Be the CEO of Your Love Life: Dating Strategies For Smart Successful Women

Robin Fisher Roffer: What you're seeing and experiencing is there's a lot of emotion on available men, granted. Like it's not in your head, you're not crazy, you're not wrong. Let's grant that there is a lot of, as we would say, dreck out there. So let's say, and it's a hypothetical, there's no real numbers around it. Let's say 90 % of men are not capable of being good husbands. And it's not that they're evil, but they're selfish or they're... damage from their divorce or they're chronically unemployed or they have an addiction problem or like there's a million reasons. So let's say that eliminates 90 % of men. Some women's like, that's awful. Isn't that a dire thing? No, don't date the 90%. It's not that hard. Cause you know what? You wouldn't want to do 90 % of jobs. You wouldn't go into Macy's and buy 90 % of the clothes. Why is it so damaging to imagine that 90 % of the merchandise is just not for you. Focus on the 10%, choose one. Welcome to the Plenty of Husbands podcast for women who are older, wiser, and hotter. This is where we inspire single women in midlife to believe they can love again. And I'm your host, Robin Fisher-Roffer. Now, do you ever wonder why you're still single after all this time? Maybe you think it's about your looks or your style or your inability to flirt or keep a man interested. You might think that Spending more time with family means less time meeting a potential partner. Or perhaps you blame men. You're convinced they only want casual flames and not real connections. If any of this resonates with you, well, you're not alone. But today we're flipping the script on that narrative. And joining me is a true expert in the field of love, Evan Mark Katz. Evan is a dedicated husband and father with 17 years of marriage experience and a wealth of insights from having gone on 300 dates before he found his beloved. As a renowned dating coach, Evan specializes in helping smart, successful women like you find lasting love. With four books, podcast series, and a vibrant substack, he's on a mission to empower women to take charge of their love lives. Now, forget about luck or chemistry. It's time to become the CEO of your love life and make smarter choices when it comes to men. So if you're ready to reignite your belief in love and gain the tips and tools to get back out there, this episode is for you. Evan Mark Katz, welcome to Plenty of Husbands. Thank you for that very warm and custom introduction, Robin. ⁓ my gosh, I could speak volumes about you, but I'm gonna let you do it for yourself. And I'm gonna start with this question. You know, I read your Substack article, the most recent one on the case for love. And you know, I never heard, okay, so I don't know why I've never heard this phrase, hetero pessimism. But there it was for me in what you had written. And at the same time, you're talking about hetero pessimism, you're also making the case for love, right? So what do you think causes this negative mindset about men among women today? And how can they shift towards a more optimistic view of love? mean, hetero pessimism is built into the discourse these days. It's not something that I've invented. It's something that anybody could observe. If you read the New York Times and the Atlantic, like I do religiously, every article about dating relationships suggests that you should delete the dating apps, that men are trash, and Marriage is dead. You should open up your marriage. You should go live in a commune with a whole bunch of other women in your 60s like the Golden Girls. And so if you repeat a message enough, people are going to start to believe that it is the full truth instead of a slice of the truth. And so to me, the discourse between men and women very much mirrors the political discourse between Republicans and Democrats. Increasingly, because of the algorithms that we occupy different realities and then we have trouble talking to each other and start to demonize. And I don't think it's a really healthy way to go into our futures. Is there indeed a problem with dating apps and men? Yes, no one's denying that lived experience, but it's only a slice of it. So we call those in the self-help world, limiting beliefs. It's partially true. but to treat it like it's totally true is not reflective of my reality or most of the people I associate with who are indeed happily married. It's not my reality either. Maybe that's why those algorithms aren't serving me up this negative pessimistic view of relationships. And I've devoted my life now and it is my mission to inspire single women, particularly in midlife, to believe they can love again. So this idea that also is in this piece that you wrote, which was so great. And I encourage everyone to go to Evan Mark Katz's sub stack page and look at this article because he talks about this concept of safe solitude, which you were just saying women all live in a commune. They all live together and we just don't need men and all of this stuff. I want you to elaborate on how women can balance the comfort of being alone because I think women in midlife. They do have their own stuff, their own world. They have their own children, a of them, their own families, their own animals, their own house, their own desire to be with those comforts that they've created all these years. But they also have a desire for meaningful relationships. So how does a woman balance those two things? That's a big question, Robin, and