Dating & Relationships

Dating A More Masculine Woman? Here’s What To Do

by

Talking points: relationships, masculinity, culture

This is a question I get all the time from men. They date a woman who takes on what feels like a very masculine energy, and they’re not sure how to handle that without doubling down on battles, roles, and standoffs. Here’s how to build a grounded, fulfilling, satisfying partnership instead.

(00:00:00) – Intro and the reasons women adopt traditionally masculine traits

(00:08:40) – What do you do? Number one: let go of “who’s right” battles

(00:12:12) – Stop fighting for the “masculine role” in the relationship

(00:16:54) – Evoke emotion

Transcript

All right, team, welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Connor Beaton here. And today, we’re going to be talking about the keys to dating a woman who is more in her masculine.

I get this question all the time from men, what do I do if my woman is more in her masculine or she can’t seem to switch out of that? How do I operate? It causes some tension. And no, the answer is not just bounce. I’ve seen a lot of commentary on the internet of like, oh, if a woman’s more in her masculine, then you’re beta and you’re attracting her.

Or if a woman’s more in her masculine, just bounce, don’t even bother with that. That is a life choice that you can make. But if you’re married to a woman who sometimes occupies more of a masculine energy sometimes, you seem to attract women and date women that are more in their masculine.

This isn’t about fixing her or changing her or trying to solve it. I’m just going to talk about why this happens. Why are more and more women more masculine oriented? And then secondly, what do you do? How do you build a healthy, grounded, peaceful, loving, fulfilling, satisfying relationship with a woman that maybe is more in that masculine orientation? So let’s dive in.

First, why is this happening more and more and more? I think the big thing, there’s three big things I want to lay out. The first one is that society has incentivized women to embody the masculine more and more. There has been this push for women to embody more masculine oriented gender norms or characteristics or traits, things like assertiveness, becoming a little bit more dominant and aggressive.

Those things seem to be more and more socially acceptable for women to embody, to be more direct, to have to be more ambitious. And they are less and less socially acceptable for a man to embody. We can see this in our culture, right? Feminism sort of denotes this idea that in some ways, and I’m not knocking feminism, I’m not putting it down, we’re just talking about it here.

Don’t bring the knives out. Don’t shank me. But in many ways, feminism is promoting equality through the vehicle of encouraging women to be more like men and men to be more like women.

And that’s a very basic frame, but it is a part of what a lot of feminist rhetoric and ideology promotes to women. And what ends up happening is that a lot of women end up embodying, a lot of modern women in big metropolitan areas, they end up embodying the type of man that they want to attract. So they end up becoming very much externally like the type of man that they want to attract.

They’re highly ambitious. They’re go-getters. They’re very assertive.

They’re very direct. They go after what they want, those types of pieces. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that outside of the fact that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for the man who is that way.

Because the inherent truth is that a man who is very ambitious, very direct, very assertive, he’s not necessarily looking to get into a relationship with a woman that he’s going to have to compete with, or that he’s going to have to grapple with for the masculine seat in the relationship. And what can be challenging is that for a lot of women who are very career-focused and very career-driven, which again is not an inherent problem, but what ends up happening relationally is that they can’t shift out of that. They can’t shift out of this very masculine way of being.

And what ends up happening is that they attract more feminine, what I call feminine-forward men. So men that are generally, you know, they have more softer skills. They’re more nurturing.

They’re more caretaking. They’re less ambitious. They’re less direct.

They’re less assertive. And they have sort of these more feminine-oriented qualities or qualities that we have historically associated with feminine, with women. They seem to attract a lot more of those style of men.

And the men that they really are desiring, these sort of ambitious, driven, direct, assertive men, either get deflected away or women adopt this narrative of, I’m just too much for some men, or some men can’t handle me, or men are scared of me. And this becomes the rhetoric and the sort of way of coming to terms with the fact that they are deflecting away or turning off the type of men that they would really want. And so society has largely, a lot of society and much of feminism has told women, you should be completely independent.

You should never, quote unquote, need or have to rely on a man. And the truth about relationships is that there is reliance. There is reciprocity across the board.

And so what can happen is that a lot of women end up becoming completely autonomous and 100% independent, and there’s no room for a man in their life. Now, if that’s truly what you want and you desire, power to you. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.

But for the women who want to be in a relationship, it can be very challenging to step out of this hyper-individualistic orientation that doesn’t actually leave room for a man to contribute into her life or give feedback or grow with her and these types of pieces. The second thing is that some women have been raised by a very dominant woman and they never really learned what it actually feels like to not be in this hyper-dominant orientation. So they don’t actually know what it feels like to be in a more feminine-oriented body, caretaking, nurturing, soft way of being.

And again, I’m not saying that those are the only qualities of a woman that are attractive or appealing to men or that in order to be a quote-unquote good woman that you have to be nurturing and caretaking. But the reality is that when you do ask men, those are things that the majority of men say that they want in a woman. They want a woman that isn’t going to make their life exponentially more complicated and drama-filled and conflict-oriented.

Men, generally speaking, desire women who are nurturing, who are caretaking to a certain degree. And it’s very interesting because the modern narrative is that men either shouldn’t want those things. It’s degrading for women to embody those characteristics, etc.

And so for some women, they’ve just never grown up around a woman who had those more feminine qualities of being able to nurture, being able to caretake, being able to care for the people around her in a way that still embodies leadership in its own orientation, still embodies strength in its own way, but they just never actually witnessed it. The last piece is that some women have been really hurt by or taken advantage of or abused by or betrayed by a man who embodied this sort of what we could call hyper-masculine orientation, right? Very dominant, very assertive, overly direct, but he wasn’t maybe honest or truthful. Maybe he took advantage of her.

Maybe he abused her. Maybe he abandoned her. Maybe he betrayed her in some capacity.

And so what happens for those women is—or maybe she just grew up around a very hyper-controlling father, a type of father that was always trying to control everything that she did, what she wore, who she talked to, gaslighting her, manipulating her. And so this very either deep mistrust of men started to come online, and so they embody those characteristics or they adopt this mentality that the only way to be safe in life is to embody those characteristics of the man who was controlling. So she becomes hyper-masculine.

You can see this in some women that maybe had these types of fathers that are very controlling, manipulative, narcissistic, coercive. A lot of these women mistrust men, and how they develop safety around men is by being in this hyper-dominant, hyper-controlling position where they’re always right, they’re controlling the outcomes, they’re dominating the conversations, they’re dominating the outcomes, and that for them is a position of safety. It’s not to excuse the behavior.

It’s just to say that that’s part of what has created it. So what do we do? Regardless of which one you found yourself in, what do you do? How do you actually develop a meaningful, deep, connected, fulfilling, and rewarding relationship with a woman who is embodying more of her masculinity? There’s a couple of things that I want to lay out for you. Number one is letting go of the who’s right battles.

This is very common in relationships where if you are a man who is remotely masculine, you’re going to get in a relationship with a woman like this, and there’s going to be a lot of battles, going to be a lot of conflict. And that conflict revolves around a kind of power struggle where she is not wanting to move out of this safe space of being in this masculine orientation, and you find yourself provoked in some way to engage in this power battle with her to try and win, to try and be right. This is the thing that you need to step out of, regardless of your relationship, stepping out of the need to win with your partner.

Because when you are in a battle with your partner and you’re trying to win, you are automatically in a position of moving out of a relational space and into an objectification space. You are moving into an adversarial form of relationships, me versus you. That is non-relational.

That is not the type of relationship. That is likely going to bring you long-term fulfillment and joy and happiness. So moving out of this power battle, beginning to identify what are the key things that you and her seem to get locked into a power battle around.

Where do you find yourself trying to prove yourself? Where do you find yourself needing to be right all the time? Where do you find yourself trying to correct her litigiously? Some guys end up going into lawyer mode, where it’s like two lawyers arguing between the man and the woman. And he’s just trying to gain some semblance of, we could call it masculinity, but he’s trying to gain some semblance of control in the relationship by being right. And so you have to start to let go of all this.

And you have to start to disengage because it’s very common that women that are very much in their masculine will use conflict inadvertently and unconsciously as a means to stay in a position of superiority and as a means of staying in a dynamic where they never have to be open, where they don’t actually have to be vulnerable, where they don’t have to share their emotions. And they can continue to perpetuate this belief or this narrative that you’re not safe or the relationship’s not safe or it’s not okay for her to open up or you never understand her or you never actually hear her or some variation of that. So when you step out of this incessant need within you to be right or to win, you stop being adversarial with her and you stop pushing her into her masculine orientation.

