This page holds seven lessons about marriage that I recorded as a husband: how to be kind to your spouse every day, what to do when you're angry at them, how fantasy gets into sex, what the numbers say about married people and sex, and how I tried to be a good husband while my wife was pregnant. It is what I practiced and believed at the time, in my own words.
I recorded these between December 2014 and August 2015, when I was married. That marriage ended in divorce in December 2025. I'm a single dad of two in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I've been dating again. I'm leaving the lessons exactly as I recorded them, as a record of what I did and believed as a husband then.
In lesson 29, "Fall in love with me every day", I say that a good relationship comes from doing a little every day, and I compare it to making video lectures a few at a time. I aim for at least 10 nice things a day. Over a year that adds up to 3,650, against 2,600 if you do nice things in bursts about four days a week. I also say you need a ratio of at least seven to one of good things to bad, and I try for 10 to one.
Lesson 30, on having a happy marriage and being a good husband or wife, is one exercise for the moments when I'm angry at my wife. I notice it, take responsibility for my own feelings, and remember my mom saying she would give anything for another day with my dad, even a bad day. I tell the story of lying on the couch angry for two hours, then crying, then leaving my wife a loving voicemail.
Two lessons are about sex within marriage, and I keep them plain. Lesson 31 is about fantasy. I describe how years of sexual fantasy alone carried into my relationships, how it left me thinking about other people while I was with my partner, and what I did to stay in the moment.
Lesson 32 is the short one. I say marriage depends on who you marry, and that the right person makes it a team while the wrong one makes it miserable.
Then lesson 33 goes through survey figures. It says about 40 percent of married people have sex at least twice a week, against 20 to 25 percent of singles. It also says 72 percent of single women over 30 reported no sex in the last year, against about 6.5 percent of married women. The lesson doesn't name the survey.
The last two lessons were recorded on the same day in August 2015, when my wife was close to delivering our first baby. In lesson 34 I say the first thing I do as a husband is take care of myself: eating, sleep, water, a daily meeting, time with friends and her family. Lesson 35 continues with tracking my food for nine months, exercising 30 minutes a day, and leading by example. It also covers praying to be a good husband, apologizing first, and why every single moment we have is precious.
This is the last part of the course. The part before it is Second Date Guide: Build on the First Date or Let It Go, and the course starts at How to Date, Fall in Love, and Live Happily Ever After: Start Here. I now work with people one on one as a dating coach.
On this page
Every lesson is below in full, in course order, each under its own heading.
- 29) Fall in love with me every day! The power of doing nice things every day (January 19, 2015)
- 30) How to have a Happy Marriage + How to be a Good Wife and Husband (March 17, 2015)
- 31) What is fantasy, how it hurts sex with your partner and how to stop fantasizing (January 24, 2015)
- 32) Marriage is about the person you marry (December 29, 2014)
- 33) Married people have sex more and enjoy it more (December 28, 2014)
- 34) How to be a good husband or wife especially during a challenging time part 1 (August 27, 2015)
- 35) How to be a good husband or wife especially during a challenging time part 2 (August 27, 2015)
29) Fall in love with me every day! The power of doing nice things every day
From my video published January 19, 2015.
For having a wonderful, happy relationship, the key is doing a little bit every single day. So make me fall in love with you every day, a little bit. I heard a friend complaining a few years ago that his wife wanted him to make her fall in love with him every day. He found it frustrating because whenever he tried some grand gesture, like doing something really nice for her, he expected a week off, so to speak, where he didn't have to try very hard. Here is something I can show you that will help put that in perspective, using two other things.
Doing a little bit every day adds up
Here is how I do my work every day. I make video courses, and I try to do a little bit every single day. I was tracking my lectures over the last month and a half, and when you go down to January 18th, which is today, I have made 200 lectures in a month and a half. That is over a thousand minutes of HD video, which is over 10 hours of HD video I have created. Now, if you told me to go create 10 hours of HD video, that sounds overwhelming. But if you tell me to do a little bit every day, to go make a few lectures every day, that sounds really easy, doesn't it? All I have to do is get up in the morning, do a few lectures first thing, and that's it. It quickly adds up to a huge total. Marriage and relationships are the same way. Doing a little bit every single day is very powerful.
Let me show you what happens on days like this. Days where I do nothing bring the average down a lot. I had five days where I went and visited my mom, and I was still working on getting my lectures set up so I could do them every day. So let's look at the average. Without those days the average is 5.8 lectures a day. With those days included, it is 4.7. In about a month, having five days where I did nothing drags the average down by an entire point. That is tough. And days where I do 14 lectures don't make up for it very well, because then I got burnt out that day. My dad often did the same kind of thing. He would have these days where he tried to do everything my mom wanted, and then everyone would get burnt out.
Slow, steady growth versus rushing in
I will show you another example, with making money. If you are trying to grow a business, this helps. On the left side is a steady revenue growth model, with profit, which includes expenses that are estimated and not shown here. The other one is rapid revenue growth. This applies directly to relationships also. Look how much money you make in the period of 12 months if you do slow, steady growth. Same way with a relationship: if you do slow, steady growth, that relationship can be incredible in 12 months. Now look at what happens if you try rapid growth. In other words, you see people who just start dating. They are going all over the world, they are doing all these things together, and they are spending every moment with each other when a month ago they didn't even know each other. That is the comparison with the rapid revenue growth model. Look how it ends up at the end of the year: $1,000. You barely have something to show, and you put in twice as much effort.
I showed you these two because they are very easy, concrete examples to understand, at least for me. On the steady side, you start your business and you very slowly and steadily put a little bit more into it every month. You don't crank up your expenses, in other words the negative things, very quickly. You only invest what you need to invest, and you very slowly go from one month to the next until, by month six, you have got up to about $6,000 a month and you are at $2,500 in profit.
With relationships, this is the whole model I am showing you in this course: a slow, steady growth model, by doing a little bit every day. Maybe one short phone call a day and a few text messages a day. You go out once a week and you get to know each other. When you are in a relationship, you are slowly and steadily building up what you do together. You don't all of a sudden move in together, spend every single moment together and completely smother each other. What you are doing is slowly and steadily getting more integrated, and you are giving each other space. This is what happens when you don't give space: you end up having these huge bad things happen. It is the same in business. When you rush in too fast, you will have a month where huge bad things happen. In relationships, I can speak very much firsthand about rushing in and having these huge bad things happen. I wrote more about that kind of giving in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take.
