you love your boyfriend and he loves you but you find yourself increasingly
frustrated with him because he's not acting the way you want him to
he makes you happy in so many ways so why can't he just do the few things you're asking him to do
if he really loved you wouldn't he want to the answer in a word is no in this love you pondcast
i'm going to explain to you why the secret of relationships is not in getting your boyfriend
to change but in finding a boyfriend that you could fully accept stick around i'm evan marquez
dating coach for smart strong successful women and your personal trainer for love welcome to the
love you podcast keep listening to learn why he doesn't do what you want um when we're done i'll
let you know how you could apply to love you to create a passionate relationship that makes you
feel safe heard and understood i've been giving dating relationship advice for nearly 20 years
and i'm proud of all the women that i've helped and i'm proud of my marriage which is nearly 14
years old but it's one thing to give advice and it's quite another to live it and follow it so
i always like to talk about my relationships not because i'm a narcissist because i think
it's a window into reality um here's what a happy marriage looks like here's the stuff that happens
in a happy marriage and in my happy marriage we have a problem um i'm really uh critical
and i find flaws in my wife and i point them out and i need to get better so when i'm giving you
advice i'm basically giving me advice so my wife is a night person right self-defined night person
her mother is a night person stays up until two in the morning doing stuff my wife is the same way
i've never quite understood it um the consequences of being a knife night person or a self-proclaimed
night person is that she's always tired she's often late she often has to take naps during the
day because she was up until some peculiar hour like six in the morning the night before
and then she's always scrambling to get things done during the day because she's so tired
and took a nap and has less time during the day so again in my head it's more like well if
you're gonna stay up until three in the morning why don't you shave three hours off of that and
wake up earlier like why don't you just coordinate your schedule to be aligned with everybody else
um and it's not as easy as that i'm i'm learning um and this is we've had this conversation for 14
years i'm not breaching any any trust uh i could just as easily tell you about the things that i'm
doing wrong so i find it really hard to watch her the self-proclaimed night person who has to be up
at 6 30 to get the kids to school and not really be able to help her out right to to just watch her
what it seems like dig her own grave and suffer the consequences where she's got tears coming
out of her eyes because she's so tired and she's so harried and she's a stay-at-home mom and i pay
the bills i try to help her out but this is her this is her thing this is her life her choices
i can't help her suffering so fast forward to a week ago i went to a conference in half moon
bay outside san francisco the atlantic magazine it was called in pursuit of happiness and it was
psychologists authors writers scientists people are experts in the field of happiness and so i
find it personally really interesting about how i could be happier and how i could bring
that into my clients lives and so i'm watching gretchen rubin she wrote the happiness project
um she's got her own podcast she's super big and very beginning of her talk right first thing she
says is this i'm gonna quote we have to accept the fact that people are different and you can't
change them and she says this a night person is a night person it's genetic so instead of spending
time on right and wrong we should know ourselves and accept others and suddenly the light went
off after 14 years of marriage and doing all this coaching i run around giving dating a relationship
advice and i've spent 14 years trying to change my night person wife into a morning person
instead of fully accepting this part of her now take that right me and that admission
consider all the things that you don't like about your boyfriend or the guy before that again we're
not even talking about character issues lying cheating we're not talking about that we're
talking about this kind of stuff he's perpetually 15 minutes late he forgets his keys and his wallet
all the time he's piles of things around the house he doesn't really do any self-help or therapy
he doesn't make much money all of those things describe my life and i'm saying this as a guy
who hit the wife jackpot who knows it who brags about it and i'm evangelical that the virtues of
a happy marriage the problem isn't with my wife the problem is with me and i say that to you
for some reason you have a set of expectations that if he's the right person he'd think exactly
like you or do whatever you asked him to do he would just sort of iron out all of your his flaws
which again i'm not saying they're not flaws your observations about him are perfectly valid if we
were to create a person from scratch maybe he wouldn't have the characteristics of this guy
all right maybe i could smooth that out in my wife but none of us really want to be told to change
all right so if your ideal guy or not with this fantasy of a man is the one who's supposed to do
whatever you want him to do what kind of man does that what kind of man has no opinions
what kind of man is so eager to please you that he's going to throw out whatever he's