Because this is what a lot of guys do unintentionally. They engage in this conflict from a place of, I’m going to be right. I’m going to win this argument.

And it becomes this very adversarial thing where you push the woman that you’re with more into her masculine orientation. So step out of those power battles. The second thing is, and this is the only way I can frame it, stop fighting for the masculine seat or the masculine role in the relationship.

It’s very common that when men enter into a relationship with a woman who has a good amount of masculine characteristics or masculine energy, for some men, it ends up becoming like an intimidation thing where they feel like they need to go into this kind of battle in order to claim the masculine role or seat in the relationship. And you see this in conflict between the two of them. You see this in how the man is engaging with her.

He stops operating from a place of trying to woo her and trying to express desire for her, and he starts trying to win her. He starts trying to conquer her. And it’s a very different energy that, again, will push that woman more into battle, more into resistance, more into, I don’t trust you.

It feels like you’re trying to control me. It feels like you’re trying to manipulate me. And she will go more into this very rigid, protective orientation that, to you as a man, is going to feel more like a masculine orientation.

And it’s kind of like if you’ve ever played sports against somebody and you’re trying to win against them and you’re kind of battling for positioning of who’s the more, quote-unquote, dominant one, who’s going to win, who’s going to take the seat. That’s what ends up happening for a lot of couples where a woman is more in her masculine orientation. The man pushes her more into that by trying to battle for this position or this role of I’m going to be in this position.

Rather than battling her, stepping outside of that battle, being able to identify, here are the ways that I’m actually competing with her for the masculine role in the relationship. I see this happen all the time with guys. They’ll deploy complaints and criticisms and they’ll try and criticize their girlfriend or their wife out of this masculine energy.

They’ll try and dominate her into it. They’ll try and use avoidance. It’s like, F it, I’m just not going to deal with you at all.

And then that creates a lack of trust. So instead of battling with her for the role in the relationship, try out grounding her. The real competition, if there was one, because we all, not all, but many of us like the tactical things that we can do.

The real quote-unquote competition is can you out-ground her? Can you stay grounded? Not unfazed or emotionally shut off or completely disconnected, but can you be less reactive? Can you actually learn to breathe and ground your nervous system? Can you stay calm, cool, and collected even when she moves into the space of maybe being harsh or coming at you a little bit and having a fierce edge? I think a lot of men end up dating a woman who has a good amount of fire in her and they don’t know how to be the water that’s unfazed by the fire, that’s unburned by the fire and actually help the fire start to diminish a little bit and turn down. What they end up doing is they meet the fire with more fire and so they meet that hostility or that aggression or that assertiveness or that directness or the criticism. It causes them to be reactive and then they fight back and they try and fight fire with fire.

You’re not going to put out or reduce your woman’s fire by meeting it with more fire. So the game is to out-ground her. The game is to out-ground her.

That means using your breath, down-regulating your nervous system, having practices on a daily basis where you aren’t going to be so reactive. And the beautiful thing about this, because I can hear some of the comments being like, that’s so much work. It’s like, well, your relationship is meant to be a training ground for you to step into the highest and best version of yourself.

That’s what it is for me. Maybe for you, a relationship is there to serve as a vehicle for your ultimate level of complacency and mediocrity. I don’t know.

Maybe that is what your relationship is for. But for me, a really solid relationship is meant to support me in my journey of stepping into my highest and best self, growing myself in many, many ways. And part of that is being able to ground.

So that’s the third thing. The fourth thing, the last thing, is evoke her emotions. Women who are more in their masculine have a whole slew of unconscious tools and responses that are meant to deflect away from their emotional body.

Again, because that’s been seen as weak. They’ve been told that that’s dangerous to share with a man. They haven’t seen an example of what that looks like growing up.

They’ve done it in the past and they’ve been used or abused or betrayed because of those things. They just generally don’t trust that a man can hear or understand what they’re feeling emotionally. So your work, part of what you can do as you step out of this battle for the masculinity as a relationship, is to occupy the masculine territory of presence and the presence to evoke her emotions out.

And so what a lot of men do is they get caught in the details of what their girlfriend or wife is saying. She starts complaining about a work situation and he says, well, how do you think you should fix that? And so a lot of men continue to push their girlfriend or wife up into their head, which is where they are in their masculine versus helping them to drop down into their body. So instead of saying, what do you think you should do? Or why do you think that happened? You can ask simple questions like, what did it feel like when that happened? Or what happened inside of you when she said that? Or when your mom called you and was complaining about the same thing, how did you respond? How did you feel? And you start to redirect and hold presence for her to express herself.

Express herself, not explain herself. Explaining is a very masculine-oriented thing. And what a lot of men do is they ask their partners to explain themselves.

Explain why you felt that way. Explain why you thought that. Explain why you made that decision versus express what was happening inside of you.

And that is a natural feminine orientation. So when you start to evoke emotions and you start to encourage expression within your partner, you are supporting them in moving back into this more feminine-oriented space. And over time, this will build a deep trust between you and her.

This will build a very deep bond between the two of you. And you will naturally occupy a more masculine-oriented role of being present, being grounded, being the person that’s evoking and witnessing the emotions versus the one that is constantly being emotional. Because this is the last thing that gets caught in this relational dynamic.

A lot of men that attract more masculine women are very out of control with their own emotions and emotional expression. And they end up occupying a lot of the territory because they are the emotionally volatile one. They’re emotionally expressing themselves constantly.

They don’t have a good level. They don’t have a good relationship with their own emotions. And so they’re either completely shut off and disconnected or they are up and down and all over the place emotionally.

And for their partner, it feels like I can’t move out of this grounded state because he’s never in a solid emotional place. So part of your work, and this is where it can be a great dynamic for some men, is that you can really work on moving yourself into an emotionally stable place where you develop that type of emotional stability and robustness that is genuine and real and not a result of suppression or repressing how you feel, but actually having a good relationship with your own emotions and being able to regulate your nervous system under conflict, under duress. So don’t forget to man it forward.

Maybe share this with your partner. Talk about what you liked, disliked, what you’d like to implement and share with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Till next week, Connor Beaton signing off.

Is Attachment Genetic Or Environmental? The Latest Research

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Talking points: attachment, genetics, psychology

Attachment as a framework for working on and healing your relationships is powerful stuff. But it’s also complex. I wanted to nerd out a bit this week with all of you over this fascinating study on attachment, genetics, and environment—with a PSA at the end.

Dig in and let me know what you think!

You can find the abstract of the study and request a full PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385437792_Genetic_and_environmental_contributions_to_adult_attachment_styles_Evidence_from_the_Minnesota_Twin_Registry

(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:28) – Why it’s interesting and a potential game changer, and why heritability doesn’t mean it’s game over

Why You’re Afraid Of Women

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Talking points: relationships, masculinity, psychology, culture

I touched on this topic in a previous episode and hoo boy, the comments. So let’s talk about it, because there are a lot of historical, psychological, and mythic examples to look at. What’s more, there are ways of working on this if it rings true.

(00:00:00) – What I mean by being afraid of women, and theories from evolutionary psychology

(00:06:41) – The perspective of analytical psychology, and the “anima and animus”

(00:15:29) – Lastly, the perspective of existential psychology, and how a man creates identity

(00:19:22) – So what do you do with this info?

The Ugly Stepsister Problem: The Issue With Entitled Women

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Talking points: relationships, mythology, archetypes, culture

The title might ruffle some feathers, but sometimes, the best way to look at an issue is through a story. The symbolism has a way of highlighting many complex things at once. This week, I want to talk about an almost common trope in modern dating, but through the lens of a classic story: Cinderella.

(00:00:00) – Intro, using the story as a lens, and the effect of the “wicked stepmother”

(00:04:13) – The shadow of the feminine and masculine, and the archetype of Prince Charming

(00:10:15) – The value of Cinderella as an archetype and symbol

***

This Black Friday, why bother getting more stuff when you could work on yourself? All ManTalks courses are currently 20% off, and save even more when you bundle all 3. Check out: https://mantalks.com/blackfriday/

Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Heard about attachment but don’t know where to start? Try the FREE Ultimate Guide To Attachment

Check out some other free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

A Man’s Guide To Helping Your Anxious Partner

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talking points: anxiety, psychology, relationships

If you’ve ever been with someone who struggles with anxiety, this one’s for you. A lot of men lean heavily into trying to fix things, even making it their entire mission. Here are some alternative steps that respect responsibility, autonomy, and help strengthen the relationship.

