Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
SEG 1 of 4 - Jelousy - Charting the Course of Family Life: Insights on Parenting, Relationships, and Navigating Digital Challenges
Discover the keys to navigating the winds of family life with us, Will and Tony, as we share our personal insights on fostering healthy relationships and tackling parenting hurdles. From the delicate art of discussing gender education with youngsters to the balancing act required when dealing with a partner's shifting priorities, we've got anecdotes and advice that'll strike a chord. We also confront the digital dilemmas that families face today, sharing our own stories of screen time skirmishes. And for those guiding their offspring through the maze of dating, we offer a grandfatherly perspective that blends wisdom with a touch of humor.
Feel the pulse of a strong partnership as we dissect jealousy in relationships, weighing in on whether it's an expression of affection or a symptom of deeper issues. Drawing on a blend of tough love and empathetic wisdom, we address the voluntary nature of relationships and the daily choices that shape them. And don't worry, we haven't forgotten about the singles out there—we zero in on red flags in dating, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and personal growth. Plus, we tease upcoming discussions on maintaining personal boundaries, ensuring that our listeners are well-equipped to forge fulfilling connections in love, marriage, and family life.
Are you ready to chat? Call Will and Tony now 607-414-CHAT.
Speaker 2:My teacher is telling my second grader about gender Should I call the school?
Speaker 1:I'm having a huge struggle with eating too much and I'm not sure how to stop. My spouse seems to be changing her priorities and I'm worried. Yeah, we're fighting the digital battle in our house. I never can seem to make progress and I'm not sure what to do.
Speaker 2:Welcome to let's Chat with Will and Tony.
Speaker 1:Focusing on what matters and ditching what doesn't.
Speaker 2:Now here's Will Kesley and Tony Pack. Welcome to the show. It's the Will and Tony Show. I'm Will, I'm Tony, otherwise known as Mr Muscle no no More like. Mr Clean.
Speaker 1:Already ditched my New Year's resolution. What Welcome to the show. I haven't fully ditched.
Speaker 2:It's called let's Chat with Will and Tony, and this is where we take life's issues. Yeah, we talk about them Every week. We tackle one, then we throw it up on our podcast. You can catch any of the shows you might have missed. The idea here is that we're not trying to be the guys that know it all. We're trying to be a couple of guys that have lived through life, have families and found things that work Found some happiness and a lot of stuff worked.
Speaker 1:Find things that work.
Speaker 2:I'm a clinical counselor, tony kind of a life coach and a corporate leader Trainer. We do a lot of stuff with the youth. We get to go around and doing all kinds of keynote presentations and youth group talks and school things. This is what we love to do. We spend time looking into ways that work and then check about our own life. There's a bunch of stuff out there that people will try to say, oh, this is the way to do it. Like the other day someone recommended me.
Speaker 1:I'd read this girl, this lady.
Speaker 2:She's really good on marriage, and then I looked her up and she's divorced.
Speaker 1:I'm waiting for water and I'm like why am I gonna go to?
Speaker 2:her for marriage counseling. And here's the thing she was a good one when she was married and then she had a divorce and then she was still producing books on it and you're like, hopefully those books are. Here's what I did before and it didn't work.
Speaker 1:So here's what I've learned, right? Here's what.
Speaker 2:I've learned. Maybe I could support that. Anyways, today we've got a couple of topics, a handful of emails. We wanna get to questions about former shows. One of the ones, though, today is we get kicked off. We're gonna talk about technology again. Today. We're talking a little bit about health, happiness. And we're gonna talk we wanna start off on this dating issue that it's interesting because many of our listeners are married, happily married, got families, but you all seem to have kids that are dating.
Speaker 1:You go, I wait and be mean. Don't know if you would agree with the person, or you're trying to give them advice and there's a thousand dynamics out there. So we're gonna talk a little bit about dating.
Speaker 2:And Tony, you're kind of into this as a parent, I am. You got one child married. You got four that are still looking Four well.
Speaker 1:I hope that the five ones aren't.
Speaker 2:But I've got five, all five married. All right and got grandkids and they're doing great. So we have a little bit of a historical background to kind of work through it. Yeah, a little bit. If you agree with us, great. If you disagree with us, that's great too. Call us, text us, tell us what your thoughts are. This is cause we chat, yeah, and if you got some great ideas that maybe we're missing, we'd love to hear those too, and then, if we don't like them, we'll ignore you or we'll address it, but we're always willing to learn right.
Speaker 1:You never know. We're not like perfect.
Speaker 2:Okay, here's the dear Will and Tony. So I've been dating this guy for two years. He's super hot. If you saw a picture of him, you'd understand. My mom and dad think he's a dweeb. They keep telling me he's a loser and to drop him. I don't see what they see in him, although he is very jealous, jealous, interesting, same it. What do you recommend I do about this? Oh, okay, well, first of all, we got several issues going on.