When you are just getting started with a relationship, you can picture having a few months that are a little challenging, where you have some disagreements and are kind of surprised at getting to know the other person. My wife and I had a lot of our most challenging arguments earlier on in our relationship, before we got to know each other as much. The idea is that you want to have those slowly and steadily, in moderation, when you can handle them a little bit at a time. What you don't want are months where you just argue endlessly, the equivalent of a business having a gigantic loss in one month. In a relationship, you want slow, steady, positive growth all the time, because months of utter devastation are very hard to get through, and often your relationship might not survive them.
Ten nice things a day
Here is another model that might make this more clear. When you do nice things every day, what I aim to do is at least 10 nice little things. It might be telling my wife I love her, or noticing something she is doing and genuinely complimenting her. Ten nice little things every day: sending her a text message at work, giving her a call, buying her a Strawberry Julius from Dairy Queen. Little nice things every day, and not the same nice things, maybe about 50 percent the same and 50 percent different. Let's take a look at how this adds up.
If you do nice things daily, that is the left column: 10 nice things every single day. You don't go overboard one day and you don't stop one day. Let's compare this to what I have seen in a lot of relationships, including my own relationships in the past, my parents' relationship, and those of a lot of my friends and family. This seems to be what is kind of normal: nice things about four days a week. I have done this in my own relationships quite a bit, so I can tell you the daily way works better. But let's look at the numbers.
Say you have a couple of days, maybe Monday and Tuesday. You have just started the week, you are mostly thinking of yourself, and you are having a hard time doing anything nice for yourself, let alone anyone else. So on those days you don't do much. Then on Wednesday and Thursday you put a little time and attention into your partner. You say a few nice things like I love you, you get them a little surprise, you think of them, you make a little call or text at work, something nice. Then on Friday you go out with the guys or the girls, and you don't do much of anything for them that day. Then you spend the whole weekend together and you do a bunch of little nice things for them all weekend. By Sunday you have spent the day with their family and your family, you have spent the whole day trying to do nice things for your partner, and you just burn out. So by the next Monday you are like, okay, I have had enough, I just want to go do my own thing and have the day to myself. Same thing on Tuesday, and the cycle repeats.
The ratio of good to bad
At the same time, you are likely to do something bad every single day. Some of you might be saying, yeah, I would be lucky if I only did one bad thing a day. I have put these numbers a little lower just to make them easier to understand, because if I put the numbers up to something like 100 nice things a day, it might get harder to follow. So smaller numbers are easier to work with: 10 nice things a day versus nice things four days a week, and then one bad thing every day. You were rude, you were inconsiderate. I know I do at least one bad thing every day. I am sarcastic, I am selfish, I am late for something. Every single day there is something. Watch how this adds up.
You do this all year, for a year, with someone. Now look at the end of the year. With 10 nice things a day, you have done 3,650 nice things over the year. Doing it in bursts, you have done 2,600. You have literally done 1,000 fewer nice things, even though one day a week you do 25 and another day of the week you do 15, and two days a week you do 25, and two days it is five. It is a huge difference. And the bad things: you have done 365 bad things in a year, things your partner could legitimately complain about or put you down for. Here is the big difference in relationship health. You want to maximize the positive to negative ratio. It is estimated that you need at least seven to one, but I try to do at least 10 to one, if not higher. With 10 nice things every single day, you are at a 10 to one ratio of good to bad. That means you can comfortably handle something bad happening consistently, because you have a lot of positive for every one bad thing. Bad things tend to be really potent and stinky in a relationship, so the only way you can make up for that is to maximize the good.
Now let's look at the number 2,600. You have fallen significantly below 10 to one. In fact, if you look at the averages of the numbers, you get an average of about 7.14, so you are around seven to one. You are hovering just barely at the minimum ratio you need to have a good, healthy relationship. Now what happens if, say, a few of those 25 days you don't do them? Suddenly you have fallen below the ratio, and your relationship starts feeling negative. It starts feeling more bad than good. You start wanting to look around for other people, and you start being afraid your spouse or partner is looking around for other people. That is the difference between doing a little bit of good every day and having a lot of days where you do nothing for the relationship. That is why you have to make your partner fall in love with you, doing a little bit every day, if you want to have an exceptional relationship. I go deeper on learning to love in Learn Love: How to Learn to Love and Find the Right Person.
You can get away with lots of different things and still have a relationship that is functional. But if you want to have a really happy, loving, engaging relationship and marriage, doing a little bit every day is fantastically powerful. That is what I do, a little bit every single day, and that is what my wife does. This relationship is so far beyond anything I imagined could be good that I feel obligated to share every single thing I know with you, with the hope that you can have it too.
I hope this has been helpful in sharing exactly what you can do every single day in terms of thinking. Think, I want to do 10 nice things for my partner today, instead of, I want to do something really nice for them this week. There is no reason you can't do 10 nice things for your partner today, and that is pretty much a guaranteed happy relationship if you and your partner can maintain it together. Thank you for going through this with me, and I hope it has been helpful and useful. More lessons like this are in my Dating playlist.
30) How to have a Happy Marriage + How to be a Good Wife and Husband
From my video published March 17, 2015.
Do you want to have a happy marriage? Do you want to know how to be a great wife or a great husband? This works for a girlfriend or boyfriend or fiance also. This is a really good exercise that works for me, and it helps me not be mad at my wife and helps me love her no matter what. I am sharing this with you because I want you to have the best chance right now to be the best husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or fiance you can be. Relationships are the biggest part of happiness in life. Relationships are crucial. It is really hard for me to do anything else if my relationship is not happy. I want you to have that happiness. I want you to feel the love, happiness and joy I feel every day, and to know that you can have a marriage that is just amazing, a relationship that is just amazing.
