8 Red Flags That Should Send You Running From A Man

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Hi, I’m Evan Marc Katz, Dating Coach for Smart, Strong, Successful Women, and your personal trainer for love. Welcome to the Love U podcast. 

Stick around to the end to discover two of the most common patterns I see from women who remain single, as well as eight red flags to look for when you’re first dating a man. 

When we’re done, I’ll let you know how you could apply to Love U to create a passionate relationship that makes you feel safe, heard, and understood. 

So we’re going to get into it now and tell you a couple of stories, some killer metaphors, some stuff that you’re going to want to write down. So here we go. 

I want to talk about two former Love U clients. And I love these women dearly. And I want to frame this, that when I tell stories of people I do so to teach, not to tear down. I tell stories about me and my wife not to necessarily make myself look good, clearly, but I do so because it’s in service of trying to help. And so in telling the stories of these Love U clients, I want you to recognize that they’re anonymous. And I’m doing this for a greater good so that I can help you make better relationship choices with men. 

So despite my affection and admiration for these clients, it’s pretty obvious to me why they remain single in their 40s. First, we’ll start with Elise. Elise is, let’s see in my world where I teach women that you’re the CEO of your love life, Elise is a perpetual intern. She’s really sweet. She’s super cool. She comes from a place of pure feminine energy. She really responds to confident guys, big brains. She’s got to, she certainly has a type. She hasn’t had much success with men because her default setting is to be a pleaser who wants to win over a guy. She sometimes bends over backward to please. And she’s operating from a place of scarcity because she doesn’t have a good track record because she’s in her mid-40s and average looking. Sorry, not everybody can be a supermodel. For these reasons, she doesn’t always believe that she deserves more. And so she settles for less. Ask yourself if he’d ever done the same thing. Not feeling terribly confident, not having a great track record with men, and then suddenly start seeing some guy who you’re attracted to with a big brain starts paying attention to you and you’re like, “well, I guess this is as good as I can get.” And my client, at least, drops everything when she meets a guy that she likes because she’s spent her whole life looking for love. The last instance I experienced with her. She moved for a guy. She dropped her life here in L.A. and she ends up fighting for a relationship that’s not even worth fighting for. That’s the crazy part. So there’s this long-shot candidate. He’s a divorced guy. He’s got a troubled son. And she moves to be with him and steps into his world after a few months of long-distance dating and discovered, quite quickly, that it’s very different being in a long-distance relationship where you could talk and flirt and put in a little effort and get a lot of rewards. Then to be a day to day partner living in the same house with a person who’s not happy, who’s got a troubled relationship with his son. And she’s coming in as a stepmom. And she doesn’t really respect the way he’s doing things. It’s like this whole chaotic thing that she decides to take on herself and she holds on for two years. 

Gosh, I love Elise. And it’s really hard to watch this since it shows the limits of my control as a dating coach. All I could do is give advice and say, don’t do that. Don’t go there. Cut this off, set some boundaries. Have some self-esteem. Operate from a place of competence and abundance. Say no to things that aren’t working for you where it doesn’t feel good. 

So I want to contrast Elise, the perpetual intern who gives the man control of things with another client of mine, her name is Sherry and Sherry has embraced her CEO energy, which is, in general, a good thing because it means you won’t settle for less. But Sherry takes it too far. She’s objectively too picky. And when she makes her choices. They’re like these deep subconscious choices. She’s not even thinking about what she’s doing. She’s just taking these long shot, Hail Mary picks. And the only way that could work is if the sun and the moon and the stars all align at the same time. That’s the only way Sherry’s ever gonna get married unless she changes her ways. 

So on the surface, you might be Sherry. And then there’s no judgment. And this is like a tale of two clients. I’ve got, you know, Elise, the intern over here, and I got Sherry, the CEO over here. She doesn’t have high enough standards and her standards are so impossibly high that it becomes impossible for her to succeed. 

