May 25, 2017

Interview with Julie Ferman: What Men Consider Wife Material

Interview with Julie Ferman_ What Men Consider Wife Material

Interview Transcript

Mike: This is Mike Hennessy. And I’d like to welcome you to today’s interview with Julie Ferman. Julie is a Dating Coach and Matchmaker providing free private registration to be able to work for personal matchmaking referrals throughout the US, Canada and beyond. You can visit her website at www.JulieFerman.com.

Julie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Julie Ferman: You’re certainly welcome, Mike. Glad to be here. And it’s an important topic so I’m all yours.

Mike: As an experienced matchmaker and dating coach, you have helped a number of men and women find the right partner.

Can you talk about the traits and qualities men are looking for in women especially those men who are ready to commit and settle down?

Julie Ferman: Yes, absolutely. It’s such an exciting, fun, and important topic. One of the challenges of being a woman and dating is that the number one thing that has to be present in order for a guy to step up to the plate and court her properly is he has to be attracted. He has to be attracted physically and this is something that we resist as women. We think it’s not fair.

I’ve been asking a question for years and years and years to both men and women and I always ask it when I’m doing my consultations. And the question is, have you ever meet anybody that you were not attracted to initially and you got to know him and before you know it, you found this person to be absolutely adorable and thoroughly datable.

Fun questions, right Mike?

Mike: Absolutely.

Julie Ferman: Well, it’s interesting responses that I get back.

Eighty-five percent of the women I’ve asked that question to will say, “Yes, I can develop attraction over time. Yes, my old boyfriend, I wasn’t attracted at all in the beginning and fell in love with him over time.”

But here’s the bad news.

Only about 5% of men will tell me that they have the ability to develop attraction over time. So the number one thing that has to be present for a guy first is that he needs to be attracted physically.

And the second thing is he needs to like her.

He needs to actually like who she is. And very often we’ll call this – when a guy feels that way, he feels charmed and enchanted by her. He doesn’t need to like her in order to have that sexual relationship. But for a romantic relationship, he has to like her and he has to care about her and he has to want to take care of her.

So sometimes a woman might say, “Well gosh, I think we should break up.” And he’ll say, “But I care about you.” So he’ll argue for the substance of the relationship. So that’s one of the things.

Also, he is looking to see is he strengthened by her? Is he better off with her? And he’ll pay more attention to this kind of a question when he’s 45 as opposed to when he’s 22. If he’s 22, he might stick around just because she is super cute. But as he gets older and he’s really thinking about lifelong love and finding partnership, he wants to know if his life is better with her or without her.

And there’s another important question that he’s going to ask and it’s a tough.

Are you ready for it, Mike?

Mike: All right. Let’s hear it.

Julie Ferman: He is going to ask himself if he’s emasculated too much by her.

He wants to know, is he contributed to by her? She might be fun. The sex might be great. But if she is an emasculator, it’s too painful for him.

So in other words, if he doesn’t feel strong in his masculine around her because she is too critical or she interrupts him or she demeans him in public, those are some of the little things that we can do as women that really turn men off and it’s unlikely that a man is going to commit to marriage with a who emasculates him too much.

And the reason I’ll say too much is because we can try really, really, really hard to never do it but we’re human and we make mistakes. I’ve been married to my husband now for 26 years and if I do say something or do something that serves to emasculate him, you can count on me to always apologize, recognize it, apologize and try to hand his balls back to him as quickly as possible.

So, there’s another important question that he’s going to ask himself about whether he’s going to keep her or not. Are you ready for that one, Mike?

Mike: All right. Let’s hear this one because I think I see where we’re going here. Go ahead.

Julie Ferman: Yeah. There’s another big one. He is asking himself, can I afford her? Can I give her what she needs?

And he’s going to make that decision based on what she talks about, what she talks about having had in the past, when he sees that women out there in the world need.

If she needs more independence then he’s comfortable with, if she needs more shopping sprees, if she’s the type of person who always talks about first class airline tickets, and he’s the kind of guy who always flies coach, he might be thinking, “I don’t think I can make her happy.” And he might just bolt. He might just let her go.

The other thing that sometimes happens, if he doesn’t have high integrity, goo character, he might keep her around anyway.

He might hide. He might actually conceal that he can’t afford or he might pretend that he can afford her or he might try to talk her out of getting what she needs. He might try to get her to be lower maintenance or get her to get by on less, to change her into somebody who needs less.

But if he really thinks that he can’t give her what she needs or what he senses that she needs, he’s out of there.

He’ll bolt. If he gets the sense that he is never good enough, that she is too demanding and that no matter what he does, it’s never enough for her, he will bolt.