there's multiple answers within that question. So let's just start with. what I call the definition of safe solitude. Safe solitude is a state that women, and again, it's men too, get in generally post divorce. And the story is my marriage was so unhappy. That's the bottom state. That's the worst is being trapped in a dead end marriage where you don't feel sexy and you don't feel seen and you don't feel safe. And then that ends and you're like, I could breathe again. I could be myself again. I'm so much happier with this freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want. And that is indeed better than being in a bad marriage. But what does everybody forget? What it's like to be in a good marriage. So we associate marriage with all these negative emotions and it's a sample size for most people of one, right? Like as if all marriage is that marriage that you exited. So we get very, very comfortable being alone and then you spend your time on work and travel and renovating your house and your kids and that's great. No one's taking that away from you. But most of those women, these are my clients, long for partnership and connection and affection because they've never gotten it before. Cause if you're 55 or whatever and you're single, your whole track record is nothing I've ever done has worked out. So you have all this body of evidence that nothing ever works out. So why bother at all? And that is safe solitude. No one could ever hurt you, but no one's ever going to love you or take care of you either. You know what? I met my true love Evan at 55 and I had had three marriages that ended before that. And I really understand this mindset. I don't need men. I have my daughter, by the way, she ended up going to college. I wasn't going to have her forever. But at that time we were together, traveling the world, being each other's best friend. Didn't seem like I would need somebody. But she's the one who actually said to me, at 17, Mom, I can't go away to college and leave you alone. You have to find somebody. So she was the one that convinced me. And I bet, and I've heard this story from other men and other women where it was their kids who said, enough of this solitude and this isolation. We want you to have a life. We want you to feel love. So having great children that are pushing you out the door or terrific friends or more importantly, an Evan Mark Katz in your corner who's cheering you on. That's what we need. So let's say somehow we get brave enough, we flip the script, we say, we do want to be with somebody that's wonderful. I'm going to give it another shot. You mentioned dating apps at the beginning. Do you like those? Is that a way to find a genuine connection? Or is it just about casual encounters? Is it all of it? Like, how do we leave ourself open to the possibilities after we've been in that solitary mindset? Yeah, well, I mean, before I even work with anybody, we got to ease them into the process because for some people dating is scary, right? I mean, you know, for me, you know, I dated for 10 years and went out with lots of people and so dating's not scary at all. ⁓ And skiing's not scary if you've been skiing your whole life. If you're 55 and skiing for the first time, that would be scary too. So I think we understand that This is a new landscape. I've never done this before. If I did, I haven't done it for 25 years. And when I did it, I wasn't even very good at it then. So the easy safe thing to do is nothing. I mean, let's just sort of establish why people do this. There's nothing wrong with being an independent single woman and having a rich, full single life and doing your Pilates class and taking international trips and doing book club and yoga retreats. These are all objectively great things, but I will. I've noticed from coaching women over the years that a lot of it is just a matter of keeping really, really busy to avoid the silence of being alone and those thoughts in your head. Is this it? So now you're like a hamster on a wheel. I just got to keep really, really busy. And as long as I'm busy, I'm going have to stop and feel lonely. And you can because you have a lot of good friends and meaningful relationships in your life. But it's a bit of a rat race. And most people, when I ask people about their ideal day, Robin, their ideal day is, I wake up next to him, we make love, he makes me coffee and breakfast. We go to the farmer's market. It's like, that's like this very, very normal day that you don't really get to have when you just meet your girlfriends for brunch and pickleball. It's not bad. It's just different. And so we have to entertain the idea that the thing you want is absolutely accessible. There's a man out there who's dying to give that to you and he doesn't know where to find you and you don't know where to find him. So then we have a problem about. 