Beyond the Man-Script - Deconstructing Inherited Masculinity with Chad Nielson (@Chadonlove)

In this episode, April sits down with Chad for a deeply personal conversation about the twists and turns that shaped his life. From the reality of addiction and the long road of recovery to rebuilding his identity through the working with Men, Chad shares how choosing courage over and over again led to deep healing and opened doors he never expected.

Did you know you can watch Safe to Love on YouTube? 

Their story eventually intersects in a way that feels both serendipitous and intentional: two people doing their individual work who found belonging, partnership, and the spark that became this podcast. Together they reflect on what it means to create a relationship rooted in safety, accountability, and emotional maturity and why their shared mission through Safe to Love
matters so much.

If you're serious about ...

❤️ Work With Chad
Instagram |  @chadonlove

❤️  Work with April
Instagram |  @aprilbenincosa 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Like men, if you give her a little intimacy, then she'll give you the pussy. And women, if you want him to to open up to you and be intimate, then you gotta give it up. And it's just this transactional nature of sex. It is my mission to just smash that into the ground. Women want sex, especially women who are over the age of 30. They are very horny. It is very true. And also men are emotionally complicated creatures that want deep connection. They want to be seen. They want to see, they want to feel loved, they want space to express the full range of their emotions.

SPEAKER_04 0:32

Welcome to Safe to Love, where we are on a mission to help the world believe in love again and give you the courage to find it. I'm so excited to introduce my love, my life, my partner, and my co-host of the Safe to Love podcast. Chad Kirk Nilton. Hi, Chad.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Hi, and thank you for having me on. Uh, really love that mission.

SPEAKER_04 0:58

Thank you for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Thank you for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

On my show. Um, Chad, I would love to know if you could just tell us a little bit about your story of how you ended up here as an intimacy coach and hosting a podcast about love.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Yes, um, it's definitely my story has definitely been an interesting one. And um, you know, I was thinking before I came on the show about the parts that are relevant for that, and really I had to go all the way back to my teenage years when I was a drug addict, and um life was very hopeless. Um, and maybe that's why I love talking about hope. Um, because I know what it's like to have um lost hope completely, not just in love, but in life itself. Um and then during my at the age of 21, I found myself sober in uh 12-step recovery and spent uh decade and a half there, actually. And part of that process was something called sponsorship, which is where in it's an act of service where one person, one um alcoholic or drug addict, sits down with another and shares their experience, strength, and hope and guides them through their own process of recovery and finding hope again. And that was the most honestly, the most rewarding part of my life, really, for the first 35 years of my life. There's something truly indescribably magical about that kind of one-on-one work with another person where you get to witness someone come from the depths of despair, come from having given up, come from that state of hopelessness that you we see behind the eyes of too many people, whether it be not just drug addicts and alcoholics, but people in general as we go about our lives and get to see that light come on and get to see them come back to life and recreate their life from the ground up. And when I at around the age of 35, for reasons that aren't really, you know, relevant here, that no longer that that world of 12-step recovery no longer aligned with the spiritual journey I was on. And I had to kind of go on to yet another hero's journey off kind of into the unknown and find myself again. And during that, and that process was very dark, um, as they often are, right? There's this one of the hardest parts about anything, and I think this is really relevant whenever we talk about divorce and and you know, some of the work that I do today as well as um coaching women and men through the initial process of going through a divorce, is we have to leave behind what we know and step into the unknown. And there's a curious thing about human beings is it doesn't even really matter how horrible the known is, right? And I think like there's a in fact I was bringing this up with a client, there's this phenomenon that will happen with people that are incarcerated, where they're at some point they don't want to leave prison. Interesting, yeah. Because it's become comfortable, right? And so that's really always what takes the most courage to make a big life transition, to leave a relationship doesn't work, to set out on a new career, is that the unknown is always more terrifying than what's known. And it takes a point in our life where you know it's very cliche, but where the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the fear of change. But I was in a in a dark place for a while, and you know, I f I eventually found uh a new community, I eventually found new spiritual work. Um, you know, I really believe that, you know, having been an atheist as uh uh for the first 20 years of my life, that spirituality and what it is very personal to me, and it's I think it's very personal to every person is a is a really key part of um living a happy and fulfilled life. Uh and I found all of that. I found that in this community. Um I found different ways to connect with God, to connect with the divinity within me and with other people. And then I uh met this woman, um and I think you know, most great stories start off that way. But I met this woman who came into my life for a period of time to teach me a lesson and sort of bend the arc of my life in a different direction. And, you know, leading up to that point, I've always been a man that had a very fractured relationship with my masculinity. Um, you know, very wounded, disconnected relationship with my masculinity. I my father died when I was eight. I grew up, my mom raised me, and I grew up almost entirely without any real male guidance. The male guidance that I had in my life were like the 30-year-old dudes that I would do drugs with when I was 15. So they were probably worse than nothing, if I'm being honest. Yeah. And like most young men, the guidance that I had was from media, right? Um, I learned from media what it meant to be a man. Um, I learned to value my how to value myself as a man. Um, and I learned what masculinity meant, both from, you know, news and the way other people talked. And, you know, we learn a lot from movies. I think the the younger generation today probably learns a lot more from social media, but when we grew up, TV and movies were really the they played a really outsized role in how we learned our values and and how we um came up with our understanding of things. And so I learned a couple things that one, the traditional presentation of masculinity did not resonate with me. And two, that my worth was dependent upon my sexual conquest. Um, and I think that's um, you know, I always tell people if you really want to understand a movie that captures what it's like to be a young man, at least in America, watch American Pie. And there's this scene where Stifler comes in, and that the whole movie is about these kids who basically feel shame and judgment and worthlessness because they're virginity. There's this point where Stifler comes in and says, I'll see you guys in the no fucking section. And and that's was my experience. You know, I um constantly felt pressure and and judgment and shame from having had a lack of sexual experience from uh compared to other people in my peer group.

