Transcription
I don't know if it was the era, or if it was my father in particular, or if it was just men in general, or if it was just a whole new male-female landscape, but nobody gave me any information about marriage before I actually got into it. I had no clue the significance of the decisions that I was making. I mean, I thought I knew; was pretty sure I knew. I wasn't a dumb kid; I was 30 some years old, so I should have known, but I didn't have a clue. And I am willing to bet that the vast majority of men, even today, really don't know what they're getting into.
So today, I want to do my level best to give you the lay of the land; what it is you can anticipate in the event that you are considering marriage. I'm going to give you 10 things that every man needs to know before he enters into this sacred institution. And trust me, there are things here that are going to affect every single one of you. I promise you that.
So the first thing that most guys don't get is that dating and getting married use two completely different sets of criteria. What I mean by that is that when you're dating, you're sort of dating just for the most attractive girl who will have you. And that's normal behavior. So in high school and in college, you're just trying to get the hottest girl because you just want to have sex with her. And so using that criteria, and I guess you could go to your hot crazy Matrix and figure out who fits the bill, but when it comes to marriage, it's a completely different set of criteria because hot girls have a whole series of problems that only really rear their ugly, so pretty heads once you've been together for a few years. So girls are really great at hiding their true, um, identities until they feel like they can safely reveal themselves. So how attractive a woman is, or how beautiful she is, should not be a primary criteria when you're considering a partner, getting married, anything like that. In fact, I would handicap the pretty ones because the real pretty girls are going to be the craziest ones. I know that hot crazy Matrix is kind of a joke, but there's an awful lot of truth to it.
A big part of the reason for that is, from a very young age, these girls have been idealized by men; they have been pursued by men; they started capturing men's eyes when they were teenagers. And, um, so they have gotten tons and tons of attention from men. So there is a, imagine the power that comes with that; it's like being a celebrity, you know; it's like everyone wants to be near them. So the hotter the girl, the more of a celebrity you're going to be marrying. And, um, along with being a celebrity is people try to warm up to these girls for all kinds of reasons, both men and women. And as a result, they are lied to all the time, and they have a vision or a form of reality that they live in that is not the same reality that the rest of us live in. Their reality is shaped by people feeding them lies, you know, just to convince them that they're the kind of person that they want to be with. Both men and women lie to them. So the men want them for sex, and the women want them for street cred; they want to, um, they want to be around to pick up the scraps; that's basically what it is. So hot girls, like really, really hot girls, you're going to have to be extremely vigilant about because, quite honestly, a lot of them are going to have been, um, lied to, and they're living in a reality that simply doesn't exist. And when that reality comes into conflict with the real reality, the one that comes with being married, there is an explosion; it's like a nuclear explosion. And, um, yeah, you don't want to be anywhere near that when it happens because there'll be a lot of casualties and a lot of fallout.
The second thing that most guys don't fully understand is that marriage is not a romantic relationship. Let me make that clear and say it again so you guys understand: We are not in a Disney movie; marriage is not a romantic relationship. Now I know that before you got married and while you were dating it was very romantic and very passionate, and there was a lot of love and all that stuff, and some of that will definitely continue into your marriage, but marriage is primarily a legal relationship. And this is an important distinction that you must understand. Marriage is critical to our society and the foundation of our economy and our culture and everything else, and so it has a lot of legal ramifications. And I would venture to say that you will not enter into a more onerous legal relationship with anyone else in your life. A mortgage, car loan, hell, you know, business ventures, whatever; none of them have the far-reaching effect of a marriage. And no other legal arrangement will a dependent, someone that you bring onto your life and that you support, or at least mostly support, or even half support, um, will have so much control over your income, your retirement, your free time. Um, you will have no choice over whether you're having children or not having children; it'll be completely up to her. Um, any abortions that might come up—none of your business; that's all on her; you have no rights in that case whatsoever. Um, yeah, they can take everything; they can take all of your money; they can take your house; they can take—I should say half your money, um, your house, your pension; they can make all of the most important decisions that you have in your life. Also, when you're dating someone, unless you live together, you have no idea what it's like to physically live with another human being. And people change, just FYI. I look different than I do now; like 30 or 40 years ago, I was a lot more handsome than I am now, but, um, my wife was a lot prettier back then, too. Um, yeah, marriage is a huge, huge, huge undertaking. I cannot overstate that; it is absolutely the most difficult thing that you're going to ever get into. So make sure that the woman you choose to get married to meets—treat it like a job interview; like you're interviewing her for the job of being your life partner. And you've got to be absolutely cold and calculating in making these decisions about whether or not you want this person to be in your life because she's going to be there for a long time, and she's going to have a lot of power over your future, so you would better feel very confident in the person that you choose. Sexual compatibility is not enough of a reason to get married. Just because a woman is willing to have sex with you is definitely not enough reason to get married. There are lots of women who will have sex with you that you will not need to marry. Do not use sex as a determining factor as to whether or not you're going to marry. She may be terrific in bed; you may just think this is the best woman I've ever met because she's so great in bed. How did she get that way? She wasn't born like that; just—I'm just saying, I'm just saying, you know, someone, someone showed her the ropes. And I guarantee you there is a man out there that is very happy that she's not with him. That was some advice a guy gave to me when I met my wife, and, uh, my wife was very hot, and he said, "You know, no matter how hot a woman is, somewhere there's a man who's happy she's not with him." So keep that in mind, especially if you've got a woman who's really great in bed; she wasn't born that way, okay? She got that way through a lot of practice, all right.