2026 dating, which is that the tools that we use are flawed tools. But just because a tool is flawed doesn't mean you don't use the tool. You have to figure out how to use it better. So dating apps are old school online dating sites, Ramon, like match.com, but they've stripped away any trace of depth. They used to have a written profile. It used to go back and forth with email. Dating apps are basically photos, swiping, texting, and then everybody complains. Why is this so shallow? Why do I feel so disposable? It's the medium. People are the same. People are not appreciably worse than they were 15 years ago. So from when I was online dating 15, 20 years ago, right, I used oldschoolmatch.com to 200 word essays about me, about who I'm looking for. I still put my clients on there. Why? Because you could differentiate yourself. You could have more meaningful conversation and it more simulates. what it used to be like to date in the 80s and 90s where you would talk to someone at a bar for like an hour and they get your number on a napkin. We need to have some courtship to have some investment and have some buy-in to make a weird process feel more comfortable. The more we swipe, text, and meet random strangers for coffee, the more everybody becomes convinced that's what dating is. No, that's what dating's become. We don't have to get into it. ⁓ my gosh, I love that. So it's not about dating apps, it's about the app. It happens a shallow medium. You can't be too surprised that every man you're talking to is talking to 10 other women because that makes sense. get rejected far more than women, by the way. It's important to establish men get rejected by 90, 95 % of women. So he has to swipe on a high volume of women and communicate with a high volume of women because most guys don't even get a chance to meet in person. Right. It rewards the shallow. It rewards the top 5, 10 % of men. So I think understanding and empathizing with the male vending experience is also a really useful exercise and a lot of women struggle to do that too. And so if we just understand there's a big Venn diagram in life, there's what men want and there's what women want. What's the overlap between what both parties want that's effective, that gets people to the place where they could feel comfortable talking to seven to 10 people online and meeting one. person for dinner and drinks each Saturday night. And if you go out with one person who you've vetted, who you've screened, who you've spoken to on FaceTime, you go on one date a week for the next 20 weeks that you're working with me, you're gonna find someone you like. I love that. What are the other ways that you encourage your clients to meet men? We've talked about the dating app, but what other ways? So you brought up something that's important, and I find I'm talking about this one story a lot. because it's ringing in my ears. There's a woman who reached out to me, she's 70, she's never been married before, put her life into her career, retired and is now a little adrift. Like she has everything except no one to take care of her. And this is not the way she wants to live for the next 20 years or whatever. And so she called me and asked for help, but didn't hire me, didn't get the help. She told me she had a solution. She joined a country club and a pickleball club. I ask you, my friend Robin, if you're 70 and you've never been married before, do you think meeting another five to 10 men is the ticket to your happiness? Because that's what she's doing, meeting another five to 10 men. I don't know. The odds don't seem so good. That's right. So we've unearthed a big aha moment that no one on the internet is talking about. Everybody's belief is where do I find him? Where should I go? What dating site? What matchmaker? What city should I move to? That is not how dating works. That makes everybody feel better. Because now you're not the common denominator in the story. It's, I'm perfect, I just haven't found him yet. So if I just keep on looking like he's a truffle in a forest, maybe I'll find him. That's not, men are 50 % of the population. We are everywhere. There's not a hidden spot that everybody knows that you haven't been told about. So I'm going to go take salsa lessons, okay. You'll see a couple little old couples and a couple people practicing their wedding dance and a couple of gay guys and three single women. What are the odds that you're going to meet your husband at that class? Almost zero. So do it because it's fun. Don't do it as a dating strategy, but that's everybody's dating strategy. What site do I go to? What place do I go to? Go live your life, go have your fun. And when you go to pickleball and you discover, gosh, it's pretty quiet in here. Maybe get on a dating site. because that's where single people go. Yeah, that's true. I mean, when we were young, we would just go to parties and bars and everyone was single. Dating in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, men and women were everywhere that were single. You could bump into somebody and start a conversation. Now they're online and we could, yeah. Just look at 2026 and this is again, the good and bad about our culture is because there is an internet and because There was a phone and streaming. We don't have to leave. We could order in dinner, frictionless. We could watch anything ever created in the world. Every concert, every movie, every TV show. It's so comfortable to stay at home that third space is people are just not hanging out the way they used to. And then everybody's like, where do I meet someone? I can't create the where. I can say that if everybody's single and everybody's lonely and everybody's streaming and everybody's scrolling. you have to use the tools available to you. So if you're a woman in a career, you could say, I'm unemployed now, maybe I should start knocking on doors locally and see if something comes up, or you could go on LinkedIn. Which do you think has a better chance of paying off? LinkedIn. Of course. I have never thought of it this way. I have to say, I would have been the person saying, go do all the things you love, take a salsa lesson, go to the cooking class, like