“Most people chase a certain feeling without realizing that the feeling itself, chemistry, is in fact chemical”
Evan Marc Katz
Dr. Veronica Anderson, Host, Functional Medicine Specialist and Medical Intuitive interviews Evan Marc Katz about why chemistry leads us into wrong relationships.
Is it chemistry, or is it love? Dating coach Evan Marc Katz specializes in helping smart, strong, successful women understand and connect with men.
In this episode, Evan will teach you the dangers of chemistry, the basics of love and ways to find a committed partner while dating. Listen to the end for the key secret to a successful relationship.
Listen to episode 40 on iTunes here or subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
40: Show Notes
Dr. Veronica Anderson’s Links:
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Discussed:
What It Looks Like When You’re Happily Married (An Ode to My Wife) – Evan Marc Katz Blog
Time Stamps:
01:05- Learning about sex from pornography
05:55 – Bill & Hillary Clinton’s relationship
07:00 – Dangers of chemistry
07:55 – Biological basis of love
11:00 – Happily married
12:30 – Break up or stay together?
15:50 – Dating multiple people
20:00 – Getting a boyfriend or girlfriend
24:30 – The secret to relationships
Full Transcript:
Female VO: Welcome to the Wellness Revolution Podcast, the radio show all about wellness in your mind, body, spirit, personal growth, sex and relationships. Stay tuned for weekly interviews featuring guests that have achieved physical, mental and spiritual health in their lives.
If you’d like to have access to our entire back catalog visit www.drveronica.com for instant access. And here’s your host, Dr. Veronica.
Dr. Veronica: I am Dr. Veronica, medical doctor, medical intuitive and all around fun host to listen to on the radio because I talk about all these subjects that nobody else wants to talk about in the way that we talk about. So what do I do, well, today you are going to have fun because we are going to talk about what everybody always wants to talk about and it’s taboo. And I actually read an article today in the newspaper about how people learn about sex in America versus the Dutch and I think the number was sixty per cent, sixty five per cent of girls, specifically teenage girls learned about sex from pornography. So how do you think that this possibly shapes our relationships and what we think about men if girls are learning about sex from pornography you know that that’s how the men are learning about sex. And this as you can imagine has led to lots of problems in what people expect in their relationships and also not just relationships, what they expect on an intimate and physical level and how it leads us astray because as you know pornography is not the real world, it’s not how things go. I don’t know how you feel about it, I think hey, if people like that as entertainment, that’s fine but you have to realize it’s just like when I went to the movies and I saw Deadpool, it’s the same type of thing. It’s acting, even when they say it’s real, it’s acting for your entertainment.
So, we are going to talk about relationship, sex and women seem more concerned about this than men. So who better to get advice from than a man so he can tell you the real deal about how men think and feel because it is very different than women. But before we get into that I have got to say hi to my, and I will call this again, trustee co-host Russell. Hi Russell?
Russell: Hello Veronica, you know you are an all round fun host and I am your all round fun co-host and never get more fun than when we are talking about sex.
Dr. Veronica: Absolutely. The audience would like to know, you know, Russell and I every once in a while have these discussions about something that happens in our life from a physical perspective and something we liked or didn’t like and some of you may be cringing right now because here we are in America that’s very conservative and first we are thinking about I don’t know. You might be into, what do they search on the internet? There is, I read another study about what people search when they are looking on pornography. And Russell you will be happy to know that I believe that the highest search term on the internet for pornography and it doesn’t matter what part of the county you are in is lesbian.
Russell: Well as a lesbian, yes, I am very happy know that.
Dr. Veronica: People say that they are against same sex relationships yet when it comes to what people are doing behind doors or what they like to look at, they are looking at same sex relationships.
Russell: I have not seen that thing particularly but I have seen a stuff like in the Red States where they are supposedly more religious and more, you know, prophets, those are the states that will always search for things like anal sex and so on.
