Spotting Red Flags
By Frank Kermit When you are on a date, and the person you are getting to know says or does something that triggers a well-honed instinct that you need to stop dating that person, you have just spotted a RED FLAG. Having the ability to weed out potential problem daters at an early onset is the best we can hope for. Wasting time with the wrong individual hurts everyone involved: you, the wrong individual and your ideal soul mate who does not have the opportunity to date you yet, because your time is taken up by that wrong person. There are two types of red flags. The first is Universal Red Flags, which are general bad signs by nature, which do not depend on the context of your situation. These would include red flags such as your partner needing to get drunk or stoned before being able to commit any act of socialization or intimacy. It has nothing to do with whether or not you have any prejudice regarding drug use for your potential partners. It has to do with the fact that this kind of behavior will tend to get progressively worse over time, as your relationship continues to grow, get more intimate, and garner higher expectations from each other. The second type of red flag to be on the look out for is Personal Red Flags. These are completely context dependent because they are based on your own personal set of boundaries and deal-breakers which you simply will not compromise on. For example, if you are deathly allergic to a particular pet, and the person you are dating practically runs an animal rescue out of their home apartment which specializes in sheltering that kind of pet, then it does not matter what ever else you both connect on, how attracted you are to each other, and how kind you both are individually. The red flag in this dilemma is more than apparent and will eventually crush any future plans. At odds in this particular example are conflicting values: a life's calling to save animals verse a person's need to stay alive. When a red flag is based on a personal boundary, there is no room for compromise. If there is any room for compromise, then by default, it is not even a boundary, and surely not a red flag. In order to be able to spot these kinds of red flags, a person must know what the can and cannot tolerate, and also have the ability to enforce such boundaries. How someone treats animals can be a red flag. It is well document that many serial killers started out torturing and killing animals before they escalated to humans. The way someone treats an animal, may be a sign of how they will treat a vulnerable human being. Personal hypocrisies are another universal red. It is when a person lives with a double standard where they say one thing, but live another. For example, a person may rage against the perils of pornography but yet have their own private porn collection tucked away in a secret stash. Simply put it is an indication that there may be a repeating behavior pattern in place such that you simply cannot trust anything that person says. Shifting boundaries is another universal red flag. When something is unacceptable one day, and more than acceptable the next day, the confusion that this repeating behavior pattern can draw out in relationship will lead to frustration and resentment. This is not about being or not being in the mood for a certain behavior, but more to do with the level of whether or not it is acceptable. For example, let us consider humor. When you have the same basic sense of humor where your partner laughs really hard at a certain kind of joke one day, and tells you how funny it is, but then goes off the handle saying those kinds of jokes are simply not appropriate in any context the very next day with nearly the very same joke: red flag. This could be a sign of a shifting boundary, which unto itself is already a red flag, but it could potentially be a sign for something more serious that would require the competency of a trained psychotherapist. Some universal red flags are easy to spot such as infidelity and violence in past relationships indicating there is a higher chance of it happening to you. Other universal red flags are harder to spot because of certain social norms that make the warning signs acceptable. One such red flag is Gender Bashing. Just because most people are attracted to the opposite gender does not mean that all of those same people LIKE the opposite gender. Misogyny is misogyny, whether veiled in humor or not. Male bashing is still gender hate, even if touted as an entitlement for a history of oppression. If you are dating someone that constantly bashes your gender, it is foolish to think you will be the exception in their lives for the way they interpret you and your gender identity. If every single relationship you have ever had, and every person you have ever dated turned out to be a dud in one sense or another, then it is time to focus on the common element in every single one of those instances: the common element of YOU. It says you have not yet learned to identify red flags early enough to put the breaks on your romantic endeavors with the wrong people. However, it is never to late to start learning today Frank Kermit
