Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

How to Get and Keep a Quality Man by Being a Quality Woman

September 13, 2022 Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach Season 1 Episode 21
Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack
How to Get and Keep a Quality Man by Being a Quality Woman
Show Notes Transcript

On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

In today's podcast, Coach Jack will help you to identify the key characteristics you need to have if you want to get a quality man and keep one. Complacency is the enemy of relationships, but you can actively help your husband to enjoy you so that you can also enjoy him.

Following today's podcast, you may want to:

  1. Identify and remove any characteristics that keep you from being a good catch for a quality man, or any man with Coach Jack's book, Overcome Neediness and Get the Love You Want.
  2. Discover why a man will break his commitment to his wife to pursue another woman in A Christian Guide to Preventing and Ending Men's Affairs.
  3. Work with Coach Jack to re-attract and re-connect with a rejecting husband.

How to Get and Keep a Quality Man
(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:28)

Coach Jack: We never have to worry about being alone. No matter how we are, naughty or nice, attractive or not, there will always be someone—many people in fact, who would be more than happy to have a relationship with us. With just a little bit of effort, we can have people to date. 

(0:45)

If you want to have a relationship with someone of high quality, however, then you will need to compete with others. It will take more effort.  You won’t be competing with everyone, for sure. You will only be competing with others who are capable of getting such a man to commit to them.

(1:01)

If you are not an attractive woman, you may be surprised to find that attractive women may be good at getting dates, but no better or even worse at keeping their husbands faithful or preventing divorce. 

(1:14)

If you are already attractive, it won’t take as much work to date a quality man as it will to get one to commit to you. Likewise, being attractive in your marriage will also not be enough to keep one. You will need to be attractive of course. No man is going to want to have an unattractive woman, given the choice. But to keep him, you will also need to be able to connect with him on an emotional level and you will also need to be secure. The better you can compete on these three characteristics—attractive, good connection skills, and being secure, the better you will be able to compete for a quality man or keep one.

(1:52)

Even if you are not able to compete for the best man, you will still need to compete for the best man that you can get. And, regardless of the quality of man you are married to, you need to be better than other women that he can get. At this point, you may be getting pretty uncomfortable with this podcast. If you just want to say, “Stop right there, Coach Jack, if I am married to a good man I will never have to worry about losing him, so I can be just as unattractive, lousy at connection, and insecure as I want to be and he will never leave me.” Well, if you believe that, then you are not living in the real world. Good men don’t want to stay with a lousy woman any more than good women want to stay with lousy men. However, the converse is also true and is what will protect your marriage—no man wants to lose a woman of quality. 

(2:47)

A single man won’t want to pass a quality woman up, and if he is married to her, he won’t want to lose her. That concept shouldn’t bother you any more than thinking that the best companies want to have the best employees and companies with excellent employees don’t want to lose them. Sports teams want to recruit and keep the best players. It’s human nature to want the best, it makes sense, and no one is going to be changing the way that works. If you want to have quality relationships with quality people, then you have to be a person of quality. There is no relationship welfare system in which someone is going to give you a relationship you did not earn. 

(3:27)

In the world of human relationships, being attractive, having good connection skills, and being secure is going to get you the best relationships with the best people. No matter what your husband is like, he is not going to want to lose you if you have those three characteristics. The more you develop them, the more you protect your marriage.

(3:47)

How can you start to work on being attractive? While appearance isn’t everything, it counts for most of the variance in being an attractive woman as far as men are concerned. Men are primarily attracted to young, healthy women. This does NOT mean that you have to be young to attract a man, though you are not likely to attract a young man if you are an old woman. What you need to do is to work on looking younger than other women your age

(4:17)

A forty year old woman who looks younger than other forty year old women will have an attractiveness boost. I’m sure you have noticed the same with men. Men who look younger than their same age peers are more physically attractive to women. When you think young, think healthy. That means clear up your blemishes or conceal them, lose weight if you are overweight, have nice teeth, a good posture, a little bounce in your step, and a smiling face. Each of these things will make you more attractive. Don’t think of it as all or none. And, unless you have some obvious deformity, plastic surgery is not worth the return. A good posture will accomplish more than a boob job in terms of looking more attractive.

(5:01)

Have a female role model who you think is confident, pleasant, and attractive and work to become more like her. A role model will help you with the specifics until you develop your own style.

(5:13)

Marriage books are of little or no use in terms of either getting or keeping a quality man. You can benefit from books for single women that teach how to attract men. They will not focus on talking about problems or discussing what you each want in a relationship. Those methods do nothing to attract men and tend to make them want to get away.

