Ending Things In A Loving Way When Your Goals & Values Don’t Match

How to end a relationship in a loving way when your goals and values don’t match.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a 29-year-old viewer who is an airline pilot from Medellin, Colombia. He’s been dating an older woman who is 37 and a flight attendant with the same airline for the past six months. He says she’s everything on his list with the sticking point being the age difference. He says that when he finally reaches the age he will want to have children, she will probably be too old.

He asks how he should end the relationship in a loving way since she is such a great girl and they never argue. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular email is from a 29-year-old viewer who is an airline pilot from Medellin, Colombia. He’s been dating an older woman who is 37. She’s a flight attendant and he’s been dating her for about the past six months. Also one of her goals is to eventually become a pilot. She’s already got her pilot’s license. I guess she’s getting her enough hours and stuff so she can become a pilot. So he’s like, “Everything is great.” She’s very feminine. She’s very submissive. She trusts his leadership. It’s like she’s everything on his list, but he’s looking at it going, I’m 32, she’s 37 and in his mind, he says by the time he’s ready to have kids, he’s like, “Man, she’s going to probably be pushing 40 or in her 40s and it might be too late.”

So despite the fact that everything is amazing, he’s thinking that he should probably break it off now, because she’s so awesome he doesn’t want to, it would seem that he’s maybe five, 10 years away from thinking he’s going to be ready to have children or start a family. So he wants to know, “How do you lovingly end it when things are great?” In other words, he’s like, “How did you end it with Katie, your English girlfriend?”

With that in mind, I had Katie come by the studio a year ago. It’s been a year since she was here. We went through these things and at the time, I had just started the business that I’m in now, and she was going back to college because she wanted to become a chiropractor. We’ve been dating for about a year and a half, two years. At that point, I wasn’t ready to get married. The interesting thing to me at the time was like, it was literally a decade later, I was in the same situation that I was with my ex wife, who I was dating, who was my girlfriend at the time, and I was going to be making these major life changes, going to move to Orlando. My girlfriend at the time, future ex-wife, was like, “Well, I would only move up to Orlando with you if we were engaged.” I was young and I didn’t know any better. I didn’t want to get engaged and I did anyways.

So here I was, literally a decade later with the best girlfriend I ever had in my life. Just totally in love, awesome girl, but I was not in a place where I was ready to settle down and get married. I was completely living off my income that I had made from real estate. Plus, assets that I was in the process of selling at the time. It could be two years, it could be 10 years. I had no idea when I was going to get really get back on my feet and get to a place where I felt I was ready to have a family. She’s in the UK and she’s going to school year round. Basically, we go to see each other a couple times a year for a week or two at a time in between semesters. Like, I don’t really want to do long distance like that, because we went from literally living together for 90 days at a time to now I’m going to see her a couple times a year for a week or two at a time when she’s got college breaks. I was like, how is that going to work?

So just because of our lives, there wasn’t a future at that time. As hard as it was, you know, we had a conversation about that and Katie and I talked about that because people had asked, “How would you do it?” It was interesting, her perspective. I mean, this is 20 years ago, all this stuff went down. For her, she was hoping that I was going to break things up because she was looking at it the same way. She’s like, “How are we going to maintain a relationship when I’m going to have like three weeks off total the whole entire year?” She was going to fall, spring and summer and she was going to Bournemouth, which was like, the best chiropractic school in the UK and is a very difficult school. So she was busy as hell with class, so she was hoping that I would break things off, which I did. It’s hard to end a relationship when everything’s going well, but in our case, just logistics and where we were in our lives was just not conducive. I wasn’t ready to get married. She wasn’t ready to get married. I wasn’t in a place where I would have been a good husband and wasn’t ready to be a father at the time anyway.

So you got to see reality as it is. This particular guy, he’s kind of in the same boat here.

Viewer’s Email:

Hello Coach,

My name is Bob, I am a 29-year-old airline pilot from Medellin, Colombia.