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Online Dating: The Digital Fantasy meets Flesh and Reality By Frank Kermit Online dating is no longer the scary thing it used to be. The stigma has passed. The stereotypical image of the teenager forever hogging the one phone line in the house has been replaced by the young adult that is too busy texting multiple friends to notice where they are going as they walk into ongoing traffic. In fact, younger generations are starting to feel more at ease with relating to each other through technology than they do in a person-to-person encounter. What will this hold for our future family builders? Time will tell. In the meantime, new technologies will also end up being just one more medium where boys and girls find themselves connecting. OK, this is the scenario: You meet a great person months ago through a friend on Facebook. You don't do this type of thing EVER, but this person seems very intelligent and there is something interesting about them. You live in separate cities, but that does not stop you. You start exchanging some private messages that turn into long texts and then phone conversations. You are getting along very well. Things are going great and you find yourself in a long distance relationship with someone that you have not actually met in person. Soon, you start swapping sexy photos with promises of more sizzling excitement yet to come. Finally, one day, you decide that you are going to visit that special someone in your life for the first time. You meet, you have a great time, and you even have sex. Wow! Could life get any better? You agree to continue the romance after you return home. You start to think to yourself that you have finally found someone, and that maybe it's time for one of you to live with the other. All of a sudden the phone calls become less frequent. The texts become less personal, and you haven't spotted a sexy pic of your true love in your email thread since you can't remember when. You ask if everything is OK? Your partner tells you everything is fine, but you know it's not like it was before. Finally it becomes clear that the only time you communicate is when you initiate it, otherwise it could be days if not weeks before you get a hello (or a poke or a wink depending on what social networking site you use.) You can feel it slipping away, so you decide to make one last ditch attempt and tell your future "spouse" how you are feeling and how important that person is to you. In response, your future spouse tells you that time is needed to think about the relationship and where it is going. Just a few months ago, that person couldn't get enough of you, but now? You fear the worst and wonder if there is someone else. Did you do something wrong? What could have possibly happened when things were going so great? Is it you or is it the other person? Online dating does have some major flaws that come with the medium. Aside from the potential dangers that generally exist when you meet anyone new that moves from the stranger to the lover position, online relationships struggle mostly because they are not real relationships. So much of what makes an online relationship work, especially if you factor in long distance and very little actual time together, is that most of where that relationship exists in your head. It is not based on reality, but often on what you want the other person to be. When reality collides with fantasy reality will always win. People who thrive in online relationships might be doing so as a means to avoid any actual intimacy. Easier to deal with people that you don't actually have to be with. When the reality of how a person really is around you does not, and simply can't, live up to the fantasy you have built in your mind as to who the other person is; it is just a matter of time before you have to acknowledge your feelings. The cold slap of reality is that the person you had feelings for might never have actually existed in real life. Frank Kermit Focus On The Person, Not The Location, Of Your Date By Frank Kermit I have been on Montreal CJAD AM radio as a regular contributor for years now on the Passion radio show with Dr Laurie Betito. In that time I have made a number of statements about my own stance and opinions on dating and relationships based both on my practice and my personal experiences. Some of my comments earn praise, and some others get the introspective discussion, and some get trashed. There is one bit of advice that I have given out over the years, that seems to have garnered a tremendous amount of backlash, and to be Frank (pun intended), I am actually shocked that of all the advice I dole out, that it is this one nugget that repeatedly gets brought up again and again. The fact that I think that first dates ideally should be inexpensive and people should pay for their own share, has earned me the wrath of audiences, more than any other topic I have ever talked about, including managing friends-with-benefits, open relationship dating, multi-partner sex, sharing sexual pasts, and sexual fetish lifestyles combined. I believe that it all started with questions about first dates, what constituted a date, where is an appropriate location for a date, cost of a date and so on. I said something to the effect that any location is fine for a first date and giving a fast food restaurant (McDonalds) as an example. You’d have thought I was endorsing a threat to national government security with the rage it enticed. One woman