go on a hiking meetup. You know, get out there. Those are all good too though, I think. But that makes you just a more dimensional, interesting person. And you might meet somebody that way, but you're your odds of meeting somebody to spend your life with, there's more people online that are out there wanting that. But how do I... But what do women get wrong when they do the eight dating apps and what do they get right? Like what are the do's and don'ts? Because you could end up with somebody across the table from you. You've said yes to on a dating app and they don't look anything like that person. So how do we avoid some of these pitfalls? I had a Ted talk that was seen by like a million people where I outlined this process and years ago, before even dating apps were ascendant, I called it the two, two, two rule. And it's a made up thing. You don't have to adhere to it. It's not like a creme brulee recipe. It was couple emails back and forth on match.com, couple emails back and forth on Gmail, couple phone calls and a date. And that was 15 years ago. So the modern version of it might be make a written connection via text where it's not just, hey, what's up, but like a conversation. Once you make a written connection, the next logical step would be to schedule a FaceTime conversation. If I talk to you like this, and you think I'm horribly unattractive, well, now you don't have to meet me in person because we did this. So everybody's like, I should just meet as quickly as possible to see if there's chemistry. Well, guess what you're doing? You have to get dressed up. You have to go out. You have to drive. So you're spending two hours. That's right. Cause the story is women, I don't want to waste my time. It's a waste of time to spend two hours going on a coffee date when you could do 20 minutes FaceTime to avoid that same thing. if you- If they won't FaceTime you. Boy, you had a red flag, right? Yes. No, I just want to meet in person. Uh-uh. Uh-uh, no, man. You're the CEO of your love life. This is the application process. Nice. I like that. So if he can't go back and forth with a little witty banter via text, and he can't say, hey, you, me, 7.30 Wednesday night after I get home from work, can't wait to hear your voice. If you can't make it through that gauntlet, well, then guess what? He doesn't. earn the right to take you out to dinner on Saturday night. But if you do a FaceTime and it's going well, you're not off the phone in 20 minutes. You're on there for an hour. What did you just have? Your first coffee day. And now you could feel really comfortable giving three hours on a Saturday night because he's been vetted and you're comfortable. And that first date feels like a second date. love this. So one of the things that you say in your writing is that, you know, women think that men are emotionally unavailable. They're avoidant, right? they're not really wanting a real relationship like they did in previous generations. But your argument is that men are emotionally available, that we're just not seeing it. How can a woman identify a truly available man who's ready to date or get into a relationship? how do they, like how many dates does it take? I don't know, give me some of the ideas. There's a lot, man. is a... I have a six month program I take people through who are going to do this in 45 minutes. I want to validate because sometimes the way you phrase that sounds like I'm negating a women's observation and experience and I'm not at all. Let's say that what you're seeing and experiencing is there's a lot of emotion on available men. Granted, like it's not in your head. You're not crazy. You're not wrong. Let's grant that there is a lot of, as we would say, dreck out there. So let's say. And it's a hypothetical, there's no real numbers around it. Let's say 90 % of men are not capable of being good husbands. And it's not that they're evil, but they're selfish or they're damaged from their divorce or they're chronically unemployed or they have an addiction problem or like there's a million reasons. So let's say that eliminates 90 % of men. Some woman is like, that's awful. Isn't that a dire thing? No, don't eat the 90%. It's not that hard. Cause you know what? You wouldn't want to do 90 % of jobs. You wouldn't go into Macy's and buy 90 % of the clothes. Why is it so damaging to imagine that 90 % of the merchandise is just not for you? Focus on the 10%. Choose one. Ugh, that felt like a weight coming off the shoulders. That's so interesting. How do I know if a man is truly, if I'm dating, obviously I'm in a relationship, so I'm saying I is the worldly why. So what if I'm dating and I'm in a relationship with somebody, how do I tell that they're really not in it to win it with me? They're just, I don't know, I'm their plaything, I'm their toy, I'm their object. Great. So we're get into something that's also kind of like a profound and simple statement. When I've worked with women, this is 23 years in, and I've asked women to tell me about their marriages, what happened in your relationship? How did you feel? 25 years into the marriage, at what point did you know something was wrong? The answer is usually six months to a year. So what do we have? A woman who's six months into a relationship feels anxious. This guy has anger issues. This guy is dismissive of my opinions. This guy's too busy. This guy's not much of a communicator. This guy can't get his act together. And due to fear and sunk costs, She normalizes her anxiety, goes to the altar, marries