So, you probably are asking in your head right now, Mike, what might be the way to go like what works, what’s a better way to be. You want to hear about that?

Mike: Yeah. I think that there are probably are ways to work around this or at least to resolve the issue between the two parties satisfactorily.

Julie Ferman: Yes. Sometimes we’re turning the guy off and we don’t even know it.

I’ll give you an example that happened with one of my clients. Her name is Susie and she is a very, very successful woman and she is a real estate developer. And on her second date with a guy she really, really, really liked, she insisted on having him drive around all of her real estate investment properties.

And he is a big guy with a big life and real estate investment properties of his own but the way she did it made him feel like she couldn’t respect and appreciate who he is. She was too busy trying to show off who she was and he kind of got the feeling that he was not going to be able to impress her because she is too busy being impressed by herself. Does that make sense?

Mike: I can see exactly that problem.

Julie Ferman: One of the things that does work quite well is when we, girls, get good at asking for the things that we really want and that we need and appreciating them when they come our way.

Appreciation goes along way with men. And men will often want to keep a woman who they feel appreciates him.

And so really, it’s a matter of practicing the art of appreciation, practicing the art of being easy enough to please.

Men don’t want women who are no trouble. You guys, you do want to work for us. But you want to be appreciated. And the type of woman that I find being left on the side of the road over and over and over again is the type of woman who is too demanding, too difficult to please, too fussy, too picky, and doesn’t appreciate, doesn’t have the ability to look and see what’s right in this guy instead of all the things that might be wrong. No guy wants to listen to a woman pick him apart for 50 years. You and I both know relationships who have ended up like that, right?

Mike: Absolutely.

Julie Ferman: Yes.

Mike: And there’s something here that I think we need to touch on just a little further. You talked about attractiveness, and I think that when you’re talking about attractiveness, to me, that’s one of those things, OK, what’s attractive to one person may be attractive to another. One person, one man may only be attracted to a Victoria Secret type of “perfect” woman. But there is a different type of attractiveness.

Julie Ferman: And that’s a beautiful thing that you point out. Yes. So what’s good to know, each guy needs to know what type of woman he is attracted to. And it’s a really good idea for a woman to pay attention to the man she is with and find out.

I have this great friend who succeeded in dating. She dated on all the websites. She hired matchmakers. She tried everything. And she is a super cute curvy girl. So she is probably about a size 10 or a size 12 and she is definitely curvy. And she had this cute little way of doing first dates. She didn’t want to have a second or third date with a guy who wasn’t attracted to her.

Now, she is African-American, curvy, and super curly big hair. And she’d stand up at the date and she had this cute personality and she’d say, “OK. So here’s me. Here’s what I look like.” And she’d turn around and she’d say, “Does this body type works for you because this is what I got?” And she had a really cute way of playing with it.

And I got a guy, Mike, who only dates stick, skinny Asians. That’s the type of woman he is attracted to. And then I’ve got a guy who likes Kardashian curves. Right? Totally different type, wouldn’t you agree?

Mike: Absolutely. And that’s the point I really thought we needed to kind of clear up there. It’s not just one dimensional. It’s not one type of person, not one type of body type that men are going to find attractive.

Julie Ferman: Yeah.

Mike: So, there’s somebody out there for everybody.

Julie Ferman: Oh, that’s true. And thank goodness men are not all attracted to the same people or we’d really be in trouble.

But the thing that’s really fun is that men are attracted to women who have confidence and it’s not like boardroom confidence like boss people around kind of confidence.

It’s the type of woman who is confident in her femininity. And it comes from a place of self-love.

And there’s something else that was interesting, there was a book that was written, I want to say, about 10, 12 years ago called Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others. And one of the things that they found when they did the studies was that the women who were being chosen for marriage were very often women who had healthy friendships with other women.

How interesting is that?

So what it shows I think, it makes sense if we think about it, it shows that she can sustain long-term relationships with other people and that there are other people in her life who come back for more. And I think it’s a little – it makes me a little bit nervous as a matchmaker when I’m interviewing somebody who doesn’t have long-term relationships of any significant. It makes me think, “What’s going on here?”

So I think that confidence is super important.

The ability to appreciate men and a lot of that means that we – he needs to feel good in her presence. And one of the things that we can practice as women, oh boy it’s a tough one, it’s allowing men to finish their sentences and not interrupts them.

Mike: There are so many things I could say right here and I think I’ll just want to pass. We’ll move on to the next question if it’s OK.

Julie Ferman: Well, my husband has a cute little saying. He says, “Generally speaking, women are generally speaking.”

