Welcome back to another episode of Finding the Guardian of Your Soul®. I'm your host, Lisa Shield. In today's episode, I dive into the intersection of romance and finance, exploring what to look for in a finally responsible partner. I share insights on how successful couples have navigated their financial relationships. Finally, I discuss the importance of trust, personal growth, and finding a true connection based on spiritually grounded principles. Stay tuned for a thought-provoking conversation that will inspire you on your own journey to finding a soulful and responsible partner. Let's dive in! Continue On Your Journey: Lisa Shield | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Book a Call With Lisa Email the podcast at: podcast@lisashield.com
What You'll Hear In This Episode:
-Building a financially responsible partnership
- Combining finances and removing barriers
- Supporting partner during times of uncertainty and income loss
- Success in dating doesn't require external qualities or wealth
- Approaching relationships with spiritual principles
- Foundation of kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, patience, and personal responsibility
- Acknowledging past anxiety rooted in fear
- Evaluating partner's principles, treatment of others, and level of consciousness
- Relationships guided by authenticity, not predetermined scripts
- Deciding to trust partner based on demonstrated qualities
- Sharing financial responsibilities as true partners
- Support during career transitions and financial assistance
- Partner's role in supporting and encouraging personal and professional growth
- Sharing the financial burden and acting as a guardian of the partner’s soul
Key quotes:
Continue On Your Journey:
Lisa Shield | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Book a Call With Lisa
Email the podcast at: podcast@lisashield.com
Lisa Shield [00:00:00]:
You. Hello, everybody, and welcome to finding the guardian of your soul. I am so happy to be here today. I'm going to talk about oh, my goodness. My assistant wrote out my banner for this, and F-I-N-A-N-C-I-A-L-L-Y financially responsible partner. She put finally responsible partner instead of financially responsible partner. That's very funny. So I just took a moment to correct that.
Lisa Shield [00:00:45]:
Hi, everybody. I hope you're having a wonderful day. It's great to see you. I think finances are a huge topic in dating, in relationships, and this is something that has come up many times in the groups of women that we coach. So I thought I'd talk about it today. The first thing I'm going to do is just talk a little bit about my own financial relationship with my husband, which I actually feel is wonderful, something I'm extremely proud of. And I think that this is something that would be great to share with all of you. So Benjamin and I have a really lovely dynamic.
Lisa Shield [00:01:47]:
You know, whatever. The elements of what work in terms of our financial relationship really echo out through our whole partnership, but this is how they manifest when it comes to money. So we really are complete partners and we designed for ourselves. My goal was not to have any barriers between Benjamin and me. I want to first say we don't have children and we don't have to worry about who's going to inherit our money because neither one of us has kids. And so the only thing that we would leave our money to might be family members. So we don't have any of those complications that some other couples may have. We also, when we met, we don't have concerns around one of us taking advantage of the other, not showing up responsibly in the relationship.
Lisa Shield [00:02:56]:
And so we trust each other implicitly in every aspect of our relationship. And so when it comes to our finances, there wasn't any reason for us to want to keep that separate in any way. In fact, not only did I not want to keep my finances separate, which I had done completely in my first marriage, but I wanted Benjamin and me to be partners in every way. I didn't want any obstacles. So I really wanted to look at all of my beliefs, all of the things that know, might have that would keep us separate, and I wanted to take all of that away. So our relationship, what happened was we bought a house together right after our first year of being together and got engaged. And when we moved into this new house, we literally took 90% of what we owned and put it on the front yard. We had a massive garage sale, and we decided that everything we wanted, we just wanted to buy new things that were ours, not things from his past or my past.
Lisa Shield [00:04:18]:
I think we kept a bed, a sofa, and, like, a dining room table and chairs. That was it. But everything else went, and we got a new mattress, of course, and it was really a wonderful thing. First of all, for me, I felt so good about letting go of all that stuff, the old memories that may have been attached to it, my former life and all, and being able to just buy things to decorate a house that was truly ours, was incredible. For a while, he had a separate bank account, and I had a bank account of my own, mostly for my business. And he had a private account and an account for his business. And then at some point, we incorporated. We put both his practice and my practice into a single corporation.
