This page gives you two long talks about how to go from single to a happy relationship. In both I say the same thing in different ways: get right with yourself first, learn to communicate, and refuse to stay in a relationship that is bad for you. They are long, and I tell a lot of stories along the way, so you can read them straight through or jump to the part you need.
I recorded the first talk on May 29, 2022 and the second on April 19, 2021. I was married both times, and I was talking from inside that marriage. We divorced in December 2025. I am a single dad of two in St. Petersburg, Florida, and in the year since I have been on about fifty dates and have no lasting relationship yet. I left both talks exactly as I recorded them.
In Best Dating and Relationship Advice Ever, from May 2022, I start with three basics. Communication comes first, I refuse to keep a relationship that sucks, and I take 100 percent responsibility for my life. My threshold is that a relationship should be positive 95 percent of the time, which means 19 out of 20 interactions. I say it is much easier to get into a relationship than out of one, so the earlier you check the things that matter, the easier it is to leave if they do not fit.
Then I talk about why I think a couple has to be able to talk about sex, and how soon. I describe it plainly: what you want, what you are willing to give, and whether the two of you match. I tell the story of how my wife and I worked this out after friction in our marriage, and why I say to ask these questions on the first or second date instead of months in. After that come values. Wanting kids was one of our non-negotiables, and I describe a couple I knew who split over it after years together.
The later sections are about listening, because I say couples have the same argument over and over when they are not listening to each other. I tell why I told my wife about my crushes, what happened with an idea I had that she shot down, and how a fight over Christmas cookies and the kids' presents in 2020 ended after I took a walk and called my mother and my sponsor. I also say you are in a relationship by choice, and that both people should be willing to leave if it is not working.
In Healthy relationship secrets from single to happily ever after!, from April 2021, I start with my belief that the first step is getting right with your highest self and being happy as you are. I describe the dating advice I read as a teenager, which was about how to play the game, and why I call it worthless. I tell how I ended a relationship that was not working, put up my Match.com profile that same day, and soon met my wife.
I talk about taking inventory of the good and the bad in yourself, and about the day I saw a man nobody should be with, which was me drinking, and got sober. I say that a partner's mood is not your fault and yours is not theirs. I give the example of telling my wife one morning that I felt bad and was open to feeling better. I also describe the darkest place I reached over a relationship, in May 2009.
Later in the talk I say my top priority is God and my second is my own health, and that a relationship with another person must never be the top priority in life, because relationships can come and go. I talk about what I would do if my wife left, the feelings I would let myself have, and the friend from my recovery program who became like a father to me. I end with the story I want my life to tell.
If you want more, read Keeping a Relationship Healthy: Videos From My Married Years and 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 post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Best Dating and Relationship Advice Ever (May 29, 2022)
- Healthy relationship secrets from single to happily ever after! (April 19, 2021)
Best Dating and Relationship Advice Ever
From my video published May 29, 2022.
You are about to experience an outstanding course on dating and relationships that will take you from being unhappily single all the way into being happily married, or in a life partnership that is better than you ever imagined. Twenty years ago, this was my biggest pain point in life. Today, I have fantastic experience to share that can dramatically alter the course of your life, and all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the information here. If you really want to love your dating life, and you really want to be in a happy relationship and enjoy it to its fullness, I trust you will watch all of this, because that alone proves you care about having great relationships and are willing to do what it takes to have them. That is what it is all about. Anything you want to manifest or get into your life, are you willing to do what it takes, to give what it takes, to have it?
I am honored you are here. I am making this for several of my friends who are dating right now. I hope it makes things a little easier for you, because I can share my 20 years of experience and collapse it into just an hour or so, in a way that helps you learn about dating much faster than I did. I want this world to be filled with people who are in happy relationships. People in happy relationships do not go shoot up schools or do horrible things to people. People in happy relationships make this a great world. Being in a happy relationship is one of the best things you can do to contribute to this world. I do not care whether you are 15 or 150. A happy relationship can manifest for you anytime you are ready. You might even save somebody's life by being in a happy relationship with them, and you might bring up children who will go out and make this an amazing world.
Happy relationships are the foundation of an outstanding life
To me, happy romantic relationships are the foundation of an outstanding life. I have never been as happy as I have been with my wife over the last 11 years. Most of the miserable years of my life were when I was single, and most of the happiest years of my life have been with my wife. If you want to hear more of my honest take on what single life was like for me, I wrote about it in Being Single vs. a Relationship: My Honest Take on Single Life.
I gave this advice to my aunt, who is in her 60s. She had a divorce and, in her own estimation, had probably never had a happy relationship in her life. I told her to go out there and get one, and to prepare herself to be ready for a great relationship. She said, well, I am in my 60s, I got divorced, I have this birthmark, and I went out with this guy and it did not work out. I said, are you just going to sit back and let this be how your life is going to be? Or are you going to get out there and do something about it? My aunt is now in the happiest relationship she has ever been in. She found it in her 60s, and she is having a great life. I do not care who you are or where you are at. What I am giving you is based on principles and on my experience, which is why it will be so helpful for you. You will love hearing my detailed stories plus the general principles combined.
Who this is for
So let us get started with who is here and who this is for. If you are totally single and have no prospects on the radar, this is absolutely for you. It is dramatic, life changing and extremely helpful, and I have several friends in that spot in mind, whom I made this for specifically. If you are already in the early stages of dating somebody, this is still extremely relevant for you. If you are my wife, this is totally irrelevant for you, because she is already in a happy relationship and already very satisfied with her life, and this stuff is already there for her. But even in that case, this might help you give better advice to someone else. If you have been in a relationship a little while, this will help you deepen it and make sure you lay a strong foundation, because these things are constants.
Put first things first
I left some silence there intentionally, because it leads into my first point. The first principle that really matters in dating and relationships is to put first things first. That means do not let stupid things, or things that do not matter that much, get in the way of what really matters. So this is all about drilling down to what really matters. And the number one thing, in my opinion, that really matters in a relationship with any person, especially if you are trying to be intimate with them and make a life together, is communication. If you get nothing else out of this, communication is absolutely essential for success. Everything else in your relationship happens through you and your communication.
That means the number one thing that is important in all relationships, which you should look for and immediately check for, is this: can I successfully communicate with this person? If you have great communication, every single other part of the relationship will be easier. The one thing you need to get right in your relationship is communication. If you can get that right, everything else is possible. Therefore, if you are single, one of the best things you can do is start working on your listening skills and on asking the right questions. I am going to give you a lot of ideas about that. If you are dating somebody or in a new relationship, work on and check that communication, because the newer your relationship is, the easier it is to get out of it if it is bad.
A radical refusal to have a relationship that sucks
Another big principle alongside communication is a focus on what kind of relationship you want, and a radical refusal to have something that sucks. I will not have relationships in my life that suck. I will not do that. I do not care if you are my mother, my wife, my brother, my friends or my family. I will not. Either we are going to help and love and support each other, and that is the fundamental understanding, the grounding principle of our relationship, or I will not have a relationship with you. That is absolutely non-negotiable with everybody in my life. It applies to my children, my wife, my friends, my sponsor, my mother and my siblings. I will not have a relationship with you if we cannot have a positive, helpful, supportive relationship 95 percent of the time. I refuse to be in something that sucks, because I have been in a bunch of relationships in one way or another that were bad, and I will not do that again.
As long as you tolerate a relationship that stinks in your life, you do not deserve anything better than that. That can be difficult to stomach sometimes. If you are with somebody and you know you are not happy, I understand it can be difficult to leave. If you are not willing to leave, though, then you have chosen to stay there and suffer. That takes me into the third key principle to lay this foundation, and that is 100 percent responsibility for your life.
100 percent responsibility for your life
For your relationships, communication is an absolute must to look for, because whether a relationship is great or terrible happens through communication. And the way you have great relationships through communication is by taking 100 percent responsibility for your life and for what you have done so far. As long as you are a victim, you are helpless and powerless. If these people just did this to you, and your ex did that, and that is why you are like this, then you are a powerless victim just on a ride, getting dragged through life. And since you are focusing on the past and on how you were hurt, you are going to manifest more of that. Does that sound like fun? No, not to me, it does not. That is why the exit from victimhood, from telling all these negative stories, is absolute 100 percent responsibility for your life.
For me, that goes back to incarnation. I chose my particular set of parents. I was disincarnated, I had no stake in the game, and I could have picked anywhere, anytime, any place to incarnate. I chose my two parents because I thought they would be a good entry point into this reality. Every single decision I have made since then has put me right here, right now, in my studio, recording this video for you. Every single thing I have done has put me here. That lays a powerful foundation for your ability to make changes to yourself. Whether you are in a relationship or single, taking absolute responsibility for yourself, refusing to have negative relationships with people and focusing on your communication will give you the space to clear out bad relationships and to change what you need to in yourself to be ready for great ones. As soon as you do that, the universe will begin throwing people at you.
What I noticed looking back on my life is that I had a mindset, on a subconscious level, that I was unworthy of a happy relationship. I had the mindset that I was single, that it is tough to be a young guy dating, that women did not want to be with me, and I had all these negative, lonely thoughts. No matter how many beautiful women came into my life, wanted to date me and tried to date me, and no matter how I tried to date them, nothing worked. That was until I took 100 percent responsibility for where I was in my life. It is not my parents' fault where I am at. I chose them. It is not the fault of anybody who did anything to me. I chose to incarnate here, and I knew what kind of game I was getting into. Before you incarnate, you can go look at the world, however and wherever you want, so you know what you are getting into. I remember picking my parents. If you do not remember picking yours, you can take it on a leap of faith and set the intention that you would like to remember, because you have the ability to remember.
What is important is that you realize right here, right now, you have a choice about what kind of life you have. Therefore you have a choice in what kind of person you are, and therefore you have a choice in what relationships you have and do not have in your life. When you have toxic relationships in your life and you shrug and tolerate them, that is crowding out space where you could have a great relationship. So if you are taking 100 percent responsibility for your life and you look around and see that some relationships need to change, the first step is usually to work on yourself, look inward and ask for feedback. You might not think your relationship with your mother is related to your relationship with your partner, but it is. All your relationships tie together. That is another key point: you cannot really separate your relationships that much. If you want to date somebody amazing, it starts there. I also wrote about why I stopped waiting around and judging myself in You Can Be Terrible at Dating and Still Find Love.
If you have a toxic relationship with your parents and your siblings, you more than likely are going to find people who are attractive to you who are just like your parents and your siblings. This is why 100 percent responsibility is so absolutely essential. When you realize you tend to attract more of the same of what you already have in your life, and that you will be attracted to people based on your attraction point, it changes things. If you are addicted to, expecting and talking about drama and toxicity, you are going to find somebody who is attractive to you and brings more of that, and then you are going to feel sorry for yourself when they are in your life. Then you will get rid of them because you will be so much better off without them. And then you will get the same kind of person next time. This is why you must be responsible for your own life.
I have drilled these basic points in really hard because all the other little details do not matter if you do not get those basics. If you do not understand that communication is the number one most important thing in having a relationship with anybody, if you do not understand that as long as you allow your life to be filled with toxic relationships you do not have space for the kind of relationship you really want, and if you do not understand that you are responsible for the entirety of your life, not somebody else, you, then nothing else I say is going to matter. So I hope you have these three basic points now. From here I am going to tell lots of stories and give much more detail on building relationships. However, it is important to master the basics if you want to get more advanced.
Some of you on my previous video asked whether I have slides or whether I am reading. I am literally just talking, because I know about this. I have no slides and no notes. I did not write a single note for this. I know this stuff, so I can teach it from the heart. I am also teaching it so that I remember it, and you get the joy of experiencing it now.
Your partner is not here to make you happy
Let us talk about step one of having the relationship of your dreams, whether you are already with someone or not. It is about being the kind of person you want to be in a relationship. It is unreasonable to expect your partner to make you happy, to save your life, or to take care of you forever. Whether you already have a partner or want one, it is unreasonable to expect your partner to do things for you that you can do yourself. So it is important to set an idea of what you can do yourself and what you cannot. What you can do for yourself is love and serve other people, and that will make you happy. You do not need your partner to make you happy, whether you have one or not. Your partner is not here to make you happy. Your happiness is your responsibility.
One of the most attractive things to me is this kind of maturity. That is why I am so attracted to my wife: she knows her happiness is not dependent on me. She can be perfectly miserable regardless of how I act, and she can be very happy regardless of how I act. Again, that does not mean you tolerate any kind of behavior in your life. I think setting very healthy boundaries makes for great relationships. You want to be willing to set boundaries and to understand what your partner does and does not do. Your partner is not responsible for your happiness. However, your partner is responsible for making and maintaining some type of agreement with you, and that is fleshed out through communication. You and your partner can work out exactly what you will and will not do for and to each other. That is what your partner is responsible for. If your partner does not explicitly agree to provide something, or to do or not do something, then in all fairness it is not reasonable to expect it of them.
This is why communication is so essential. For example, if you are just assuming your partner is not going to have sex with somebody else and you never explicitly talked about it, you might want to talk about it immediately. My wife and I have had very clear conversations about things. What I have noticed is that when I was in my teens and twenties, I did not have very good conversations about what really mattered. With your dating, it is essential, especially early on, to talk about what really matters in your relationship. If you are looking for people to date, focus on what really matters. If you are single, focus on what you would really like your relationship to be like. If you have started to date somebody, communicate with them as much as possible about the things you really care about. Everything else can wait.
What I have noticed from talking to some of my friends who date is that they often hardly talk about the things that really matter. They disqualify people based on things that mostly do not matter at all, and the things that do really matter are often left to chance or discovered, unfortunately, way too far down the line.
It is much easier to get into a relationship than out of one
Here is something you need to understand about relationships. It is much easier to get into a relationship than it is to get out of one. I will say that again because it is really important. It is much easier to get into a relationship than it is to get out of one. It is very quick to get into one. You can easily jump right into bed with somebody and say, sure, I will be your boyfriend. I have done that. Then you think, what did I do? I do not even like this person. Then you go through the uncomfortable process of trying to get out of being that person's boyfriend or girlfriend. And God forbid you just passively go along, because you can realize you have been married six or ten years to somebody you do not even like, and you have not liked each other for a long time. That goes back to the basics: be unwilling to tolerate things and relationships that are toxic or that are not good for you overall, that are not 95 percent positive.