him, raises three kids. It's like she got on a track and never got off. All because she ignored her own anxiety. So how do you know if a relationship is on the wrong track? You're going to feel anxiety. And love is fundamentally a lack of anxiety. That's beautiful. Love is fundamentally a lack of anxiety. It is letting down your guard and exhaling and knowing. I don't have to worry about what happens next. I don't have to micromanage him. I don't have to check his cell phone. I don't have to say, where is this going? Because he makes me feel safe, heard, understood. He treats me well. I'm at ease with him. If you're at ease, you're relaxed. There's no anxiety. So people think love is butterflies. No, love is the opposite of butterflies. is, that's such an eye-opener. And yeah, I'm like, but you know, if you are used to a guy who creates anxiety in you and you're used to drama, maybe from your childhood. And this person feels very familiar and they're in chaos and they can't get it together. That was my mom. So I would just keep picking guys that like couldn't get it. It was almost like through these men, I was trying to fix what happened in my childhood. And I would just keep going forward and marry them. All the things you're saying, go to the altar, feel the anxiety, feel upset, but thinking that I can fix this. How does somebody get out, I know how I did it, but I wanna hear from you how you've seen your clients get out of those kind of patterns where they're almost craving the drama. And if a guy is making them feel calm and beautiful and accepted and loved, they get like, they become the saboteur to that relationship. so first of all, I wanna give you credit, Robin. A, you crack the code, right, like. The thing that you just said about, if you grow up around a narcissistic mother or an emotionally unavailable abusive father, that becomes your normal. You play that out repeatedly over time. And you think that's how men are or how relationships are. And it's not, it's a very small sample size that you've normalized. Relationships are chaos. Relationships are fighting. Relationships take work. I'll ask you, Robin, because I don't know the answer to this one. Does your current relationship take a lot of work? Actually, it doesn't. Exactly. So now we have a new paradigm. it's like, I think of the relationship, I'm trying to think of a metaphor, but it's like leaning back into the sofa. It's like an ⁓ Mm-hmm. Yeah. And at first, and did try to sabotage it. I did go, this is too good to be true. I don't think I deserve this. I even went to, he's so much smarter than me, better than me. I went to all these places. When is the shoe going to drop? This is too perfect. I mean, if it wasn't for Roxy, my daughter cheering me on and wanting me to have this relationship, I would have pulled some of the stunts in the past, like walking away from a really good thing. But she kept me, she was my Evan Mark Katz. She was in my corner cheering me on and I'm very, very lucky. And each day is bringing ease. And I, I really miss him during the day when he's gone. I mean, I really do and I can't wait for him to come home. But in my last relationships, I would get anxious when my husband would come home and I knew I had to perform to be loved. So you are exhibit A and B and C of the difference between an easy relationship and a difficult relationship. Most people, if you look around, the story goes relationships take work. I'm going to add one word, bad relationships take work. Mm, that is amazing and so true. So you talk about women becoming the CEO of their love lives. And I think we're going around the edges of that right now. How does a woman take control finally of her dating experiences and not just say, it happens, it'll happen. When he shows up, I'll know it. Like all these things like leaving it all to chance. CEO of your love life sounds like to me, you're in charge. You're not leaving it to chance. Am I right? Pretty ironic. that women who are type A CEOs take a very passive approach to love, but it also makes a certain amount of sense. You have one really strong muscle, that's your career, and then the other one feels weak and atrophied, so you double down on the strong one. So you could spend 50, 60 hours a week doing the thing you're good at that makes you money. You know what's hard is to pick up that weight for the first time and be like, I'm gonna get online for a half hour a day and talk to When we look at our time allocation, right? Let's just start there. Whatever you put your intention on, that's what happens. If you can get to the gym for high intensity cardio four days a week, you're going to do better than the person who shows up once a month and reads a magazine on a treadmill. You've done hard things everywhere. This means creating a dating practice, the way you have yoga and meditation and a morning routine and a skincare routine. Hey, do have a dating practice? What? Do you get online to talk to guys for a half hour a day and go out with one guy a week? No? Okay. This would explain why you don't have a love life. Wow. That's so amazing. And I know you work with high achieving women. That is really your specialty. So that resonates with me so much because I'm like, wow, if I was single right now, I would need to... pour myself into this like I do everything else, my skincare, my workouts, my nutrition, everything. But none of those things are 24-7, Robin, right? No, they aren't. You're not on a 24-7 husband hunt. It's just a thing you do