(00:00:00) – Intro, my working definition of anxiety, and the many places it comes from

(00:05:42) – Signs of anxiety in your partner

(00:10:47) – So what do you do? On reinforcement and co-regulation

(00:14:59) – Attune to her signs, and physical touch

(00:17:36) – How to balance leaning into discomfort with backing off

***

Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Heard about attachment but don’t know where to start? Try the FREE Ultimate Guide To Attachment

Check out some other free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance.

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Transcript

All right team, welcome back to the ManTalks Show, Connor Beaton here. And today, I’m going to be talking to you about how to help your partner when they are anxious. So if your girlfriend or your wife is somebody that struggles with anxiety and you’re not really too sure what to do, whether they have an anxious attachment, whether they just struggle with anxiety in general, we are going to be talking about what anxiety is, the signs that your partner might be anxious, and the signs that oftentimes we miss, and then what to do specifically.

Now what I want you to know up front is that just because she’s anxious, just because your partner is anxious, it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with her or you or the relationship. And it doesn’t mean that there is something for you specifically to fix. What happens for a lot of men, especially the nice guys or the guys that find their worth and their value in sort of providing solutions within a relationship, is that they can get caught in this loop that every single time that your partner gets anxious or has some anxiety, that your rational brain turns on and is like, okay, let me figure out how to solve this problem.

And that can create more anxiousness in your partner. It can cause them to feel like there’s something wrong with them, perpetuate the anxiety. It can frustrate the crap out of you because you are very likely not able to solve their anxiety or fix it indefinitely, and so it can create all types of challenges.

So what is anxiety? Well, the anxiety that I’m talking about and the way they’re going to be talking about is an excess of energy in the body, right? So neurologically, when you look at the brain and you look at the different centers of the brain and the neurons that are firing in different centers of the brain when you are having anxiety is very similar to the parts of the brain that are firing when you are having excitement. So the anxiety that I’m talking about is an elevated state within the body, an elevated energetic state and an elevated alarm state in the body. So it might be an excess of thoughts, might be an excess of unwanted physical sensations, it might be an excess of emotions that feel a little wild or uncontrollable, and it’s generally an excess of future-based realities, future-based worrying.

Now that worrying–just to sort of hone in on that one piece for a moment–very common for people with anxiety to be experiencing something in the present that they are worried is not going to go away, right? It’s like, oh no, I feel anxious. Is this ever going to go away? Am I going to have to deal with this all day now? Is this going to be around until I go to bed? And that can spiral up the anxiety. So that’s the anxiousness that I’m talking about.

Generally speaking, when people have anxiety, depending on the severity of it, and this is all to contextualize it for you because maybe you and your partner have never really talked about how they experience their anxiety, which I would encourage you to do if they are comfortable with it. But generally speaking, you can think about anxiety as the sensation that things are starting to move very quickly, and move very quickly energetically either within, so your emotions are starting to go fast, your thoughts are starting to go fast. For a lot of people, their breath and their heart rate start to elevate when they have more anxiousness and more anxiety in their body.

And so that state, that physiological state or the mental state that they can find themselves in often sets off the alarm system in their body and they want to escape from it. It’s like, get me the heck away from this. I don’t want to feel this way. How do I get rid of what I’m feeling right now? So the anxiety can be caused by a number of different things. It can be from past trauma, right? It could be remnants of, like, a PTSD type of situation. It can be because that individual is lacking some self-worth and it manifests in their relationship as anxiousness.

It can be because of past betrayals from you or previous partners and a host of other causes. So there’s many different things that can contribute to anxiety for that person. Knowing some of their triggers can be helpful, but to be honest, anxiety can, you know, set in at strange times.

You know, it’s like when you were a young man, oh boy, this is going to be an analogy. Here we go. It’s like when you were a young guy and you would be in random places when you’re going through puberty and all of a sudden you’d be getting, you’d get a boner and there’d be no reason for it, right? You’re like, you’re on the school bus on your way to school, and all of a sudden you have an erection. You’re like, what is this doing here? Like, why do I have this right now, you know, or just strange situations where you all of a sudden have an erection.

That’s what anxiety is like for a lot of people. That’s a terrible analogy because erections are great and anxiety for a lot of people is not so great, but that’s what it’s like. It can just happen at certain moments when you’re least expecting it with no real prompting, you know, with no real external or internal trigger.

Now, again, it can be helpful for that individual to start to identify what they know some of their triggers are. You know, for some people, it’s going to be certain social situations. For other people, it’s going to be certain conversations within the relationship. I mean, we just go down the rabbit hole, but those can be helpful. I’m going to give you the signs now. Okay, let’s talk about the signs.

I’m going to talk about women specifically. These, some of these are going to cross the border into how men display their anxiety, but let’s talk about how to know when your partner is anxious. A good sign is that she may not want to be social on a regular basis or that there are certain social situations that she does not want to be in because those situations might cause her to feel anxiousness.

I remember I was with a friend recently, one of my wife’s friends, and we were out in a public setting, lots of people around, and we were walking and I noticed immediately that as more and more people started to come around us in this social setting, she, her whole body language started to change, and I just went and put a hand on her shoulder and I said, how are you doing? She’s like, man, I feel so anxious right now. I was like, yeah, I can tell. So certain social environments might cause her to feel anxious.

Different moods and swings, you might notice that she’s easily irritated or constantly overthinking. Those can be a manifestation of anxiousness and anxiety in certain people. Constantly checking in on you and the relationship like, oh, are you okay? Is everything all right? Are you all right? That can be a really, really strong sign of that anxiety that manifests in your relationship where she might just text you and check in on you or constantly checking in on you. Again, it’s not a personal thing. You don’t need to personalize it. It is a manifestation and a byproduct of her anxiety.

Negative self-talk, you might notice that sometimes she self-deprecates or puts herself down and you’re like, where does that come from? That can also be a part of the anxiety. Another big one that I see very common in a lot of professionals is hyper busy and overworked. So some people will, instead of dealing with their anxiety directly, they are constantly busy.

This is the person that’s working super, super hard, comes home, needs to be cleaning, needs to be busy, doing busy work, kind of like doing nothing all the time, but doing something all the time, and can’t seem to sit still and just find calmness and peace. That is a very big sign that they have anxiousness and anxiety in their body, and they don’t really know what to do with it, and so they’re trying to busy it out. Last one is this kind of paranoid, I hear a lot of guys say this, my partner, my girlfriend, my wife, she’s paranoid.

She’s paranoid that I’m going to betray her, I’m going to do something, or I’m not telling the truth, and it’s like, I’m telling her exactly how I feel and what I think, but she just doesn’t believe me. That can be another sign of anxiety. It’s not to excuse any behavior that might ensue from that, like digging through your phone constantly, or invading some of your privacy, or whatever that looks like, but that paranoia sometimes can come from that anxiousness of, is he going to betray me? Is he lying? Am I safe? Because remember, anxiety is an excess of energy that is generally coming from the experience of lacking safety.

I am unsafe in some way, and what that can do is cause your partner to try and over-rely on you, try and over-index on ensuring that there’s safety within the relationship, that it’s solid, looking for different cues. She might also be very hyper-vigilant in noticing any subtle changes in you, so if you’re tired or if you’re stressed out and overwhelmed in a certain way. I’ve seen this a lot in couples that I’ve worked with where the guy’s like, I just can’t catch a break.

She just is so hyper-vigilant and hyper-tuned into what I’m feeling and thinking and going through that if I’m ever off, she’s like lasered in on it, and it’s almost like it’s not okay for me to not be okay. That is a very common theme. I’m going to get into what to do next, but that’s a very common theme that can cause some frustration in a relationship.

Whenever you are not okay, you’re stressed, you’re overwhelmed, you’re maybe a little disconnected or withdrawn, that’s going to activate the crap out of her anxiety, and this is why a lot of anxious-attached people get in relationship with avoidant-attached people and why it’s so hard for that dynamic to end. Oftentimes when an anxious and avoidant come together, it is a recipe for a disaster in the relationship, but it’s also a recipe for a very hard ending because they almost never want to let go because there’s something about it, that dynamic, that activates the avoidance and activates the anxiousness, and it can be intoxicating in some ways and really, really frustrating in other ways. What do you do? What do you do? How do you support your partner when they are anxious? A couple of different things.

If she’s worried about the relationship, asking questions, are we okay? Are you all right? Are you thinking about it? I don’t even know. I don’t want to give some examples and then get in shit for this, but do you think about other women? Are you sure you want to be with me? Do you think about leaving me? Those types of worries and insecurities that can come up from an anxiousness, there’s nothing wrong with reaffirming your commitment, reassuring that you love her, and reinforcing that you want to be in the relationship. Sometimes that is the prescription that’s necessary.

