Alright ladies, this episode of Women of Impact is dedicated to all of you, my single independent homies out there, whether you're single and happy or looking out for Mr. Rye and growing wary of these dating streets. I've got you, after seeing so many failed marriages in divorce court, the divorce attorney, my girl Faith Jenkins, is the single woman's champion by waiting for the right guy, marrying after she turned 14. And she's joining us today to share the six lessons she learned to master being single and living her best freaking life until she found somebody that was right for her. Now, we're talking about what it takes to go from single to soulmate. And we want to show you how to master the single season of your life so you never ever settle, ever settle or cave into family interrogations of your single life at dinner, ever break in again. Now we're diving deep into the truth behind rushing into relationships and the heartbreaking truth is that loneliness can drive the best of us to settle guys for what turned into pain and unfortunately, sometimes trauma. Now guys, I do each and every one of these episodes to make sure you have the inspiration and practical, the actual practical strategies you need to having that life you actually had envisioned for yourself. No woo woo share, no making things up, no dreams with your head in the clouds. This is what do you actually want in life and how do you go after it? Period. So don't miss out on part two of this epic conversation with Faith Jenkins and the rest of the six lessons you need to master your best single life releasing tomorrow. Like, well, why am I still single? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something off within me? Those questions will start to weigh on you and you'll start to feel like, well, being single is something that obviously you need to get out of. For everyone who wants to attract lasting relationship, love is not going to be the thing that keeps a marriage together. It's going to be... You talk about the six lessons that we can use to master being single and then finding that soulmate. So I want to go through the all six lessons we do today. So let's start with number one, how to be single when you don't want to be. So my journey is sort of the opposite of yours because I know you've been married for over 20 years a long time. I just got married shortly after I turned 40. So I spent my 20s and my 30s single. In my 30s Lisa is where I was faced with the questioning of why are you still single? Why are you not married? And I've

always said if you're not careful and you're not grounded in your, in embracing your journey and

what that is, those questions will start to weigh on you and you'll start to feel like,

well being single is something I obviously need to get out of. I don't, I don't need to be here because everyone's telling me, you know, why aren't you this? Why aren't you somewhere where you're not? And for a short period of time, it actually became something that I was embarrassed about. Like, well, why am I still single? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something off within me? And the questions would start to weigh in that way. And at some point, I just decided, you know, we only have so many, I'm celebrating birthdays, I'm celebrating holidays. What am I going to do? Am I not going to enjoy my life? Because I don't have a man. Or am I going to enjoy this period of my life? It's like slow down for a second and enjoy this phase of your life because life keeps going. And you're going to go to the next phase and you're going to go to something else and this is the time to just enjoy the now. So I had to make that decision for myself to sort of just ignore all the noise and be okay with where I was. Oh, okay. So how do you, let's go a little deeper now, then how do you,

A, ignore the noise,

because saying you look in order

and then going to dinner with your mom when she's crying, saying, Oh, I can't believe you, I'm never gonna be a grandmother or you're never gonna get married and you're gonna die alone. How do you then actually ignore the noise? Right. few things. Number one, I talk about in my program how to be single when you don't

want to be. You have to decide that no matter where you are in life, you're going to live a fulfilled life. What does that mean for you? And so when I was single, that meant doing the things that I enjoy doing with or without a man. And so if that meant traveling, I traveled. Sometimes I traveled solo. Do you know how many people I met traveling solo that I probably would not have met if I was with a group of people? Because you talk more. People engage more. I mean, you always want to be safe, but you just meet so many other people when you're out there and you're a part of the citizen of the world. There were restaurants that I wanted to go to that I would, I had a great group of friends. I had good members of my family that didn't put that kind of pressure on me, didn't question me, and I would plan things with them. I enjoyed my nieces and nephews.

There are so many things that I did that I thought I am going to live because in the midst of living, in the midst of having this fulfilled life, because I was always thinking to myself, who do I want my person to meet? Do I want them to meet somebody who's been sitting around, not doing much with their life? And then because I'm waiting for somebody else to come along and make me happy, That's not how it works.

Who you are in a relationship has to be grounded in who you were when you weren't in a relationship. Because that's who you're bringing into the relationship. And I knew that and I realized it. And I thought, I'm gonna live my best life no matter what phase of life I'm in. And then when I meet that person, they're meeting somebody who's already happy,

somebody who already has a lot of things going on.