Lisa Shield [00:05:22]:
And that was when we got rid of my personal bank account. And then we just have now one account for all of our personal expenses and another account for our businesses. And Benjamin takes care of most of our financial stuff. He pays all the bills, everything's set up on autopay. He's extremely responsible that way, and I trust him. And I love not having to think about that stuff and knowing he's doing a good job with it. And I don't feel the need to have a separate account if I go to the spa, if I have any kind of treatments, if I buy clothing. He knows that even though I love beautiful things, I'm never frivolous, and I'm always working hard and working at my business and in my practice, and as is he.
Lisa Shield [00:06:26]:
And so we just both contribute financially to this marriage being true partners. In the very beginning, when we first moved in together, I actually sold an importing business I had and enrolled in coaching, training. And so I was in transition in my career, and Benjamin paid for almost everything. In fact, I didn't even know until much later the lengths to which he went in order to make sure that every bill was paid and that we were fine during that period because I wasn't really earning an income. He did that for a long, long time, and there was never a complaint. He never questioned my dedication to my career. He never tried to encourage me to earn more money. He actually encouraged me by being what we call a guardian of my soul and really reinforcing his belief in me.
Lisa Shield [00:07:37]:
Not by trying to tell me how to run my business or make more money, but by believing in my power to do those things, to figure them out on my own and creating a container for me to do that. And one of the main ways he did that was by taking care of the vast majority of our financial responsibilities during that time in the relationship. So he was working long and hard hours to be able to do that. And I was also building my practice. It wasn't until literally 14 years into our relationship. So 14 years into our relationship, I became a coach right away, and I was really earning what most coaches do, which is not a lot of money, you think about it. Most coaches earn $70,000 a year, especially 20 years ago. So I was working and I was seeing a lot of clients, and I was busy, but I was making about 70,000 a year.
Lisa Shield [00:08:51]:
And we lived in Los Angeles. We bought a home and all, and so Benjamin was footing the rest of the bill. And at one point, I started to really look at our financial situation and the part I was playing in it. And out of love for my husband, out of love for Benjamin, I started to look at what I was earning, and I began to ask myself what I could do to create more wealth, to bring in more money. And I was 54 years old at the time. I met him when I was 41, so that was 14 years. And he had supported me lovingly through that entire process. And I loved him so much, and I knew that he worked hourly.
Lisa Shield [00:09:48]:
He's a body worker. He made a great living at that time. But I saw how hard he was working, and I knew that there was only so much he could raise his rates. And I had to make a real change if we were going to have more money. And I looked at myself and I said, Lisa, if anyone's going to really bring in more money, it's you. You have to look at this. And literally the next day, I saw this video ad on Facebook of a coach, and it blew me away because it sounded like that coach had been hearing my inner dialogue about earning money as a coach and where I was wasting time and how I could start to earn more. And it was like he was, like, really parroting back every single thought I had the day before.
Lisa Shield [00:10:49]:
And he said, Look, I can show you how to create a six or seven figure coaching business. And all you have to do is jump on a call and we'll talk to you about how it's done. So I booked a call, I think, for that very same day. And after an hour long call, I signed up for this coaching program that changed my life. And I'm very proud to say that I think for the last three or four years, I've done well over $1,000 in my coaching practice based on the help, the work of this man. And I have been able to now support my husband and me through things like the pandemic. He couldn't work from one moment to the next. He's had several very serious illnesses and operations, and the whole thing really flipped.
Lisa Shield [00:11:50]:
We didn't expect that to happen. But I like to say the baton has gotten passed back and forth financially several times in our relationship, and we've never ever for a moment said, oh, well, you need to earn more money or I'm not going to foot the bill, or when are you going to get back to work? We are true partners in every sense of the word. And when the pandemic hit, Benjamin said, what am I going to do? I don't know how long I'm going to be out of my practice. And I said, well, it may not be what you want to do, but I said, Maybe you'll come on my Q and A calls with the women in my coaching course. And just, I think they'd love to hear from you. I think it would really add something special. And so he did. He just blindly started coming on two Q A calls a week.
