So Evan is Evan our dating expert, our only male dating expert, Evan Katz, which we love because I love getting the male perspective is here. We're going to talk more about dating relationships the holidays, and he has a gift for all of you, which is amazing. So, Evan, what is your gift going to be today? This is exciting. It's a holiday, You're giving a gift.
I wouldn't get too excited about the gift, but it's the gift of knowledge. If you go to my website, Evanmarkatz dot com, forward slash just be, you could take a short quiz, like a really short quiz, and you will get an answer to the question have you been wasting your time on the wrong men? And I predict you will be shocked and appulled to discover that, indeed, you spent most of your life wasting your time on the wrong men. And I will continue to give you free dating relationship advice.
I need that, Okay, I need that quiz. Okay, great, Okay.
So I have been in a dating adventure era and I decided that I wasn't going to get serious at the earliest until.
Like the end of this year. Or the beginning of the of the of the next year, right, and I haven't.
I've like flirted with I've posted some like pictures of me holding someone's hand from behind and like the back of someone's head, but.
I have not people.
Despite what the media says, I'm not hard launched anything intentionally because I don't want any of my relationship life to be so public. But even like little pat nip and hints, just to make people that I'm dating feel like they're part of something and not like, you know, demoralized or like insignificant, I have posted like breadcrumbs, but but I've been I've dated for months and when I'm seen now, oh and like the truth that there have been people that I've dated that no one's ever seen.
And then there have been some people that I happen to have been a more public places or I want to go to an event, and it's that part sort of sucks when you're public, because a picture is worth a million words, like everyone. So my question is, I sometimes I don't want to like ever confirm or deny or launch or not launch, but I feel like I want to.
Why Why does Leonardo.
DiCaprio, for example, get to run around and like just be photographed with different people. But no one thinks he's marrying them. No one says it's like his serious girlfriend. No one says it's a hard launch. He's just like in pictures of people. And even if you took a picture and you saw a girl, wouldn't mean Leonardo DiCaprio
or any of these guys, you know, hard launched. And it like women get crystallized and reduced to like if she's in a picture with someone, it means they're in a relationship, because that's all women are supposed to want. Like we're not we're not. We don't get to be like guys. I could just be dating. I could just be dating. Why can't I just be a person that's out dating. But it has to be defined because that's the difference between women and men. Men get the fuck around.
Women have feel like they're begging to be married.
I agree with everything you said. It's a double standard, and you're in a very unique position where you can defy that and just say here's what I'm doing. I don't care what the world thinks, just the fact that you have you have to have a vocabulary for this death and and again I look at what you do
with great admiration. The idea that you have to launch your relationship publicly, that there's a pr campaign around that instead of just two people who take down their dating profiles and like each other and focus on each other, that there has to be a larger thing behind it. These are levels of complication that most people will never have to be faced with. It's like relationships. Finding someone you could spend all your time with for the rest
of your life is challenging enough. Now we layer what a lot of people do in your position. I'm going to remove you from it individually, but you know, public long distance, vast sums of money, individual business ventures, tons of travel. Think about just regular people, right, Doctors and lawyers live in their suburbs. Right. And now you're laying all this other stuff. And then you say, why is it so hard the life you lead?
Right?
This is Icarus stuff. I mean it is. There's zero value judgment for what you've created. And I would never want you to dim your shine. Just know this. These are very very unique issues that are faced by people who republic that regular folks don't have to deal with. And now, but a complicating factors.
No, But I always bring it down to the cul de sac.
If let's say that you're in the middle of the country or some in a cul de sac community, and you know, the husband breaks there's a divorce, and the husband goes off and he's dating different people.
He's sort of like a cat, and the women at the car.
Pool want him, you know, and all of a sudden, But if she's with someone, it means, oh, she found someone and she's going to get what she really wants, because women really want to get married again. Like it's just as a construct that's different for men and women. That's what I'm saying. Well, I have to talk about myself for celebrities as an example, but then I distill it because it's not relatable.
And I do think that most of these things can.
So it's not about someone who is on the cover of Forbes magazine, but it's about a woman who society is telling to become more successful and to be motivated and to want to go get it. But then you know, the dope who works at the car wash is going to feel intimidated. It always works, I think for.
It, I feel like you're getting a lot of power over to the dope at the car wash and what the people think. And again, I'm not in your shoes. So I would go back to the ceo intern metaphor. No one's telling you, as a woman what limits you should have on yourself. If you want to be alone for the rest, if you want to be Martha Stewart,
go ahead and be Martha's Stewart. Right. I have a Martha Stuart story which I won't tell here, but I like, but like, there's a very conscious choice to put that first in relationship second, and you will end up with great wealth, but you might end up lacking a certain amount of romantic love. And it's not bad and it's
not wrong. It's a choice I would tell any woman, no matter where you live, no matter what you do, no matter how old you are, I don't care if you're listening to Bethany and you make twenty one grand a year, Right, you were the CEO of your love's life. Men are the interns applying for a job with you. You hold that job open until you find someone who's worthy of it. Right, and you can do whatever you want.
You could cycle in turns out every three months, because that's where you're at in your life and that's perfectly good and no one has to judge you for it. When you decide you're ready to get serious, don't let someone occupy that space so you can. And I encourage women to be because most of the resentment I'm picking up is I want to date like a man. Great death, did he date like a man?
Okay?
So women's hiring how much you know, as a relationship in New York City apartment, you're not getting high ceilings, light, a bathtub, and space, like because you're the CEO, you're hiring an intern. Okay, how much of that job do they have to be able to do? What are women's expectations? Like if a man's going to be loyal, they're not going to cheat, they're gonna love you.
But they may have a definition that's different.
They may you may be dating they give bad text or they you may be dating someone divorced and they're always going to put their kids kids entirely first.
