Ep. #37 Personal Boundaries Part 2: Case Studies and Action Steps with Mark Manson

[Angel Donovan]: But anyway, I’m going to like try and get down to something kind of more practical, I guess. Say I’m going out to a club tonight to meet some women, what are some simple things that I can think about or do to make sure I’m maintaining some healthy personal boundaries so that I’m going to attract women and so I’m setting kind of a foundation for potentially good relationships going forward?

[Mark Manson]: So the two kind of immediate mindset changes that I give to men that I think have the quickest results or the best results for them that also has to do with this stuff, the first one is to see all rejection as incompatibility. The reason rejection is so harsh and so uncomfortable for most men is that they take it personally.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: They believe that it is a value judgment on how worthy they are as a person, and of course if they’re a man that's coming from a place of inadequacy or not feeling like they’re good enough, it hurts just that much more. So one way I like to look at it is that basically I am who I am, I’m proud of who I am, I care about who I am, and I’m going to present myself as well as I can to the women I want to meet, and if they reject me or if they don’t like me, or if they blow me off, then I perceive that not as I’m not good enough, I perceive it as simply an incompatibility of values and desires at that moment in time. And it doesn’t matter if she’s a girl who never called me back or if she blew me out really hard when I approached her or if she said she has a boyfriend, it’s basically, if she doesn’t see the potential for how awesome I could be with her, then I’m better off not pursuing her and I’m better off pursuing somebody else who will see my value and will see how cool I am.

And it’s amazing, once you kind of reorient to all that towards it’s just simply being an incompatibility, an incompatibility of logistics, an incompatibility of values, an incompatibility of simply timing, the rejections really start stinging a lot less and you actually get to the point where they begin to help you, because it’s nice because you start spotting, you’re like, “Oh, normally I would spend two hours trying to convince this girl to go out with me, but since she doesn’t see how awesome I am, then I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince her, therefore I’m going to go find somebody else who is interested in me.” You start saving a lot of time and you start becoming a lot more efficient in terms of the women you meet and the women you date.

The other mindset change I give to guys is to pursue out of curiosity. So most men, when we pursue women, we pursue women because we’re trying to get something. We’re trying to get approval, get validation, get laid, get more dates, get more phone numbers, and a lot of times the reason, the motivation for this is very shallow and superficial. It’s to impress her buddies or to feel like we’re good enough to hang out with this one guy we look up to or to not feel like a loser anymore and…

[Angel Donovan]: So that second point requires that we have self-awareness and we can look at the underlying motivations for what we’re doing, and I guess that comes back to owning your emotion…

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …like at the beginning where you talked about having responsibility for our emotions. So if you have responsibility for your emotions, you have to understand them. You have to become aware of them first and what’s triggering them.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the way that looks, like pursuing out of curiosity, the way that looks is that, for instance, an average guy, let's say he's at a bar and he wants to approach a girl, an average guy will look at her and his immediate thoughts will be, “What do I say to get her to like me? How should I approach? God, I hope she likes me. What can I say? I should come up with a funny story,” etc.

A guy who’s pursuing out of curiosity pursues her, approaches her, and his thought is, “I wonder what she’s like. I wonder if we’re going to be compatible. I wonder if she’ll make me happy. I wonder if she and I will click. I wonder what cool thing she has going on in her life.”

This also applies to things like dates and escalation. A lot of guys go out on dates and they spend the whole time trying to impress her and convince her that he's a cool guy. What about sitting there and asking yourself, “Is she a cool girl? What does she have going for her? What is interesting about her? What cool things have happened in her life that I can relate to?” When you flip that script and start pursuing from that place, first of all, you’re pursuing a way that maintains your self-respect and your boundaries, and also it diminishes anxiety because basically there's no way to fail.

So it’s like if I see a pretty girl in a bar and I say to myself, “I wonder what she’s like. I wonder if she’s cool. I wonder if she’s smart,” and I go and I approach her and she’s really obnoxious and has nothing interesting to say, then I found out. I succeeded. I don’t sit there and I’m like, “God, I could have said this so I just could have gotten her number.” No, I don’t want the phone number of a woman I don’t enjoy talking to. Instead, I sit there and I’m like, “I found out. I was curious to what she was like. I found out, I don’t like her, and I succeeded.”