been doing on his own for the rest of his life just to think your way not the man that you want
right that's the hard part if if a guy just rolls over and says okay honey i'm not gonna be a night
person anymore okay honey i'm gonna suddenly be a neat person like that's not that's not realistic i
think of my parents marriage um which was a good good but not great marriage my mom wanted my dad
home from work earlier um he always refused and they always thought about it he would work from
8 30 in the morning to 8 30 at night his version of events was that he was providing for the family
and my mom's version of events was that he cared more about work than he cared about the family
and both of them are right and both of them are wrong in some way she's not wrong in thinking
he could have come home a little bit earlier from work where she is wrong is that she spent
30 years making him wrong having married a guy who's a workaholic and expecting him to not be
a workaholic feudally trying to change him when this is who he is and this is who he always was
i did a podcast recently with a therapist named caitlin cantor shout out to caitlin and
she said and i wrote this down because i found it interesting and relevant you don't have the
right to be angry that he thinks differently than you and he doesn't have to bend over
to do what you want the right man als wants to make you happy but he also has to have a spine
so what i tell all the women who come to me for coaching and love you is that you have a rule book
in your head and he hasn't read your rule book and yet he gets in trouble all the time for getting
your rule book wrong even though he doesn't know your rules and even though he may have his own
set of rules which are perfectly reasonable that are working perfectly fine for him so would you
want your man right or hypothetical man perhaps to criticize you for how you ate the food you
put into your mouth would you want your man to criticize you for how long it took to prepare for
a trip would you want your man to criticize your relationship with your friends and your family
would you want your man to criticize how you dressed of course not but you feel perfectly
comfortable telling him what to eat how to pack who he should hang out with and what to wear
and i'm not calling you out individually obviously i don't know you this is a human
tendency this is what we do so i'm gonna close on a story from a love you grad who posted
recently in our private facebook group that her loving boyfriend of a few years did something
that upset her the other day she asked him to put sunscreen on her and he did he slathered it on her
back and rubbed it in about 20 seconds which is certainly what i would have done that's how we
do it around the cat's household but my client was upset because he didn't put the sunscreen on
lovingly and use this sunscreen application as an opportunity to bond the touch and she asked
me in this group what i thought and i told her that it never occurred to me in my entire life
that i should be gentle and precise about putting sunscreen on myself or on anybody
else that it was something that i viewed entirely functional like picking up a heavy grocery bag or
something like that now my client who's great really she's amazing she gives wonderful advice
to the people who graduate love you she was smart enough to know that this was her issue
and that her loving boyfriend and he is loving in every way which is why they're together
his failure to massage her sensually while he applied the sunscreen was not indicative of how
much he cared about her and that if she asked him to put on sunscreen again he'd probably do it the
same way he did the first time even though she already said what she liked that's because he's
a different person than her and he values things differently it doesn't have to be a problem unless
she makes it into a problem so your takeaway from this podcast is ultimately about tolerance
love is about tolerance it's not about similarity it's not about the high highs and the butterflies
and the chemistry it's about tolerance for these differences fact is you're never going to agree
with any any one person on everything across the board what you want to do is find people where no
matter what your differences are you can agree to disagree and still love each other anyway
right in spite of the fact that you're never going to see eye to eye just as my wife don't
see eye to eye on so many things but still have a really wonderful marriage so it may be annoying
to put up with his way of doing things but just imagine how many things that you do that annoy him
that he puts up with and that's what allows you to be a successful couple so
do you find fault with the guys that you're seeing do you constantly muse in your head
about how you could change him if so please comment below i'd love to hear from you
my name is evan marquez thanks for tuning in to the love you podcast for more episodes like this
on youtube click on the subscribe button ring the bell and choose all
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more love in the world and if you want to have an easier relationship or at least easy enough that
makes you feel safe heard and understood look for the link below go to www.evanmarkcats.com
and watch my free video on how you can gain confidence attract quality men and fix your
broken man picker when you're done apply to love you to join hundreds of other smart
strong successful women from around the world in a coaching community where women
like you actually get the unconditional love that you deserve take care see you soon bye