Top Questions for 2024!

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If you guys don't know me, my name is Ralph Brewer, and I've been putting out content under the Dad Starting Over brand, if you will, for over a decade now. It started off a few years of doing a blog, which resulted in a book, which got a lot of attention, sold a lot of copies of that book. That book is called The Dead Bedroom Fix. It's on the topic of sex and marriage, and it's a book for men and talking about things that you can do to improve your potentially sexless marriage situation. Um, that book was so successful that the third edition of it just came out in 2024. I've written 3 other books, including Red Flags, Divorce Panic, and Real Talk. And all those other books, their sales combined don't equal that of The Dead Bedroom Fix. So you can see what a huge deal it is to a lot of men and why I sold so many copies. But the success of that book allowed me to create a members-only group. Uh, we have coaching, myself and there's other guys on the team that provide coaching or mentorship to guys from around the world. Our members-only group has over, uh, over 700 members from around the world. And you can learn more about myself, read articles, videos, get my books, join the group called the Brotherhood, all at help4men.com. Help4men.com. In the last 3 or 4 years or so, I've really put a lot of attention on video because I could write an article and several thousand people can, you know, read it, or I create a video and several million people can view it. You could see where I should spend most of my time. So because I put out so many videos on a daily basis, I get a lot of messages from people, men and women alike, A lot of questions come in via, you know, email or Facebook Messenger or Twitter or Instagram. And I thought it'd be fun and kind of interesting to compile the most common questions that I receive for 2024 as we're coming up to the end of the year here and answer them for everyone. So here are the most common questions that I have received in 2024. Number 1, how soon should I expect change from my spouse? What this is referring to is, and this mostly comes from men, but I put in a lot of work into myself, into my relationship. I'm, I'm doing all these things to give and give. Basically, when do I start getting back in return from my spouse? When am I going to see real change from them? And again, this usually revolves around the sexlessness part of the marriage. So I've had some guys that are like, you know, we've been completely sexless, touchless, everything else for like over a decade. I'm doing all this work that's outlined in your book. How soon until my wife changes? And I say, you know, look at chapter 7, dude, of the book. Just spoiler alert, the chapter 7 is basically, you may do everything in this book and it may not change a damn thing. And there's a concept called Occam's razor, which basically says when you eliminate all other factors, usually it's the simplest thing that is the solution. And for a lot of guys, the simple solution here is, dude, you just married the wrong woman. You should have never got with her in the first place. And these guys know it. They're just kind of in denial. They really don't want to break up a family. They don't want to have to deal with the fact mentally that, oh my gosh, you know, 20-some-odd years ago I married the wrong person, and I've known it for 20-some-odd years, but I've been basically too scared and I didn't like myself enough to leave. And they're, you know, throwing a Hail Mary by buying books and courses and, and watching YouTube videos and podcasts and all this stuff— things that I put out, by the way. And I thank them. I say, you know, thank you for, you know, basically putting money in my pocket. I appreciate it, but I'm not going to take more of your money and sign you up for some multi-thousand dollar boot camp and all this other garbage just so the end result is the same, which is it takes two to tango, dude. And if your wife doesn't want to make real change and, you know, come over the bridge, so to speak, to meet you, um, then it's just not gonna happen. She has to have that drive within her to say Yeah, I got some issues here I need to work on, and I want to work on this relationship. I love my man to death. But when you don't see that for 10, 20 years, it ain't gonna change just like that, no matter what you do. Another common question that I receive from my viewers and followers out there, and this one comes from men, they are newly in the dating market post-divorce and they're getting nothing out of it. They create online accounts, they go out in the real world and try to meet women. And sometimes these men say, it's been a year, it's been 2 years, it's been more, and I've really tried. And I can't get a date. And a lot of women hear that, kind of roll their eyes like, oh yeah, right. No, this is a very big chunk of the population out there. A lot of men have been stuck in long-term monogamous marriages and basically kind of lost their step as far as the mating game is concerned, the courting process. They really don't have much in the way of charm, conversation skills. They let themselves go physically. And in their defense though, what a lot of them do is by virtue of my material and others, there's a lot of YouTube videos and so forth on physical fitness. So it doesn't take much to learn, eat this, don't eat that, take this supplement, take this drug or whatever it may be, and you can look like a Greek god. And some men genuinely get there. You look at them and go, holy crap. But even those guys, they don't get anything. Some of them, that was the missing ingredient, the physical, and that allows them to be more confident. They get more attention by virtue