Now, what I want to put as a caveat, an asterisk in here, is it’s not your responsibility to do that all the time in the relationship. So you need to have a conversation with your partner, with your anxious partner, when their anxiousness is not hyperactivated, and say, hey, listen, I love you. I love reinforcing that I want to be with you.

I’m happy to reassure you in moments when maybe worry and concern happens, but I really would love for you to start working on reassuring yourself and looking for the clues and the cues that tell you that I really want to be here. Can you start to do that? So get her buy-in and commitment so that the reassurance and the reaffirmation that you want to be in the relationship, that the relationship is stable and okay, doesn’t rest solely on your shoulders.

And this is what a lot of men do. They see a mission. They’re like, oh, I can reinforce that I want to be with you. And then that becomes all-consuming.

So get her buy-in to have her start to look for the cues and the clues that the relationship’s okay, it’s stable, you love her, you want to be in the dynamic, and that will help her move into a more secure, less anxious space. Number two, begin to help co-regulate. Now there’s a number of different ways that you can do this.

I’m going to give you a couple of them because this is one of the biggest things that you can do with your partner. When she’s not anxious, ask the question, based on what you know about yourself and your anxiety, what do you know or think would help you when you’re anxious? So what can I actually do to support you? She might have some ideas. She might have no idea at all.

Either one is okay, but exploring this as a couple can be incredibly helpful because she might say, you know what, I just need you to put your arm around me, or I just need you to give me some words and remind me that I’m okay. You know, those types of things. The next thing that you can do to help co-regulate is have some code words to lessen the possible embarrassment of when she’s feeling anxious.

So I’m going to use an example. In my marriage, this isn’t about anxiety, but it’s about being hangry. My wife, when we first started dating, she’d get hungry when we were traveling. I remember we were in Paris once and we were exploring the city, and I could just see her getting more and more and more crunchy. And I was like, what is going on? She’s like, I’m so hungry right now. And if we don’t get food, I’m going to tear somebody’s head off.

And I was like, oh, okay. And so we created code words, lemonade, pink lemonade, and Arnold Palmer. And it was like degrees of hanger. And so she would say, I’m lemonade right now. And I was like, oh, okay, we got to find food. So if you put some language to this, it can be very helpful, especially if your partner is somebody that struggles with social anxiety.

They might not want to just come out and say, hey, I’m feeling anxious right now. That might feel overwhelming, confronting, et cetera. And so if you have a little bit of playfulness around it and you have this shared language and she can come to you and say, hey, lemonade.

And that’s the signal of like, oh, she’s got a little bit of anxiety. It’s like, okay, well, here’s what I can do. I can put my arm around you and et cetera. You can have some mechanisms to then co-regulate together during that space. So have code words that can lessen the possible embarrassment. And next, begin to attune to the possible signs that she might be struggling.

Changes in breath, changes in body posture and body language, changes in communication and the way that she’s engaging with you or other people. There are patterns, right? People that have anxiety, they have very specific patterns of expressing that anxiety through their body, through their breath, through their language, how they begin to maybe start to shut down or pull away or close off. And so start to attune yourself to the external signs that you see that she might be experiencing anxiety because then you can check in.

Hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling today? That can be helpful under certain circumstances. But what I will say is please do not over-ask your anxious partner how they are doing. Because what that does is cause them to then self-reflect.

And for some people, they’re going to start to worry like, oh, am I okay? And like, why is he asking? So start to tune into the signs for yourself and you can be preemptive. If you notice like, oh, she’s doing that thing where she’s starting to close off and she seems like a little squirrely and she’s like frantically cleaning something, that’s the sign. Okay, that’s the sign.

I’m going to go in. I’m going to give her a big bear hug and get her to take a couple breaths with me. Next, physical touch, physical co-regulation, okay? For some people, when I’ve worked with couples, they’ve found that helping your partner get some of that energy out, that excess energy, like, hey, I’m going to hold your hands.

Let’s jump up and down. Let’s stomp our feet right now. I’ll shake your shoulders a little bit playfully, right? Not aggressively. We’re not trying to like shake the baby. That’s a very dark joke. But playfully, all of this is playfully. Bear hug, a little bit of a squeeze. What I do with my wife is I’ll wrap my arms around her. I’m not giving her a tight squeeze and hug, but I’ll give her enough of a hug that I’m like, I’ve got you. I could pick you up right now. I’m holding you. And then I’ll say, take a couple breaths with me. And I’ll lead that like deep inhale, nice long exhale. And I’ll just say, soften into me. I got you.

And guiding your partner through that in that way can be very helpful for her, even if she’s not really aware that she’s anxious. And even if she’s not anxious, sometimes it’s just nice to have this baseline that you’ve created in your relationship of regulation, that you are leading the charge of regulation in the dynamic. The last thing I’m going to say is about not going along with the anxiousness, but sometimes with anxiety, people will want to change plans.

They’ll want to cancel things. They’ll want to shift behaviors. They won’t want to engage with things that they have agreed to engage with.

And generally speaking, I like to use the 80-20 rule. So if you are the non-anxious partner, it can be very beneficial to be a stand for moving into the places and spaces that might be anxiousness inducing or that your partner, not actively anxious inducing, not like trying to jump out of an airplane or anything like that, but in the places and spaces, the conversations where that person knows they’re probably going to feel a little bit of anxiousness. And so if you are the stand for moving into that space, that can be very helpful.

The 80-20 rule comes into a lot of the times people with anxiety are going to want to back out. They’re going to want to change plans. They’re not going to want to do, especially if it’s somebody that has social anxiety.

And what you can do is be really grounded and somewhat firm in saying, no, we’re going to go do this. And so 20% of the time, you might need to shift. You might need to alter things.

You might need to stay put and just breathe and support them. 80% of the time, you can support your partner in facing, leaning into the anxiousness, right? As the saying goes, the only way out is through. The only way through the anxiety is to face it and not hate it.

People with anxiety generally hate their anxiety. And they really loathe when it comes up, whether it’s just with you in a sexual encounter, or it’s in a conversation with you, or it’s in a social setting. Generally speaking, when their anxiety comes up, it’s like, oh, here’s this thing.

I hate this part of me. And that can cause them to start to collapse. So if you can support them in facing the anxiety by having some of those hard conversations, engaging in the places and spaces that might be anxious, and support them in a kind of exposure therapy, again, you are not their therapist.

It’s not your responsibility to fix them. It’s not your responsibility to do this for them. But it can be your responsibility to hold the frame that this is where we are going to move.

And usually that is best if it comes from a place of, I trust you, and I see you as somebody that can face this. I see you as somebody that can make it through this experience. Not just your anxiety as a whole, but this maybe anxious-inducing situation.

So those are my rules of engagement, the things that I have found to work really, really well for couples. Let me know which one really landed for you. Definitely man it forward.

Send this to somebody, and probably listen to this if you’re in a relationship with somebody that has anxiousness, if they are comfortable with listening to it. Send it to them and say, hey, what about this really resonated? Maybe there’s a bunch of stuff that I disliked 90% of what he said, but that 10% really hit. Great. Take that 10%. So share this with your partner. And as always, this is Connor Beaton signing off.

See you next week.

The One Skill That Can Save A Relationship

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Talking points: relationships

We all know how a couple handles conflict can be the difference between love that’s thriving and resilient and something that is…well, the exact opposite: leading through conflict. Listen in for five aspects of the that don’t get talked about often enough, in my opinion.

(00:00:00) – Intro, and a practical definition of conflict

(00:03:14) – Address your conflict kryptonite

(00:05:59) – Ownership over blame

(00:07:57) – Stop seeing conflict as a path to disconnection, and have conflict “agreements” 

(00:10:44) – Breathe, ground, assess

(00:13:30) – The best question to ask

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Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Heard about attachment but don’t know where to start? Try the FREE Ultimate Guide To Attachment

Check out some other free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Dr. Warren Farrell – What’s Weighing Down Young Men?

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Talking points: culture, masculinity, relationships

Warren’s been a consistent and committed voice for men for decades now, an it’s been far too long since we’ve talked, so when I wanted to get some insight on how things have changed—or not—he was the obvious choice! We cover the complexity of what “makes” a man, get into politics, and some solid practical advice for couples. Enjoy and dig in.