So it creates a much more healthy motivation and gets men off of this like feeling like they need to perform up to these, you know, like meet these like arbitrary metrics of success. So those are my two pieces of advice for guys to try on those mindsets, see how they feel. And generally, most men, within a few days or a week or two, start feeling a lot better about their interactions. They feel a lot less anxiety, they feel a lot less pressure, and they start feeling better about themselves. They feel more self-esteem, which therefore makes them more attractive.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Like I’m looking at those now as tools. However, like I would say on the first one, I don’t really agree with you. You know, you’re saying that basically if she rejects me it’s always because she’s not right for me?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Well, you know, I think that's a great tool to have and maybe even something that beginners should all start with, intermediates should go with, but maybe someone who’s been around for a while should take that down and… Because, you know, we all have our good days and our bad days. And you know, people talk about like also, say that you go out to a club, often the first approach you do isn’t so good just because you haven’t been social, if you’ve been doing your work or something, something internal or something completely antisocial just beforehand and you weren’t being social. It takes us a little bit of time to get warmed up and get into that social gear.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah…

[Angel Donovan]: So we may fumble our words or do whatever, or say something dumb, and it might not go so well. So I think to say all the time that it’s not going to work out with the woman is probably not right and… But I’m not taking away from the fact that it’s a very useful tool especially when you’re getting started.

[Mark Manson]: Well, actually, let me clarify that, because the way you’re describing it I actually agree with, because if you go around every time you’re rejected, you say, “Well, she’s not right for me, I’m fine, she’s not…”

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Mark Manson]: You know, that just becomes another form of overcompensation. So when I say incompatible, I actually mean like incompatibilities in terms of like timing, mood. For instance, you could meet like the girl of your dreams, but again, let's say her brother got in a car accident that day, like there's nothing you’re ever going to say that's going to attract, like make her interested in dating you in that moment. So I see that as an incompatibility.

[Angel Donovan]: That's a logistical incompatibility.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. And one of the things I talk about in my book is that if you’re finding that it seems like every woman you meet is incompatible with you, then that ultimately falls back to you. It’s your responsibility, because it’s your responsibility to develop yourself to the point where you become more compatible with the woman you’re pursuing.

Because there's this idea that a lot of guys buy into where you can date… It’s like, “I want to date a so-called 10, but I’m unemployed, I live with mom, and I play World of Warcraft all day.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I guess, well, the other area like I’m kind of concerned about is because, especially when the guys are starting this stuff, a lot of them, and this is something you talk about in your book in another area, but they tend to like have a narrow experience of life, okay?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So most men, they haven’t seen a lot of stuff. So what’s going to happen when you go into a club or whatever? There are not very many girls that you’re going to be able to go up and be just you and it’s going to fit, because you have this very narrow lifestyle and set of experiences, and that will just kind of affect how you come across, and you’re more likely to get rejected, right? So if you then say, “Oh, she’s not right for me,” you’re going to kind of bounce back and stay within that comfort zone, for want of a better word. Whereas if you say, “Okay, that didn’t go so well. What did I do? Why did she respond that way?” and think about it that you might learn something about, “Okay, she’s this type of girl,” and also what you do there is you have a motivation to step outside of your comfort zone and relate to other girls. And when you’re coming from an area, like if you’re already experienced the world and every type of girl there is and so on, you can make decisions about what’s good for you and what’s not, but if you’re starting out, I just think your experience is too narrow to be able to kind of make those decisions and really know, right?

[Mark Manson]: Well, let me say that when I say incompatibility I don’t mean that she’s not… it’s not necessarily that she’s not right, it’s just that you’re not right for each other in that moment. So the response, like whenever there's an incompatibility, it’s both people’s responsibility. It’s not her fault. It’s not my fault. It’s just we are not right for each other in that moment for whatever reason, and that could be because I’m inexperienced than she is. It could be because I’m in a bad mood and she’s not.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Mark Manson]: It could be because I’ve never been to a nightclub and I’m really nerdy and she’s like some hot go-go dancer. All of these things, they’re not her fault, they’re not your fault… And it does come back to the guy. It’s like, so if all the women you’re approaching are like go-go dancer girls in clubs and you’re a nerdy guy, A, you’re incompatible with all of them, and B, if you want to be compatible with them, then you have to like get involved and get experienced in their world and like understand the places that they come from.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: So yeah, I don’t disagree with you at all. I think it's more a semantics thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Mark Manson]: And I agree that guys who have a very narrow spectrum of experience, it’s almost just more important that they get as much experience as possible…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, but I mean, that's something you cover really well in your book, about expanding your consciousness…

[Mark Manson]: …and then actually… Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. Another thought I had about this whole personal boundaries thing was like, let's assume I’m looking for a woman with good self-esteem, right? Because we’re saying that that's going to lead to healthy relationships, if I have good self-esteem as well.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Can we use personal boundaries to explore women’s self-esteem when we meet her? So should we use this to select or screen for women by testing her personal boundaries by potentially like doing something to set a personal boundary that’s either right for us or maybe we think it’s a bit too far to test her? What do you think of that idea?