of the fact they look a lot better. And, you know, combine the confidence with the attention and some of their social anxiety goes down, and voilà, they're off to the races. While others, it's they take care of the physical, they look a lot better, but there's still that insecure little dude inside. There's still that socially anxious guy who just can't talk his way out of a wet paper bag. He just doesn't have those skills. He's plopped in front of somebody at a bar, at an event, and he doesn't know how to get a conversation started. He doesn't know how to ask questions, and it's not good for these guys. So for those guys, I say it's a matter of probably some type of mentorship, working with other men, not necessarily like in a strict, you know, pickup artist type of thing, but just hanging around other men. And by virtue of like osmosis, you know, learning from them, other guys that are more social, have lower anxiety and so forth, and getting out with them and, you know, buddying around with them, getting out on your own over and over and over again. This is something that takes time. And just like everything else in life, it takes reps, repetitions to get better. Like working out in the gym, you don't start with 225 pounds on the barbell and rep it out 20 times. You start with just the bar and you do that a few times until it feels comfortable. Then you put a little 10-pound plate on each side. You do that a few times until it feels comfortable. And then maybe years down the line, you're putting two 45-pound plates on each side, 225 pounds, and you're repping it out. You look back and go, man, I remember not too long ago I could barely do the bar. Yeah, because it took a lot of repetitions and going in and out of the gym week after week after week after week. This mentality applies basically to everything in life. And yes, even the romantic department. It takes practice. There's no such thing as a natural. Every woman seems to be attracted to and seems to want a person who is a natural at this charm game, at this being a genuine, good person, also charming, also good looking, also successful, just seems to— everything seems to click for him with very little effort. That is very attractive to women. As soon as they pick up on you're kind of faking it, you're not being your true genuine self, then that throws off kind of warning signs in them. And they're like, this may be dangerous, I guess, for lack of a better word, to be with a person who's not really what they're showing. I better keep my distance. It's a very natural, normal, and healthy reaction to that. So it may be for some of you guys, you're trying, but you're still on that kind of fake it till you make it stage. And people can kind of see through you. They can see your social awkwardness. They can see that you're— something's not quite right. And how do you get over that is that you do it, oh, I don't know, 900 more times. And if that sounds like, dude, I'm out, I'm just being honest with you. That's what it takes. Over and over and over again. I used to be way more socially anxious than what I am now. And, um, I used to be the type that— it's still somewhat— if I don't know you, I really don't do a lot of small talk and all that stuff. It's once I get to know you that I open up, and then people are like, you're way more funny and normal than I thought you were. I've learned that that's not necessarily fair to myself and to others just to be so closed off until they earn my trust, so to speak. It's like, no. So I open myself up. Who are you? What do you do? What are you doing here? Who are you here with? Who's your husband? Who's your wife? Whatever, you know, whatever it may be, and get the ball started. And now I've become a pretty good conversationalist. That took time, a lot of time, and divorce. Divorce helped too. Here's a really common one that I get all the time. Why do you talk so much about sex and dead bedrooms? Again, the book I mentioned, The Dead Bedroom Fix. I used to write a blog back in the day, some 10 years ago, and I wrote on a variety of different topics. And would you know it, the only time my writing got any kind of attention was in regards to sex and marriage talk, or dead bedrooms as the internet called it. I didn't coin the term, that came up, I think, my searching on Reddit or whatever, there was a subreddit or forum dedicated to dead bedrooms that was back then very active and is still to this day extremely active. And so the book is basically my thoughts based on my experience and the experience of others on how to potentially fix that situation. And that book again took off and is way more popular than any other topic that I've ever talked about. And that trend carries over into the video world. I have done videos on physical fitness, financial stuff, career type stuff, friendship stuff, cultivating friendships, parenting, divorce, you name it, I've talked about it. And there are two topics that move the needle, so to speak, more than any other. In second place is women and infidelity. And in first place by a long shot is marriage and sex, more specifically the lack thereof. So being a smart business guy, yes, there's, you know, I got to keep the lights on. There's a I have to— I have a big nut to cover, as they say, every month to keep this whole thing going. And if I want to get attention via social media, which allows me to earn dollars from these social media platforms directly— YouTube and Facebook, for example, sends me money, or Meta instead of Facebook because that encompasses Instagram and Facebook— they send me money every month just for posting and getting more and more people to be active and communicate. So the further my reach is on these platforms, more money I get in return. So that incentivizes me to talk about