(00:00:00) – What’s happening to young men in today’s culture
(00:09:47) – Warren’s take on why there seems to be negation or dismantling of biological underpinnings of maleness 
(00:17:53) – Is there really a difference between men and women, and Warren on listening first, solving second
(00:26:08) – Why do we see a gender divide in politics?
(00:36:06) – What Warren would say to men in their 20s and 30s
(00:41:54) – On Warren’s book Role Mate To Soul Mate, and what makes falling in love easy but sustaining love difficult
(00:52:27) – Advice if you feel like you’re always walking on eggshells with your partner

Warren Farrell, PhD, has been chosen by the Financial Times of London as one of the world’s top 100 thought leaders. His books are published in 19 languages. They include The New York Times bestseller Why Men Are the Way They Are, and the international bestseller The Myth of Male Power. Dr. Farrell presented the findings of The Boy Crisis (2018) worldwide, from the White House to the Norwegian Parliament. It was a catalyst for bipartisan legislation for father involvement in Florida.
Dr. Farrell’s most recent book, Role Mate to Soul Mate: The Seven Secrets to Lifelong Love (2024), is based on his teaching couples’ communication for the past 30 years to more than a thousand couples and psychologists. Warren has been a pioneer in both the women’s movement (elected three times to the Board of the National Organization for Women in NYC) and the men’s movement (called by GQ “The Martin Luther King of the men’s movement”). He advocates for a “Gender Liberation Movement, freeing both sexes from the rigid roles of the past.” His life journey is the subject of a forthcoming documentary.

***
Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/
Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship
Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 
Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify
For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
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The Key To Quitting Porn And Weed Is…

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Talking points: porn, addiction, mindset, psychology

We all know it’s not easy. We all know it takes time. What you might NOT know is that there’s a simple reframe about quitting things like porn, weed, alcohol, and more that swings the odds in your favor. Listen in.

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:02:58) – A new perspective on some addictions
(00:04:27) – The real question to ask
(00:07:08) – What to do instead 
(00:09:27) – If you’re like me, this is gonna take time
(00:19:45) – Number five: they create, maintain, and repair connection
(00:25:04) – If you’re not sure which one to start with, start here

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Say no to subscriptions, but yes to a razor that’ll last you a lifetime. Visit HENSONSHAVING.com/MANTALKS to pick the razor for you and use code MANTALKS. You’ll get two years worth of blades free with your razor—just make sure to add them to your cart.

Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
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5 Signs Of A Securely Attached Relationship

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Talking points: attachment, tactics, mindset

Let’s admit we all want a relationship that’s balanced and has minimal conflict and insecurity. I’ve talked about what anxious and avoidant couples do, but how do securely attached couples navigate? Here are five things to model.

(00:00:00) – Intro, and a quick recap on the main attachment styles
(00:07:30) – What do securely attached people in relationships do? Number one: healthy conflict  and resolution building
(00:10:45) – Number two: they operate from a place of trust
(00:12:40) – Number three: they can self-regulate and work towards healthy de-escalation
(00:16:54) – Number four: they have a healthy balance of independence and togetherness
(00:19:45) – Number five: they create, maintain, and repair connection
(00:25:04) – If you’re not sure which one to start with, start here

***
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Get matched quickly with a therapist who can help you through the tough times and help you learn more about the best version of you yet. Visit BetterHelp.com/mantalks today to get 10% off your first month.

Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance.

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Transcript

What are the signs of a securely attached person in a relationship? How do you know if you are securely attached? How do you know if you are engaging in this behavior, and what do you actually need to do in order to create a securely attached relationship or to be more securely attached in your relationship? I’m going to go through the five main things. I’m going to have some action for you to take at the end of this video, so make sure you stay tuned to that. You can always skip ahead, but you’re going to actually need to tune into most of the content here in order to understand the action that you’re going to take at the end.

But before I begin, I want to just give a quick recap. What is an anxious, an avoidant, a disorganized, and a securely attached person? So, I’m going to give you my definition. I have tried to distill these down into the most simple definitions possible for you to hold. So you might want to write these down or just try and remember them if you have a good memory. So here we go. An anxious person.

An anxious person’s experience internally is as follows: I am not okay unless you’re okay. I’m not okay unless you’re okay. So I need to know, are you all right? Are you angry? Are you angry with me? Is it safe to engage with you? Another way of saying this is my nervous system depends on you. My nervous system is not okay. My body, my sense of safety, my sense of independence, my individuality is dependent on you, on you being all right.

If you’re all right, then I have a chance to be all right. This is why anxious people will over-text, over-communicate, constantly check in, those types of things. An avoided person is the inverse of this.

So an avoided person sounds something like, I’m only okay when I do it myself. Or I can’t rely on others to be okay, only I can do that. Or I don’t need you to be okay. And so that is a version of my nervous system rejects you. My nervous system doesn’t need you. There’s a rejection of co-regulation; there’s a rejection of real deep, lasting, and prolonged connection.

This is why a lot of truly avoidant people will sometimes even get with a secure person and that secure person will find themselves getting a bit anxious. You keep pulling away. Or we start to get into a deep relationship or deep intimacy, or we have great sex, and all of a sudden you pull away.

Or things will be going well for a couple of days, and then all of a sudden you pick a fight and you disappear for 72 hours, right? That is an avoidant behavior. My nervous system rejects you, and it can only withstand so much connection before I need space because I have learned to provide safety, security, individuality, independence in a very siloed way. The last one is disorganized attachment.

There’s different forms of disorganized, but I’ve just distilled this down to I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay, then I don’t, and then I’m afraid I can never be okay on my own. So it’s a bit of a combination of the other two. It sort of oscillates back and forth between the anxious.

Sometimes, I need to know that you’re okay in order for me to feel safe. Sometimes I’m going to reject you and don’t care about what you need or don’t need or the boundaries that you’re setting. I don’t care about those things in order for me to be all right. It’s a bit of both of them, and that’s because as a disorganized, my nervous system is on high alert, right? Your nervous system is on high alert as a disorganized and you struggle both to self-regulate and to trust that another person can help you co-regulate.

So what’s a secure? A secure person sounds something like this. I can regulate myself. I’m okay when you’re not okay and I allow you to help me be okay when I’m not okay from time to time.

So notice the secure does three things. I can regulate myself. I’m okay to help myself be okay. When things are stressful, when life is taxing, I know what to do in order to turn down the alarm system in my body. I know what to do to support myself without going off the rails and needing to drink or smoke weed or watch porn. I have good mechanisms to regulate myself and be all right in solitude, in crisis, in conflict, those types of things.

So I can regulate myself. I’m okay on my own. I’m also okay when you’re not okay. This is a big thing that anxious attached people struggle with. As soon as their partner is upset, they’re not all right. They get sucked in immediately.

So I’m okay with myself. I’m okay when you’re not okay. And when I’m not okay, I’m also okay with you supporting me in finding my way back to an okay place, right? So when I’m stressed out, when I’m pissed off at my whatever, at my boss, or when I’ve had a really stressful day because of some client situation in my business, I can have a conversation with you and you can be in a good place and help me get back to a good place. I also trust you to do that.

So those are the three signals of a secure person. I’m all right with me. I’m okay when you’re not all right, right? When you’re upset, I don’t need to personalize it. When you’re sad, when you’re angry, even if you might be angry with me, I don’t need to take that on in such a big way that I need to storm out of the room and close down and stonewall and shut down or become passive aggressive or judgmental. I can also allow you to contribute to me when I’m taxed, when I’m stressed, when I’m just done or overwhelmed, or whatever it is.

So those are the signs of a securely attached person. Now, what are the five things that securely attached people do?

Number one, and arguably the most important because it can be the most challenging, is you both engage in healthy conflict and confined resolutions. You both engage in healthy conflict and confined resolutions. Now the reason why this is so important to engage in healthy conflict and to find resolutions is that this is the number one sign of a healthy relationship. In my opinion, one of the number one signs is that the two of you can navigate through conflict. It’s one of the hardest things because it puts you into direct contact with your nervous system.

How do you as an individual operate and engage when you’re stressed, when you’re overwhelmed, when you feel personally attacked, when you feel like the other person is disappointed with you, when you maybe feel a little bit embarrassed or you’re angry, right, and you start to get frustrated. Your nervous system comes online, and you have to deal with that inside of yourself. And so really healthy couples will resolve conflict within 24 to 72 hours.

