GLD 512 - What Exactly Are You Looking For?

Think you know what you want? Think again! Brian breaks down what really matters, how to go about your search, where to recognize the possibilities, the number of chances you get at love, and much, much more!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is pod popular podcast for the people, the Great
Love Debates. It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love Debate,
It's a great love to Hi, get everyone, It's Brian
how he welcomed to the Great Love Debate, the world's

(00:22):
number one dating a relationship podcast since twenty and fifteen.
I'm here in the very fine studios of Pod Populi
Podcasts for the People. I'm back at the one, uh
after a bit. I've been here a while with the
one in Boca Ratone, Florida, and uh bocratone translates to
mouth of the rat. You think about it, but it

(00:44):
really should translate to mouth of the lizard, because this
place is absolutely crawling with creepy critters. And I'm not
just talking about the old dudes on the golf course,
and there are a lot of those. Anyway, I was
gonna talk about something fairly broad today. I was going
to have two guests in here, but they are stuck
in traffic. Uh so you get just me. Sorry, But

(01:07):
because I gotta catch a flight, so I gotta do
this now. But I really want to talk about what
I want to talk about, because I just overheard a
question from another podcaster who's in the studio a minute
ago and she was talking to her guest in like
the waiting area, and both the question and the answer,
it just drove me nuts. So one of them asked

(01:30):
about She's like, are you single? What's your dating status?
You know, because that is idle chit chat for I
suppose men and women in their thirties and forties. That's
what they asked, like, what is your dating status? And
the first woman or the second woman said as she
was having trouble and it was frustrating and blah blah blah.
So the first woman who asked the question said, well,
what exactly are you looking for? And when I heard

(01:53):
that question, and every time I hear that question because
people do ask that question, my hair feels like it's
on fire because I absolutely hate it. And it's just
maddening to me. And you might be thinking, what's wrong
with that question? I've asked that question. I've been asked
that question, Like you might think that's a reasonable question.
What is wrong with it? What exactly are you looking for?

(02:14):
And what are you looking for? Is bad enough, but
what exactly are you looking for? Is It's the absolute worst.
That word exactly you talk about trying to hit the
smallest possible bullseye. You can't even draw that bullseye because
there's no exact in life, the relationship you're looking for,

(02:35):
the person you're looking for, the scenario you're looking for,
you cannot ever quite totally land that plane, not in
your mind and not in reality. There's no exact in life.
There's no exact in love, and there is certainly no
exact in your search, or there shouldn't be. So. The
big picture angle, which people have gotten on my case

(02:57):
about before, is that all of you have absolutely no
idea what you're looking for. You heard me to death say,
get rid of the words not my type. If you
are over thirty and you are still single, you have
no type. Your type is not working out for you.
Because if you did know exactly what you were looking for,

(03:21):
and if exactly what you're looking for was right there,
you wouldn't let all the numerous opportunities that are right
in front of you and all around you walk through
and out the door every single day. And you might
be like, what does that even mean? What about the
times I hear I met the girl of my dreams?

(03:42):
Trust me, his dreams are not about that girl, at
least not without a whole lot of revisionist history wrapped
around it. He isn't dreaming about her. He never dreamt
about her specifically exactly. He dreamt about a feeling of her,
a scenario of her situation with her, a position with her,

(04:04):
maryl But none of those are exact, or do they
involve the concept of exact. You've heard me saying on
this podcast on more than one occasion, and if you've
been to one of our live tour stops, the question
invariably comes up. People have always said to me, will
Brian tell us what do you look for in a girl?
And I've always had the same answer for decades, and

(04:26):
that is that I only look for one thing, and
that she likes me. Everything else is negotiable. And you
might be like, Oh, that's Quippi, that's cute. But my
logic to that answer is that if she likes me
and isn't afraid to show it, that builds an environment
of confidence and communication where anything and everything is possible.

(04:47):
But that answer, that jokey, fairly serious answer, that isn't
really exact either. It's more theoretical, and I'm not even
sure it's even accurate because even if she didn't like
me at least at first, because trust me, back in
the day, no matter how cute and charming I was,
there are plenty of women with bad taste who just
didn't like me right away. So even that answer that

(05:11):
she likes me, it wasn't exact and it wasn't accurate
because there was plenty of wiggle room for the plenty
of women who didn't like me. There was a chance
they eventually could or would. That's that's the wrong common me. Anyway,
this is what I want to get into today. We
have to take a quick break because we have to
pay for things like South Florida pest control around here,

(05:34):
but we will be back right after this. And we
are back, and we were asking about my issues with
the question what exactly are you looking for? So when
you're when you're searching for someone or in this case
something love, we'll just say love. I suppose, I hope,

(05:56):
I hope that's what you're looking for. You got to
cast out as big net as possible. And that's that's
not just a net in terms of scope in numbers,
it's a net in terms of possibilities and the possibilities
we always believe around here that they're always out there everywhere,
and those possibilities are born out of two things, hope

(06:18):
and imagination. And the hope obviously comes from positivity and
the confidence that someone or many ones will be out
there that you can possibly fall in love with. You've
heard me break down the stats that I shared in
my book many many times, and I will go through
them if you haven't heard me break down it before,
because I think they matter. So years and years ago,
this whole great love debate started because I wrote a

