92: Stop Giving Access to Men Who Haven’t Earned It

Women keep giving girlfriend access to men who have not shown boyfriend-level consistency.

And emotionally unavailable men count on that.

In this episode, Darla breaks down why emotionally unavailable men push for access before they’ve earned trust, commitment, consistency, or emotional safety.

Because access is not intimacy.

And just because a man asks for something… does NOT make the request reasonable.

You’ll learn:

•  why emotionally unavailable men push boundaries early 
•  how guilt and pressure are used to negotiate access 
•  why standards trigger emotionally unavailable men 
•  the difference between standards, boundaries, and access 
•  how women accidentally teach men their boundaries are negotiable 
•  why emotionally willing men respond completely differently 

This episode also goes deep into:

•  over-giving 
•  reciprocity 
•  shared responsibility 
•  emotional labor 
•  fast-tracked relationships 
•  dismissive avoidants 
•  narcissistic manipulation 
•  and what happens when you finally stop accommodating unreasonable requests 

Because emotionally unavailable men don’t usually ask for connection first.

They ask for access. 

And if a man gets angry when access is denied, that tells you everything.

This episode is for the woman who is done:

•  negotiating her standards 
•  over-explaining her boundaries 
•  confusing chemistry for alignment 
•  giving access to men who haven’t earned it

Connect with Darla Ridilla: 

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3 Keys to Magnetizing Emotionally Available Men masterclass: https://www.highvaluewoman.info/masterclass