Now obviously most relationships have some things that don’t have resolution in the immediacy because they’re more foundational and they take longer periods of time to sort through and sort of chew on and deal with. But when that reoccurring conflict comes up, the two of you are able to find your way back to one another within 24 to 72 hours, ideally 24 to 48 hours. Most avoidance, most anxious people, this cycle will play out for days or weeks at a time, right, where a conflict will happen and one person stonewalls for five or six days or a week until that conflict is just sort of gone or avoided.

This is pretty key because conflict in many ways, conflict’s got a bad rap in our culture, but conflict is how you as an individual and you as a couple sort through the relational issues, discrepancies, you know, differences within maybe values or how you communicate or differences in desires. And so this is an integral part of any relationship. A really great relationship is not conflict free. I think that is a garbage narrative that is spewed out online and that is really detrimental to a lot of people individually and relationally.

What we want is the ability and the capacity to have healthy conflict and the majority of you that are watching this video have likely not seen good examples of that in your life. It’s probably one of the main reasons why you’re watching this video in the first place: because you grew up in an environment where conflict was hostile. It was avoided. One person engaged with it, and the other person shut down or got walked all over and that’s what you view. So you’ve repeated that pattern or you have gone in the complete opposite direction, right? There’s no conflict in my household, and now in my adult relationships, I create a lot of conflict for some reason.

So engaging in healthy conflict is the number one thing. Number two, the second thing that securely attached people do is they operate from the place of it is safe for me to trust you and it is safe for me to trust me. I can trust myself. I trust myself. I trust myself not to text bomb the crap out of you. I trust myself not to blow up and become so volatile in a conflict or an argument that I damage the trust in the relationship.

I trust myself to make good decisions that honor the sanctity of our relationship and I trust you to do all of those same things, right? It’s okay for me to tell you the truth. It’s okay for me to be honest, to express my desires, to express my wants and needs even when they’re hard, even when I’m not sure that you will approve of them or fully accept them, but I trust that it’s okay for me to voice those things. I can take what you’ve said and communicate it to me at face value. I don’t have to relentlessly question it. I don’t have to constantly be on high alert that you might be withholding something from me. That’s a securely attached person and dynamic.

I trust that it’s safe to trust you and I know that it’s safe to trust me. Again, not all the, not a hundred percent of the time, obviously there are some situations where people miss communicating something and it erodes the trust a little bit or they make a bad decision or there is a period of time where the relationship is sorting out for the first couple of years what the real rules of engagement are, what allows the relationship to function in a very healthy way. Those things will be tested over time, but as a general rule, secure people trust the other person and trust themselves in order to communicate what’s necessary.

The third thing that securely attached people do is I can regulate myself so I can calm myself. I can ground myself. I have tools and resources to navigate through my own emotional intensity when I get angry, when I get disappointed, when I’m upset with you as my partner, but I also allow you to contribute to helping to regulate me.

This is healthy de-escalation, healthy de-escalation. I trust myself to be able to regulate, but I also trust that we can co-regulate together. This is part of the conflict thing. For many people, as an example, for avoidance, co-regulation is a non-starter, doesn’t exist in most avoidance lives. The reason for that is because of the environment that an avoidant grew up in. It wasn’t safe for them to trust another person and so they had to do a lot of stuff on their own, or they were abused or abandoned or neglected or really hurt by someone.

They learned that it wasn’t okay to trust another person to help them be all right internally and they had to over-index self-reliance. I can’t trust anybody else to help guide me through this and so I literally have to do all this on my own. This is why, generally speaking, more men are avoidant than women.Now that’s not an absolute. There are many avoidant women that I’ve worked with and there’s many avoidant women I’ve seen in the comments section of my YouTube videos and my Instagram content, but generally speaking more men will be avoidant and more women will be anxious. Just as a general rule, it’s not an absolute.

But this is very important because each person in the relationship needs to know how to de-escalate their systems without checking out, without attacking the other person, without damaging or diminishing the relationship, without villainizing the other person as the entirety of the problem, without stonewalling and emotionally shutting down entirely and disconnecting from the other person emotionally. So you have to develop the tools and the skillset to be able to say, all right, that conversation was hard. That sucked.

I didn’t enjoy that. I disagreed with what you said, or things got heated. I took things personally, and to be able to have some self-accountability of the part that you played in the disconnection and that requires an internal de-escalation emotionally to be able to sift through your own anger, to be able to self-reflect and see your own contribution to the conflict or the problem, but not even just relationally, that you have the tools and the ability to regulate yourself when things outside of the relationship are causing you stress and duress, right? When finances are rough, when your parents are being a pain in your neck, when people at work are acting like complete clowns and it’s stressing the crap out of you because you can’t get your deadline met because you work with somebody that is perceivably incompetent.

Those types of things, you have to be able to trust yourself to be able to regulate, to de-escalate and then when you are maybe overwhelmed or taxed, that you can trust the other person to support you through that process, that you will open up, you’ll talk to them. You’ll talk about some of the things that are challenging in your life right now. You trust them to maybe have some good insight or feedback or that they just listen to you, right? And sometimes that means you communicate, hey, here’s what I really need.

When I’m dysregulated, and that might be too clinical of a word to use in your relationship, but you might want to say, you know, when I’m overwhelmed, when I’m really stressed out, when I’m really on edge, here’s specifically what I could use from you. What doesn’t help is telling me everything that I should do. Don’t try and solve my problem in the moment.

What I really could use from you is X, Y and Z. I would just love for you to listen to me, ask a couple questions, hear me out and sometimes tell me that that’s shitty. Sometimes tell me that that’s pretty hard, but that you have faith and trust that I will be able to figure it out. Like those, whatever it is for you, I don’t know what it is for you.

Maybe some of that resonated, maybe some of that didn’t. The fourth thing that securely attached people do is that they have a healthy balance of independence and togetherness. a healthy balance of independence and togetherness. Because at the core of the avoidant and anxious dance is anxious people will over rely on togetherness.

Remember, I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay. That’s dependence. I need you in order for me to be okay. And independence is the avoidant. I don’t need you. I don’t need you in my life. I don’t need you to be in order for me to be okay. I don’t need you in order for me to be happy. I don’t need you at all.

And that over indexing on independence doesn’t allow for relationship to fully blossom, doesn’t allow for trust, safety, security, deep intimacy, revealing, all of those things to really flourish in the relationship. So there’s a healthy balance of, I enjoy my own independence, going off with my friends, enjoying time with my buddies, whatever it is for you, right? Watching the football game, going racing, shooting guns, whatever your hobby is, going and doing photography, doing yoga. I enjoy solo time, solitude time, time with my own friends.

I have my own life outside of you in this relationship. But then I also contribute and actively curate the togetherness of our relationship. So I invest time and effort and energy into making sure that you and I spend time together.

And both people do that, right? So in an ideal relationship, secure, both people are secure and they are both contributing to the togetherness in the relationship. Finding hobbies, having shared interests, creating shared experiences and memories. I remember this great quote where somebody said, your job as a parent is to make memories for your children.

And I think that in some ways that is true for us as partners in a relationship, that of our job is to help curate these moments of connection and intimacy and love and experiences that you want to have with your person. I think about my relationship with my wife and that’s something that I’m always aiming for and that she’s always aiming for with me, is that we are looking for opportunities to create experiences for one another and that builds this togetherness. But we are also very independent people outside of that, with a very robust life outside of our relationship.

So finding that balance because with the avoidant, there’ll be a lack of togetherness. With the anxious, there will be an over-reliance on togetherness. And with the disorganized, it’ll be a back and forth, right? It’ll be like, I don’t need you, I need you 100% right now and it’ll kind of oscillate and it’ll be confusing for the other person.

So working on that balance of independent time, my own life and togetherness. And the last thing, very, very simple, I tried to break this one down to be very simple because I want it to be kind of tactical. I create, maintain and repair connection. I create, maintain and repair connection. So securely attached people do this constantly throughout the day. They create connection with their partner.

They maintain that connection with their partner when they’re together and they repair that connection with their partner when things have gone astray, right? Maybe you go on a business trip and you’re gone for a couple of days and things are really crazy busy and you come back and you haven’t really talked to your partner in a few days and they’ve been at home with the kids for a couple of days on their own. You can see that they’re stressed out and you make a concerted effort to create connection with them or maybe to repair the connection because they might be frustrated and having like a little bit of resentment of like, you got to go on the road and have a great dinner at this steakhouse and you come home and I’ve just been with the kids locked up in this house for a couple of days or whatever it is in your relational dynamic. So we all do things that break connection and this is part of the conflict.