Dr. Veronica: And that is true. I posted that on my Facebook page and nobody commented about it because, you know, here we are it’s America, we would rather watch violence and talk about violence than talk about relationship and sex. And so here we are a bunch of screwed up mess and so therefore we have to call in experts to tell us how to do what we ought to know how to do. But luckily we do have people who are experts and so let me introduce to you, this gentleman who has been all over the place, CNN, New York Times, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal and more and more and more, USA Today, Evan Marc Katz. He is a relationships expert and one of his lines said I love because, you know, people have always come to me about relationships and I would tell them what to do. I think I get the right answer because of my intuitive skills and so when somebody will talk to me about something I will be well, here is what is going on, bla, bla, bla. This is before I admitted that I was an intuitive, bla, bla bla, you know, try this, I think this is going to work for you. And people come back to me and “oh, my gosh I can’t believe it, I did exactly what you said to do and it worked like a charm”. And so I have done radio interviews about sex and relationships, actually back a while ago I was on Fox News Network with Neil Cavuto as a relationship expert and I was commenting on the relationship of Bill and Hillary Clinton interestingly and about Hillary and her wife skills which we are not going to get into politics today and wife skills today but it was one of their most popular segments that people were calling to me, this is back when I was still an ophthalmologist. It resonated so much that people were calling my office and everything like that and my psychologist said oh, my gosh you should do this as your next career because you just know how to tell people the right things. But this is what I do now because I have other areas of co-genius. But, Evan Marc Katz is going to tell us, he has to start and tell us why chemistry leads people into wrong relationships. So Evan Marc Katz welcome to Wellness for the Real World.
Evan: Thank you for having me Veronica, I appreciate you including me in the show.
Dr. Veronica: Thank you so much for being here, so tell us, chemistry, people are so hooked on chemistry they feel when I first see a person there is supposed to be a spark fly, if no spark flies that’s it shut down the relationship move on to the nest person. What do you have to say about that?
Evan: I think people tend to have a pretty black and white reading of chemistry and like most things in life there are more new ones and ………. 0:07:15.8. So when I talk about the dangers of chemistry as a blinding force that binds people and keeps them in unhappy long term relationships due to passion chemistry and that in love feeling no one is suggesting that one should have a relationship without chemistry, somehow that’s what people hear. I say be weary of blinding white hat chemistry and people say oh so you should just settle in being in a relationship where you are unattached to someone and it is not the case at all. The issue is that most people chase a certain feeling without realizing that the feeling itself, chemistry, is in fact chemical and there is a chemical reaction to your brain. And if anybody sort of doubts that you can go to Wikipedia, lookup the word, scroll down to the biological basis of love and look at Helen Fisher’s research on this, it talks about love as three overlapping stages, lust, attraction and attachment. And lust is that initial thing that you could feel for a total inappropriate stranger at a bar. Attraction is lust that is individualized for one person, it becomes your boyfriend or your girlfriend and you may lust and be attracted to that person and that’s marked by dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, high highs, low lows, “oh my god, he called, oh my god I can’t stop thinking about him, he didn’t call me I think I am going to kill myself”. That’s what happens when you are under the influence of chemistry. It is the equivalent of being on cocaine or methamphetamine. Or, what happens to sustain a forty year relationship, chemistry wears off in eighteen to thirty six months. So real love, attached love, the thing that endures for forty years is what happens after that feeling is gone but people think that feeling is love and that is a big part of what I try to do as a dating and relationship coach and try and educate people into making long term decisions not just being so driven with the feeling of chemistry which keeps them in bad long term relations.
Dr. Veronica: So most of the people that you meet, is that their problem generally that they are driven by their chemistry and they can’t get past it so they continue to choose inappropriately?