Website: https://www.highvaluewoman.info

Send me an email: highvaluewoman7@gmail.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Emotionally unavailable men don't usually ask for connection first. They ask for access. Women keep giving girlfriend level access to men who have not shown boyfriend level consistency. The moment you raise your standards, emotionally unavailable men are going to try to convince you that your standards are the problem. Access is not something a man is entitled to because he wants you. It's something that he earns by how he shows up. Welcome to You Have the Power, The Road to Truth Freedom and Real Connection. This podcast is for women who are done asking why emotionally unavailable men keep showing up and are finally ready to change the way they relate. The chemistry is always there, the potential looks promising, but the consistency, death, and emotional presence just never fully arrived. Because emotionally unavailable men are the problem. They're the feedback. And when you stop managing relationships that require you to disappear, emotionally willing men are magnetized to you. Let's begin. In our final episode of Reasonable versus unreasonable request series, we are going to talk about how we can hold our standards and our boundaries when we receive an unreasonable request. If you've been listening to this series, in episode one, we talked about the difference between what is reasonable and what is not reasonable. And in episode two of this series, we talked about the patterns that show up with emotionally unavailable men when they make an unreasonable request, or even if you do. But in this final episode and part three, we are just going to talk really about what holding standards looks like and how you can go from accommodating an unreasonable request to holding your standards and your boundaries. We're also going to talk about what happens when you stop giving unlimited access. And I want you to remember that your standards, they protect your peace and your boundaries are there to protect your standards. And both of those, your standards and your boundaries, are going to determine who gets access to you. And I also want to point out that this episode is about discernment. When it comes to situations in relationships and dating, women often confuse attention with connection. They think chemistry means safety. And they also think that giving access means they're creating intimacy. But for those women who are following the magnetic connections pathway, they know that presence means I'm giving too much too soon. Agency means I'm not available for that yet. And then empowerment, that's when she holds her boundaries calmly, without guilt and without overexplaining. She knows in order to have a magnetic connection that emotionally willing men are going to respect her standards and they're going to rise to meet them. Emotionally unavailable men, they're going to push for early access way before they've earned it. And they do this when they ask for sex too early. When they expect you to carry the emotional labor. And what I mean by that is you're doing all the work to do the relationship. He's not texting, but you're texting, you're calling, you're setting up the dates, you're putting up with his crap. You're carrying the load, and it's not a shared thing. Or maybe there's the other where he's love bombing you and he's texting you a lot. And there isn't any kind of pacing in the relationship or the dating experience. He's asking for sleepovers that goes with the sex. And that goes back to what I just said about giving girlfriend energy before it's been earned. He's asking for wife energy, like cooking, caretaking, exclusivity without giving you the consistency. Because the bottom line is he wants the benefits of the connection before he's demonstrated the capacity for it. And an emotionally unavailable man is often going to do this with certain tactics. He may exert pressure. He's going to fast track that relationship. And I was either with a narcissist or an avoidant, a dismissive avoidant specifically. They both fast tracked the relationship. There were two different reasons for that. A narcissist is doing it to manipulate you and hook you. An avoidant is doing it because they're feeling the dopamine hit and they're giving into it. Their intent isn't to hurt you, but that is what they do. Emotionally unavailable men are also going to guilt you. Let's just see where this goes. And you're making this complicated. You're asking for too much. They're making your needs seem unreasonable. And his reaction to your standards and your boundaries, I'll say it over and over again, will tell you everything. Because if he pushes back, that's very important information for you. If he doesn't, that's also important information. A boundary is going to reveal his character. Emotionally unavailable men are going to resist your standards. They're going to say they're too high. They're unreasonable. They're going to try to negotiate or step right over your boundaries. They're going to push. And they're going to shame you for holding them. They're going to tell you how unreasonable you are. And why do you have to be so rigid? Why are you such a bitch? They're going to try to guilt you for having your own needs. If you're dealing with the man-child, which often goes hand in hand with the emotionally unavailable, he's going to want relationship benefits without earning them or without showing responsibility for them. I found with dismissive avoidance, they go for sex and intimacy fast because that's how they connect. They don't want to connect with you emotionally, they want to connect with you physically because there again is the dopamine hit. When they're denied access, they are going to react. And it's not going to be in a positive way. I can remember even being promised by him for something he was going to do. And then when he didn't do it, holding him accountable. And he didn't want to be held accountable. He wanted to put the blame on me because they see standards as rejection. If I don't get what I want, they're like little children and they act out. And then if you're dealing with a narcissist, you know, the patterns are definitely manipulation, entitlement. They outright punish you when boundaries are enforced. My ex used to use silent treatment. That was his most effective tactic with me. Narcissists will try to get a lot of information and details about your life up front because their plan is to use it against you as a weapon in the future. And they often do this when a boundary is set. The bottom line is a man who benefits from your lack of boundaries will always struggle when you enforce them. And I always have believed that the people who have trouble with your boundaries are the very ones that you made them for. So if we break it down, what does this look like? Where do I even start? We want to start with our standards. And what that is, is what is it do you require? I'm going to just share with you what works for me. And you can take what resonates with you and leave the rest. So let's start with standards. Standards is sitting down with yourself in a quiet moment and asking yourself, what is it I require? What is it I need, and what is it I want? Without considering how others will react to that. Here are my standards. I'm looking for a life partner. I'm not