Why Being Undisciplined Communicates Incompetence & Turns Women Off

Why an undisciplined man appears incompetent and turns women off romantically.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer whose previous email I answered in my video newsletter titled, “When Men Fail to Lead in a Relationship, Their Women Resent It.” He’s read 3% Man 26 times and been following me for five years. However, he has a drinking problem where he simply loses self control and turns into an angry and argumentative man with only a few drinks. He told his girlfriend he would stop. Then he did it again.

She doesn’t trust him because he keeps going back on his word and is undisciplined. This lack of discipline causes him to appear as an incompetent man his girlfriend can’t trust, rely on or feel safe around. He asks how to get her trust back. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular email is an update from the viewer whose email, I guess about a month ago maybe, I answered, and the title of that video newsletter was “When Men Fail to Lead in a Relationship, Their Women Resent It.”

Now he’s read 3% Man 26 times. He’s been following me for five years, but he’s got a bit of a drinking problem. So when he drinks, he’s kind of like Jekyll and Hyde. He gets kind of angry and argumentative. He’s promised his girlfriend he’s going to stop. It wouldn’t happen again, because it just always caused problems when he drank. When he stopped, things got better. Over the holidays, he’s like, “Hey, one, two, three drinks. No big deal. It’s the holidays. I’ll tip back a few,” but he lost control once again, created a lot of problems. This has led to a lot of issues in their relationship.

So if you’ve got a drug or alcohol problem, maybe you’re playing video games too much or just eating food, you can become addicted to a lot of things. You using the addiction to avoid feeling things or doing things that you know you need to do, you’re basically checking out in life.

Being a man is purpose, drive, mission, succeeding, accomplishing, breaking through barriers, overcoming challenges. That embodies what women are attracted to in men. When you do the opposite and you flail around, or like in this case, you have a drinking issue where you basically lose control when you start drinking and you, in essence, turn into somebody else, and you do a lot of bad things that you normally wouldn’t do. Your girlfriend’s only going to put up with that for so long because you’re constantly displaying that you’re undisciplined.

If you’re an undisciplined man, then that means you’re incompetent. That means you’re not the type of guy that she can rely on. You’re not the type of guy that she can count on to get up early, go to work and do those things, especially if she’s going to become a stay-at-home mom and raise your kids, if you guys decide to have a family.

She’s got to be able to trust you and your competence to always handle things. When you vacillate back and forth between being responsible and disciplined and a jack-in-the-box, like this guy tends to do, your girl is just not going to trust your masculine core.

You can only burn her so many times where she relies on you to at some point where she’s just like, “I just can’t count on this guy. He’s just not going to get his act together.” That’s the danger that, what I like about this email is, you really can kind of get a sense of that, of what this guy is doing to basically shoot himself in the foot and to cause unnecessary problems in his relationship because of his unwillingness to be disciplined.

As Jocko Willink says, appropriately apropos, I guess is the correct word, “Discipline equals freedom. Everything you want comes as a result of discipline.” You want a good relationship, it comes from a result of discipline. If you’re not disciplined, especially if you’re the guy, if you’re the man in the relationship, no woman’s going to feel safe or comfortable with you very long, because she’s just not going to be able to rely on you. You’re supposed to be the reliable one. You’re supposed to have more masculine energy than she does, and this guy basically turns into a child, an immature, out of control drunk child, when he drinks.

You can only do so many embarrassing things, especially when the girl’s friends and family sees you doing this, and it happens over and over every once in a while. “Hey, sorry. I drank a little too much. Don’t remember, black out drunk,” whatever. If you’re a type of person that gets blackout drunk, you probably should not be drinking.

This is just a good email that really illustrates what happens. So he was already trying to repair his relationship here. He was good for a while, but he’s like, “Just two or three drinks I’ll be good. That’s not a lot. I can handle that,” and of course he didn’t. He couldn’t, and it caused a problem as you’ll see.

Viewer’s Email:

Hey Corey,

I’m very grateful for you and how you’ve helped us guys. You answered my last email in your video “When Men Fail to Lead in a Relationship, Their Women Resent It.” I’ve read 3% Man 26 times now and I’ve been following you for over five years. It’s helped me find a beautiful girlfriend who I used to have a really great relationship with, recently it’s been rough.

My girlfriend and I have been together for over a year now, and things have been rocky for the last six months. She says now that she has no trust in me.

Trust is earned. Trust is the hardest thing to get, and it’s the easiest thing to lose in a relationship. If you tell somebody you’re going to do something, you got to follow through on it. You can’t just waffle and flake out or, “Oh, I drink too much,” or “I got up on the wrong side of the bed today. I stayed up too late the night before. I forgot to pay my bills on time.” You just can’t be that way. Especially if you are presenting the image that you’re going to be the guy for this woman to rely on, or any woman for that matter. If she can’t rely on you, then she’s not going to feel safe having children with you, submitting to you, following your lead.