We all do things that break connection and so one of the things that I found to be very helpful for people is to start to look at how do I individually break connection with my partner? What do I do? Do I stonewall? Do I shut down? Do they text me and I don’t text back? What complaints do they have about me that maybe are valid and true and can I repair those things, right? I remember when my wife and I were first dating, I was in Vancouver. She was in New York. She would go to bed before me and one of the things that she really appreciated was if I just sent her a text before I went to bed, right? Just like, good night.

I’ll talk to you in the morning. She would wake up before me, right? She’d wake up at six o’clock in the morning, New York time, which is like 3, 3.30 in the morning in Vancouver time and so we had this thing where I just text her before bed. She’d text me when she woke up and it was just this connection when we were apart.

It’s super simple, right? Just a super simple contact point and I would remember that when I didn’t text her at night, that was upsetting for her because we had this routine. We had this thing that was maintaining the connection between us when we were apart because when we were together, that wasn’t an issue, right? We didn’t need to do that. So it’s those types of things that you want to build and maintain into your relationship so you can think about how do I want to create connection with my partner? What can I do? Is there a certain look? Is there a certain energy? Is there a certain comment or gesture or a certain way that they like to be touched? Is there a certain gesture that I can do for them to take care of them that’s going to create connection or maintain it or repair it? Sometimes the easiest way to repair connection with any type of partner when it’s been broken is to say, hey, I realized that we had a pretty big disagreement and I think we both contributed to that and I would like to initiate a repair with you.

I’d like to repair with you. Are you open to that? And if you’re not, then let me know when you are. And that simple approach of I’d like to repair with you, let me know when you’re ready can be incredibly powerful for you taking the initiative.

And secure people will do this. They might not have a very scripted thing like I just said, but secure people will have a form of, you know what? That argument didn’t feel good or what happened there. That sucked. I was in the wrong. Let’s make this better, right? And it might be being goofy and playful. My wife does a very good job of this, right? When she’s been in the wrong, it’s usually this very playful, you know, sort of like a little silly engagement because I’m usually a little more like surly and like a bear when I’ve been upset.

And so that like playful silliness is almost this gesture that tells me like, oh, you’re wanting to repair right now. And sometimes I’ll even say to her, if I’m really like, are you trying to repair right now? Is that what you’re trying to do? And she’s like, yeah. Or she’ll come to me and say, you know, I’m sorry. I really want to make things right with you. Are you open to talking right now?

So those types of things, we have to start to bake into the everyday of our relationship because again, those are the things that you didn’t get. If you are an anxious, if you are an avoidant, if you are a disorganized, you didn’t get somebody that was consistently creating connection with you. Hey, do you want to spend time together? Hey, I’d love to talk to you right now. Hey, I’d love to play this board game or go on this hike. Or what are you working on? Tell me about your day at school. You didn’t get those things. Or what you got was a very overbearing, hypercritical type of creating connection. And then maybe some of you got no maintaining connection whatsoever.

Or what you got was a hyper invasive type of maintaining connection where the person was always there and in your business and, you know, trying to, you know, a parent trying to get into your private life and you’re like, get away from me. Or you had somebody that just didn’t repair at all. There was no repairing connection.

So these are the types of things that you have to start to build. Really secure people do these things exceptionally well. If you are not too sure where to start, start with this one. Really look at what can I do to create, maintain, and repair connection when it’s broken, when there’s disconnection that’s happened, or just how do I want to bring more aliveness into the connection with my partner? So the action. This is the action. If you are in a relationship, send this video to your partner or sit down and watch it with them.

The whole thing. See what resonated with them and choose just one action, whether it’s maintaining, creating, repairing connection, regulating the self, finding that balance between independence and togetherness, whatever, whichever pillar, whichever sign you wanted to really focus in on, choose one and commit to three to four weeks of taking action on that one thing. Hey, I want to commit to a month of repairing connection every single time there’s been some argument or some conflict that has disconnected us.

I really want to get present to what I do to create disconnection. As an avoidant, this is super important, and as an anxious, it’s super important. Also, really starting to look at how do I create connection with you? So pick one of the signs, focus in on it for a month, make a plan together and commit to checking in once a week.

How is it going? How are we doing on developing safety and trusting one another and trusting ourselves? How is this actually going? You have to open the lines of communication. So you might want to set, you know, 30 minutes on a Sunday night after the kids go to bed in order to have this dialogue, right? So pick one, take action on it, spend at least 30 days. Please try and give it 30 days to take action on this with your partner.

And as always, man it forward. Share this with somebody that you know will enjoy it, that could use it and need it. And do not forget to subscribe to whatever channel you are tuning in on.

Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.

Experts On: The Power Of Connection To Others—And Yourself

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Talking points: isolation, culture, relationships, friendship, anger, connection

Every now and I then, my team and I like to compile some of the greatest insights from our guests and center them around a theme. This week, we’re going hard on connection. The importance and nuance of it, the consequences of being without it, and the ways connection manifests.

These days, connection isn’t easy, but it’s more important than ever. Listen in some highly distilled wisdom.

(00:00:00) – Doug McKinley on isolation, passing down wisdom, self-leadership, working weaknesses, and adding value to you and your world
(00:21:51) – Nedra Tawwab on developing satisfying friendships and how to navigate tough conversations 
(00:35:26) – Marisa Franco on how men and women build friendship differently, “friendship minus mission”, how camaraderie has changed over the years, and the impacts of NOT having friends
(00:50:56) – Angus Fletcher on changing your internal story and your relationship to yourself, cultivating inner antifragility, and relating differently to your own anger

***
Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

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Why I Took Two Months Off When My Kids Were Born

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Talking points: fatherhood, parenting, mindset, culture

Taking time off as a man seems perfectly normal—until it’s done for a newborn. While I don’t disagree that a father can (and should) work to provide for his family, I also think that your presence is a deeply important factor in your kid’s development. Here’s my rationale.

(00:00:00) – What inspired this episode
(00:03:10) – The real reasons I took time off
(00:07:56) – How I’ve learned to define success
(00:11:52) – I challenge men to think differently about things when their children are born

***
Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance.

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

All right, team, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Conor Beaton here. And today, I’m going to be talking about why I took two months of paternity leave. My daughter was just born. My son was born three and a half years ago. He was born in March of ‘21. My daughter was born a month ago.

And I’m recording this now because I’ve seen a couple of videos. I saw this video by this guy, I think his name is Bedros Kulian, and he was talking about – I think it was Bedros Keuilian, it might have been somebody else – but they were talking about how ridiculous it is for a man to take time off when his kids are born. And that a father’s not needed there, and what a father needs to do is to provide and all of those things. And I don’t disagree with the fact that as a man, you can provide for your family, and that’s incredibly important.

But I decided to take time off when my son was born because of a number of things. And it’s so fascinating to me that there is this kind of rhetoric against men for taking time off when their kids are born. I remember when I worked at Apple, there was a guy that was up for a promotion into a leadership position who decided to take the full amount of paternity leave, and it cost him the promotion. He didn’t know that, right? That obviously couldn’t have been public knowledge, because you shouldn’t be held back for those things.

But he was. He was held back from a promotion because he took paternity leave. And he was punished for that, essentially, because the expectation in our culture still on men is that they don’t do those things. That you, as a man, you work. You go to work. And that’s still corporate expectations. That’s still the expectations that companies hold. That’s still the expectations that most women hold. That’s still the expectation that a lot of men hold.

And so it was interesting because I was talking to one of my men’s groups, and they were asking me how I was feeling about my daughter being born. I said, “good.” I said, “I’ve cleared my schedule. I’m going to be offline for two months, basically.” And one guy was like, “What?”

I was like, “Yeah. I’m not seeing clients. I’m not working. I’m not really having any calls. I’m not having any meetings.” I said, “I have a couple of things here and there that I need to take care of that will probably amount to three or four hours of work. But I have spent the last year arranging my business. And I scheduled this out.

As soon as I found out that my wife was pregnant, I started to work with my team to make sure that we could structure things in a way where I could take time off to be with my family.”

Now, I realize I’m in a unique position that I run my own business, and I can do that. And some of you, you work construction. You work in a corporation. And you can’t just design your job to take two months off when your child is born. Now, you probably can approach your company and say, hey, I’m going to have a kid, and I’d like to work from home for the first month and a half or reduced hours. I’m going to take paternity leave or whatever it is.

But I did this for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is important to me, after everything that I’ve learned about early attachment, one of the things that I’ve learned is how important it is for children to connect to their parents.