SPEAKER_04 7:43

Real quick, I want to ask what movies were you watching that like influenced you, and what did you learn from those that didn't resonate from you?

SPEAKER_02 7:53

Um, you know, I can't really think of any particular movies that that back then I watched. It the it was really a lot more from social. Well, I th so I grew up on three shows that that shaped me. Uh one was Star Trek The Next Generation. So uh uh Z Jean-Luc Picard, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, is was pretty much my surrogate father, and I think is the only reason that I have anything good. Uh The Simpsons, where I learned my uh sense of political cynicism and snark about the world, and married with children. Where you learned how to where I where I learned how to do this, which I still enjoy. I do, I do still enjoy. I don't know why, but it's very comforting. Uh, and a lot of bad lessons, right? Um, you know, that there's the character in that show, Bud, um, his whole character was just mocked and ridiculed. I mean, Bud was the original incel before incel was a term. The whole premise of that show was he was constantly mocked for failing to get sex from women. Um, whereas his sister was constantly mocked for being sexually promiscuous, right? And I think that's the thing. Like, I really believe that we don't give satire, satire, satirical fiction enough credit because it exaggerates something, but it reveals something that's very real, right? And and not to get kind of ahead of myself, but that is such an under-discussed dichotomy in American society. We talk a lot about how women are judged that their value goes down by society with their sexual exploits, right? Like we even talk about the extreme examples of you know, Mormon girls being told your b your body is a piece of bubblegum and if you have sex, it becomes a chewed piece of bubblegum. This really happens, and it disgusts me. I literally can't even talk about it without getting upset. But on the other end, men are socialized and primarily from other men, um, to you know to gain social status and worth in the tribe by the quantity and quality of women they've had sex with. Um in fact, I one thing I I really try to speak to, especially young men a lot, um, and I really get to see this having a ch a son now as a teenager. Um, this socialization, this pressure to go out and get laid, and you see it all the time in, you still see it all the time in rom-coms about young people, right? Like men just want to fuck. Men just want to get laid. And there's so much of this that does not even come from their own biological desires. I mean, it's true, we're like young men are horny. I'm not going to pretend they're not, but what's really driving that to a self-destructive level is the social pressure from other men. You do not get social status in in other circles of men without talking about your sexual exploits. Um, at least in, you know, younger men. I think I think as if we get into middle age, we tend to grow out of it, but the damage is done. The programming is there.

SPEAKER_04 10:59

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Um and so so these were kind of some things that drive me, but but I also had this really like I didn't want, like, I didn't want to be what I had seen presented as masculine. Like the masculine presentation was like stifler, or the Jimbro, or the person who was cruel and objectified women and uh took. I didn't want to be a taker. And so I kind of wholesale rejected my masculinity. I had really, and I would just say, like, I I'm I'm very comfortable with my feminine side. I didn't think I was that masculine of a person. Um, and so I met this woman who was who had been doing a lot of work with a tantric coach. And she, in in the course of that work, as part of her own healing journey, had really deeply connected to this like kind of divine sexual femininity within her. And and I met her, it was really like kind of divine timing as well. I met her during the fall of the first COVID year of 2020 when there really wasn't a whole else going on. Like I was working as a in my uh medical engineering field, but like we I'll be honest, that whole year we didn't accomplish much. Like we were at home. I would like log into, I probably logged like 10 hours of actual work a week and still somehow was outperforming my peers because nobody just knew what to do. So I kind of had this fall where it just, and she wasn't working at the time, and we just spent days at a time in um kind of a little love bubble. And it it during that experience, I found a connection with my own masculinity and found that actually, to my surprise, I had a very strong masculine core um that really only came out in its proper context, right? With somebody who was very embodied, who was very connected, who um really was able to understand and connect with me on an emotional level. Because that's by the way, another trope of modern masculine of traditional masculinity that men are simple. Men are emotionally simple. Um, I've never really got to know a man in my life that was emotionally simple, by the way. But it is a it is a we are taught that we are emotionally simple. We are taught that we are so much so that we don't even know it's a performance. And we just take all those complicated emotions and stick them down.

SPEAKER_04 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

And then they come out in anger, right?

SPEAKER_04 13:30

So the the symptom of that for men, what do you how do you think that shows up?

SPEAKER_02 13:36

Oh, I think it shows up in a lot of ways. I mean, I think it shows up in anger um and a sense of persecution, which to be honest, I can really relate to. You know, there's I mean, it's 2025 right now, as we're recording this, we are experiencing the results of 2024 in America. And, you know, there that was driven for the first time in my life. Young men, any any group of of of adults under 25, um, they voted for it um for the Republican Party. And the the core of that was this angst in young men, and it's it's talked about a lot. The it's they call it the loneliness crisis amongst men. It's talked about and then it's ridiculed. Um, so if you go search loneliness crisis in men right now on the internet, you're probably equally as likely to find an article trying to bring light to it as you are an article mocking it. But um we are at an age where like people are not having sexual romantic relations at a at like a record low level. You know, and these things aren't easily quantifiable, but they are when they when the shift is that significant, they can. And so men are feeling lonely, and that there's just so many symptoms of that, right? Men are feeling lonely, so they're they're not getting emotional, intimate connection. But also, as we go back to what I said before, they're feeling like failures.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

There's like they're told like you're failing. And this is programming that this pro this is programming that that is, I cannot stress this, comes it comes before sexual desire. Right? Like if you look at the time when you really start to care about dating and intimacy and romance, say it may be 12, 13. Like this is the kind of way that McMen talk to each other about these things at in sixth grade. Like we are socialized and we are programmed to want to gain the approval of other men before we're even interested in women. So as we develop our sexual desires and we start to go through puberty and we start to gain a desire for um dating and intimate relations, we have already had so much into us that our primary motivation is still the approval of other men. Um, and so not only when someone is whether they're a young man or a woman or of any age, but like, but really this showed up, this is showing up right now. I just bring this up as showing up right now, especially in young men. There's also this sense of failure because my again, our value is tied to our sexual conquest, to our ability to get a mate, to our ability to find a partner, whether that be from the sort of, you know, you might call it the degenerative side, where, you know, your bros are asking how many chicks you slept with that weekend at a party, or you go all the way to the uh hyper conservative religious side, where your parents and your clergy and every single person you talk to is asking when you're gonna get married and start a family.