[Mark Manson]: I don’t think you have to test because a woman with low self-esteem is going to have bad boundaries, and if you have good boundaries, if you have high self-esteem and have developed strong boundaries, those weak boundaries will become very apparent very quickly in the way…

[Angel Donovan]: Can we have an example…? Yeah, sorry.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Let's see. So, for instance, let's say you’re a high-self-esteem guy with strong boundaries, you go on a date with a woman who has weak boundaries or low boundaries, and you’re just talking to her, and let's say that you say something, let's say that, I don’t know, you’re talking about politics or something, I don’t know why you would ever want to talk about that on a date, but let's say you are, and you make an opinionated statement and she gets really upset and she starts trying to change her mind and she starts implying that you’re a bad person and that you’re an idiot and all these things. She would be an example then of a person who is not respecting your boundaries. She is taking responsibility for your views, which are different to hers, and so she’s trying to force herself and her views onto you.

[Angel Donovan]: Ah, so you’re saying when there's a personal attack?

[Mark Manson]: Right. So it comes back to those two things, right? It’s people who either surrender their own values for yours or people who try to push their values onto you.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, it’s interesting you say low self-esteem, because I think some guys will think, “Well, it should be around the other way,” but what you’re saying, like I know where you’re coming from, is like people with low self-esteem often have to hold on to their values more strongly than others, and sometimes they say they can’t hear the alternatives.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: So they have to reject them, and sometimes that ends up being some argument or some personal attacks and what have you.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah, I mean you begin to start seeing it in just like small behaviors and interactions. You may meet her, say, in a bar, and just like the way she’s talking to her friends, like she’s… You see this all the time with girls who get into all sorts of drama. Maybe her friend is talking to some guy who she doesn’t like, and so now it’s her responsibility to go and like cock-block this guy from her friend, and that's an example of poor boundaries in that she feels that it’s her right and her responsibility to protect her friend when she doesn’t know the guy in that situation. And it’s also disrespectful for the friend because it implies that she can’t take care of herself. So you see this in all sorts of little small behaviors.

Another example that happened to a friend of mine recently is he dated a girl for about six months and they broke up, and he went through this kind of, you know, like he’d block her from Facebook and not answer her calls, and then he’d answer her calls, and just kind of going through this whole thing. And she was really depressed after the breakup, and she would post these like really sad, lonely things on her Facebook wall, and he would call her and try to make her feel better. And they’d kind of like rekindle things for a couple of days and maybe they’d have sex again, and then things would fall apart and he’d be like, “No, we’re broken up,” and she'd get even more upset and even more sad and there’d be more drama. And I had to kind of sit down with them and like, “Dude, this is just poor boundaries. Like when you broke up with her, her emotions are not your responsibility anymore. Like I understand you feel guilty, I understand that you sympathize with her, but it is not your job to fix it. You can’t go fix it. If you try to go fix it, you’re going to make it worse.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. And you know…