Only you can be your best self
Here is the one exercise that is fantastically helpful for me, which I do whenever I find myself being mad at my wife or not being a good husband. All of this is based on the idea that you can only be your best self. You can't change or control anything about the other person. If you want to be a good husband, wife, fiance, boyfriend or girlfriend, all you have to do is focus on you and trust the other person to be the best version of themselves, or trust that the other person won't want to be around you anymore if they are not right for you. I wrote about this kind of giving in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take.
Here is the exercise I use that works fantastically well. Whenever I am not grateful that I am with my wife, whenever I am not happy, whenever I am out of sorts, this is what I do. The key to a happy marriage is maximizing the good and having some kind of exercise or technique that reminds you when you are not doing good. First, I must notice that I am not being a good husband. This happens whenever I am angry, resentful, upset, not loving and caring, not listening. It happens often enough. All I have to do is recognize that I am not being a good husband. If I don't know I am being a bad husband, if I am not even aware of it, then I am completely powerless to actually change it. If I am just in a rage and I am not even realizing I am being a bad husband, if I am ignoring my wife or being really rude and inconsiderate, then I am powerless to change that. And that often will look, from my point of view, as if she is doing something wrong.
If I ever think my wife is doing something wrong, the fact is I am doing something wrong. If I can't be loving and understanding with my wife no matter how she acts, then I am not being a good husband. No matter what she does, if I am loving and understanding of it, then I am being a good husband. This is what I use when I am out of being a good husband, when I am judging her, when I am not being nice to her, when I am being inconsiderate of her, or any time I am not in a place where I feel peaceful. When I am being a loving, good husband, I feel peaceful. I feel like everything is okay. I know you know what that feeling is. The key is to have some kind of exercise you use when you realize you are not feeling loving and peaceful, when you are feeling violent, hatred, anger, resentment, hurt.
When you are feeling hurt as if the other person did something wrong, you are the one doing something wrong. When I am feeling hurt, it has nothing to do with my wife. It has to do with me. Oh, poor me. When I am feeling hurt, it is because I am not being loving and understanding of her behavior. If I am loving and understanding of her behavior, nothing she does hurts me. Whatever she does is okay. That is what love is. If you have parents, which I would guess you do, you can probably see love and understanding there. You went through your life acting however you wanted, I hope. I know I experienced this with my parents. They were loving and understanding with me, and they still are, regardless of how I often behaved. That is the key.
So if you are hurt, if you are angry, it is always your fault. In other words, if I am angry, if I am hurt, if I am thinking anything my wife did wrong, I am always in a place where I am not being a good husband. Ultimately, how I am feeling is completely up to me, and how I am behaving is completely up to me. It doesn't depend on what she has done or what she is doing. The victim mindset I used for a lot of my life led to a lot of unhappiness. If you want to be happy in your marriage, you have to take absolute responsibility for your feelings and your behavior. This one exercise helps me get out of being hurt, self pity or anger, whatever it is.
I would give anything for another day, even a bad day
Here is what it is. Eckhart Tolle mentions this in one of his recent readings I listened to, and I also got it from my mom. My mom lost my dad last year, so I lost my dad last year too. He passed away. She has often said, I would do anything to have another day with your dad, even a bad day. The more I have thought about that, the more I see the secret to a happy marriage is right there: I would give anything to have another day with your dad, even a bad day. Mom had to get that the hard way. After being married 30 years, and after often struggling to have a happy marriage, I am grateful they somehow made it through all of the challenges to the point where they did till death do us part. That is incredible to me. All of their sacrifice and all of their suffering is there to help me have it a little easier. I don't have to wait until my wife dies to get the same knowledge my mom has right now. My mom already knows the secret to a happy marriage: I would give anything to have just another day with your dad, even a bad day. That is all you have to focus on and think about to be a great husband, a great wife, in any other relationship.
Here is how I run that through in my head. If I am angry at my wife, I pull that thought up. I would give anything to have this moment with my wife. My wife is here, and I am grateful for that. I have this moment already with her, the same moment my mom wishes she had with my dad. I have that moment right now. That is a miracle. Whatever kind of day I might call it, all I need to remember is that I would give anything to have this moment.
Time travel into now
Sometimes the necessary thing to do is fast forward a little bit. Often in life we think of time travel as going from now to another moment. Time travel is real if you do it the opposite way, if you go from the past into now, or from the future into now. I remember all the times I would have given anything just to be with the girl of my dreams. From about the first memories I have, when I thought Minnie Mouse was the best girl in the world, up until right before I met my wife, I would have given anything so many times just to be in a great relationship. That is something I must remember at all times, and it helps me whenever I am a little bit off, whenever I am a little bit angry, whenever I am not being a good husband. I remember how miserable I was when I was 15 and never thought I would find a wife. Hey, you have a wife right now. Isn't that awesome? Yes, it is. Does it matter what she just said? No, it doesn't. Remember when you were 15 and you said, man, I would put up with anything a hot girl did to me. Bam! That includes anything. Whatever your wife just said, that is anything. Oh, okay, I am sorry. That is how you get out of being in a bad place.
I always have to start with I am sorry, because I always did something wrong. If I am feeling angry with my wife, if I am feeling hurt, if I am feeling anything negative, I always did something wrong. That is how I get back to it. I go into the past and I go into the future. In the past: okay, I am in my dreams right now, this is what I wanted my whole life, and I am sorry I am not appreciating it. It works even better going to the future. I usually go to the future first, because it is very certain. That wonderful woman who is my wife, along with me, if I fast forward far enough into the future, I turn into an old corpse and then into nothing but dust. I am dead. My wife is dead too. It is not certain who will go first, but if I go far enough into the future, one or both of us is dead.
It is easier to do looking at my mom. Dad is already gone in her present right now. He already died. So I can see into my own future. I am not sure whether it is from my point of view or my wife's point of view, but I can see very clearly into my own future where one of us has died. That is a place most married people don't want to go. I see a lot of couples who are just unhappy, but they don't want to think into the future either. I talked to a guy yesterday and shared this with him, and he just got uncomfortable with the idea of thinking about death like that. Do you want to be miserable right now? Do you want to have a hard time in your marriage right now? Do you want to waste the beautiful moment you have together being angry, hurt, or in some kind of pain? Think far enough into the future and you will find the miracle of right now. You will find the miracle that your wife or husband is not dead right now. That is a miracle, because it is a certainty in the future. One of you will leave the other one way or another, hopefully not by divorce, although that is about as likely as death or more likely. You will leave each other at some point, at least in the physical form. Ultimately, as Eckhart Tolle shares and I love, we are all one, so in that sense you never really leave each other. But your forms will leave each other at some point. One of you will die or you will get a divorce. So isn't right now a miracle by comparison to that?
