Have you ever felt like your past has permanently shaped your love life? In this deeply personal episode, I share the emotional journey of my client Lorelei—a smart, successful woman whose early experiences with an abusive father and controlling husband convinced her she was unlovable. We explore how trauma can create limiting beliefs that sabotage your dating life and how genuine emotional safety—yes, even from a male coach—can start to heal that. If you’ve struggled to trust men or believe that love is still possible for you, this episode will give you hope, insight, and a path forward. Tune in to rediscover what’s possible in love, no matter your age or past.

What You’ll Hear:

I share an emotional coaching session with my client, Lorelei, a smart, beautiful woman in her 60s who’s finally confronting the childhood wounds that shaped her entire love life.

You’ll hear the devastating belief her inner child whispered—“If no man has loved me in 60 years, nobody ever will”—and how we’re slowly rewriting that story together.

I talk about how so many women unknowingly base their entire view of men on just two relationships: their father and their ex-husband.

I unpack how your early experiences with men can quietly dictate who you choose, how you feel about yourself, and what you believe you deserve.

You’ll hear how Lorelei began to trust again—not just in the process, but in me as a man—despite having every reason not to.

I reflect on the unexpected role I’ve come to play for some of my clients: the first man who makes them feel safe, heard, and understood.

I explain why seeing love modeled in real life matters—and what happens when you’ve only ever seen dysfunction.

I talk about the emotional breakthrough that helped Lorelei go from fear and paralysis to finally getting online and believing love might actually be possible for her.

I share why I believe the second half of Lorelei’s life is going to be better than the first—and how that can be true for you, too.

And finally, I invite you to open your heart to a new chapter, one where you stop living by old pain and start creating the love story you’ve always deserved.

Full Episode Transcript

We’re going deep today. I’m not going to say that I’m going to cry, but I’m not saying I’m not going to cry either.

This episode is for every woman who’s had challenging relationships with her dad and subsequently with every other man that’s ever come into your life. There is hope for you. So please stick around for this entire episode.

My name is Evan Marc Katz. This is the Love U Podcast. Thank you for listening.

I really appreciate you. The Love U Podcast is a place where you can learn everything there is to know about dating and relationships, sex, and men from a man’s point of view. I have been doing this podcast since 2016, been a dating coach since 2003 before there were such things as dating coaches.

And so hopefully I have something to share with you that might be insightful. And I really appreciate you subscribing on Spotify, on Apple, all the positive reviews and five-star things. If you haven’t given us a review, it’s been like a month since I’ve gotten a comment.

So maybe you could be the person who makes my day and offers me a nice comment about what you get out of listening to the show. I’m also excited before we get started in the meat of today’s podcast to tell you about the next installment of the Extraordinary Love series. I do that the third Wednesday of every month.

It’s a Zoom call with a specific topic and a live Q&A every single month for free. We’ve had over 500 women registered. I think this month might be over 600 women registered in total.

And it’s something that you definitely want to be a part of this month’s topic, what high-quality men want in a long-term partner. And so go to extraordinaryloveseries.com, put in your name, email address, and phone number, and I will see you on the next Extraordinary Love series. So 22 years into this, that’s how long I’ve been doing this, I keep learning.

It’s a fun part of the job. It would be terrible if I was just running on autopilot and never, you know, I just, I talk at people rather than with people. But the nicest part about this is when you deal with human beings and you listen, you have always something reflected back to you that you haven’t seen before.

So I have a relationship that I think is pretty special with a client of mine named Lorelei. We’ll call her Lorelei for this sake. She’s beautiful, she’s bright, she is, I think she’s around 60 years old, and she has overcome so much in her life.

On the outside, you look at the life she had, she was living the dream, she was married to a very successful man for 25, 30 years. She got to be the stay-at-home mom that she wanted to be, to devote all her energy to her family. That’s what you would see from the outside.

From the inside, she felt small and disregarded and unintelligent and unimportant and controlled. She was trapped in somewhat of a prison for her entire adult life. And it all started, again, without breaching her trust, this is not an unusual story, it started way back in her childhood.

