Hey girls, look at this baby bump. I'm seriously gonna show you this every time
because I love it so much. Can you see it? Looks good. I can see it in there. Thank
you. I love it. We just finished our Instagram photo shoot for our Instagram
announcement of pregnancy and we had ice cream involved
because we're eating for three and ice cream is a big part of our relationship.
So while James is chowing down -- I didn't know it was in the freezer, so this is a
very special surprise -- like Christmas morning so -- so while he's chowing down on
that, we're just gonna have a short little chat with you guys impromptu
about dating. And the whole theme of this is: Should I stay with him or should
I go? Because you girls write in a lot of questions that are amazing questions
about boys that you're dating or thinking about dating and different
issues that you see in the relationship, and you're like, "Is this a red flag? Is
this something I should leave or is it okay? Can we work through this?" And I
don't like to give like super specific advice because I don't know you and I
don't know your boyfriend; like you really need someone who's older and
wiser in your life who knows you and your boyfriend who can kind of speak
into your relationship. But I did figured we'd take three of the commonly asked
scenarios and share our advice on these three specific scenarios in general, as
to whether we would stay or we would go. And the choice is yours alone to make,
but hopefully these thoughts can help you. So scenario number one. I love saying "scenario" (with soft "a").
Some people say scenario" (with hard a) and it sounds very nasily.
"Scenario" (soft a) makes me feel very British, I think.
Um shout out to Matt and Est, my friends from Great Britain. Where was I?
Oh yeah so scenario number one is: I've been going back and forth a lot with my
feelings for this guy, like some days I feel like yes this is perfect, this is
awesome, I want to be with this guy, and then some days I'm like, I really don't
wanna be with him, I don't think this is right. How do I know which feeling to go
on? Should I stay or should I go? And this is something that I experienced a
lot in one of my relationships when I was in my 20s and I was dating this guy and
he was wonderful. Like he treated me so well, we had so much fun together, we
talked about everything, like it was a really healthy, really good relationship
in so many ways, but I just like couldn't totally fall in love with him.
And we were dating for like a year and a half and I just felt like, "Why can I not
fall in love with this guy?" And I couldn't figure it out, why I what my emotions were
so up and down. Wo I decided to track them in a calendar, which I called my
"emolander" because it was an emotional calendar, and every day I would just put
like an emoji face on it that described my mood that day,
because I wanted to see like, is this correlated to like my period once a
month, or is this just like totally random? And as I tracked it I realized
that it was totally random. Like some days I really liked him, some days I
was indifferent, and some days I was like, I don't want to be in this
relationship. And it just went like that all month long for like two months. So I
was like, okay this is probably not a good sign. And so I was talking with my
friend Joel about it-- I'm talking a lot. If you want to butt it in any-- no no no no.
I'm engaged. I've also been like thinking about this every night and I just told him
about this idea five minutes ago and was like, "Want to eat ice cream and throw
in your two cents while I talk?" And he was like, "Oh my favorite thing, eating ice
cream. Sure." Pretty much. That's pretty much true. So my friend Joel I was
talking to about this; he was one of my really good friends at the time, and he's
like, "Tiff, if you knew that there was a guy out there for you someday who was
everything you'd prayed for. Not that he's gonna be like everything on your
checklist, but that he's exactly who God has for you and you're gonna be really
excited to be with him, would you still stay with this boyfriend?" And I was like,
"Not for a second. I would break up with him right now." And Joel was like, "That's
like telling because that means that you're walking by fear-- fear of being
alone, fear of not finding the right person, of you know never falling in love,
but God doesn't call us to walk by fear, He calls us to walk by faith-- faith that
He's good and that He has good things in store for us." And that was really the
turning point for me where I was like, you're right like I'm not in love with
this guy, I really don't even want to be with him, I'm just afraid of being alone,
and that's not fair to either of us, that's not fair to put him through that
emotional roller coaster, and so I broke up with him. Yeah I think that's really
good advice and what I think makes that so true is that you've been dating this
guy for like a year and a half. Yeah. So you really knew what he was like and he
really knew what you were like. That's a good point. A lot of times you have
these feelings at the beginning of a relationship and all that means is
one thing: Congratulations you're a woman. You will feel that way. And guys are gonna feel
that way too especially early on. I would say in the first three months, very
normal to feel that way. If you're dating someone you know, once you really get to
know them and they really get to know you and you're interacting with their
friends and they're interacting with your friends and you know your lives are
more intertwined, then when you start having this up and down, that that's more
of a-- that's when you should kind of probably ask yourself those
questions and talk-- talk to people who are wiser than you are, that are observing
you. That can be really helpful. They can never tell you what to do,
but a lot of times they can point you in good directions and they can help you
really understand what's going on inside.