actually wrote to me privately claiming that, “No one falls in love at McDonalds you Dufus!” (One of the nicer messages I assure you) When you go out on a date, what is your goal? Are you looking for someone to pay your way to high priced dinners at fancy restaurants, or are you looking to go on a date to find a compatible partner to fulfill some role you desire? If your goal is to just get more “stuff” (meals, gifts, attention) the only people you will attract are the kinds of people that only have “stuff” to give, and will have their own expectations of what should be “owed” to them (The good news is that people who use people regularly end up with people who use people). If your goal is to find a partner to share some aspect of your life, then if you know how to manage dating (which most people do not) the location of the date becomes almost irrelevant. So yes Virginia, you can fall in love anywhere. So who should pay for a first date? Yes, there is an etiquette that suggests that the person who is doing the inviting should cover the cost of a date. I have found that a high number of women tend to strongly endorse this etiquette. Understandable given the fact that even in a modern society of equality between genders, men are still the primary gender that is expected to ask out women on a date. Men seem to fall into two distinct categories. There are men who truly respect women as equals and thus expect women to be capable of paying their own share until such a time as the couple moves from casual dating to something more serious (at which point joint expenses have their own rules). Then there are men who believe a man should pay for a first date because either they view themselves as being a gentleman in paying, or more insidious, they still view women as needing to be handled much like children, who could not possibly take care of themselves. Though, most men would not openly admit it because they are not Frank enough (again, pun intended), there are few other areas of life where someone wanting what could be interpreted as special treatment is ever looked upon with the respect of an equal. If you are heading out on a date, and are more concerned with judging the location of the date, instead of focusing on the person you are dating, your focus is on the wrong element. The WORST thing that could happen to you is that you end up in a serious relationship with someone that used the razzle-dazzle of showcasing during those first few dates just to get you committed, and who turns out is too incompatible for you seven months later. Was the razzle-dazzle worth the lost time of months (could be years) with the wrong person? That is up to you. One thing I can tell you for an absolute certainty. It certainly was the worst thing that has happened to some older clients of mine that come into my office, because they are shocked by being single (and usually child-free) at an age where they thought they would have already had their own families, and ask me for help to answer their overwhelming question of “Frank, What Happened?” Frank Kermit What Seeking Arrangements Does Not Tell You: The Secrets of Seeking Arrangements By Frank Kermit Originally written in 2015, updated April 24, 2018 Seeking Arrangements is a website that calls itself a dating site that targets young, attractive women in their late teens and early twenties, to help them meet financially established, usually older men who want to trade major financial support (averaging 3000$ a month) for a negotiated form of companionship. It entices the girls by describing the men as financially stable, experienced in dating, willing to pamper with shopping sprees and expensive gifts and travels, and also potentially offering valuable guidance and mentoring (i.e. career-wise) aiming for long term stability. It entices the men involved by describing the benefits of no strings attached relations, readily available girls at his discretion, and that the number of sugar babies to sugar daddies is a whopping 8 to 1. On the one hand, as long as everyone involved is an adult, and enters into such an agreement of their own free will, then the only real issue is whether or not such an arrangement is legal where the two adults live. There are places where prostitution is perfectly legal and The Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby set up isn't actually all that different from prostitution. To understand what makes the Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby set up similar to prostitution is that when a sugar daddy falls on hard times, loses his source of income or tries to negotiate a lower rate of exchange; it is very likely that his pseudo girlfriend can no longer offer him that brand of companionship and quickly ends the arrangement. The fact that it is just like prostitution in this regard is not the problem. I do not believe in judging anyone for entering into the sex trade; because everyone has their own reasons to take part it in (both the sex-worker and the client). To be clear, I believe the prostitution should be decriminalized and have nothing against people that pay for sex and companionship, and the people that provide the services of sex and companionship. As long as everyone is a consenting adult, and they are made aware of the consequences of their involvement, not just the positives.