And by the way, when you're out and you're meeting people and you're dating, guess what? People like to meet people they find interesting. That's who they're attracted to. People who they find interesting. So I was doing things that I love and it made me more interesting when I met other people. I love this so much.

Okay, so doing things in spite of whatever other people may think, going forward, I love that so much, choosing to live hit me very hard. And so what about the internal dialogue of the belief systems that we have growing up where it's like you're not a full person until you meet somebody else. You're not a real, I got this, grown up with orthodoxy, not a real woman until you have babies. And so that internal dialogue was my own voice in my head. And then also the worry about what, you know, the biological clock is ticking. Or if you're not married by 30, if you're not married by 40, if you're not married by 50, well, now you're expired. Right. Right. How did you prevent that internal dialogue? Lisa, I've seen so many relationships where I felt like the person just picks up body because there was pressure for whatever reason to do so. And I saw how those relationships were crashing and burning. And I just didn't want that for myself.

So I thought I will take some time and really discipline my thought life as well because that outside pressure can get to you if you're not careful. And I just made a decision based on what I was observing in family court with these families and people would tell me, you don't know real unconditional love until you have a child. People would say things like that to me or you don't know true love until you have a baby. And they would say those things to try to put more pressure on me to move my life in a different direction, which was you need to settle down, you need to get married, you need to have kids. Well, first of all, that's just not true. It may be true for some people, maybe some people feel that way, but you have to understand I worked with a lot of families and I saw, again, I was working with women and most of them had children. I saw women who were angry and bitter because their husbands are their significant other left and they had sons who they took it out on. They were jealous of their own daughters. So this notion that somehow having a child is going to bring up all of this love and all of these things in you that you will never experience otherwise. It's not true because I saw people who abandoned their children. They were able to look at them and still turn around and walk out the door and leave and disappear. So me at an early age seeing all of these issues in family, I just knew that it true. And I thought, I'm not going to let somebody else's perspective try to put pressure on me to move in a direction, to just pick somebody when I truly did not believe that that person would be my person. Did you do the process at all of, what if I never found somebody? Yes. And how did you feel about that and what did that process look like? I would rather and I have a beautiful daughter and I met my husband after I turned 40 years old, but I would rather not have children then to have a child with somebody who's toxic and be tied to co-parenting a child with somebody who was toxic because I saw what that looked like. And it was really, really hard for people to be able to navigate that space. I was willing to be okay not having children because I could not settle for something less than being able to navigate parenting with, and my choice was to have a child with my husband one day. That's what I wanted. But for me, I was very, I wanted to be very careful about making that choice because I actually think marrying the wrong person is an easier thing to get out of than having a child with somebody who is toxic. And you have to deal with a lot of that for the rest of your life. You can't co-parent with somebody who's toxic. So you're constantly trying to navigate somebody else who has a tremendous amount of influence over this person that you're trying to raise up in this world and this day and age to be a good human. Yeah, good. I've just had so many people with it, how they use their children as ammunition when it comes to getting a divorce. It is one of the saddest things that I witnessed working in Family Court because people will try to use the person who they know you love the most or the thing they know you care about the most your relationship with child, and they will try to use that against you. Unfortunately, they are okay with your child being hurt as long as they can get to you. So, the love for their child is not at a higher level than the hatred that they have for you. And that should never be the case. But it happens regularly. And it's pretty sad. Reason 1,772, why you shouldn't go with some delays and write for you. You do your best, for example, when you've never witnessed a happy relationship growing up. How do you make a choice when all of your experience, when you're drawing from ignorance? That's where I was. How do you make those choices? I had to learn a lot of these things, some of them the hard way, but I also drew from all of my professional experience and watching other people make mistakes and say, okay, I saw this person make this mistake. I know to avoid this rope lock or avoid this pitfall because I'm watching someone else go through this. You know, there's story about the two sons with an alcoholic father. One of the sons never touched a drop of alcohol his entire life and they asked him why what was was your? And he said, I wash my dad. The other son started drinking when he was 16 years old, continued in college, became a raging alcoholic and they say, what happened? What, what, what happened? And he said, I wash my dad. So oftentimes it is a matter of what you pick up on and what you choose to embrace your knowledge of life and making a decision about which way you're going to go based on the knowledge that you have. Some people have this innate and I would say I was probably one of those people Lisa, my parents got divorced when I was young, when I was probably 11 years old. And I just remember thinking in my mind, I'm happy they got divorced. I was not upset about my parents getting divorced. They did not need to be married. And I thought they were better parents to me, allowing me to see what a healthy, co-parenting relationship looked like, then what a bad marriage looked like. Because if I witness a bad marriage, the entire time I grew up, that's all I would have to draw from. Kids are okay for the most part with their parents getting divorced. It may hurt, but the pain of them watching a toxic relationship, that never goes away versus you can get over that breakup. You know what they want to see? They want to see their parents come together and celebrate their birthday. They want to see their parents come together and celebrate the holiday. They want to see that, but they're okay when they know it's not working and it's really hard for them to witness that day in and day out toxicity. They're usually okay with the parents going their separate ways and with the right foundation and when you don't have one parent that's trying to alienate or turn the child against the other parent, they're able to heal a lot faster. Yeah, God. Having grown up and saying my parents divorced when I was around eight years old and they never went to court and that was one of the reasons that they're like no like we want to show our kids that we're not going to fight over Then they're going to put their best interest at heart Yeah, and so to your point I think it's way better to have a healthy loving two parents that don't live together then have that toxicity Absolutely and but growing up if you have grown up in that environment people then can repeat it and so they perceive certain behaviors as love or as a sign of affection

