Emily Merrell  0:00  

Hey, my name is Emily Merrell. I’m a taco loving people connector, and I’m obsessed with playing the name game and all things networking. I’m the founder of second degree society, a female focused networking community, as well as a business coach for female business owners, passionate about bringing their business to the next level with the help of events, community and connections. I crave deep conversations and am continuously curious to see what makes people tick, and I’m invested in uncovering their stories with some life lessons along the way. This podcast is aimed to inspire and educate as you tackle your busy day. So join the conversation and tune in for the second degree podcast. All right, welcome back. I’m Emily, your host, and I am so excited. This is not very usual, guys. We have a man on today’s show, so he is allowed on the show. I made sure he was properly vetted, an incredible individual, but I am so excited to welcome Evan Mark Katz. He’s a dating coach for smart, strong, successful women. Mark, Mark, I’m going to call you mark half the time too.

 

Evan Marc Katz  1:09  

Everybody does. I can’t help it. No. What do you prefer Ultra it’s a stage name like Michael J Fox or Tommy Lee Jones. When someone has your name in Hollywood, you have to choose another name. Wait, what’s your real name? My name is no, my name is Evan Mark Katz, but I would never use my middle name professionally. Oh, okay, unless the executive producer of the TV show 24 was named Evan Mark Evan Katz, so I had to be Evan Mark Katz, but I’m just Evan.

 

Emily Merrell  1:36  

I’m just Evan. I love it. Well, just Evan, based in Los Angeles. Welcome to the show I love that you are so passionate about helping smart, strong, successful women in dating that like, what an interesting niche. How did a man from LA get into this?

 

Evan Marc Katz  1:53  

A man from LA gets into this because he comes to LA to be a screenwriter. We already tipped off. Um, comes very, very close to success, you know, Project Green Light with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, I finished in the top three, and had agents and managers, and I did everything except make money. And when I turned 30, I was like, I can’t be the 40 year old guy trying to sell a screenplay. And I went to grad school to get a degree in teaching screenwriting. While I was there, I got a job answering phones at an online dating company, and after a year, I said, Oh my god, I gotta write a book about this. And so I wrote a book in 2003 called, I can’t believe I’m buying this book. The book, unlike my Hollywood career, did well, and suddenly I was in Time Magazine in USA Today, and I was like the same unemployed screenwriter guy I was a year before, but there was demand for what I was offering, because it was the early days of online dating, when no one was talking about it. Yeah, what were the platforms

 

Emily Merrell  2:49  

that were? Were available in 2003 like, did the internet even work at that point? There

 

Evan Marc Katz  2:54  

was an internet again. We don’t have to, we don’t have to age me down. But yes, there was, it was an internet. I was an early adopter of online dating. I was actually using the product, and so in when I was working in customer service, I would be like, Hey, I noticed your profile is really short. Hey, I noticed you haven’t logged in in a couple weeks. I noticed that you sent like, 15 emails yesterday to people and emails so all on emails at this point. Yes, I mean again. And we could talk about that it was a better world. So So basically, I made up a thing that didn’t exist. I created an industry called dating coaching that now there are 1000s of practitioners of. And so I got really, really lucky, and I started writing people’s dating profiles, and they’d say, Oh, my God, I’m getting so much attention. What do I do now? I said, Well, you flirt. I don’t know how to flirt. Okay, so let’s log into match.com together, and I’ll show you how to flirt. And so all these things were sort of natural skill sets for me. I did not know that being me for a living could be a career, so I I just kind of went with it. And then about five years into it, not only did I learn from coaching other people what my blind spots were. I was a single guy doing this at the beginning, but I also realized that 80% of the people who came to me were the same kind of woman, right, smart, strong, successful women who had everything but the man, really strong muscle when it comes to work and less confidence when it came to love. I cut men off my list. I used to work with men. I cut men off my list because the problem is, men need help, but they rarely ask for it, and that’s unfortunate, too, and I can’t do anything about that. And so I focus my energies on a certain kind of woman, and I’ve had, you know, a really great 20 year run. I’m very, very fortunate to get the validation of seeing wedding photos and baby photos and things like that, which is very tangible benefit that I think people in regular jobs don’t always get to get

 

Emily Merrell  4:57  

totally you gotta see your ROI really come to. Life, I am curious, with the strong, successful woman, is there a certain point that you see them approaching you for advice, or when they’re like, starting to feel that, that scarcity of like, I need a man in my life?

 

Evan Marc Katz  5:12  

Yeah, I mean, I think people and in general, I mean maybe people turning to you or any of your listeners, people act out of pain. Um, they’re either avoiding pain or chasing pleasure. But usually people come to me when the pain is too much. I wish I had more 27 year old women who I could have a positive impact on, right in her prime dating years, right? 27 to 33 that would be great. That woman does not call me until she’s 36 and the number of men looking for her has dropped off because she’s in advanced fertility. So I think that, I think it takes a bunch of bad dates, a ghosting, a dumping, a realization a big birthday. And the truth is, most of my clients are not in their late 30s. They’re these days on the other side of it, right? There are women who married the wrong men when they were 25 and are now single moms at 4550 55 empty nest starting over. Oh, my God, the landscape has changed. The number of men available to me has changed. I’ve changed. So my clients tend as I’ve gotten older, my clients have tended to skew older, even though good dating and relationship advice is largely universal. So I wish I worked with with younger women, but for the most part, my clients now skew late, late 30s to 70s.