[Mark Manson]: And her…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it’s a very common scenario, and it’s extremely bad for the girl as well.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But I like the way you’ve linked it back to the personal boundaries issue.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. You see it a lot with parents and kids, parents who can’t completely let go of like controlling their kid’s life a little bit.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, all the time.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, I talked to a client recently on a call, and he was a guy in his early 20s, he was just recently financially independent, had a really good job, and he was kind of confronting a lot of these major life decisions for the first time, and so we were going through them and kind of reasoning through them, and I was giving him my perspective. And we got to the end and he's like, “Yeah, I got one more thing,” and basically he was moving out of his parents’ house. We had already discussed that. He said, “Yeah, so my car is like really old, it’s really run-down. I’m making a lot of money, and the car is under my dad’s name but I’m going to buy a new one under my name.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: He's like, “Should I do that?” And I was like, “You have the money, right?” He was like, “Yeah, I have the money.” I’m like, “Well, then obviously, of course, do it.” And he said, “But my dad’s going to get really mad.” And I was like, “Well, why would your dad get mad?” And he said, “Well, technically it’s his car, and if I’m going to trade it in… But he never uses it.” And you know, it was this whole thing where basically this guy is like 24 years old, he's financially independent, he's living on his own, and he wants to buy his own car, and he said that his dad was going to get really upset about it. And I explained to him, I was like, “This has nothing to do with the car. This has everything to do with you being independent.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And you see situations with parents are still taking responsibility for their kids’ life circumstances when their kids are grown adults and like can take care of themselves.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. And this is probably the most typical situation of weak personal boundaries you can really come across, right? Because parents often have expectations for their kids.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Maybe that's changing a little bit, and especially like in some cultures more than others. So, for instance, if you take Asia, like there are extremely, extremely strong, very well-defined expectations for what your kid’s going to do to the extent that they’ll give you piano lessons when you’re 5 years old because you’re going to become a pianist or whatever. And actually my parents did that to me. I had piano lessons. [Laughs]

[Mark Manson]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: So I know a little bit about that. But also like I think that's probably the most common example here, is career, right? Or studies, like your parents will have expectations about what kind of career or studies you have. So I think that's probably something everyone can relate to.

So parents, they always have these ideas. Is that another situation where there are these unhealthy personal boundaries, and is that exactly the same as the things we’ve been talking in the dating and relationships world? So, for instance, if you have this problem with your parents where they expected you to do x career or do this in your studies, do well, and you’re not and maybe you’re going a completely different direction, maybe you just want to write or you want to become a rock star or whatever it is, is that an indication that you probably have the same things going on in your dating life?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, I mean it’s really indirect and kind of unseen, but one thing I call in my book… You know, my book’s called Attract Women Through Honesty, and I have a whole section in my book called Honest Living, and my argument is basically that if you are not living based on your own values and your own desires, then you are effectively being dishonest to yourself. And when you’re dishonest to yourself… You know, the whole argument of the book is that honesty in general builds self-esteem and boundaries and a perception of high status within yourself and allows you to have a successful dating life and an abundant dating life. And so I actually referred to it as Honest Living, as living based on your values and your desires and your goals. And if you’re not doing that, then it’s effectively dishonest to yourself, and you’re going to be less motivated, you’re going to be less proud of yourself, you’re going to have less self-esteem, and it basically sets a precedent for every other area in your life that you’re willing to negotiate your boundaries. It’s like, “Well, I hate my job but it makes good money, and I negotiated that value. So when I’m on a date with a hot girl who’s annoying me, I’ll negotiate this value too.” And these things are linked up together.

And it really struck me, getting kind of back to the parent thing, when that idea really hit me was back when I used to do a lot of pickup coaching a few years ago, and I had tons of clients who were… I mean, they were otherwise cool guys, they were smart, funny, interesting, but all these guys kept showing up who lived with their parents or were like still somehow financially dependent on their parents, even like up into their like late 20s, early 30s, and all of these men had kind of this history of like no matter what they did, no matter what sort of like self-improvement goal they had, they never got anywhere with it.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And initially I found I just kind of started telling them like, “Well, move out,” because what I started noticing is these guys, as soon as they moved out and became financially independent and like responsible for their own subsistence, all these other areas of their lives finally started to improve. And so I started giving the advice, just move out. Move out as soon as possible. Like don’t worry about approaching, don’t worry about dates or online game or whatever. Move out, get independent, get yourself in order, like started building a little bit of confidence and self-esteem.

And I think you hit on the point that describes it, is that if you’re a grown man and mom and dad are still taking care of you, I mean that is a boundary that is just being overstepped every day of your life, and you can only feel so good about yourself and you can only feel so independent and only so confident if that's happening. And if you’re not feeling independent or confident or high-self-esteem, like you’re never going to present yourself that way to women no matter what you do. So yeah, I think it’s a huge thing, and it really ties into overall like self-perception in everything.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think, you know, all of us have our family, I think boundaries tend to be more intense in families, right? And more difficult to navigate. I think you said that somewhere too. So it might be an easier way to start thinking about this stuff if you look at the family complex and where you’re trying to establish your independence and having difficulty, it might be a good way to start learning about this stuff, and also how to kind of practice setting boundaries.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Maybe you should start at home with your family and tell them you’re going to pursue the career that you want or whatever it is and kind of tackle that problem first before you try to deal with the details in the rest of your life, like dating.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think the dating stuff, I mean the boundaries, it really starts becoming a side effect of dealing with this deeper internal identity and self-esteem issue.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Alright, so on the theme of life, there was something I saw that you wrote that I kind of liked, and it was about how it relates to parts of your life. You said—this is paraphrasing—“You should own that part of your identity. You should make it something that you are, and not just something that you do,” right?

