This is pod Popular podcast for the people, the Great Love Debate.
It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love Debate. It's a great loved base. Hi again everyone, it's Brian Howie. Welcome to The Great Love Debate, the world's number one dating and relationship podcast since twenty fifteen. I am in the very fine studios of Pod Popular. I am at the one in Scottsdale, Arizona. And as I told you, Scottsdale is an old term for bottomless mimosis. That's the etymology of the word Scottsdale. Somebody asked me a few
days ago. And it's amazing how many of these shows I start with somebody asked me the other day.
But they do. And that's how things get triggered in my head, because every great idea.
And every sort of great thing in every conversation or relationship starts that way with somebody asking something.
Somebody starts with a question, how are you? Who are you?
Will you go out with me? Will you marry me? Do you want this man to be your lawfully? What a husband? All of them, they're all questions, and they're all something that you can sort of look at as as a starting point. And what that starting point is and where it leads I don't know, but you always got to start somewhere.
So back to this starting point again.
Somebody asked me, they go, you say a lot of the same things over and over. Do you believe all of those things? They might have said that, or they might have sayd do you still.
Believe all of those things?
Because they're like, well, at some point you must have believed it, or he said it, I don't know, but did you still the things you say over and over sort of the tenets of this show?
Do you believe it?
And I said, of course, I answer that question with a question. I was probably defensively. I said, like, what, like, what do I say that you think I don't believe? And they said, well, we know you always say that women look for red flags and men look for green lights.
Do you believe that to be true? And I said, absolutely absolutely, I believe that's true, probably more than ever.
And then they said you say something like and they paraphrased me wrong and don't if you're gonna quote me, get it right. And they said, you say women want the men to try harder, men want the women to make it easier. Do you still believe that? And I said, I do absolutely, more than ever. And then they said, do you believe that being asked why you are still why are you still single? Is a compliment? Why are
you still single? Is that a compliment? Yes? I said, I said absolutely, for sure, there's no doubt that it is. If you're insecure about your own sort of single status and you don't like any inquiries about that, that's your problem. But the question itself, it comes from a place that there's actually a referendum on your desirability and you should embrace it as such. They don't ask why are you still single to people who don't seem attractive to date?
They don't so own it, accept it, deal with it, and thank the person who asks it. But next on their list, and they actually had a list. They got some of them wrong, but they had like this list of things that they have heard me say more than once. And I say, and I always say this at our live shows. I say, it's never that you haven't met the right person, it's always that you haven't been the right person. So they asked me if I still believe
that or if I do believe that? And then I said ugh, and here's why.
So I.
Say it all the time, and I still believe ninety eight percent of the time that's true. And when I say it at our live shows, there's always a reaction to it that people don't like to hear that because it puts the burden of their relationship status or lack thereof.
It puts it on them, and people don't ever want to take responsibility, even though if you take responsibility, that means you're in somewhat in control of the outcome, and being in control of the outcome is probably the best waited to get into a relationship or to be in a relationship. But a few years ago I did make a change to that, and it was subtle and people might not notice the difference, but I added an almost, I added an exception.
So now it's almost always that you haven't.
Been the right person, and that doesn't sound as good, and I don't like that it's like that and it's not as catchy. I love big blanket statements, I love wild generalizations, that's.
What we do here at the Great Love Debate.
But by adding the almost, it's a little more accurate. So what made me change that, Well, I did a show in Charlotte, North Carolina a couple years ago, and a woman at that show came up to me afterwards when it was over, and she said she just looked at me, and she goes, that wasn't true for me. And I said, what, which part of the show wasn't true for you? And she said that I hadn't been the right person, and so I said, well, what happened? And she looked at me very seriously, and she said,
I bet on the wrong horse. And when she said that, I was like.
You know what.
I knew exactly what she met by that, because I am a horse racing fan and I'm a gambler, and I like the way that she said an analogy that I completely understood.
I knew what she meant.
And I felt terrible for overlooking that exception, because it is real.
It's a real thing.