 

Emily Merrell  6:42  

I will share my my older sister, an older half sister, a few older half sisters, but she got divorced at like, 54 she got married at 25 and we were we kept trying to get her back on that horse. We’re like, we gotta get you on a dating app. We set her up. I like, downloaded photos illegally from her Facebook so I could set up her profile. Just, she just wasn’t ready until she was and she the overwhelm, like, to your point that the amount of questions like, How do I maintain this or he wants to meet tonight? Like, oh, what’s he interested in? And the skepticism, it was really fascinating. And I’ll also share then my mom also her. Her late husband passed away five years ago. We got her on Bumble. We got her on Jade. Eight. We got her on match. We got her on I think she got herself on everything, like everything that there is that is to be found. My mother has found spiritually singles, and it is like teaching a 15 year old How to Date all over again, just some of the rules of the road. Like you don’t have to send an essay. You don’t have to send that much information before you get on a phone call. We’ve taught her about cat fishing. Yeah, it’s like it’s a whole new Wild Wild West,

 

Evan Marc Katz  7:53  

right? So if, if you can give that amount of wisdom, I basically do the same thing, more hand holding, go deeper, cover everything, every eventuality, everything that could happen, and give people the ability to attract quality people. Mm, hmm, without all the emotional roller coaster and burnout that people usually associate with the medium, and the medium itself is a poor medium, even old school online dating, the kind that I did, you know, 1520, years ago, match.com JDate, you had a written profile with information you could email back and forth and have a little longer form conversation. There was something resembling courtship, yeah, and now we’re this short attention span instant gratification society where everybody hates it, everybody complains, and everybody keeps on doing the same thing. So a big part of my job is, how do we zag if everybody else is zigging, and there’s actually success to be had in doing something differently, but left to our own devices, we kind of just follow the crowd. And it’s it’s almost like lennings. Why is everybody swiping right on strangers, texting once, meeting strangers for coffee, and nobody likes it.

 

Emily Merrell  9:08  

No one, not a single person. They all dread it. You’re so, so, right? So what do you think the solution is to that? Is, is online dating the answer, or is there an alternative, like, Could we go back to the olden days and meet people in real life.

 

Evan Marc Katz  9:22  

The olden days technically still exist, and that people still have friends and go to parties and go to bars and can technically get set up. There’s more big concept of creating community, but more people working remotely, more people, especially as they get older, their friends pair off, they move to the suburbs. So any person who complains to me, they hate online dating. I honor that complaint, but dating coaching means that you’re dating. If you can’t get yourself a date a week through real life, you should probably learn how to date online the same way you might want to get a job, but if you avoid the internet, it may be hard to do a job. So I think it’s a tool a highly flawed. Tool that we can use differently. And I’m still toying with the terminology on this, but compared with this, sort of what we described, swipe text, meet, blind date, total stranger, no real connection. We need to make a greater connection online and sort of slow walk it a little bit in a way that most people don’t, and it might mean, contrary to what you said, instead of Mom, don’t write something long. Maybe we do have a have some texting that looks more like paragraphs instead of one liners, so there’s at least some differentiation and connection. And then we get on the phone or FaceTime to connect, and that’s our coffee date, right? And if we do this in a half hour, you want to kill yourself because I’m unattractive and boring, then great. You avoided a bad date, yeah? But if we have a great conversation, the next thing you know, we talk for 90 minutes, you’re going to be even more enthusiastic and feel comfortable giving me a Saturday night where you wouldn’t if you just texted me once and I was a face on a website. So I’m actually trying to bring back people. Bring people back to early 2000s online dating, which I had a great amount of joy and success at, but apps have almost rendered that irrelevant. So it’s not that we get rid of the apps, it’s that we use them slightly differently to make some screening and connection, because you might need to talk to seven to 10 guys. Mm, hmm, and this guy is perverted and this guy is busy, and this guy doesn’t ask any questions, and this guy has no sense of humor. You might need some written interaction for him to vet himself. And that’s why my central metaphor, my love you. Courses. Women are the CEOs and men are the interns applying for a job. And if this guy can’t go through your your sales funnel, if he can’t get from point A to point B in a week, I guess he’s not he’s he doesn’t want the job that bad. And now we only we might go on one date every 10 days, but at least it’s with the guy you like, as opposed to this endless texting harem and then wondering why everybody sucks.

 

Emily Merrell  12:10  

How many dates Do you think make sense to go on to give someone a chance that

 

Evan Marc Katz  12:16  

that’s a that I see why that’s a question. I would rephrase the question,

 

Emily Merrell  12:22  

okay, so how many? How many dates do you recommend women partaken with one individual to allow love to present itself? One,

 

Evan Marc Katz  12:36  

just one. So women are often trying to talk themselves into things that they don’t want to do. It’s fascinating. Women are more sensitive, more intuitive, and less likely to listen to their own feelings. So I give women permission to listen to their own feelings. It’s not a particularly brainy concept. And so what are we judging guys on on a first date? It’s not whether he’s your future husband. You can’t tell, you can’t tell what kind of person he’s going to be on date. One you think you can, right? You can tell if a guy’s an awful guy on a first date, but you can’t always tell whether he’s your guy. So we’re looking for comfort. Can I be myself? Fun, that I enjoy myself? Attraction. Do I need 17 beers to kiss him? So if you have positive like, six out of 10 scores on comfort, it was I could be myself. I wasn’t all nervous and weird fun. Yeah, I’d want to do that again. And attraction, guess if you kiss me, I kiss him back. Now, there’s a second date, and if it doesn’t meet all those criteria, there’s no second date. So we don’t go out with a guy for like, a month trying to convince ourselves to be attracted to him. We’re trying to convince ourselves that this should be fun, or if you’re nervous and awkward around him all the time, trying to convince yourself that that’s okay because he might be smoking hot, and if you are a nervous wreck inside, that’s not a fun date, either. So you’re married, I’m married. Good relationships are nobody says this fundamentally easy? Yeah? I agree this, this. I I could just, I just want to close down the bar. I just want to sit in the car and talk with you. It is just fundamentally easy, and all the checklists go out of your head. Yeah. So women need some structure and permission to say it’s okay if he’s not your guy, next, next, next, next. Now, if you next every single guy, there might be a problem. That’s another conversation, but you absolutely shouldn’t have to talk yourself into a date.