So she’s bright. She’s attractive for her age. She wants to have kids even though she’s in her early 40s. And she’s always going to attract a lot of people because she’s objectively a catch. But Sherry has even greater problems to some degree than Elise does. If Elise lacks self-esteem, Sherry has some major blindspots, fatal blindspots, not the least of which is that she thinks she’s 100 percent self-aware. She thinks she understands everything. 

So when I give her advice, she almost never follows it. She uses her own instincts, not recognizing that those instincts are what has led her to be forty-three, single, and childless. And so there’s no judgment. And, this is for all my clients. There’s no judgment. But why would you hire a coach if you’re not going to take some of what he says under advisement instead of “yeah, I hear you. But I’m just going to do my own thing.” 

So Sherry’s issue is that in no particular order, I wrote a couple of things down. She’s looking for the opposite sex version of herself. I’m familiar with this because I’m a lot like that, was a lot like that when I was single. I wanted to date East Coast, Jewish, liberal, intellectual, good work ethic, sarcasm, whatever the hell that makes me me. I find that familiar. I find that attractive. And I was always drawn towards it. And I didn’t recognize for about ten years that trying to date the female version of myself was a losing strategy. 

So Sherry dates in that manner, wants to date herself the male version of herself, but without her own flaws. Which brings me to share this second problem. She doesn’t recognize her own flaws, and that’s hard. And I use myself here because I think it’s easier if my flaw is that I am opinionated and a know-it-all and sometimes arrogant, anything anybody could say about me, I’ve heard it a million times before. And if those are my flaws and therefore I’m pretty difficult because I have opinions about everything and I micromanage situations and I micromanage at work and I micromanage in my relationship. I could at least take ownership of that and be like, “you’re right. I have to step off. I have to soften that.” I’m not going to insist that someone who feels that way about me is wrong. They’re right.

The problem is a lot of people have a hard time admitting what their faults are. So it’s very easy to see someone else’s faults in yourself. And that’s what Sherry does all the time. She points the finger at other people. Never really recognizes, never looks in the mirror, and recognizes how she is equally complicit in why she’s single. It’s not just everybody else’s fault and everybody else is flawed. Because I can hand Sherry a husband and she’d still find 100 things wrong with. Which things can you and can’t you compromise? And Sherry hasn’t figured out the art of compromise yet. She refuses to compromise, even though she compromises in her career. She compromises on her home, she compromises with her family and her friends. But she won’t compromise in this area. That’s probably its own Love U podcast – “How one should compromise.” 

Finally, Sherry takes huge and terrible risks in love. Again, I present this to you because maybe you’re familiar. You chase excitement instead of comfort. Now again, comfort doesn’t mean you’re with a guy who kisses like your brother. Comfort just means it’s easy. It’s smooth. It has this really organic path. When you’re chasing excitement, you’re banking on the long shot. Overvaluing that instead of the smooth ride. So we’re spending a lot of time on hope, fantasy, and potential. What are examples of this moving in with someone after a month, going on a three-day cross-country date, looking in other countries for love, developing full relationships by text? And so it looks perfect. That’s exciting. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s really safe to do to fall in love with a guy in another country. It’s really safe to fall in love with a guy in another state. It’s really safe to fall in love with the guy who’s got a wife because it never works. It’s built-in. It’s never going to work. 

So I want to borrow a metaphor from Love U because I think it’s useful. And I share with you that the eight red flags that I promised at the beginning of the video because there’s a lot of ways that one can get rich in life. You could save a dollar a day in your piggy bank. You could start a 401K when you’re 21. You can work your way up from the mailroom at some company. Right. You can take over or expand a family business. You can work side by side with some genius entrepreneur. You could start your own company. You can invest wisely in stocks and real estate. It’s all viable paths to get rich and build wealth by the time you’re ready to retire. OR you can buy a lottery ticket. Now, a lottery ticket is the fastest way to riches. But it’s the one with the least control and the highest failure rate because the lottery is the fast path. It’s no work. There’s no thought behind it. It relies on luck. 