That helps me the most whenever I am mad at my wife. A week or two ago I was really mad at my wife one morning. She hadn't done anything wrong. I just was mad at her. I lay on the couch for two hours being mad. I kept trying to do this exercise, but my mind kept resisting.
So I kept doing it again and again. Finally, my mind gave up, screamed in surrender, and said, oh, I am sorry, I am sorry. I am utterly, totally miserable now. Please stop, please help. I will do anything to not feel like this. I am sorry. I am sorry I was angry at my wife. If you don't want to be angry anymore, that is all you have to do. I am sorry. From the core of your being, surrender.
Surrender, cry, and call
Then, and this worked great for me, I let it all out. I cried and let all that emotion out. Now, men, we are programmed: don't cry. If you watch movies, or if you see people interacting in real life, anytime someone cries it is like, oh my God, what is wrong? In my experience, crying is like throwing up for the emotions. You throw all of that negative emotion out, it is purged, and then I can be pure again. So I got mad. I thought of all these things I am telling you. Then I felt utterly miserable, and then I surrendered. I said, okay, I don't want to be mad anymore. I am sorry. I am sorry I did this all wrong again. I cried.
I called my wife. She was still mad. She didn't answer and let it go to voicemail. I left a very heartfelt, loving voicemail. Look, I am sorry I was mad at you. I am sorry I gave you a hard time this morning before you went to work. I love you. I hope you are doing good. That was it. She listened to the voicemail. It took her some time to do the same kind of thing, and she called me back. It was fixed. We spent a couple of hours being mad at each other instead of days, weeks, months, years. That is the miracle of doing this.
If you want to be a good wife, a good husband, if you want to have a happy marriage, you have to be grateful for what you have, through the understanding that you haven't had this all your life, and you are not necessarily going to have it one more day. One of you, at least, is not going to have it for the rest of your life. So right now is a miracle. Right now is a time when, at some point in the past, you would have given anything to be right here, and at some point in the future you would give anything to be right back here. You have to see that at all times if you want to be happy. You must never lose that. As soon as it slips from my consciousness, I slide into unhappy. The nice thing is, like I said earlier, all I have to do is notice. All I have to do is notice that I let it slip, and then I can get it back. What I have shared with the past and the future is a helpful exercise to get it back.
Take absolute responsibility for yourself
If you aren't comfortable going to these places in your mind, you can try something different. However, if you are not comfortable thinking about what you wanted before or what you want in the future, you probably shouldn't be comfortable thinking about why you are mad at something your spouse just said, or why you might be afraid of what will happen in the future. If you want to go into the past and the future in your mind, go where it helps to go. Go to the point where your spouse has died and you are sitting there thinking, I would give anything to be right, and have them back. Oh, okay. Ah, I am back right now. Okay, everything is fine. Everything is just fine. Or go to the point in the past when you thought you were hopeless and miserable and would never find the right person. Okay, this isn't so bad. This isn't nearly that bad. All right, I am sorry I am not appreciating this. Absolute, complete, utter responsibility for yourself. You can't do anything more to change me than you can do to change your spouse.
I am grateful people come to me now and ask me things. For most of my life I asked other people for help and no one wanted my opinion. When you have a wonderful, happy marriage, people want to know about it. I have just shared with you exactly how I have a happy marriage. It has been work getting there, mainly work on me. I had to get myself to the place I am sharing from now, and I want you to be able to go there. I am grateful that I am in a place to share this with you. I also share this with you to help myself. I don't ever want to forget these things I am sharing with you. I do this to be a better husband myself.
I hope this has been helpful for you, because I think you have the chance to have an exceptional relationship where you are loved. That starts with having an exceptional relationship where you are loved inside yourself. I wrote more on that in The things I want out of other people I can give to myself like love and respect. I appreciate each minute you have spent on this and hope it has been helpful. If you want more lessons like this, they are in my Dating playlist.
31) What is fantasy, how it hurts sex with your partner and how to stop fantasizing
From my video published January 24, 2015.
What fantasy is
For a happy sex life with your partner, removing fantasy is very important. So first, what is fantasy? Second, how does it work when it comes to sex? And third, how do you go about removing it? Fantasy is being somewhere besides now. It is usually linked with being in some theoretical future time or in some other reality.
For sex, it works like this. Often, when you first learn about sex, which for me was when I was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, the fantasies start, and they are linked with masturbation. At first it was just interesting enough to mess around and wonder what this does. But as I got older, I started adding fantasy to it. What if I got together with this girl? What would it be like? The problem, especially for men but for lots of young women too, is that before you have ever had sex with someone, you have spent years fantasizing about sex. You have spent years doing it by yourself while thinking about people who were not there. I know I did a lot of that.
From when I was a little kid, I knew that masturbation was bad, but I never quite got why. No one ever said why it was bad. Why can't I mess around with my own body and see how it works? Well, I am telling you now why, at least in my experience. The sexual fantasy part of it is why. If you are not fantasizing, and you genuinely just enjoy messing around with your own body, I don't see anything wrong with that. What I see wrong, especially as it applies to me, is the sexual fantasy element. It is often coupled with porn and with things like role playing or constant daydreaming and sexual thoughts all the time. Sexual fantasy ends up being very debilitating, even though it is a lot of fun. It is debilitating for your sex life.
Here is the thing. In your sexual fantasies there is a little bit of suffering, because on some level you are not really there with that beautiful person you are thinking about. At some honest place deep down you know you are just lying in your bed, or in the shower, or some private place, shamefully pretending someone is there. On the surface I fantasized about being in bed with a girl, or with multiple girls, and I said that many times. I even had some fantasies about guys, and those were really shameful to have. Having a fantasy about a girl felt okay, but having one about a guy felt disgusting, and then I felt like I was a bad person. That is what happens as you have those fantasies. So that is what sexual fantasy is: being in your mind somewhere other than where your body is. What you are doing in the moment does not match where your mind is. Your mind is someplace where a pretty girl or a pretty guy is doing things to you, and the truth is you are sitting there by yourself. Sexual fantasy is engaging in sexual acts outside of what is actually happening.