You put all your eggs in a broken basket that you may or may not be aware that it's broken, and sometimes years go by, and I have been the broken basket many times. I felt like someone I dated bet on the wrong horse, and that horse was me, and they kept waiting for me to get it or wake up or understand or change in some way. And you can say about anything and any relationship you know, whether it's working or not, well, that's dating, and that's
the luck of the draw. And that is true. But there's there's one exception to that, and it really hits harder for a certain group of people, and a certain group of people happens to be a giant percentage of the people who listen to this show. Lots of you listening to this are going to fall into this category of what we're going to talk about in the next couple of minutes. If you bet on the wrong horse
in your twenties, that's part of life experiences. Probably shouldn't be getting on a too long a ride in your twenties anyway, But if you bet on the wrong horse in your thirties, especially if you're a woman, it can be life changing and it can be fate altering, and it can be crushing. And so let me explain that
a little bit. So if you're a woman and you get into a relationship with a guy at say thirty three, you really have to get it right if you are going down the road with this, because if he is not the right herd horse, you better get off that horse.
Because if you start out at thirty three and three four five years go by and you haven't gotten married, or the relationship isn't where you want it to be, and you haven't started that family, and you just haven't gotten to the place of the happily ever after, and you come out of that relationship at thirty seven, thirty eight, thirty nine, that is an entirely different and entirely more difficult place to be.
If you want all the things you.
Wanted at thirty three, you do that at twenty three, and you come out of at twenty seven, it's the same. It's essentially the same. You come out of it at fifty three and you come out of fifty seven, it's essentially the same. But thirty three and thirty seven is wildly different. And I had one of those relationships. I think I actually had two two relationships where I gobbled up chunks of somebody's thirties. And that's not really my fault.
You know, I was who I was. But they bet on the raw on the horse, they bet on the Howie horse to be the right one that was going to go fifty years with them or go to the place they wanted to go. And maybe I wasn't emotionally capable at that time, or maybe I was just fine in a you know, B minus relationship, or I wasn't as serious about things, but they kept thinking that this was the horse, and you know, I wasn't who I wasn't, I don't know.
Didn't work out.
And this is always such a delicate conversation on this podcast, and I don't bring it up that often, even though it's really important because, like I said, as a really big percentage of the audience who tends to put blinders on and not pay attention to this. But it's deeply personal and a deeply treacherous area to get into. I don't want to hear about what you read in your egg freezing pamphlet. I don't want to hear about it.
And I don't want to hear about the outlier of the woman in your pilates class.
Who had twins at forty six, Like I.
Don't want to hear about it, because you're using outliers to choose your dating path, and that's not a wise idea. We talked about the generalizations earlier. The generalizations are because it is a numbers game and you got to play the odds, just like horse racing. So and I don't want to hear about pilates at all when it comes to this, because we had somebody on this podcast about six years ago and she's like, I'm fine, I can have kids in my forties because I do I do pilates.
And she's like, I'm like, your insides don't always match your outsides in terms of science and aging and fertility and all that kind of stuff. There is a lifetime of difference between thirty three and thirty seven with what we are talking about. And I know you guys know what we are talking about. Even the options in the dating pool get way, way smaller. If he's thirty seven and you're thirty seven. If he doesn't want kids or he already has them, you're probably a bit too young
because you still probably have a kid. And if he doesn't want kids, if he does want kids, I mean, you're in a position where you're not gonna have three. You just not and possibly not even one or two. And that's that's harsh. And people get mad when I say that, but that's.
A real thing. It is.
But this whole discussion that I'm having here, it's not about fertility as much. It's about choices, and anyone can make the choice to go all in with someone because you're betting on the pot of gold. If it works out, that's the upside, and it isn't your fault if it doesn't work out. And it wasn't wrong for you to believe with this person in the magic and the possibility and ultimately the outcome, and it wasn't out of the scope of reason to think that you were right and
it was right and he was right. And if I'm saying that, saying he I lost my train of thought and all that because I'm saying that if he's it, because it doesn't isn't much a big deal for the guys. That's why I'm saying that he it just isn't. Sorry, age doesn't matter nearly as much, and that probably is unfair, but it's I'm fair to pretend that isn't the reality.