You might feel like your second fiddle or you're a stepmom.
And like whatever the so where is the where does the CEO decide who can fill that position?
And how much of it?
And what about Like you had if you had your last person build six of the points, this new person feels a different six, Like, how do you decide which six you want?
For example?
Oh wow, we're really going there today? I love it. Okay, there's no one size fits all answer. I mean, I try to give one size fits all answers because they make for a good copy. But generally we're talking about a feeling. People go for lists, but there the list they're going for ten to be the wrong list. And again I don't want to say there's one way to do it. Woman to say, I need him to be six feet tall, I need him to be colleg I need him that list. A lot of women have been
dining out on that list forever. And what is that led to? Dating guys who are tall, cute, handsome, successful who treat him like shit and they feel emotionally be raffed and unseen and unimportant and small and they can't set their boundaries and they can't speak their mind, and there's a lot of tension in those relationships. So I drive people not to a specific kind of guy, I just drive I drive people to a specific type of feeling. The feeling is for it, and it's not across the
board is safe, heard and understood. So we start there, Can this guy make me feel like I could be myself, let down my guard, know that he's I could trust him, that he's never going to abandon me, that he's not going to judge me, that we could repair conflict easily. Right, because a lot of women try to contort themselves to be with a certain kind of man. We want to get rid of that contortion. Right, If you're the CEO, you should not have to spend all your time walking
on eggshells about what the intern thinks. So we start with the feeling of safe, heard and understood, and then we add that's the floor. Then we need to add these other things on to that, and then we ask is it necessary? So I loved your New York City apartment metaphor the trade offs, Oh, I could live closer to Central Park, but it's going to be more expensive there. Maybe if I live, you know, Park Avenue, I can go up a little bit higher and be closer to
the subway. Whatever the hell it is, there's always a tradeoff. I think people tend to make the more trade off, the wrong trade offs. Men venerate youth and beauty above everything, and women venerate money and power over everything to their to their detriment. So it's not that you should stop
being attracted to the things you're attracted to. It's if a guy is in the ninetieth percentile of intelligence and income, he's a pretty solid guy, right, A lot of women would look past him because, as I said, you know I make five hundred thousand and he makes two hundred thousand, and that well, together you make seven and you could have a nice life. So I think once we get away from the dick measuring contest of who makes more money and who has more power, it's how do these
two people work together? It's the system you've built companies, Right, there's culture, there's a flow. So in a good marriage, there's a flow. And it's fundamentally easy. If you find you have to constantly negotiate all these little things, that relationship ship's gonna be torn apart, no matter how much you haven't come and no matter how amazing that first date was, no matter how amazing the sex is. I really work backwards from safe heard and understood, and is
this easy? Because if it's not easy, why are you still doing it?
How do you.
Advise women to operate and protect themselves. Around the holidays. There's a lot of emotion, There's a lot of expectation, balance, stress, New Year's Eve meaning placed on things that are just days, but they have meaning for people. How do you navigate that or tell people how to navigate that.
I think that I think holidays become a time of reflection. You can't avoid reflection, am I Where I want to be something about the combination of the family holiday Thanksgiving, Christmas coupled by New Year's Eve, which is often a couple's holiday where you kiss. So people kind of get in their heads around this time of year. It doesn't
have to be torture. You can surround yourself with friends and distract yourself with the fact that you don't have someone that you love unconditionally, or that you're not loved unconditionally. And it could also be a motivating factor to say, hey, next year, I'm going to be more intentional about dating and the kind of partner I choose because I don't want to be in this position next year. So you do not have to be you know, you know, like the Valentine's Day thing, you know, some sort of like
lonely hearts, lamenting what you don't have. You could go out and kick ass and have fun and go home with a stranger and that's perfectly great. And if that is not where you ultimately want to be, you could take steps forward to a more positive outcome because dating and relationships, we're proving it here are a skill.
Or even if you're melancholy and said, which is normal and reflecting, at least turn it into something good.
Like there have been people who get hurt and I'm like, okay.
Well, like drink green juices, like make it a health thing, Like do something, give yourself face masks, like every day what do something where you feel like you're making this hard time meaningful. So you're kind of saying you can't wrap yourself and bubble wrap. It may be challenging, but but make it into something meaningful when you reflect.
But and that makes love no different than anything else in the world.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, there's a lot of there's a lot of suffering. There's a lot of loss. You know people, I know people right this very second who are going through a divorce, who're fighting cancer. I'm speaking for myself right now, are going through you know, no people going through those things. I'm not going through those things, and they have to. It's hard not to let the dark cloud of negativity win. And so I think listening to two podcasts like yours, where you have a very can do spirit, you don't
let you know. You know you're tough and shit happen, so you don't let it get you down. You fight your way.
It could be that could be annoying now because then you're not Yeah, I know, it's like you're always managing something and you're always like versus like actually dealing with it.
So that's its own problem, that makes any sense.
It happened simultaneously, Yeah.
Solving something. I'm great at that. It's like you're always gonna be okay, I'm a survivor. But like it's not as it's better for people to just like be in it at least and have a feelings versus like manage it.
You don't always have to do something. Holidays can be a time for rest and reflection, and the new year is gonna come no matter what. Yeah, it's it's yeah, can take an argument. I found girlfriends three years in a row over December because everybody else is like kind of shutting down. Yeah, and I was like, you know what, I'm kind of lonely and I'm not wright.
I understand that too. That's funny you say that. I've heard that too, like thanks Giving and Chris. People are home, they're reflecting, they want it.
It's so true.
It's yeah. So sometimes if everybody's gonna dig, then you use that.
Yeah, that's the pandam was the pandemic. So amazing, awesome.
Walk back to, walk back to after, walk back to the after