Lisa Shield [00:12:58]:
He writes the dating profiles for the women who go through the course. He helps edit their photo shoots. So he gives the women a man's perspective on what photos to use. And it's not only been remarkable, like, just magical to have my husband sitting next to me as my co partner and co creator in this business, but we get to spend more time together. And when the pandemic was over and he started to rebuild his practice again, I said to him, look, go back and just do what you love. And he said, no, I'm going to continue working with you. I'm going to continue coming on the calls because I see how valuable it is to the clients. So this is how we work together.
Lisa Shield [00:13:50]:
This is how my husband and I earn an income, how we both show up for each other. And it's this beautiful dance that we do where two responsible, adult human beings just co create together. And what's lovely is we can dance in the moment when life throws us all these unexpected moves. We can maneuver around them and with them because we're such incredible partners and we don't live according to other people's rules. We're not sitting there blaming each other or scrutinizing each other or letting our fear overwhelm us. We're just doing whatever is necessary in that moment. We look at the moment that's in front of us and we both show up. We both contribute as much as we can.
Lisa Shield [00:14:51]:
Now, let's get into some specifics. We do not have to have separate accounts and worry about certain other people children or other relatives, mothers, fathers. None of that influences us. We're very fortunate. There's nobody who will get or inherit our money or who is waiting to inherit it. Nobody. And so it is completely ours to do what we want with. So we didn't need a prenup.
Lisa Shield [00:15:33]:
We don't need to worry if one of us passes away before the other, our home will go to our partner. There's nothing in the way, right? And yes, we do have a will. We have relatives. My niece and nephew and my half sister. There are people in our lives who will get our inheritance, but they're not our immediate children and family. And so for them, this will be an unexpected gift, because there's not anybody who's in line, so to speak, to receive this. And so we can do whatever the heck we want. We can spend every last penny of it and not worry, right? And so that gives us tremendous freedom.
Lisa Shield [00:16:27]:
It really does. We are very fortunate in that respect, and because we trust each other implicitly to make good decisions and to be conscious of the other person and conscientious, we are thoughtful. I would never go out and buy a brand new Ferrari and drive home with it without talking to Benjamin. He'd probably say, okay, if you really want a know, we'll figure out how to pay for it. But I just wouldn't do that without you know, I make careful decisions out of love and out know, wanting what's best for him and the relationship. And like I said earlier, I have good taste, but it's not over the know. I'm not out buying Birkin bags and louboutin shoes every day. I'm very careful.
Lisa Shield [00:17:32]:
I buy nice things, but I'm careful. So we're very fortunate. Now, let's talk about some of what makes this work. First of all, we trust each other implicitly. We really trust each other. And this is the foundation of a truly, truly, truly healthy dynamic in any aspect of your relationship. And this is not blind trust. I'm not seeing what I want to see and hearing what I want to hear.
Lisa Shield [00:18:11]:
I spent a lot of time vetting men and going on dates to find a man whose values I respect and admire, and that took a while. And I truly respect and admire Benjamin's value system. I mean, he has so much integrity, and he shows it in everything he does. He's responsible, he's communicative, he's he's open, he's caring, he's generous. And I looked for these qualities in a partner. I looked for them. I did not have those qualities in my last partner. My husband was a pathological liar.
Lisa Shield [00:19:05]:
He was completely financially irresponsible. He borrowed money from people and never paid it back. He was a liar and a cheater. And I lived with that for 13 years, and it was pretty agonizing. I was in a lot of fear because I didn't know what he would do. He never showed up. I had a lot of financial insecurity. Not like some people who are living hand to mouth, but when your relationship, your relationship security and your love and that your partner is ideally your anchor in the world, the person you can turn to and trust.
Lisa Shield [00:19:56]:
And there was so much instability in terms of our finances, and much of it was being created by him, not me. And the way I was creating it, of course, was allowing it to go on and staying with him and not walking away. And I did eventually. It was the thing that made me leave him. It was the thing that really made me leave, because I started to see once I quit picking up the slack and paying all the bills and keeping us afloat, I started to see what was really going on. And there came a point where our rent hadn't been paid in six months. The phone bill hadn't been paid. I could have paid it.
