Hey guys, welcome to another Ask Mark. Uh, if you missed last week, this is the video
segment where I just answer your questions, one on one, the comments you're writing, I
get to answer them personally and it's way quicker than me doing normal videos, which
take a little while to come out and produce and stuff. I can just pop the camera on and
answer your questions immediately, which is really exciting. So I picked a few for this
week and the first one comes from Angela and Angela says, Hi Mark, I'm so happy you're
doing Q and A's now. Thank you Angela. I'm happy I am too uh, as someone who's been single
all my life, how do I know if I'm finally ready for a serious relationship? Great question,
Angie, great question. Thank you for writing in.
This is a question I get a lot and a lot of women go, okay, I've been single for a while,
how do I know if I'm ready for a relationship? How do I know if I'm ready to jump to the
other end? And this is kind of the equivalent to you coming to me and saying, Mark, I'm
a, I'm a great accountant. I had been, I've been a great accountant for a long time. Uh,
but my passion is painting and I want to go, I want to become a professional painter, how
do I know if I'm ready to jump ship? And I say, well, have you painted before? What's
your experience in painting? You say, no, no, I never painted. Just just been an accountant,
so how do I know if I'm ready to be a painter? There's a middle ground there, okay? If you
were going to do that, you'd go, okay, I'm going to dabble in painting. I'm going to
paint on the side. I'm going to get my painting experience up before I go jump ship and become
a professional painter.
And the same applies here. See, a lot of women think of of dating the middle ground as like
a speed bump as like this annoying thing that you have to get through so that you can get
the relationship you want in the end. Dating isn't a means to an end. Dating is the end
into itself. It's like if you want a great body, if your goal is to have a great body,
you can have that goal, but the real goal is just show up to the gym every day. Okay.
If you show up to the gym every day, the body's going to take care of itself. Take this channel.
I don't set a goal to get number of subscribers like that's a nice result, but the goal is
to keep making great videos for you guys and do it every single week. If I do that, the
result is going to take care of itself.
So Nikki Goldstein has this great term here. It's called single, but dating, and that basically
describes the bridge between being totally single and being in a relationship. It's the
first step. It's the dabble. It's when you go home from your accountant job and start
to paint. Okay? That's much less of a big step and that's much less intimidating. And
when you're meeting men, rather than thinking, Oh God, is this guy relationship material?
How do I know to this whole, I think he is, now, I'm really nervous. You're just thinking,
Hey, I'm single but I'm dating. So I would change the question Angela to Mark. How do
I know if I'm ready to get out there and still be single but start dating and it's like,
awesome, awesome question. And look, if you're asking the question then you probably are
ready. There's, there's never going to be a perfect time, Angela.
There's never going to be a, there's never going to be a perfect time to get out there,
Angela. So you know what, if you feel like in your life, you're happy with where you're
at and you're feeling fulfilled and like you've got got stuff going on that you're doing for
you, get out there and get out of your comfort zone and do it. Start being single but dating.
Katie wrote in with a question too and Katie said, uh, did you see my email? Um, I'd like
to ask you about long distance relationships, how to keep a man thinking of you and have
him wanting to meet you again when he's far away? Okay. Really good question. Really good
question and long distance is is tricky business. Now I haven't done full videos on long distance.
I will have those come out, but here's a little snippet of sort of my thoughts on long distance.
Long distance - I'm not a huge fan of and the reason is as a dating coach, my goal is
to get you into a happy, fulfilling relationship with the right person. Not, not necessarily
with a particular person, because women come to me and they'll say, Hey, this guy treats
me like this. Let's say extreme example. Hey Mark, I really love this guy. I really want
to work with him. He's been cheating on me a lot lately, but I know there's a good side
of him and I know he really loves me. I'd be like, bugger that guy. I'm not going to
help you get with him. I'm going to help you get with someone who actually deserves you.
So for me it's about getting you the right person, not necessarily that person. And what
that means is that in long distance, you have to get to know people.
To, to know if they're the right person for you, you have to get to know someone, you
have to be around them, you have to spend time with them. You have to see them on a
bad day and how they act when there's stress and how they act when things aren't going
so well. All of this is impossible with long distance. Now that's not to say it can't work,
but a lot of long distance relationships start when you either meet online or you meet in
person for maybe a day or two, like on a holiday or something. And then it's, you go long distance
after that. You need to be around someone to know if they are compatible for you. You
just, you can't read that. You can't know if they're the right person for you without
being around them. And that's the hard part with long distance. So here's my advice for
today, Katie. The first thing is if you want to make a miss you and you want to have them
think of you, you've got to be talking to them regularly, once a week minimum, but really
twice a week you've got to be on the phone to that person for a reasonable amount of
time building a connection and building rapport.
