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The Biggest Problem men face when in Relationships with Kimberly Hill

Ansh BahriLeave a comment

The Biggest Problem men face when in Relationships with Kimberly Hill – Love Vitamins for Relationships

So what is the biggest problem that men face in relationships today? Raashi thinks that I don't understand the female perspective (how dare she !?) Huffpost rates attraction, sex and communication as the top 3 biggest relationship issues in Men. As per our expert guest, Kimberly, "Of course everyone is having unique or different experiences and different frustrations that they bring to the dating process and into their relationships. But without a doubt, over the last few, many years I've worked with men, there are common themes that do tend to reoccur." She talks more about how men are often unaware of what they are looking for or from a relationship, approaching them with unhealthy attachment styles. It's essentially not a sustainable practice to be able to consistently be putting more energy or resources into your relationship than you are actually being able to replenish from it. Constantly creating this scarcity, this depletion of who you are, what you're bringing into this relationship, it's not a sustainable practice for a long-term healthy relationship because that's not built on equality. Kimberly adds to that about the importance of interdependence in relationships. Listen to the full episode for more. If you enjoyed listening to this episode (or the podcast), please share your diagnosis with 1 close relationship or anyone else who would enjoy listening to this as well. If you would like to share your story, fill out this quick form. The best gift you can give us is positive feedback and your observations. Follow us wherever you are listening and do us a favor by adding a Review on Apple Podcast. LoVita – Love Vitamins for a healthier is a community by Partners for Partners. We share stories about how Partners are working intentionally towards building a healthier relationship. To learn more check out the links below 🔗 LoVita Blog for Frameworks Sign up for our monthly Newsletter for exclusive content We're also on Social media – Instagram, Facebook, All above links in a single page Connect with Kimberly Hill Website: http://www.kimberlyninahill.com Instagram: @kimberlyninahill Podcast: The Self Confidence Project — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/support

Kimberly is a Certified Dating & Relationship Coach and a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner who supports men to attract and keep healthy, loving relationships. She is the host of the honest and relatable podcast, The Self-Confidence Project where she talks candidly about the stuff we all face in life and love. She has thousands of hours of direct intimate work with men on confidence, dating, and relationships and brings a mastery of coaching, emotional maturity practices, and leadership to her clients. Her clients go on to find fulfilling and deeply rewarding relationships.

So what is the biggest problem that men face in relationships today? Raashi thinks that I don’t understand the female perspective (how dare she !?) Huffpost rates attraction, sex and communication as the top 3 biggest relationship issues in Men. As per our expert guest, Kimberly, “Of course everyone is having unique or different experiences and different frustrations that they bring to the dating process and into their relationships. But without a doubt, over the last few, many years I’ve worked with men, there are common themes that do tend to reoccur.” She talks more about how men are often unaware of what they are looking for or from a relationship, approaching them with unhealthy attachment styles.

Lack of understanding of what you are looking for

One of them is that a lot of men dating today aren’t particularly sure. what they’re looking for. Oftentimes, and this goes for men and women, oftentimes we get into the dating process and we let. Things like attractiveness be the leading factor. Ooh, I think that guy’s hot, so I’ll date him. Ooh, I think that woman’s beautiful, so I’ll date her. And oftentimes we allow ourselves to be clouded by the sexual chemistry or the attraction, and we don’t really consider. The underlying components of personality, behavior, compatibility, shared visions, a and things that really actually are the, like the secret recipe for making a successful long-term relationship.

So first thing, of course, is getting into, dating or a relationship without really understanding what you’re looking for. What brings you satisfaction with you can, you can see now it’s very easy to to, to reflect and go. Of course that’s gonna cause frustration and stress. So clarity is super important and, and we can go about getting that in different ways.

Attachment Styles

More men, in particular in the United States, can expect to grow up in fatherless homes than they can expect to grow up with a father. Which means that the way men are being raised in today’s society is different from how men were raised in the past. If men are being raised by their mothers, their mothers are, usually displaying different characteristics and their fathers would. And I do tend to see a lot of men that are particularly conflict avoidant or can get into certain, behavioral patterns like people plea. Now this doesn’t bode well in the dating process or in your relationships because sometimes these men are lacking the ability to express what they need to ask for, what they need, and oftentimes they’re trying to do their absolute best to please their partner, but they’re, sabotaging their own needs and wants. And so early on, That might make a woman fall for him. Oh, he’s so shris and so charming and he always is sinking to me. Gosh, he’s so considerate and wow, this man is perfect , right? And then you get into the realness of a relationship where drama and conflict and mistakes and all sorts of things come up. And if an individual isn’t particularly equipped with how to be honest or communicate effectively or to ask for what they need, and they still tend to fall into that, people pleasing, usually it builds up a great deal of resent. And it causes the relationships to deteriorate because you are. Trust first and foremost. When you’re not being honest with what you feel, think what you need, you’re actually not being a trustworthy person. So when trust starts to dissolve in a relationship, your emotional connection dissolves, your physical connection dissolves. And guess what? A lot of these men are divorced. A lot of these men have been divorced by their partners because more women initiate divorce than men. So these guys who. , wow. I was just doing my best end up being rejected by their partners and they internalize that thinking it’s all their fault. when really they might just be missing a couple fundamental skills that are not always easy to learn and apply, but are essential to understand for any healthy long-term, commitment.

