Welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. In today’s video, we are going to talk about beauty, truth and goodness, how to be attractive series. And this is a section on truth. And in today’s video, we’re going to talk about understanding the dating process itself, I think as women and men too. I mean, I think everybody in the millennial and Gen Z generation, like, we don’t know how to date, like, frankly, we don’t know, how should it start? How should it end? How do you know when it’s going off track? How do you know when it’s going? Well, like, we kind of just go with the flow, and we like hope it works out in the end. So in this video, I’m going to kind of talk about the dating process.

A lot of what I’ve said has come from relationship experts. A lot of what I’m going to reference comes from Bob Grant, he’s like a marriage Therapist and Relationship. psychologist, john gray has written a really good book, it’s called men are from Mars, women are from Venus, it was written in the 90s. But it is a classic, it has helped 1000s of couples. So we’re going to talk a little bit about the dating process. But before we get into that, the first thing is you want to have your goal straight, why are you dating, dating should be leading toward marriage toward finding a life partner, you are not dating, just to have fun. if you’re dating just to have fun, then you’re gonna get discouraged during the low points. There are points in normal healthy, if you’re talking about a relationship that leads to you guys both falling in love the guy becoming in love with you, and being emotionally attached to you and wanting to commit to you for life, which is usually what women want, we want a man to fall in love with us and marry us, we want to be that one woman that inspires him and brightens his life and changes his life for the better. We want to be that person and we want to be special to him, we want to be cherished and valued by him. And if you want that to happen, there is a certain process now obviously, every relationship is different, but there are general phases, that general kind of hallmarks that tend to be in healthy relationships, that ended up leading into marriage.

And one of those is both people have to want to be looking for something long-lasting, if you guys are both looking for one or both of you is just looking for a quick hookup, then it’s not going to work. Yeah, there are always exceptions. But you don’t want to build your life around exceptions, you want to maximize your chances of having something good and stable and healthy happening. And so for that reason, you want to avoid men that they tell you outright, oh, I’m not looking for anything serious, or I don’t like marriage, just a piece of paper, avoid those men like the plague, life is too short. And there are plenty of men out there that do value marriage, and that do want a woman in their life long term that do appreciate women and don’t see them as like human toys. So avoid men like that. And again, your goal, you should think of marriage as this is how I find a life partner. This is how I find a future husband. When you look at it that way things will kind of fall into place. Because the reason I say that some of you may be watching and be like, No, that’s not what it is. Or I’m super young. I just want to play the field and like Why does it have to be serious? And it’s like, here’s why it has to be serious. Because when you are dating somebody, they’re hot, right? You want to sleep with them? Well, that instinct to sleep with someone leads to children. Yes, nowadays, we’ve figured out ways of avoiding that. But in general, at its most primal, instinctive, basic level, it leads to children. And that’s why nature has designed that instinct to bond people sets, bonds people together, and you don’t want to be bonded with somebody who’s going to be a pain in the neck. That’s why a lot of relationships fall apart, because you guys never developed a foundation of communication and shared interests.

And just all the emotional compatibility never has a chance to be discovered, whether it’s there or not. And if it is there, the basis of it is never really developed. And you guys never really bond emotionally. But then you go bond sexually, and then all kinds of problems ensue and heartbreak. And how many times have you heard someone say, yeah, it was ain’t gonna work, but I stayed in it, because it was too painful to leave for, I put so much time into it, I didn’t want to lose what I invested so much, I didn’t want to walk away from it. Well, a lot of times, that’s because of that bonding that happens with sex, that investment that you feel is that attachment that is created. So that’s why you want to approach dating from the point of view of you’re looking for a life partner, because when you’re dating somebody, you’re going to be attracted to them physically, or you should be, you know, if you’re not attracted to guy physically, you shouldn’t be dating them. But that instinct is going to propel you toward attaching with this person, and you want to make sure that the person you’re attaching to, isn’t going to make your life difficult down the road.

So that’s why you don’t want to date just to have fun, that is a problem with our society. And it’s not healthy, you know, and it’s part of the reason we are having a horrible time finding good partners. This is why we’re having so many marriages break up, a lot of people got married, simply because they just kept dating this person. And, you know, they just kind of drifted into marriage, you know, they’re like, Well, you know, I’ve been seeing them for like, three years, and she’s getting mad that I haven’t proposed. So I guess I better propose, you know, because I don’t want to start over again, you know, and, you know, in the attachments there, and, you know, also, you know, if you’re sleeping with somebody, especially for men, they’re getting regular sex, it’s hard for them to give that up, you know, they may know that the girl isn’t right for them, but it’s really hard to give that up. And so then they can often stay with women that, you know, they’re not really crazy about, but it’s just easier to stay. And that’s how you can often end up dating a guy for like, seven years. And then he breaks up with you. And like suddenly marrying someone else in like six months, it’s because men got complacent, this is part of the reason the religious people say don’t sleep with someone before you’re married. It’s because it can activate this like complacency in the relationship. And you guys can kind of get into this like a comfortable rut. And you can get into that with somebody who really isn’t right for you. And then you end up having to go through this horrible heartbreak to like, you know, when you realize like, Oh, you know, this person really isn’t right for me. But oh, you know, we got so much history together and, you know, you’re emotionally attached to them because of all the sex and then it’s like, and then it becomes really painful. Because, you know, you kind of know, in your heart, like, Oh, you know, I gotta break this up or not right for each other, we got to break up and find the person who is, you know, for each of us, and that’s really painful. And then that can also lead to regret, you know, you can know, on some level, like, we’re not right for each other, and then you know, maybe, you know, maybe one of you didn’t want to end things, you know, and so then you always have this regret, and you can never really fully love another person, it just creates a ton of problems.

And so again, it may sound prudish of me to say that, you know, you shouldn’t be sleeping with people you’re not married to. But there are reasons for that. It’s not like finger-wagging. Like, oh, you know, you shouldn’t have fun, like, that’s not what it’s about, it can create problems, you have to do your homework on the person you’re dating, and you have to be sure that they’re going to be the right person long term. And once you bring sex into the picture, you kind of lose your objectivity about who this person is, and then you just kind of bond and get attached. And sex is designed that way, you know, biologically and with nature, you know, nature designed it that way, because sex leads to children, and the propagation of the species and human beings are very delicate, and they need their parents for years and years. You know, could a five-year-old live on their own? No, they couldn’t. If you look in the animal kingdom, most animals are not like that, you know, after at most, maybe a year or two, the little baby deer can go off and live by itself or the little baby gorilla or whatever. But in general, you know, birds, you know, they hatch and then shortly they grow bigger and they can fly on their own. You know, dogs are the same way, you know, after they’re weaned like they can live on their own. And human beings are not like that. It takes years and years for, you know, a baby human to grow up and be self-sufficient, you know, arguably age 18 and some even past that. But the reason, you know nature knows that about human beings. And so insects, it Bond’s people together and it kind of blurs that. That idea of who this person is, and it kind of softens your view of their faults, because nature wants the parents of a child to stick together so that that child will survive. It’s in the interest of propagating the species to keep those parents together. So that they can raise that kid until that kid matures, and then human beings will live, and that’s why sex Bond’s people together. And it removes the objectivity and the clarity about the maybe less appealing parts of this person, it blurs their faults, let’s put it that way.

And then, you just get attached to them. And again, it’s nature did that on purpose. if you were seeing clearly what a pain in the neck this guy is, if you already had kids with them, you leave. And this often happens. This is why a lot of divorces happen spouses, they stopped sleeping together, and then that bonding that happens doesn’t happen anymore. And they kind of drift apart. Sex is not a bad thing, that bond, when somebody, and  they’re right for you, and you guys get married? Yeah, it’s important to sleep with them. Because that keeps that bond together, it helps you guys get through the hard times. And again, that tendency of sex works in your favor, because again, children are coming into the world, children will die, especially back in the day when there was like, when we were more primitive, and we didn’t have, society and grocery stores on every block, and life was more like hunter-gatherer. If the parents split up, that kid could die, they were living with just one parent, that parent was also weaker,  two people were stronger. And if you only had one person, that parent could die, and then that jeopardizes the kid anyways, I think you get the point. So dating, it’s leading toward a marriage partner, okay. And you can leave me hate mail and hate comments. But that’s what that’s my story. And I’m sticking to it. So having said that, with the dating process, men and women, like I said, in another video, they approach it differently. And one of the things is, men are kind of strategic, and they kind of want to kind of hunt the woman a little bit. And I know that sounds really weird. But it’s true. Men want to kind of like observe, like, they don’t really want women to just make it too easy for them. Like, I know guys are gonna disagree. And they’re like, No, no, I like it when, but you have to look at when men actually do not what they say, the women they fall in love with are often the women who do it especially in the beginning, it was not clear that he was going to get her when there’s that. And it’s the same with women, too, when you’re not really sure if that guy likes you or not, or it can increase the attraction because you’re like, ooh, this guy’s kind of valuable, he’s not just like, throwing himself at me, men and women are like this, people often talk about, like, yes, men are hunters. And I feel like men are like this to a greater degree than women are. But we’re both like that, to a certain extent, nobody wants a partner who’s just going to be super agreeable, and never just never disagree.

And they’re just going to kind of like, throw themselves at you. you had me at hello, like, having said that, when you are dating, there is one phase that is going to happen. And it is something that john gray calls, rubber bands, men are like rubber bands. And that Bob grant calls it tension, he says tension is your friend. And what that means is there are going to be dating is going to kind of go in waves, there’s going to be times where you guys are having a bunch of closeness and you’re really connecting. And then there’s gonna be times where maybe you’re not, maybe he didn’t call back. And it’s been a couple of days, you went on your second date. And he hasn’t called back and he thought he was gonna call back by then or, the date was going so well. And he said, he’d call back the next day, and he didn’t, you call back three days later, so there’s, there’s going to be times of closeness, and then there’s going to be times of kind of distance. And this is something that men do, again, it goes back to men have a lot of feelings, and sometimes they get overwhelmed with their feelings, and they can kind of feel like they’re losing themselves in the relationship, and they kind of have to take a step back, guys, it depends on the individual personality of the guy, some men, they’re not, they’re not going to maybe they had a very stable mother. And they’ve had pretty good experience dating up to this point. And so they don’t really feel as much of a need to like pull away, but in general, and oftentimes, especially if he’s a good guy, he’s going to be consistent and you’re not really going to notice this happening. So ideally, if, if he stops calling for like a week, that’s not rubber banding, that’s him not being interested. And if he shows up again, randomly, then it’s like That’s him, like wasting your time.

So you gotta take this one with a grain of salt. It’s easy, especially when you like a guy, it’s easy to go, Oh, well, he just needed to kind of take a step back and get his head around the fact that we’re dating, and it’s like, no, if a guy really likes you, he’s going to be very quick to get in touch with you quick to make plans for the next date, he’s going to stay in contact with you pretty regularly at least every couple days, you’re not going to have him like vanish out of nowhere, and then just suddenly pop up like nothing happened two weeks later,  that’s not what I’m talking about. What I am talking about, though, is, there will be times in the relationship, no matter how consistent this guy is, there will be times where you’ll kind of sense a little bit of a change, you’ll be like, Huh, he’s not as attentive, he kind of looked at his phone a little bit while we were talking. He’s never done that before and so, it’s not always a sign of like, impending doom, it’s not always losing interest, and we’re going to break up, it can be, but usually, it’s not, like I said, Men, just they kind of go through these little like, they’re like waves, they’re up and down. Sometimes they want to be really close to you and really lovey dovey. And then other times, they’re just, they’re just a little more distant. And guys don’t even understand it themselves. if you ask them, like, Why are you being distant with me? Or what’s wrong? Or don’t you like me anymore? Or where’s this going? guys are like, I don’t know where it’s going like that. The whole question of like, where’s this going? That’s usually not going to help you.

Now, there are times where for your own sake of closure, you feel like you need to ask it like, that’s fine. But in general, men are gonna pull away, and you as a woman, because we’re more intuitive. And we understand people’s psychological state, at a very keen level, most women, we usually don’t want to say we can read people’s minds, because we can’t. But we can often read their emotional state better than men can. And we can pick up on the fact, we can pick up on the fact that he’s emotionally cooling down a little bit, we’ll notice something’s off. Maybe he didn’t call back when he said he would or he normally calls back every day around 3 pm. And this time, he waited until seven, and he didn’t say, he didn’t give any reasoning, so there are times where you’re going to sense a little bit of pulling away, and it can make you feel like something’s wrong. Bob Grant talks a lot about this. He says, When there’s tension in a relationship, it’ll make you feel like something’s wrong and you’ll have this urge to reconnect and like, oh, let me call him back or whatever. He says, Don’t do that.