It is unreasonable to expect anyone to be 100 percent positive. My threshold is 95 percent. If you want a relationship with me, it is 95 percent. That means 19 out of 20 of our interactions should be positive, loving, kind and supportive to each other. Everybody gets to have a bad day or be a little bit unkind now and then, but that should be the minority, one out of 20 of our interactions. All of this drags us back to communication.
What I suggest, if you are totally single, is that you start thinking about the things that really matter and the questions you would need to ask if you find somebody you want to date. If you have just started dating, or almost named somebody in particular, then you need to thoroughly probe this person and yourself on the questions that really matter, because the shorter you have dated somebody, the easier it is to back out. The longer you date them, the more difficult it is to back out of that relationship.
What matters to me, starting with communication and sex
I am going to suggest some things that really matter, and these are flexible. I am going to give you my things that really matter, and what matters to me may not matter to you. But communication above all should generally be number one for everybody, because with communication you can talk about the rest of these. If you cannot communicate, you are just jumping in and hoping for the best. That does not seem like a very good strategy in such an important area of your life. It is important to figure out exactly what kind of relationship you want, and for better or worse you may not realize what you want until you have had a good bit of what you do not want.
For me, I want in a relationship, obviously, good communication. The second thing I want in a relationship is a great sex life. I enjoy a monogamous relationship. A monogamous relationship is much safer and much simpler than a non-monogamous one. I like that I do not have to date anybody else, that I can totally focus on having platonic friendships with everybody, and that my sex life is all with one person. So for me, sex is the number one thing among the things we need to talk about, with communication at the absolute top. There are a lot of things that are important to talk about and to verify that we are on the same page, but sex needs to be talked about almost immediately. This is something most kids, and my definition of kids is teenagers and people in their twenties, struggle with, and even people my age and 20 or 30 years older than me still struggle with it.
My wife and I have a great sex life because we have a great relationship, and we have a lot of conversations about sex. We got a little lucky getting started, but it still took us years of talking to get it right. You can speed that up, and that is why this is the number one thing to communicate about right away. If you are not dating anybody, think about talking about this and listening to what the other person has to say. A lot of people are a little scared or uncomfortable talking about sex, but to me there is no more important topic to talk through thoroughly and immediately.
There are basically two main angles. One, what do you want sexually? Two, what are you willing to give? Think of them like Venn diagrams. You do not want to go any further with a person if they are not willing to give you what you want sexually, or you are not willing to give them what they want. There is no point in proceeding any further, because you can have all kinds of other friendships in life, but a romantic relationship needs this. Sex is the one thing you need to really get right after communication, and therefore it is the number one thing you need to communicate about. It helps to be extremely detailed. For example, if there is something specific you love receiving, then you want to know whether the other person is willing to give it.
If the partner you are thinking about being with, or the person you are considering dating, or have started dating, is someone you want to be sexually compatible with, you want to know whether they enjoy or are willing to provide what you want. That was a question I did not ask when I dated, and wow, what a waste of time. I personally enjoy receiving oral sex, and my philosophy is that if you are not willing to give it to me, I have zero interest in being with you. That is a question you should ask on the very first date, because I went out with women for months only to discover they did not like doing that. Well, why on earth did we go out in the first place? I spent months dating somebody when on the first date we could have figured out we were not compatible. Good. Let us move on, let us meet other people, bye.
You need to be compatible so that everybody is happy sexually, because it is unreasonable to be with somebody in a monogamous relationship when they are not satisfied with the sex they are getting. It is unreasonable to expect them to be faithful. It is ridiculous to think you should be in a relationship with somebody when you are not getting what you want sexually. Outside of sex, in a romantic relationship, almost everything else can be provided by someone else. If you really love listening to a certain kind of music, you can listen to that music with almost anybody. If you love going to concerts, you can go to a concert with almost anybody. Sex, though, is the one thing that, if you are in a monogamous relationship, which most people are but not all, you are providing each other and other people are not allowed to provide.
Monogamy, change over time, and getting the sex right
To me monogamy is simple, but that does not mean it is right for everyone. I have friends who are poly, and it is interesting to hear about their experiences. I am assuming you are a monogamous kind of person, since you are still watching this. If you are monogamous, it is absolutely essential you get the sex right, because that is one of the only things you provide each other that other people are not allowed to provide.
I do suggest there are possibilities. Sometimes there might be a reason to change course, for example if one partner got very sick. I have a friend who was in a monogamous relationship. They both cheated, and then they had a dead bedroom. Then he ended up getting a girlfriend, and now the wife, the girlfriend and he are all together, and that is kind of amazing. I am amazed they were able to make that many changes. So over the course of a relationship there may be changes. However, if you are getting to know somebody, you work with what you have, and if you want a happy monogamous relationship you need to get the sex right. I have hammered this point home again because it is so important and so often ignored, or people just do not want to talk about it. Then you have all this drama. You vulnerably ask for something and they say no, and you get upset. They leave, you do not text them back, and everybody's feelings are hurt when you could have fixed it with a simple conversation.
So I suggest you get comfortable talking about sex, and be specific. You can practice in your own head right now. You can practice with your platonic friends. You can practice as much as you need. That is how you can quickly verify that you are sexually compatible. Sexual compatibility comes down to this: each person has what they want to give and what they want to get. Does what you want to get match what the other person wants to give? Does what the other person wants to get match what you are willing to give? That is what you need to talk about. So get to know exactly what you want to get and exactly what you want to give, and then listen, and encourage the other person to talk about what they want and what they like.
Talking about sex builds control, honesty and a better life together
Some of us are afraid of talking about sex because we are afraid of losing control of ourselves. I find that the more comfortable I am talking about sex, the more amazing control I have over myself. I once got a massage with no clothes on, from a very attractive masseuse who also had none on, and I did not even become aroused, because I have that much control over myself. Talking about sex helps promote control. It is usually the people who hate talking about sex and will not talk about it who have the least self-control in that department and who do the most regrettable things. I also have a commitment to utter transparency in my sex life. I will not do anything in my sex life that I would not be willing to tell everybody about, my mother, my siblings, my kids.
If you have had experiences in your sex life that you feel bad about and feel scared about, I want to say something. I once had a woman on a first date unload the worst of her sexual history on me, including some of the most painful things that had ever happened to her. She unloaded these things on the first date. I do not know if that is the best way to do it, and at the time I thought she was crazy. But I realize now that level of honesty is very attractive. If you have experiences you are ashamed of sexually, they can block you from wanting to talk about sex at all. You want to reprogram those, and the way you can do that is to find someone you feel safe talking to about your sex life in complete, honest detail. Then you will be more comfortable talking about sex with anybody you are dating. As long as you feel bad about your sex life and your sex history, you will find it difficult to talk to somebody you are dating about it. You will be constantly afraid of how they will judge you, ashamed of yourself for even talking about it, and scared to bring it up.
I have felt ridiculous about this myself. After being with my wife seven or eight years, there was one night we obviously needed to have a conversation about sex, because we were having friction. I was feeling rejected and hurt, and she was feeling pressured. We had a conversation that was really meaningful, and we came out of it with an agreement that works for both of us. Ironically, that has encouraged me to be much more considerate. Last week she was sick for days, and it encouraged me to think that what would really be great is to wait until she feels better. That is what I would really like. I love sex and I want it frequently, every day or two. I think it is a great way to connect. I have seen studies saying people are much less likely to be depressed when they have sex every two days, and in my experience, being intimate with somebody else really helps my whole brain chemistry and my body work better.
This is why I have spent so much time on this: before you even hardly get to know your partner, make sure your ideas about sex and their ideas about sex go together. You can see how incompatible I would be with some people. I want to have sex every day or two, whenever I want to, and I do not care if you have a headache, what mood you are in or whether you are mad at me. You can tell there are a lot of people who would not be willing to provide that. If, God forbid, something happened to my wife, I would not be interested in being with anybody who was not willing to provide that. In turn, I provide more than my wife wants. I am willing to please my wife every day, morning, noon and night, if she wanted it, though she does not need that much. I am also willing to be considerate and to save my sexual energy for her, and that makes a difference to my wife. We have talked about all of these things, and my wife prefers that I save all of my energy for her, and we enjoy that part of ourselves together.
When we first started our relationship it was not like that, and that was because we did not talk about those things. Once we talked about them, we got a really symbiotic relationship. Now my wife and I save all of our sexual energy for each other. I also consider the state she is in. What we have learned is that it helps me to get out of myself and consider her. I have written more about this kind of giving mindset in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take. When I looked at her sick this last week, I thought, I can wait. I said, you are too sick, I am good, I will take a few days off, let me wait until you are better. That is great communication.
My wife and I have been through a lot of arguments and a lot of fights to get to this point. What I am saying is that if you get comfortable talking about sex, you do not have to go through those arguments and those fights. I am in a place where I am so happy and connected and have everything I want in my life because, instead of learning everything the hard way, I learn from other people whenever possible. That is what I am offering you, because I do not know how much time you have left in your life to find a partner or to really enjoy your life. I want you to be able to get it right this time, or with the next person who comes along, either way.
I have spent a lot of time on this because it really matters. Make sure you are sexually compatible immediately with whoever you are with. It is worth it. For example, say you have been on a few dates with somebody, you kind of like them, you have messed around a little bit, but you do not really know them that well sexually yet. Grill them about sex. If they get grossed out or weirded out, or say you are a pervert, or say they do not want to have sex every day and would never have sex whenever you wanted to, then good, get lost, make space for me to have what I want in my life. It is worth losing somebody to find out they are not compatible. A lot of times we get too attached and think it has to work with this person. No, it does not. If you have an idea of what you want in your head, you get disciplined and you wait for exactly what you want. When it comes along you will know it, and when it is not there it can be frustrating. I had an idea of how I would feel when I was with my wife, and all these women came along that I did not feel that way with. It was frustrating, because as soon as I started dating them I knew I did not feel really excited to be with them. This is what I mentioned earlier: refuse to be with somebody you are not really excited to be with.
Single or in a mediocre relationship
Both being single and being in a relationship can be great. When you are single, you have a lot more time to hang out with your friends and a lot more time to meet people and try to find the right person. If you are dating somebody in a mediocre relationship, that is one of the worst places you can be, because you are not available, or you should not be available, to be looking for somebody you really want to be with, and yet you are not really enjoying where you are at either. One of the best things I did in dating is that I stayed mostly single until my wife came along, and that allowed me to be ready when she came along. If I had been ready earlier, she or another woman just like her would have been there in my life.
We have talked about communication and sex a lot, because communication is primary and the main thing you need to be able to communicate about is sex. If you have the communication, and the sex fits, meaning what you want to give and get matches, there is one more thing I have not said yet. In my opinion you need to be highly sexually attracted to the person, because that goes back to what I just said about a mediocre relationship. If you are dating somebody and you are like, oh, they are cute, move on. I remember thinking when I was dating my wife, my God, I would love to be with her. That is what you want. You want to feel that you would love to be intimate with and committed to your present or future partner. That is how you want to feel, because it will allow you to experience the maximum joy and will empower you to give the most.
Short-term thinking will punish you
What I have noticed is that I have dated women I was not that attracted to, and the thought was, am I going to sit at home alone tonight, or am I going to go out with this woman I do not even like that much? From a purely self-centered and short-term point of view, it can be easy to make that decision. Yeah, I will go out with this woman I do not really think is that attractive just so I can get a little something tonight. Selfish, short-term thinking in dating will really punish you, because you keep making the same kind of decision over and over again. You get to be however old, or however young, and you look around thinking, what happened to my life? I still do not have anybody I really love. It is very important to have space for somebody you really love. So with dating and relationships, you want to think long term, even though in the short term it might be painful to let somebody go.
Say you have the sex talk I have suggested with them. You realize they do not communicate that great, and the sex with them is not going to be what you want for whatever reason. Maybe they want it too much, maybe they do not want it enough, maybe they do not give what you want, or you do not give what they want. When you think short term, you avoid that sex conversation and you tolerate much less. When you think long term, you look at the rest of your life and see it would be better to be single and ready for the right person, the amazing person, to come along. It would be better to be constantly available for that, because once they come along, oh man, life is so much better. It is hard to describe. If you are tied up in mediocre relationships with mediocre communication and mediocre sex, you are not available for something awesome. You are worth the way I feel about my wife.
The beautiful thing is that I am not scared of losing my wife either, because I know the world is full of amazing people to be with if you can communicate and disqualify the people who are not amazing for you. Somebody who is amazing for you to be with might not be amazing for me, and that is why a willingness to fail is really helpful in dating and relationships. I wrote about a time when I made my own rejection happen in I Expected Her to Reject Me. Then I Made It Happen. A willingness to fail is another thing that got me to be with my wife and to the point where I am in such happy places. I was the guy constantly trying to pick women up. I got all kinds of fake phone numbers, all kinds of first dates, a lot fewer second dates, but still a bunch of second dates, third dates and beginnings of relationships. I learned the hard way what is really important: communication, and communicating about sex first. If you are not very sexually attracted to someone, or if the sex conversation goes poorly, cut them loose immediately. Life is shorter than you think. It has been 37 years since I was born, and good Lord, I might live 10,000 years with time travel and age extension technology, but in the sense of what people are really used to, how did I get to be 37 already? Make sure you are ready for exactly what you want to come along, and then go look for it.
It happened for me, so it can happen for you
This is why even if you are single, I want you to be thinking about all these things you want, because once you know what to look for and start to imagine having it in your life, things change. If you are single right now, you might think, Jerry, this sounds great, I would love to have a man or a woman in my life who could communicate like you do, someone I could have a great conversation about sex with, someone I am really attracted to and could have a great sex life with. I would love that, but I do not believe it is going to happen. It happened for me, and therefore it can happen for you. I am not special. Jesus said even the least among you can do all that I have done and greater things. You absolutely can have the relationship of your dreams if you are under the influence of God and unwilling to have anything else. The more you prepare to receive the relationship of your dreams, the faster it will come.