Strong Inter-dependence

It’s essentially not a sustainable practice to be able to consistently be putting more energy or resources into your relationship than you are actually being able to replenish from it. Constantly creating this scarcity, this depletion of who you are, what you’re bringing into this relationship, it’s not a sustainable practice for a long-term healthy relationship because that’s not built on equality. Kimberly adds to that,

It’s really important in any relationship to have what’s considered like strong interdependence. If two people in a relationship are so independent, then they’re not really sharing their lives with each other. and if two people in a relationship are so co-dependent, Well, then they’re sharing too much with each other, and neither of those are particularly a good recipe for a healthy, long-term relationship. Either of those scenarios might last long-term, but doesn’t necessarily mean they’re fulfilling or satisfying or healthy. And so really what we wanna look for is healthy interdependence, which means we have a really strong sense of our own identity. We know what we like and don’t like. We can communicate that with our partner and they can do the same. We can share parts of our lives together. We can trust that we can rely on one another, but we also know how to get out and get on with our day. We also have friends that we socialize with and hobbies and passions we pursue that are independent of our partner, and that’s what keeps us as an individual, strong and healthy because we know who we are and what brings us satisfaction.

Connect with Kimberly

Generalizations can fuel your curiosity with Brent Dowlen a men’s coach

Raashi Bhatnagar

Generalizations can Fuel your Curiosity with Brent Dowlen a men’s coach – Love Vitamins for Relationships

Brent Downlen, the host of The Fallible Man – Building Better Men, joined us to share his experience, learnings and stories of working in personal development with men who want to grow as men. We talked about topics like ☑️ Honest gut-check for your relationships 🐛 Communication on Real Issues 👫 Touch Base Communication 🧬 Generalizations for Men and Women 🚸 Evolution of the relationship with Parenthood If you enjoyed listening to this episode (or the podcast), please share your diagnosis with 1 close relationship or anyone else who would enjoy listening to this as well. The best gift you can give us is positive feedback and your observations. Follow us wherever you are listening and do us a favor by adding a Review on Apple Podcast. LoVita – Love Vitamins for a healthier is a community by Partners for Partners. We share stories about how Partners are working intentionally towards building a healthier relationship. To learn more check out the links below 🔗 LoVita Blog for Frameworks Sign up for our monthly Newsletter for exclusive content We're also on Social media – Instagram, Facebook, All above links in a single page Connect with Brent Downlen Fallible Man Website Fallible Man Podcast Social Media Links – Instagram, Facebook, YouTube — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/support

Brent Dowlen is a men’s coach & podcaster. He hosts the Fallible Man Podcast. His journey started from a desire to become the best husband, Father, and Man he can be. The Fallible Man is a Lifestyle of Personal Development aimed specifically at Men’s self-improvement and growth.

Brent joined us to share his experience, learnings and stories of working in personal development with men who want to grow as men.

Honest gut-check for your relationships

To share more about what Brent and his wife do to build a healthy relationship, he explains how they started with a gut-check.

The first step in that is we had a real honest gut check about four or five years into our marriage and realized that while we thought we were perfect. We just weren’t talking, there were some problems under the surface and we just weren’t talking about it or dealing with it. I don’t think it was a purposeful thing that we were avoiding it. It just didn’t occur to us that we should be talking about these things. Once we got past that point of honesty with ourselves and stopped pretending we were perfect and started giving ourselves some room to breathe on that. Then we started getting focused.

One of the things we do, we like, we actually continue to do like marriage seminars whenever possible. We’ve been married for 21 plus years and we focus every chance we get to go do like a marriage class. This is part of it is we make a purposeful, intentional choice to go. We still got a lot to learn. Let’s see what they have. It’s also really fun because we look at some of the questions that come up from like the different classes that we go to or whatever, and it makes us laugh because we look back at our marriage and go, yeah, we used to do that.