like eating and sleeping and showering. ⁓ my god, you make it seem so easy. I love that allocating time. That's really, really smart. I love that. What are some of the other actionable ways to open your heart for love? Remember, this podcast, Plenty of Husbands, is about women who have been hurt or they have had loss and I want them to believe they can love again. So what are some ways for them to open themselves up to love, especially if they've had repeated disappointments? I have been doing this long enough that I've recognized that dating is just another skill set. But most people don't think of it that way. We think that because we're smart, we're attractive, we're kind. that love should just work out for us. And it's not how it works any more than every good person in the world has an amazing job. That's not how it works, right? So whatever you do for a living, you have a specialty, you have a skillset if you've been doing it for 20, 30 years, right? You don't think you're better at your job after 20 years than you were after like six months? Of course you are, Robin. That's how you became you. So if there's a best practices for PR or there's a best practices for... how to handle, like my wife almost died in childbirth and the doctors had a whole protocol. This is the thing that would kill people a hundred years ago. And it happens to one out of 25 people. They don't clot properly. They had a whole protocol, 10 doctors doing this and then saved a life. And that happens to one out of 25 people. That's because they have best practices. It's because they have a protocol. There are best practices for dating and relationships, but nobody knows what they are because who spends? all their time trying to figure out the best practices. We want to get online, swipe right, come home with a guy like you're ordering a book from Amazon. It's not how it works. So I don't understand why people don't get the idea that this is playing piano. This, it like, it's a ⁓ thing you do. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. But nobody wants to be good at dating. They just want the results the same way. Nobody wants to diet. They just want to lose weight. Gosh, that's so true. What is it about love that we think it's just supposed, is it the movies? it immediate? is it books that make us believe we're just going to, there he is, you know? It's, know, Kathy and Heathcliff on the Moors, all they had was each other. you know, they're saying like, no matter, even if you just live on the Moors and there's no one else there, but there's that one person that's meant for you. Do you believe in soulmates, by the way? There's just, okay. Tell me about that. Tell me about that. If I got hit by a bus, my wife would marry another guy within a year or two because she's amazing and any guy would be lucky to have her. She should just spend the rest of her life mourning my non-existence. Like, it makes no sense. We're treating people as if they're finite. There's one of you. There's a billion of everybody else. So this is, it's one of the things I coach. Whatever guy you're seeing is not the last man on earth. I have a friend. We have a mutual friend. who just had, who just got heartbroken, who just got heartbroken by a guy she met once, tears, she met him once. She told a whole story and treated him as if he was the moon, the sun, and he was a guy that she barely knew. So he's gone, we'll find another one and another one. And that is the beauty of 2026. It's not like you're in a town of 150 people and you got to marry the quarterback. There's... infinite numbers of people to choose from. If anything, there's too much choice. That is very encouraging for women who think there's nobody out there for me. And I think if you say there's nobody out there for me, that's your story. And that's the way it's going to unfold. If you say he's around the corner, all I have to do is put my taxi cab light on and he knows he can get in. That's a different mindset. So don't you think some of this is the mindset? That's huge. Telling that we're in abundance. There's not just one soulmate or person for you. Right. What you believe might as well be true. It's not true, but what you believe might as well be true. There's someone out there who thought that they were patriots for strong in the Capitol because they believed it was true. That's a logical behavior. If you believe dating apps are bad, men are trash and marriage is dead, there's very little intent to engage with those things. If you believe that that is 100 % true, I'm here to tell you it's not. but it may feel like that for you. And if you talk to your network of angry, scared, disappointed, middle-aged single women, like it may feel that that is reality and it's a slice of reality. And I love this too, even for the younger women, cause I have a 26 year old daughter and I love all of her friends and we talk about guys all the time, but I think there is a tendency to think that the guy you're with right now is the best you can do. There's no one really out there and you end up putting all this time and energy into somebody who makes you anxious, isn't really, it doesn't have good character. We didn't talk about character, but you know how important character is, right? That's so key. Character and connection more than chemistry is what I believe. you, Evan, I think- Mad and my coaching, people come in with their list. It's usually the wrong list, right? The list is the external, weight, age, education, income. I understand what's