And it kind of reminds me of this quote that I think… I can’t remember who it was, but I’ve remembered this for a long time. I think it was from Jerry Seinfeld about when he was first starting out, and I’m paraphrasing here again, but he said something like, “I was working towards becoming a comedian…” And this is when he wasn’t doing so well, right? But he says, “But I was scared to hell of actually taking the decision to become a comedian.” So it’s kind of two things.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Is this an easy way to look at establishing personal boundaries in your life? So if we’re thinking about like really doing this in our life, is a good way to think of it owning it, and is there some way of describing how we own something in our life?

[Mark Manson]: I think in terms of our values and what we believe in and how we see ourselves, these things are really not worth anything unless we own them and identify ourselves by them. And a really good example of this is actually kind of one way that a lot of men approach dating advice and pickup. So one of the first posts I ever wrote on my site years and years ago was a post called Performance Versus Character, and I talked about how what I noticed when I was involved in the pickup community was there are two types of men, and there were basically the men who read and digested everything but they perceived everything to be a behavior or a tactic, or like a surface-level thing to adopt and like trying on like a new mask or something like that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And then there were the men who read and digested everything but they saw in terms of actually altering their character and their identity. And I get this all the time… Like one of my big concepts that I teach in my book is vulnerability, and it’s this idea of being willing to expose yourself and your ideas freely and without worrying about the reception you’re going to get back from it. And it’s really a core identity. It’s like the way you adopt vulnerability is that you live it, is that you decide like, “I decide that I am not ashamed of myself.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And that is a decision you have to make and something you have to integrate into your identity. Well, I get emails all the time from guys who say stuff, they’re like, “Hey Mark, the vulnerability thing is very interesting but it doesn’t work. See, I went on this date and I told this girl about my dog dying and how I hate my mom, and she didn’t have sex with me. So it doesn’t work.” And like I just see those emails and I’m like, “You don’t get it.” Like you’re seeing it as another tool, as another technique, as another thing to try on, and that's actually the complete opposite of what vulnerability actually is. Vulnerability is the decision to not try things on and to not put a mask on and to not try to portray yourself differently than as you are.

And ultimately I think the men who see these things as simply performances or performance behaviors to practice and master without ever integrating it into who they are or their identity or how they perceive themselves, they never get past a very limited amount of success. And that goes for dating and just other areas in general. I mean, if you are trying to become a professional day trader and you perceive everything simply as different behaviors and patterns to mimic, you’re never going to get past a very limited amount of success until you adopt that identity and digest everything as like, “This is who I am and this is how…” like looking for the principles behind the patterns and the behaviors, looking at the intentions and the motivations of, why did this guy trade this way? What is the pattern he looks for here? Why does this work? Until you get to that second level, you’re really limited in anything that you do.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So I’m thinking of like potentially tips to start out towards owning something in your life, whether it be, “I’m not doing so well with the ladies. I’d like to be better…” So that's a goal, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So in a sense we could be talking about owning that goal, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And owning this new part of your life that you want to create, so it’s going to become part of your identity. What steps would you advise someone to take in order to own it? So are there specific actions that he could take to basically kind of ensure the outcome or support it so it’s more likely to happen? Are there any specific things you’d advise someone to do?

[Mark Manson]: I think sharing it as if it’s a part of yourself, because that generates accountability. So if you make the decision like, “I struggle with my dating life and I’m going to try to make it better,” and you want to adopt as part of your identity, finding somebody to talk to about that and telling them that and say, “I am struggling with my dating life and I am committed to improving it,” because that kind of cements it. It’s no longer just you trying on your perception of yourself. You’re actually generating that perception in other people who are going to keep you accountable for it.

[Angel Donovan]: You’d have to be careful who you are doing this to, I guess, because they’d have to be someone who you could trust to take it seriously, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, absolutely. And actually I would say, the closer the person is to you and the more you trust them, the more powerful it is, because obviously if you tell some random guy at work or something who doesn’t know you well, you don’t really care what he thinks. But if you tell your brother or you tell your best friend, it has a lot more weight behind it.