Communication on Real Issues

Brent explains that one of the problems in their relationship early on in terms of communication was just there wasn’t any communication on real issues.

it was just there wasn’t communication on real issues. Both of us saw and encountered issues in our marriage and just personalized that. We went, oh, that’s my problem fix. I need to take care of this. We didn’t talk about it, and if she was frustrated with me, she didn’t tell me, Hey, I’m frustrated with you, or, I don’t like the fact that you did this, or it was, oh, well, I must be reacting to him badly. We just kind of pretended everything was perfect and kept going and kept going.

Brent goes on to share more about some of the other problems during that time like they were in the middle of a job change and had lost their home. He had lost this job and were behind on everything. Money was just coming in hardly. They were sleeping in a friend’s couch. He explains how everything just got bad and there wasn’t that polite space anymore because we had nowhere to go at that point. And one of the most beneficial things of their marriage early on, was they moved away from their families.

I had one family member in the area that I worked with and, and we’re very close. But when you’re away from everybody, all of your friends, all of your comfort spaces, well, when you start to fight or when you start to have a problem, You got nowhere to go and you got no one to cry to. All you gotta is each other when you don’t know anybody else. You need to go somewhere where neither of you know. Y’all can find good work. You can find a community to plug into, but where you know, no one start over with just you two, all of the space to run away. There’s no shoulder to cry on where you can go back to mom’s house or nope, no, no. Best friends, you can talk to ’em on the phone, but there’s no buddies to go out and, man, I can’t believe she did this right. Get away, get some space where all you have is each. And I mean that, probably carried us through the first several years. We were so focused on that.

Our takeaway – Marriage is not only the journey of two people, but it’s also the journey of the individual willing to do the work and show up to grow themselves so that the “we” can benefit from it. It’s a true testament of the two-part nature of being in a relationship. There is the, the showing up for the we and taking care and being able to listen and communicate and grow with your partner. But there’s a lot of work that happens behind the scene as an individual in your own life that you have to be accountable and responsible for.

Touch Base Communication

Brent explains more about their style of touch based communication and what it means for them

We’re very touch base in our communication to the point where I’ve actually had friends tease us because, It’s not even like a sexual touch, it’s I’m constantly touching my wife. She’s constantly touching me, right? If I’m by her, my hand is on her hip or on her shoulder or close to her touching her hand. I want to physically connect. And for us, a lot of times that’s where the communication starts is just that little touch. There may not be any words being said, but that little touch betrays how we’re feeling at the moment. She knows I might not have the right thing to say cuz I’m good at that. I’m gonna stick my foot in my mouth. But when I lead in with walking up behind her at her computer and putting my hand on her shoulder and just being there for a minute, it changes the pace and helps fill in the words. I don’t know what correctly to say.

Our takeaway – Non-verbal communication is a very important concept and physical touch, even non-sexual, but just intimate physical touch, lets your partner know, I’m here for you. Sometimes there isn’t the right thing to say or we just don’t know what is the right thing to say. But we can still express I’m here. I’ve literally got your back in this moment, and I want you to know that I am that person that you can lean on and take support from, even if I might not always have the right thing to say. So yes, we firmly believe in the value of non-verbal communication.

Generalizations for Men and Women

Brent explains how in general, men and women all tend to flow in a state of reactivity most of the time.

Very little of your day is actually constructed of intentional, purposeful decisions. We’re just reacting from one moment to the next moment to the next problem. Very seldom do we actually stop and get intentional in the moment and stop reacting to things. You actually have to actually put the brakes on. We don’t like to do that. So men and women both just flow in this just state of reactivity. If you can break that cycle, you can open up communication. If you can get them to be intentional instead of reactive, you can disrupt a lot of the small problems we run into.

The other thing we do is we make assumptions about what the other person should do based on how we feel and think.

Guys want to have downtime. Well, that’s fact we do because there’s actually a difference in the way men need to unplug versus the way women need to unplug psychologically. Like our brains actually need, men need that blank space for us to unplug.

Our takeaway – Generalizations are a great place to start getting curious. They give you a way to start that conversation on – Hey, what are these differences? And when you’re getting curious, then you’re starting to dive deeper and really get to the bottom of your individual truth. But you have to start somewhere, which is what I think the value of generalizations and stereotypes actually tends to be. There is a faulty understanding that we should start and stop with stereotypes and generalizations, but that I think is an incomplete journey and just one part of a much larger story.

Evolution of the relationship with Parenthood

Brent how children change everything, going from hormonal changes, body changes, emotions running up and down both for men and women. Brent shares his own stories and stories from his friends on how men get protective of their kids and try to be the provider for the family. He also shares his advice to couples

I try and tell couples they should always wait at least three years before they have children because you need that time to build you and to solidify you. Because the minute you have a baby, the next 20 years is theirs. The number one divorce rate is right after kids leave. It’s not in the first couple years. That’s the second highest. That first two to three year period is number two. The highest divorce rate is right after the kids leave the house, because after 20 years, if you only have one kid, all of a sudden you’re living with a stranger. It’s been all about the kid for 20 years, unless you’ve been really, really active. About your marriage and prioritizing that marriage. It becomes all about the kid. And so that’s one of the things that we have learned and tried to do is we try to prioritize our marriage in front of our daughters.

