After his first marriage failed due to poor partner selection and family dysfunction he didn't recognize, the speaker learned to vet partners more carefully and walk away from red flags early. With his current wife Natalie, he schedules regular date nights and treats maintaining intimacy as non-negotiable work, since long-term marriages naturally lose their early spark.
Chapters
From Facebook, Mary Bell says, what are the most important lessons you learned from your first marriage that helped you succeed in your second? What an excellent, excellent question. I would say the number one— it's going to sound kind of asshole-ish of me, but there's something to this— do a better job of vetting your partner. Not necessarily that they are good or bad, but that they are a good connection for You, uh, hindsight is always 20/20. We always look back on the past and go, huh, makes sense now, right? But in hindsight, I look back on my relationship number one with wife number one, and, uh, first things first, very little relationship experience. We're way too young to be saying you're my one and only from now until the day I die. We were still maturing, still growing, everything else. Number two, a lot of dysfunction in her relation— in her, in her family, rather. Which I sat back and watched and made me go, ooh, and that should have painted the picture for, dude, you're probably in store for a lot of what you're seeing here in your future. Didn't know that. I was very ignorant of that. So make a long story short, I don't like to throw my ex under the bus. It's not necessarily fair hearing one side of the story, whatever, but better job of vetting candidate number 1. So I took that into, you know, I guess the dating phase, if you will, of, uh, post-marriage number one, and really put women through the wringer. And there was a real, uh, there was a lot of moments there early on. I was, uh, getting to know people and, uh, there was some of those really tough moments of, I like you, we're really hitting it off, the sparks are flying, but I see this thing that makes me say, I can't do this. I'm sorry. Adiós. That was really, really tough early on. And lesson learned. I got better at it. And in hindsight, I look back and go, phew, that was good. I avoided some really big, big potential problems there with those potential candidates, relationship candidates. So anyway, so there's that part. Do your diligence up front. And then the more, I guess, wholesome, nice stuff would be the dating, staying connected to your partner. Relationship number one is like, we're parents now, done. Us as a couple, done. And it was just understood, that's just what you do. You just, you just set that nonsense aside— the dating, the romance, the staying connected. Yeah, no, you know, we don't need to do that anymore. And I remember even hearing overtly from people, like, I think my own mother at some point was like, you, it's important that you two, you two get out and do things, like, leave the kids with us or something like that. And I remember like Yeah, right. That's not gonna happen. And just poo-pooed it, right? And it was such solid advice. You have to stay connected in that way. And that is something that wife and I now, Natalie and I, really put a lot of effort into is it's not a question of are we gonna do date night this week? It's where's date night this week? Or date nights plural. Who's gonna watch the kiddo? Um, where and when are we going. It's just, it's, it's, uh, baked into our relationship. It's an integral part of our connection. It has to be there. We recognize that, or else you very easily drift apart. Um, I, I've mentioned here plenty of times in past videos that there seems to be a very natural mechanism amongst human beings that when we get together in a long-term monogamous relationship and have kiddos, there seems to be a very natural tendency to drift apart. The sex goes, the connection, the romance, everything just drips. And it's Mother Nature's way of saying, go, go make babies with somebody else. You know, we're supposed to proliferate our species and, you know, do that again and again and again. Well, we don't want to. We want to stay together. Well, it takes work. That's what I've learned in relationship number 2. This, this whole staying connected, staying romantic, sexy, connected, whatever you want to call it, takes work. And thankfully, I have a partner via the vetting stuff that I talked about earlier who is on board with that.
