Episode 20: When American Dating Fails, Go Global

I'm navigating new beginnings while reflecting on past relationships and helping my adult children find their paths.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Website brandonheld.com now launched with podcasts being uploaded incrementally
• Memory challenges affecting creative process and retention of episode ideas
• Identification as an audio-visual learner who struggles with reading-based education
• Reflection on three past marriages and what each relationship taught me
• Introduction to international dating through watching 90 Day Fiancé
• Experience with dating sites connecting Americans with international partners
• Disappointing experience with a Colombian woman who never showed for our meeting
• Struggle to guide my son Ethan toward stable career options while respecting his choices
• Challenges balancing new job requirements with time for my younger children

Intro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:24

Welcome back to Brandon How Life is Crazy. This is episode 20. We are reaching the end of my outlined podcast and I will be trying to come up with some other ideas for future episodes. I have currently started my website, Brandon, and I was able to Start uploading some of my podcasts. I'm going to do it incrementally. I don't want to do it too quickly because the cadence I want to have is two times a week, ideally. And frankly, I just need more ideas for episodes to be able to keep up with that cadence. I'm really creative for some weird reason at night laying in bed. Or when I wake up in the middle of the night and my brain's going wild. But then I don't write stuff down and I forget. I know I've had ideas for future episodes. I know I've had thoughts that have crossed my mind on good topics to discuss or cover. And I've already forgot them. Forget them within minutes because that is one thing that goes with you when you get older. And that is your memory. Not that my memory was ever great because it certainly was never great. I definitely had strong times, strong points in my twenties. My memory was pretty good and I was very good at remembering things that were important to me, but I've never had a really great rope memorization skills. Just when I need to get in and test for school, like it didn't behoove me to study days and weeks in advance because I just didn't retain that memory. I was someone who always had to crash study, not because I'm a procrastinator. I'm quite the opposite of a procrastinator. I like to get things done and get them over with. And when they're looming over my head, And then to be done, it's almost like this anvil that's sitting on my shoulder weighing me down. And so I prefer to get things done right away whenever possible. And I couldn't do that when preparing for tests. I had to do the kind of last minute night before cramming and studying and then the next day. cramming and studying and tried to jam all this stuff in my memory so I could recall it quickly because my long-term rote memorization skills just sucked. Maybe I was studying wrong. Someone who probably knows much more about remembering things than I do, which I have looked into different ways to remember things, would probably know What I would need to do differently to have a better memory in those regards. That's why I really struggled with, say, Spanish. Because you have to memorize the words. How are you going to speak in Spanish if you can't memorize words? That was an issue for me. And it was definitely something that I had to do. And I just couldn't. I couldn't remember all the different words in Spanish, so therefore I couldn't speak Spanish very well. Anyway, I went off on a tangent there. Maybe you're someone that has memory issues and you're someone who doesn't understand, or maybe you think you're all alone. You're definitely not. We all have different ways of learning. I'm definitely an audio visual type of learner. Oh, the perfect scenario for me is a video, right? It hits two parts. It hits what I can see and what I can hear. The worst way for me to learn, the absolute worst is reading. I can't stay focused. I can't concentrate. And I'll get through three pages and my brain will be somewhere else. My eyes will have read the words and I will be turning the pages. And then I'll realize, oh man, I just haven't retained anything that I just read and I'll have to go back and read again. So that's a little bit why the way education works bothers me and it definitely needs to be updated and reformed to match all the different learning styles and learning types just because Not everyone can read a book and learn from that book and turn that knowledge into memory and knowledge and be able to repeat that back on a test. Doesn't mean they're not completely capable of being intelligent in other ways and being a high contributor to some type of career or society. It's just Tom Cruise dropped out of high school. So what's Tom Cruise worth? Probably half a billion dollars, if I had to guess, maybe more. And he dropped out of high school. I know that's a one in a billion story, but it's still a point. There are plenty of people that are not highly, quote unquote, educated by school. who have done well in life. Unfortunately for me, I needed that education to open doors for me. And then I just needed my own work ethic and ability to apply myself to keep those doors open or open new doors along with that experience. So now moving on, here I am in my new role, my new job. As we've established, so I'm back on my feet. My health is getting better. I'm starting to work out again. And now I have unburdened myself, whether by choice or force, of this unhealthy, bad relationship that I was in. And I believe in love. You have to believe in love. If you don't believe in love, you don't get married. I was divorced three times and I am married a fourth time, which I will get to at some point. But you don't do that if you don't believe in love. You also just don't do that lightly. At least I didn't. When I got divorced the first time, I never said I'm never going to get married again because I knew what that was. For me, it was a situation that just was what it was. I knew it was never a lifelong situation, but the second time I got divorced after a short marriage that was an ultimatum, I really believed I was never going to get married again. I