(06:39):
book called How to Find Love and sixty Seconds. I'm
not saying you should buy the book because a lot
of things in the book I no longer believe because
I've done the great love debate a million times and
I've learned what was wrong, but one that was right,
this concept of sixty seconds and the title is not
about a quickie in the bathroom. The title references these
short first of time, these windows of opportunities where if

(07:02):
we can look up and get our head out of
our apps apps, we could recognize, act on and not
kill the opportunities. So let's talk about how many there
are in a normal day, in a normal place. If
you do normal things like leave your house. You have

(07:27):
to leave your house unless you're only looking a date.
Delivery drivers and there are actually plenty of those, but
that's more of a fetish podcast, so maybe find one
of those Amazon Prime. Erotic fiction is probably a thing,
but it's not our thing anyway. If you go to work,
or you go to gym, or you go to church,
or you go to the store, if you just get
out into the world in pretty much any city anywhere,

(07:49):
you will find yourself within ten yards of one thousand
people of the opposite sex every single day. One thousand
people within thirty feet. That's a lot. That's a lot
of people. You could never find a club with that
many people or bar, and you could swipe on a

(08:12):
bumble or tinder for hours and hours and hours and
not get to one thousand people in an evening, but
before you developed a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome. First, anyway,
So I asked people because people always say, well, it's
not a thousand cute guys, or it's not a thousand
single women, or it's not a thousand in my age
range or whatever, and you know that's fair, and to

(08:35):
engage with you know, but if you engage with each
one of those take the thousand people. If you engage
with each one of those people, all thousand, you had
the time to engage with each one of them for
sixty seconds. That's what the love and sixty seconds the
book refers to. If you could engage with each one
of them for sixty seconds, how many of the thousand
do you think you could connect with on a level

(08:55):
where a spark might happen? And people overwhelmingly give me
the answer like a few, fine or five, or they'll
say maybe six, and that's good. I'm okay, that's totally fine.
But the people when they give me that answer, they
give it to me pessimistically. They always look at five
or six out of a thousand is terrible odds. Those

(09:20):
people are looking at it wrong. Five or six out
of a thousand, Yeah, that sounds like terrible odds. That
is point oh five point six percent. That feels like
lottery odds, needle in a haystack odds. But that's where
people get it wrong. They look at the denominator. Stop
looking at the denominator, look at the numerator. Instead of

(09:41):
saying five or six out of a thousand, get rid
of the thousand and simply say five or six. You
know the thousand are out there, how many could you
if you engage with you could fall in love with
five or six every day within ten yards. That means
there are five or six people every day right near
you that if you could engage with them, you would

(10:01):
have a really good chance at love. So you multiply
that by three hundred and sixty five days in the year,
and you're talking about two thousand people each year within
thirty feet of you that you could fall in love with.
Back to the question, what exactly are you looking for?
The answer is that exactly that the opportunities. Somebodys you

(10:25):
say the I'm looking for the opportunities. Well, there you are,
the possibilities, the hope, the chance. What exactly are you
looking for? The one I haven't met yet? The end?
That's it. And there's kind of this impish playfulness in
the positivity or that answer. And if you stick to that,
you what exactly you're looking for the one I haven't

(10:46):
met yet? I think you will. I think if you
stick to that, you will because it's the mindset. I
think the exact answer will be right in front of you,
and there's an exercise that you can do. I usually
I used to end our live shows with this. I
haven't done a live show in a while, but if

(11:07):
I did one, maybe tease, I would end with this.
I'll share with you guys on the podcast, because I
don't think I've done in a while. Those of us
over I don't know thirty five. When we were kids
and we went on vacations, went on long car rides
with our parents, we didn't have things like iPads to

(11:28):
entertain us in the backseat. We had to do things
like count blue cars. And a lot of you out
there know what I'm talking about, like count blue cars.
So if you do that as an exercise for killing time,
that is fine. But if you go back to the
thousand people around you every single day and you tried
to count five or six people with blue eyes or

(11:52):
brown eyes or green eyes, you would be forced to
recognize them. You'd be forced in some way, at least visually,
to engage with them, and then suddenly everyone around you
will notice you back. If you start to notice the
people around you and try to notice them with specific specificity,

(12:13):
let me find the five people with green eyes not
saying green Eyes is your type. I'm saying start there
with the mindset. Not only will you recognize everybody around you,
people will start to recognize you back. And when we
start to do that, I think the possibilities are everywhere.
So what exactly are you looking for that the possibilities

(12:34):
you say that's very broad, it's actually really specific because
it's a mindset. Anyway, shoot me an email Great Love
Debate at gmail dot com if you've got thoughts, questions,
a philosophy, or you disagree with me. I always say
I don't give you advice around here. I give you opinion.
That's opinion that's rooted in advice. Do with it whatever
you like. Uh please. We are over five hundred episodes

(12:57):
of this show. Like, share, follow, and review this podcast
to this day. Your reviews mean a lot to me,
and they mean a lot in the podcasting ecosystem because,
as always at the Great Love Debate, we never stopped
making love. See you next time. The Great Love Debate.

(13:19):
It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love Debate. It's
a Great Love Debate.