SPEAKER_03 16:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

So, so we're so we're we're seeing both this complication, this, this uh confluence of genuine sense of a loss of fulfillment in sex and romance, and also this feelings of immense failure. And when we feel like this sense of shame put upon us by society, we lash out. We lash out and we blame them. And so um there are men everywhere. You know, I did this deep dive into what's called the manosphere, and I won't go into that very well right now. Um, I think that's something I'd really love to bring Cam on to talk about, but um there are a lot of groups out there that will exploit young men's angst and feelings of victimhood, right? Men are feeling like young men are feeling like the world is blaming them for their problems and they don't think it's fair. And when somebody is feeling hurt and vulnerable, it's very easy for a you know dark voice to come and whisper, well, it's their fault, and point that finger at women. And so you're seeing this, this uh breakdown, this literal, you know, we used to call it the war of the sexes, but it's it's it's almost literally happening right now. There's there's never been more angst, especially in the the younger demographic, the generation Z, between men and women. They're literally like anger and hatred at each other. And that's what happens. I mean, it unfortunately anger is one emotion that men are taught by other men is safe to have. So if we can't express all of our complicated emotions, then they're gonna come out as anger. Um so so anyway, so I I I get this experience with this person, and you know, it was it was one of those you are masculine. I realized that I am masculine. And I and I to tell a long story short, TLDR, exactly. That that was exactly it. And I cannot I cannot overstate what a revelation this was for me. Here I am now, five years removed from that story, and I wear that rather confidently and sometimes cockily. Um but uh I do have that kind of shitty and grin smirk that I that I wear sometimes. But it was really, it was really surprising to me at the time. And also I realized that this pursuit that I had been on ever since I, because I I was divorced, I had been divorced about um seven or eight years before then. So I had I'd been single for a long time. And again, I wasn't even entirely aware of how much I was chasing a new partnership, not just because I was lonely. I was. I wanted companionship, I wanted sex. Everybody wants sex, by the way, and there's nothing wrong with that. Um, but also because I felt like such a failure as a divorcee, right? The single divorceed man who can't hold down a consistent relationship, who is um not having sex for periods of time. Like I was having sex, but I was also having months without sex and just feeling like what a failure am I. Right?

SPEAKER_04 19:40

Because for Even though you were an engineer and making good money, it didn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

It didn't matter then. It did it didn't matter. I mean, if you're that's that's just the way we're wired, right? If we have if we're doing four things well and one thing wrong, that one thing wrong is all we focus on. Right. It's that's that's just the way we're wired to to pay attention to threats. Um and I also realized that I had a lot to offer. I had learned a lot in the ways of dating and intimacy, and and that the deep like the sexual fulfillment that everybody's seeking that sells so much is really more about emotional intimacy than it is about sex itself. Now, don't get me wrong, uh kinks and um exploration, toys, um you know, those are all very valid and important.