Physical, emotional abuse from her father set a template about how men are and why you should be with them. She was unprotected by her mother, and it taught her that the world was an unsafe place, that you had to go along with things that you didn’t like, and that her opinion and voice didn’t really matter. If I talk about being the CEO of your love life, this lovely Lorelei has never felt like the CEO of her life.

And she carried that belief into her marriage and chose a man who vaguely resembled her father, another controlling guy who was detached from her and her emotions, and he gave her enough of a good life that she couldn’t see how to escape. It never really had the courage to leave. And so, as I said, this is a painful story, but it’s not an uncommon story from where I sit.

So a few weeks ago, I’m coaching Lorelei, we do these one-on-one Zooms, she’s a private client of mine, and I was picking up on her ambient anxiety about dating, and to some degree about coaching with me. Just because you’re on Zoom doesn’t mean you can’t get a vibe from someone. So I was getting some sense of fear about dating and men, and maybe her belief in what we were doing together.

And she said something to me that was so profound, I was like, I’m writing this down, I’m going to talk about this in a podcast. So she said she had a conversation with her inner child, and this is work she’s done on her own, it’s nothing to do with me. The little girl voice inside of her, because that’s our formative years.

I mean, I wouldn’t put an inner child next to me and say, hey, meet little Evan. But I do think that there’s definitely an inner child voice that everybody has. This one for her is the person who’s the victim of so much abuse.

These are her earliest memories. So her inner child, while she and I are working together, said, and this is her quote, if no man has loved me in 60 years, not my father, or my ex-husband, or any other man, nobody will. This is proof that I am unlovable, unworthy.

So I was, that’s devastating to hear. And so what I was picking up was her fighting her resistance to this process of just being loved. And again, I don’t want to throw the word love around too loosely.

I wouldn’t want my clients to fall in love with me. I don’t fall in love with my clients. What I do is show them love.

I show them what it feels like to be loved, to have someone who is in your corner, who’s not judging you, who’s not abandoning you, whose goal is your happiness. That’s the not-so-secret secret of my business. And so she’s so wary of men, and I happen to be a man.

And so I’m overcoming 60 years of her inner child saying, no, he’s just another man. You’re not safe, whether it’s with me or with any other guy on the planet. And so when I gently point it out, and this is logic in the face of very deep emotion, but it’s sort of unassailable logic.

Her sample size of men is two. It’s her father and it’s her husband. And these are the guys who did the major damage in her life.

So there’s billions, millions, depends on how big or small you want your community to be, but there’s an infinite number of men out there. And the number of men who are her vision of how men are is two. So she was born into the family with one, right? That’s her father.

That sets the template for the husband she chooses. It’s like she’s got blinders on, right? So she interacts and devotes her life to two men who are constitutionally incapable of being the self-aware, sensitive, selfless guy who can make for a good husband, right? She didn’t barely choose either of them. It was almost like it was given to her.

So why would she draw the worst possible conclusion about herself? That because there are two bad men that she spent most of her life with, that somehow that’s about her. That’s absolutely the last conclusion I would want her to draw. And the conversation continued because she heard me and she’s like, you know, logically that makes sense that it is only two men.

I get that, but those are the only men in my life. And she explained further, and we talked about just different paths growing up. She explained further that she has no friends who are in really happy marriages and therefore she has no relationship role models to either inspire her to a good relationship or show her what it even looks like or feels like to have a relationship.

It’s someone who’s blind, who’s trying to paint a landscape or something like that. It’s not her fault, but it’s really hard to know what you’re going for if you’re not around it all the time. And so this led me to think that she basically knows two types of people at her juncture in life.

People who come from dysfunctional families and have dysfunctional marriages and stay in dysfunctional marriages for 20, 30, 40 years, right? Like, oh, I guess this is what love is to people who give each other the silent treatment and berate each other and cheat on each other. And I mean, I guess that’s a version of reality. That’s what she was used to in her family.

Or people who are friends of hers who are in sort of normal marriage that sort of deteriorated. It’s not abusive. It’s just two people who don’t really love each other.

