Tyler. And thank you all once again. Gonna hang it up for real this time. All right. You guys have a wonderful rest of your week and weekend, and I'll see you on the next one. Toodaloo.