things that people want to hear about. And so people want to hear about dead bedrooms. People— I say men want to hear about dead bedrooms. That's my audience mainly. So I'm going to talk about it more. And by virtue of the fact that these are really popular topics, even though let's say on one week I will talk about parenting, divorce, custody, physical fitness, oh, and dead bedrooms, Facebook, YouTube and so forth picks up on, well, we have all these other topics, they don't really get much attention, but the dead bedroom one got a lot of attention. And it puts it more so on your newsfeed within your algorithm because it's popular. And therefore you see my dumb bald head talking about dead bedrooms all the time, ignoring the fact that I'm also talking about those 5 other things. So hence why that's the only thing you see and why I get all kinds of messages saying, why is it you're only talking about sex? Honestly, I prefer not to. I would like to diversify, talk more about physical fitness, for example, and health. As a guy who's 50 years of age almost, it's important to me to, you know, keep this engine running as smoothly as possible. But that doesn't seem to be very interesting to many people, and it's also kind of a saturated market, saturated field. There's a lot of people talking about physical fitness, so it is what it is. Here's the last one we will do. This is a common one, unfortunately. Why do you seem to hate women so much? I have some pretty regular female followers who comment on my stuff quite a bit, reach out to me via Messenger and stuff. Hearing me say that this is a common question, those women will probably go, "What? Really? No, not you." If we were to summarize what it is that I talk about, all these different topics, dead bedrooms included, if we were to summarize all of it, put it under a category, I would say it's probably relationship talk. More specifically heterosexual relationship talk. Being a hetero dude, I talk about men and women and how they differ and come together and all this other good stuff. What I have found is in the world of relationship talk, men and women both are very, very sensitive. Admittedly biased point of view as a dude, but I would say even more so the women are more sensitive to very straightforward kind of factual cold scientific kind of data-driven talk. Here's an example of the sensitivity that I'm talking about and how it can kind of warp your perception, uh, about this whole game in general, about me and my content specifically. So I will say something to the effect of the majority of murderers, even like serial killers, rapists, people who commit sexual assault, uh, all these terrible things, right? We know statistically that it's men the majority of the time who are committing these acts. Now, when I say that, there are some men that go, "Whoa, hey!" But for the most part, what men say when confronted with this evidence is, "Yeah, that may be true, but that's not me, and that's nobody that I know. I don't know anybody who's a murderer, rapist, and sexual assault person," or whatever it is. We may, as men, um, be overrepresented in those circles, but that's still the minority, very small minority of men, and it's nobody that I've ever come in touch with, and it's certainly not me. Now, if I go to the ladies and I say, and ladies, you've heard all this stuff about the men being rapists and serial killers and murderers and all that other stuff. For you ladies, here's a little nugget of info. Um, did you know that there are 5 personality traits One of them is called neuroticism. For oversimplification, it's kind of a propensity for negative thought. Somebody who is more apt to be anxious, depressed, ruminating on things, finding life kind of difficult to deal with— a real glass-half-empty type of person ranks higher in trait neuroticism, to keep with the psychological vernacular. Now, if we were to give personality tests to people, you know, it's like a parabola here. The average— most people fall like in the average so-so category. Some are— the tail end over here is not really neurotic at all, and then the other tail over here is really extremely neurotic. Those that are really extremely neurotic, if you will look at who ranks the highest, it's like almost all women. So with that being said, if I were to be a betting man and have a couple in front of me, man and woman couple, or, you know, an auditorium full of couples, if I were to put up all my money that I have and say I have to bet on men or women, which ranks higher in neuroticism, who is the most neurotic, I better put my money down on women if I want to win. That's just what the data shows us. So here I am saying men, mass murderers, serial killers, rapists, men go, yeah, Sucks, but that's not me. Women, high in neuroticism, negative thought. The women's initial reaction is, go to hell, who are you, this is nonsense, this is misogyny, this is sexism, you have no proof of this. Even though, you know, countless studies, Googling, every psychologist in the world will tell you he's right, ladies. The point I'm making is that even with something as relatively innocuous, especially when compared to the super violence over here on the men's side. When I point out something on the women's side that is just like a personality trait, for example, sure, it could be construed as not the most positive thing in the world, but it's certainly not— it certainly doesn't garner or warrant the reaction that I get from a lot of ladies, which is absolute vitriol. Women tend to be more sensitive to criticism, for lack of a better word. I've done a lot of videos on If I go to men and say this, and women and say this, the exact same thing, men tend to respond more positively than women do. For example, your looks bother me, I'm