We utter a lot more words than you guys do and it’s really important that if we want to have great relationships with men that we know when to be speaking and when to be listening and we need to listen to his stories and his jokes even if he has told us this joke 15 times. He might be telling it to new people and we need to laugh at that joke and we need to fan that flame. And it gives him the kind of juice that like reenergizes him for the next big activity in his life. And the women who don’t laugh at their men’s jokes and the women who don’t let him tell the story or finish the story for him are usually not the ones chosen for marriage.

Mike: So I’ve got another question here in the time remaining and it’s actually kind of a 2-parter. So I’ll ask the first part first. I think it’s a good way to go. Can you talk about the things that women might do unwittingly we can hope that end up with him being seen by a man as a more casual hookup than as a serious committed relationship?

Julie Ferman: Yes. And that’s such an important question. I’m so glad you asked it.

Sometimes as women, we are so sincere and so serious about finding relationship that we love too early too fast.

We become vulnerable too early too fast. If a man is really ready, the two things that have to be present in order for him to engage in relationship is number one, he has to be attracted to this particular woman in a romantic way.

But then the second thing is timing has to be right.

So if he’s ready, timing is good for him in his life to take on his woman for a lifetime together. If he sees that she is too promiscuous, that she is too easy to get into the bedroom, that she parties too much, that she is dating a lot of guys, if he sees that she doesn’t value herself enough to stay in her feminine and pride herself on her value as a woman, he is going to pick up on that message. And without even really knowing it, he is just going to move on. He doesn’t want to be with a woman who is dating five guys at once. He doesn’t want to be with a woman who slept with 200 men. He really doesn’t.

My father kept warning me about that as I was growing up, that men when they’re ready to get married, they don’t want to choose the woman that has been with too many men.

So, the biggest way to avoid doing that is to be careful.

Keep your pants on until after the two of you decided that you only want to date each other and you’d have conversations about what sex means to you and what it means to this other person.

Are you in alignment? Who is looking for a relationship? Who is just looking to play around? What about birth control? What about STDs? You have to be able to have those conversations first. And if you are not quite comfortable enough to have those conversations, it’s really simple. Keep your pants on a little while longer.

And then the other thing is that you really want to take your time and ask early on what this person’s primary dating purpose is and what is your primary dating purpose? And if you are not in alignment, just wait a little longer. And you can do this a lot better if you don’t ever have more than one glass of wine or one alcoholic drink. By the second one, decision-making becomes a little more loosey-goosey and by the time the third drink rolls around, forget it. All bets are off.

Nobody ever called me on a Monday morning, Mike, and said, “Darn! I wished I had slept with that guy.” Never happened.

Mike: Well, is there – we’ve talked a little bit about some of the positive things are there. Any other positive tips you can throw out there because this is such a broad topic and of course, in the few minutes allotted to us, we certainly can’t cover it all but is there any other maybe parting comments you’d like to throw out there on this to set the tone maybe for your dating relationship and say, “I’m serious about this. We’re going to have a good time and we’re going to get to know each other. But I’m serious. Are you?”

Julie Ferman: Yes, and it’s so fine to do. If people are using online dating sites for example, especially with the online dating sites where you have to sift and sort very quickly, definitely keep everything positive. Don’t say anything negative.

Keep it all positive but definitely state your primary dating purpose.

Why are you there? If you’re there because you’re looking for marriage and family, put it there. The people who aren’t looking for marriage and family, they will sort themselves right out and that’s a good thing.

The biggest mistakes I see people making are dismissing each other too quickly for issues that are not critical.

So the most important thing that I want everybody to do who is out there dating is get very clear about what your top 5 critical criteria are. And don’t dismiss somebody or say no to the second or the third date if somebody isn’t making the mark on item number 7 or item number 12. Those are secondary. Look and see. Look for evidence that the things that really matter to you, your top 5, happen to be present in this person.

And if so, have a second date. Have a third date. Keep talking. Keep your clothes on. And have fun with it. You want to make sure the people that you’re meeting are enjoying the time that they’re spending with you. So if you make that your mission, your dates will go better and you only want to spend time that that next date, only schedule it if you think there’s a possibility that you might be on the same wavelength and looking for the same kinds of things.

Mike: Julie Ferman, thank you so much for joining us today.

Julie: You’re welcome, Mike. Thanks for the opportunity.

Mike: And this is Mike Hennessy. And on behalf of the team at LoveEvolveandThrive.com, I would like to thank you for listening to our interview and wish you the very best in your relationships.

Our guest expert today was Matchmaker and Dating Coach, Julie Ferman. And you can find her at her website, www.JulieFerman.com.

For free tips and thoughts on relationship advice for women from hundreds of experts and authors, please visit our website at www.LoveEvolveandThrive.com.

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