So practice your communication with everyone you already have in your life. I talk to my mother and my brother about sex. That is new; I did not used to. I am comfortable talking to anybody, including a woman I am very attracted to, and I am comfortable talking about sex in detail. I am honored that women share with me exactly what their boyfriends do and do not do, their birth control, their periods and cycles. I appreciate that because I am a grown-up and I can have those conversations, and someone talking to me about their personal issues does not get me all excited. It is just part of being a grown-up and having a conversation. The better communication I have with others, the better understanding and appreciation I have for where I am at.
I have a platonic female friend who shared details of her and her boyfriend's sex life, and it helped me really appreciate my sex life with my wife. She is attractive and I like the guy she is with, and hearing about their struggles helped me be glad I do not have those struggles with my wife. For us it is very regular, and it has been even through having kids. You see, it is important to be detailed about these things when you talk with your partner. Even if you are totally single and do not know who you will date, you can practice with your friends and get more comfortable talking about sex. Get more comfortable listening to people talk about sex too, because you would be amazed where you can help other people, and sometimes other people can help you, just by giving you perspective. I really appreciate that part of my marriage because I talk to other people and they say, yeah, I have not had sex with my wife in a month. I am like, divorce! I am out!
Non-negotiables after communication and sex
From your communication and your sex, you can set up a kind of non-negotiables, basic rules or foundations for your relationship, things that really matter to you. Once you have your communication and your sex right, you can dig a little deeper and see about the rest of the details. But I have spent so much time on communication and sex because the rest really does not matter at all by comparison. If you can communicate and you can have great sex, you can do anything else in a relationship.
Sure, there might be things that are really important to you. For example, if you are going to run for political office for a certain party, you might not want to date somebody from another party. I currently identify as a very moderate Republican, just barely over the center line, and my wife identifies as a pretty significantly liberal Democrat. That is good, because Democrats and Republicans need to make love to each other, not war.
It's good to see yourself in the other person, and to not look over at the other political party and say these are the enemy and they're not like me. I can't look at a Democrat without thinking of my wife and her whole family. That's good, because it makes it clear we need to work together. A friend told me recently, "Oh, I could never date this guy with this kind of politics." I told her she's wasting her time. You're disqualifying people you might love dating because of things that don't really matter, like people's politics.
So what does really matter? There's a third thing that really matters, and it sits within having healthy relationships: the character of the person. If you can communicate and have great sex, the character of the person will be fully exposed. But after you've established your communication and identified sexual compatibility, one of the main things is the person's character. Do you want to be with somebody who is honest and fully transparent, which happens through communication? The values of a person are very important.
Verify values early, on the first or second date
This is why it's better not to have sex early. You want to verify that you can communicate and that you have sexual potential. Once you've verified the sexual potential, you want to verify that your values match up. If you're really attracted to a person and you can really communicate, then you can figure out whether your values match and whether your vision of the life you want matches.
When my wife and I dated, one of our non-negotiables was that we wanted kids. Neither of us was interested in dating anybody else who didn't want kids. We both definitely wanted them. I've seen a relationship break up recently where the couple had been together quite a while. One person really wanted more than one child, and the other did not want even one child and felt that having one was a huge compromise. That person then felt the other should be loyal, compromise, and stick with one child instead of demanding a second. These are things you can work out on the first or the second date. You didn't need to be married for years, build this whole life together, and then get divorced. This was known. You knew it on the very first date.
If you're single, I hope this helps you ask the questions that are really important. Ask and get to know every single question that matters on the first or the second date, and immediately disqualify people if they don't line up. If you're farther in than the first or second date, you absolutely need to figure out everything that really matters to you and get it on the table immediately. Be willing to be single again and move on if, number one, the other person's values don't match what you want, or the other person can't or isn't willing to provide it, and number two, what they want is something you can't provide.
For example, you need to talk about kids. Do you want kids? You need to be brutally clear and honest. This is a place where you don't want to be a people pleaser, and it's also where you really want to listen to the other person.
Listening is where most couples struggle
One of the biggest areas most people struggle with in communication is, number one, listening. This is the main place people struggle. It's why couples have the same argument over and over: they're not listening to each other. My wife and I at this point almost never have an argument over the same subject, because we really listen to each other, and by listening we understand and make adjustments. If you're having the same fight with somebody over and over, I guarantee you it's you, not them, who isn't listening. If you really heard what they said, you would understand them, and if you understood them, you wouldn't be fighting against them.
My wife and I had arguments about my drinking. When she came to understand me, she realized this guy needs to get sober or she needs to leave him. When you really understand somebody, you stop having arguments and trying to change them. You accept how they are and you set boundaries. If it's important to you to date somebody sober, you need to establish that immediately and establish your boundaries. Again, the first or second date is when these should be established. Maybe you say, "Hey, what I really care about is that someone is trustworthy and transparent."
That's what I love about my wife: she's totally trustworthy. The thought doesn't even cross my mind. I'm out here filming in my studio, and it's not a real possibility in my mind that she's anywhere doing anything except exactly where she said she'd be, doing exactly what she said she'd be doing. That needs to be established up front.
Transparency matters most when it's hardest
Transparency and honesty are most important when they're most difficult. My wife has such high trust in me because anytime I get uncomfortable, I talk to her. I bring up the things that make me uncomfortable. What really stinks sometimes is being honest when you don't want to be. I've developed little crushes on people since I've been with my wife, and what's uncomfortable is telling her. I'll say, "I'm not going to do anything about this, but I've been thinking about this girl a bunch. She's attractive, I'm very happy where I'm at, and I'm telling you this to be honest because it's something I've been struggling with." After a few of those conversations, guess what stopped happening. I don't get crushes on people anymore, because I never want to have another one of those conversations with my wife. And she knows she can trust me because I tell her things like that.
Sometimes it can be too much. My wife has said, "Look, I don't need to know exactly what you're thinking. If you're thinking about some other woman, I don't need to know unless you are seriously considering leaving me to be with her. I understand that things come and go like that, and it doesn't bother me. If you're planning on leaving me, we need to talk about that. Otherwise, talk to your sponsor, talk to your mother, talk to your other friends. I don't need to hear about it." But that also proves to my wife that I'm very trustworthy, and a willingness to talk about anything is extremely important to me.
That's why sex is a good gateway to see how good your communication is. Sex is often a very messy and vulnerable topic, and if you can get messy and vulnerable talking about sex, you can do it in other areas of your life as well. I wrote more about that in Sex Education 101. It's by being transparent that we make change.
It's by telling my wife about these crushes or ideas that I've changed. I once told my wife that there was a person in her life, someone she really cares about and knows well, and that I thought it would be good if she moved in and I could have both of them as a wife. I was seriously thinking this, and I thought it would be a great idea. You know what destroyed that idea? Seeing how it looked to my wife. It looked disgusting to her. It looked like I didn't even have any chemistry with this person, that I wouldn't even want to be with her, and that if my wife and I weren't together, the two of us would never date. I shared the idea with a bunch of other people first, and then my wife asked what I was thinking about and I just unloaded it on her. That's when she said, "All right, I don't need to hear about any other woman unless you're seriously thinking about leaving me for her."
Faithful with one person, a friend to everyone
My wife has also made it clear that I can be with whoever I want, but I only get to be with her if I'm faithful and monogamous with her. If I go be with somebody else, I don't get to be with her. That's great, because it gives me the freedom to have platonic relationships with everybody else in my life, who know that sex with me is off the table. It allows girls to tell me about their intimate relationships with their partners. It allows me to be with a single girl and be a great friend to her, because she knows she's safe and I'm not going to make a move on her. I love that, and the perspective is helpful for me to be well rounded.
A lot of us are stuck in isolated places in our lives, and it's really because of our own lack of communication and transparency. This is why a lot of married men only have married men for friends, and a lot of single girls only have single girls for friends. We're often scared to have something different, and we often start asking questions about our motivations. I never ask questions about my motivations anymore. I'm here to help and support other people. I only have sex with my wife, so in all my other dealings with people I'm there to love and support them in a non-sexual capacity. There's never a sexual agenda with anybody besides my wife, and that gives me a great amount of freedom.
It allows me to be friends with single attractive women and single attractive gay guys. I identify as bisexual, and it allows me to be friends with everybody and to work with everybody. That perspective is valuable. I get the perspective of a 70-year-old guy with 40 years sober who's dating, and I can see what that has in common with a beautiful girl in her 30s who's dating. It's beautiful to see what those perspectives have in common and what's different, and it's amazing that I can then share my own experience with both. My perspective helps them, because single girls, for example, often don't have a married guy who can be a very good intimate friend, have these kinds of conversations with them, and give them perspective on their situation.
What I find really helpful in my life is to have a diverse group of people I'm connected with, everybody from babies all the way up to 80-year-olds, single and married, in monogamous and polyamorous relationships. I have all kinds of different relationships where I have a deep level of communication, and that gives me a broad perspective. I have friends who are dating, friends who are single, friends who have been married a long time, friends in almost every different situation. It gives me the ability to appreciate where I'm at, because one of the most valuable things in a relationship is being able to always see the big picture. No matter what's happening on a day-to-day basis, I love my life, I love my wife, and I'm grateful for our relationship.
The Christmas cookies and the presents
Let me give you an example. A year and a half ago on Christmas Eve, I was putting the kids to bed while my wife did some work. My wife had said, "Please don't show the kids the presents on Christmas Eve." Then I ate the last two Christmas cookies just as the kids were about to get in bed. They had already brushed their teeth and were about to read, and of course they busted me. My daughter came running out of the room and said, "Dad, you ate the last Christmas cookies. Now Santa's not going to come to our house!" I said, "Look, Mommy and Daddy are Santa. Mommy and Daddy eat these cookies anyway." She said, "No, that's not true." I said, "I'll show you the presents right now. The presents are in Mommy and Daddy's bedroom." She said, "No, they're not." So I walked her around and said, "Here are the presents. These are the presents." She had just turned five. I showed her the presents, she realized I was telling the truth, and she went to bed peacefully. I thought, all right, that went great.
Then my wife came in and blew up. "Seriously? The one thing I asked you to do, don't show them the presents, and you showed them the presents." I said, "Yeah, well." She said, "You ate the cookies," and she got upset. I thought I could be nice about it, but I got upset too. Then we woke up Christmas morning and we were both upset, both angry at each other.
You are there by choice
I have found that in a relationship, if I'm upset with the other person, then if I'm disturbed, it's not really them. I'm the one choosing to be married to my wife. If I don't like her or don't want to be with her, I'm free to leave at any time. I think it's incredibly important to remember in a relationship that you are not there by force. You are there by choice, and this goes back to one hundred percent responsibility for your life. I don't care how long you've been with someone, you are still there by choice.
I read a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and there was a lady in it who talked about how she wanted to divorce her husband. They weren't happy together. She wanted to travel the world, and her vision of what she wanted in her life no longer matched his. But she couldn't stand to think of what her mom, her family and her friends would say if she got divorced. So she stayed married to this man, got cancer and died. Right on her deathbed she told her caretaker, "Please don't live your life like I did. Don't be with somebody you don't want to be with anymore. I wish I had gotten divorced and gone and lived my life the way I'd want to live it. I bet I wouldn't have gotten this cancer if I had lived my life the way I wanted to." Then she died, and she told the author to make sure people don't worry so much about what other people are going to think.
A lot of times we make these irrational decisions, like "I'm going to stay in this bad marriage because I don't want to tell my mom and my friends about getting a divorce." Get out. What helps to have a healthy relationship is a willingness from both people to leave if it's not a happy relationship. Remember how I said before that I will not tolerate relationships in my life that are not ninety-five percent positive? My relationship with my wife has been about ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent positive. I'm not saying that if there's a hard time for a week or two you need to immediately leave the person. What I'm saying is that if you have proven you cannot have a healthy, supportive relationship with somebody, you need an immediate exit plan.
Clear boundaries and willingness to change together
My wife and I have clear boundaries. She said, "Look, you stay sober or I'm leaving. You drink, I'm leaving you." That is a healthy boundary, because I agree with her. If I drank again, clearly I wouldn't care about her. I'm an alcoholic, now with eight years sober, but one of my big motivations to get sober was when she said, "I can't stand to be around you when you're drinking anymore." I realized she was going to leave me if I didn't get sober, and I realized she was right. She should have left me. She should have threatened that and been willing to do it much earlier. I told her, "If you become an alcoholic like me, I am done. I will not be with an alcoholic who's drinking." My wife is what you might think of as a normal drinker. She goes out occasionally with her friends and has a drink or two, and that's fine with me. But if she were to start having a glass of wine every night, or two or three glasses every night, we would have to renegotiate the terms of the relationship.
What really helps in a relationship is being willing to change together, and I'll come back to the Christmas story. It also helps to know that at any time either party can say, "Look, this relationship isn't what I need right now, and I'm going to step back."
Here's an example. I identified, and I changed my race. I was one of the first transracial people in the world. I prefer not to have races at all, but if you must think of me as a race, I prefer to be thought of as black. That's the race I feel most closely matches who I am in this particular incarnation. My wife found it very frustrating, with all the negative attention, because people made up a whole bunch of crazy stories about it, and I got all kinds of nasty, hateful labels thrown at me because I said, "Hey guys, I feel black." I said that people can change their gender regardless of their biology, which I support, and I'm changing my race. Don't mind my white skin color, I'm just going to be on the way light side of black.
My wife kind of hit a bottom emotionally and mentally. She said, "I don't know if I want to be with you. I don't want to deal with news cameras in my face." My story went viral and went out in a lot of places. She said she had been thinking about what it would be like to have a divorce. I said, "Look, I love you and you're the only one I want to be with, but you are free to leave anytime you want to, and I trust you to do what's right." That's where you get to a beautiful place: when you can be with someone and you both know you're there by choice, and if just one of you decides that this isn't right for me anymore, it's okay.
