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Maturity: Does It Impact Relationships?

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More Videos from Mike Lindstrom 6 videos in this series

Maturity: Does It Impact Relationships?
Maturity: Does It Impact Relationships?
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Relationship expert Mike Lindstrom describes how maturity affects a romantic relationship.

Mike Lindstrom:
Where your partner is on the relationship maturity scale is an extremely important part of any relationship and what we found is that there’s a big difference between men and women. This probably goes without saying, but women develop their maturity at emotional level much-much faster than men do.

So for example, we postulate that a man who is 21 years old, okay, and a woman who is 21 years old, if those two were to stay together, if they were, chances are probably they won’t and stay together and be married and live a long, successful marriage, you know, statistically speaking.

The man at 21 is got a relationship maturity scale that’s extremely low. The woman in that situation, even though she is 21 years, according to her identification, she is really emotionally about 27 or 28-year-old. We almost, as we see this grow we almost see this 7 to 10 year gap until you reach 50 and beyond. Once you are 50-years-old and beyond you start to become more mature in the same age with each other.

So I’ll give another example. Let’s say you have a 28-year-old man who is dating a 40-year-old woman. Now we don’t see that very often. In our culture it might be a taboo thing. You’re seeing lot more celebrities like the Demi Moores and Ashton Kutchers kind of break those paradigms of course, but a 28-year-old man is really young compared to a 40-year-old woman on the maturity scale.

They may only be 12 years apart, but they are light-years apart when it comes to their emotional maturity. So it’s important in all relationships to just be brutally honest. We call it the big mirror. Put the big mirror up in front of your relationship and say, “Okay, I know how old we are in reality but where are we really when it comes to our emotional maturity relative to each other?” Because one of the big drivers we found where there was disconnect, whether it be in the dating world or in divorce, was one partner was at a place in their life where the other person wasn’t.

For example, a woman who is 34 years old and has no kids, she may feel as if she wants to settle down and get married because she feels like her clock is ticking. Well she is dating a 25-year-old guy, okay? A 25-year-old guy by and large is not thinking about settling down having a family and having kids. Like most 25-year-olds are thinking about just got out of college; what’s my career going to be; what’s my next step… they may be only two or three years into their career so they don’t feel like they could financially support a family.

So emotionally, from a maturity scale, they are not there yet so they may feel pressured. So that relationship was more likely to fail. So you can see all kinds of examples whether you take the man that’s older or the woman that’s older – it doesn’t really matter, but it’s important to measure where are you in that relationship and where are they relative to you when it comes to the maturity scale? It’s important.

About Mike Lindstrom:
Dan Lier & Mike Lindstrom have been coaching and speaking about success for a combined 30 years. Dan & Mike are well-respected success coaches and have studied the behavior between men and woman as it pertains to sex, love, communication, intimacy, loyalty and finding the partner of your dreams. As proud parents and loving partners, they are passionate about the relationship secrets set forth in "Dan & Mike’s Guide to Men". They have been featured on several media outlets including Fox News, ABC News, HLN, CNN and the Howard Stern Show.

Visit Mike Lindstrom at Ask Dan & Mike

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