 

Emily Merrell  14:40  

Yes, I agree with that, that. It is funny though. You see, I’ve been around girlfriends before who have brought a guy around 234, times, and at the end of the night, I’ll go to my friend and be like, do you actually like that person? Because you didn’t even talk to them the whole night. You ignored them the entire. You’ve mean your body language basically said F you, and yet you’re trying to convince us that we should audition him like our what? What is this? What is this experience for

 

Evan Marc Katz  15:12  

for you and for him? And I think that that’s part of the problem. When you haven’t had success in love, you don’t know what to do. Yeah, right. Like every time I fall in, you know, fallen head over heels for some guy that I knew was the one that blew up in my face. So maybe it’s, you know, what my grandmother said, it’s, you know, it’s, you know, just find a nice guy who’s who’s got a job and, you know, and that, in and of itself, isn’t enough either. You need to feel a connection. In fact, I outlined, you know, a small checklist, just like we talked about, comfort, fun, attraction, long term checklist, character, kindness, consistency, communication, commitment, connection, love, it. If you have those things, you’ve got a great start. If you’re missing any one of those things, your relationship is going to suffer, you could find the world’s perfect man, but if he does, he’s not a healthy communicator. Doesn’t matter if he’s perfect, if he doesn’t want to commit, doesn’t matter if he’s perfect, if he’s fundamentally unkind, doesn’t matter if he’s so we get so caught up in the checklist, what we’re presenting to others, what he presents to us on his dating app, how he presents himself on the first date. We get dazzled by his wit, charm, intelligence, and then ultimately, it’s how does he treat you, not just in the wooing phase, but down the road. And every happily married couple knows this. They might not have identified it the way I’m identifying it, but everybody sort of instinctively knows this, which is why you can talk to happily married couples and ask them, you know, their point of view, and they’ll largely tell you the same thing about what a good relationship looks like. It’s not mysterious, but people who are used to bad relationships have normalized those bad relationships, and we talk ourselves into, well, maybe this is good enough, even though the entire time you’re feeling off and anxious. And you had also

 

Emily Merrell  17:02  

mentioned I liked this metaphor about the strong woman being the CEO and the guy being the intern, applying for or applying for an internship. So I’ve seen this firsthand. We’ve done a lot of events around dating too. But these women who are so successful and so independent and they don’t want to sacrifice meeting someone that is less successful or less independent than them. They’ve got in this mind like they have to meet this guy who is super wealthy and handsome and brilliant, and if he’s not that, then they they hit the chopping block and they go next on the dating. So what’s the downside of dating of a man who is brilliant, wealthy and handsome?

 

Evan Marc Katz  17:46  

Well, I would, I would flip it over and turn it back to to you or to any woman who’s listening to this. All good qualities come with bad qualities. These are things that we are not inclined to say out loud, but they happen to be true. If a guy is a self made millionaire, he didn’t get that way by being home at five o’clock to rub your feet and make you dinner. Right? He’s probably a workaholic who’s very successful. He puts his work first. He might travel a lot, he might work late. He might be kind of in his bossy Alpha all the time, which means that he values his opinion more than yours. He might be dismissive of your opinions. He might think that, because he has money, rules don’t apply to him, maybe he could take you on a nice vacation or buy you some diamonds and you’ll be quiet for a little bit. We’ve seen this with really success, successful guys. It doesn’t mean all successful guys are that way, but there’s certainly a pattern of, if I’m going to date a tech founder, I might really be renting a small portion of his time, because his real love is his vision, his business. Take a brilliant guy. Brilliant guy is fascinating. If you’re a 95th percentile intelligence woman and you are only attracted to Brainiac guys, I totally get that. What’s the problem with the brainiac guys might be a little socially awkward, might be a little stubborn, might think they’re smarter than you be a little patronizing, condescending. Might be just difficult to get along with. Kind of quirky comes with being in that stratospheric IQ area. Um, there’s tremendous downsides for dating the brilliant guy, even though we could all agree, stimulating the same way dating a rich guy is better than dating a poor guy. I really, really get that. And people tend to get into this false binary. It’s one or the other. We could say the same thing about a really gorgeous guy. What do we know about really gorgeous guys? They know they’re gorgeous. Maybe they didn’t develop other parts of their personality. Maybe they’re used to women throwing themselves at them. Maybe they don’t have to try as hard. Maybe they don’t want to be monogamous. I. It maybe you spend too much time at the gym and not enough time looking at you. There’s any number of things that come or there’s the jealousy that comes with dating a really gorgeous guy. So you could say, I just want the good parts without the bad parts, but it’s rare that you separate them. Now you factor all those things in together. Well, now you could think about your previous relationships and why they didn’t work. And so when people hear this, they’re like, so you’re telling me to lower my standards. No, I’m telling you to raise your standards. I’m telling you that the way you’ve been dating hasn’t been making you happy. Mm, hmm, right. And if you want to get happy these things that you value the most, height, weight, age, education, income, all the external you can still find it attractive. But those aren’t the deal breakers. The deal breakers are the things we talked about, character, kindness, consistency, communication. How does he treat me? How do I feel within the relationship? And you know what? I don’t know anybody who’s ever broken up with a guy because he was five nine, not 510 I’ve never known anybody who’s broken up with a guy because she made 150,000 he made 149,000 it’s never, ever happened before. Yeah, people break up because of character, kindness, consistency, communication, commitment. And if you look back on your history, I’m sure you’ll see the same thing. So maybe when we’re online, we can screen in, and that’s not lowering your standards. We’re looking for better treatment, better men. Going out with a guy with a guy who makes a little less money, going out with guys a little shorter, going out with a guy’s a little older, is not settling at all. You settle your way into misery. You compromise your way into happiness, and your work is a compromise, and your friends are compromised, and your family is a compromise, and your home is a compromise. This is one area where people think, nope, won’t compromise at all. I deserve this. I I put a lot into this. Is what I deserve, and that’s fine if you’re content with the status quo. But I talked to a lot of women who refused to take any of these ideas to heart, and are telling me at age 40, 5060, how lonely they are and how they’d love to have someone to share everything with. But I didn’t come this long to settle, and so I’ve never told anybody that that they should be settling, yeah, right. But I can tell you, my wife and I have been together now for 17 years. Hope she doesn’t think she settled, because I’m five foot nine, right? Like, I, like, maybe she did. The guy before me was six foot seven. That was the previous boy was six foot seven and younger, right? I can’t compete with six foot seven and younger.