There are ramifications to taking part of this lifestyle that only come to the attention of those involved when it is too late. For the girls involved these risks may include living with the possibility that someday in the future, their involvement in this could be revealed and affect them in ways they never considered. For example, if they wanted to keep it a secret from a her future employer, life partner or her children's friends but it was made public because a former sugar daddy (or someone with access to his estate) upload evidence on the Internet of her time as a sugar baby. Some former sugar babies end up struggling financially, because they become so accustom to the lavish lifestyle their sugar daddies offered, that having to work for a living, usually making less money, causes them to rack up debt very quickly. Just because she is being taken care of now, does not mean she is being taught to be independent. Trying to find a sugar daddy when she is older, and beyond the demographic of the sugar daddy target audience, becomes a terrible rude awakening for these women. It is not a coincidence that Seeking Arrangements and other services like it specifically aim to recruit young, attractive women in their early twenties. Older women in those circles are more expected to take on the role of a Sugar Mommy and offer support to younger, attractive men. It is the same arrangement, with the reversal of genders. Finally those of my female clients that were former sugar babies, now struggle with finding a life partner in part because her standards are so high and out of proportion with the kinds of men that would actually date her, and those men she would be interested in dating, would not want to date her given her past as a sugar baby, or they are too shallow to date a woman closer to his own age. Although some sugar babies are getting degrees in higher education, not all are, and not all sugar babies finish their degrees. Many of them may even not be considering how the gaps in their resume will affect them. How does she explain how she made a living during certain periods of her life, yet has no work experience to show for that time? It is because of such gaps, these women struggle to find work outside of the sex industry. (Sugar baby isn't exactly a high-ranking resume credential for jobs outside of sex work). One sex worker I interviewed for an old audio production I did, stated that this particular snafu was one of the reasons that made it so challenging for working girls to get out of the business. The consequences for the men involved are different. It seems there is less of a stigma for men that pay for the services of the sex industry, than there is for the girls who work in the sex industry. The real risk in paying for companionship, attention, and sex, is that it dulls a man's ability to know what is socially acceptable behavior on an actual date. Those of my male clients who were involved for years with such arrangements get used to being told what they want to hear, thus they never learn through legitimate social experience that their behavior is actually creepy and turns women off. When these men behave exactly the same way, dating women they are not paying to be there, they get their own rude awakenings through massive rejection and abandonment, never understanding what they did wrong. Real life dating is as much a learning experience about social acceptability as it is to find a compatible partner. When a man pays for sex as the outcome, and it is a pre-determined guarantee regardless of what he says or how he behaves, he does not learn how to attract or interact with women in a way that encourages a woman to want to continue spending time with him (let alone have sex). When trying to understand the true nature of what the girls involved should expect seeking an arrangement, I would tell them this: If a man only wanted the companionship of a woman who was not interested in having sex with him, he could easily do so with every woman who he asked out and rejected him, but who offered to stay just-friends. And even in those cases, some men still stuck around hoping to get more from her than she was offering. Be careful out there folks. If you had a Sugar Arrangement and are struggling to get back into the regular dating realm, sign up for Frank Coaching. Frank Kermit P.S. I was quoted in another article about the Sugar Baby Industry. Please go see Sugar Daddies: The Quick Cash