Lisa Shield [00:20:45]:
I could have, but I stopped because I wanted to see what he would do. And he didn't do it. He didn't get his act together. And that's when I knew it wasn't going to happen. And this is a dangerous thing that we do. I didn't want to face the truth, and so that's why I kept doing it for so long. Even though it was painful, it was upsetting because he wasn't being a partner to me. And so I hated myself for allowing it to go on, for rationalizing it and justifying it and telling myself, oh, well, at least I have a partner, and I'm not a woman who needs much.
Lisa Shield [00:21:34]:
And he loves me. He may have loved me, but he wasn't a good partner. He didn't take care of me. And I'm not talking about him like me being a stay at home wife and whatever and just taking and having him caretake me. No, but he didn't take care of me. And when you have something that you value, when you have someone or something precious, you care for it, right? You take care of a car or a dog or a child. You care for the things and the people you love. And he wasn't caring for me.
Lisa Shield [00:22:20]:
And I was afraid to stop doing this because then I would paying for bills and keeping us afloat, even though it was soul crushing for me to keep doing it. And I knew I was not valuing myself by doing it and that I would never get what I really wanted in life and in love, but I kept doing it because I was so afraid to be alone. I was really afraid. And there was this part of me that thought, well, what if this is as good as it gets? And I'd never dated much prior to meeting my ex husband. I dated some in college and whatever, but not really. And when I met my ex husband, we had chemistry. We were in grad school together. It was exciting, and he was a kind of an exciting guy, very avantgarde, very creative guy, funny.
Lisa Shield [00:23:23]:
And so I fell into that trap because he did fill a need I had. But as time went on, 13 years went by, and we didn't grow in that relationship. So finally, after six months of the rent not being paid, the phone bill not being paid, I left. I got the courage to finally leave. And when I left, I didn't look at him and try to figure him out. I didn't blame him. I don't know why he did the things he did. I do not know.
Lisa Shield [00:24:09]:
I mean, I can make stuff up, but the truth is everybody has to figure himself or herself out. And the only way I was ever going to get what I wanted in this life was to really figure out why I picked this man and why I stayed with him for 13 years and how I was going to find a better partner. That's what I had to look at, because I didn't want that. Even if that had ever really resolved, it wasn't ever what I truly wanted, at least not in the long run. I stayed out of fear, not out of love. I stayed out of the fear of being alone. And I kept hoping it would get better, and I think a lot of us do that. So I finally got the courage to leave him.
Lisa Shield [00:25:08]:
And when I did, and the more I took responsibility for myself please know this was not an overnight process. It's not like I left my ex and I just figured it all out, but I was determined to figure it out. I didn't want to be alone. I love having a partner. I love being a partner. Can I be alone? Do I enjoy my own company? Yes. Yeah, I do. And I love being with a partner more.
Lisa Shield [00:25:52]:
And so I wanted to do this work and I started to think about who I needed to be, what I wanted to attract in a man. And I started to really dream the kind of relationship I wanted. I started to think about not limited thinking about, oh, well, these things can't happen, or whatever. Look, I'm going to be honest, I am incredibly creative. It's one of the things I pride myself on. And I'm a free thinker. I just love to think for myself. And because I'm so imaginative and I think out of the box, I really felt like I could do anything I put my mind to.
Lisa Shield [00:26:45]:
I never thought it would be easy. I'm not afraid of some hard work. I'm not afraid of some challenges. I knew that that would be part of it. But I also knew I could figure this out and create something extraordinary. I never doubted that. And so I was talking to my operations manager just right before this call, and we were talking about how amazing online dating is that people want to or maybe it wasn't my I was talking to one of my salesperson, my enrollment coach, and we were talking about how amazing online dating is. When I was younger, I didn't really date.
Lisa Shield [00:27:39]:
I didn't feel comfortable with men. I didn't know what men wanted from me or boys wanted from me. I was so awkward around men and boys. It was crazy. I mean, I felt so uncomfortable. And I didn't have a good relationship with my father or my brother growing up. And so men were anomalies to me may have been space aliens. For all I knew.
Lisa Shield [00:28:18]:
I'd sit across from a guy and I couldn't even communicate. And so when I hit it off with my ex husband, I was just happy to actually connect with a man back then, to know what it felt like to have all those emotions and all. I mean, yeah, I'd had crushes when I was a kid, but the connection with my ex was different. So once I left him and I started dating again, online dating was really a blessing for me because I hated having to go out when I was younger and flirt with guys. And I would come home from being out with girlfriends, and it was one of the most wretched experiences I ever had, was going out with girlfriends for cocktails or to a party or whatever and trying to flirt and pick up guys. For some women, that's fun. For me, it was agonizing. Agonizing.