Evan: I mean, I think it’s always, you know, when you do interviews like this you are in a position to say name you top dating advisor, your top three bullet points and I think it’s a very common thing that people content with. and this is not just the stuff for you know, fifteen year old Romeo and Juliet. You have people in their sixties who are making decisions based on chemistry rather than compatibility. And so I think people have a lack of understanding about what chemistry is and a lack of understanding about what compatibility really is. And again that is the main of thrust of what I do, I have a six month course called Love You that walks people through this process of making healthier relationship choices independently because it’s not something that we are taught in school and it’s not something that we always arrive at naturally despite a lot of trial and error.
Dr. Veronica: Yeah, I think it depends on what you have been around and what we are seeing in the media and all that other type of stuff and so there is always this big over assurance, sparks fly and they live happily ever after and you never see anything past that. Which leads me to say, I was reading your blog and An Ode To My Wife and you said before you got married you still were a dating and relationship coach and people would say, well, how do you know, how do you know because you are not even married or you are not in the relationship. So tell me what drove you to talk about Ode To My Wife or what it looks like when you are happily married?
Evan: You referred to my blog, I have been writing twice a week in a blog for the past eight years and in 2015 we had nine million unique people coming and read it usually in some sort of random Google search when you are looking for dating and relationships questions online. This was just a reference to a New York Magazine article by Heather Havrilesky, which she talked about what is like to be in a ten year happy marriage and I really just built on her original post as a guy who has now been married for seven and a half years. It’s so different than the pictures that are painted, I wouldn’t even blame Hollywood and the media. I think if you are or you know someone who is happily married and the say that only about one third of marriages are happy marriages. If you know someone who is happily married or you are happily married, you feel like you have a secret that a bunch of people don’t understand and it is not a terribly complex one but it makes you want to be evangelical to tell people, well, here is what we do, here is what works for us. Does that make any sense?
Dr. Veronica: Yes. And for someone who is on their second time around what made me happy when I got married the first time and then caused me to jump out of it is not the same thing that makes me happy now in life. And so how do you, you also talk about, are you starting over or taking a break, evaluating the relationship, how do you, do you have people come to you that are in the midst of a breakup, either a marriage breakup or a relationship breakup and determining whether they should stay or not. What do you tell people like that?
Evan: Again it is always dangerous to give a black and white answer. But I will say this, if someone who is in a relationship is turning to a dating and relationship coach, you relationship is probably already broken. I have never gotten a call from a happy couple who just wanted to share their joy with me. You understand?
Dr. Veronica: yes
Evan: Happy couple don’t seek this kind of advice and so it is usually too far gone to sex and I usually encourage people to break up before they start working with me as opposed to the illusion of help the I am going to act as a marriage counselor or relationship counselor and help you guys communicate. My believe is that each relationship is like putting on a shoe, it fits, it fits and it’s really comfortable to walk in and if it doesn’t fit you could spend your whole life trying to force your foot into the shoe but you are probably better off just buying a better fitting pair of shoes. I am a believer in easy relationships. To me it’s an older paradigm perhaps from you know, the greatest generation, you know, relationships take work, you know, relationships take work, and that’s it relationships take work, I don’t think relationships take work and I think bad relationships take a lot of work. I think good relationships are fundamentally easy, they may take effort, I have to be generous and thoughtful and sensitive to my wife but it’s not work, you know what I mean?
Dr. Veronica: That’s very true. I have got to say when I was married before for quite a long time I felt like it was a struggle a lot of the time and I felt that I had to stay in because that’s what you are supposed to do and it was like running uphill quite a lot of the time. And I don’t blame my X for this I am not angry about this I blame myself because I believe I stayed in the relationship too long and so therefore I chose to run uphill because you are taught that’s once you are in a relationship and you are married you should just stay through good and bad even if you are absolutely miserable and so this is why two thirds of marriages I believe, and some people who are in long term relationships are really very unhappy because they just think I am going to stay and what I think that really has to do with people lacking the courage to move on and figure out what’s like out there.