 

Emily Merrell  22:40  

He was too tall, and her neck probably hurt,

 

Evan Marc Katz  22:43  

you know, but he cheated on her, yeah, as did the husband before that. So my wife chose integrity over height,

 

Emily Merrell  22:52  

sense of humor, maybe subjective,

 

Evan Marc Katz  22:54  

subjective. So again, it’s not about inserting myself into that equation, but I really think if you look at people who are happily married, they they genuinely like each other, they genuinely respect each other, they genuinely go out of each other’s way to make each other’s lives better. And that’s one of those things get lost when we’re just trying to trade up. And what? What teaches us to trade up more than dating apps? Everybody, everybody is disposable. I That’s

 

Emily Merrell  23:23  

the word that I used to I just, I feel like it is, is like ordering Uber it’s every we don’t even remember the the faces of the people that drive us. We’re just, we’re just going through the motions of things with dating, that’s exactly what it is. And it numbs the healing. It numbs the last breakup. It numbs the feeling of loneliness you get like, a head of dopamine every once in a while. So based on everything you just talked about, what advice do you have for people, if, when they’re okay, they’re hearing you, they’re like, Evan, I get I get it. Now. What do I actually do when I open my dating app? So you don’t want me to just like rage swipe anymore. How do I how do I thoughtfully look at the at the how do I say the roster ahead of me? Yeah,

 

Evan Marc Katz  24:07  

um, we’ll use hinge, for example. Hinge finally got around to something I’ve been saying for 20 years, which is that if you have too many conversations, they’re all going to be devalued. If you’re texting 30 people at once, you’re not going to know what you’re saying to anybody. You’re not going to get into any depth. It’ll be hard to differentiate yourself. So hinge recently restricted the number of people you could the number of matches you could have open. You could have 10 matches open at once. Wow. And if you want an 11th, you have to close out another one. So they’re getting around to this thing that I’ve been saying for years, which is, you should be talking, right? And talking is a very loose term, to seven to 10 people at once, knowing that the attrition rate is going to be really high, right? Seven to 10 people might lead to only one date a week, but how many dates a week do you need? You go on one date a week with a guy you kind of like, who’s earned the right to take you out. Out there was a little flirtation a week of, you know, this sort of courtship dance before meeting, maybe a maybe a FaceTime call, or something like that. Prior, you go on one date a week for the next 25 weeks or next six months, I predict you’re going to find someone you like. So at the beginning, and this is, this is, this is hard for people, I encourage people to screen in, not out. Most people screen out, right? If you are, you know, a top tier woman, you’re probably saying no to 99% of guys, and that’s fine. I’m not going to judge you like I really understand. Even if you’re an Ivy League institution, you have to accept five to 10% of men you do otherwise, you can’t fill your freshman class, right? So you’re five times more selective than Harvard. Is that really what we’re going to say right now? So my guess is, if women could say, instead of 1% of men that I’m swiping right on, I’m going to try to find five to 10% of men that I could at least give a chance to, that’s what I mean by screening in all right? His profile is okay, his photos, okay, we don’t know anything about anybody, so let’s just batch them, and from there, we screen out based on effort, right? He might be a seven on the app, but maybe in real life, he’s delightful because he’s funny and he follows through. So we pay attention to his efforts to again, I like the word. It’s the old word to court you. He asks questions, he gives comments, he he’s willing to play. When you say, hey, let’s get on the the phone and talk on on Thursday night before we meet. He’s like, Sure, what time should they call you? He calls you at that time, right? Shows up on the date. He’s a he’s a gentleman. He comes up with a place, he picks up the check like we really judgment for their efforts, not just before the date and on the date, but after the date. How quickly does he follow up to say, I want to see you again. And how, how much effort is he making in between, in between dates, to show you he cares. Is he escalating from once a week to twice a week to texting you every day? So sometime in the first four to six weeks, he’s like, this guy’s acting like my boyfriend. Is he doing that? Or is Are you part of a texting harem, and it’s pretty obvious that you’re you’re you’re rostered, right? So we’re judging men for their efforts, not just their bios. And so if we screen in and give guys a chance who we might otherwise overlook, who are decent guys, see how they follow up and treat us seven to 10 guys in conversation, maybe only one or two of them are in play in real life. But with that cadence, if you put in like a half hour a day to online dating, the same way you have a dating practice where you put in a half hour a day to yoga or meditation or high intensity cardio or skin care, if you can get a half hour a day to lead generation on these log dating apps, you can get yourself one decent date a week and be done with this whole process by the end of the year.