Lisa Shield [00:29:27]:
I had no clue how to do it. And not only that, I would watch these other women and I felt worse. I mean, it just made me feel horrible about myself because I really wanted to connect with men. And I just kept thinking, oh, my god, if that's what I have to do to connect with a man, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Because either I'm going to have to settle and just to be with somebody, which I did in many ways with my ex husband. And when I left him, I just thought I'd rather be alone than keep doing what we were doing. But I looked at myself and I said, lisa, you've got to figure this know, you don't have to connect with every man on the planet. You don't have to be a goddess, but you have an amazing heart.
Lisa Shield [00:30:28]:
You're smart, you're caring, you're kind. Certainly you can attract a wonderful man. And that's what I set out to do. And I loved again online dating because I didn't have to go to parties. I didn't have to do this in real life. And when people say, I would wish it would happen in real life, a lot of times I really feel like they're saying, I don't know how to do this. And I just want it to happen, and I don't want to have to figure out how to make it happen. I don't want to have to do any work.
Lisa Shield [00:31:08]:
I just want to meet a guy and fall in love and live happily ever after. Even your girlfriends who do meet a guy and fall in love, at least 50% of them don't live happily ever after. At least 50%. So doing work in this part of our lives is not just important. I feel it's imperative. And what I got to do was really start to explore what I wanted in a partner. The kind of relationship, the kind of rapport and dynamic I was looking for and then online dating gave me the ability to get out and find him. I don't care where you live.
Lisa Shield [00:32:04]:
I don't care how many liars and cheaters and scammers are online. I don't care there are liars and cheaters and scammers out in the real world. There are people, men who will ask for your number and never call. It's an illusion that online dating is any different than meeting in real life. There are obstacles to both. And believe me, you have actually way more control over meeting guys online than you do in real life, waiting for it to happen. You may meet one or two guys in a year. You go online.
Lisa Shield [00:32:49]:
You can have one or two dates in a week if you're really good at this and you don't have to be a beauty queen, and you don't have to be a millionaires or a sex kitten, you can get plenty of dates if you know what you're doing and your energy and your heart are open. You can attract a lot of men online, and maybe not as many if you live outside of a bigger city, but all it takes is one. So I started to think about the kind of man I really wanted, the qualities I was looking for. And while I was doing that work or while I was exploring all of that, I was also doing a lot of interpersonal work and especially working on myself spiritually, really looking at the spiritual side of life and honing those spiritual principles, which I had never really stopped to do. Those spiritual principles are what play out in our romantic relationships. That's really the foundation of my relationship with Benjamin. It's not a script of the right words to say. It's not asking the right questions.
Lisa Shield [00:34:26]:
It's not some sort of timeline that was artificially created. The real foundation of our report is all the spiritual principles kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, patience, taking personal responsibility. That is the foundation of a guardian of your soul relationship. It's founded on honing those spiritual principles. So in many ways, our clients will come to us, and they'll want scripts, and they'll want, well, what do I say? Or when do I ask these questions? Or how do I say this? Or when should I expect him to say I love you? Or how do I get him to say I love you? All of these things, when you're really operating out of spiritual principles, they're just second nature. They're second nature. So, for example, I often found myself being anxious in relationships. And when I stopped and looked at where my anxiety was coming from, my anxiety was often coming from fear.
Lisa Shield [00:35:51]:
And because I was suppressing my emotions, there were things that I was feeling in the relationship, things I wanted clarity on, so that I knew where we were going, so I knew how he felt about me. And I may have been afraid to ask those things because I didn't know how to ask them. And I was afraid of the answers. But when I would look at coming from love and compassion for myself and this man, I would start to see things in a completely different light. So when I looked at seeing the situation not from fear, but love and compassion, it suddenly became okay to ask those things. And I would be asking those questions that were causing me so much anxiety, not with the fear of, oh, my gosh, he's going to tell me something I don't want to hear, right? If I didn't have an agenda, there was nothing he could say that would disappoint me. Because the goal was genuine curiosity, love, wanting to know, wanting to feel safe in the relationship and wanting to also take care of myself. Because if I didn't know certain things or I felt unsure about what was going on in the relationship, I was putting myself in harm's way because I might develop feelings for a man who wasn't feeling the same way about me.