Let’s talk about exclusivity and I want to tell you a little exclusivity story. This is really funny. When my current husband and I first begun to date, as the American way would have it I was seeing a few other people at the same time and it was nothing serious as far as I was concerned. It was just every once in a while somebody to go out with and hang out with. Well, my husband originally being from West Africa that was not acceptable in the culture there. My husband, at that time, we had just met, told me when we first met hey, it’s just going to be casual, I just let you know I am not really interested in getting married, I was married before, it didn’t work out, I really kind of really didn’t want to get married in the first place. I know a lot of women are looking for marriage, so I just wanted to let you know upfront that I am not the marrying type. And I said, cool with me, I have married, I have done that white picket fence life let’s just go out and have a good time. But as we proceed to date, one day I meet this guy in the parking garage and I start talking to and he is a guy, he is going to be my husband but I am just dating him at the time and he gets really jealous and upset. He gets really uptight that I am talking to this guy and I said to him but, you know, wait a second we have only been seeing each other for weeks now and you are not the only one and we end up getting up into a big rigmarole about who I can see and who I can’t see and if I am going to see these other people then I am going to be seeing him at the same time because that is just not the way it works. You do one thing at a time, one person at a time, that’s it, it doesn’t matter what I said that I don’t want anything serious but you still should only see me, exclusivity. I believe women have a different view of exclusivity than men do but now in the hookup culture when women just want to hookup just as much. So how do you know you are exclusive?
Evan: There is a lot there my dear Veronica. I think it’s not nearly complicated as people make it out to be. People reveal themselves in their action and ultimately people are responsible for their own choices. So what you see is, a woman goes out with a man three times and sleeps with him then keeps her fingers crossed that he is going into her boyfriend. That’s a perfect case of getting the order wrong and again I am not trying to use wrong as a pejorative term, you know, anybody is allowed to have no strings attached sex and do whatever makes you happy but the problem is when you set yourself up for disappointment or failure. If you are having sex hoping it turns into a relationship I would generally recommend that you don’t have sex until you are in a relationship. And so clients who work with me, you know, we use the term sexclusivity. You don’t sleep with any guy who is not your boyfriend, some guy might want to be your boyfriend in three weeks, some guys might want to wait six weeks before you both determine that this is a relationship worth investing in where you are using the terminology boyfriend and girlfriend. The problem of course is that people have sex first, they go instant gratification, I am sleeping with him because I like him, right? That doesn’t mean that he likes you, that doesn’t mean that he wants a relationship, doesn’t mean he wants a relationship with you. It just means there you have a pulse and you are willing. And so women and men handle sex differently it creates a whole bunch of friction and to me the simplest thing is to lay out the terms when it’s appropriate I think you are a great guy, I think I am really attracted to and I don’t sleep with other guys who are looking at other people on match.com. You could understand that can’t you Ron? And they will say, yeah, I guess so and then you could employ foreplay X number of weeks as you continue to date each other and figure out if you like each other personally, platonically before you cross the threshold and say yes you are my boyfriend, yes I am going to sleep with you. So a lot of people have a lot of things that are under the guise of exclusivity and the guy will say I am exclusive, I am not sleeping with anybody else. Well, that doesn’t mean he is not dating anybody else, it doesn’t mean he is not looking for anybody else, it doesn’t mean he wants you as his girlfriend.
So the word exclusivity, right, is sort of a like a legal loophole and so I don’t worry about the actual exclusivity. Are we boyfriend and girlfriend and as antiquated this terminology sounds is the appropriate terminology. And if a guy hasn’t stepped up and made you his girlfriend, cleans you in six weeks or so he is probably not going to.
Dr. Veronica: So I hear you saying six weeks or so. Do you find overlooking at lots of relationships that six weeks tends to be a good amount of time to give someone and so if I am talking to a guy and I am not sure about how things go, he hasn’t made a definitive move, move on to the next person at six weeks?