no longer physically attracted to you. A lot of men said, I will jump to attention, thank you for telling me, I don't want to lose my husband— my wife rather, and my family. While women say, go F yourself. Another video saying, your attitude stinks, you need to fix yourself. Most men say, got it, I hear that all the time anyway, not a big deal. While women say Go eff yourself. And then I create a video saying, just in general, there's something about you— attitude, looks, just something I'm not quite happy with. Men say, what exactly is it? Tell me so I can fix it. Women say, go eff yourself. Not all, but I, you know, I tabulated all the data and it shows that majority of women are negative, you know, my definition, more so than positive when it comes to those criticisms. Now what a lot of women say is it's all in the presentation. We women are far more sensitive. We need far more nuanced, soft criticism and feedback. Don't come to us saying, "Your attitude stinks." Come to us saying, "Dear, I'm worried about you. Is there something that I can do to help you?" Is there something— you know, you get the idea. That carries over into criticism of me, all my videos. So if you're pretty hypersensitive to direct science stats kind of talk, which it seems a lot of women, not all women, seems like a lot of women are, then the knee-jerk angry response is he must hate women, which is far from the truth. There are a lot of women that I, uh, respect a great deal. The pretty much all my professional types that I look up to in this world are women. Um, Esther Perel, my friend and a person I look up to a great deal. Uh, Dr. Samantha Rodman-Whiten, Dr. Psych Mom, check her out. Who else is out there? Helen Fisher is an anthropologist who is very, very popular in our sphere of relationship talk. Wednesday Martin, Dr. Wednesday Martin, has written some controversial books about open marriages and female sexuality in general. Emily Nagoski has written a book called Come As You Are for women, a big giant Bible about women and sexuality. Again, these women way smarter than I am, way more educated than I am, have a lot of letters after their name that I don't have. I'm not a professional anything in any way. So I look up to them a great deal, as well as some men like Dr. Robert Glover, author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, Dr. David Buss, and on and on and on. So to throw out a, you know, a blanket statement of he hates women, it's nonsense, really. So guys, those are the most common questions that I receive. I should, you know, I say in 2024, those are pretty much the common questions that I've received over the past, you know, 5, 7 years or so since the book came out. And I get a lot of messages from, from people. So guys, keep the messages coming. I do respond, or I try to at least. Every now and then I'll miss one, but because they come in so, so often, but I try to respond to every single message that I receive. You can send me a message on Facebook. That's a pretty quick way to reach me. Go to the Dad Starting Over page. And fire me a message there or shoot me an email at ralph.b@help4men.com. And if you're wondering where the Help for Men thing came from, this is also another question that I get often. We decided earlier this year, 2024, that we need to come up with a brand and move all of our business under a name that is more inclusive than Dad Starting Over. I'm keeping Dad Starting Over as kind of a content creation name. I may have more different names in the future here, but All of our business, the books, the courses, the community, the brotherhood, um, everything is done on our events and so forth. Everything is done under the Help for Men brand. That's far more inclusive, far more appealing to the general public. And because of that, I've gotten attention from the mainstream press. I've done interviews with New York Magazine, with News Nation, with Forbes, because Help for Men sounds a lot more legitimate than Dad Starting Over. And you go to helpformen.com/articles and you can read all kinds of free articles and see videos on there. And guys, uh, we're going into 2025 right now as I create this video. Um, a lot of you need help, and there is absolutely, positively zero wrong with that. It's, uh, you know, anybody who's ever excelled at anything at any point in their life has said, "Help." They go to a mentor, they go to coaches, a team, or something. It helps them get over the hump and expedites their, uh, achievement way more so than if they were doing it on their own. They can make a thousand mistakes when they do it on their own and say, oh man, I wish somebody had told me this. Or they could just go to the experts right away and say, what do you guys think about this? That's what our group is, the HFM Brotherhood. Learn more at help4men.com/join. Help4men.com/join. And if you're a veteran, you can get in for basically pennies a day, and you get all kinds of benefits including our live Private discussion forums on Facebook and Discord, our live Zoom meetings, of which we have like 6 to 8 live meetings every single week except for holidays. We record all the meetings. We have over 1,000 hours of meetings that are recorded. You get all my books at no extra charge, the ebook as well as the audiobook format. We get together in person. The coaching that I mentioned is way cheaper for members than it is for the general public. Courses, some of which are free, some of which are a few bucks, and on and on. Lots of cool stuff. So check it out, help4men.com. Or go right to help4men.com/join and check out the HFM Brotherhood. All right, guys, I wish you all the best. Happy New Year, happy holidays. Let's make 2025 a good one, shall we? Reach out if you need anything, Ralph.Brewer@help4men.com. Thanks, guys.