Women want to be with a man they look up to, they admire and they respect, and some dude that acts like a drunk frat bro that has no self-control, that’s cute in college maybe, but it’s not cute when you’re in the world of adults.

I’ve promised to change behaviors, and while I’ve changed many of them, she says it’s like Groundhog Day. She says I’ll hear and understand her, then the same problem will occur.

You got to be consistent. You can’t vacillate. You can’t be great nine out of 10 times. If you promise to do something, you got to be consistent 10 out of 10 times.

Recently, we had a discussion where she wanted to break up with me because she felt like I was continuously being mean to her and hurting her. I realized it was a problem only when I was drinking, that I didn’t want to break up, and that it’s something I could work on. She agreed to keep working on things.

So he basically says, “Hey, I’m going to quit drinking. You’re right, this only seems to happen when I drink, so I’m going to stop that. I promise you. You have my word,” basically is what he says. A woman has to be able to count on that. Regardless of feminine energy being chaos and all that, you’re supposed to be the man.

There are characteristics that a man has that you must embody if you want women to be attracted to you and feel safe and comfortable with you, to submit to you and follow your lead. If you don’t display these things, you can cry about it all you want, but biology is biology.

Women respond to what they respond to. Holding women accountable and all that other nonsense, if you can’t even hold yourself accountable, no woman is going to be able to live up to the standard that you want to set, because you’re not following it yourself. She ain’t going to follow it. She’s eventually going to find some other guy that can be disciplined.

During Christmas, we were with family and she eventually became very loving and affectionate again.

Well, as I talk about in the book, it takes time for a woman to fall in love, it takes time for her to fall out of love, and it takes time for her to fall back in love. So things were going good for a while because he’s like, “Hey, I’m going to stop drinking. I got this. Don’t worry, babe, you can count on me.”

However, this problem flared up again. I thought I’d be OK with 1-3 drinks…

Dude, you told her you were going to stop. You didn’t say, “Oh, I’ll be OK with one or three drinks.” No, you said, “I’ll stop. This only happens when I drink, so I’m going to stop drinking. I thought I’d be OK with one or three drinks.”

…But one night I got carried away and made a complete ass of myself with her and her friend (I don’t want to go into detail because I’m really fucking embarrassed).

So I know there was an email about a month ago, and I don’t know if it was the same one, but in this particular email, this guy was on a date and out with their mutual friend group and his girlfriends. I don’t know if it was this guy. It may have been somebody else, but he worded it, I’m thinking maybe it was him.

So this particular guy is out on a date. He gets blackout drunk. He drinks, “Oh, I’ll just have a few drinks,” and of course, this guy gets carried away. He gets blackout drunk to the point where he doesn’t remember anything. He wakes up the next day and his girlfriend is absolutely raging, pissed off, mad at him. What had happened the night before was that he was out in their group, and he grabs the ass of his girlfriend’s best friend, who happens to be there with her boyfriend who did not like him grabbing his girlfriend’s ass. So he almost got his ass beat for doing that. He had no recollection, doesn’t even remember any of it. Obviously, his girlfriend was upset.

This particular guy, I think it may have been the same dude, I can’t remember. Bottom line is, that’s the extreme. If you’re getting drunk to the point where you don’t even remember anything that happened, like, “I’ll just have a couple of drinks.” The next thing you know, you wake up the next day and you have no recollection of what happened the night before. You shouldn’t drink, simple as that. If you want to maintain your relationships, you shouldn’t drink. Just simple as that. You can’t control yourself, it’s just better not to even mess with it.

She told me she wasn’t cool with what I did…

Again, I don’t know if this was the same guy, but I suspect that it is.

…That her friend said she should break up with me if I did that regularly, but was still loving and kind to me through the trip.

It is the holidays after all.

After we got back, we had a few drinks together and I asked her why she fell in love with me in the first place and told me it’s because I was consistent, kind, reliable, and safe, but she said those things changed.

That’s what she said, though. He was consistent, kind, reliable and safe. He was disciplined, initially. He put on a good act, apparently.

I started to feel like she was criticizing me…

Remember, he’s drinking again. “Oh, we just had a few drinks together.”

…And asked her not to, and she apologized and we went to sleep. I was still unhappy about the criticism in the morning and she asked me what was wrong. I told her, she listened, but then started to criticize me more for all the ways I had hurt her, and became verbally abusive. I walked out the door when she started yelling. 

Yeah, if she’s going to yell, he’s like, “You got to be nice to me. You can’t talk to me this way.” You know she needs to leave or you leave when she abuses you. You just can’t put up with it. That’s part of setting and enforcing healthy boundaries.