 

Emily Merrell  28:11  

I love that, and I think that is just such a helpful way to think about it, too, in terms of just measuring on effort. The only caveat I would say to that is, as an ex New Yorker, how women get so scared by nice guys. The guy is too nice. Then there, there’s something wrong with him, and I’ve seen this self sabotage happen because I’ve been in that department. I almost broke up with my husband before he we could even start. You brought me flowers, and I was like, Oh, he’s so nice. I’m going to destroy him, like, I’m going to be too mean to him, you know, all these things. And he’s like, I’m trying to, like, level up. I really like this girl and show her where I’m like, you know, I’ve had all that crappy treatment that you’ve talked about before. So you’re that’s what you’re used to. So when you have someone all of a sudden showing interest in you. You’re like, what’s wrong with them? Did they murder someone before? The questions that just start percolating in your brain, right?

 

Evan Marc Katz  29:10  

So there’s a belief, and it’s a false belief, but it’s a common belief that there’s only two kind of guys, right? Instead of what it really is, which is a spectrum. So there’s either, I mean, and again, you’ve, you’ve heard this in various forms before, all the guys I like don’t like me, yeah, all the guys who like me I don’t like. So it’s just two non overlapping circles that’s dating. Now, by the way, that’s dating for everybody. Everybody I like doesn’t like me, everybody who likes me I don’t like. That’s the condition of being single. My belief, as I’ve already expressed here, is that they’re not two separate circles. There’s a 10% overlap. We just don’t know where those 10% of people are. They’re buried in with everybody else, right? So there has to be an overlap. You. And there’s no way that there’s 50 million married couples and somehow you’re the only person who doesn’t have lid to fit their pot. So I don’t believe any of the this is impossible at any age in any city, right? But people put these false binary labels on so these guys are the toxic, masculine, selfish douchebags, and these guys are so boring and uninspiring, right? Those men absolutely exist. I’m arguing for the 10% the nice guy with balls, right? It’s a guy who fundamentally is a good guy, treats you well, wants you to be happy, but you’re not going to walk all over him. He has opinions, he has ideas. He has ambitions. He can get done, right? That’s who everybody wants, right? Some people call him a nice guy with edge, but he doesn’t even have to be that edgy. My wife isn’t edgy. We joke. My wife is round. That’s how edgeless she is. She’s just, like, kind of middle of the road, likes, you know, sitcoms and Dave Matthews Band, and just like, you could give her to anybody and they’d like her, because she’s just so like able and indeed, middle of the road, it sounds like an insult these days. Oh, you’re so basic. But you know what? She’s the best person I know. And so I think when we really pay attention to if I devalue people who are nice to me, who does that leave in the dating pool, Emily, guys who are not if I devalue a guy who calls every day because he really likes me and I only value the guy who intermittently texts me over valuing something that only activates my anxious attachment style and leaves me guessing. And so is it exciting? Yeah. Does it feel safe? No, yeah. So I think we have to kind of retrain ourselves. And I did this with again, I did this with my wife. I was dating her, and I was like, this, can’t this? Can’t be. I didn’t spend my whole life looking for this. It’s way too easy. There’s no drama. I always know where I stand. We don’t fight about anything. This can’t be right? I spent all this time trying to dissect it, and I was like, There’s not an actual problem here. The only problem is that I thought love was going to feel different. I thought it was going to be more like roller coaster. But no, the roller coaster was the mistakes I made in my 20s. Totally.

 

Emily Merrell  32:19  

Did you see that movie with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, anybody? But you, yeah, it was, I thought that was, like, the worst example of breaking up with a relationship, exactly what you just said. When she’s like, I’m engaged, I you know, I love him. It was just like, we never had any fights, like we never had anything wrong. You’re like, then she’s going to this tumultuous relationship that has up highs, highs, lows, lows, and so it’s very much that chemistry bomb. And I’m so curious your thoughts on like chemistry and using chemistry to get you into a relationship. But does chemistry really sustain a relationship?

 