You have to be more proactive once there are children. You have to be very proactive in your preventative maintenance because it is so easy and it’s not usually intentional. It’s so easy to become so ingrained in the child or in the children if there’s more than one that you, your relationship takes third, fourth, or even fifth priority.

Final Thoughts

My message to men is just be intentional. you invested in this relationship, so be intentional with every part of this relationship. It’s so important to be intentional every moment you don’t get that back. Every moment, every conversation, be present, be intentional, and guys don’t ever stop growing. Marriage takes work every single day, grow you. Don’t try and change your wife. Just grow. You become the best you and your marriage will grow with that.

Connect with Brent

Website – https://www.thefallibleman.com/
Podcast – https://www.thefalliblemanpodcast.com/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/thefallibleman/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/fallibleman
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@TheFallibleMan

Skip the Beat – Parasocial Relationships

Ansh Bahri

Skip the Beat – Parasocial Relationships – Love Vitamins for Relationships

Parasocial Relationship – We talk about how to be intentional in your date nights. To build a healthier relationship here are the two takeaways from the episode. 1️⃣ Manage your emotions first. 2️⃣ First, reflect on what is it that would create an intentional date night for you. Sign up to the newsletter and follow us on social media for exclusive content. https://linktr.ee/lovitalovevitamins — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovitalovevitamins/support

Situation

You and your partner are great at doing the chores of the day, taking care of all the errands, the laundry, the dishes, the cooking; you’re an amazing team, when it comes to kids, you are happy. It’s a healthy and happy household. Recently, you listen to the last episode of LoVita. Since then, you’ve been wanting a more intimate and more personal emotional connection with your partner. So you set up a date night, you book a reservation at your fancy nearby restaurant, you make it clear to your partner that you want this to be special and special in a way that there’s no distractions, no cell phones, no talk about kids, no talk about the things and tasks that might be coming up on your to do list. You want this to be a conversation between you and your partner. Like it might have been your first day where you’re talking about your dreams and stuff. But five minutes into the dinner, you realize that it’s not going the way you wanted it to. There’s a lot of distractions from the restaurant, your partner is not giving you the same response that you expected

Dissection by Raashi

So I feel like two separate thoughts come to mind.

The first I would say is that the origin of this problem started a while ago. And this lack of engagement that you’re feeling at your date night is really just a symptom of a much larger problem.

The second thing is that, you know, if you’re if you’ve already tried in the moment fixes like asking your partner to maybe put away their phone or you know, bringing up a conversation topic, but you see that it kind of fizzles out or you’re asking questions, you’re trying to dive deeper, but you’re getting one word responses.

Like if you’ve already done the work of asking your partner to be present, and they just aren’t. At this point, I would personally suggest that the healthier choice for you as an individual is to find some way to make this evening enjoyable for you, regardless of how your partner is showing up. And no, I don’t mean by be by being mean to them, or ignoring them or just feeling deflated, that you’re never going to have another fun date night ever again. What I mean is find a way to preserve your peace, and enjoy this evening so that you can then have the energy to be intentional when you get home, or over the next few days to really be able to dissect and dive deep on why were you not able to create that emotional connection at your date night.

It takes two to tango, right. And so even though your partner isn’t showing up for you as you’d like, you’re in charge of how this evening ends for you. And how you’re able to process this moment when you get home later that evening, or maybe over the next few days.

Now that first point that I mentioned, when it comes to the we and enjoying date night as a couple, well the secret tends to lie in communicating individual values, and then cultivating shared values. That’s normally where we see this disconnection really starting from is not having taken the time to step away from that daily grind, and really talk about what is actually going on. What is this feeling of, of missed connection, this lack of emotional connect that we’re feeling with our partner? And how do we want to address it? Or maybe why why is so important for us to begin with.

So my recommendation is over the next few conscious coupling sessions that you have, it’s important for you to intentionally share and discuss what your expectations are for date night. And what does it mean to show up emotionally, to have this conversation to be distraction free. And when you create a safe space to have this kind of a conversation and really share and listen to the different desires that you and your partner have. You can start to create a set of shared values. And that’s what’s going to help you to both show up to date night and be on the same page of what it means to not talk about the kids or worry about the next thing that needs to be taken care of the power of doing this work and crafting shared values before your next date night is how you both can work towards building a healthier relationship and having more meaningful evenings together, rather than just going through experiences of missed connection.