Evan: Listen, it’s not a magic number, this is just pattern recognition, this is what we see. So I would say that there is two sort of a bifurcated pattern you see, two people fall in their incredible chemistry, they dive in, two dates they are like let’s give this thing a shot. They are instant boyfriend and girlfriend, they are instantly having sex, often it turns out to be a mistake because they are blinded by chemistry, they haven’t taken the time to get to know each other but they feel what they feel, there is no point in seeing anybody else, let’s go. So there is the very quick ramping up where you are exclusive and you are having sex and that can happen in a couple. And then these people who are a little bit more mature and people who are a little bit more recent, a little bit less blinded by passion, you don’t the oh, my god you just know feeling but this is good person and having fun, attractive. And in short the more time you are spending with this person the more you should like them and crave their company. So it may start off as once a week but then you are calling and testing everyday and you seeing each other twice a week or three times a week and, hey, what are you doing next weekend? You start to plan in advance and pretty soon it becomes clear that this is ramping up towards a relationship. If a guy, and again I always putting on the guy, I am a coach for women but if a guy hasn’t seen you for eight weeks and you are still just seeing each other once a week with an occasional text, what makes you think it is going to be any different two months after that. You see what I mean? So there should be a normal ramping up, a normal arc towards what appears to be boyfriend girlfriend, right? Taking your profiles down, talking everyday, seeing each other multiple times a week. If that doesn’t happen organically, it doesn’t really matter why, it doesn’t matter if he has gone shy from his previous divorce or if he is in a bad place or he is still having sex with his neighbor, I wrote about this in my book Why He Disappeared. It really doesn’t matter why he disappeared, it really doesn’t matter why he doesn’t want to be your boyfriend, just pay attention to his action. So you don’t have to get angry, you don’t have to issue him an ultimatum but if you have been seeing a guy once a week for six to eight weeks and it’s just flat, it’s just the same, it’s passing time seeing each other casually, I would feel perfectly comfortable saying “hey, Brad it has been really fun getting to know you, I am not looking for once a week guy, I am actually looking for a boyfriend, my best of lack, take care”. And ninety percent of the times he will be like, yeah, I understand best of luck, he is not going to say wait, wait, where are you going, I don’t understand, he is going to know, he was just kind of using it to pass the time and you just cut him off. So it doesn’t have to be emotion, it doesn’t have to be anger his actions speak volumes and the guy who wants you will step up and show that he wants you. You can’t force him to know that he wants to be your boyfriend everyday but if you give him, you know, a month, six weeks, somewhere thereabouts he should get a clue that you are a person worth investing time in and he shouldn’t have to continue to play the field and keep his options open. He should be wanting to close his options at that time and take off you the market.
Dr. Veronica: Yes, well we are talking to Evan Marc Katz, he helps women understand men and get to the right relationships. His website, www.evanmarckatz.com and marc is with a C, you will able to find him, he is all over the place, has been all over the place, somebody who has nine million views on their website is, you know, you will be able to find him and he is the best which why you were hearing him on Wellness for the Real World. Now I am going to tell Evan that I broke all the rules when it came to dating and relationships and it happened to work for me. I have always been one of those people that can just pick the right guy, people say how do you get great guys? I just got it like that, I don’t know, I just got it like that. But I am not obviously not the person who goes to dating coach because I have it figured out. So as you guys know the story ended well because this guy who at first said he didn’t want to get married or do anything a few weeks after we are dating he is really fighting for me and I am saying time our here, time out here and, you know, about a year later, you know, six months or five months into the relationship he asked me to marry him I said yes and we are happily married and it’s great.
Evan: How long have you been married?
Dr. Veronica: We have been married for four years now and so I will tell you the secret owed to my husband is he allows me to be who I want and do what I want to and I think it’s the same with him. We allow each other to be individuals in our relationship and then we come together, you know, a lot of times we are even living apart because we are in two different locations and that’s how life has taken us and it absolutely works well for us. So Evan Marc Katz I would like to thank you so much for being on Wellness for the Real World.
Female VO: Thank you for listening to the Wellness Revolution Podcast. If you want to hear more on how to bring wellness into your life visit www.drveronica.com. See you all next week. Take care.
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Dr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.
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