Evan Marc Katz  32:55  

Again, it’s great question, and the answer is nuance, because when I when I give this answer, people like he’s telling me to settle again. There’s what I say and there’s what people hear. And so again, I want to state it very clearly, very loudly. You can’t have a relationship without chemistry. And no person who gives advice, who’s telling you like you should have a relationship. No one’s telling you to have a relationship without chemistry. If you don’t have chemistry, some chemistry. If you don’t have a satisfying sex life, you don’t have a successful relationship, you have a friendship. So let’s take that off the table, that there’s no chemistry, not what anybody’s saying ever, ever, ever remember I said you can’t even get past the first date without some chemistry. No one’s saying that. What I am saying is chemistry does not sustain a relationship. Right? In fact, most of the things that people look for, this is a Northwestern study from a couple summers ago, right? The things that people get excited about, which is chemistry and common interests, have 0% correlation to happy marriage, which is to say that because two people are Catholic doesn’t mean they’re going to have a happy marriage. Because two people like skiing, doesn’t mean they’re going to have a they’re going to have a happy marriage. Because two people both went to grad school, doesn’t mean they’re going to have a happy marriage. This has nothing to do, right happy marriages. Does he help out with housework and child driven is he sensitive to my emotional cues? Can I trust him? These are things that have nothing to do with chemistry, that don’t show up on the apps, that fundamentally matter. So it’s more like if you’re buying a house, you’re paying more attention to the color of the paint than the foundation of the house. And so yes, we absolutely need chemistry. Chemistry is the spark that starts things off. But everybody’s been married knows even that chemistry dies a little bit. It’s called hedonic adaption. We get used to it at the beginning. It was my new car. That was just my car right smell, yeah. And if you, and if you’re, if you’re sleeping with the same person for 20 years, there’s no way it could be as exciting as it was for the first couple years, when you’re living apart and everything’s new. New and right, and you build a different reality. And so people mistake the first couple years of dating for what marriage is going to look like, and marriage is a completely different beast. And this is not me. You can go to Google the word love, go to Wikipedia, scroll down to the biological basis of love, and it’ll break love into three phases, lust, attraction, attachment, and we spend most of our time in our in the lust, attraction phase, even though that only lasts 18 to 36 months max, and we’re not really thinking what’s going to happen for the next 40 years. Yeah, so we need to pay attention to both. It’s not eschewing chemistry just for stability, but if you’re trying to build something that’s going to last for the rest of your life. I think you’d want something. You’d want someone, we call it consistent. You might call it predictable, someone who does what they say, not someone who’s always leaving you guessing and disappointing you,

 

Emily Merrell  35:52  

yeah, and following through. So true. I do say to my husband, I was like, You were obsessed with the dog, then you were obsessed with me, and we had our first son, and you were freaking obsessed with him,

 

Evan Marc Katz  36:01  

which, when number two comes, here’s here’s the exciting part, he’s going to get even closer to number one. Number two. He can’t do anything, right? You have to nurture number two. So he’s going to spend a lot of time playing man to man defense with number one.

 

Emily Merrell  36:20  

I always say I’m like, I built the first one for you. I’ll build the second one for me. So we both have our little buddies, but he’s my my son is obsessed with my husband. I wake him up in the morning. He goes, No, I want daddy.

 

Evan Marc Katz  36:33  

Can I get up that will? That will ebb and flow too. I’m not giving parenting advice. Those relationships change over time too.

 

Emily Merrell  36:41  

Okay, good, good, good. One day I’ll be the favorite. It’s fine. I’m not hurt, but it is. I am curious. You had mentioned so when you met your wife 17 years ago, did you meet her online, or did you meet her in real life? I love that question.

 

Evan Marc Katz  36:59  

There’d be a great story in saying I met my wife online as proof of concept of how online dating works. For sure, I can’t give a simple answer, so here’s the real answer. 45% of people meet online. 45% of relationships start online these days. So we if we say online dating is broken, terrible. Well, half people meeting that way, so it can’t be that bad and always fail. I went out on 300 dates online from 25 to 34 Wow. I did not meet my wife online, and we were online at the same time on the same site. We were both on match.com but we wouldn’t have chosen each other. So that’s why I tell the story. She was San Diego, conservative, Catholic. I never would have chosen the Jewish guy. I was 34 wanted two kids. Wouldn’t have chosen a 37 year old woman. So we’re two shifts passing in the night online. We met in real life. We talked for six hours at a potluck dinner. We never stopped talking. And so this is my point. Online dating is fine. It’s just a big box filled with people, but left to our own devices. We will be passing up our person because of our made up parameters that box us in. So that’s why I like telling the story of how I met my wife and wife and that I didn’t meet her online. We could have but the way we date, we narrow. And when I said, we try to we should be screening in I should be expanding my parameters, not narrowing them. And most people don’t want to do

 

Emily Merrell  38:35  

that. I love that story. I think it’s it’s so wonderful. My husband and I would we met in real life too, and we never would have swiped on each other at that point, right? We talk about it all the time. It was, it was the in person banter, and it was the in person humor, and it was the nagging that I did so well that really just brought out his personality and was able to, I dish it, he dish it right back. And I think that’s always just an interesting experience too, because online, you can get a taste of it, but it can get

 

Evan Marc Katz  39:08  

and especially with the the dating apps, where there’s so little information to go on. Yes, I mean, I’m a former comedy writer. I i have a skill that I could take two sentences and turn it into something. Not everybody can do that. I remember we still our kids know how my wife and I met, because we were at this pot like dinner, and my wife had previously been talking to another guy named Evan at the party, but he was black, yeah, right. And so when I met her and I said, Hi, I’m Evan, she goes, Oh, you’re the white. There’s the black, Evan, you’re the white. Evan. I said, Yes, that’s what my mother calls me. And you know, all these years later, you know, we still joke about how stupid an opening line that was that I introduced myself as white Evan, and that’s. Thing that literally could not happen online. So online dating has the same people as real life. They’re not they seem worse. They’re not worse. It’s a cross section of people the medium itself, because we have these really short bios, short attention spans, short texting we use sort of lowest common denominator. What’s the least I can do when I’m imploring whoever’s listening to do more. Yeah, right, right. Better profiles. Have longer text exchanges, get on the phone, have a real date on a Saturday night with someone that you’re excited about and trust, instead of just meet and greet as quickly as possible. It’s not high volume, it’s high quality. So ask yourself, would you rather go on one decent date a week or two, or meet as many people who you don’t know as quickly as possible? You know the answer to that question.

 

Emily Merrell  40:50  

I Amen to that. Oh my gosh. Well, I have so many other questions that we Eric short on time, so I’m going to ask you, Evan, how can people find more? How can they find out more about working with you, about your your offers, your books, your courses, your podcasts.