That's so good. See okay how is it even fair-- I think about this for days and then you have five
minutes and you're not even thinking about anything but ice cream and you
come up with that. Great freezer-burn ice cream is powerful. No I hate freezer burn.
I will not eat any more of that ice cream. That's disgusting. More for me. It's been in our
freezer for like three months, and our freezer does not work well-- it's like
a freezerburn heaven. Whatever, it's ice cream. No, it's not ice cream anymore. Doesn't go bad.
So I hope that helps, so um if you've been with them a short time,
maybe try it awhile. If you've been with him a long time, personally I
would go, but that's just me. So scenario number two: This is a question we get a
lot is: My boyfriend struggles with pornography. Should I stay or should I go?
That's a great question. Personally I think that it depends on his attitude
toward the struggle and the extent to which he struggles with it. Here's what I
mean. So in our culture a lot of guys have
this very cavalier attitude, like oh I'm a man, of course I struggle with porn,
it's no big deal. Or you don't even use the word struggle. You're like, I'm a man, I
like at porn. Whatever. Yeah that's true. And that like
whatever or it's not a big deal attitude, that is a big deal. That's a very
telling sign. You want somebody-- I mean there's been a lot of studies done-- we've
talked about this in other videos-- about how much porn destroys relationships and
intimacy and your own life. It's an addiction.
You wouldn't marry someone who was addicted to crack. I hope not.
Yeah and so like if you --and so like it's really is a big deal.
But it is also a real struggle for guys. Like guys were made biologically to
want to see a naked woman. Like um girls we are hot, like our bodies-- or just any
hot woman-- yeah that's true, not even necessarily naked.
And so like porn is a real struggle and it's really easily accessible, so this is
something that a lot of really awesome guys do struggle with, but if they have
the attitude of like, "I want to honor God in my life, I have accountability in my life,
I have systems in place to work through this and to hold me accountable to
staying true to what I know to be God's way," um I think that attitude is awesome.
Because nobody you marry is gonna be perfect. Everyone's gonna have
a struggle of some sort. Or a lot of struggles. Yeah I think a lot of times it's
just-- I struggle with overeating. Case in point. Well you haven't eaten
very much yet. Well okay I take that back; you've been eating for a while.
But I think a lot of it is figuring out which struggles you can live with in
your spouse and also like how the person works through those struggles. Like
that's very -- the person's attitude is everything. If your
boyfriend has said, "Look I got to be honest with you, I do look at porn
occasionally," you know that's a sign of a person of character. If the way that
you found out about your boyfriend's pornography habit is you happen to look
on his phone or his computer and he was maybe even pretending that he wasn't
looking at porn, that is a big deal because that is a person who's trying to
hide their sin, who's trying to whitewash their their issues, and that is not good
because if there are some-- if that person is inclined to try to cover up issues
instead of dealing with them, there's gonna be other issues that they're gonna
try to cover up rather than dealing with.So really how they deal with
an issue like porn shows you how they'll deal with other issues in life. So it's a
great way to get to observe who this person really is, what they're like. The
other factor that I think is really important is the extent to which it has
impacted their life. Even if they do really want to get help, if this is
something that they're constantly struggling with every hour of the day-- I
know there are some people who porn has become such a huge stronghold in their
life, it's like they can't go a day without
being on there all day, forgetting about work, forgetting about their
responsibilities, like porn is their life. In that case I would leave, because even
if they're trying to get help, they need time to get help on their own. And yeah
that would-- what Tiffany is describing is the same thing as if someone is
legitimately an alcoholic or legitimately addicted to some other kind
of behavior altering drug. Like you do need you need professional help for
something like that. Yeah and I think like having friends is good, but he can't
do it for you. And you have to be able to see over a long amount of time-- not just
two month,s but like over a year or two years, like is he really making a
change in his behaviors? Do you agree with
that? Or maybe you don't need to quite a whole year but you need like some time. I
can't just be like, "I've been working through this for two weeks that's great!"