(5:35)

Learning to smile and flirt is far more useful, and is just as important when you are married as when you are single. Learn to say things that make your husband feel attractive and important. The more attractive and important you make him feel, the more attractive and important you will become to him. The reverse is also true. The less attractive and important you make him feel, the less attractive and important you will be to him. This is how relationships work.

(6:04)

Keep in mind here that I am talking about getting and keeping a quality man. I am not talking about transforming your husband into a quality man. Generally, you can improve the quality of your relationship, but not the personality of your husband. Many people ask me how to change the personalities of their husband. I have no way to help them do that. Only God can do miracles. However, I can help them to improve their relationship, despite the quality of the man they have. If you would like to learn more about that topic, I refer you to my book called What to Do When He Won’t Change

(6:42)

Your quality, however, does NOT depend on what your husband does or does not do. How attracted he is to you depends on what YOU do, how connected he is to you depends on what YOU do, and how much he respects you depends on what YOU do. The same is true for every other woman your husband comes into contact with. The same is true for single women and for the men they are interested in.

(7:10)

Getting and keeping respect is an important part of getting and keeping a quality man. It is very difficult to be attracted and connected to someone we don’t respect. In order to get respect, you don’t make your husband feel like the reason for his existence is to please you and you don’t make him feel that the reason for your existence is to please him. 

(7:33)

Although it is important to please your husband regularly, you will also have your own friends, activities, and career (if you like), even if he is not pleased about that. You will also not allow any kind of disrespectful treatment from him, your kids or others. Treating others well does not  include letting them treat you badly. If you want to get or keep a quality man, you will need to make sure you are not doing any of the needy behaviors you will find in my book, Overcome Neediness and Get the Love You Want

(8:06)

A quality man will treat you very well, although he will also have his own friends and activities. He will not be including you in everything. You both will be making time for each other. Just as he will be using good behaviors to help you to enjoy your relationship, you also need help him to enjoy your relationship. To do that, you will be relaxed and friendly with him, you will look at him with eyes that love him, you will touch him with hands that like to touch him, you will smile at him from a heart that loves him and you will use a pleasant voice with him. Your goal will be to make him feel loved despite his faults—not that you will only love him if he fixes his faults. “For better or for worse,” remember?

(8:51)

You will learn about his interests and enjoy talking with him about anything that is not disrespectful toward you. If he is into mineralogy, you will enjoy listening to him talk about different kinds of rocks. If he is into football, you will get into football too, whether you have an interest in sports or not. You will also not give him so much of yourself that he takes you for granted or wishes that he had more time for himself. 

(9:17)

You can see that getting and keeping a quality man requires that you first be happy with your own life, without him. You need to be healthy, look healthy, and be well balanced among friends, activities, family, and career. You will be a woman who loves him without being a woman who needs him. And, you will not be threatened by his having a life without you, although you will never put up with any cheating or disrespectful behavior.

(9:44)

If you are single and already like this, your problem won’t be difficulty in attracting a quality man. Your problem will be that you will attract every man and will need to resist wasting your time with men who are not of good quality. If you are married to a wonderful, quality man, and you are already like this, then why are you listening to this podcast? It would only be because you don’t really have a quality man or have stopped being a quality woman and you need to get back to being that way. 

(10:16)

You need good bait to catch good fish. Whether you are single and after a quality man or you are married and want to be good bait for your husband, I have given you several ideas for working on being that bait. In the real world of relationships, men are not the way you want them to be. They are the way they are. You will need to be the kind of woman a good man wants if you want to have a good man. And, if you are married to a good man, you need to be the kind of woman your husband wants to stay with or you will have an unhappy husband. 

(10:50)

Before I close, I want to make sure you don’t think what I am saying is somehow against women. I want women to have good relationships with good men, and to be able to keep those relationships good and free from affairs. That is why I wrote my most recent book, A Christian Guide to Preventing and Ending Men’s Affairs

(11:11)

Let me tell you what kind of bait I think a man should be for a quality woman. He should be relaxed and friendly, make her feel important and be interested in what she is interested in. He needs to make her feel loved and important and treat her as a priority over all others. He needs to have his own friends and activities and to stay healthy, so as to continue to be an attractive man for his wife or for getting a quality woman, if he is single. He also needs to treat his wife respectfully, but not put up with her or others behaving disrespectfully toward him. And, he needs to be as capable and skillful as possible, so as to help his wife to feel like he is more capable than other men. Would you like to have a man like that? If you would, then it should make it easier for you to see why a quality man would prefer to have a woman like the one I described.

I am in the business of helping people to get more love and respect from their spouse. Getting your spouse to give you a chance is about you becoming the kind of person he would like to be with. He doesn’t want a doormat, so we would never work on that. He does want someone who is easy to love and who makes him feel loved. If you would like my help with that, then we can work on that together.

(12:33)

[Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.