SPEAKER_04 20:40

And I think that's what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

This is uh just kidding. You gotta trim your nails, babe, and then I'll then I'll show you, then I'll teach you. But that's a whole other story. Um if you wanna if by the way, if you're a woman and want to know how to please contact me. There is a lot of there's a lot of really dangerous information out there that I'm I'm kind of one of my side project is to correct. Um thank you, Trisha. I'm really proud of you. But so I I just realized I had a lot. I had like I had had this sense that I was failing at that and that I didn't know a lot. I didn't know a lot about how to be a man, I didn't know a lot about how to how to be a good lover. And I kind of had this sort of healing in that relationship and realized how much of those stories were not mine and were not true, and that I had actually a lot to teach. Um, and I also had this hole in my life where where's where sponsorship used to be. You know, and that's the only reason I bring that in. I I really want to kind of honor the the anonymity of of the 12 step program, but I think it's really important to understand that like I I had found community and I I'd found spirituality and I'd started to find all of the things. Took me about a year that I had lost when I left. 12-step recovery, but I was not doing any kind of one-on-one work with another man. And it just in the serendipitous way that the universe works. Um, after that relationship ended, she actually moved to Costa Rica and I was back in another one of those dark nights of the soul. Uh, somebody that I followed on Instagram, Cam Fraser, like put on his story, like, hey, I'm starting a class. Um, my I'm starting a course, somebody that I'd followed and very much respected. And I I really, he's one of the few people that I just wholesale would endorse. Like that man has deep integrity and really speaks to a lot of um what men need and how to understand men and how to understand what it's like to be a man. And he was putting on, he was creating a course called Sacred Sexuality Coaching for Men. And I said, you know what? I'm gonna do that. And I was it was it was one of those things where I didn't really want to tell anybody about it. You know, I wanted to do it, but I didn't have like the confidence to really even speak about it. So I kind of was doing it on the down low. Um, but I went and I took that course, and it was really, really cool. It was really, really taught me a whole lot and kind of started to give me a little bit of the confidence. And I found, you know, it was part of as part of any kind of good coaching course, by the way. If you're looking at any kind of coaching, whatever it is, and this doesn't include a practicum where you do take actual um volunteer clients and have them graded, then I would not I would not give them your money. But as part of this course, we had some volunteer clients, and I just realized like when I was when I would be working with a client, um, when I would be sitting down and talking to a man about about sex and intimacy and love and the struggles that they have with it, that I I like there was all that doubt, and this is just sort of the magic of service, right? All the all the um shadows of self leave us in those moments when we're when we're really focused on being of service. And I knew like this is this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And I have also always had a sense about me of just very authentic vulnerability that makes other people open up to me easier. I I learned this in my entire time in recovery. People would always just tell me that they'd be like, you know, you you shared, and it made me feel more able to share my dark story, right? And I had found too that a lot of men that I had known that had done a lot of healing work, a lot of recovery, a lot of therapy, a lot of whatever, like the things that we do in our adulthood to try to unfuck ourselves, right? And to grow into um deeper human beings, um, a lot of the men that I had known still had that as their like dark secret. And men would tell me secrets of not even, I mean, not a lot, a lot of them, honestly, uh they don't even feel like secrets. But at the time, any kind of any kind of sexual discussion that isn't bravado is very hard for men, right? Like we're taught like when men talk, when men in most circles, and I really want to really emphasize that last part, because we are changing this. We are changing this reality slowly, but I'm a part of many communities where this is not true and we're growing. But today, 2025, most circles of men, when men talk to each other about sex, it's the only thing that we're we talk about is how big our dick is, how great we were, and how many women we've been with. It's all bravado. It's just like we tell fish stories, but we tell them about sex. Um, there's very little space for a man to say, you know, I'm having a hard time getting an erection. There's very little space for a man to say, uh, I'm having a hard time lasting. Uh, there's very little space for a man to say, I I worry my dick is too small. Uh, but these are the things that a lot of men think about. Um, and so I felt like I had sort of kind of this ability, the this sense about me that men felt more comfortable telling me these things and wanted to pursue that. Now, I should point out though that, you know, this story, like many stories, is did not go linearly. Um after that, I kind of failed to launch my my coaching practice. My day job was a medical device engineer, and I got a fancy new gig as of as a director of uh of a startup and this great corner office downtown and kind of let that take me off the path. And for about two years after that, I didn't uh I never ended up, I I worked a couple more practice clients, but I just sort of let that the the the all of it, the distraction, the excuses, the imposter syndrome, I let that the fear take me off of that course, and I went back to what was comfortable and familiar, even though it was far from fulfilling. And that was uh working in a you know, working in a regulated medical device industry and pushing papers around and um, you know, trying to trying to bring a human element into that. Like I like I like the uh the I liked having people that I worked with and worked for, but the work was never fulfilling. And then fast forward to last last October, I met up with the same tantric coach that had been the coach of the woman earlier in the story. She was in town, we went to lunch because we'd always had a great rapport and just kind of caught up, and she just said to me, like I mean, she just gave me the business. And and she and she knew told you the truth. She knew the message that would get to me was because I it I've always found that like when I'm sort of stuck, I'm not as like personally motivated to get unstuck is hard for me, but I but she said, you know, there's a lot of men out there that need your help, and you're just sticking around. I mean, that's paraphrasing it, but that's what she said. And I in in those kind of moments of like clarity and internal clarity and and and you know courage, I said, All right, well, I will commit the next time you're in town, because she was in town for a tantric retreat that she'd invited me to, and I had all these reasons not to go, money, time, whatever. I said, I commit the next time you're in town.

SPEAKER_04 28:22

And she was staying at my house until she was staying at your house at the time.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

Actually, I picked her up from where you were staying at the time.

SPEAKER_04 28:28

She's like, Do you want to come? And I was like, No.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

No. Well, that's good. We weren't quite ready.

SPEAKER_04 28:32

We weren't ready.

SPEAKER_02 28:33

We weren't quite ready. Um, and I said, Up, but I told her I'd commit to that. And I believe, and I don't commit to things. I don't commit to things as you you can attest to this. Uh it's probably very frustrating sometimes. I don't commit to things willy-nilly, like, because I believe that that a commitment is a diff deeper level than an intention. And when I commit to something, then I believe I'm gonna f I'm gonna do it. Yeah. Um, and I also believe and have I believe this from personal experience, that when we really commit to something, the universe will conspire to make it possible. So I committed to her the next time you're in town, I will go to, I will go to your retreat, whatever it is, whenever it is. And she said, okay. And then a couple months later, she sends me a flyer for her next retreat in town, which is a couple's taunture retreat. And I said, I said to her, I said, I don't have a partner. And she said, That's okay, because I got someone for you. And that's how I met April. And um the and then things started to move so quickly. Like the universe just it's crazy how we have those moments of our lives where everything starts to swirl and happen all at once, right? Like the universe sort of moves in these like slow, slow movements and then these jumps. I got laid off from that big fancy job and could not get another job to save my life. I entered a job market that in corporate America was very broken. Corporate America is very broken, uh, which is not the topic of the show, but it's it's it's it's kind of funny how that how it worked in my favor. At the exact same time, I met April, and you know, we agreed like neither of us were in a place that we wanted to date. I had gotten out of a very, very toxic relationship. And I say that not to say that that person was toxic. I don't believe in calling people toxic. Sometimes I do, but I don't believe in it. But the our relationship was really bad. And I had it was one of those times in my life where I was like, I wanted to retreat from the world of dating, um, put my dick on ice and just lick my wounds for a couple years before I ever put my heart out there again. And and it, you know, and April was also in a spot where she was like, Yeah, I'm not ready to date, you know, I just got separated. And so we said, okay, well, let's let's just let's just create this tantric healing partner container where we would explore. We didn't even know what nobody knew. Uh the um coach, the tantric facilitator of this event, she's the one that's like, this is a tantric healing partnership, but she didn't know what it was either. No, it was but it was beautiful. I like making it up as well. I like that. I mean, I love making things up as I go along. Right, give me like the slightest bit of guidance and then let me and then let me cook with it. And so we just started to get to know each other without this pressure of dating, without this pressure of even sex, was just like, let's just let's just get to know each other in in sort of this tantric space of um energy, energy and intimacy and see what happens. And what happened was very quickly we realized we had a lot in common and we had a lot of the same vision, and we started having these beautiful conversations that weren't about what we wanted to do with each other yet, uh, were about what we wanted to create in the world. And this podcast actually predates our first kiss. The idea, the dream of this, of this podcast predates our first kiss. And I I love that so much. And, you know, that's a that's kind of go into that story when we tell the story of of our of our love story. But you know, the the the thing was is that April basically said to me very early on, and I was still in, I mean, I, you know, again, as a man, another thing that's by the way, another thing that is tied to our value is also our ability to earn money. So when you said, well, you were earning good money, but you weren't having sex, it's like, yes, but guess what? Like, we got to do both. To be a man and feel like we're traditionally society, like to feel whole, we have to be earning good money and having good sex. And if we're not doing both, then we're we're a failure. So I was going through this very like deep crisis of the one thing I'd always been good at ever since I graduated, even though I felt like a failure to everything else at times of my life, was making money, and I wasn't making any money. Um, I didn't know how I was gonna pay my mortgage, I didn't know how I was gonna support my family. Like I was just deep in fear and scarcity. And and April said to me, like, you're not meant to be an engineer, you're not going to be, you're not going back to that. You're you're meant to be, you're meant to be a coach. Like, because she had known about my background and and how I'd kind of failed to get that going. And just in kind of her divine feminine way, like said that very early in knowing me. And I remember I remember because I'm I'm somebody that lets people into it.