Right when it up, if you have grown up in that environment, people then can repeat it. And so they perceive certain behaviors as love or as a sign of affection, right? When it's really just a toxic idea of what affection or love actually looks like. And one of the reasons that I also hear that people do settle though is because they don't like to be lonely. Like the feeling of being alone and there's so many stats and studies now out there about one of the biggest signs of dying early is actually loneliness. And so understanding why people don't be want to be alone. But in order to not be alone, Emmys you need to find someone. Someone's fearing being alone, then they may choose somebody that isn't right for them. And I have a quote of yours, I think it's something like, um,

just because you were thirsty, it doesn't mean that you should go and drink poison. Hmm. And so I love that analogy when it comes to a relationship as well, of how that can be the same. How do you then prevent or encourage people to not settle for the momentary happiness that may then end up leading to the long term toxicity? I know just in my work and talking to so many

people, they're in relationships, but they're still quite lonely because they are not getting

their needs met in that relationship. So being in a relationship is not the answer to loneliness.

It's just not. So, and being single does not mean that you have to be lonely. When I interviewed the women that I did for my book, so many single women in their 30s, one thing I found that was consistent throughout the women who were really happy in their lives, and yes, they also wanted a relationship, but they had filled their lives with so many good things. So even though they weren't in a relationship, they still had social interactions and social circles and groups that they were drawing from and that they were interacting with and that was a special part of their life. They did things that they enjoyed doing and a lot of them actually ended up meeting their partners just being out doing things that they love doing because then they met other people who enjoyed doing those same things. So it was amazing to witness that process. Just continuing to live in every day, just making a choice, asking yourself, what is it that I like to do? What is it that interests me? What is it that I find fun and fulfilling and filling your life up with those things during this single period? Because once you, if your goal is marriage and once you get there and you get married, you have to understand now you're a part of a team. So everything you do, you're getting input from the team. Is this good for us? It's not just about me anymore. Where when you're in this single season of your life, it really is about you. What is it that you wanna do? Do you want to take those cooking classes? Do you want to move to Bali for a year? Do you want to, you know, just stretching yourself out

as much as you can. If more people would understand, embrace this season, just like you're going to embrace your Mary season, just like you're going to embrace this partnership. It is a, your goal is living a fulfilled life right where you are. And because of those women, this core group of friends and women that I interviewed for the book, because they chose to fill up their cups in their season, I never heard them complain about being lonely. And then the perspective of what if a year from now you meet your person and they come into your life? What do you want them to see you've been doing over the past year? And if that happens, if you meet your person a year from now, how would you live your life? Right now, what would you be doing? You would probably be enjoying every aspect that you possibly could knowing that you're going to enter into this partnership. And now it's not just going to be me, it's going to be a wee. I love that so much. And then also, as you were talking and you said, if your goal is married, I think the follow-up thing is really, why is that a goal of yours that's important? Like, what is it about marriage that you're seeking? Because they don't know if enough of us ask that question.

Like I got married so young

and I think a big part it was like, oh you meet somebody that you fall in love with the next stage is marriage, the next stage is good. Right, there was a plan that was pre-given to me from childhood of how I should live my life. And so even getting to the age of 25 back in the day, like oh god, just single 25, what's wrong with you? So even asking yourself why is marriage a

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