Speaker 1:You see, he's hot, she makes sure I make me understand that.
Speaker 2:Cause I wouldn't want her to write and say he's so ugly, I hope he thinks he's hot. Parents are involved. Obviously the guy's super jealous. I can kind of see this one coming down All right. So what part do you want to talk about? Parents, that he's a dweeb?
Speaker 1:Well, the first one I reacted to is jealousy Cause. To me, that's one of the big red flags, because there's something about this guy that either he doesn't trust the girl, isn't confident in the relationship, so he's always getting jealous, or he's super not confident in his own self, oddly enough there's research out there from really funky groups that say jealousy is a good thing.
Speaker 2:It drives people to work harder for each other. No, it's not Jealousy, okay, so let's break into jealousy for a minute. The purpose, the reason, the typically the reason somebody is jealous is because they lack self confidence in themselves. I agree, that's just it. Now someone say, well, no, no, I'm jealous cause my wife. She's always talking to her guys at work on email and that bugs me. Okay, I understand that what you're saying. There's a difference between jealousy and hey, this doesn't feel right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we want to talk a little bit about the jealousy versus. I don't feel right, jealousy drives. Look, marriage is voluntary. Let's just start there. Relationships are voluntary. Yeah, exactly, you're choosing to be together, that's it. And I walk, got a ring on my finger, that's great. It doesn't mean you have to come home at night. You choose to come home at night, hopefully. Yeah, exactly the reason.
Speaker 2:I presented that way is that people can make covenants, they can make promises, they could swear before God to be married and, at the end of the day, they have to wake up and decide to come home, and you have to be behaving in a way that makes them want to come home. Okay, I want to put these two pieces together because it's voluntary. Yeah, and this is why we talk about people get together, get married, and then they start dragging on each other and ripping each other for this, that and nothing. Nobody wants to be married. For that reason, they want to be married, so they're happy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the happiness, the whole point of you wanted. You know anybody who's married. I you know. Think about the time when you were there. You were in the moment of getting married. You were marrying them because you want to be together forever. You wanted to be, yeah, always. Happy, you're happy, and you're excited about life, right, Okay? So nobody's getting married because they're depressed.
Speaker 2:All right, so we got to put that whole side. We're put that aside a little bit because there's lots of reasons we get upset about each other in a marriage and Marriages are not supposed to be cum laude all the time.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're absolutely not. They take work. They take, that's about the getting up every day and getting ready to be like hey, you know I'm gonna put the work in, so I keep having this joy with my spouse and remember the three things that you have to have in a good marriage.
Speaker 2:Three things you have to have right, catch, pencil out, here it goes. You have to have a heart of gratitude, agree. If one of you does not have a heart of gratitude and is a grumpy dump, that's a problem. In a suck, suck the life out of people, so you got to both be willing. This is something you choose. By the way, you're not born. You can choose to be a person of gratitude. You just have to stop and say thank you once in a while. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you appreciate what you're doing. Yeah, and vice versa, right, otherwise you just drains.
Speaker 2:So if you don't have parts of gratitude. Start there. That's the first you want to start your relationship number two you want to work on being adaptable and happy.
Speaker 1:That's not two things I love that adaptability and happy being adaptable is.
Speaker 2:This is a skill set you develop.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not the. You're not the martyr, don't be the martyr. Adaptable like ooh, I'm gonna adapt because I'm a martyr.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna wife says I want to go home and see my family this weekend. You don't like her family, so I'm not gonna go stop it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, find a way to be adaptable and happy.
Speaker 1:Correct. I'm totally on that and I think that's so important to be adapt and it has to be equals.
Speaker 2:It can't be one person's always adaptable and the other one's always taking. That takes. They take out of people's buckets. You've got to take your bucket. You can dip from each other's buckets, but nobody can pour one out. It has to be a union one.
Speaker 1:I think you got to be working to fill each other's buckets just as much as you're dipping out of each other. I started out of gratitude hard of forgiveness.
Speaker 2:Right hard of adaptability. The next thing on there is to learn to become this. One Takes time. Learn to become more selfless. You're not as needy. A lot of people get relationships because I need like I wish it was all time. I need more love it for my wife. I need more. I need more time out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of eyes in that statement. I, I, I, I, I, I, I. And I think that's exactly when you start talking about selfishness in a relationship. Yeah, that's when you're you're constantly pulling out of the other person bucket. When you become selfless, you're working to add into their bucket more than you're drawing out. So there's gonna be times when it's rough and you're gonna draw from the other person's you know emotional bucket because you're gonna need them, because it's. It's a challenge, but the majority of the time, if you find yourself adding to that bucket versus drawn, when come time you need the bucket to draw from it's gonna be full.