SPEAKER_04 33:14

You're a little upset.

SPEAKER_02 33:15

I was. I was like, who you don't know me? You didn't know me. I got bills to pay, I got shit to do, you know. Uh but I was like, but well, but yeah, this podcast sounds like fun. So we um but it was just like it was almost like it was almost like the universe knew that I was ready, knew that I had found I'd had enough experience, I'd found enough depth of courage, and I had found the right support, and it was time. And it was time, whether or not I was ready, the world is ready. The world is ready for a deep sense of healing and on many levels. And you know, my my part to play in that in that great awakening is is to help men. Um primarily men, I do, I do work with women sometimes in specific circumstances, but primarily men to help heal their relationship with their sexual with their sexuality, yeah with their masculinity, and teach them that they actually do want intimacy. It is not a commodity that they trade for sex, which is how it is portrayed in 95 plus percent of social dynamics in media, right? Like men, if you give her a little intimacy, then she'll give you the pussy. And women, if you want him to to open up to you and be intimate, then you gotta give it up. And it's just this transactional nature of sex, like it is my mission to just smash that into the ground. Um, women want sex, especially women who are in the over the age of 30. They are very horny. Um, it is um it is very true, and also men are emotionally complicated creatures that want deep connection, they want to be seen, they want to see, they want to feel loved, they want uh space to um express the full range of their emotions. And so so yeah, I I I'm not very good at staying in my lane. I've never have been, so I you know, my the the the I do I do call myself uh an intimacy coach because primarily that has been the focus of a lot of way of what I do, but you know, sex sex is just a part of that. Intimacy I I just look at it like sex is here and intimacy is here, and I want to help men have better sex. That's also how I can help women. But you know, women's i in the course of dating and being single, which is in my past, which I'm happy to say, uh I went on at least 100 first dates. And that's not a brag, that's actually kind of like not a good statistic. You know, I didn't have a I didn't have a hundred second dates. I definitely didn't have a hundred, you know, sexual encounters or a hundred girlfriends, but I went on a over a hundred first dates and and I would just listen because I like listening. It's I guess it's always been my skill. I'm just a curious person by nature, and you know, I would I found this very deep um di difference between the story of what women's chief complaint about men was in social media and in media, and what women would complain to me about in social media and women, it's a constant barrage of men are too forward, men are just trying to get laid, men are sending you dick pics.

SPEAKER_04 36:37

And I'm don't approach me at the gym.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Don't approach me at the gym, don't approach me at the coffee shop, don't approach me at the DMV.

SPEAKER_04 36:42

Don't approach me, don't just don't approach me.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