But you need more time than that to know if you really had-- I can even go two
weeks without eating ice cream. I mean can you really? Probably two weeks.
Probably not three though. Mmm. That's probably fair. Yeah anything else
you would say to that? No. Okay, last scenario. Scenario number three. I
actually don't know how often this one's been asked, this is not a popular one, but
it should be. It's really important. So what about my boyfriend really struggles with
money. He's not wise with his money or a good steward of it, he kind of just
spends on random things and doesn't keep track of it, isn't really good with it.
Should I stay or should I go? And I wanted to talk about this because I
think that money issues are a huge factor in a long-term relationship. I
think-- correct me if I'm wrong- I think they're one of the main reasons for
divorce in our country. Yeah depending on which statistics you look at yes.
They're a really big deal. So like the way you spend money is gonna
impact every part of your life really, and it shows how you'll be responsible
in other areas of life, not just money, and so I think that both for you and for
your boyfriend, that's something you should be working on growing in always,
whether you're single or dating or married. That's a really important life
skill to work on and one that we're often not taught. And if we don't see it
modeled when we're growing up, like we're not gonna know how to do it, so you're
gonna have to learn. So I know like the Dave Ramsey course has been helpful for
a lot of people-- his Financial Peace courses-- and
like getting even a mentor, learning how to make a budget, learning how to stick
to that, learning how to say no to items that seem really awesome and you want to
just buy them anyway, but say no. With that that boyfriend I couldn't decide
whether to breakup with-- the one issue in our relationship was money, and that was
part of the reason I felt comfortable leaving him is because he would-- I
remember him buying me this nice camera for my birthday and apparently he told
me later he'd found it originally in a different color and bought it and then
he found it in the right color and bought it. I was like, "Oh okay so you
returned the first one?" And he's like, "Oh no." He never returned it! It sat on his
bedroom floor and the bill for it sat on his credit card. And I found out that he
had so much credit card debt! And that's not-- that's not a reason to dump
someone in and of itself I don't think, like I've had credit card debt
in my life, like there's-- I think that's something that most Americans have had
at some point, but he wasn't working through it, he wasn't trying to get out
of it, he just kept buying and buying and adding to his credit card debt. And just
that that was very irresponsible. And so yeah, so I think that again it's their
attitude toward the issue. It's are they learning how to work through it, are they
taking steps to work through it, are you seeing real changes over time in their
lives? That's what you want to look for. It is a terrible terrible terrible
idea to marry someone who is poor, a poor manager of money. Now you can date
someone who's a poor manager of money, but you can't marry that person. So if
you want to get married to someone in the next couple of months or years
and they're a poor manager of money, they either need to shape up very quickly
or you need to find someone else, because that's a really big deal.
You know, you cannot be a man if you can't manage your money. You're still a
boy. Yeah I would agree. I know that sounds really harsh, but I think
it's just really true. You'll thank me later. Yeah for real though. So those are
our thoughts on should I stay or should I go -- so girls what would you do in
each of these scenarios? Sould you stay or would you go? Comment your thoughts
below. And if you want more boy talk, I actually have a whole book that I wrote
and it's called "Boycrazy: And how I ended up
single and mostly sane." It's written like a novel and it's really fun and easy to
read and I had so much fun writing it and it just includes everything-- all
the big things I learned about dating and singleness between the ages of like
17 and 27 and it's really fun. So if you want to check that out, you can get it on
Amazon or on our website which is linked up above. And I'll see you girls
next week. I love you all! Bye.