I don’t like luck as a strategy. That’s what I’m here to share with you. There are better ways to date. Dating is a skill set. Relationships are a skill set. It’s not just something that you come by because you’re human. Just like anything in life, playing guitar or computer programming, or getting along in corporate America, there’s a skill involved in this. 

So as a dating coach for smart, strong, successful women, I see myself as your risk manager. What are the chances that this investment is going to go south? And why would you make an investment if it has a very, very low percentage chance of paying off? So I am risk-averse when it comes to love on behalf of my clients. 

And here are eight red flags that you should pay attention to and write down that I wouldn’t even embark on a relationship. I wouldn’t even go on a first date in these situations. 

Number 1, long distance. 

Number 2, he’s separated. 

Number 3, recently divorced. Like, the ink is still drying. And he hasn’t had a relationship since his divorce. 

Number 4, he’s got current addiction problems. 

Number 5, he’s got current employment problems. 

Number 6, he says he’s going through a weird time and he doesn’t know what he wants. 

Number 7, he thinks you’re too good for him. 

Number 8, he says he doesn’t know if he ever wants to get married or if he wants to have kids. 

I am positive you have and continue to take a chance on guys like this. You see something in his profile. Have a conversation. You hit it off. He’s cute. He’s smart. He’s interested. And then these things that we just read off, we throw him out. We discount them. We pretend that these things don’t matter. Other than this is going to come up somehow down the road and it’s going to come back to bite me because it always does. So why even get started? 

I’ve got a quickie anecdote and it’s a client of mine. She was in Love U five years ago, and I adore her. And I’m not going to mention her by name. But she joined the course. She was in her late 40s and never married. And through the work in Love U, you learned how she should be treated by a man, raised her standards in such a way that she never had a better relationship in her life. And as she graduated the course, I remember her telling me she was seeing a guy who was really, really good to her. He was a good guy and he made her feel safe, heard, and understood, and all the other things we talk about and in Love U. But this guy was suffering from a certain kidney disease, and he had one of his kidneys removed and he had circulation problems. And because of his circulation problems, he had the bottom of one of his legs amputated. And because he had all these health problems, he was depressed. And because he was depressed, he was taking antidepressants. And because he was taking antidepressants, he had erectile dysfunction, which is affecting their love life. And my client was explaining to me that she really loved this guy. She really loved how he made her feel and how he treated her. But it was hard because he was facing all these issues. And I remember saying to her point-blank, again, forgive me for being insensitive. “Jessica, I promise you, you can find a guy with two kidneys, two legs, and a working penis who is good and treats you well.” And that strangely crude statement gave her some relief. She treated him as if this was it. It was the first guy who’s ever treated me well, but he’s got all these problems. These problems are really hurting our relationship. And she thought that was the highest she can go. I said, “no, you can get all the good treatment with a guy who doesn’t have these problems. 

And so extrapolate that you could have a great relationship with a guy who is in your city. You can have a great relationship with a guy who isn’t recently divorced. You can have a great relationship with a guy who does know that he wants to get married and have kids. The idea that you have to accept these things in men is just not true.” 

So if you continue to take a chance on these long shot guys with these major obstacles to overcome, just because you’ve got chemistry and excitement and now by paying attention to those red flags and eliminating the 90 percent of the guys who run afoul of those red flags, now you can focus your attention on the 10 percent that actually have a chance of working out. That is the Love U way. 

Thank you for your time. My name’s Evan Marc Katz. I appreciate you tuning into the Love U Podcast. 

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And if you want to find love right now and are committed to making healthier choices with men so you can have that easy relationship that makes you feel safe, heard, and understood look for the link below and apply for coaching with me in Love U. 

Talk to you soon. 

1. Download my free special report, The 8 Massive Mistakes You’re Making in Relationships
2. Get the man of your dreams fast by applying to enroll in Love U.

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