How fantasy hurts sex with a partner
Here is how this works for sexual health with a partner. For me it was six or seven years of sexual fantasy, and doing it by myself exclusively, before I ever had actual sex. And of course the fantasies did not match up with the reality at all. But it was such a new experience that I was completely in the moment. I was not fantasizing about being with some other girl. I was with the girl I was with, and I was there. That continued until I had a girlfriend and started having regular sex with her. Once I got used to it, to the point where it was not new or special anymore, where we had been together hundreds of times, the sexual fantasy crept back into my mind. I would be with her and thinking about her friend, or a girl I saw at the gym, or six other girls. That is only logical. When I have been sexually fantasizing my whole life, it does not just go away overnight because I got with someone.
It hurts, too. It ruins sex when you sexually fantasize. Often both people are fantasizing about someone else, and that kills a sex life, because neither of you is paying attention to what is going on. You are just mindlessly going through the motions, thinking about someone who is not there. This creeps up on you. It crept up on me. And it brings horrible shame, because you can't talk about it with your partner. How are you going to say, look, I was thinking about your friend last night while we were together? And then your partner is going to say, that's great, I was thinking about your brother or your sister while we were together. That takes a hell of a lot of honesty that most people are not willing to have.
To make any headway on this, the first thing you have to do is notice it is happening. I noticed it when I was watching Entourage and Ari was talking about all these thoughts about other women in relation to having sex with his wife. I identified with that a lot. Yeah, I get that. Now I have been working a spiritual program, and I have been given the power to see all of my defects, and this was an awful defect, a brutal defect. There is nothing worse than being with the person of your dreams and fantasizing about someone else while you are with them. It is horrible. It produces shame. It makes the sex not as good. To be with someone wonderful and to be fantasizing about being with four other wonderful people at the same time is just terrible. It misses out on the beauty of what you have. I wrote about this kind of chasing in my post on chasing fantasies.
So there is a solution. If you are having thoughts about sex with someone else while you are with the person you are with, that is an indication of sexual fantasy. You are fantasizing about something that is not real. You are not with that other person. That ultimately ruins sex. You see it everywhere. That is why things like Fifty Shades of Grey are so popular, because they draw in all those sexual fantasies. Guys and girls alike, straight, gay, old, young, whatever race, sexual fantasy is ingrained, especially in Western culture, and more of the world is getting ahold of it, for better or worse. It is ingrained in everything. All these characters you see are tailoring your sexual fantasy, speaking to your sexual fantasy. It is not to say you won't notice when other people are attractive. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is fantasizing about them, wanting them, looking at another attractive person and saying, I want you, I've got to have you.
How to get out of sexual fantasy
So what do you do about getting out of sexual fantasy, which is extremely hurtful to your sex life? I know personally it produced a lot of shame, feeling like I am a bad person, a bad husband, a bad boyfriend, a bad fiance. That is what sexual fantasy produces, and it really sucks. Here is how to get out of it. Stop engaging in any sexual fantasy. I have a spiritual program that helps a lot too, but the most basic behavior you can change is to stop engaging in any sexual fantasy behavior. For me, I am married, and that means no pleasuring myself. You might think, why would you need that if you are married? You could ask a lot of married people that and get a lot of different answers. The fact is, I don't need it while I am married, and I don't even need it while I am single. The sexual fantasy involved bleeds over into having sex with a partner. I can't just watch porn innocently on my own without that fantasy creeping into being with my partner. I am grateful to have learned that. Once I saw it, I was willing to say, I won't do it, no matter what, because I know how much it hurts sex with my partner. And I want that sex to be good. I want to appreciate every moment.
You want to be in sync sexually with your partner. If you are pleasuring yourself and they are not, or you are doing it more than they are, you are out of sync. You want to depend on each other to satisfy sexual desires, because then you don't have to get involved with fantasies. You can stick to reality. This has helped me enjoy each opportunity I have for sex much more, because I am not fantasizing. When I recognize a fantasizing thought, I don't engage with it. I let it pass. I see a thought like, man, wouldn't it be great to get with her, and I just let it go. I don't grab onto it and I don't fight it. Well, there goes another thought. Next. I stay in the moment.
When you are with your partner, you want to stay in the moment. Don't start thinking about yesterday. Don't think about tomorrow. Don't think about how great it would be to be with someone else. You might say, I can't control my thoughts, they just come up. You can control whether you pay attention to those thoughts and take them seriously. It is one thing to have a thought about someone else, a want or a desire, and another to engage with it and pay attention to it.
I hope this makes sense. I hope it sheds light on something that for me was totally in the dark in all of my relationships and in the beginning of my marriage. It was so shameful for me to deal with, and it made me feel so bad about myself. I didn't know how to discuss it with my partner, because my wife has a very good, healthy sexual life that she grew up with, and I didn't know what to do with my unhealthy sexual life, mainly my fantasies. I hope this helps you a little in understanding that happily ever after sex with your partner is a focus on just sex with your partner and getting rid of sexual fantasies. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope it has been helpful. You can find more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
32) Marriage is about the person you marry
From my video published December 29, 2014.
Being married is all about who you marry. It is the same as having a job being all about where you work, having a family being all about who your family is, and where you live being all about the location you are actually in. Everything in life is relative, and marriage is exactly the same way. Part of the value of this course is breaking down any existing stereotypes, hesitations or negative thoughts you have about marriage generally. Marriage, when you marry the right person, is a beautiful, miraculous, wonderful thing. It is an official commitment to being more than just yourself and being part of a team.
It is all about who you actually marry, though. If you marry the wrong person, and by the wrong person I mean the wrong person for you and for them, you don't make a good team together, and marriage can be miserable. It is like working at a company where you are not a good part of the company and it is not good for you: the job can be miserable. So the idea with this course is to break down any existing stereotypes you have about marriage and to start fresh. Marriage with the right person is one of the best things in the world. Marriage with the wrong person can be utterly miserable. That is why there are so many divorces.