 

Evan Marc Katz  41:06  

My name is Evan Mark cats. I’ve been a dating coach for women for 20 years now. You can find me everywhere, online, real Evan Mark Katz on Instagram. I’ve got a podcast called The Love you podcast. We’ve got about nearly 3 million downloads at this point. So we’ve been doing it for a long time. Um, I have a array of products and coaching options. I made a special gift for your listeners. If you go to Evan Mark cats com, and I’m sorry, I gotta get get my proper forward slash, Evan Mark cats.com forward slash second degree, you can download a free 25 page ebook, and I, you know, have a mailing list. I send a whole bunch of free stuff. So if you subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to my mailing list. Follow me on social. I get a ton of free information. And if you choose to engage, we can get on the phone and talk about with the right coaching package for your needs.

 

Emily Merrell  41:59  

I’m curious as a this is a real question for real life example, but if you have a friend that you think needs your services, is there a right way to tee up dating coaching to someone

 

Evan Marc Katz  42:12  

that’s really hard. I mean, I’ve had, I’ve had moms say, can I give you to my daughter? Right? But you can’t. And again, I wish I could, I wish I could say that. I mean, I do have, I do have an answer, but it’s a tricky answer. It’s the same way that you can’t tell your friend who’s 30 pounds overweight, who complains she’s overweight and doesn’t like how she looks and how she feels and the guy she’s attracting. You can’t sign her up for the gym and give her a personal trainer. She has to be self motivated to do that. So I think the softest way to do it is, in a way, the way we’re doing it now. Hey, I met this guy. Hey, I heard about this guy. I thought he had something interesting to say. Check out his podcast. Check out his website. It’s the real soft sell, because he said some things that really made sense. And I didn’t know there was anybody doing this for people like us, but so I think it has to be really, really soft, otherwise your friend will build up resentment. Otherwise my friend, my smug, married friend, looking down on me. Why doesn’t she think I could do this alone? There’s a whole story in there. So in general, people can only do this when they’re ready. You can’t give you can’t you really can’t give it to him. You can’t buy one of my books as a gift. Um, it really has to be, he has to be in some place in her life where she’s like, Okay, enough is enough. Enough. Sleeping around, enough. Focusing all my attention on work, enough. With these roller coaster rides with the avoidant attachment style guys, like, I’m ready for the next phase of my life, and whatever I’m doing isn’t working. If that resonates, you may be ready for coaching, but you know, if you’re not at that place, then, you know, listen to the free shit. That’s fine.

 

Emily Merrell  43:53  

Yes, exactly. Well, I so appreciate that. And yes, I do wish we could just gift you to our friends. I think that would be the ideal you could gift me to your community, exactly, and this is the gift that we’ll give on keep on giving. Well, Evan, before we go, I have some six fast questions that I have not run by you, that I want to ask you. Okay, I’m ready. Okay, tell us an unknown fun fact about Evan, like I have so many fun facts that are known.

 

Evan Marc Katz  44:25  

I’m a I’m a trivia dork. I won the Nassau County trivia championship in high school. I was on win Ben Stein’s money when Jimmy Kimmel was the co host. It was a trivia show in like the late 90s. I’m on a top five national trivia team right now, and I’m not that good. I’ve just surrounded myself with some good people. So I know a lot about a little do you practice your trivia? That would be too much work. It’s I like to read and I. Absorb stuff, but I’m not. I’m not one of those. I’m not like one of those people who like memorize the dictionary to compete in the spelling bee. I’m just a reader. Okay? I love

 

Emily Merrell  45:07  

that. That’s so fun. I love a good trivia I’m wildly competitive, which is, no, I know you can’t tell that, right? I’m a very soft spoken, demure personality.

 

Evan Marc Katz  45:18  

You for somebody who’s competitive, you’re actually very warm, curious and likable. Sometimes competitive people are like, I’d tell you my story, and you’d be like, you’d hijack and tell your story over mine. Yes, that is true.

 

Emily Merrell  45:30  

No, I’m a good holder, typically. Okay, who would be? I’m gonna this question’s typically, who would be a dream person to be connected with, but I’m gonna tweak this to be, who would be a dream person, especially living in Los Angeles, that you’d want a dating coach,

 

Evan Marc Katz  45:46  

that I would want to coach, yes, that you would want to coach. Oh, especially given where I live, yes, you gotta give me a Kardashian. We’re in the same school district as, yeah, it’s the Calabasas school district Las Virgenes, and man, if I, if I could, if I could help one Kardashian make one good life decision, I’d probably be set for life. You really would be right hooking up with one huge, huge influencer. So I don’t know, I don’t know about them as individuals, whether they be a dream client, but I feel like I could probably have the greatest impact on the world if I could help one Kardashian develop a happy relationship. Like, that guy

 

Emily Merrell  46:28  

is not a good choice. You see, he has three children with four different women. Or,

 

Evan Marc Katz  46:35  

yeah, again, it doesn’t take a dating coach, yeah, to be able to do some of this job, but sincerely, if I, if I could work with with someone of that profiler, or Jennifer Aniston, or something like someone who’s like a an America sweetheart, who just never put it together totally.

 

Emily Merrell  46:51  

Or J Lo, can you just, like, talk some sense into J Lo with all of her situationships? Yeah.