You never have to be alone again
Once you get this down, once you can communicate and talk about sex and then get into values and all the other deeper stuff, you realize you never have to be alone again for any period of time. Once you can communicate, verify whether you're sexually compatible and have deep conversations about values, you very easily can attract the right person into your life and disqualify anybody who's not right. The way I look at it, I'm grateful that I'm not afraid of my wife leaving, because I know I could find another woman just as amazing as my wife to fill her spot. I know that if I were single again and I sat down, communicated, talked about what I want and what I'm willing to give, and talked about the things that really matter, I could find somebody else. So I am not overly attached in the sense of "you have to stay with me, never leave me, what would I do?" I know I could find another beautiful woman if my wife moved out, and I could move her in as soon as I was ready for one. I wrote about how that played out in real life in I Started Talking to 14 Women at Once. Everything Changed.
You might think, well, that's nice, Jerry, you're attractive, you've got your life together, you have the ability to be as attractive as you want to be and to have your life together too. That's why I make this stuff every week. I used to not think I was attractive, and I did the work to change that. I listened to hundreds of audiobooks and I let everybody in my life help me. This is also why talking about sex can be very therapeutic. Sometimes the people you have conversations with will help you realize, oh, this person's attracted to me. I help other people feel attractive, and I know where my comfort level is. I'd like to be able to tell more people I don't have such a deep relationship with, "Hey, you're attractive, I like you, I like your vibe," and not have them get the idea that we're going to start dating from here. But I'm grateful that I'm able to tell everybody I have significant connections with, if they're open to hearing it, and that's beautiful.
Back to Christmas morning
So let me come back to that Christmas story. It's Christmas morning 2020, and my wife and I are both upset. This is why it helps to have lots of connections in your life and to always remember the big picture and one hundred percent responsibility. If you really love somebody, being upset at them is a way of hurting yourself. It's so obvious when my wife is upset with me. She's such a loving, giving and selfless person that I know it hurts her to be upset with me. So if she's upset with me and I have operated within my values and my morals, I'm able to really support her and love her until she feels better, and give her space. On Christmas morning I gave her space. I stayed quiet, and I've found that if you are upset with somebody you're dating, often silence, and asking other people for help remembering what's true, will make a big difference.
On Christmas morning 2020 I took a walk with the dog for an hour right after the kids opened presents, and I called my mother. I said, "Mom, I'm having a hard time remembering that I love my wife right now. My mind is filled with thoughts of how my wife is wrong and mean, and do I really want to be with her? Mom, can you help me remember how much I love my wife?" My mom helped me remember. She said, "Well, let me tell you about what your father did." After talking to my mother for an hour, I called my sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous. Then I got home and told my wife I loved her and that I was sorry. Christmas immediately went better for the rest of the day.
Ending a fight quickly
If you're having conflict with somebody you're dating, the last video I made on my Jerry Banfield YouTube channel and the Jerry Banfield Show podcast, the last episode, is about how to end a fight or how not to have any conflict in your life. I think it's called How to End a Fight in Seconds. I talk about how I don't have conflict in my life, and if there ever is a conflict with my wife, it ends quickly. It ends quickly by my taking responsibility for what I did and asking other people for help if I'm off center. Once I get back on center, it's usually pretty quick that she gets back on center too.
The other night my wife got upset about something, and I took inventory of myself and realized I was centered. She was just upset, and it was okay. It wasn't really about me at all. The nicest, kindest, most loving thing I could do right then was let her go to bed, walk my dog, call my mother and leave her alone. That's exactly what I did. Sometimes you'll get this expectation or pressure that you should fight with your partner, and keep fighting through to some place where you get together. What I've found is that it often works better to step back, take a little space, and then come back and resume your communication once you've gotten yourself centered.
So I did that. My wife was upset, and I said, "Love you. I'm going to walk the dog. Goodnight." I left not thinking about how bad she is or judging her. I left praying, "I hope and trust that she's okay and she'll feel better in the morning. She's just tired and cranky, just like the kids get sometimes at bedtime. It's nothing personal." She went to sleep, she woke up, and that's exactly what happened. When we woke up the next morning she felt just fine. We literally didn't have to have that fight, and we've learned we don't have to have that fight. In the past we would have had it, stayed up an hour too late, been tired and still been suffering the next morning. We didn't have that fight this time.
Why communication and sex matter, and infidelity
This is why, again, the communication and the sex are so important. If you can communicate and consistently have sex, you avoid what I've noticed in most of my friends and family who've gotten divorced: they had a crummy sex life. Either they stopped having sex altogether, or one partner became very inconsiderate of the other. Maybe one just had a baby and said, "Oh, I don't have any time for sex at all," indefinitely, until the baby grows up or whatever it is. One partner just totally went into self and stopped considering the other partner's sexual needs. Then they have all these fights, and then one goes out and cheats. And now you feel victimized: look what they did. But you put in your half by going into self and not considering your partner at all, and then they did the same thing back to you.
To me, infidelity in a relationship is always a function of selfishness and self-centeredness. If you've agreed to be in a monogamous relationship, here is how I look at it. I could be with any woman I want to today, any woman who wants to be with me, and we're talking consensual here. If some woman wanted to be with me, I could be with her right now. All I need to do is tell my wife first. I'd go tell my wife, "Hey, I'm going to be with this other woman," because I'm not allowed to be with another woman until I renegotiate the monogamous relationship. Let me be specific: I'm not allowed to have sex with her. I can be all kinds of intimate. I can talk about anything. The same thing goes with a man. I'm bisexual either way. I usually say woman because I'm still used to talking like that, and I've only identified as bisexual in the last year.
But here's the thing. I can do whatever I want as long as I honor and change any conflicting agreements that are in place. I have an agreement that I won't have sex with anybody but my wife, which means I cannot do anything beyond that unless I change the agreement with my wife first. It is dishonorable to have an agreement in place with somebody and not honor it. That's where it comes back to one hundred percent responsibility. I love that I trust myself. I know I'm not going to suddenly lose control and have sex by surprise. Being a good communicator allows you to talk through things, and I don't want to be with anybody besides my wife. That's the beauty of it today. It's taken a lot of work to get here, and it all comes through communication. Everything flows from there.
What matters most, whether you're single or not
I hope this has been extremely helpful for you. I'm happy to make a more specific video or zoom in on a specific subject. I don't get the comments a lot, but I'll check on some of them, so you can ask a specific question if you want. I've given you what's most important here. Whether you're single or in a relationship, what's most important is being able to communicate and be on the same page sexually, and then everything that flows from there: your values, what's important to you, whether you want kids or not, and your vision of your life together.
It's important to kind of manifest your life together, and this is why communication is so important. You want to talk about the things you're interested in doing together and bounce ideas off each other. Listen to each other. Be willing to change your opinions for somebody else. I know it can be intimidating at the beginning of a relationship. You think, well, this person lives here and I live there, what are we going to do? This is why it's important to make sure it's the right person first. If it's not the right person, it doesn't matter whether you live separately, an hour away or more. If you're not compatible as communicators, sexually, and in the vision you have for life, it doesn't matter what else. If you are compatible, you'll work out all the details together.
My wife and I lived an hour apart when we started dating. The more we communicated and had sex, the more I became willing to do whatever it took to move in with her. I had a lot of fun with my bachelor pad, and she lived with her parents. We ended up renting an apartment to move in together, and we didn't even really talk about it that much. My wife got a job in Sarasota after law school and was talking about getting an apartment. I thought, hmm, I'm going to be spending a lot of time there. I'd never moved in with a woman at that point. I thought, I'm going to be spending so much time there, I might as well just move in. So I moved in with my wife after dating her for less than eight months from our first date. I had never lived with a woman before, other than my mother. It's been great.
Grateful for the past, and not being possessive
What's great is that I love where I'm at today, and I'm grateful for my past, because a lot of the time I did what you might think of as wrong, and they were learning opportunities. I had lots of nasty fights with girls. I lost a job over dating a girl before. I had a relationship where a girl cheated on me, and at the time I was so hurt over it. I thought, she's ruined our life, what am I going to do without her? I kind of make fun of it today because it's so juvenile. What you're going to do is learn from it and find another person to be with. You're going to make yourself the best, most worthy person to be with, and then you're going to be with somebody else. That's what you're going to do. I told the longer version in I'm So Glad My Ex-Girlfriend Cheated on Me.
I'm so glad that girlfriend cheated on me and dumped me, because I deserved it. I was a jerk. She wasn't getting what she wanted out of the relationship, and she tried to leave without cheating. I was all clingy about it, so she cheated on me. Even when I was crying and whining, "Don't break up with me," she knew she had cheated, so she felt she had to leave. I hope she doesn't feel bad about that. It was the best she could do at the time. There is a much more honorable way to do it.
The last thing I'll say is that you don't want to be too possessive with another person. You noticed how I mentioned before that my wife and I are in the relationship by choice, and at any time either of us can make modifications to it. The right thing to do, the honest, transparent, good-communicator thing to do, is to talk about these things in advance. Take the time I got the idea that I should have two wives. When I got that idea, I talked to my wife about it, and she destroyed it. I realized, hmm, she's exactly right. Instead of keeping that idea to myself and letting it fester until I do something stupid, I brought it out in the open, we destroyed it, and now I'm at peace. I don't get ideas like that anymore. That's why it's so beautiful to communicate.
It's so beautiful to feel like what you really want is someone you can talk with about anything. That's why getting into sex right away, I mean getting into talking about sex, matters: if you can talk with somebody about sex, you can really talk with them about anything, because sex is one of those very vulnerable topics. I hope this has been helpful for you, and I trust you'll keep coming back if it was. At the time I made a new class like this every week on my Jerry Banfield YouTube channel, and I also put it on The Jerry Banfield Show podcast. You can find more like it in my Dating playlist.
An ongoing education to be your best self
This is part of what I called Jerry Banfield University. Once a week, whenever I make a class like this, I also put together all of the other videos I watched that inspired me that week, and the gaming videos where we talked about certain subjects. I put all of that together for you. My goal is that this is part of a comprehensive, ongoing education curriculum you are undertaking to be your best self, to have your best life, and to constantly expand and learn and grow your spirit and your soul. To me, that's where happiness and meaning come from in life.
The people I see who are unhappy are often stuck in the exact same routines, doing the exact same things, telling the exact same stories and just repeating the past over and over again. The people I see who are really happy are constantly seeking new ideas and learning, constantly expanding their worlds and not getting back to the same old ways. I want to thank you for being out there and helping others as much as possible. I'm honored you've spent almost an hour and a half with me. That means a lot. I love you. You're awesome.
Talking with me
If you want to talk with me, the best way to have a real conversation is to schedule a call with me on my website and talk one on one. Thank you very much. I love you, you're awesome. Have a wonderful life. Here's to happily ever after for you and for me.
Healthy relationship secrets from single to happily ever after!
From my video published April 19, 2021.
What are the secrets to having an amazing relationship, and to taking yourself from single, if you want to go from single, into a relationship that lives happily ever after? I'm Jerry Banfield and I'm grateful today. I have had a very happy relationship in my life with my wife and now my children for the last 10 years. I have extremely good relationships with everybody I'm connected to, not just my wife or my children, but everybody. I am on good terms. I have nobody in my life that I am not on good terms with.
What I'm going to do is share my experience, because for a lot of years I was painfully single. I didn't like being single, I wished I were with someone, and I struggled to have a healthy relationship. Before I met my wife, I had lots of drama in relationships, with things like restraining orders, lost jobs, and people threatening that if I broke up with them, they'd take their own life. The usual kind of drama that you get into. I'll share all of my experience today to help you have better relationships, because I find that what helps me most to be happy as often as I am, which is almost all day, almost every day, is my relationships. I am blessed, unstoppable, I'm feeling fantastic, and I'm enjoying my life, and my relationships are a big part of that. I have three priorities in life: God, health, and relationships. My relationships strongly support my health and my connection to a higher power.
I'll focus specifically on romantic relationships here. However, a lot of what I say will be extremely relevant to other kinds of relationships too. I intend to answer as many of the questions you are asking while I'm live on Facebook as I can, about specifics.
Get right with your highest self first
Let's begin with the number one principle for having healthy relationships. That principle, surprisingly, is getting right with your highest self, with God, with why you're here, with who you really are. As long as you are not right with that, every single other thing you do in your relationships will suffer.
If you're not sure why you're here in this life, if you don't think there's any higher power than you, and you feel stuck being a human being in this body, just trying to go through life and survive, then all of your relationship drama is unavoidable. You will consistently run into major challenges in your relationships. You'll essentially get dragged along with the flow of life, feel like a powerless victim or a perpetrator of hurt, and everybody around you will come along with you for that. Or, if they're not up for it, they'll let go of you.
That's why the most important thing for your relationships is that you be happy, feel connected with something bigger than yourself, and take good care of yourself before you even consider being in a relationship. In other words, you come from a place where you're happy being single, where you love yourself as you are. You don't need anyone else to make your life worth living or to make your life fun. You are in a place where you're very happy as you are.
This is the key thing that blocked me from having happy relationships, especially in my teens and in my 20s. I was not happy as myself. I was not consistently connected to anything bigger than me. I was just focused on me and this human life, and I thought, I don't know if there is anything else, and I don't really care, and we can't get answers to that. I didn't like myself, I didn't feel good being alone, I really wished I had a relationship, and I hoped somebody else would help me feel better. As long as you place these expectations on other people, that they're going to do for you what you ought to be able to do for yourself, your relationships will all struggle.
I see some of you joining in the chat, and it's nice to see you today. Yes, this is a self help channel and a gaming channel.
It is okay to be single
It is okay to be single. In fact, I'm saying that if you want a truly happy relationship, you will best attract it into your life from a place where you're very happy being single. If you are unhappy being single, you will be unhappy with a partner. If you are happy being single, you will be happy with a partner. I wrote more about this idea in You Can Be Terrible at Dating and Still Find Love.
At the same time, I also suggest that relationships have huge benefits for us. For example, in the book I talked about recently, Mind Over Medicine, being part of a supportive community produced a more powerful positive health effect than several things like diet, exercise, eating, drinking alcohol, and smoking cigarettes. Several of those bad habits combined produced as much negative as a supportive community produced positive. So while, yes, it is important to be able to be happy by yourself, I will suggest that being very connected and having strong relationships will make it easiest to be happy over a long period of time and leave you feeling the most supported.