This girl is no angel either. No guy wants to sit there and be berated and scolded by a Karen, giving him a hard time. I mean, the dude got black out drunk. Again, he drank. Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but if every time he drinks he turns into somebody else, he drank and then they had a fight. Remember, this is what he told me he was going to stop doing.

I talked to her later about how she needs to control her anger, and she said she would.

Well, if you don’t control your drinking, it’s like a leader leads by example, not by force. It’s just like when the parents say, “Don’t do this,” and the parents, “Do as I say, not as I do,” it doesn’t work in the real world. As I think it was Sun Tzu that said, “A leader leads by example, not by force.”

I asked her later at night why she blew up and told her I felt like I had to walk on eggshells around her because she would blow up. I could tell she was hearing me, but she wasn’t engaging. I asked her why and told her if she wasn’t actually engaging, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing with her (She seemed more looking at me like an enemy than a friend).

Yeah. She’s hurt. She’s angry because you, again, have not followed through on what you promised. You said you shouldn’t drink. You said you wouldn’t drink. Then you drank. You got blackout drunk, caused a problem. Then you get home and you have a few drinks together, then you blow up again. Maybe neither one of the two of you should drink. That’s the one common thread I’m seeing here is that alcohol is involved in these blow ups. Maybe you’re both are hotheads when you drink.

It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you’re the man. You’re supposed to be the disciplined one. You’re supposed to set the tone, you’re supposed to lead by example. If you’re constantly setting the example of, “I can’t control my drinking,” if your girl follows your lead and then she yells at you, it’s like you started it. You led her down that path.

Before the red pill guys start crying, we’re men here. Men take 100% responsibility. “Extreme ownership,” as Jocko Willink would said, and Don Shula said, “Men blame themselves. Weak men blame others.” If you do something stupid and your girl falls along, well, you were the leader. It’s your fault, the buck stops with you. If you don’t like it, then don’t be a man. Go get a sex change or whatever.

She said it’s because she feels numb to me and that she has no emotional connection with me.

In other words, her feelings and her attraction are really super low. She doesn’t respect him. She doesn’t admire him. She doesn’t look up to him. She doesn’t trust his leadership. She doesn’t feel safe with him. He’s not the guy that she fell in love with. He’s this undisciplined college frat bro, basically, who can’t control his liquor or his drinking.

I tried to hear and understand her, but she’s said she has no trust in me and wants to see through my actions I can do better.

Yeah, because you keep making promises, then you keep falling down on it. We all know, this is at least the second email I’ve done with you, and you said yourself that your problems stemmed from your drinking. You got to stop. You told her you’re going to stop and you haven’t.

She has real trust and vulnerability issues that come from her mom I think, and it makes it really difficult to try to open her up.

I don’t know what to do Coach.

Be disciplined and be consistent. Be a man. Follow what’s in the book. Don’t do the opposite. Don’t get black out drunk and be grabbing her friend’s ass or whatever the hell. If that wasn’t you, whatever the hell you’re doing to cause a scene, don’t do it.

You got to knock it off. If you don’t, maybe you get away with this once or twice more, three times maybe, once her feelings are totally gone, all her respect is gone and she gives up on you, she will leave you and you won’t get her back. She’ll move on down the road. You’ll find out that she’s already lined somebody else up.

I feel like I’ve been better about following through, but she has all of her walls up and isn’t open to me at all.

Well, you just violated her trust again. What do you expect? It’s not a video game. You don’t just hit the reset button and everything’s fine. You don’t just throw a fake apology out there and that just solves everything. If there’s no actions to back up your apology, then your word is meaningless. She can’t trust your masculine core because as a man, you don’t mean what you say. As a man, if you tell a woman you’re going to do something, you have to do it. Simple as that.

I feel like I can’t do anything right with this girl, I’m always fucking something up.

Best,

Bob

Again, the one common thread is the drinking. When you drank, things go bad, so don’t drink. It’s pretty simple. If you keep drinking, you’re going to lose this girl. You may only have one or two more times you can pull this crap and she’ll let you slide before she’s just done and she checks out. So you better get your shit together, dude.

You better be disciplined. You need to stop drinking if you want to keep this girl. If you don’t, say you keep doing what you’re doing, you screw this relationship up. You go through a heartbreak. There will be a period of time eventually you’ll get over it, you’ll attract somebody else, but you’ll turn to the next girl off for exactly the same reason. You’ll drive her away for the same reason. You can’t handle liquor, you can’t handle your alcohol. That’s on you.

You have the ability to do something about it. Do things that don’t involve alcohol. Find something else, find a new hobby, but you’re going to have to be disciplined and you’re like, “What do I do? I don’t know what to do, Coach.” Yeah you do. Discipline equals freedom, and you’ve been undisciplined and you’ve been displaying incompetence. No woman is going to follow you for any length of time or want to be your girl if you’re going to continue to lose your shit and act like this. That’s just a fact of life.

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.