The idea of this course is to get you into a frame of mind, and into habits and patterns, where you can land the right person: the right person for you, and you the right person for them. Marriage is a beautiful thing, and it is all relative. I wrote more about this in my post on why tactics get the date and not the marriage. There are more lessons on marriage in my Dating playlist.
33) Married people have sex more and enjoy it more
From my video published December 28, 2014.
What the numbers show
Married people have more and better sex. In my view that is a fact, and here is the data to show it. Sex twice a week is much more likely to happen if you are married. If you are married, there is about a 40 percent chance you will have sex at least twice each week. When single, it is only 20 to 25 percent, and the tables I am showing next are even lower. Not only that, but about 40 percent of married women are satisfied with sex and about 50 percent of married men, versus 30 percent of single women and 38 percent of single men. Married people tend to have more sex and enjoy it more.
Here is the big detailed list of the numbers by age and by sex. If you notice the most common thing, single people are about 50 percent or more likely than married people to have had no sex at all in the past year. For married people the number is around 5 percent in youth, then 10 to 20 percent getting older, up to 30 percent in the sixties and 50 percent in the seventies. That means a married person in their seventies is about as likely to have had sex as a single person from 18 to 20. And the real opportunity is from 25 to 29, where only about 1.6 percent of married people reported not having sex, while in the 30 to 39 range it was only about 4.5 percent. Guys are having a lot more sex when they are married. Even compared to partnered people, a lot of the people who are partnered are having a lot less sex than those who are married.
What the numbers leave out
The one thing this does not account for very well is outliers, people who are not normal. In other words, it doesn't account for healthy marriages versus unhealthy marriages. More than likely, all of the marriages that are not having sex recently are in the unhealthy category, and even most of the few-times-per-year to monthly ones are in the unhealthy category. If you are happily married, you are more than likely having a lot of sex. If you are single, you are more than likely not. It is that simple.
The idea is just to communicate concretely with data that married people are having a lot more sex than people who are single. People who are partnered, while they are still having a lot more sex than those who are single, are consistently going without longer than people who are married. That likely comes from the fact that about half or so of people who are partnered end up breaking up and not getting married, so a lot of these partnerships are unsuccessful relationships. A lot of marriages are also unsuccessful, and the rate of unsuccessful marriages is high to begin with, but the rate of unsuccessful partnerships is much higher. There is a lot more dysfunction in partnerships than in marriages. People who are married consistently have more sex. Some of the partnerships tend to have a bit higher repeat sex, in other words nearly every day, but they also have much higher rates of not having any sex at all. And this is for men.
The numbers for women
Now let us go to women. It is a lot the same story, and women are even more likely to have no sex at all when they are single. If you go back, you can see most men were having sex from 30 to 39 even when single. Most women were not having sex from 30 to 39 when single. Sex is a very satisfying, wonderful thing to do, and if you are single you are not likely to be getting it at all, especially if you are a woman over 30. That means marriage is where it is at. Look at this: 72 percent of single women over 30 did not have any sex at all in the last year. Of married women, only about 6.5 percent did not have sex in the last year. And of partnered women, still 14 percent did not have any sex at all. The bottom of this table makes it clear that marriage has a lot more sex and has it frequently. If you fall anywhere in the married table, you are likely to be doing better than anywhere in the single table and most places in the partner table. There are some places where partners have more sex, but overall the partner table is loaded with areas where there is less sex, except in some of the older ages. Sex is something that happens a lot when you are married.
The whole point is that when you are married, the data shows you are much more likely to have more sex. If you are not having sex in a marriage, that is almost a guaranteed indicator of divorce. In a partnership, it is almost a guaranteed indicator you are going to break up and not be successful. And if you are single, you are not likely to be having much sex either. So a happy marriage is about the only place where you get to consistently have sex. As a young man I was really frustrated with my inability to have sex, and I think it might have helped to hear that if I wanted to have more sex, I needed to be married. If I wanted to be married, I needed to find a partner. If I wanted to find a partner, I needed to work on being the best person I could be. That is what this course is all about for you. I hope this lecture made it clear that if you are single, you are not likely to be having much sex, and that is normal. I made a similar point in my post on why single men win big. There are more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
34) How to be a good husband or wife especially during a challenging time part 1
From my video published August 27, 2015.
How can you be a good husband when your wife is pregnant especially, or how can you understand your husband better if you are the wife and you are looking to give something that is helpful to your husband? Thank you very much for watching this. I will share with you what has been working for me, and I feel that what has been working for me has been given to me by others. All I have done right is to listen and apply it. The information is all around everywhere, and you have the chance today to really hear what I am saying if you want to have a great marriage and to be a good husband and a good wife, even while you are pregnant.
Take care of yourself first
I am grateful. I am so proud of my wife. She is getting close to delivering our first baby, and our marriage has been a lot of fun. It has been the best it has ever been since we have been pregnant. The number one thing I do to be a good husband is that I take care of myself. I don't let myself get into a place where I am a mess. I love myself. I go to work on myself each day. I don't mean that I am whipping and beating myself into shape. I am loving and allowing myself to be. I am watching what I am doing each day and paying attention to it. I am making sure I have eaten. I am making sure I am aware of my emotions. I am making sure I am drinking enough water and getting enough sleep. I am making sure I am peaceful and happy with life, saying yes to how life is, feeling good and feeling like I belong. I have a meeting I go to every day. I have lots of friends there, and I go and contribute to that each day. I enjoy spending time with my wife's family. I have worked on my life to be a good person myself.
If I am not taking care of myself, I can't possibly be there to help my wife out. If I am a mess, if I am all emotional and hungry and angry and lonely and tired, then anytime I am around my wife I am going to give that to her, along with her pregnancy. When I take good care of myself, I make space for my wife to just be with me in a loving, peaceful place, where she is then able to see what is going on with her, deal with it and take care of herself. When you are pregnant it is more important than ever to take good care of yourself, to get enough sleep, to make sure you have eaten, and not to get all crazy angry or upset or frustrated, because your body is under a lot of stress. If I want my wife to take care of herself, I have to lead by example and take care of myself. I can't ask her to do as I say and not as I do. I have to do as I do. I wrote more about showing up well in my post on how depth can be exponential. The next part of this lesson is in my Dating playlist.
35) How to be a good husband or wife especially during a challenging time part 2
From my video published August 27, 2015.
Leading by example with our bodies
I practice what I want my wife to be able to do for herself, too: to love herself and take care of herself, and to accept her body and the changes it is going through. I have to love and accept my body as it is in order to do that. I can't very well be eating badly and treating myself badly and then say, well, you should just accept that your body is a lot different right now while you are pregnant. Well, what about my body? I am doing the best I have done in maybe my whole life at eating better, exercising consistently, taking care of my body and getting good sleep. And I am amazed how well my wife is doing with her own body and her own pregnancy. Everything has been very smooth. The main thing I have seen is that my wife is taking good care of herself. We both have been trying and growing in taking better care of ourselves.
To me, if you want to be a great spouse, it is all about leading by example, and leading by example from the point of view that you are one unit together. It is not that I am in great shape now and taking good care of myself, so I look down on you and tell you that you had better get up here with me. It is a matter of asking what I can do for the team that is good for both of us. It is amazing that when I take better care of myself, my wife is inspired to try new things and take better care of herself. And she inspired me to take better care of myself to start with. I looked at her and said, man, she is going to live until 90. My dad died and left my mom alone. My grandpa died and left his mom alone. And his dad, my great grandpa, died at 24 and left his wife alone. I don't want to do that to my wife if I can help it. I want to take care of myself so that I can live until 70 or 80 or 90 years old and be by her side as much as possible. I understand I can't control all the things that could possibly happen. I also understand that if I take good care of myself, a lot fewer bad things are likely to happen.
If I do 30 minutes of exercise every day, I am likely to have lots more energy, and I am likely not to get tired and frustrated so easily throughout the day. When I have more energy, I am likely to be able to help out more easily. Can you help me with this? Sure. And sometimes I can even just offer help: hey, do you want me to do this for you? I have plenty of energy, I will do it right now. The bassinet where you put the baby is in the room behind me, and I have tons of energy. After I do these videos, I will carry it into the bedroom, because I have the energy to do things today since I am taking care of myself. At 31, this is the best shape and health I have been in. I care about being a good husband, a good family member, a good friend, a good person here with you, and I work at it relentlessly.
I use an app called My Fitness Pal. I don't think the app is new, but I just started using it, and I put in every single thing I eat there, every single day. I have tracked my food, in terms of calories at least, for nine months now, every single day throughout the whole time my wife has been pregnant. She started paying more attention to what she eats also, and I didn't tell her she should do that. She just saw me doing it every day, and after months of it she started looking more at what she was eating. Maybe I should have some more fruits and vegetables, she said. If you buy some for me, I will eat them. So I buy all kinds of healthy foods, and she snacks on them now. It is amazing what you can do when you take care of yourself for your spouse. If you take good care of yourself, your spouse, if they really love you and want to be with you as a life partner and a friend, will often be inspired to try what you are doing when they see it working for you. I wrote about a similar idea in my post on how the right person makes you want to give.
This matters especially when one of you is stuck with something, like pregnancy, where your body is changing and there are lots of things that can feel negative, like getting a lot bigger. I am taking good care of my body and losing weight. It is funny that I have lost about as much weight as my wife has gained while she has been pregnant. She has gained a little more, and I have lost quite a bit. I can't do anything about how she is right now with her body, and yet I can show her that I am loving and caring for my body as it is, and she is loving and caring for her body as it is. I can get in better shape right now and give her the space to feel good: I am doing what I am doing right now because it is the right thing, and it is okay how my body looks. My husband loves how my body looks, bringing the gift of life in. If I want to love how my wife's body looks, I have to love myself. For one of the first times ever in my life, I am happy to look at myself and say, oh, I am taking good care of myself. Then I lead by example again. It is easier for my wife not to get frustrated with how she looks, but to say, my husband thinks I look good, and I am doing the right thing right now to bring life into this world, instead of going down the path of I am so big, I am so this or that, and all these negative things.
Prayer, apologies and feelings in the open
Life is full of challenges, and there are so many beautiful things to go through, and yet there are a lot of hard things to go through too. My wife and I have already been through my dad passing and her grandmother passing, both people who were very precious to us and with whom we had spent a lot of time. I look at it with my wife that we are here to go to the very end together, where one of us dies and then the other one joins, in the afterlife if you want to look at it that way. We are on this journey together until the end, and given that, every single moment we have is precious.
One tool I use that is really helpful is prayer. I pray to be a good husband. It is that simple. I don't think it matters who you pray to. It works kind of like an affirmation. Whenever there is a little tension between my wife and me, which is especially important when she is pregnant but important all the time, I pray to be a good husband, and I often say that I will do anything to be a good husband. Usually after I do that, I open up to listen. Even if there is just peaceful silence, or a little anger or resentment that is not expressed verbally, soon enough everything fades and is fine. If there were mistakes made, we apologize. It starts with me apologizing, especially when I have done something wrong, because if I have done something wrong it is up to me to fix it. It is not up to me to expect my wife to act a certain way.
In fact, yesterday I apologized to her. I told her we would go to lunch at a certain time, and I just played video games a good hour or more through that. I said, look, I am sorry, that was rude and inconsiderate. She did not react very well to it, although she reacted wonderfully compared to what was possible. She was a little put off and wasn't very okay with it to start with. She didn't say a whole lot about it. She was very graceful. Later I apologized to her again: look, I am sorry for expecting you to just be fine with it right away. Look, I was rude and inconsiderate, I am sorry. There you go, it is done. And then I got upset again, because I was expecting her to be okay with it right away. I say upset, but I didn't say anything. I felt upset inside. We didn't have an argument or anything. It was just the feelings.