I think writing about it. I think one of the things that the pickup community does very well is that it encourages men to crystallize their progress and their commitments through writing, you know, with all the forms and the field reports and all that stuff.

[Angel Donovan]: Journaling.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. I think that kind of stuff is extremely important. Whenever you have like a really major long-term self-improvement goal, I think journaling, chronicling it, writing it for other people to see, these are all very strong ways to reinforce an identity.

And then choosing specific behaviors to pursue that reflect it. As you and I both know, like for every guy who reads and studies this stuff and actually goes out and tries to apply it, there are 10 guys who just read and read and read and never do anything. And at some point, if you’re actually going to adopt this identity and it’s going to stick, your behavior has to start reflecting it, so making that first leap and saying, “Alright, I’m going out. Like I’m going out and I’m going to try this one thing I read.” And as soon as you start doing that, now it’s like… You know, once you do that, you can’t get away from it. It’s like it’s proven now. You’ve done it.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Yeah, totally. I think seeing is believing and doing it… I used to call them reference experiences, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I kind of used to like to think I have to go and try and get a new reference experience, because once I got that it’ll be easy afterwards.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I only have to go and get that experience once and then… And you know, I think for everything in life it’s true. You’re outside your comfort zone, you just kind of have to make that first jump, leap of faith, and then once you’ve seen what it’s like up there, it all gets easier.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So I’m thinking of kind of like troubleshooting this, the more difficult areas of personal boundaries, more like in situations where you might have to enforce your personal boundaries. So you gave us a couple of examples, but I’d like a few more of them. Especially in the kind of dating or out in bars, meeting girls, or relationships, what do you think are typical situations where you have to enforce your own personal boundaries when it kind of comes up?

[Mark Manson]: What enforcing personal boundaries is, basically, is basically standing up for yourself and your values, and also not taking on the responsibility of somebody else’s values and self.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: So where that comes up mostly, you know, if you’re a guy going out at night, talking to random girls and hitting on them, where that's going to come up most is when women behave in ways that you find to be like rude or unenjoyable, because most men are so fixated on like, “I have to get a phone number, I have to try to have sex with her,” they really just overlook everything a girl might do that's kind of pissing them off. And as we talked about earlier, the irony in that is that it makes him less attractive because he's like letting all that go.

That's a common way. Flaking, like phone number flaking, is a huge way that guys do not assert their boundaries. You know, my whole approach to flaking, I think flakes are ridiculous. I think nobody should ever get them.

[Angel Donovan]: My theory on the flaking thing is that, you know, when that generally happens, I don’t know, when it wasn’t a weird situation or anything that… If everything was kind of normal and you did it straightforward, I think the flaking tends to be very low-self-esteem girls, right? Who don’t really kind of know what to do, because their whole world tends to be like shaken up on a minute-by-minute basis where someone calls them and their mind changes about something. So I think you can kind of tell when you meet someone that that's going to be a more flaky type of girl.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: And like coming back to what you were saying earlier, that's probably someone that you would like screen and you would move on and go and talk to someone else.

[Mark Manson]: Absolutely, and I mean, that's just another benefit of asserting these boundaries early on, because if you stand up for these boundaries early on, then you screen out all the women except for the high-self-esteem, emotionally mature women who actually like you. And high-self-esteem, emotionally mature women who actually like you are never going to flake on you, ever.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And if they do, they’re going to have a legitimate reason. They’re going to call you back and say, “I’m so sorry. Let's go out Wednesday instead.” And so I used to get criticized a lot because I’ve stood up and I said, “I never get flaked on, and you shouldn’t either.” And I got criticized a lot for that, but it’s really as simple as screening out the wrong women ahead of time and screening in the right women.

And then also, when it comes to asking for a phone number, I get a commitment right then and there because it’s… You know, the only reason you’re getting a girl’s phone number is so you can see here again. So like a lot of guys do this whole like, “Well, maybe we’ll hang out sometime and keep in touch and blah, blah, blah.” It’s like very soft and weak, and it’s very noncommittal.

And so if I’m getting a girl’s phone number, I’m getting it because I want to see her again, and if I want to see her again, I’m going to tell her and figure it out right then and there. So when I ask for a number, I say, “What are you doing this week?” And she’ll say, “I’m busy Tuesday but I’m free Wednesday.” And I say, “Awesome. Wednesday night we’re going to go to this wine tasting or this dance class or whatever,” and get her to agree to it right then and there, and then trade the phone numbers, and then say, “Awesome. Cool.” Done.