Now, yes, it is far more important in the first three years of life. A mother’s role is far more, not important per se, but the baby, the infant, especially for the first 12 months, their nervous system is essentially connected to their mother’s. And it’s not that the father doesn’t play a very important role, because as a man, you can, if you are present, support the mother in regulating her nervous system, in being calm and feeling grounded.

And you can also just be present for your kid or your children. And one of the things that I wanted to do when my daughter was born was to take time off to spend time with my son, to take him on some adventures, to go hiking, to just hang out, to be around, to really experience life with him and to help him transition into being a big brother. And when he was born, I did the same thing.

I took a month and a half off, I think almost two months, month and a half off to just be with my wife and my son. And for me, that was one of the most formative times. This is why I say that.

I watched this video of this young man talking about how his father handed him down a Rolex. And this Rolex was very important. His father had purchased it at a time when this young man was quite a bit younger.He was like eight or nine or something like that. And the dad had bought this Rolex, and it was this signifying moment, this sort of signature moment in his life where he had kind of made it, right? Financially, he was doing well enough, he was successful enough in his career that he could go buy this watch. And it was very important to him.

And the guy is talking about how he remembers being there. He was there when his father bought this Rolex. And for a lot of guys, there’s these moments in life where you kind of make it, right? You get this promotion, you build this company, you sell this company, you can afford to buy something or take your family on a trip.

There’s these moments that kind of stand out as like, ah, like I’m really having this type of success right now. Anyway, this young man gets this Rolex from his father, and with it, there’s a note. And he expects the note to say something along the lines of, you know, this is my most prized possession, and I’m handing it down to you.

I hope that, you know, I hope you do success, blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead, the note says something along the lines, and I hope I don’t butcher it or botch it, but it says something along the lines of, I’m giving this to you as a reminder that you, you my son, not this watch, are the single most important piece of success in my life. You are the standard of success.

And this watch was not the standard of success. And the time that I got to spend with you was arguably the most important and most successful thing that I did with my life, was building the relationship with you, helping you become the man that you are today. And yes, the watch is nice.

Yes, the, you know, the material things are nice. Being able to do those things, provide those things for you, being able to provide those things for our family, they were important, but you superseded all those things. You were far more important than those things. And for me, that really hit home, and it hit home because I’m a very ambitious person. I like to build. I’ve built a successful company.

I’m doing better financially and in business than I ever thought that I would, certainly in my late 20s or early 30s. You know, I’ve done well, and there’s more to go. And part of it, as I’ve grappled with this notion of what is success, how do I define success, what I’ve come to realize is all of the financial success for me personally, all of the business success for me personally, is to give me the time and the freedom to be with the people that I love and create memories and experiences with and for them.

I love this idea that part of your role as a parent is to make memories for your children. And it’s not that you can’t make memories for your kids, you know, if you aren’t financially well off or if you don’t have a lot of money. You absolutely can. I took my son camping earlier this year. That cost almost no money, you know, it was like 30 bucks a night to camp. We were in like one of the most beautiful campgrounds on the East Coast in Maine in Acadia National Park. Memories that he’ll hold with him that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, you know, as long as I have my cognition with me. And it didn’t cost a lot of money. But creating the flexibility, being able to just have undivided time and attention and presence for my wife, for my son, for my daughter.

These, for me, are the mark of success for a man because if you have hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, but your kids have no idea who you are, they don’t really know what you stand for. They don’t really know what type of man you are outside of the irritated, rundown, overly exhausted human being that walks in through the door at the end of a 12 or 13 hour day and doesn’t want to be bothered. That for me is not the type of success that I personally want to have.

Now there are men that that’s their aim, right? They’re dedicated to their mission in the world to such a degree that they will sacrifice everything and anything in order to achieve it. And we need men like that. The truth is that we actually do need men like that. We need men who are willing to say, nothing is more important to me than this mission in my business or in the world, this problem that I’m trying to solve in whatever it is, the economy, the climate, roads, whatever, whatever the problem is. But for me, I really value being able to play the game of how successful can I be monetarily and financially while also being incredibly successful as a father and as a husband. That, to me, is a very interesting game because that chess seems super fucking hard.

It seems super hard. I can feel the part of myself that could check out from family a little bit and could put in the 12 to 14 hour days and do the business meetings and fly around the world constantly and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what interests me more is how do I do some of those things while also being as present as possible, not just in attention, but in time, in energy, in wisdom.

And so for me, that has become the aim of success is finding some type of equilibrium between being very successful in what I do. And that does mean that sometimes it pulls me away from my family. In 2022, I was away from home seven or eight weeks out of the year.

If you added up all the days that I had traveled, I was gone quite a bit from my family. And there’s moments like this that are paramount, that are super important to just be there, to root in, to ground in, to be with the family and to reassert and reestablish and cement a value within your family system. And so for me, this is why I took this two months of leave and worked towards this for the last nine months, I guess, 10 months, worked with my team. Everybody was on the same page. I’m going to be offline for this amount of time. Here’s the projects that we’re going to have going. Here’s what needs to get done while I’m offline. Here’s what we’re going to be doing once I come back online. And everybody was on the same page and that was able to work really well.

We’re doing some big things coming up. We’re designing an app for our members of the Alliance. We’ve got five, 600 men in an online group that’s growing. We’re going to have a couple thousand as of next year. And so we built an app, we’re building out the whole backend, the whole thing. That’s all happening right now while I am largely offline and not working and being with my family during this very important time.

And so I say all this because I want to challenge men to think different and bigger and broader about when their children are born. You know, if you’re watching this and you don’t have kids yet, I just want to challenge you to think about how can you structure that? Because I think what ends up happening is that we as men approach having kids and we kind of fall into, this is what society expects of me. This is what other dudes have done.

And I’m not interested in that. I don’t care what other guys have done. I’m not really interested in, well, this is what the guy from JP Morgan does. He’s a VP making a million plus dollars a year. I should do exactly what he does in order to get his results. I don’t care about that.

What I’m interested in is defining my own version of success. And for me, that is playing the game of chess of being very financially successful while also being very present and successful at home with my family. Because what I can tell you is that after having my son, the whole game changed.

I realized how fundamentally important it is and will be for me to be present in his life. And so for everybody that is out there, I hope that you continue to challenge some of these things. I’m not saying that you need to be a stay-at-home dad, if that’s what you want to do, power to you.

But what I’m saying is that we don’t always have to fall into the trap of I need to sacrifice what I really want at my core because there’s this looming definition of success that society and other men have told me is what success looks like for a man. And we can start to shift and broaden that. I’ve loved having this time off. I’ve also got a lot of projects done around the house, which has been pretty brilliant. But we can broaden our definition of success to capture other things.

So comment below. Let me know what you think about this. Don’t forget to man it forward and subscribe to the channel wherever you are listening. Thank you so much. See you next time.

John Gray – Are Men Still From Mars, Women Still From Venus?

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Talking points: relationships, testosterone, estrogen, stress

I had John on the show years ago, and it seemed like the right time to ask: has anything changed since publishing his seminal book? Turns out the answer is yes—and no. Dig in with us as we cover John’s take on conflict, mindset, confidence, emotions, hormones, and a lot more!

(00:00:00) – How have things changed since you wrote your book, and do men and women deal with stress differently?
(00:16:40) – John’s take on why testosterone has become somewhat demonized, and the limits of talking about your feelings in a relationship
(00:36:32) – John on truth, and the meeting place of mindset and reality
(00:44:41) – The paradox of confidence and the comfort zone, and the basics of emotional processing
(00:56:25) – The balancing act that is testosterone and estrogen, and its effects on aggression and self-esteem

John Gray is the author of the most well-known and trusted relationship book of all time, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. USA Today listed his book as one of the top 10 most influential books of the last quarter-century. In hardcover, it was the #1 best-selling book of the 1990s. Dr. Gray’s books are translated into approximately 45 languages in more than 100 countries and continues to be a bestseller.

Dr. Gray has written over 20 books. His most recent book is Beyond Mars and Venus: Relationship Skills for Our Complex Modern World. His Mars/Venus book series has forever changed the way men and women view their relationships.

John helps men and women better understand and respect their differences in both personal and professional relationships. His approach combines specific communication techniques with healthy, nutritional choices that create the brain and body chemistry for lasting health, happiness, and romance.

Connect with John
-Website: https://www.marsvenus.com/
-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johngraymarsvenus_official/
-Books: https://www.marsvenus.com/books

***
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Easily match with a therapist who can help you through the tough times and empower your best self. Visit BetterHelp.com/mantalks today to get 10% off your first month.

Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance. 

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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