interested in a short-term relationship. I want someone who is also looking for a life partner. I do want to be married again. I do not want to be divorced again. So I'm being very choosy. One of my standards is clear communication, consistency, reciprocation. And I have certain boundaries around those that I hold. And the boundaries are enforcing my standards. If you ask me out on a date and then you don't follow up, and especially if I don't hear from you for a week, you're not that interested in me. Your number gets blocked. You're done. Over. Because if a guy's really into you, he's not gonna stand you up for a date. He's not gonna breadcrumb you. He's not gonna say, let's get together sometime. Or he's not gonna say, like the one guy who said he wanted me to be a date at his Christmas party that was happening in a couple of days, he just needed to confirm the details and never did. And a week went by. Okay, you didn't meet my standard, you're done. You've already shown me who you are. I don't need any more information. I don't need you to abuse me, to show me that you're a monster. I have certain standards that are deal breakers right up front. And then I enforce it. I blocked his number after a week, done. I have no more interest in talking to you. It doesn't matter that you bought me breakfast the night we met and that things look promising because what looked like potential was not the reality, and I had to face that reality. And when someone meets your standards and they don't push back on your boundaries, or they do, that determines who gets access. Access is a privilege, trust is a privilege, and it's not just given, it's earned. If you set a boundary and immediately abandon it, you're also teaching people how they can treat you, that your standards are negotiable. Something that I did in my last relationship, and I realized now it would have ended anyway. I let him know what he could get away with. And they're like little children. If they get away with one thing, they're gonna push that line a little bit further the next time. So I got into an argument with my ex-boyfriend, and he did something that I didn't like. So I texted him because he was at work, and that was not the time to have the discussion. And I said, I'm not coming over tonight to spend the night, but we do need to have a video call because I need to talk to you about what happened and we need to resolve it. I'd already set the boundary. Your behavior is unacceptable. While we can work through it, because of that, there's a consequence. The conversation ended up going very well. What I should have done and said, I'm so glad we are able to work this out. I'm still not coming over because I told you that's what I would not do. I'll see you tomorrow. Instead, I got all wrapped up in, well, he showed up well. So I'm gonna go to his house and spend the night after all. What I just said is my standards are negotiable, my boundaries are negotiable. The next time I gave him an ultimatum, which is the night that I broke up with him. I gave him an ultimatum that he had to go to therapy and actively work on himself in order for me to stay in the relationship. I could see that there were patterns that needed to be addressed. And I was willing to give him that opportunity to better himself, but he chose not to. He had even said he would do it, and two days later, he withdrew his promise. And I had to act on my ultimatum. I said I would leave the relationship if he didn't go to therapy. And I packed up my stuff immediately. He did offer to help me drive my things. I had several things at his house, and so he I didn't have enough room in my car for everything and my dog. So he offered to also fill his vehicle and drive home with me. And when we got to my house and we unloaded everything, I looked at him and I said, Did you think that I was going to go back on my boundary and let you stay? And he said, Yes, I did. And I remembered that night I actually had on a smaller issue. And I realized that in some ways I gave him permission to step on my boundaries because I let him do it in the past. And sometimes when we talk about reasonable versus unreasonable requests and our boundaries around them, sometimes it's not always black and white. And sometimes there is a gray area. A request in one context could be unreasonable, but that same request in another context is actually good and reasonable. You know, if we talk about a couple of different examples, let's say that a woman has decided she's going to be a stay-at-home wife or mom. She has a talk with her partner or her husband, and they both mutually agree. And here's the key they mutually agree that he's going to be the breadwinner of the home. She's going to stay home to take care of the household and possibly the children. His expectation that she's going to do all the cooking and cleaning and household management is reasonable. Because, first of all, they've mutually agreed to it, but it also matches the agreement and the capacity. If she is not bringing in any income and he's bringing all of it in, I feel it is reasonable for him to expect her to do it all. I'm not saying that she shouldn't get a break every once in a while, especially when she's ill. You know, there are exceptions to that role as well. But as a day-to-day expectation, he's going to his job, which is outside of the home. She stays home and that's her job. But if you take that same expectation, and this happens way too often, where the woman is expected to do all the household management, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, even when both of them are working. That same request and expectation is unreasonable. The expectation becomes unreasonable because now the responsibilities need to be shared. If he's working and she's working, it's not fair to expect her to do a quote unquote second shift in a second job. So this is where the two of you need to sit down and have that conversation about what is each of your capacities. Where can there be fairness and reciprocity? What are our schedules? And what are the realistic expectations of each person? And how can we show up as partners and not dictators? Because expectations that ignore reality are really just pressure. In my first marriage, I was a working mom, but I did take eight weeks of maternity leave. My husband went back to work during those last six to seven weeks that I was home with a baby. I had a lot on my plate. I was breastfeeding, so I was up every three or four hours around the clock feeding her. When he came home in the evening, I asked that he take care of our baby daughter for a few hours to give me a break. Yes, he'd been working all day, but this was a little bit different in intensity because, as women know, a newborn, there's there's no time off. There's no time for a nap. There's no time to get the dishes done. There's no time to just sit and be quiet. And so I asked for just a few hours a night because overnight I was back on quote unquote duty. I couldn't ask him to get up in the middle of the night to feed the baby. He had to go to work the next morning. So I wasn't getting any sleep. I needed some reciprocity when it came to the parenting responsibilities, the housework. I needed emotional and physical recovery and support. And he actually did this really well. He was great at sharing the responsibilities. And that was a