#sugarbaby #sugarbabybeauty #sugarbabyneeded #sugarbabylifestyle #sugarbabywebsite #sugarbabywanted #sugarbabylife #sugarbabysecond #sugarbabybear #sugarbabybearfriends #sugarbabyproblems #sugarbabylove #sugarbabydating #Sugarbaby #sugardaddy #sugardaddyapp #sugardaddysite #sugardaddymeet #sugardaddyseekinghissugarbaby #sugardaddyrelationship #sugardaddyallowance #sugardaddyfinder #sugardaddytravel #sugardaddywebsite #Sugardaddys #sugardaddydating #SugarDaddy #sugardaddyhunting #sugardaddyseeking #sugardaddysnightclub #sugardaddyforme #sugardaddysites #sugardaddyfoundation #sugardaddyhunters #sugardaddywanted #sugardaddysnyc #sugardaddygoals #sugardaddydatingsite #sugardaddyneeded #seekingarrangement #sugardaddy #sugardaddydating #sugardaddywanted #sugardaddies #paytoplay #cashcow #callgirls #blondegirls #polishgirls #workinggirls #hookers #payyourbills #money #formoney #girlsjustwannahavefunds #howtomarryamillionaire #spoilsme #spoiledme #letstalksugar #allowance #sugarbaby #sugargirl #sugardaddyneeded #mysugardaddy #visual #artist #seeking #patron The Ashley Madison Affair Re-thinking our relationships and the practice of monogamy By Frank Kermit Ashley Madison, a website that caters to individuals in seemingly monogamous relationships and who are looking for a discreet affair, has been hacked. This means that the discretion and secrecy promised to its membership has been compromised, with full personal information of customers now made publicly available for anyone to download them. The aftereffects, according to various media sources, include suicide of those exposed (at least two thus far attributed directly to the hack), cheating partners confessing their indiscretions to prepare partners for the fallout, a number of people targeted for extortion who are blackmailed into either paying up or having their information further exposed to family and friends, credit card cancellations to avoid illegal identity thefts, a growing number of lawsuits against the website and a big reward offered by the company that owns Ashley Madison to help catch the hackers responsible for the revelation. What is not so publicized is that not everyone uncovered in this scandal is a person in a monogamous relationship attempting to have a secret affair. Single men and women looking for casual sex with other singles do join this kind of site. Also overlooked are couples that agree to have some kind of non-monogamous relationship and find it easier to discover other open-minded individuals through a site like Ashley Madison rather than attempt to find discreet partners through other means. I wonder how some of the couples affected by this will cope. Affairs unto themselves do not necessarily end relationships. It is how a couple copes with the broken trust and how they examine the lack of fulfilling emotional needs that will determine whether or not their relationship will survive this challenging issue. In moments of crisis, we may find new opportunities to reach a level of honesty with ourselves and our partners that could put an end to behaviors of betrayal and potentially help rebuild our relationships on more solid foundations. Maybe it is time for some individuals to accept that monogamy is simply not something they are capable of or interested in pretending to exemplify anymore, or to recognize that they have taken their partner for granted and fostered extreme neglect that pushed them away. Perhaps what could be the most desirable outcome of this entire situation is that, with the right guidance, singles and couples struggling with fidelity may finally learn to be honest with others about their sexual needs and questioning whether they may or may not have neglected their partner’s needs, which led in part to their current predicament. Surely the one thing most people can agree on in the aftermath of this revelation is that, if so many people publicly identify as monogamous but aren’t actually practicing monogamy, then maybe we all need to re-think our relationships and expectations as a society regarding monogamy. One sure thing that my practice of coaching has proven time and time again is that people and relationships are much more complex than the sensationalism mass media would rather you focus on. More to the point, monogamy is not for everyone, and neither is a non-monogamous relationship. However, people can make either relationship structure work with the right partner. It takes being honest with themselves first, and learning to communicate their needs to their partners. One sure thing that my practice of coaching has proven time and time again is that people and relationships are much more complex than the sensationalism mass media would rather you focus on. While some in the public are praising the hacker group who committed this act in the name of some moral calling, I cannot help but wonder what their next target will be. Their motivation is based on what they find immoral, which means anyone doing anything that is counter to their personal code of ethics could be targeted. Will abortion clinics be next? Perhaps it will be hospital records, to reveal patient medical conditions because of some righteous stance on what diseases are more culpable to have than others, or government offices willing to file marriages (same-sex, inter-faith, inter-race, age-gap) that they disapprove of. Could we see a shaming campaign against sexually active adults who are members of regular dating websites? Perhaps disrupting legal proceedings will be next because some hackers out there feel that divorce proceedings are contrary to their code of ethics. Evidently, the hacker groups are powerful enough to carry about these threats. Something to think about if you happen to be amusing yourself with the effects of watching people’s lives unfold in the wake of the hacking of Ashley Madison. Frank Kermit |
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