And this is my point. She’s got friends like this, right? Marriages that exist sort of in name, but the kids are out of the house. They don’t make love.

They don’t do loving actions for each other. They minimize the amount of time they spend together. It’s just more marriage in name.

And again, I know that those sort of things exist. I’m not denying their existence. They’re extremely common.

But this is her only entryway into marriage are those two stories, the neglectful marriage and the abusive marriage. And so it helps to know people who are walking the walk, right? And this is anything. If you want to learn to be a successful businessman, it probably helps to work at a company with other successful businessmen and so on and so forth.

My wife opted out of her career and she took a bunch of mommy and me classes with other people who’d done this before and could teach her how to do this better so it wasn’t so scary. I mean, we are all constantly learning from people who have done it before and theoretically done it better. And then my client, Lorelei, said something that really kind of floored me.

And the reason I’m recounting this whole conversation is that it was profound and there were kind of things dropping that I hadn’t considered before. She said, I, me, Evan, was serving the role that her father and brother and husband should have served, right? And I hadn’t quite contemplated that before. And this big revelation, like I knew it was my job to show people love, but she told me I didn’t understand the power that I had.

I never thought of this as a power position, right? That I was being tasked with being the man that she should want to date, not literally, figuratively, right? Leading, right? Like all the stuff I talk about here, leading with character, kindness, consistency, communication, making each of my clients feel safe, heard, and understood. The stuff that I say you should get from your partner is stuff that I got to exhibit in every interaction. Every word that I say has to lend credence to the idea that I’m obviously not the only man on earth who knows how to be kind to a woman.

So this conversation did two things simultaneously. It made me more compassionate. It’s not like I was not compassionate after two decades of doing this, but it made me almost softer, more tender to my smart, successful clients, right? These really impressive women kind of need a hug as much as they need anything.

And it was a breakthrough for Lorelei in that she came to terms with the idea that she could trust and that there are other men besides some dating coach she found on the internet who are kind to women and want to be in service as part of a larger integrated partnership. The thing she’s looking for actually exists, right? And she’s starting to believe that this is true when her whole life has indicated otherwise. So Lorelei’s getting online.

It took her a while. It had taken her three months kind of dragging her feet, a little afraid. But I predict she’s going to find a good man a lot sooner than she thinks because she’s so amazing and because her dating sample size is so minimal.

It’s like she doesn’t even know what’s out there yet. So I’m excited for her. I’m optimistic for her.

And I think that we can close the book on the first 60 years of her life and open up a new chapter, brand new, unwritten, right? And plot out something that’s a lot more beautiful for the next 30 years. So if you want to be part of this, please, I encourage you, go to evanmarckatz.com/now, book a time to talk with me. I’m just going to ask you questions about yourself, why you’re reaching out, what’s not working in your love life, what you want to see happen in your love life, what obstacles are getting in the way of your success.

And we’ll plot out a course of action to get you unstuck from where you are in a more positive place and taking action to help you achieve your ultimate goal of creating a lasting, loving relationship, the kind that you deserve. I really hope to see you there, evanmarckatz.com/now. Before we go, I want to thank you for listening to me.

I know this isn’t a conventional podcast, I don’t know. I’m sure most podcasts are three people bullshitting about what they saw in The Bachelor, going on for three hours about politics or something. These are little sort of 20 minutes of me thinking out loud.

But hopefully somewhere along the line, you pick up something that you could take into your real life and makes you feel better about your chances of doing something really important in a pretty chaotic world. Having your go-to person is kind of everything. I’ll be talking about that a lot more in the next coming weeks.

I’m also excited, before we close, to remind you Extraordinary Love Series, extraordinaryloveseries.com, doing a Zoom call for high achieving women looking for high value men. And this month’s coming topic is what high quality men want in a long-term partner. You don’t want to miss it.

So go to Extraordinary Love Series to register. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you.

I love you. I look forward to reading your comments and reviews on YouTube and Spotify, et cetera. And I look forward to seeing you again next week.

That’s it. That’s all I got. Talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.