just thought marriage isn't for me. I just spent five years with someone who at the time I thought was terrible. the biggest love of my life that I would never love anyone like I loved her. But that just obviously turned out not to be true. And the third time around I went with someone that I thought was a more safe, stable option because she wasn't this beauty queen that my second wife was, but she was someone who was really into me and seemed at the time to be loyal and just really wanted me as a part of her life by the way she treated me, by the things she said to me. And we made that work for 12 years. But in the end, it didn't work either. And I got married in that case thinking it was going to be my future, my life. She decided to end it and that's okay. Life goes on. It was tough. And here I was at this point now, three divorces, another girlfriend that I knew I was never going to marry. But I was trying to, I don't know. I don't know what I was doing. I just didn't want to end it yet because I felt like I owed her. And I'm not saying I ever would have. And for all I know, maybe we would have stayed boyfriend and girlfriend for many years by my side. logic and reasoning, but she was super religious and getting married was important to her. And I knew that wasn't something I was going to do. So that was over. And I had been watching a show called 90 day fiance and while watching that show, I saw a few things that made that appealing to me. One, I saw Women from another country, they were just different than American women, indifferent in some good ways, in my opinion. They still had some more what I consider old-fashioned values, where the man should be the head of the household and the man should take care of the family while the wife... as more of a wife and a mom. They cared more about their appearance and upkeep, which is something I've always cared about for myself, is my health and my appearance. I'm pretty vain, that's the truth. You don't try to stay in good shape just because you want to live to be 100. You also stay in good shape because you feel better about yourself for whatever reason. That works for you. And for me, being fit and strong and looking in the mirror and being proud of what I look at matters to me. And I feel like a lot of that's been lost in this country. And then even when you find it in the small world. options that are limited to find, I have found myself not to be compatible with those women for whatever reason. That was one reason. Another reason was I was seeing these beautiful women with these not so good looking American men. And I was thinking, I'm not a bad looking guy, so... You know, if these guys can get a beautiful woman, I'm sure I could meet a beautiful woman from another country. And finally, thirdly, I thought at that time, I've just gotten onto two ugly things and I could use the type of relationship where. We don't just dive in head first and we're just like immediately spending all our time together or living together or whatever the case may be. But there were some downsides I didn't think about getting into something like that. And I'll talk about that as I go along. But I was thinking mostly of the positive. And so watching 90 Day Fiancé made me really feel like the next person woman I want to be with is going to be from another country. I got some money now. I can travel. I can go see her wherever she's at. And I joined two sites. I joined internationalcupid.com and I joined braziliancupid.com because I specifically thought Brazilians were beautiful based off of this one Brazilian on 90 Day Fiancé whose name was Juliana. And she was with a guy named David and he was like 50 something. And she was this young 22 year old model and she was beautiful. And I thought Brazilian women are beautiful. There's a lot of famous, beautiful Brazilian women. So I specifically wanted to look for a Brazilian, but I also looked across the world. And so initially I was talking to women from everywhere, literally everywhere, Ukraine, China, Philippines, Japan, Africa. I wasn't really talking to women in Africa, but a lot of women in Africa were trying to get my attention, but I just never really found anyone that did it for me in Africa. There was even Canada and UK. There was just, it was just all over. There was Columbia. And then of course on Brazilian cupid.com there were Brazilians. So I was on the sites and I was trying to connect with people talking to women specifically and make a connection. It was just really hard to do for one reason or another. Maybe they didn't speak English. We were using a translator app to try to translate our conversations, which is awkward because translator apps are not completely accurate. And it's hard to maintain a flow. Maybe some of them were catfish spammers trying to catfish you or scam you out of some money. which is why if you ever do something like this, don't just send people money. That's a huge mistake because there are a lot of scammers out there trying to do that, but I have enough common sense to know if I couldn't get on a video call with someone and talk to them face-to-face and get a feel for who they really were on a video call, then most likely they were a scammer or a catfish on the other side, and I didn't. encounter some of those. The first girl that I somewhat connected with was a Colombian girl named Juliana from Colombia. And we were talking. She was fun to talk to and she was attractive and fit and all that. And we had video calls. So I knew that she was real. I knew that she was who she said she was. But she was also very sketchy at times and hard to reach and just not everything fit. Not everything seemed right. She would always swear to me that she was just dating me, no one else, blah, blah, blah. And so yeah, after a couple months of talking to her, I tried to meet her in person. I went to Mexico to meet her there. And she supposedly had flown in and tried to land to meet me. And the Mexican authorities wouldn't let her in. And she went back to Columbia and we never met. And I knew with all the issues that already had arisen, just my doubts in her. I don't know. Trust is an issue for me, as you can imagine, after some of the things I've gone through. And so I knew when we didn't meet, that was the end for me, right? But she calls me crying, saying, I swear to you, I was there. The Mexican authorities