So this one is one that I made a huge mistake on, and I didn't even think about it. I figured that all women knew something about babies; that they were just born like with some kind of maternal instinct, and they could just deal with babies. I could not have been more wrong. My God! If your intention is to have a family, then the number one criteria you need to choose with, or use to choose your woman, is whether or not she knows anything about children. If you really want to have a family, you better pick a woman who spent a lot of time with babies; a lot of time with babies. Babies, to a novice, to a novice mom, are life wreckers; they will screw her up more than anything else in the world. They will make her question her credibility as a woman; they'll make her wonder whether or not she's going to kill this child or not because she's so insecure about everything. I mean, the postpartum stuff, up and down, the depression, the anxiety, it is enough to kill any marriage, trust me. So if you're going to have a family, when you're dating women, you need to ask them about their experience with children; like, are they the oldest in a large family, and they were—have they had to babysit a lot? They had to take care of the younger ones, you know, they help their mom with raising children, that sort of thing. You definitely do not want to get the youngest in a large family, 'cause she ain't got no experience, you know. So you definitely need to find a woman who knows what she's doing with babies; otherwise, this baby coming into your life will end up being the end of your marriage sooner or later. The children will be the thing that causes the biggest problems because she's going to be overwhelmed. Now that's not all women, but generally speaking, that's a lot of women.
Here's another one I didn't think of: You definitely need to be checking your woman's credit score. You need to find out how much debt she has; is she paying her bills on time? If a woman is in financial trouble, she's looking for you to bail her out, and if you bring her into your life, she will wreck it. I promise you, if she's gotten herself into trouble, she's just looking for someone with deeper pockets; she's not going to get out of trouble; she's just going to be getting into bigger trouble now 'cause you have more money. So now she's going to get into trouble with her money and your money, and she might not even have any more money; she might just be using your money. Yeah, so you don't want to find out it's your honeymoon that she's got $75,000 in debt that she needs you to pay off. That—yeah, you're not, you're not getting married to be somebody's personal banker. So yeah, you do not want to get into a relationship with a woman who has a lot of debt; very, very important.
The next one is you should definitely get to know her parents really well, and this counts for two: The mom; you want to just watch her behaviors, talk to her, learn about what she was like as a, as a child, um, what does her mother look like? Has her, has her mother gained a ton of weight? What are her mother's values like? All these things are very important. How does her mother treat her? What kind of relationship do they have? Girls and moms, um, famously have difficult relationships, so definitely keep an eye on that one. Then you need to become pals with her dad; like you need to go out and have some beers with him, or go hunting with him, or play golf with him; do some kind of activity that gets him talking, that way you can find out what kind of guy he is and what role he's played in her life, and any advice that he's given her; what kind of man he wants her to find. You know, is this guy a pushover to his wife? Is she running the show and he's just paying the bills, like most guys from my parents' generation? Or is he, um, the kind of guy that really laid down the law to his wife, and, um, he truly wears the pants in the household, and his daughter was raised by him in a lot of ways? You know, they went out and did things together; they went fishing, they went hunting, they played golf, they played sports; he was the coach, she was the player, whatever; that he was intimately involved in raising that girl so that she has a good understanding of, of men. Now if her parents are wack jobs, and I know people say, "Oh, she has no control over that," doesn't matter; does not matter; we're not handicapping here. If her parents are wack jobs and they're screaming at each other, or one of them has a criminal record and one's an alcoholic, or whatever, you do not want to be a part of that; I don't care; you do not want to be a part of that. That will come up and bite you in the ass; I promise you, because if they're acting that way now, they acted like that when they were first into—in being married; they, um, they raised their children around that environment; those children were exposed to that kind of toxic energy all the time, and it's in there; it's in there. You don't know when it's going to come out, but it will come out, and when it does come out, it's going to be lethal to your marriage, to your relationship, to your finances, to your whole life. So you do not want someone who's got a ton of emotional baggage from being raised by really bad parents; critical, and I cannot tell you how important that is. I never would have guessed it, but I have seen it firsthand; it happened to me, and even now my ex-wife is in therapy trying to figure out what her parents did to screw up her head, and I'm telling you it's serious stuff; it really is.
