There's a moment in every man's life where he looks at the woman he's with and feels his chest tighten with that dreaded question: "Is she The One?" It's that nauseating spiral of doubt that keeps you up at night, overanalyzing every interaction, wondering if you're settling or if there's someone better waiting around the corner. I was recently on Melanie Curtin's podcast, Dear Men, diving deep into this exact struggle because it's the most common relationship pattern I see destroying good men and good relationships.
We covered a lot of ground. Melanie and I talked about the excitability vs. availability spectrum, how sometimes the women who light us up the most aren't actually available for real relationship, and the ones who are available don't quite hit that electric charge. We got into porn and Instagram's role in warping our attraction baselines, making it hard to appreciate the woman actually in front of us. And we explored the attachment wounding underneath it all, how our childhood patterns drive us toward unavailable partners or keep us from fully committing when someone good shows up.
One thing I really wanted to get across: the half-in, half-out thing hurts everyone involved. Your partner can feel when you're not fully present, and it closes them down. So my advice to guys sitting on the fence? Go all in. Pick a period of time and show up with everything you've got. Lead, be deep, be authentic. That's the only way to really know if it works. You'll learn more in three months of being fully in than three years of hedging.
The sexual piece matters too, but here's what I've found: if you've got threshold attraction and a secure attachment foundation, improving your sex life is way easier than trying to build trust and safety from scratch with someone new. Good enough sex plus real connection beats electric sex with constant drama every time.
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Melanie Curtin: Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. I want to highlight one thing you said about when you're not fully in, you're not fully invested, you're in your, you're doing this kind of hanging back thing. We can feel it. And for me it shows up as neglect. And neglect is a form of abuse, as you've mentioned, at its extreme end. And it does cause harm. It does. So to your point, going all in, shit, what if I go all in and then I break her heart or I disappoint her? It's an illusion that, that is more hurtful and harmful then what? It's more obvious. But I think that a lot of us are, are frequently trying to protect one another from hurt in relationship. And here's the bottom line. You are going to get hurt in relationship. It's going to happen because it's painful. It's not all the time repair is possible, yada, yada, we've got healers and all of the things that. But it's kind of like, yo, if you're going to learn skateboarding, you're going to get your ass kicked. If you don't know what you're doing yet. If you're actually going to learn jumps, snowboarding is kind of the same, right? If you're going to, if you're going to learn how to do this well, you're going to get hurt. It's going to happen. It's part of the learning process. It doesn't mean it's going to kill you. You're going to get hurt and then you're going to get better. So I think, think making decisions to try to avoid hurting someone in relationship is a little bit of an illusion. And there is a hurt around neglect or even semi neglect. I've definitely been in relationships where I felt semi neglected or neglected and it's like, I don't, I don't know how to even handle this. Like, there's no like show up. Right. I remember with one of the men I was with just feeling that whole thing in my body of just wanting to like yell in his face, like, show up, show up for me, show up for us, where are you? And I didn't, I didn't yell those things at him, but I felt I could feel his like, you know, ambivalence essentially. And then the last thing I wanted to say was for many people, ambivalence is part of the package there. You're never going to feel A hundred percent in. You're never going to feel this is perfect. I'm absolutely sure. So it's not cut and dried. And there is a part of you, of me, of everyone that we need, that we need to accept of. There's a part of me that's going to be ambivalent. There's a part of me that's going to question. There's a part of me that's going to feel this way now, down the line, you know, in five years, whatever it is. And that's okay. That doesn't mean that you're bad. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong. You don't have to make a choice from that part. But I think it is important to acknowledge that for many people that kind of coming to terms with this is part of me, this is part of my personality. I have this ambivalent part. And it doesn't mean you can't take risks or do things with your life life. It's just there's something I think it can be freeing to understand this is a normal part of relationship and it's.
Jason Lange: Going to come up with anyone. Yeah, I think that's can be really liberating for a lot of men. It's not like Hollywood and most of the time it's not like Hollywood. You don't just make first eye contact. No. It's true love. And end up forever. Like you have to discover is this my person? Through hardship, through. Yeah, hurting, getting hurt, hurting the person. How do we rupture? How do we repair? How to. What does it feel like to wake up in our pajamas after a week of traveling? Like all that stuff is important because you're really getting to know each other.
Melanie Curtin: And it's also important to stay connected to your community and to have other high quality folks in your life that know you and know you well. You need that. You need that for a bunch of reasons. But one of them is they can help you make these decisions. They can reflect things that you've been saying over the last six months or ways you haven't been showing up. But you can only do that if you have those folks in your life. Life. You need that community. You need those, those men's groups, those, those people that know you well and are tracking you over time. That's an investment. If you don't have that in your life yet, get that in your life, you're going to need it. Whether or not you're in relationship, it's important and it helps you with this part of how okay, fine. How do I actually figure this out though? If I'm feeling totally.