I came across your work in 2021 after a terrible heartbreak I had.

After the breakup, I noticed a pattern in my relationships which made me think that I was the reason why my relationships didn’t work out and I needed to change something in my life.

Since then I have read the book nine times, given readings to certain chapters from time to time to refresh my knowledge in the fundamentals. I improved myself physically and mentally got a better paying job doing what I love the most, which is flying and started being successful with women effortlessly. Your work certainly changed my life. Thank you!

Here is my case:

I have been dating a 37-year-old woman for the last six months, she studied marketing and got her pilot’s license but is currently working as a flight attendant in the same company I work for here in Colombia and she is also pursuing a career as a pilot.

She is a loving, feminine, submissive and caring female, physically stunning, a very familiar person, disciplined towards her goals and we share similar goals and values and have common perspectives towards life in general.

When I started dating her it was just casual dating and hookups as I was dating and hooking up with two other girls as well, one was 25 and the other was 23, which as the weeks passed by they flaked out and disappeared from my life by themselves just by following what the book teaches (Amazing how it works).

Yeah, the book is designed to bounce the bad girls out of your life, to reveal the character flaws, bad behavior and bad parenting as quickly as possible so you can dip.

I really enjoy my time dating with this 37-year-old girl, we have never argued, she trust my core and is submissive to my decisions, we have sex almost every time we see each other and around two months ago she told me she would be very jealous if I date other woman and that I am only hers (Absolutely textbook isn’t it? LOL). I replied with some jokes and made her laugh, keeping the conversation light.

Even though she has not said the L word yet, she has mentioned that we’re falling for each other and sometimes she mentions plans she has in the long term for us, so here is where my problem comes:

Despite her being almost everything on my list, I find the age gap between us an obstacle for me to think in a long term relationship with her since I would like to have a family and by the time I am planning on that she might not be able to have children any more due to her age.

Well, at what age do you want to have kids? That’s super important that you’re going to be with somebody and if you’re going to get married or cohabitate and have a long term relationship, those types of relationships are ideally suited if you’re going to raise children. So the question becomes, do you see her as the mother of your children? Could she be the mother of your children? Would you want her to be the mother of your children?

The second question would be, what about her family? Because if you have kids with her and she’s got parents, aunts, uncles, you’re going to be co-parenting with their family, what do you think of her family? Do you like the family enough? Do you like their parenting skills? Do you like the way they parent their children? Because if you have kids with her, those people will be co-parenting with you. They’ll be the grandparents. They’ll be the aunts and uncles. That’s the important thing to ask. In other words, do you want her to be the mother of your children? If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t stay with her. You should end it. If you would like to see her as the mother of your children, then yeah, you should definitely keep dating her and giving her the chance.

Additionally it would be very difficult for us to raise children given our jobs which require us to spend a lot of time away from home. So,I would rather have a relationship with a woman who is working in a different industry than me. 

Or maybe she becomes a stay-at-home mom. What about that? Have you thought about that? I mean, she is a flight attendant now and you’re a pilot. Pilots make usually pretty good money, especially if you’re living in Colombia. That cost of living is way cheaper down there. Again, it depends. If you’re working for a Colombian airline, maybe the pay scales a lot less than it would be somewhere in the West.

I am afraid if I break things it would be very painful for both of us. She might hate me and would not want to see me anymore. I know if I let more time go by, it would be harder for us to finish what we currently have.

How to be brutally honest and break things in a loving way, just like you did with your English girlfriend? What if I can not find a girl that I can click with so easily as I have with this woman? Is the grass greener on the other side?

Thanks for your advice coach, God bless you and thank you for all you do!

Bob

Like I was saying with with Katie and I, we had both made choices in our lives. That, and at the time I was like 34, she was 22, 23. So the way I was looking at it, I figured, “Nah. Three, four years, I’ll be back doing really well again and then I’ll be ready to settle down.” You know, I didn’t realize it was going to take as many years as it did to figure out my business model. So I was in for a long ordeal, and that was part of the thing. I didn’t know what my future was like, and so I didn’t know how long it was going to be until I really got back and was super stable again.