Now the second thing that always comes up is how do I handle the status? The whole,
what are we thing? Exclusive. Non-exclusive. Here's my advice with this. Unless it's not
going to be very long unless it's only going to be a couple of months before they are in
your physical vicinity. It's going to be really hard to be exclusive and the reason is it's
the old saying, if you cage a bird, all of us would just fly away. If you let the bird
fly free, it always comes back and so if you have no opportunity, if there's no future
of this guy coming to visit you and being in your physical proximity, then what you
want to do is build rapport and build attraction the time he's away and not necessarily cage
him up because if you try and cage him, he's just going to want to repel from you and run
from you and you're going to be wasting your own time because you're investing in someone
and committing yourself to being at least mentally exclusive without knowing if he's
actually worth it cause you haven't spent time around him.
So when you don't try and cage him, instead you're on every Skype call, you're telling
him about your great day, your salsa class with your friends, your beach trips with your
other friends, uh, the way you've been working on your goals. When you're doing all that,
that guy's constantly going to be thinking about you and wondering why is this woman
not trying to cage me? Why is she so cool and relaxed about all this that she's not
trying to force me into exclusivity? He might hook up with other girls, yes, but he's always
going to be thinking about you and missing you and wondering how your value is so high.
So when you do actually have the chance to be in person, whether it's six months, 12
months, whatever it is, when you do have the chance to be in person together, he is going
to want to make that work and he's going to want to invest.
Yes, it's not, it's not much fun in the short term to have, to be thinking of him with other
people. But in the long-term it's the best way to build attraction and make him miss
you. Okay, and final question today is from Tricia and Tricia writes in, my ex broke up
after nine years of being with me and then he dated someone else for two months. They
broke up and he is now telling me he would want us to have space and just needs time
for himself before breaking up. I gave him a suggestion. I said, let's have six months
space instead of breaking up. And he chose breakup, says a lot. Now his rebound has failed.
He is turning it around that he now says we have having space. Uh, we have three more
months left out of the six. This guy.
I feel confused and not sure how to handle this as you should. He told me that if the
rebound had worked, he would have moved on and during that, he would've moved on. So,
Oh sorry. You know, you're my back, I would have gone to this other one, but uh, no sheesh,
that didn't work out. So now you're my backup plan. Uh, then he asked if he would find someone
if I would still be friends with him and I said no bloody oath. I told him, I suppose
I'm the one who finds someone, uh, and he said that's what he's afraid of. That he would
fight for me. Right. So this guy's only willing to fight for you when you have someone else,
that speaks volumes, Tricia. I'm just confused because he didn't give me nothing concrete.
If we will be back together.
Tricia, this guy has basically gone off and dated someone else after you try to make it
work. And then he said, Oh sorry, sorry that didn't work. Can we actually do that thing
we said before? I kind of liked the idea of having a backup, but but give me three months.
Just just put your life on hold for three months while I go and sort out my shit. Tricia,
you can have as much space as he likes. He can go take three months. He can take three
years. He can take 30 years. But do not put yourself on hold for someone who clearly sees
you as an option rather than the person who wants. And for someone who thinks they can
just disrespect you by putting you on the back burner. Bugger that! This guy's either
in or he's out and by these actions he is out.
This is like, this is not cool. Don't ever be someone's option. You are worth so much
more than that. You are worth so much to the right person and you never ever sit waiting
being someone's backup plan while they make up their mind of what the hell they want to
do with their life. Tricia, get away from this guy. The only thing worse than spending
nine years with someone like this is spending 10 years with someone like this. Now who knows?
He may get his shit together and he may, uh, in a year's time he may say, okay, I've actually
figured out my life. And who knows? He may put in the effort and you might just happen
to be single at that point and things could work out in the future, but do not put yourself
on hold for this guy right now. His actions are communicating utter rubbish and you're
worth so much more than that.
Well ladies, thank you again for tuning in. Make sure you post all your comments. Again,
I'm doing this every single week and it's really exciting. So post your comments, all
the videos, I pick them from all the videos and of course, even if I don't do yours on
video, I am going to answer it in, in the videos, in, in, sorry, I'm going to answer
it on the channel myself. So make sure you subscribe, share the channel with your friends.
Let's, let's get more people on here. Let's get more involvement. The bigger community
we build, the more we can spread positive self esteem and the message of you are worth
right around to, to women right around the world. Thanks again for watching. Make sure
you hit the subscribe button. Pop a like on the video, post your comment. I can't wait
to hear from you and I look forward to chatting to you all next week. Bye guys.