Just because you're single doesn't mean you don't have a lot of very healthy supportive relationships. You can have very healthy supportive relationships with your parents, with your siblings, with your children, with the people in your community, with your friends and with the people you work with. You can be single and have a lot of strong community and very healthy relationships around you.
If you are single and isolated, that is usually going to be a bad recipe. For example, if you're single and you don't talk much with your parents and you don't have a lot of close friends, you will often be desperate for a relationship. That desperation will either push away somebody you'd really like to be with, or attract somebody who feels just the way you do, someone you can be miserable with together, and then you wish you were single again.
Therefore, if you really want to have a great relationship, it starts, continues and finishes with working on yourself. The more great work you do on yourself, the more, if you're single, you will attract a fantastic partner to you almost effortlessly. And if you are in a relationship, either the partner will thrive and support you and love you and give you everything you want, or the partner won't be able to stand you and will leave and make space for a new partner to come in.
The worst advice I found as a teenager
I feel the need to share all of this because I remember when I was a teenager Googling for things like dating advice. I remember reading a website that gave the absolute worst advice, and I didn't know anywhere else to get good advice. I read things like how to play the game with a woman and how to get her to like you, and all of that stuff is absolutely worthless. That's why we're not going to talk about any of it. If you want a fantastic relationship, it is 100 percent about taking responsibility for your life and your feelings and your circumstances, and finding a way to love where you're at. Then you'll attract, or make the most of, whatever you already have.
I like to share this because I like to think that maybe there's a young man out there who's already watching, or a young woman, or an old man or an old lady, or who knows who. Maybe there's someone out there who has never heard some of these things before. When I share them for the first time, it may make a heck of a difference in your life, because the first time I started hearing these things, I thought, wow, I've never even considered looking at it that way. You mean my wife is not responsible for my feelings? Really? You mean I'm completely responsible for my feelings, and my wife is completely responsible for her feelings? I can't remember anybody saying that to me, maybe because I wasn't listening or maybe because it wasn't said. I don't remember ever hearing it until I was in my 30s: it's not up to your wife to make you happy. If you want to be happy with your wife, it's up to you to look within and be happy.
Someone in the chat asked about the gaming. The gaming is usually after the just chatting part.
Singleness as a chance to do the work
You can see the importance of doing the work on yourself. One of the best things about being single is that it's an opportunity to do the work on yourself without distraction. By distraction, I mean getting sucked into the illusion that somehow your partner is disturbing you. I'm not talking about your partner disturbing your work, because really your partner is here to help you do your work. My wife is here to help me grow spiritually. She's here to test me.
If you're in a relationship, taking full responsibility for your own feelings is the best thing you can do to feel better. That's the one thing I've done in my relationship with my wife that has helped us reach a level of happiness I've never seen. I have never seen anyone up close have a relationship as good as I have now. My parents loved each other a lot and had a lot of rocky times. I did not see them have the level of peace, connection and communication that I have with my wife. I've never been close enough to anyone else to see this either, and it's because I've done the work on myself.
For this reason, if you're struggling with your partner or your relationship, I suggest you back up off of them and do the work yourself. For example, there's no need to tell your partner what they need to do if you're doing your own work. Either they will be motivated to follow you by example, or they will leave. What usually happens in an intimate relationship, if you really do the work on yourself, meaning you connect with some kind of higher power, is that things shift.
If you have problems like mine, you take responsibility for them. Seven years ago I was drinking, in the middle of my alcoholism. It wasn't up to my wife to fix my alcoholism, it was up to me. I prayed to God, please help, I'll do anything to get sober. I followed the help that first came in the form of a thought to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that help has continued to come in terms of going to Alcoholics Anonymous and reading books. I've read over 200 books, most of them self help. I work a lot on myself to be the best I can be, and I take responsibility.
This morning, for example, I was feeling a little irritable, a little bad, and my wife came in in a great mood and said, how are you doing? I said, I'm feeling a little bad this morning, and I'm open to feeling better. I let her good mood wash over me. When you do the work on yourself, you can even help your partner, or a potential partner, deal with themselves. My wife sometimes can get a little bit insecure about my feelings if she thinks that somehow she's responsible for them.
What I do to help her is say, I'm feeling bad, and it has nothing at all to do with you. Sometimes she needs to hear that and sometimes she doesn't. Then I say, I'm open to feeling better, I'm open to any help you have to feel better, whether it's a hug or just understanding. From my wife's point of view, all she wants to know is that my mood is not her fault. The more I do this, the more she does it back. Our partners are often mirrors: whatever we do, they will often do back.
Be the best version of yourself and you attract a partner
Let's back it up a little bit. If you're single, you might be thinking, well, Jerry, that's great if I'm with a partner, but I'm not. Here's the thing. If you focus right now on being the best version of yourself that you can be and want to be, you will attract a partner into your life. You don't have to hustle or hunt them down. I used to feel like a hunter, like I had to go hunt down some girl as my prey and lure her into a relationship with me. What I see now is that when you take care of yourself and make yourself as attractive a partner as you can be in your own eyes, a partner shows up. I wrote about this in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take.
This starts with honesty. For example, pay attention to how you're eating. If you look in the mirror and see someone overweight, who is a jerk to people, who doesn't like their life, who is in a bad mood a lot of the time and has a few bad habits, then that's a good starting point. You think, whoa, I don't like that. I weighed 70 or 80 more pounds than I do now, and the number probably goes up the further back I look. I used to weigh a lot more than I do now. I used to drink. I used to have bad money spending habits. I still managed to attract love into my life because I still loved myself enough. The longer I was with my wife, the more motivated I got to be my most attractive self, for her and for me. You don't have to live with your partner every day, all day, but you have to live with yourself all day, every day.
The starting point is honesty. I was lying in bed with my last hangover, realizing that I needed to get sober or I was going to die, and that I didn't know how to do it. I said I would take absolutely any help that was out there. Then I took the help, and I continue to take the help and give it forward. One day I looked in the mirror and realized, I hate how overweight I am and I want to be thin. I want to look how I look now. I looked in my bank account fairly recently and said, I don't like this. I want to have money in my bank account, I want to spend my money wisely, and no matter how much money comes in, I want to manage it effectively.
Take inventory of the good and the bad
When you look at yourself with this kind of honesty, you can also see what you're doing well. For example, you're consistently nice in certain situations, or you have a lot of love to give. You can look at the positive things about yourself and say, I love physical intimacy, and I will be very happy in a relationship to provide that every day or every other day or whatever it is. You want to take inventory of the good things about yourself because you want a complete picture.
Sometimes you may need a friend or a family member to help you have this perspective. If you're like me, you might only be able to see the bad things about yourself and not see how to change them. A good friend can help, especially a friend who is of whatever you're looking for. For example, if you're a straight man looking for a woman, and you can have a female friend without constantly wanting to be intimate with her, she might be able to help you see, look, I think you're attractive in this way, and in that way, and you have this and this to offer. Even if you're in a relationship, you might need someone else to help you appraise what is good about you and what you might be able to do to change the things you don't like.
Here's the thing about changing how you look. If you knew what to do to change it, you would simply do it. If you think you're going to change the things you don't like but you don't, then you don't know how. If you think, I just need to eat healthy, but you don't eat healthy, then you don't really know what to do. If you know what to do, you will simply do it. So there's that first kind of honesty, and you can do this in a relationship too, to appraise yourself: what kind of partner am I, what do I have to offer, what liabilities do I have, what can I change, and how would I like to be?
Seeing a person nobody should be with
When I looked at myself and saw a person who was not very desirable to be with, I got a massive desire to change. I said, I want to be sober, because nobody should be with me when I'm drinking. My wife ought to leave me, as she was about to, and that motivated me to get sober. I saw that my wife was not going to keep putting up with my drinking, and once I made that decision I thought, I need that change, and I thought of my family. Good morning to the folks joining the chat, it's nice to see you today.
Once I saw that I could go from a drunk to a sober person and be happy with it, I realized I could change anything else I wanted to about myself. I could change my weight. I could put on more muscle and drop the extra fat. Then I realized I could change things about my personality. I don't have to be an angry person who's ready to blow. I don't have to be an angry driver, driving on the road and running cars off the road. I don't have to be how I am, which leads me to the question, how do I want to be? What kind of a husband do I want to be?
I want to be husband of the year. I want to be a husband that women look at and almost faint, thinking, oh my God, that's so attractive. That's the husband I want to be for my wife. I also want to be the kind of husband who's proud of the kind of husband he is, but not so proud that he isn't willing to make improvements, willing to constantly assess his behavior. A husband who feels worthy without any positive reinforcement. A husband who's just happy to be in the relationship.
If you're single and you think this way, you are going to magnetically attract a person into your life who will be a great partner for you. If you are already in a relationship and it is truly unproductive, then your partner will leave you, or you will feel very excited to leave them. Good morning to the new people on the live today.
How I ended a relationship that wasn't working
I was in a relationship before my wife that was not very satisfying to me. I had tried to break up with the girl, but then she said, I can't live without you, that kind of thing. So I waited a little bit. We were going to go visit my family, and on the way there we stayed with her parents. At the last minute, I felt, oh, I can't live without her either. Then at the last moment I said, I really just want to go by myself to visit my family. Once I was home with my family, I started to get really excited about dating again. I realized it would be dishonorable to have a girlfriend and a Match profile up at the same time. So I was very excited to break up with my girlfriend. I felt nothing bad about it. I felt this was the best thing for me and therefore for her, because it's not good for anybody to be with somebody who doesn't want to be with them. It is not good for either person.
I called her up and said, look, thanks, I've enjoyed our time together, and I really want to start dating again. So I'm going to put my Match profile up, and I'm therefore going to end my agreement to be in a relationship exclusively with you. She was at home with her parents, so I figured this would be a good time to do it. As soon as I hung up the phone, I went on Match.com and made my profile active. Very shortly after that, I met my wife. I'm so grateful that I broke up from that relationship. I also wrote about this kind of situation in Chasing a Woman Who Pulls Away: Why I Now Say Stop Sooner.
The beautiful thing is that when you love yourself and you're happy with yourself, you are truly giving yourself love and acceptance. The best way to do this is to have a very strong community of people you're connected with: family, friends, people at work, people at home, people at recovery meetings. The more people you have in your life, the less you will find you need out of a romantic partnership. The less you need out of a romantic partnership, the better you are taking care of yourself. You will attract somebody to you who is the same way, and you will have a great time together. Whether you're single or in a partnership, it's always all about doing your own work. From there, all good things happen in relationships.
Delete the negative stories
There are some negative stories that may be in your mind, and I'll go into them now. If you notice these operating, you will want to consciously delete them and reprogram new ones. For example, when I was in college at the University of South Carolina, I was telling myself the story that there are not very many hot girls available. In my mind I had a perception of lack. Even though I was surrounded by beautiful women all over campus, I had this idea that there weren't enough girls for the number of guys who were there. At least according to the Match.com data, that seemed to be accurate. When I looked on Match.com, there were twice as many men searching for women with the same criteria I was using. There were something like 700 men who met the criteria and about 400 and something women.
While that may have been valid externally, it also blocked me from seeing the opportunities that were around me. So what if the odds aren't in your favor? If you take great care of yourself and love yourself, the odds won't matter as much, or you will reposition yourself to put the odds in your favor.
Good moods are contagious too
I am fantastic this morning. I was feeling a bit down earlier, and I'm glad I worked the stuff I'm talking about. My wife came in from working and said, how are you? I said, I'm feeling a little bit bad this morning, and I'm open to feeling better. In a few minutes it was gone. Have you ever noticed how somebody else's bad mood feels contagious, how when someone around you is in a bad mood, you'll catch it? Good moods have the same property. I am certain the same thing can be said for health conditions. If you can catch a negative condition from a bad mood, you're going to be able to catch it from another person, so you must also be able to catch the antidote, the positive equivalent, from them. Maybe that's why everybody around me seems to be healthy: they're catching all my good vibes. Maybe that's how it works.
I caught my wife's good mood this morning. I simply was open to her good mood washing over me, and now I feel fantastic. I remember thinking this morning, I don't know what I'm going to talk about today, because I'm not even in that great of a place myself. My relationship supported me.
In other scenarios, that same situation, where I feel bad, went like this. Instead of owning my own feelings, I went to blame somebody else for them. I would think of things like, my wife is not doing this the way she should be, and that's why I feel bad. Then when she walked in in a good mood, instead of allowing her to feel good and leaving her undisturbed, I would throw my bad feelings at her and try to drag her into them. I would say, I can't believe what you did last week because of this and that. All of a sudden, instead of both of us feeling good, both of us felt bad, and that was completely caused by me. The more I take care of my own feelings, the more it becomes almost impossible for my wife to drag me into her negative feelings, or for me to drag her into mine. That's the beauty of what I'm saying here.
Limiting beliefs about relationships
Let's go back to some of those limiting beliefs that we hold about relationships. The key is to identify whichever ones you're holding and consciously reprogram yourself. For example, you might think there just aren't a lot of good men out there, that most of the good men are taken by good women, and that the men who are single are jerks, which is why they're single. If you hold a belief like that, I'm sure you will find external evidence that you're right. What really matters is, where are you wrong? What if there is a great man who would be just perfect for you, and the only way you'll find him is if you know that he exists?
Sure, there may be lots of jerks in the world, and lots of single men who aren't worth being with, but that doesn't matter, because you're not looking to be with all men. You're looking for one person who is right for you. Even if 99 out of 100 of the men near you fit your belief, if you understand that there is a great man available regardless of how many you see who aren't, and you focus on that, you will be drawn to that great man. You will happen to run into him at the store. You will happen to have a friend who knows him. If instead you are stuck in the belief that all men are jerks, you will not see or be connected with the one who is not a jerk, the one you would love to be with. That won't manifest, because you're not looking for it. When you aren't looking for the one who is different, you'll never notice him.