When you are in touch with your spouse, the feelings are there and you don't have to say anything. You can both see them clearly. When you clear out the baggage, the problems and the awful habits, the feelings are fully exposed and easily visible, and you don't have to even talk about them. They are right there and you both can see them together at the same time. That also makes a great environment for causing problems, essentially, because you can have problems and you can have hurt, and nothing even has to be said. It is amazing, and it requires taking loving care of myself each day and apologizing as soon as possible for any time I have been selfish or rude, or have not thought of her, or have expected things of her. Now, she says I have a right to expect things of her. Well, I don't have a right to expect things of her and build a resentment if she doesn't meet them. Basically it is all up to me to be a good husband. If I am a good husband, it makes it easier for her to be a good wife, and if she is a good wife, it makes it easier for me to be a good husband. It is a positive feedback loop. The better husband I am, the easier it is for her to be a good wife, and it just goes on and on. Today it is really easy for both of us to take good care of each other. It is somewhat the default, and yet we have been through lots of times when we had arguments and fights and were not good to each other.
We have been together since the beginning of 2011, so it is coming up on five years soon, and we have been married for coming up on three years. We have a very happy life. When I met my wife to start with, it was immediately the best relationship I had ever had, after dating girls for about eight or nine years and thinking I knew about dating, and it is so much better now that it is almost unrecognizable from how we started. Seeing that there is always room for improvement will allow you to keep growing in your relationship.
Room for improvement and gratitude
I see that even as I share this with you, there is room for improvement. Instead of me having to apologize for being rude and then apologize for being resentful, maybe I wouldn't be rude or resentful in the first place. If you want to have a great marriage, especially when you need each other the most during a time of challenge such as pregnancy or any other similar time, taking good care of yourself is the answer.
One tool I find really helpful, specifically in meditation, is to picture clearly the end, or the reunification, whichever way you want to picture it. This brings me into the moment and into gratitude. Any moment I waste being upset with my wife is, to me, a tragedy, and yet it can be used as a good learning experience. With my dad passing away last year, I got one very valuable phrase from my mom that helps me. She says she would give anything to have even a bad day with dad again. I repeat myself sometimes, so I will focus on the anything there. She would give anything to have even a bad day. Now, I don't have to give anything, and yet I do give anything to have a fully beautiful day with my wife today. The beauty is she is here right now, and that is a miracle. My parents were married 30 years, and there were a lot of days they didn't appreciate being with each other. My mom fully communicated that, and I fully listened to it. You don't have to miss out on appreciating your wife or your husband while they are alive here with you today.
Sometimes you may need a tool to help you. Here is a tool I use when I realize I need help. I pray, and I already shared that. Often after I pray, when I am in a more challenging spot where I am not willing to let go after a few prayers, a meditation will come to me. Another day it was a really powerful one: thinking about the end, so to speak. The end is not something theoretical that might happen someday. Someday, for sure, you or your spouse more than likely will die first. That is certain, and we don't have to debate it. It is possible you might go in a plane crash together, but almost all the time one of you dies first. Most people go through the other one dying. That is a near certainty. You might say, oh God, I don't want to think about that. But it is worth thinking about, because when you think about it in great detail, it will hurt. Yes, it will hurt. It often makes me cry to think about it, and a full on good cry too, not a little tear but a full, messy cry. What I get out of it is intense, complete gratitude for the moment. A gigantic thank you just for being here, to God and to my wife, just to have that moment. To me, that brings in all of that desire to take care of myself, to love and understand my wife unconditionally and to be a good husband. It allows that to fully flower and to be experienced.
So I think about either me or my wife saying goodbye to each other, saying I love you, it has been a wonderful life, and I will see you whenever it is my turn to go. I think about mom, who has done that for a year and a half now with dad. And my wife's grandma, who was 90, about 20 years after her husband died, and she would still call out for him in the night. I know these things hurt to think about, and it is good because it brings gratitude into the moment. Most of the things you get bent out of shape about with your spouse are something that happened in the past, or that might happen in the future that you are afraid of. If you are going to bring the future into your relationship, bring it in a way that brings gratitude, rather than thinking about something they did that might cause a problem or projecting a year ahead to a problem.
Even today with my wife, picturing a little bit of the future and going through having our first child together is overwhelming, and I let that emotion out. I was trained as a man not to cry, that crying is weak and for sissies. I have untrained that. Through a great spiritual gift, I have reprogrammed myself. I cry when it is overwhelming, and I have cried about every other day the last two weeks. It is overwhelming having your first child come into the world, and yet each cry brings gratitude and peace. If you want to have a happy relationship, it helps to have gratitude and peace. Why would you want to be with someone if it is awful and you are not thankful to be with them? There is someone out there you could feel gratitude and peace with, and hopefully it is who you are with.
Doing your best and letting go
The nice thing is that if you practice all of these things, you can totally forget about what the other person is doing. If you are doing your wholehearted best, and not the I am a victim, I am trying so hard, look at me, but genuinely trying to put all of the love you have into the relationship, there is a certain hands off feeling that comes with it. If I am doing my absolute best, that is all I can do. If I am giving all I have to give, that is all I can do, and whatever else happens is out of my control. The relief is amazing. I don't have to control and manipulate. I don't have to force or try to plan. I trust my wife. I trust her to take care of herself, to do what I am doing, to do her best. I trust her to love me, because she has loved me a lot even when I didn't love myself.
These are the things that are working great for me today. They are, as best I can explain them, the core of how, in the face of pregnancy and being together, my marriage is the most amazing it has ever been. That is a wonderful blessing, and I have it because I can share it with you. I get this blessing because I am willing to give it away. I am willing to give you the same opportunity. If you try any of these things I have suggested, maybe you can have some of the same thing, if you don't already, or you can have the chance to do even better. More of these lessons are in my Dating playlist.
Most importantly, I pray today that I remember these things I am sharing with you. I need to remember them each day in order to be a good husband. It doesn't matter what I did yesterday or what I will do tomorrow. I have to remember these things each day in order to practice them. I pray to practice every single thing I have shared with you today, because that is what makes a great marriage and a great loving relationship, especially in times like when your wife is pregnant, in times where there are things you might call a challenge life has given you. I call it a blessing. You could also call it a challenge. I pray that in sharing this with you, you have the exact same opportunities today to have a better relationship than you ever imagined with your spouse. Thank you.