wouldn't let me in. And she wanted to keep it going. And I just said, this isn't going to work for me. So I had cut it off. And that was the end of that. So I was just going about my life, going about my business and working and trying to get in better shape and seeing my kids. At this point, Ethan was still in Arizona, but it just, nothing was going his way. He had a really toxic relationship here that he couldn't break away from, which sounds familiar. Right. And so I was trying to get him to join the air force. I never wanted my kids. to join the military. That's just the overprotective father in me. It's one of those things where, you know, just because you went through it and you were able to handle it and you gained some pride and all that from what you went through. I just don't know if my kids are wired for that, but Ethan, I felt like he needed it. I knew what a change was. bootcamp had made in me. I knew what it changed being in the military had done for me and the projection of my life and how it changed my life. And I felt like Ethan needed that. He was like 24 at this point, 23 maybe. He had already dropped out of college. He didn't have any future plans. projections of where he was going to go or what he was going to do or how he was going to make life better than these call center, barely above minimum wage jobs. And I didn't want that life for him. I tried really hard to talk him into joining the Air Force and he didn't hear it. He didn't want to hear it. He wasn't having it. He gave me the old, I'll think about it, but I love Ethan, but that's one thing he's always done is he's always been great at making you Hear what you want to hear when you're standing in front of him, even if it's not exactly how he feels. I was waiting for a real decision on his part. And then he came back with there's this music class cause he wants to work in music. He wants to do producer type work where he's on the switchboard behind the switchboard, helping produce music. And there was this class back in Ohio close to his mom that he could go to for 5k and it was two months and this was going to help him go in that direction. I asked him for information about it and I read it and I saw what it was. I also happened to talk to my brother who is a drummer. He had been in the music scene, lived in Nashville, and his best friend went to this exact same thing that Ethan was going to go to. He basically said it was a waste of time and money, that it did nothing to help him for that. And I shared that with Ethan and he just didn't care. He didn't want to have it. He didn't want to hear it. So he left Arizona. He moved back to Ohio with his mom so he could go to this school. And he just, he had to learn things the hard way, always has. Doesn't want to use my advice for whatever reason, maybe because we're not as close as he would like us to be. I guess my advice doesn't mean as much. I'm not sure. I still love all my sons and I want to help all my sons succeed and be successful in life. And that is all I was trying to do for him. So he went back to Ohio and he went through this school, this thing that he went back there for, and it ended up being exactly that. I think at first he was excited because he felt like he was getting maybe some new experience and some new thoughts or whatever that he didn't have before. But in the end, it did nothing for him. It didn't get him anywhere. And he was back to square one. as to where he was when he first moved out to Arizona, which was now he was back in Ohio, jobless, living with his mom. And that made me really sad that he was back there again because I really wanted to help him get off the ground and get his life going. I was dealing with that with Ethan and I was working my new job, learning my new job. And that was causing me to miss time with my younger boys because I couldn't work. My job was on site and I had to drive 35 to 45 minutes one way in a complete opposite direction at 6.30 in the morning to get to work. And my kids didn't go to school till 8 or not. And then they got picked up in the afternoons at 2.30 and 3 something. And I just didn't have the bandwidth to get my kids to school and or pick them up while going to work. So it was cutting into my time with my sons and that was affecting my mental health. So I was looking for something and someone to connect with and help me feel better just about what I'm going through in life. And having a life partner is huge. That's what they're there for, right? You're there to help them when they're down. They're there to help you when you're down. And you just go through life assisting each other, loving each other, helping each other when you need it. just helping each other just because two heads are better than one. So I was still on the apps trying to find that. And I finally did connect with someone, someone on BrazilianCupid.com and I read her profile and she was intelligent. She could speak English. And she was currently studying for the bar exams in Brazil to become a lawyer. She had graduated law school and now she wanted to become a lawyer. And so I messaged her and I thought it went into a black hole for a little bit because she didn't respond to me for a couple of days. So I just thought maybe she wasn't interested. I learned later that she just didn't get on there anymore. She had given up. She... started focusing on her potential law career and just didn't think anything was ever going to come of the Brazilian Cupid.com. But she did get back to me and then we started talking and right away it was pretty great. I could tell she was intelligent. She had a lot of logic to her way of thinking. She wasn't too overly emotional. But she was studying for bar exams, and she was really committed to that. So I just wasn't getting a lot of her time. Initially, I had questions how interested she is, she was in me. And she wasn't the greatest at letting me know that she really was. She just was busy, super busy, like she would say the words. But there was a lot of comfort in those words. So it was a struggle in the beginning. And so I was just kind of working through that and doing my job. And we were about to do a big go live at Davis Month. And I had to go through that. So I was trying to focus on that. And that's where I'm going to end this episode. And I will pick up from there in the next episode. So thanks for joining.