I mean, literally, that is but just don't approach me. Um and I'm not here to invalidate that that is the experience that women have. They've been f they they they've felt creeped on, they've felt uncomfortable, they've they've had men, every woman has had that experience. But the chief frustration that women would tell me when we were dating in their experience of dating is that men were won't approach them. Won't well, they they won't initiate, they're afraid to kind of make moves, they're um they don't know how to to shift into a sexual uh energy, they don't know how to create polarity in the bedroom, um, and they're very frustrated. And, you know, I live in Salt Lake City, uh, the uh heart of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons. So, you know, my sample size is is skewed in that way, but I I really doubt that it's that different, you know. Women are like they're frustrated because men don't know how to show up as men in intimacy and romance and in the bedroom. And so this is where I and I just am somebody that goes where the need is. I I sense the need for for service, I sense the need for what I can do and offer, and I go and I go there, and that's where the biggest the need is. And you know, my how we got to this podcast is I'd learned a lot about safety, this embodied sense of safety and what that means, and how that is because I had had this rel like I had had some of those relationships that some people have had, a lot of people have had, not everybody, where they're like just hot and wild and uh unbelievably painful, just this roller coaster of emotions. And I learned that like intimacy, connection, being vulnerable, being seen, being touched both physically and emotionally without safety is just re-traumatizing. It's hell, it's utter hell. And so I had started to become sort of obsessed with this idea of like learning and then teaching how what it takes to create safety in in intimacy and in and in our bodies. And April was just all about that too. And so that's when um that's when safe to love came to be. Uh our first, our first iteration of the title was Safety First Intimacy, but we realized that a lot of people were confused by that. So so and also Safe to Love is uh it's just such a beautiful it's just such a beautiful it's just such a beautiful title and such a beautiful phrase. Like I I love it every time we say it and every time I hear it because it really embodies like what we want to create. Like what we want, like what our shared mission is, is people people everywhere deserve to fill fill a space in their life where they can experience deep love and feel safe doing it, and and healing work takes place in that, you know. And what what what's happening is people are going out and they're having these sexual and these emotionally vulnerable and emotionally intimate relationships without creating the foundations of safety. And so the everybody's just getting more and more fucked up. And the thing about dating is that the older you get, some parts of it get easier. You're you're let you we just start to lose a lot of the weird, awkward BS that we have when we're younger. Well, you know yourself more, you know yourself more, you know what you want more, but every year your life, you throw another bag on the on the cart that you drag with you from relationship to relationship, right? And so, you know, it became less just about how do we create um, how do we create spark and how do we create a connection because those things are important, but people are do a lot of people are teaching that and a lot of people are doing that without the fundamentals underpinning it, and then everybody's everybody's losing their mind. There's this it's so painful to let yourself surrender and fall in love and get attached and be seen by somebody, and then have that person not be ready to hold you in that. So the idea is safe to love, safety, intimacy, sex, it's gonna flow in that direction. Um, otherwise it will just be reperpetuating that cycle.

SPEAKER_04 41:16

So, and that's what I let me ask you a question real quick on that. So, how did you create safety from your last toxic relationship? How did you what it was your steps to create safety in your body to be able to feel safe to love with me?

SPEAKER_02 41:34

Uh well, I boundaries. My other probably my favorite word. His his love language is I think that if you um were to go, it just go up to anybody in my community, uh anybody that knows me, and be like, Mr. Boundaries, they'd be like, You mean chat? Um, I love boundaries, I think boundaries are sexy. I think um I like my consent enthusiastic and my boundaries clearly communicated. And I also believe and we did a little boundary play. I mean, we, you know, and I think that's the details of that. I feel like we could share more about when we tell about our story, but it's true. It's like, you know, here's here's what I've here's the thing. We're all screwed up in a different way, right? Let's just embrace it, right? Like we're just we're all screwed up. It's beautiful, we're beautiful, messy people.

SPEAKER_04 42:26

It's called being human.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

It's called being human. We all tend to have the same wounds, but we have we also tend to have often very different uh expressions of those wounds. And so some people don't know how to let anybody in. They just don't. They just don't ever let anybody in. And they keep these walls up around their heart, keep these walls up around their life. People may date somebody for years and still not actually share fears and wants and desires with them, right? Or be married to them for 15 years, or be married to them for 15 years. Some people um what react in the opposite way, and they and and I'm one of those people because I just I don't know how to front. I don't, I get very, very, I I almost get like itchy and uncomfortable and agitated with with when I'm interacting with someone's mask. Like I want to know, I want like it's just boring to me. Like I want to know what's under that, and I also just don't know how to not overshare. So so um I I had to I had to learn to kind of consciously create the the process, the process of letting someone in. The process matters. Yeah. Compatibility matters, all that stuff matters, but if the process matters too. And so, so, you know, I'd let kind of said, let's set boundaries here and let's go move slowly. Let's move slowly. It's very important to me. You know, we stood we met, I believe, like January uh sixth, I think it was right before I got laid off. And we the the Tantra retreat that we we met to be healing partners for was the very end of March. And we were very clear like we're going to just be in this container that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was there was no talk of a relationship. There was no talk of any of that, like which was which was hard at times. So there wasn't just like sexual boundaries that we had, but there was emotional boundaries. There was boundaries about commitment. There was a boundaries about expectations or talks about the future, right? We we really made sure that we created a container to keep what we were exploring together in the moment for a period of time. Um because the reality is we feel love. We can call it infatuation. And people say, oh, it's infatuation, not love. The only difference between the two is the length of time and how much we actually know about the person. It feels the same. We feel those feelings for each other, for other people, long before we actually know them. So what are we in love with? Right? What are we in love with? We're in love with our magnificent minds is pattern recognition supercomputers that have led to this, that that have you know led to this evolutionary advantage where now we as human beings, hairless apes, run the world. It just f it just loves to fill in blanks. It's just it's obsessed. It's why we love like murder mysteries and stuff. Like we just love to get a couple clues and then paint a picture around it, right? Like those connect the dots, you know, draw like four dots and then boom, paint a whole face around it. And that's what we do instinctively with people. We get to know someone, we've known him for a week, maybe we've known him for two weeks. They've told us all this stuff. We've had this beautiful kiss and sex, and we're like, and our minds just fill in the blanks with this pattern of what of our dream of a life. And navigating that period of time requires our adult conscious self to just constantly check us and be like, okay, this feels really good, but we don't know yet. Let's just see how it plays out. And that's basically what we did. And we really did not even um, I would, we would not, we kind of just set boundaries in clear sober mind before we were sort of lost in each other's.

SPEAKER_04 46:20

Yeah, we made agreements.