So we kind of touched on this one a little bit earlier when we were talking about sex, but you need to understand, or get an idea for, what her prior relationships were like. In every relationship, you talk about your exes; how does she talk about her exes? Were all these guys toxic? Were they all bad guys? Was she dating a lot of really bad guys, or did she have a handful of truly wonderful relationships that just didn't work out for one reason or another? But if she's got some—a bunch of relationships where she complains about that guy being, um, a liar, a cheater, toxic, a narcissist, whatever, man, you just need to turn around and walk away because I guarantee you it wasn't them; it was her. And women will project out onto them what's going on inside of her. You see it all the time; hell, I even see it in the comments where people will project all kinds of—on me—I never said or did, or they have any idea about; they're putting together a whole narrative about me, and most oftentimes it's, it's women. So, um, just be aware that if she's talking about her exes, there's a really good chance that she's the toxic one, and you do not want that kind of energy in your life.
So this next one's for when you actually get into the marriage, and you need to understand the amount of intention that is required to make a marriage work. This is not something that is going to work, uh, the same way dating did. You're going to have to kind of create this artificial, um, set of circumstances in order to keep your relationship thriving. In other words, the spontaneity is going to kind of go out of a lot of your relationship, and a lot of this is going to have to be pre-planned and contrived, especially once children come into your life. But just two people working and having jobs and careers, it's very easy to get distracted with all that stuff, all that noise in your life, and not give the relationship the, the need, the attention that it needs. And if you're not intentional about that, your marriage will fail; you will eventually just grow apart, and the marriage will fail. So you've got to understand that it's something that is a continuous growth process; it's not something that is static. You have to work together in order to, uh, make sure that this relationship continues and grows and becomes stronger, and that you're growing together, or you will grow apart. I promise you; it's all up to you and her together, working to make sure this thing works. You know, and this one I should have mentioned earlier because it's so foundational to the whole thing: You need to be really, really honest with yourself about why you are getting married. If it's just because you don't want to be alone, or you are lonely, well, that's a you problem; that's not a marriage problem. Like you're, you will not find happiness in a marriage, um, companionship maybe, but if you can't come into a relationship at a high point in your life, and you're not feeling good about yourself individually as a single person, and you're trying to get this person, this woman, to fix you in some way, to fill your life in some way, to make you a better person in some way, you're probably not ready to get married. So, um, now companionship is fine, you know, it really is. I mean, everyone likes to have some companionship, and having someone to go out with, but do you really need to get married to have that? And you really have to have someone living there with you all the time in order to, to, um, to have that level of companionship? I mean, I have two dogs; they're pretty, pretty good at keeping me busy, you know, they're chewing on sticks now, but they're good companionship. You don't need to get married; you don't need to sign a legal contract that's going to sign your entire life away in order to have companionship. There are lots of ways to get companionship without getting married. So really take a look at yourself and decide: Are you ready? Are you the man that you need to be to meet the kind of woman that you want to meet to have the relationship that you want to have? Because if you're not the man that you want to be yet, then you're not going to meet the woman that you want to meet, and you're not going to have the marriage that you want to have.
So all right, you guys, that's all I got for you today. It is really cold and windy out here today, so I'm not going to do a ton of drone shots, but, um, I hope you've enjoyed this video. I hope it is giving you some insights into some of the dangers that you need to keep in mind before you make this commitment because it really is a huge, huge, huge commitment; much bigger than most people realize. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed the video. If you have, please like and subscribe, and please share this video with guys that might be trying to decide whether they should be getting married or not, because you know, like I said, I wish my dad was there to tell me, you know, and, um, yeah, and he, I don't think he even knew this stuff, you know. I don't think he had any clue; I just, I don't think he still does; I think he's still in the dark about all this stuff. So anyway, in the meantime, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.