Because I think I came across this stuff, this strategy, just because I hate phones. Like I really… Like even with my friends and my family, I hate texting and I hate calling. But it’s just there's no reason to sit there and go back and forth on text for five days straight and like sit there and be like, “Well, she said she wanted to hang out but she’s busy, and then maybe Friday but she might have a thing Friday,” and like you’re just left in no man’s land for weeks at a time and it’s just a lot of wasted time and effort.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, good.

[Angel Donovan]: I think an area where people get confused about this also is in different types of relationships, because I’ve seen over the years many different styles of handling situations and setting boundaries, and this can depend on your philosophy. So this is also probably something a bit more for advanced guys. Right now we’ve got a bit more experience with women and have more complicated lives, but for instance, in the area where you have looser, more open relationships, maybe you’re seeing multiple girls, and something doesn’t go as you wanted, then you have many different ways to react to that.

So I’ll give you an example. So if you’re out at a party with one of the girls that you see loosely, you know, she knows you see other girls and she’s supposed to be allowed to do the same thing, and you know, she takes a liking to a guy at the party and she’s flirting with him and maybe even goes as far as her kind of disappearing with him at some time, what do you do about that? What is your standard in terms of… Is there a boundary she’s crossed or not?

So it’s kind of a pretty complex situation. And I want to kind of add the dimension, too, here, is that many people are in many different types of relationships, especially when it comes to this openness in relationships versus the typical exclusive kind. For example, one of the guys I know in Bangkok, his girlfriend is actually a hooker, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So she’s working and sleeping with guys, obviously, many nights in a week, and he's got to that stage where he's okay with that. He's completely fine with that, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So he has a very, very different standard, obviously, than someone who’s in an exclusive relationship. So like setting any standard and having a balance in it in a way is a little bit of a… can depend where you and the girl are at and what you’ve set as your expectations. So could you talk a little bit about that? Is that something you have ideas on?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. I think when you get into non-monogamous relationships or multiple non-monogamous relationships, it’s almost like… Like all this boundary stuff that we’re talking about, all this honest communication, being willing to open up, stand up for your values, not taking responsibility for the other person’s problems, all this stuff that we’ve been talking about the last hour and a half, obviously that helps monogamous relationships a lot, like it can make your monogamous relationships very, very successful. I would say for nonmonogamous relationships, it’s beyond that. It’s a prerequisite. Like you can’t even… If you don’t have this stuff put together, you’re not even going to maintain nonmonogamous relationships, because you have to be able to talk about this stuff. Like you have to be able to negotiate, “Okay, when is it okay for me to go out with another woman? When is sex with other people okay? When is it not?”

And I differentiate this between that kind of… Because there’s kind of like a gray area where you’re dating a number of girls and you’ve been dating them for, you know, say, a couple of months, and they all know that you’re not exclusive, but none of them know like how many girls you’re dating and who you’re having sex with and all that. You know, I see that as just part of the dating process, and when I’m in that phase, I let them know like, “Look, I like you a lot and I want to keep seeing you, but not committed at the moment or not monogamous at the moment, and it’s okay.” It’s just when you’re with them, you’re with them, and when you’re not with them, you know, when you’re with another girl, you’re only with that girl.

But when you get into these kind of polyamorous situations where you have an agreement, you’re like, “We are going to be a couple but we’re also allowed to date other people,” you have to be able to talk this stuff out. So the example you gave where you’re at a party with a girl and she ends up talking to another guy and kind of disappearing with him, if that bothers you, like if you have an expectation set with her that that's not okay, for instance, like if you two are both out at a social function, you two are there as a couple, if that is the expectation, then yes, that is a boundary that you need to assert. Like you need to go and talk to her and be like, “What the fuck are you doing?” and renegotiate or figure out where that discrepancy is.