SPEAKER_02 46:21

We made agreements, yeah. We set boundaries with ourselves and each other that we would not have a relate, we would not talk about that. And so we went and we had this tauntric weekend, and then you were a part of this uh apprenticeship program, so you stayed for the weekend, and I went home. You stayed for like two more days. I went home and and went home and was like, and and that was like the end of our, you know, that was the end of our um container, and I was like, I don't want this to end. And so then I asked you if you wanted to be my girlfriend, um, which by the way, man, um women really like when you have courage. So this is this is probably more to young men. I've been trying to help my son's friends. Um men, men, men will look for like all the evidence that they're gonna get a yes. And the reality is like if you got women will exist in this quantum state with men where they'll be like, I don't know, I might date him. But then if a man is like, I'd like to take you on a date, woman's like, whoa, okay, let's do that. So um I asked you to be my girlfriend, and you said yes. And you know, that's how our anniversary is April 1st. So that's always gonna be funny, but but that is, you know, how we did it. Like we we had to take our time and we had to do so consciously because our internal drive, our bodies, our hearts, they don't they don't really care about the future. They don't really care about what it really takes to have compatibility of if we could actually be together and you know, I've got this and you've got that, or you live here and I live there, or your dreams to move to Scotland, and my and I have a child, or all these things do matter. They do matter for the ability to have a long-term relationship, but our bodies don't care. They just want what they want when they want it. And so we have to And then they don't want to let it go. We have to develop this real yep, and then they don't want to let it go. And once we're attracted attached to something, we will self-abandon religiously to keep it. So it's important to make sure to keep our higher selves in line and set boundaries with ourselves to make sure that we have those things of compatibility. And I should also point out that that was where we sort of kept it. Like we're gonna date. Even though at that point there was really deep feelings. Um, and and and both of us were we were like, I really, really like you.

SPEAKER_04 48:46

Yeah, I really adore you. Yeah, we would say everything except for the L word.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Yeah. And and again, that that process, that process, um, you know, how that played out to where we're here today is another beautiful story that I would like to say for for when we can talk about that. But but you know, that is something that I that I also teach people. Like it's it nobody talks about the process. And you go online right now and you just see what's popular in the in the sphere of the uh the relationship influencer sphere, and let's be real, that's where everybody's getting the freaking information, is from popular Instagram accounts. Yeah. Everybody. Um, they just talk about like what we need in a partner. What we should, what we, what, what we what most of it is what other people should treat how other people should treat us, which is good because most of us have taken, have not been treated well, and we need to know that message. Um, but it's also created this like problem where everybody's like everybody's learning red flags.

SPEAKER_04 49:45

Yeah. Actually, maybe um speaking of the process, can I ask how you being an engineer has like affected or impacted or like influences the podcasts that we do?

SPEAKER_02 49:57

Well, it definitely influences the work that I do a lot in how I approach coaching, which really I guess the it's it's not too dissimilar, right, to what we do here. Um because it's it's very practical and very risk-based. You know, my actually, I was actually, I ended up in quality engineering, not to my which is I probably would have found a lot of satisfaction in in regular engineering, but but really what my job was was all about risk analysis, right? And I learned to look at the world from this perspective of risk. Everybody in in a non-binary way, people want to people want to cheat the game. That's what I see almost universally in both the clients that I've worked with and the friends that I've talked to throughout the years. People want to cheat the game. How can I get love without risking my heart? And the answer is you can't. And trying to operate from a place of uh fear and pain avoidance is what is keeping you stuck. Pull stop. So what but there's also a lot of us that are just tragically reckless with our heart. Um and so you know what what what I what I do and what I teach people to do is like take take intelligent risks, right? And that's sort of kind of what I said, where we as like I was gonna get to know you. And more than that, I was gonna I was gonna make sure you got to know me before we fell into lovey dovey land. Um because I've fallen into lovey dovey land, like I've had the L word told to me within a fortnight, more than once. And I was feeling it, right? So wanted to get to know you first, wanted you to get to know me, wanted to make sure that we had that we had this, like we had some of the fundamental requirements to actually have a long-term relationship, not just a beautiful experience. Because at this point in my life, I had I had had enough of those beautiful experiences.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

Yeah, and well, because of the podcast, we also wanted to take it even extra slow. That's true. Because the podcast was like more important at that time than actually the the love, lovey dovey relationship.

SPEAKER_02 52:20

And I think that's true. I to me it's even more that the mission. And I think that's what makes our relationship so beautiful. And at times it's been hard. And we've and what but it's built on a foundation before mutual attraction. It was built on a foundation of a shared mission. And so, but eventually, eventually, I had we both had to risk a heart. And so that's sort of what I say. Like in in the world of in in medical devices, you you cannot have in the world of medicine in general, everything you do has risk. Every single time you get your blood drawn, every single time you get a flu shot, every single time you get uh your teeth cleaned, there's a risk. Something could happen, something sometimes does happen. So risks in that world are always outweighed by benefit. So it kind of sounds clinical and unromantic, but I I really look at what I do with my heart from this risk-benefit analysis, and I make sure before I put my heart out there, that I've done some, I've from a kind of reasoned adult state of mind, done, made sure that it was worth the risk. And that's and that takes time, you know, it takes time. And so I take this sort of risk approach. I really do it. Sometimes I find myself with clients and it will hit me like, God, I am just really this is all coming from my engineering career. Um, so it's and also we talk about safety, right? And I actually have this piece that I'm writing for our Substack that uh hopefully will be published by the time this episode drops, uh, where I kind of talk about that, right? Like, what does safe mean? Safe does not mean the absence of risk, right? Um, that it's not possible. Like literally every single breath you take is risk. It could be breathing in something that could be shortening your life by some bit. Like life itself is risky. And so, how do we embrace that without going all the way to the other end of recklessness? And we've seen that, right? We've seen that, especially for any of our listeners that live in Utah, you have seen this in the ex-Mormon community. It is a wild thing to know uh people who leave the Mormon church and and and they have been in a safe bubble, a safe, a comfort bubble, a contained little bubble their whole life. And they're just like, I'm gonna do all the things I didn't get to do as a kid. And it's like imagine like if any of you ever w were at like a party when you were like, you know, a teenager or maybe 18 in college, but with that level of like wild recklessness, except these people now have uh credit cards and IDs.