Speaker 2:So here's the common sense part of this thing that we all I think we all know this right when you love your neighbor, when you give charity of yourself to something else you know, we learned that Christ teaches that that's, that's the place of happiness. We okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it all. Then look at your day. I want you to stop for a minute, see, but do you live that principle when you wake up? Do you choose to be more compassionate towards others? Do you choose to show gratitude? Do you choose to do for others because it makes them happy? Now here's the magic to this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Unless you've tried that, you don't know the happiness that's on the other side of it Exactly.
Speaker 1:And I'm telling you, there's happiness on the other side of it.
Speaker 2:I'm telling you Way more happiness.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, way more Every time I'm down. If I'm down, the fastest way for me to come back up is to be grateful for what I got and to serve somebody else.
Speaker 2:Go do something for somebody else.
Speaker 1:Somebody, something for somebody else, and it could be my life, it could be my kids, it could be one of my coworkers. Bringing happiness to somebody else is so much more fulfilling to me. When you're striving to bring happiness, it's just, it's a whole, nother level of joy.
Speaker 2:So when you're worried about being jealous what about they're doing? And you're not being fulfilled and it doesn't work for you and you have to do all this stuff you don't wanna do, Okay, you're doing it wrong and when you relax a little bit and let the thing have a little more legs, you'll find that your spouse will also return that favor. Now, spouse, it's important you don't become a taker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some do some are just needy, needy, needy, needy, careful, you're dipping out of the bucket. But let's start with those three things, right? Heart of gratitude, okay, so adaptable and happy. And becoming more selfless. Now there's a bunch of other things, but those are the three characteristics of all great relationships. I'm with him, will, if you have Talk to me, okay. So once you got those things, then we start like worrying about well, I'm jealous, I'm this, I'm that, I'm this, I'm that Jealousy, remember, comes from a-.
Speaker 1:Selfish.
Speaker 2:A selfish problem. You got worried. You're more worried about your ability. It can also come because the other person isn't making you number one in their life. So if you find the number one, the person is like, well, that's number one, and the kids are number one, the guy at work's number one, and this is number one and I'm number 15. I'm number 15. I don't care who you are. That hurts, yeah, it hurts. And so when I get people coming into counseling like, well, he's so jealous he can't even let me talk to somebody. Well, I first then ask first of all him aside what's going on in your life that you don't feel like you're number one?
Speaker 1:You know. I think that's a really good point, because one of the things you want to think about when you're spying, you know, think about your relationship, yeah, and you start deciding am I actually showing that they're number one, right? Yeah, now, most of the time when I've seen it in my past on the back to the question from the caller is when there's jealousy there, there's something going on with the person who's jealous. Unless there's a, you are absolutely not putting them as primary in the relationship. Unless there's something like that, it's more of a selfishness or a lack of self-confidence in the person. But you're absolutely right. If your behavior is you're not putting that person number one, well then you gotta check yourself and go oh, I'm actually not putting the most important person in my life number one. I need to make some changes and then maybe that jealousy will go away.
Speaker 2:Right, Because she's saying he's so jealous. Okay, well, first of all, he and his baby be a jealous individual, which means he's got a lot of needy issues going on and I would be careful I'd be so careful to marry this guy.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you, Unless this is resolved, If this was a dating situation I'm saying red flag you might want to just move on Right. And how many of you have been those?
Speaker 2:dates who are like hey, they get jealous, they'll follow you around, they want to check your phone book, Look, remember. I read your texts. It starts at the beginning, it's voluntary. And if he wants to be in relationship with you, it's voluntary. And you want to be in relationship with him, it's voluntary. If he doesn't like the voluntary side of this thing and he thinks lockup is the way to deal with this, that's not a relationship. Yeah, he's trying to control.
Speaker 1:It's trying to control.
Speaker 2:It's a control problem and he's feeling he can't control you. So there's so many facets of this. It's not just cut or dry. But if you look at it from the big picture, typically you want to run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what I would say. I mean, when you're out there dating, we talk all the time on the show date to evaluate, right. Your whole point in this dating scene is to decide are there big red flags, are there things that I can't overcome here? And you got to keep your eyes wide open, you got to be looking and evaluating constantly and if there's a major red flag, like a high level of jealousy or high level of control, is that what you want to be in for the rest of your life?
Speaker 2:It'll get worse. You think, well, let's get married, he'll know I committed and.
Speaker 2:I got a ring on my finger. It doesn't change. It doesn't change, it doesn't change. However, we're talking about the other person and their weaknesses in this thing. When we come back, we want to talk about yours, hers. She needs to check her six. That's a fighter pilot term. Check your six, check your behind there. I want you to do because, remember, everything about happiness happens because you choose to make good decisions, not because of what someone else does. You make your choices and I want you to check your six and say now, what am I doing that could be aggravating this, what may not be correct in the relationship? And am I doing it as best I can? And that doesn't mean that you have to capitulate and open up your phone to everybody.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about it. We're going to talk about I got some good, I got some ideas with this let's chat.
Speaker 2:We got to take a break. If you want to check us out on our podcast, it's let's chat with Will and Tony at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:See you in two.