You're being unfair to yourself and to learn how to do the to kind of deal with reality and avoid the painful pitfoollfalls of a four or five year situation that doesn't work out. You got to decide earlier if he wasn't ready or he's not ready with you. You got to get off the horse, or kick him, or train him, or speed him up, whatever it takes. You can't dick around waiting for him to learn how to be the right horse. It's your responsibility to recognize the signs. Who knows,
maybe maybe not. I don't know. So we're gonna explore this a little bit more. Sorry, it's not as fun a topic as we normally get into around here, but we got to earn the gambling money, so I got to take a quick break, and we will be back right after this, and we.
Are back to talk about literal horses.
As I said earlier, I'm a huge horse racing fan, so forgive the metaphors, but all the bloodlines and the breeding and the talent and the development in the world. The horse acts the part, he looks the part.
Maybe he just can't run. That happens.
There was a Kentucky Derby Winner war emblem. He won the Derby like in like two thousand and two. It's a shame that I know this. It's sad that I know this turned out to be a gay horse. He was gay, so they spent a lot of money on the can't test for that. They spent a lot of money on the breeding rights, and they just could not get him excited around the mares.
They just couldn't.
And you know, people paid a lot of money to try and breed this horse and breed with this horse, and he just didn't like the ladies.
Sorry.
So he had all the breeding, and he had the bloodlines, and he had the talent, and he had all of it and this didn't work out.
So somebody lost a lot of money.
Because he was a gay horse, which is fine, but they didn't care about him having a good relationship with a stallion. They wanted him to breed with the bears and it didn't work out. So sometimes they can't run, or they can't run far or fast, and that's not the fault of the owner or the trainer or the jockey.
They just couldn't see it, you know.
Or maybe they could, or maybe they wanted it to work out so bad because they had so much invested in it that they overlook the things that probably could
have shown up. Because once you've sunk an investment into it, whether you paid money for this or you put time into the relationship, then you tend to either overlook or blur the things that are important that are going to make you make a decision that you really don't want to make, which is, I don't want to do this anymore, I can't or this is not going the way I
want to go. And the more time and the more effort and the more money and the resources you put into it, the less likely you want to have that conversation with yourself much less the other person. So you know, you're kind of saying that you didn't see what you didn't want to see, or are you saying that there was absolutely no way to see what you were, what they were, or what they could be, or you were too deep into it, you know, except just go for it.
And I think that's what that woman was saying to me and Charlotte, like there was no way I could see it and at some point like I just had to go down this road and hope it works out, which is, you know, life is about ROI. It's not a sunk cost, it's not you know, diminishing returns. It's the need for a payoff. Every time you go out with somebody the first time, the tenth time a lifetime, you are looking for a payoff and that's hard for everyone to see and do in a moment, much less
a month or a year or an entire relationship. So we can't tell you to go for it at the Great Love Debate and then constantly tell you to be looking for a way out. That's a really really hard way to date. You can't sort of play it halfway. You kind of have to go for it, and sometimes you go for it and you continue going forward. And we've done a bunch of podcasts even this year about when's the right time to go out, and then we do podcasts that are like, well, don't get out and stay in and.
Work through it.
It's complicated. That's why we raise these questions all the time. That's why we never run out things to talk about, because there are a lot of layers and nuances entire conversation. So to bring it back to her comment to me, she did bet on the wrong horse, and it wasn't that she hadn't met the right person, And it wasn't that she hadn't been the right person. It just wasn't the right time and maybe it just wasn't the right fit.
And that's not wrong. We're not you know, we're using words right and wrong here, But just because it wasn't right doesn't mean it was wrong. There was a customer service phrase that it's not really that the customer's always right, it's that the customer is never wrong. And they're kind of the same thing. But you can look at them as, oh, yeah, I see that it wasn't wrong by her, it wasn't
wrong by him. I think I'm giving I don't know him, I'm giving Bete for the doubt here, and it wasn't wrong by them.
Se La V didn't work out. So this all started with a question.
And maybe you expect me to give you an answer about how to avoid picking the wrong horse. Don't ask me. I've probably been on two thousand horse races in my life, real ones, not metaphorical ones, and I've lost a lot more than i've won.
We all have.