If the expectation is, hey, you’re just friends and you have sex sometimes and you can do whatever you want, and she goes off with that guy and you find yourself getting a little bit jealous, then that is something that you need to figure out within yourself, say, “Why am I jealous? Do I like her more than I thought? Am I not up for this arrangement that we have? Maybe I should talk to her and tell her that I feel a little bit more for her.” So yeah, I mean self-awareness, strong boundaries, willingness to communicate, these things are all prerequisites, or else it’s going to get messy really fast.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Yeah, that sounds like good advice to me. Like some other advice that I’ve seen before is like, for instance, in that typical situation, is basically kind of to ignore it, so take it completely… I guess this would come more from… It’s not so much the pickup artists who were saying this, but basically to ignore it and just get on with life and have fun at the party and whatever, and when she comes back, kind of act that it never happened and just have fun, don’t cause any drama over it.

Now, I think what you’re saying is like don’t cause any drama about it, right? This whole approach shouldn’t be about setting boundaries in a way that causes drama or negativity, but it’s just basically in a cool manner establishing, like for instance, “Hey, I didn’t think this is something we’re doing,” right? At the party for instance.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: So in your case, what you say is like walk over to her, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute? Hey, I thought we weren’t kind of doing this stuff in front of each other,” or whatever kind of rule in a calm kind of conversation manner.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah, I would say if it doesn’t bother you or if you honestly don’t care, then don’t do anything about it. But if it does bother you or it confuses you, then yeah, you need to, A, figure out what about it that bothers you, is it that you’re jealous or is it that you thought the expectations were different, and then you need to talk to her about that and say, “Look, I thought the expectations were different. If you want to do that, that's fine. I just wasn’t aware, or look, I just want to know that that's going to be okay between us.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So, some good points from you there is basically, when you get to polyamory and multiple relationships, dating multiple women, it’s more complex, right? So there are no rules or typical standards how you should deal with anything. You really kind of have to just work it out based on how you feel about something, like if it’s okay with you or not, and with a degree of self-awareness of course.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You’re not going to start trying to enforce standards upon her and not abide by them yourself, which is kind of what some people do. So yeah, we’ll put that down to complexity and there are no specific rules, so you just have to kind of take it based on how you’re feeling. And it probably, you know, in those situations, you may have to take a bit of time to kind of figure out where you are at if it’s your first time in that kind of situation…

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …and think, you know, maybe take a bit of timeout and even take a day or two to think about how you feel about the situation and how you want to approach it going forward…

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. That's a really good point for I guess just things that trigger you emotionally in general…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: Because, you know, jealousy, boundaries, expectations, like sleeping on it, giving it 24 hours and then thinking about it, often gives you a lot more perspective and makes it much easier to go about it.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Awesome. Okay, so this is a question I fire at everyone and it’s your turn.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: What would you tell a complete newbie to dating, self-improvement, the whole thing, to focus on to improve his dating lifestyle and life as fast as possible? Give me your top three recommendations.

[Mark Manson]: I would tell him to get not just sexual but as much social and sexual experience as possible as soon as possible, just to broaden his horizons, meet new types of people, go to new events, try out new hobbies, take new classes, talk to people that he would never talk to, and start exploring as much as possible, as soon as possible. I would tell him to do…

The second thing I would say is like to drop the need to prove anything to anybody including himself. A lot of men get into this kind of fixated on like, “I’m 20 years old and I’ve never had a girlfriend,” or “I’m 25 years old and I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’m a loser. I have to prove to people I’m not a loser.” Yeah, it’s basically ego stuff, and that usually leads… I mean, if that's your motivation, it leads to kind of a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about like overcompensation, a lot of performance. And it can work in the short-term, but usually just it self-sabotages down the road, and you’re just much better off like saying, “You know what? Like this is an area of my life that I’m not experienced in, so I’m just going to explore it as much as possible and push things as much as possible for my sake, not to impress my friends, not to prove to my parents that I’m not gay, whatever, to just push it for my own experience and my own enjoyment.”

And then the third thing I would say, hmm, for a newbie, I would say err on the side of aggression. If you’re ever in a situation where you’re not sure like if she likes you or not, err on the side that she likes you. If you’re in a situation where you don’t know if you should kiss her or not, err on the side of kissing her. If you’re in a situation where you don’t know if she wants to have sex with you or not, err on the side of her wanting to have sex with you.

Because most newbies, most men who lack experience, they don’t know how to accept positive signals from women, and so they just get kind of lost and confused. And so it’s very helpful for them starting out to just, until there’s like a clear no, [laughs] assume it’s on. [Laughs] Until proven otherwise, assume she likes you.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent.

[Mark Manson]: So there you go.

[Angel Donovan]: Thanks for those, Mark. And that's that. We’ll be back next time. Thanks for being on the show, Mark.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been fun.