In your case, you love what you do. You’re a pilot. You’re already doing what you love. You’re 29, she’s eight years older than him, so it really depends on the woman. It’s like if you love her and you see her as the mother of your children, or you’d like to have her as the mother of your children, then you should stay with her. If you have already decided at this point there’s no way you want her being the mother of your children in any way, and you don’t want to co-parent with their family, then yeah you should dip. Especially now with her. If you’re playing what’s in the book properly, I mean, she’s getting to the point where she doesn’t want to share you with anybody else and she’s going to want a relationship. It’s not fair to her to waste your time, especially if she’s 37 and eventually wants to have kids as well.

What about this? What if things are so great? You never argue, you get along, sex is amazing, she’s a good woman, she’s family oriented, could you see yourself starting a family with her now or in the next couple of years? Because there’s really nothing wrong with the relationship. Your situation is a little different than Katie and I. You guys live in the same country. Katie was from the UK. I lived in Florida, United States, and we were like a 14 hour plane ride away from each other, and we had to deal with immigration and stuff. So your situation is a little different. You got to figure out what it is that you want, and then maybe you sit down with her and share your concerns.

Have you guys even discussed children yet? Have you discussed how old she wants to be when she has kids? Again, she’s 37, so what’s she got? Seven, eight nine years tops to where she’ll be able to, because each year that goes by, it’s going to get harder and harder for her to conceive and have a child. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just harder than dating somebody that is younger. Again, you got to take it on a case-by-case basis and it’s up to you and how you feel. If you’re certain that you don’t want her to be the mother of your children, you don’t want to co-parent with her family, then you got to rip the band aid off and just be honest with her and tell her, “You’re amazing, but I’m not gonna be ready to have kids for 10 or 15 years. If you want to have children, you know it’s not fair for me to expect you to give up having kids to be with me.”

If you’re open to having kids with her, you should have a discussion about that. You did say you have same goals and values, you don’t argue, you get along great. It’s like, you don’t have a weird distance situation where you’re on opposite sides of the ocean or you’re just starting out a career and you’re broke as a joke or you don’t know where your next paycheck is coming from. You’re stable. She’s stable. The question is, can there be a merger? If you really love the woman and she really is as great as you say she is, and she’s family oriented and wants to have kids, why wait? What’s going to change in the future? You have more money five years from now, 10 years from now, you’re probably still going to be a pilot, right? I assume you’ll get raises and you’ll make more money and you would want a woman that’s in a different career. Doesn’t mean she has to always stay being a flight attendant or a future pilot. Maybe she is a stay-at-home mom while the kids are young. Then maybe once the kids get old enough, she goes back to work and does something else, or maybe she doesn’t. These are conversations that you really should be having with her because you have so much in common. You have so many good things, and you don’t have a situation where you’re like, long distance like I was or there’s major life changes.

So my question to you is, if she’s as awesome as you say she is, why wouldn’t you want her to have kids now? Why wouldn’t you want to get her pregnant in next year or two? Or start trying now, or start trying in six months or a year or so? You’ve only been dating for six months, you have this conversation with her and say, “Why don’t we give it another six months? If in six months things are as great as they are between us, maybe we should start trying to have a family,” unless you were like, “I don’t want to have kids when I’m 29. I want to be 40 or 50,” or whatever, or 35.

Again, I’m not a mind reader, but these are things I would consider. If you’ve got a great woman that checks everything off in your list, what’s stopping you from having kids in the next couple of years? I would argue that it sounds like she deserves at least another six months to see what it’s like. If things are as great a year down the road, two years down the road, why wouldn’t you want to have kids with her? Obviously it’d be a different story if there were all kinds of problems. When things are this good, what are you waiting on? That’s something that, you and her should probably be discussing together.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.