And there's times when the horse doesn't win the race and you're like, you know what, that was the right horse. There's a bad ride by the jockey, or they got stuck in traffic or something happened. But you could still look at look at yourself and be like, you know what, I made the right choice. It just didn't work out that is a lot easier to live with than I made the right choice and it didn't work out, And God, I wish it worked out. God, I wish I could
do it again. And I don't want to know why it doesn't work out, and over and over and over, And that's conversation that we have because of the situation that we all have gotten into. That's gambling, that's life, that's love. And you don't want to phrase it like that's too bad.
It's not. It's too good.
That's why you keep doing it. You keep at it, and you keep hoping for the big payoff, and sometimes the odds are really really long, and sometimes the best one doesn't always win. You know, she thinks she bet on the wrong horse, but I don't think she believes that wasn't the best horse. Sometimes you do everything right and someone else ends up in the winter circle with
the garland of roses. So I'm grateful to her and apologetic to the woman who pointed that exception out to me to sort of my rule that night in Charlotte. And I should have been more sensitive to her reality and probably lots of people's realities. You know, I can't always get them right. And sometimes I err on the side funny, we're clever, sue me. Charge your money to go to these shows?
What do you want?
Try to entertain here? Can't always win at all. But at the end of the day, no matter how many times you don't come on top, you gotta remember you only gotta get it right once. So it doesn't matter how high the denominator gets, because the numerator that you are going for remains the same. One out of five one out of fifty, one out of five million. The one is the one that counts. Ride the one, bet
on the one. So I hate when people get asked about why are they're still single that I brought up earlier, and they say I was too busy focusing on my career, or this city sucks for dating, or I just haven't met the right person yet, because you almost assuredly have and either you didn't recognize that person, or you didn't act on that person, or you didn't appreciate that person,
or you weren't the right person. But sometimes the right person was simply the wrong time, and sometimes the wrong person was at the right time, and that's the wrong horse. She bet on the wrong horse, and she guessed wrong and hoped wrong and it just worked out wrong.
And lots of.
People have done that, and it doesn't make it any easier. But you have to be careful about when and how and how much you place with these bets. Life's a gamble. Loves a gamble. You take your shot, you hope for the best, because when it's the best, it's always the right bet. Keep chasing the payoff, go to the track, and you wonder why people keep at it, because that's the scary thing about gambling. When you get it right, it makes it worth It makes it all worth it,
and that's why you date. You're not trying to get twelve out of seventeen right, trying to get one out of seventeen right. If it's the right one, if it's the long term one, it's the lasting one. So yes, you can bet on the wrong horse, but mostly you're looking for the right horse, and you just got to be cautious and careful about when you do that and how long you do that, and who you're doing that with.
And you cannot overlook the aforementioned red flags, and you can overlook the clock, and you can't overlook where you are in your life, and you can't overlook where the other person is in their life, because you know, trying to hit two bullseyes is really, really tough in any aspect of life. But she didn't and it didn't work out, and God bless her, and I hope she's fine and
everybody else too. So a little bit of a rambling rant about this, but I was thinking about it because somebody asked me, and I was like, that is the one that I wiggled a little on, and maybe there's one hundred other caveats to that, and somebody will probably pointe out to me. I'll probably get emails from you guys to tell me one of those. But that's the one that stuck with me because of the way she said it and how she said. I'm like, you know what,
She's right, and I should have been more sensitive to that. Anyway, shoot me an email, Great Love Debate at gmail dot com.
I know you guys have a lot of thoughts on this.
You had a lot of thoughts for the last episode we did with Duran Yaffa, the divorce attorney, and I'm surprised at how many of you were divorced, or maybe I'm not surprised. About half our audience usually is divorced, But you guys send a ton of feedback that I'm gonna pass along to her and we probably do a follow up on that. Go to Great Lovedebate dot com. Check out our live tour schedule. There are live shows
coming up. We fired up the candle again. We are doing the Great Love Deboat on the High Seas in the Caribbean and I will have all the details from that. If they're not on the website now, they'll be on one of our socials somehow pretty pretty soon. And please like, share, review, follow this podcast. Your reviews mean a lot in the podcasting ecosystem because, as always at the Great Love Debate, we never stopped making love.
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