Lisa Shield [00:37:37]:
And so I would be loving to myself to get clarity on those issues. And if that's where I was coming from, those were very noble reasons to be bringing up these kinds of questions and very mature, very adult reasons. And I would be taking care of myself. I would be looking out for him as well, because I also didn't want to waste my time in a relationship with a man who couldn't give me the things I wanted. And so I started to come into my relationships in this very different way. And because of that, I was able to navigate all of these very challenging. When you're trying to date and find a partner and you're doing it at the level of your ego and you're trying to figure things out at the level of the mind, it's very hard to find this true partner. But when your intentions, when your motivations are more from spiritual principles, everything seems so clear.
Lisa Shield [00:39:03]:
And I guess I'm sharing all of that because as I said earlier in my talk, and I know I've rambled a little bit, I just decided to let myself do that today. In terms of finances, it wasn't about asking a series of questions. It was about looking at this man's principles and really observing who he is, who he was, how he moved through the world, how he treated me. Was he generous? Was he compassionate, was he caring, was he responsible? And when somebody has those qualities, they permeate that person's entire life. Was he conscious? Did he move consciously through life? Did he make conscious decisions? Was the life that he was living a conscious creation? Or was it something that he fell into and was not happy with? And as I started looking at all of those things, I just knew that this was a man I could trust in every aspect of life. He was the man who a. Man who had the qualities of being a true partner. Nobody wrote us a script for any of this.
Lisa Shield [00:40:48]:
I really surrendered. I trusted myself. I took care of myself. And I knew I would leave at any relationship, at any time if I felt it wasn't safe for me or if I felt that someone wasn't all in with me. And I did. I actually proved to myself, right before I met Benjamin, I met a man who was quite handsome, maybe one of the most handsome men I'd ever dated. And he had a cool career, and he actually had even done some work with Don Miguel Ruiz. Some of you may know he's the author of The Four Agreements.
Lisa Shield [00:41:33]:
He had actually not at the same time as me, but he had also been a part of a community where we worked directly with Don Miguel about 35 years ago now. And so I felt a connection with him over that. But he turned out to be what I now understand is avoidant. I would absolutely say this man had avoidant personality disorder, and he didn't just have some avoidant tendencies. I actually think he would have been diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder. And I didn't know that term at the time, but I had been doing so much work right before I met him and got into a relationship with him that I very quickly, within six weeks, saw that he started doing this sort of hot and cold push pull thing. And Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Lisa Shield [00:42:37]:
Hyde and I saw it, and I said, Lisa, if this is what six weeks looks like, you don't want to hang around for six months or six years. And I cut it off immediately. So I had proven to myself that no matter how great looking a guy was, no matter know, I didn't care if he worked with Don Miguel, and he'd studied The Four Agreements like me and whatever else, he knew a lot of the same people I knew, I didn't care. Once I understood that this was a very emotionally immature and unhealthy damaged man, I ended it the next day. So that was also very important to see my own clarity. And in the past, man, I would have stuck it out. I would have contorted myself to get this guy to love me. We would have argued and talked, and it would have been awful.
Lisa Shield [00:43:41]:
And I was able to see it. I didn't need to go through it. And I got myself out of it. I also was tested again. I was dating a man, and this was somebody who I actually knew. It was sort of an interim relationship sweetheart of a guy. Definitely somebody who was a rebound relationship, but a sweetheart. And he got violently drunk one night.
Lisa Shield [00:44:15]:
Like, I had never seen somebody turn into a completely different person. The sweet, sweet sweetheart of a man turned into a mean monster. It was horrifying. Horrifying. I mean, I saw it once with alcohol. I don't ever want to see that again. It was like a rabid dog. And he was so like this man who had been so sweet and kind and whatever, was mean and vicious and attacking and whatever.
Lisa Shield [00:44:53]:
And I literally took my things. I left. And the next day he called me and said, I'm so sorry. And I said, look, you have a problem. You're an alcoholic. That just doesn't happen. That's not a one off. Like, you have an issue with alcohol and you need to stay away.