SPEAKER_04 55:07

It's just it, there's a well, they have also children, children, money and their own house.

SPEAKER_02 55:12

But they don't necessarily always care about that.

SPEAKER_04 55:14

They don't, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:15

That's what just there's you know, there's this people thinking binary, people thinking like safe, protected, nobody can touch me, or wild and crazy, YOLO. That's a phrase we used to have back, by the way. I don't know if Gen Z still has that. YOLO, you only live once. You scream that as you do something stupid. Yeah, did you know that? Yeah, okay. Well, some of them let out. Um, but the um, you know, I like life, life should nothing good ever happens in the extremes, right? So, so I look at like how do we bring ourselves in that balance where we are taking risks, but we're taking smart risks. We're taking risks that we consciously choose into, not ones that we not impulsive risk, not like hormonally based risks or risks that come from our wounds, or risks that come from that part of us that feels like we missed out on life or our chinkies.

SPEAKER_04 56:06

Um that's talking about myself.

SPEAKER_02 56:09

That's how we that's how we that's how we that's how I teach people to live. That's how I try to live. You know, that's the that's the north star of living to me, right? Like, but life is meant to be one where you take risks. And and and all too often people seem to people seem to oscillate from one end to the other. And I've done that. I mean, when I was when I was 22, I had a bullet bike and I drove around on it with no helmet, wearing gym shorts, you know, and I look back and think, that's really stupid. Like I have a child now, and the risk of a bullet bike in general is just not worth it to me. But for God's sake, if you're gonna ride a motorcycle, I put on a helmet, you know, like I and wear pants. And wear pants. Yeah, wear pants.

SPEAKER_04 56:51

Because uh pants are not optional.

SPEAKER_02 56:53

Because road rash is not sexy and it's not a fun time. And so, you know, I yeah, I would say that's it's just kind of trying to bring people back from that swing and people and we'll swing too. We will like we'll we'll go through this oscillation where we're like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spend any money, I'm not gonna do anything, I'm gonna leave the house, I'm never gonna date again. Yeah, how many times? I'm never d I'm not dating for a while.

SPEAKER_04 57:14

Yeah. Well, it's our like what? Like, I'm never going up again. I'm never gonna give my heart away.

SPEAKER_02 57:19

I'm not gonna do this for a year. We love those two. I'm not gonna do this for a year. I've never done and I've only done like three things for a year in my entire life when I actually sent that goal out. And, you know, in recovery, like we don't we say, I'm not gonna drink today.

SPEAKER_04 57:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:32

So that's a whole other story. But but then, but then we'll like do that. Maybe we'll for like two weeks. We'll like go to the gym and eat nothing but like kale and fruit smoothies, and we'll work out 17 times a day, and then we'll go ham and go to a party and and party for like three straight days. Like we, we, we, we just have to get off this oscillation and get and kind of find ourselves sort of in that balance where the pendulum comes back and says, I am going to take risks that are worth it. I'm gonna be bold, but I'm gonna do it from a place of conscious choice. I'm gonna tune in and say, what is it that's really important to me? This mission, this podcast is a big part of the mission. Yeah, but this mission to what is the courage? What is the what is the I always mess up the wording of it? Make the world believe in love again or something.

SPEAKER_04 58:25

Yeah, we are here, we are on a mission to give the world courage to believe in love again. I don't think that was not it.

SPEAKER_02 58:33

No, it's really good. I know we have to read it. It the point is that is a mission. That is a yeah, I'm gonna actually I'm gonna give her space for that.

SPEAKER_04 58:41

Welcome to Safe to Love. We are on a mission to help the world believe in love again and give you the courage to find it. Oh that's we we do know our mission. We just have different ways of saying it. And both Chad and I are long-winded, so we have to like get us to sync down. We're we're which we are coming to the end of our episode basically. We're verbals, and so I want to ask you one thing.

SPEAKER_02 59:00

Well, let me just finish this one thought and then you can and then you can ask me that. Um that's a mission worth risking big for. That's a mission worth leaving behind a comfortable career in engineering. That's a mission worth not knowing where how how it's gonna work out.

SPEAKER_03 59:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:22

And that's really what love is. And your relationship should be like that. Like go into relationships where it's like this is a woman, it's worth risking the big hurt. That's true though, but it was pretty smooth.

SPEAKER_04 59:44

Um, it is, and that's why that's why we're here. So thank you for being on this with me. Um what's one piece of advice you would leave our audience with to give them hope in love?

SPEAKER_00 59:58

What's one piece of advice I would leave the audience with giving them hope? You think I'd be better prepared to answer that?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:03

I would say to take a breath and stop judging everything by its immediate response. Um just take a step back, decide what you want to do, and then give it some time. You know, don't try to decide the only thing that you should here's what the only thing you should try to decide if you're on a dating app is if this person is somebody you want to have a date with. Quit trying to figure out if there's a love of your life. You're gonna drive yourself nuts, you're gonna invent a person in your head that doesn't exist. The only thing you should be trying to figure out when you're on a first date is is this a person that I had like by the end of the date, was I bored talking to them? Is this a person I want to have a second date with? Quit trying to put that, is this the love of my life? Is this my partner? Pressure on the early part of dating. And you will find um that it's it it becomes a lot more freeing. And trust that the process the process knows. What's that song that you know that you sing?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:08

The way it knows the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:09

The way knows the way.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:10

You don't have to know the way, the way it knows the way the way knows the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:13

Um is that two pieces?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:17

That was good. Okay.

unknown 1:01:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:20

Well, that was a chat in April with the safe to love, and we just want you to remember to be brave and that love is worth it, and it's out there waiting for you.