reasonable request on my part based on the reality and the capacity of both of us. Something that really gets under my skin, and I feel is very demeaning, is when we talk about men, quote unquote, helping. When we need help emotionally and physically in our household, the man stepping in isn't doing us a favor. It's his responsibility, particularly if there's children involved. Because a father's not helping with his own child, he's participating in the life that he created. And even if it's not his child or you don't have children, it's a partnership. That means both people contribute and participate in a level that both of you decide is fair to each of you. And this is where we have to have teamwork. We have to have shared ownership and we have to have reciprocity. So if you fast forward to my third marriage, my ex and I decided mutually that for a few months I wasn't going to work. He had a very demanding job. Um, he did in-home health care with elderly people. And so he would actually go live with his client for four days and come home for four days. And he was so drained, it took him probably an entire day just to recover physically and emotionally from his job. And during that time period where and I wasn't working, I took it upon myself to do all the housework, to do all the cooking and cleaning. He didn't ask that of me. I gave it and I gave it willingly. And I I it was for me, it was an aligned choice. During those four days where he was working a very intense job, I was home by myself. The intention during that time was when I was going to write a book that didn't happen. But I wanted to make sure when he came home, he didn't have anything that needed his attention. I always made sure the house was clean. I would time his dinner to be ready when he'd walk in the door. And I did it from my heart, not because it was an unreasonable request. I did it because I felt I not necessarily owed it to him, but it was it was a gift I wanted to give him to show my appreciation. Not only was he carrying all the household expenses, he had offered to pay some debt payments for me that he didn't accumulate. They were from a previous marriage that I was struggling financially to get through because I wasn't working. And so that was part of the agreement that he was going to do that for me. I felt it was my way of showing my gratitude was to take care of him for doing that. And I didn't feel resentful and I didn't feel diminished because it goes back to what I said before. We agreed on it, it matched the reality, and it was chosen freely by both of us, and it was aligned, and that same behavior can feel loving in one relationship and self-abandoning in the other. And that is why context matters. And when it comes to reasonable versus unreasonable request, emotionally unavailable men and emotionally willing men are gonna react very differently to those standards and boundaries. An emotionally unavailable man is gonna push for access, even when it's not earned. He's gonna resist your Standards and try to guilt you out of your boundaries. And he will create pressure in a variety of ways. He does this because he wants access and benefits from you before he's given you commitment and consistency and before he's earned it. And he sees your boundaries as obstacles to the things that he wants. But an emotionally willing man, he's actually going to respect your pacing in a relationship. If you say you you only want to see him once a week for the first month to get to know him, he's not going to push to see you two or three times a week. Even if he really is into you. Because he's going to honor those boundaries. He's going to value consistency. If he says he's going to call you on Thursday at six, he's going to call you on Thursday at six. And he's going to reciprocate effort. It's going to be an equal give and take. He's going to invest in you and he's going to invest in the relationship. He actually's going to feel safer around you because you do have standards. Because a woman that doesn't, she could be emotionally unavailable. She's not stable. She's not grounded. She doesn't know what she wants. Because an emotionally willing man wants a woman who knows what she wants and she's willing to wait for it. He also understands the trust is built over time. And when trust is built, access is received. Because your boundaries, they don't push the right man away, they reveal who he is. When a woman isn't grounded in her boundaries and her standards, she'll say things to herself like I need to accommodate him so he doesn't leave. But a woman who's empowered and knows what she wants and is willing to wait for it, she will say, I hold my standards calmly so the right man has space to reveal himself. If a man walks away because you don't give him immediate access, he was never aligned for deeper connection in the future. The right man is not going to resent your boundaries, he's going to respect them. Emotionally willing men aren't looking for shortcuts to access. They're looking for ways to build connection with you. And you are not being difficult or unreasonable for requiring reciprocity from him. And you're not asking for too much. You're learning to stop giving too much too soon. When you're coming from an empowered state, your standards are that you are not chasing him. You are not trying to prove to him how valuable you are, because you already know that. You're not negotiating your standards. So someone else chooses you. You are learning how to hold your standards with a backbone. And this is so you stop attracting the emotionally unavailable men and you start recognizing the emotionally willing ones. And if this episode hits something deeper in you, I'm going to ask you to book your magnetic connections call. It's where we look at your patterns, where your boundaries are, where you're giving access, and talk about where you're giving away your access too quickly and what needs to shift in you so you can start attracting that aligned magnetic connection instead of entertaining emotional confusion. If you're ready to stop giving in to unreasonable requests and you're ready to know what your standards are, determine your boundaries and hold them, book a call. And speaking of standards with a backbone, just a little teaser for our next episode, we are going to be starting a whole new series called Standards with a Backbone. In episode one, we're going to be talking about how chemistry is not commitment. And this is where so many women get trapped and they confuse that emotional intensity with emotional safety. We're going to talk about why emotionally unavailable men like to create that fast chemistry and why your nervous system mistakes it for alignment and why consistency matters more than the spark. Because chemistry without consistency creates attachment, but not connection. You have the power. So now it's time to act like it. Thank you for listening to You Have the Power, the Road to Truth, Freedom, and Real Connection. If something landed while you were listening, pay attention to that. Emotionally unavailable men aren't a mystery to solve. They're information. They show you exactly where you've been waiting, minimizing, or tolerating what doesn't actually work for you. This podcast isn't here to teach you how to handle that better. It's here to help you stop participating in it. Share it and subscribe.