You find what you're looking for. For example, if you start shopping for a certain car, all of a sudden you notice those kinds of cars driving all over. I tend to notice cars that I know people have. My neighbor has a nice white Mercedes, and I notice those driving around because I think, hey, maybe that's my neighbor. I notice cars like mine because, hey, that's just like my car. I hardly pay any attention to cars that I don't relate to. Based on my attraction point, what I'm paying attention to is what I will notice, and I won't notice the hundred other cars that drive by. I will notice the ones that are like the cars I'm used to paying attention to. It's the same with men or women or whatever it is you like, even aliens. Whatever you pay attention to is what you'll notice. If you pay attention to jerks, you're going to notice jerks. Somebody just sent me money in the chat, and I'm paying attention to money. Thank you for the hundred stars. Someone said, I love this, it makes perfect sense, I love the way you get people to see things from another perspective. Yes, that's why I do this. Thank you, I'm so glad you're here for this.
My darkest place over a relationship
Some of you have been talking about the relationship things you've been going through recently, and I think that inspired this discussion to come up in me today. Relationships at one point, especially romantic ones, were my biggest pain point. I almost ended my own life several times over what I thought were relationship pains. This girl doesn't want to be with me anymore, or I don't want to be with her anymore. Mostly it was that she didn't want to be with me anymore, because I acted like a lunatic and I wouldn't apologize. If you've been to really dark places, seemingly over your relationships, I understand. What I can tell you is that you might be amazed at how good your life can be.
I remember 12 years ago now being in the darkest place. There was a girl, and if you want the full story about her, it's in my book Officer Banfield. She was a perfect 10 in looks. My God. I actually got to be intimate with her for one night, which was fantastic. I was going crazy before that happened, and once we actually got together, my craziness hit a whole new level, a whole new level of high and a whole new level of low. I was thinking, this is so bad, I had better shoot myself before this gets any worse.
I see today that I was not prepared to be in the relationship of my dreams, and the girl I attracted was not prepared to be in the relationship of her dreams either. I had this idea in my head that if I could just get a beautiful, fun girl to like me, my life would all be great. Actually, I'm so grateful that she and I connected, because that's when my illusion was broken. I realized that even if I get everything I want, I not only can still be unhappy, I can be in utter misery. I had been under the illusion for a long time that I was unhappy and suffering because I didn't have the things I wanted, and that if I had all the things I wanted, I would be happy.
In May 2009, I reached a point where I had all the things I wanted. I had a beautiful girl who really liked me. I had a job I was really proud of as a police officer, with higher pay than I'd ever gotten before, lots of respect, and statewide jurisdiction. I had friends who consistently liked playing video games with me, and we'd go out to the bar together. I had in my mind what was a perfect life. I had set up this thing in my mind that if I had all of that, I'd be happy. Right after I got all of that came the darkest places I have ever been to in my life. I had the most times I wanted to go to a bar, the most times I wanted to end my own life, and I felt like I went completely insane. One moment I'd be telling her, I love you, you're the greatest, and literally the next moment I'd be telling my friends how absolutely horrible she was. Oh my God, it was crazy. That's when I called my dad up, just two weeks after getting together with her, and said, Dad, I'm going to end it all. This is unbearable. This is horrible.
Forgive yourself and what you did
If you've been to places of pain in your relationships, I understand. The key thing to learn is to take full responsibility for yourself, your feelings, your behavior and your actions, and to forgive yourself for your feelings, your behavior and your actions. Whatever you did in the past was the best you could do. If you did something dishonorable in a relationship, for example if you agreed to be monogamous with someone and then cheated on them with their best friend, or whatever you did that you think is so bad and so unforgivable, it's not.
I'm so grateful for another girlfriend I had, at a time when I again wanted to end my own life, and even thought about ending hers too. She cheated on me and left me. At the time I felt like such a victim: I don't deserve this, it's all wrong, it's not fair. Today I'm so glad she cheated on me. If she's watching this, thank you very much for cheating on me. That was awesome. I'm so glad we had the time we had together, and that then you did whatever it took to move on, because neither of us was happy, and that helped both of us a lot. Even though it was painful in the short term, there's no need to forgive something that is completely understood and even seen as a good thing.
No matter what you went through in the past, it is giving you things today that you can use to help other people, and that you can use to be motivated to have a great relationship. If you'd like the full story, it's in my book Officer Banfield.
I have the very full story of the relationship I just mentioned from 2009. A viewer wrote in, saying that because of where she lives she has been alone and more secluded, so she has had a lot of time without outside influence, and she came to the conclusion that she is enough just the way she is. If the right person comes along, what you see is what you get. Exactly. That is a good place to be: I am enough as I am. And there are certain points in life where it is beneficial to us not to be in a romantic relationship.
My wife and kids went to Disney for the weekend, and I was really happy without them around. I thought, my God, I can just do whatever I want all day. This is great. It was such a joy to focus on me instead of being so aware of how what I am doing is impacting what they are doing, and kind of dancing with them. I got to take a break and just dance by myself. It was a pleasure. It was even a little uncomfortable when they came home, because part of me wished they would be gone another day or two, or maybe a week. So there are definitely times in life where it is appropriate not to have a romantic relationship. That is where honesty comes into play, because I love having a romantic relationship. I think it is awesome. If you want to see how I think about the single years, I wrote about it in Single Men Win Big, But Keep Your Eyes Open.
Why a partner helps me grow faster
For me, having a romantic relationship encourages me to grow faster. If you are single, you can get away with a lot of the ways you think and a lot of the things you do. If you are with a partner, they encourage you to grow spiritually, because even if everything you are doing is right, your partner will sometimes take issue and challenge you. Those challenges lead to mastering the spiritual principles. If your partner is having a bad day purely because of themselves, it can be easy to get sucked into it, to feel responsible for it, or to try to fix them. If you are single, you do not have to deal with any of that.
So if you love being in a romantic relationship, you can also really appreciate the benefits of being single. You can appreciate that you do not have anyone else to think about. Now, you might picture someone being miserable because they have no one else to think about, but that can also be looked at as a really good thing.
Another viewer said he did not know what he would do in the future, only that he was planning to play Magic that day, and that was all he knew. That is a fine plan for a day.
A different viewer wrote that he finds dealing with people's moods hard. He just wants to live in harmony, and it seems some people cannot think that way. That is exactly what I am talking about. Other people's moods are challenging, and it is much easier to do without them. However, it seems many of us have incarnated here for the purpose of learning, growing and experiencing life, and other people's moods help us learn and grow.
My son's mood and my reaction to it
Yesterday I was not liking my son's mood. My son is almost three years old. He fell asleep for thirty minutes in the back of the car on the way home from Disney, and he was in a miserable mood. He went from giddy to throwing everything on the floor, crying and screaming at somebody. I thought, my God, man, just go to sleep. Take care of yourself and stop putting your mood out on the rest of us.
What is nice is that I cannot fully get into thinking that way today, because I know it is not my son's mood. It is my reaction to my son's mood. It is possible for me to react completely with love and empathy and think, man, I feel you. I know that when I do not get my sleep, sometimes everything seems like the worst. Our partners, our relationships and the moods around us help sharpen the fire of our spirit.
I see lots of people in AA meetings, especially single people, and it seems to me they are not being challenged that often. They can afford to sit at home and watch TV in peace. Nobody is bothering them. They jerk around in their head with some of these thoughts and get a little uncomfortable, but nobody challenges them on a daily basis the way I get challenged. I wake up in the morning and there is my wife, my daughter and my son, and it is up to me to pay attention to what I like. Sometimes it challenges me. My wife and daughter are going at it in the morning before school, or my son is not cooperating, and I have to focus on this: I love my kids, I love my wife, I love my kids, I love my wife. Then there are the moments where I think, everybody stop it, you all suck right now. Some days my wife and my daughter are just going back and forth, and I think, can you not all just be nice? And then I know that thinking that will only make me feel worse.
Those mornings help sharpen my spirit, because they help me take full responsibility for my own mood again. If I love my wife and I love my children, so what if they are getting aggravated with each other? So what if my son is hitting my daughter? I am not going to let him, but I do not have to get upset about it either. My son is three and my daughter is almost six. That is what they do. They slap each other sometimes. They punch each other sometimes. They push each other down and kick each other. That is what they do at that age. At a certain point, regardless of what I do, they are going to grow out of it. I do not have to be afraid that my daughter will still be hitting people when she is older. If she is, that is up to her. She knows that I do not go around hitting people, even when I get upset. I might pick her up and move her a bit, but she can see that I do not operate how she operates. I do not kick somebody when I get a little upset. She can see by my example a different way of being than the way she is being. That is me leading by example, and I do not need to get upset because my children hit each other. I can separate them without getting upset.
My son often starts it. He will go up and smack her in the face or punch her. I think, good Lord, dude, she is twice your size. I am glad my little brother was not like that, because I would have whooped his butt, and my daughter whoops my son's butt too. She is nicer than I would have been to my brother. My brother was very nice to me and I still punched him. I was the way my daughter is, except more so. One day, my daughter started hitting my son, and I was able to make a game out of it. I intervened without getting upset or off center at all. I picked her up and turned it into a game, so I stopped them from hitting each other and I did not get upset about it at all. That is really cool, because when I first started dating my wife, any little conversation could get us both upset and we were both afraid to talk.
Learning to debate with my wife
One memorable conversation happened when my wife was in law school and I was in a master's program in criminology. We were talking in class that day about something like human sex trafficking. I told my wife I did not think human sex trafficking was that big of a problem, and that I thought we had bigger things to deal with first. Sure, it happens and there are people affected, but a lot more people are affected by things like starvation and so on. My wife really did not like that. That was an uncomfortable morning at Busch Gardens, let's just say that. There was a lot of her being quiet and me feeling bad, and then we got through it and were able to appreciate just being with each other.
One thing I have had trouble with is that my wife likes to mentally spar, whereas I usually do not. She likes to have a debate, get her points out and argue them, say, well, let's talk about this politician or that issue. I do not usually care to debate. Often my fear would get triggered. I had seen my parents have a debate and then get into a big argument over it, so I had a fear that if we got into a debate, we would get into an argument. As soon as my wife made a statement on anything you might think is controversial, I would often get afraid or be kind of a pain about it.
Now we have settled on two things. One, I realized that my wife likes to debate, and I can maintain my center while I playfully debate. Two, if I do not want to debate and I let her say whatever she wants without a reaction, she will not debate with me, and she will find one of her friends to talk politics and debate with, and play that game with them. If I simply do not play, and I do not judge her for trying to play, she will go play with somebody else.
When a partner is moody
One viewer said his reaction to people's moods needs to change. When women are moody, he wants them to leave, and he does not have the patience for it. I think a lot of us can relate to that. When our partner is moody, we just want them not to be around. That is often because we are afraid of catching their mood, or because we do not know how to support our partner when they are in that mood.
Even if you are single, you can start to set an intention for this. When I get to have a partner, I am going to do really well whenever they are in a bad mood. I am going to trust that their mood is not going to affect my mood. I am going to let them be in that place and not try to fix them. When you think this way while single, you are going to attract an amazing partner. I wrote more about getting ready that way in Getting Ready to Date: Become the Partner You Want to Attract.
I think it is important that when you are single and you want to have a partner, you get excited and know that life, God, the universe will give you what you want if you are prepared to receive it. If you want to be prepared to receive a partner, imagine what you would want to accomplish before they arrived. For example, take a look in the mirror. Is there anything you want to adjust about your appearance before your perfect partner comes along? Do you want to put on more weight? Lose a little weight? Be a little more toned? Do you want to get a tan? I am working on a tan, because I think I look sexiest with a tan. So I am consistently walking around with my shirt off when it is sunny out, working on it. I also think it is healthy for me. If there is anything about your behavior or your mindset you might want to adjust, you can pick up books that stand out to you, or see what I have read. You can start getting excited about how you are going to be in the relationship and know that when you expect it to come, it will come. I wrote about this kind of preparation in Dating Is the Most Worthwhile Thing You Can Possibly Do.
A viewer said that mental spars cause fights, and that we are smart, which is why we do not want to do it. Well, I am grateful today that if I consciously set the intention in my mind that I am going to have a little mental spar with my wife right now, and that it is safe and okay and we are just playing around, then I am able to do it and we can have fun. Another viewer joked that my wife was watching this, ready to whoop me once I finished the stream. My wife actually does not watch.
Do not take things personally
Another big thing in relationships, or if you are single, is not to take things personally. If your partner is upset, either it is not your fault, it is theirs, or they think it is your fault, in which case it is still their fault. It is on them. It is their feelings and their experience. Your partner's emotions are not your responsibility, and therefore your emotions are not your partner's responsibility.
The beauty of being in a partnership is that you can ask your partner for help. I did that this morning. My wife asked how I was feeling. I said, not very good, and that I was open to feeling better. That is all we talked about, and five minutes later I felt better, and nothing external had happened. Just saying it and owning it, I felt better. If I had put the story on my wife or on something else outside of me, say, can you believe the state of politics right now, and even if my wife had joined in with, yeah, I cannot believe this person or that person, I would not likely have felt better, because she would have been helping me continue to feel bad. Instead I caught her good mood. It is really cool when you can catch your partner's good moods and also be immune to your partner's bad moods.
Especially if you are single, do not take things personally. Realize that whatever the other person is doing is what is right for them or what they need to do right now. For example, I used to take it so personally in dating when I did not get a text message back from a girl. I would think, oh my God, what is she doing? I would take it so personally, as if somehow I was not good enough, or I would put some story on her about what was wrong with her and what was wrong with women generally, and then I would feel bad. Today I notice that people in dating often take things the same way I did, way too personally. Why is he not calling me back? Well, because he is an immortal God who has incarnated into flesh and he is choosing to do something else right now. That is why he is not calling you back. Well, am I just not important enough to him? Why even think that? What could you think that would make you feel better? Who do you need to call back that you are not calling because you are thinking about him not calling back?
Who you are attracted to
That is where it all comes to a traction point. A lot of us, if we are unhappy, will be attracted to other people who reinforce our unhappiness. If you are attracted to a person who is not calling you back when you are dating them, that is a lesson. Sometimes the lesson is to allow people to be how they are going to be. The lesson may be to focus on who you can call back. Have you noticed that lots of times it seems people are attracted to someone who is not attracted to them? If you really let go and love yourself, you will find that who you are attracted to is very flexible. If you are one hundred percent responsible for your emotions, you are happy with yourself, and you refuse to be with somebody who is not on that wavelength, you will naturally find somebody very attractive who is right there with you. But if you are unhappy with yourself and you think how awful people are, you will find yourself attracted to a person who is not calling you back. Then you will find the person who is attracted to you, and you will not call them back.