attractive. I'm not going to argue with what you find attractive. but I could give you a Top Chef Supermodel Rhodes Scholar, but if he doesn't want to get married and you do, your relationship's dead. If he yells at you and talks down to you, your relationship's dead. If he disappears for days or weeks at a time, your relationship's dead. So what are the things that matter most? Character, kindness, insistency, communication, commitment, right? If you look at your relationships and your three marriages and why they didn't work out, you can anchor onto character, kindness, consistency, communication, commitment as the culprit. No woman has ever dumped a man because she discovered after they got married that he was actually 5'10", not 5'11". ⁓ my gosh, that I love, first of all, I love those five C's. Unbelievable. We're going to put those into the description of this podcast. Incredible. And you're absolutely right. It's not about height and weight. It's not even really about looks. think you can fall, a woman in particular, I'm not sure about men, but a woman can fall in love with a man over time if he has great character commitment. Let's not go too far to the other end of the spectrum. We need to validate that attraction is important. Good sex is important. If you don't have attraction and good sex, you also don't have a marriage. To me, that's just the ticket in. That's the baseline, right? A six in attraction can turn into a nine. A three can't turn into anything. So we're not, a lot of people hear this and like, ⁓ these guys are telling me to settle. Uh-uh, baseline of attraction, right? And then how does it feel? How does he treat me? That's a better indicator instead of who is he on paper? And a lot of women choose men on paper. And the reality is I'm walking on eggshells all the time. Yes, yes. I chose two out of the three husbands. Well, I would even say all three looked great on paper, right? But it was how they made me feel. And that's where I could, cause I'm a great salesperson. I could convince myself and do storytelling around why I should transcend my doubt and not listen to my gut instincts, which is a woman's superpower, and not listen because I thought that also they love me. I'm not lovable. That's the best I can do. And let's just move forward. If you're unhappy, Robin, it's objectively not the best you can do. Right? So, so again, if you're in a bad relationship, get out. Don't try to change him, don't try to fix him. Get out of the bad relationship and stay single until there's a relationship where you can relax and feel safe. And for most people tying these ideas together, because I know we're close to the end of our time, tying these ideas together, there's two different things. There's more than two different things, but there's where do I go? How do I meet him? Well, that's a skill to learn to do all the things, to flirt, to meet men in real life and the skill of dating online. And it is very much a skill. It's not. something that comes naturally. So there's the skill of lead generation creating opportunity. And then there's the just as important skill of how do I choose? So most women are focused on the first one. Where do I find him? But if I introduce you to a thousand guys, but your pickers off, it doesn't matter if you meet a thousand guys, cause you're always gonna pick wrong. So we have to do both of them. We have to teach you how to create opportunity and we have to teach you how to choose and listen to your emotions. That's why I work with people for six months, not like, you Hey, let's just talk for an hour and we're going to solve all your problems. my gosh. I could talk to you for hours. are flattered. I don't know how you thought we were going to do this in 45 minutes. You're so brilliant. I love what you have given this audience that really needs it. How can people interested in working with you get in touch? My name is Evan Mark Katz, V-A-N-M-A-R-C-K-A-A-T-Z. I have been doing this for 23 years and I have a podcast called the Love You Podcast with over 3 million downloads and 450 episodes. I got a blog that's been read by 300, not 300 million, 35 million people. And if you go to my website, you could tool around and give me your name and email address and I'll send you free advice. And if you are really motivated to change your life and you're done wasting time on the wrong men and want to finally get this thing right. You can book a time to talk to me at evanmarcats.com forward slash now. And I work with people for six months. That's all you need to find a guy. Six months and you could find a guy, ladies. You've heard it here from Evan Marcats. I absolutely love this advice. All right. That's it for today's episode of Plenty of Husbands. I want to thank you, Evan. You have brought so much wisdom, inspiration, and enlightenment to everyone who's listening, who's watching. By the way, If you're not watching him on YouTube, this man is so good looking. I want you to check him out. He doesn't just sound good, he's cute. If you know someone who needs to hear Evan's advice, please share this episode. And if you crave more of these kinds of conversations, follow Plenty of Husbands on Spotify, on Apple, and on YouTube, and join us next Wednesday for a fresh episode. Until next time, I'm your host, Robin Fisher-Roffert, and I'm reminding you. to practice your ABCs of love, action, belief, and courage. It's time to step into your next chapter and live your greatest love story. Evan, thanks so much. Bye everyone.