 

Evan Marc Katz  46:57  

I mean, I think dating coaching is very, very universal. These principles now these people make lead really extraordinary lives that you and I as mere mortals couldn’t understand totally at the same time, there are relationships that are built for success and there are relationships that are built for failure, and that’s why we’re never really surprised when Hollywood couples break up because they travel so much, because there’s so much ego, because there’s so much insecurity, because there’s so much temptation, they’re very, very rickety. And that’s why I think the ones that succeed are the ones where it’s not two celebrities, right? It’s Julia Roberts and her cameraman husband, or Matt Damon and his hairdresser wife, or whatever. Like, I think it’s, I think those are the ones that succeed, because they’re not both pursuing their things. Yeah,

 

Emily Merrell  47:46  

yeah. No, that’s great. Well, we’re going to get you a Kardashian. We are going to fish a Kardashian. You have that? Do you have that? Yeah, I totally do. I DM them all the time. They just never DM me back. Oddly, I guess they get lost in the excited relationship, damn. But it’s weird. I don’t know. I think we would be good friends, actually. I think I would probably, like, my brain would melt. I think Courtney. No, it’s the Yeah, Courtney. I think Courtney. I could, like, I could chill with, okay,

 

Evan Marc Katz  48:12  

I I’m completely neutral. Actually, the next podcast I’m, I’m on is going to be a real housewife podcast, really? Yeah, I don’t know when this is airing. When is this airing? Do you have any idea? Oh, well, now I’m going

 

Emily Merrell  48:25  

to compete with it. When is there is airing that

 

Evan Marc Katz  48:27  

one’s I’m shooting that on October 8. Okay, it’s with a famous, real housewife is having me on her podcast. And so I’m sort of excited about that because, again, it’s a, it’s the real housewife cinematic universe that I’ve never really been a part of. I love it. Start watching your seasons. I don’t speak, I don’t think I have the time to catch up. No, you have 17 years. Okay, quick, quick questions, really quick. What show are you currently watching? Gosh, we were watching only murders in the building with the kids last night, and then my wife and I watched something separate from that. It’s Kelly Coco and Chris. Chris Messina,

 

Emily Merrell  49:09  

yes, is it the one where she’s pregnant at the podcast? Yes, I forgot what it’s called, based on, based on a true story. I was like, it’s like, murders. Podcast, yes, I think that is so good. Do you like

 

Evan Marc Katz  49:20  

that’s, that’s my wife’s jam is I do I like a little more. It’s not, I don’t have a problem with it, but I tend to do like, you know, succession, like, kind of, like prestige television. And my wife is very much into the, the murder comedy genre. Totally. My

 

Emily Merrell  49:36  

husband has this hoodie up and he’ll go, this show is so bad. Why did you do that? This show is

 

Speaker 1  49:41  

so bad. I don’t I don’t complain. You’re

 

Emily Merrell  49:45  

a good, good, good man. What book are you reading as an avid reader, and just those who can’t see behind him, he has like, a million books, and on his bookshelf, actually really

 

Speaker 1  49:55  

exciting. Last week at trivia, there was a category on literature, and I. Just ran the whole table. It was named, name the match the Pulitzer Prize winning author with their Pulitzer Prize winning book. And that was really fun and exciting. That, again, that never happens. They’re usually asking questions about like anime or geography. So what am I reading now? I’m reading the midnight library by Matt Hague. I just finished this book, which is really wonderful. It’s probably too soon for you guys. It’s called Working identity. It’s more for people in midlife crisis about what makes you happy and the meaning of work and the place that work has for you, and how do you change over the years? There’s a big difference between when you’re 35 and 45 and 55 and that kind of thing. So yeah, I try to mix it up between non fiction and fiction. Yeah,

 

Emily Merrell  50:51  

I agree. That’s where my brain is. And okay, this is a deep question, but what is your favorite emoji?

 

Evan Marc Katz  50:58  

Oh, gosh, you should probably not ask a 50 year old guy, because I probably only looked at the top like five. I just get

 

Emily Merrell  51:08  

inspiration. This is a selfish question, because I didn’t even know these emojis exist half

 

Evan Marc Katz  51:13  

the time. Yeah, I I would say, just because I have dating relationship and advice, it would be the heart. But I’m sure there are some wonderful, creative emojis that I just haven’t been able to discover through the the menu of hundreds. Yeah, that’s your next homework. Just really dig into the emoji. That’s I know that’s the thing that’s going to really transform my relationship with women in their 20s, totally.

 

Emily Merrell  51:35  

Well, you’ll just speak in text, and then emojis with one another, and then this is my final question for you today. But what permission Do you want to give our listeners?

 

Speaker 1  51:45  

Oh, I love that. Okay? I want to give your listeners, presumably women, permission to raise their standards for what they come to expect, for men to communicate your needs and set healthy boundaries, to know that you’re worthy of real love and devotion, and to never settle for a relationship where you can’t relax and be yourself.

 

Emily Merrell  52:14  

Amen. That is a mic. If I could drop this mic, I would drop it. That was a great end to you. See, my we have this, I think no different mics. Never mind. I’ll drop my mic. Yeah, you drop it. He’s dropping it for me. Well, Evan, thank you so much for being on today’s show and just sharing just such a wealth of wisdom and reframe on the world of dating, especially at this complicated junction that we’re at.

 

Evan Marc Katz  52:38  

Yeah, no, really, you’re a great interviewer, very, very engaging and fun. My pleasure. I’d volunteer to come back for more if you want some more. Okay,

 

Emily Merrell  52:47  

we’ll do a check in. We’ll do a Okay, and now I’m 40. What do we do now?

 

Evan Marc Katz  52:52  

Time is sort of All right. Thank you so much for your time.

 

Emily Merrell  52:56  

Thank you, Evan. I’ll see you later. And listeners, if you like this podcast, give it five stars, share with a friend and we’ll see you the next time. Take care everyone you.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai