So I just tried to do this video in a coffee shop because I was out of coffee and I was like, well, I'm going to go get coffee. I'm running low on time because I'm also going to a brunch this morning at Paul's place. So I refilled the coffee because you get, you know, your little discount. And then this one I got ground for french press because Paul has a french press, but no good coffee. So I figured, I'll bring good coffee to the brunch. That way I get good coffee and everybody's to be happy,
right? Right. So I sat, I had my coffee in the coffee shop. I chatted about dating, why I struggled with sharing it in the past. Like, sharing about my dating life, but so much else, why everything is...ugh dating. Ugh. It felt a little bit stilted doing it in public, because obviously I was like, you know what? I'll challenge myself. I'll do this out in public. Let me sit and talk about it, and who cares? But I have a feeling that it was probably a little bit stilted. So forgive me for not havi
ng another coffee for you. But while we were interrupted, thanks to Matt Thompson, today's patron producer, and all my patrons, for sticking with me through the highs and the lows and all the self discovery that's been going on the last two years. But we can start with why I've always struggled to share about my dating life on YouTube. I've talked about a little bit. If you go back in the past, somebody left a conspiracy theory-esque comment on one of the videos I made where I talked about datin
g people and not women. Women are people. Just for whoever left that comment to clear the air on that, I am, as I have often put it in the past, irredeemably straight. I am into women. I am single. I am dating a little bit. Like, I am open to meeting people. And if I say people all the time again, it's just because women are people. So I'll be using the words women and people interchangeably throughout this video, I'm sure, just out of habit. But if that bothers you, for whatever reason, I don't
know how to help you with that. I think the thing is to get into why it's been so hard for me to share about this, why I think it's important that I do share it, and how things have changed from the past to now, not only with sharing it, but how I'm going about it and what's going on in here. I grew up very religious and I grew up also in the house of what I would describe as a female supremacist. My mom raised us to think that men were kind of generally incompetent, and women were the ones tha
t really managed to get things done. So the voice in the back of my head is actually kind of the opposite, I think of a lot of people, where I've always tended to think that women were amazing above and beyond, and they were the ones that were going to get stuff done. But also with the religious upbringing, having to go from, like, nothing to married is just what got internalized. It was somehow wrong. It was somehow sinful to want someone, to have a desire for someone. And so then to let her kn
ow that would be to bring her into that. And therefore, now you're both in sin. And so somehow you had to go from being just friends or having just met to fully committed in marriage, pretty much? There's a huge jump in there, and obviously it doesn't work that way, but that is kind of the way that I was raised. At least that's how I internalized it. And so those are the arenas that I'm trying to overcome. And so then all of that happens to just be doubled down with shame. Like, if you have not
only the culture, but your mom telling you that it's wrong, basically, to want a woman, all of this stuff somehow ends up engendering shame. It makes it really tricky then, to share that with anyone, let alone the world. So this is kind of a part of that process of overcoming it. And honestly, this is really uncomfortable for me. This is not a subject that's easy for me to talk about. And that's part of the reason that I want to, is because if I don't figure out a way of sharing it, of expressin
g it, which I'm able to do with my friends, thankfully. But this is another barrier, right? If I'm not able to do that effectively, then it holds power over me, and I haven't really fully moved on from it. And so that's part of the reason I think it's really important to change the way that I've gone about it. It had a huge impact on the way that I dated as well. And I think part of the reason that it's tricky, then, to share about actively dating and the women that I have gone out with that I h
ave been with, that I have just been interested in, and nothing's ever happened. Whatever those stories are, it's complicated, not only because it's me sharing publicly and feeling this somehow deep rooted shame like something is wrong with me because it never worked out with any of these women. I always just assumed that it was my fault. I figured that I did something wrong. And in one way, that's helpful, because it always gives you something to work on. There's always more to learn. But it's
not fair to me either. It's not entirely or always my fault. On the other side, there are women on the other side of that, right? There are other people that are living their lives that haven't necessarily given their consent for me to share their stories and where, ethically or legally, you don't necessarily need that, I don't want to go around messing with other people's lives in the process or just trying to figure out my own. It's not what I'm here to do. So, with that in mind, I've always b
een pretty guarded in how I share dating stories. And the biggest change, really, has been in myself all around. At the root of it, dating was always a pursuit of validation. It was trying to fill that hole of that sense of self worth that I did not have, the love that I didn't get as a kid, the inability for me to connect with people in the way that I wanted to as a result. And so, so much of dating was also just about pursuing validation. I think that's part of the reason why it's really hard
to share those stories, too. Because once you dive into the fact that I wasn't really looking to connect, I wasn't really looking to find love. I was just trying to prove to myself and to the world around me that, hey, I'm worthy of love. Maybe I actually am attractive. Maybe I actually am worth being with. That's, like, the core heart issue at the root of all of it. And that's very hard to expose, because that's the deepest fear that I have, is that ultimately, I'm not worthy of love. And that
if I open myself up the way that I'm doing right now, all I'm doing is opening myself up to the proof that I'm not. That by bringing it out into the light, it gives others the opportunity to look at me and say, yeah, you're right. You're not worthy of love. I've shared a little bit about the woman that I was dating before, COVID. When we broke up, that was her thing that she said to me, was that she hoped that I would learn to love myself. And I didn't take that very well. I shot back something
that was true, but I didn't need to say, speaking of embarrassing. And in reality, it very much was exactly what I needed to do. That was 2019, and I started therapy, and I discovered very quickly how big of a mountain I had to climb on this subject, specifically. Forget, like, romantic dating, forget other women just coming to terms with the lack of a relationship that I had with my mom, the damage that that did, and the years of work that I've had to do to just get started on healing and becom
ing my own person. The stuff with my mom is, again, a subject that we can talk about another time. It's another very difficult subject for me to talk about, and it's one that, because of the relationship that we had, there's a lot of fear involved in even being open about the reality behind it. But in cutting her off, if you didn't know that. I decided to cut my mom off completely years ago now, which was, unfortunately, one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life, and then to really sit
and do the work and just grind away at it in therapy, in reading, in my friendships, I've come a really long way. It's been a long time since I've really, really tried with anybody. Besides some coffee dates or going out for drinks or whatever, I haven't really gone out with anybody in a really long time. I don't know. Part of it is that I recognized a lot of the patterns that I'd fallen into, and I was working on changing them, but I really had to learn to trust myself. I discovered that my bo
dy, my emotions, everything was telling me what was true in the situation, but the way that I was raised, the voices in my head and just wanting to not be shallow or... like, she's great on paper, why don't you give this a real try? There's a lot of things like that that got me into a lot of trouble where if I'd just gone with how I felt, if I'd listened to the anxiety that I was feeling or to the comfort that I was feeling, whatever it was, if I'd actually trust myself, I would have avoided a l
ot of bad situations and might have found myself in some better situations. And so taking a step back to really learn to trust myself has also been huge, because I haven't done a good job of that most of my life. That goes back to the over rationalization of the religiosity of my youth as well. The hyper intellectualization of... all the way into my 20s, like using the brain and reason to avoid feeling and to avoid those pesky emotions. That was a huge failure in my training, really, to grow up.
There's a lot that I'm having to learn. All this to say that I'm in a place where I definitely want to be more open. I want to make sure that I'm able to share with you what's going on because in this exchange of sharing my life and the whole journey that I'm on, obviously finding love and romance is one of the biggest parts of that. And I haven't shared it in the past because I was afraid that even just confessing the fact that I hadn't found it would somehow devalue me as a person and would g
o again to prove that maybe I wasn't really worthy of being loved. And now I see that that's really not the case. And honestly, I would rather share the journey. I'm going to try and figure out how to navigate that. I have gone on a couple of dates where thankfully, it's just fun to get a shot and it's nice to capture a moment. And I don't want to hide the fact that I'm going out with anybody, but I also don't want to highlight the fact and I'm not going to fess up to it unless she and I are in
a place where it's like, oh, yeah, this is really fun and going well, and then we'll navigate how we do that together. Because I think that anytime you're bringing a relationship into a public sphere, it adds a lot of pressure and it might be very unnecessary or unhelpful pressure early on, but at the same time it says, look at my life like this is what I do. So somebody that's not able or willing to be a part of that, also probably not going to work out. And that goes back to the whole values t
hing, figuring out where you're at, where you're going, and finding someone who loves you for who you are, where you're going, what you do already, so you're not trying to change who you are to accommodate them. That's also part of it. And I recognize that. And I recognize that I am worth it. What I bring to the table is valuable. And if that's a non starter for somebody, like the idea of being with somebody who lives their life very much on camera, probably a sign is not going to work out. So t
hat's also important to track with. And then on the other hand, I need to maintain this very strong effort towards self development and becoming the better version of myself. If I dream of having an amazing woman that just completely blows my mind and is somebody that I admire, that I respect, that I look up to. If I want that, then I need to continue to work on becoming that myself. And I need to become a version of myself that's another, maybe one or two, or I don't know how many iterations aw
ay from where I am today. But I need to be... not the best version of myself, because that's not really possible, I guess. But I need to be somebody that that person could also admire and respect. It's not even that it's only fair, it just makes perfect sense. And the best part of that is that if I never find that woman, that at least I end up being this great version of myself. My life is amazing. Generally very happy with where I'm at. I have amazing friends, I love what I do. This is incredib
le. I'm so glad to be here with you as a way of expressing myself, as a way of engaging with art, but as a way also of making my living. I have nothing to complain about right now, especially if you've been following me. For the last decade, my life has gone from the absolute sh*t hole, bottom of the barrel, to a place that I never could have imagined that I really would get to, and I'm so grateful for that. I would like to find somebody who adds to that, and to whose world I can also add a lot,
that together, the whole would be greater than the sum of our parts. And if I can't find somebody who I don't diminish, or who doesn't diminish me in being together, then I'd rather be single. And it's really nice to be at that place in my life, maybe for the first time ever, where I genuinely feel that way. And I have done for like the last six months at least. And I'm just going to keep barreling ahead. If you're single and you're dying for some companionship, I don't know that I have any rea
l answers or solutions, but I can say, genuinely, that this path that I've been on and all of the investment that I put into myself has made a world of difference. And I wouldn't trade it for anything. So if you don't know where to look, if you don't know how to meet anybody, if you don't know where the ladies are, where the fellas are, where the whoever is, whoever it is that you're looking for, the greatest thing is that the best love story that you have to write is the one that you have with
yourself. And that is exactly where you can focus your energy today. And we'll talk more about that in the future. My friends have been telling me some cool stories about how they love themselves, so we'll dive into that more in the future. But just remember that the first person to love you is you. And the best person that's going to love you is also you. So let's work on falling in love with ourselves. That would not have flown as a kid. Like the very conservative religious upbringing I came f
rom, would not have not have let that sentence fly. So you know that I've gone a long ways. Anyways, I'll see you tomorrow.
Comments