Lisa Shield [00:45:15]:
You need to get help. And he said, I'll go get help. Don't leave. Don't break it off. And I just said, Look, I've been down that road before and I am not going down it again. And that was the end. I said, you need to get help, and I'm not sticking around for that. And I cut that off too.
Lisa Shield [00:45:34]:
So those were two relationships right before I met Benjamin, where I had this clarity that there was no man on the planet that I was going to stay with that was wounded and damaged and was going to try to pull me into that nightmare, which I'd done enough times to know that I was done. So right after that, I met my husband. And back to money. Look at someone's principles. Look at someone's values. Pay attention. Is he frivolous? Does he just love to go out and self indulge? I mean, sure, some of that's great once in a while, but it's got to be balanced with responsibility. It can't happen all the time.
Lisa Shield [00:46:36]:
You can't be going every night and just blowing through tons of money. I don't care how wealthy you are. There's got to be a certain moderation, even if you do have some cheat days. So pay attention. People show you who they are. Sometimes we just don't want to see it. But they show you. And if you're paying attention, you will see it.
Lisa Shield [00:47:08]:
Trust your gut, women. One of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal is your intuition. If something feels off, it usually is. You will never regret trusting your intuition. So notice if you go out and a man doesn't treat you to dinner look, I get it. Young people today are not they're splitting things. But that's something you really need to ask yourself. When a man buys me dinner, to me, I don't expect him to.
Lisa Shield [00:47:53]:
But when it does, it says a lot about the kind of man he is. And I want to be with a man who is willing to do those things for me. It allows me to feel feminine when I'm paying for everything or paying half of everything. Maybe I'll change my opinion at some point. It may be that that happens. But when I was with my ex husband, he didn't do those things for me, and that filtered into other things in our relationship. He not only didn't pay for me and pay for things for me. I actually had to pay for vacations and nice dinners and certain things if I wanted those things, because he didn't always have the money or what happened later was because we were a couple, it felt like, oh, as a couple, we were doing that together.
Lisa Shield [00:48:57]:
It wasn't him or me, but really it was always me and not him. So I really did want this time around to know what it felt like to have a very masculine man who does pay for those things or does take care of me. And he takes care of me in all kinds of ways. That was just symbolic of all the other ways he cares for me and I, in return, care for him. All right, I have rambled enough. I didn't really talk about specifically the things I was going to talk about, but I think in some ways, this was a more valuable and unique conversation than if I just listed off a bunch of notes that I had written down. I think this was really more authentic because it gave you a window into Benjamin and me and a little bit about what I was looking for to find a guy like him and who I had to be, to find a man who's so responsible and who cares for me the way Benjamin cares. And look, the dynamic I wanted was I wanted to be treated like a wanted because it allows me to be a woman when a man does those things for know, if Benjamin wasn't treating me like a woman, I don't know that I would have grown in my femininity.
Lisa Shield [00:50:36]:
I don't know if I would feel as feminine as I do and have permission to play the feminine role in our relationship to the degree that I do if Benjamin didn't take care of me the way he does. I love that flow. I love that traditional masculine, feminine dynamic that he and I have. All right? This has been finding the guardian of your soul. I'm Lisa shield. Please go to my website, lisashield.com. Click the button all over the site. It will take you to my free 45 minutes webinar.
Lisa Shield [00:51:17]:
You can watch that master class or webinar or whatever they're calling them these days, and you can sign up at the end for a call to talk with a member of my team about how we can help you find the guardian of your soul. If you're ready to do this, please sign up for a call. There's no reason to waste another moment struggling and suffering and trying to figure this out on your own. Also, send us your suggestions for future topics to Lisa No I'm Sorry podcast@lisashield.com. And also catch getting inside the right male mind. That's an episode that my husband and I do together where I pick his brain. That's a strange expression. I can just see me in there picking his brain not a good visual, but anyway, that's what I do.
Lisa Shield [00:52:14]:
I get him to open up as a quality man. I think it's important for women to hear inside the mind of a man like Benjamin. He's truly unique. And that's all I have for you today. So thank you for joining me, and I will see you next time. Bye bye. It.