You can see how I am applying this right now on this live stream. You might have seen some of the comments that I could have taken personally, that I could have gotten upset about and gotten into. When you are feeling good, when you are feeling God, you can easily accept that other people are acting from how they are feeling and experiencing life today. If someone comes into my live stream and puts in a comment you might think is negative, I know that is where they are at today. I know how I operate. If I came into somebody's live stream and wrote something negative, it would be because I felt bad. If I truly did not need it, I would not say anything, or I would simply not watch their live stream. There would be no need to inject that energy into their stream, because what I give is what I get. If I give off a bunch of bad vibes, I get bad vibes back immediately in how I feel about myself and how I feel about life.
I am excited about these things because they are big, life changing things. Even if you already know all of them, you can hear them over and over again to make sure you remember them and keep focused on them, because there is a big world out there that will be happy to get you into what is wrong and how awful people are. I am grateful to be part of the how awesome life is world. I find that people simply mentioning prayer reminds me to pray. Someone could talk about prayer every day in an AA meeting, and every day I am happy to hear the exact same thing.
My wife just sent me a picture, so I took a look at it. Our stimulus check arrived! We can pop bottles all night, baby. Water on ice. Let's go.
Getting my priorities right
If I could summarize everything I have said so far, it is this: get your priorities right in life. For me, my top priority is God, higher self, higher consciousness, connectedness, awareness of my true self. All of those are kind of interchangeable words. The ultimate experience of God is one of connection, of feeling empowered, feeling omnipotent. That is my number one priority in life. My number two priority is my own health, this physical body being properly loved and taken care of. That means God and health come before my wife and my children. If my relationship with God is screwed up, then certainly my health and my marriage are going to be screwed up along with it. If I am right with God, I am taking care of myself, and I am going to be fantastic in a relationship. Or if somebody else is not right for me, I will be so obnoxious that one of us will quickly lose.
Get your priorities right, and whether you are single or in a relationship, you can work on whatever your top two priorities are. The relationship with another person must never be the top priority in life, because relationships can come and go. I have a fantastic relationship with my wife today, and yet she is an immortal divine creator. She is with me voluntarily at any time. At any time, for no reason at all or any reason at all, maybe to help challenge me to grow spiritually and practice all the things I am talking about, she could end our relationship. I have no control over her. Once you realize that when you are with somebody else, you can see the necessity of getting right with yourself and your higher power, because if you put another person above yourself, they have become God over you. They have the ability to ruin your life and control your life. That is why it is important always to keep a higher priority. Whatever you consider a higher awareness, higher consciousness, your knowledge of who you are, your spirituality, whatever you think of as God, that and, to me, my health are priorities that come before my relationship.
One viewer said he came to the stream for the gaming, but the guidance was appreciated. My great pleasure. And today I do not go around afraid that my wife is going to leave me, because I know it is up to her every single moment that we are deciding to stay together. I also see that the grass is not greener on the other side. I am very happy where I am, and if my wife left me, I would be very happy to have the exact same thing back in my life. I am not scared of my wife leaving, because I know that if she, for any reason or no reason at all, decided she would rather take a different life path and be rid of me, then, because of everything I have talked about with you, I could easily attract another woman I would love just as much as my wife, either with her own kids or we would have some more kids. I could easily attract that back into my life. If you want a place to start on loving yourself first, I covered it in Learn Love: How to Learn to Love and Find the Right Person.
So I do not say that you can never leave me, because that ruins and stifles a relationship and makes it uncomfortable. My wife is free to go whenever she wants, and she knows that. I know that I could leave anytime I wanted to, for any reason or no reason at all. I can see that I am where I am today because this is where I want to be. There is nowhere I would rather be right now than married to my wife in this exact place. If that changes one day, then that is okay, and there is a world full of beautiful people that we can all have relationships with. That is what gives me peace and truly makes my relationship an enjoyable place to be today: nobody is held hostage in it. Even though we are married, I realize we could easily, if we wanted to, figure out how not to be married anymore. At the same time, I love being married, and I will do whatever it takes to be a great part of this relationship.
In some ways I surrender my individual self to being part of something bigger, which is a husband and a father. I am not just Jerry Banfield. I am a husband and a father, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and a live streamer. I am not just me. I am part of something bigger, and to me that is the God experience. There is no longer what a family member calls the selfish me versus the more objective or reasonable me. There is just one of me.
A viewer said this is gold, not only for a healthy relationship, by not putting your happiness on the other person, but because if something does happen, you can survive just as strong. Yes. Let me be clear: I love being with my wife every day. I imagine there would certainly be some feelings if she came in today and said, I just got this stimulus check, I am out, I am cutting you loose, I am going to go get a new man. I have no doubt there could be feelings. There might be days lying on the floor crying. There might be grief and screaming. But when those feelings subside, which they would do fairly quickly, there would be more feelings. There would be excitement, feelings like, I wonder who I am going to be with next, or, I wonder if she will come back.
Feeling the feelings and getting through them
One of our viewers said his wife had just left and he spent four days on the floor crying. It is okay to have emotions. I am under no illusion that my wife could walk out and there would be no reaction within me at all. There might be, and there might not be. I do not know how it would go. What I do know is that everything would be okay.
It was like when my brother called and said my mom had fallen off her horse and she might die. She was going to the hospital. My daughter was asleep in the baby carrier, and the whole of life drained out of me onto the floor. Safely and almost immediately I totally relaxed, lay on the floor and cried and screamed for a few minutes. I woke my wife up. I woke my daughter up, and she started crying, because she had been taking a nice nap, back when she used to sleep through the night in the carrier on me or my wife. She was having a nice sleep or a dream, and all of a sudden dad was on the floor screaming and crying. Everybody in the house woke up, and I felt the feelings. As soon as I was done, it was okay. I thought, all right, I might lose her, that is where we are right now, and I can deal with that if she dies. What I might have felt even more was that she might live, and this could be an unpleasant experience for quite a while if she lives. It might be easier if she just died. I am glad today that she survived. It was a hell of a ride, though: all her surgeries and being in a nursing home, then her leaving the nursing home against advice and feeling like she wanted to die. It was a very emotional journey afterward. Once I felt those initial feelings, I was able to continue operating at my normal level of consciousness.
Another viewer said he fell down a rabbit hole and was emotionally and physically ruined, and that it will destroy you. Yes. The benefit of what I am saying today is that if you have been down the hole, you know how bad it can get, and I think there is great motivation then to look for ways you do not have to go all the way down there. What I can say is that you can stop at any point. Like we say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the elevator can stop at any floor. You do not have to go all the way down to being a drunken bum who is homeless and has no relationships or money anymore. You can get off the alcoholism elevator while you still have a wife, even in poor health, and still have your house and your job. Or you can take the elevator down another level and lose your relationship, and another level and lose your house. This is your life. You are the creator, and you can stop wherever you choose.
Today I feel my feelings, because that is what actually helps me not go down the hole. For me, when I went down the hole, it was when I was struggling to feel my feelings and ask for help. This is why it really helps to be part of a supportive community. Let's say my wife left. I am hesitant even to speak of things like that, because in some ways it is almost like a little prayer, but it is helpful to use an example. If that happened, I have a lot of support from people who have been through a spouse leaving them. I could talk to one and ask, what did you do when your spouse left? Then talk to somebody else and ask what they did. There are probably fifty people I know who have been through a divorce, and I could ask them all, take all the best pieces of advice, and I would not feel alone at all. I could go out to lunch with those people. I have lots of friends now. It would also give me an opportunity to ask my friends, hey, now I am single, who do you think would be a good partner for me? You start to get excited about every possible scenario that could happen in life, because no matter what happens, there is a good way and a bad way to look at it.
The good that comes with the bad
Even if the worst happened, even if you were murdered today, there is still a very good side to that. The good side is that you are now liberated from this body, which you might think you are imprisoned in. You are liberated from that delusion. You are now fully conscious of your bigger self, and you can reincarnate anywhere, at any time, in any body, wherever you would like to be. Even the most extreme, horrible thing that could happen to you, since life is truly neutral, once you take responsibility for where you are focusing, you see that nothing bad can happen to you without something good coming along with it.
Take my dad dying. At first I looked at it as purely bad, purely miserable, purely wrong. I used to hate other people who still had their parents alive and were older than me. And my dad dying was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. There is a phrase, you either grow or go. I either needed to grow to levels I had not grown to since maybe I was a child, or I needed to go completely down the drain and die. It was one of those things so severe: my dad was the closest person in my life besides my wife. My dad died, and three months later my wife was getting ready to leave me. I felt so bad, and I was drinking worse than ever, and out of feeling that bad a massive desire to do better was born. I had never felt so motivated to do better from within. My dad was dead, so I could not call him for help with my drinking, and my wife, the person I am closest to in the whole world, was about to leave me if I drank again. From that, a massive desire to do better was born.
That is why anything bad you have been through has also given you the opposite. If you have been through really bad health, there is the gift of true appreciation for good health. I have been physically ill so many days in my life as a result of alcoholism, from nauseous hangovers. I spent hundreds of days lying in bed, so sick, as an adult. That produced in me a very powerful desire to be healthy. If you have had a bunch of what you think of as bad relationships in the past, then there exists in you a very powerful desire for the best relationship you have ever seen. Once you tap into that, every other thing will flow. If you want to see where that leads, I laid it out in How to Date, Fall in Love, and Live Happily Ever After: Start Here.
A viewer said hello and hoped I was having a great day. I am, man. But I was not earlier, and my wife supported me in feeling better by giving me her good mood. Another viewer said she gets that too, and that you will still go through that, but you will be able to survive it. Thank you for clarifying. Yes, it does not take away from the fact that you love your wife and want to be together, but you will be able to survive it.
Picturing the partner you want
I remember as a kid thinking a lot about what kind of relationship I would have with my wife. This is where, if you are single, visualizing your partner can be really helpful. If you clearly picture what kind of partner you want, and you accept them and accept the help you need to get that partner into your life, they will come. What I did was picture the wife I wanted, starting in elementary school.
And then I blocked the help I needed to make that happen. For example, I would go around picturing the girls at my elementary school. I would picture them, my classmates in second grade, as my wife. But just picturing is one thing. There is also the thing of letting somebody know you like them. I never let any girl know that I liked her until 11th grade. The benefit of letting a girl know you like her is that if she does not like you back, you will often find someone else to like. If you never tell her, you will not move on either.
Visualization is really helpful, but then there is the real physical work, you might say. If you picture the man you want to be with, you might realize that all of a sudden this guy at work looks a lot like the man you would like to be with. If he has a wife, you might wonder what to do about that, and that is where it helps to just get to know people. You might be surprised. You could even tell him how you feel and say, "Look, I just like you and I do not know what to do with that because you are married." He might say, "I think you are great, and since I am married that is not going to work for me, but I have a friend you should meet." Then all of a sudden the guy's friend is just like him, because he is great and he has great friends, and he connects you. Even though you could not have seen ahead of time how that was going to work, you visualized, you prepared, and you even got really uncomfortably vulnerable. I wrote more about that kind of openness in Open Heart Dating: Why I Stopped Holding Back, Even When It Hurts.
Ask for advice and build a community
Instead of being so direct, you can also ask for advice. You can say, "Hey, I am looking for a partner. Do you have any advice for how I would find one?" That is where having a community of people you really know and are vulnerable with makes a big difference. I have friends today, men and women, including women I find attractive, and I have told them, "I think you are very attractive. I do not want anything sexually out of what I am telling you. I am telling you so you know what you look like from my point of view, because it is the truth and it is good for your own self confidence." I have friends I can have very candid conversations with, so if I were single, I could ask them, "You know me really well. What do you suggest, or who do you suggest I get to know?"
When you have a strong community around you and any one part of it collapses, like your partner, you can rely on the rest of the community to help you. If you have a big need, like you are single and happy by yourself, you are also happy in a relationship, and you want a relationship, then you can ask, and you have a community of people who can all support you.
I see my role this way. I run into lots of attractive women because of my lifestyle. I get massages, I go to yoga, I do sound baths and fitness classes, so I run into attractive women all over the place, and some of them become my friends. I feel my role is to help them see themselves as I see them. From my point of view they are beautiful and desirable, and if my wife was not around, they are the kind of woman I might like to be with. What I want is for them to look in the mirror and see what I see instead of what they see with their own critical eye. One woman was telling me, "I got up and I am all bloated, and I did not even want to come to this pool party today because I am so bloated." I said, "Stop. You do not look bloated from my point of view. You look gorgeous and perfect. So I invite you, next time you start giving yourself all that nonsense about how bloated you are, forget it, and realize that nobody else thinks you are bloated. Nobody you would care about appealing to even notices that you might be bloated that day. Consider that next time you are being mean to yourself."
Seeing myself from the outside
What has really helped me is seeing myself from the outside. I see myself how my wife sees me, how my mother-in-law and father-in-law see me, how my mother sees me, and how my friends see me. Then when I go up to the mirror, I am seeing myself from everybody's point of view, and I like what I see. I am proud of it and grateful for it. I am not standing at the mirror judging and saying, "You are not good enough," and this and that. I am looking in the mirror and saying, "This is my mom's son. It is amazing that I am here. My mom's son looks fantastic. My wife's husband looks amazing right now. I would be happy to be married to him if I were her."
Some of you might be put off by that kind of positive self image, like, "My God, get a room for yourself." But if you really want a happy relationship, that is what you want: that positive of an image. When I go around complimenting other people, I am really showing myself how nice and loving I am. When I have the courage to be vulnerable in situations that somebody could take the wrong way, it leaves me feeling that much stronger and more trustworthy.
Friends without bias
I actually had a bias at one point where I could not be friends with an attractive woman. I figured that if you are married as a man, you should not have attractive straight women as friends. Then I realized that is just as bad as being racist, or whatever other negative term you want to put in there. I thought, "Wow, I have been discriminating the whole time I was married." If you were an attractive woman, my walls were up. We could not be friends, sorry. Maybe if you were a mom and married, but we definitely could not hang out just the two of us, because that would be weird.
I am glad I realized that, and I said, "I intend to be a person who has no bias." It does not matter how you look, whether you are an attractive woman or the opposite of that. It might even be more interesting to have a friend who is attractive, to walk through my own reactions to that, and to get help with it. That is what I did. I met a massage therapist who was very attractive, and I was able to talk it through with her. She was massaging my whole body, so she was very familiar with me, not sexually, but everything except the private areas, basically. I was able to tell her, "Look, I need to tell you that you are attractive, just because it is true. I know you struggle to see that sometimes, and I think about it a lot. I want to be able to be friends with you without it feeling like I am trying to cheat on my wife." I worked through that with her, and now it is amazing. I can truly have friends without bias, which is such a gift.
Once you can work through your own thing, you can help in ways you could not help before. Often women who are single are drawn to me because I help them feel good about themselves, without trying to make a move on them, which is an awesome thing to be able to do. What I am trying to say is that when you really get in there and love yourself, you will be great even if you are single. If you are in a relationship, you will be that much better, and you will even be secure that if this relationship passes, another one will fill its place.
A comment about losing a marriage
One viewer says that asking for help and talking to a counselor was the best thing he ever did when his wife of 16 years got pregnant by another man and split on him and their two kids. He thought the world was coming to an end. Now, looking back, her leaving was the best thing that ever happened to him and it put him in an amazing relationship today. Thank you for sharing that. Hearing it from you is powerful, because for a lot of us, where he was looks like the worst case scenario. You not only went through it, you are in an amazing relationship now, and that is beautiful. You made it through, from however you found out that your wife of 16 years got pregnant by another man and split, to where you are now.
That means you are uniquely equipped when somebody else goes through something similar. You can react with real empathy and say, "Look, I have been there, and look where I am now." You can listen as they pour their heart out, "I cannot believe she did this to me. I do not know what I am going to do. I just cannot live with this." They will know when you really understand where they are. You are not looking down on them and saying, "Well, that sucks for you, dude. Too bad you do not have a happy marriage like Jerry does." They can feel safe to open up to you. If you are open to helping people like that, and it has not happened already, you will be drawn to people you can help in that way.
There is massive joy in it. Often people who are attracted to work with me now are going through alcoholism in one way or another. They share how often their partner has left, and they are trying to do better, and they pour their heart out to me. I feel so good hearing it because they know when they are talking to me that I understand. I am not judging them with "you are an idiot for drinking that much" or "if you were stronger, you could just stop." I am also not reinforcing them by saying, "Yeah, your boyfriend is just a jerk for leaving." I am not saying that either, because my view is that it is good your partner left to help you grow. Your partner is doing just what they needed to do to help you right now.
That is how I look at it. My wife was ready to leave me, and she stuck around longer than I would have stuck around in her position. Today I am glad that she let me know she was getting ready to leave me over my drinking. When someone in a similar situation pours their heart out to me now, I end up feeling fantastic, and I often do not even have to say that much. Often they talk 90 or 95 percent of the time. You might think I talk all the time based on watching this stream, and you will want to check with my wife on this data as well, but most of the time, when I am not doing these live streams, I am listening. It is from my listening that I get all this stuff to talk about. It is from looking around, seeing what people are going through, and remembering what I have been through that I know what I want to talk about today.
Wrapping up: behave as if your partner is always with you
I feel it is time to wrap this conversation up. We have talked about how to have better relationships for an hour and a half. If I have helped you remember what you have already learned, and appreciate what you have been through as giving you tools to help somebody else and tools to live your best life, then it was worth it. For example, that relationship I had 12 years ago that was so challenging at the time also showed me the value of behaving myself in a relationship. The relationships I had that ended so painfully, when I did things that contributed to it, taught me a valuable lesson. Do not do anything that you are not happy with. Do not do anything that you would not feel good about talking with your wife about. Act honorably in all situations in front of all people, because it does not matter whether your wife finds out or not. It is as if she is with me all day, every day, even though she almost never watches my livestreams. She says, "I get enough of you at home. I do not need your livestreams too."
Trust after a terrible experience
Oh my God. One viewer says that after being held hostage for three days and almost beaten to death by an ex-boyfriend, she escaped the house by jumping down one floor. Nice. She says she can say she is happy to be alive, she has been single for four years, she has found peace again and appreciates the small things, but starting new relationships is really hard because of trust issues. You have powerful experience to help somebody else out with, especially another woman who has been in a similar situation and is fresh off of it. That certainly sounds pretty awful, and I have not been through anything like it myself, which is why I am not in a good position to help somebody who has. You are equipped to help.
I remember after my ex-girlfriend left me and cheated on me, I had trust issues and I could not even say the word relationship. I could not even hear it. The woman I am talking about from 12 years ago really wanted to be in a relationship with me, and I still had such trust issues from the girlfriend I thought I was going to be with forever, who cheated on me and left. I told that story in I’m So Glad My Ex-Girlfriend Cheated on Me. I am grateful today that I was willing to work through those issues and to trust again. I believe Mother Teresa said something along the lines of this: you might build something your entire life and someone will tear it down in a day, build anyway. You might work hard your entire life to build a great reputation and someone will tear it down in a day, build anyway. That is the mindset, that you might get hurt again, but it is worth it because of all the good you can have. The joy I have had with my wife in the last 10 years has been immense. In fact, it has connected me with God. I remember thinking I could not love my wife more than I love that which created and made all of this possible.
My wife rarely watches, because as she says, "I get enough of the Jerry Banfield show already." If she is going to listen to or watch something, she would rather hear a different viewpoint than what she already gets for hours every day at home. I agree with her. If she did something like this, I probably would not listen to it much either, because I already have her at home to listen to in real life.
Bad experiences make a powerful desire
It actually helps. The more bad experiences you have had, the more they help create a very powerful desire. In the example of almost being held hostage and almost being beaten to death, you have a very clear example of what you do not want. You do not want somebody like that. So then, what do you want? What kind of person would you like to be with? It is okay, and in fact many of us can have very happy lives without a romantic relationship, but the question is to look within and see if there is a desire there. Some of us, I feel, come into this life kind of celibate. We do not really need or care about a relationship that much, or at least for certain periods of our lives we are happy being celibate. Others of us have had a bad experience and just do not want to get hurt again. If we are honest with ourselves, we are operating more on fear of pain than on seeking good and pleasure. Anything that allows us to work through that lesson can be seen as a blessing, because when we work through it, we have a powerful experience to share with someone else.
That is how I look forward. The men who helped me get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous were coming to meetings before I was born. What I think about today is who I can help get sober who has not even been born yet. One day they are going to run into me, and when they see I have been sober for 30, 40, 50 years by the time they see me, they will want what I have. They will want to know how, and they will know I understand them. They will want to know how I got from where they are to where I am, and they will see my life and say, "I want that." The worst stories we have are also setting us up for the most inspirational story. You could have a truly inspirational story. If there is a desire in you, and I mean you already do, think about how much better it can get. You already survived, and I applaud you for jumping out the window. That is awesome. That is something I would do. I am not just going to take a beating. I am looking for a way out whenever possible.
Imagine your life in 10 years. You are with a partner you absolutely trust and love, who has honored you and helped you grow, and if you want a family and a partner, that has manifested. Then you run into a woman who has been through something similar. When she looks at you, she knows: "Wow, you went through that too, and you are where you are today? Oh my God, talk to me. What do I need to do to get through my trust issues? What do I need to do to attract that kind of man into my life?" To me, that is what starts to make life look divine and purposeful, when you see how your story can lift someone else up. When we are all lifting each other up, we are equipped to lift even more of us up. The more we help each other have better lives, the more we can help every single person on this planet be lifted into a better condition. To me, we solve all the problems of the world by first making the best story of our life that we can.
The story I want at the end of my life
Picture when I die, what do I want my story to look like? I want it to look like this: I got beaten up. I got violated. I had a rough time. I put myself through hell also. And this is how I got out of that, this is how my life became beautiful, and these are all the people I helped along the way. When I die, that is how I picture feeling fantastic. To me, heaven would be looking back on a life I am proud of after I have passed, saying, "That was an awesome ride. I am so proud of myself, and I am so excited to see how the lives turn out of everyone I helped." That includes those of you watching or listening to this, when just some little thing clicked and you got the courage to go on a date again and be willing to fail again, if that is what it takes. Willingness to fail is willingness to succeed.
Or maybe you became comfortable. If you just want to be celibate and you truly have no desire to be with another person, that seems reasonable to me. Being with other people is challenging, even when it is great. Then you were okay with it and said, "Look, nobody else for the rest of my life is ever going to tell me again that I need to date." If you know what is right for you is to be celibate, then everybody else's opinion is completely irrelevant. It does not matter if your mom thinks you should date again or your brother thinks you should stop being lonely. If you truly know what is right for you, everybody else's opinion is irrelevant.
Even something like that, I can feel the impact of it today, and that is how I am inspired to do what I do. I picture being able to go see the details of it: this person listened on this day to my live stream, they changed this little thing in their mind, and because of that their life took a different trajectory. Instead of ending up unhappy that they were alone and never tried to date again, maybe they did try. Maybe they found the person of their dreams, had a great family and lifted a bunch of others up. I am honored by that. There are people in my life who are just heroes. One of them is a friend who had 30-something years sober when I met him in Alcoholics Anonymous. I did my first confession with him. He had been through gruesome life experiences. To put it in the simplest terms, he was abused as a child growing up, for a long time.
When he talked openly about his experience to a room full of people in AA, I knew this was a person I could open up to privately. I could lay out every bad experience I had ever been through, honestly, without minimizing it, in gruesome detail. In being friends and connected with him, he became like a father to me. When he died, I went through the same kind of experience as when my dad died. He is a hero in my life, and my entire life trajectory was changed by running into him. That is so beautiful to me, and it is what I set out to do. He used to get emotional and cry at meetings, which was kind of amazing to me because I did not even know how to do that. He has had that impact on me for the rest of my life. He helped me see that this is what I want to do for other people. I want to have that level of impact on somebody else's life, where from meeting me their life is forever changed in the positive, and then all the people who have never even met me benefit from that person's life being changed.
I have a whole bunch of people like that. A woman was there to chair my first AA meeting, and I still remember her. The first day I walked in, she told me to get some phone numbers. I said no. She said, "Well, I did it that way and it was harder for me." I remember that. I got some phone numbers and I loosened up a little bit. The people who were there were regular people. If you just looked at them, there was nobody famous, nobody important in the eyes of the world, and those are my heroes. Whenever I do this every day, I am carrying the message they carried to me. That is why I love doing this so much. I am so grateful that I can get emotional when I talk, because that is how you leave a lasting impact on somebody: when you can really speak through the heart.
Tears of joy and gratitude
One viewer says I have been crying and look sad. I am actually feeling so much joy and gratitude right now that this is how it comes out. I am feeling so thankful, and this level of vulnerability is intense. My heart is fully expressing itself, and it is amazing. I think this has been a fantastic conversation. Another viewer reminds me how many people are here every day, and says they care and love me. I am here today because there were heroes like that in my life, so my goal is to do that for you. Maybe where you are, there is not an AA meeting full of heroes right next to you.
Brene Brown shared something like this in her speech called The Power of Vulnerability. After listening to her, it created a desire in me to be around people who were sharing like that, and that is when I was attracted to Alcoholics Anonymous. I look at creators like Brene Brown who put things out like that, and my intention is to be like that. Thank you to the viewer who said thank you for sharing these beautiful stories. My pleasure. I am so proud of myself. I love myself so much. I remember looking at my friend as he cried in meetings when he shared, because he led with his heart so much. At the time I could not do that. I shared purely from the mind. I said, "I know I can do that. I see the power that comes out when he does it, and I want to be able to do that." Now I am so grateful that I can let that much energy flow through me that it brings me to tears. So thank you.
Another viewer says I am a hero. I certainly am in my own mind. My wife uses that as an opportunity to poke fun at me. Wayne Dyer is another hero to me. I have listened to hundreds of hours of Wayne Dyer. He has eight kids, and when they were around 11 years old, his daughter would say, "Dad, you wrote a book." He would say, "Yes, I wrote a book about parenting." And she would say, "You wrote a book about parenting? Who would want to read a book you wrote about parenting?" From his kid's point of view, it was ridiculous. His kids would say things like that all the time. When he was upset, his daughter would say, "Dad, don't you think all those people who read you would like to see Mr. Positive now?" Anytime he had a hard time, his kids called him out on it: "Dad, what would all your readers think of this?"
Real, and sober
Another viewer jokes that I must be streaming high and getting paid for a dream job. What is beautiful is that this is all sober. This is what is possible in your natural expression of yourself. Once you learn that you do not need alcohol or drugs to get into the deepest, most emotional and powerful parts of your mind, you can release all kinds of feelings and creativity. Alcohol and drugs are a crutch. I say a crutch because if you can walk without one, that is preferable. A crutch makes it more difficult to walk and is only something you might want to use temporarily if you have an injury.
Today I am grateful that I can get into these things. I used to think you could only get into these parts of your brain with alcohol or drugs. Now I can get into deep emotions, deep joy, deep gratitude and spiritual experiences. Some people think I must be doing drugs. I say no, this is what is possible normally when you know it is possible. Look at your kids if you have kids. Look at the different states they get themselves into completely sober. They get into states you would look at as drunk, completely sober. At no point did we lose the ability to do that. Some of us have forgotten, but if you decide to remember, you shall remember. Another viewer says, "Jerry does not need drugs." That is right. I am real, and people like my friend showed me how to be real, sober. Lots of times you can only learn by being around an example, like hanging out with him at meetings, talking to him afterward, going to lunch. That is how you learn. Another viewer asks what sobriety is. It just means being sober.
Thank you all for a great discussion. I will wrap this up here. I love you all, and thanks for a fantastic stream. I am so glad we could rise to a level of emotion here that got me to cry. That is fantastic. If you want more like this, you can find more of my videos in my Dating playlist.