What if your biggest fear in dating isn’t rejection—it’s investing time, money, and hope into change…only to feel like nothing works? In this episode of the Love U Podcast, I share a powerful conversation with a client who overcame that exact fear and discovered why success in love is never about luck. We’ll explore how to break free from dating inertia, replace limiting beliefs, and build the confidence to attract the right man. You’ll learn why results come from deliberate action, not passive hope—and why fear of failure is the very thing keeping you stuck. Listen in and find out how to take control of your love life starting today.

What You’ll Hear:

• Why fear of failure — not men — is the #1 reason women hesitate to invest in dating coaching.
• The truth about my 100% success rate (and what “success” really means in Love U).
• How coaching differs from therapy, self-help books, and passive dating advice.
• The three biggest transformations I can virtually guarantee in six months of working together.
• Why “doing nothing” guarantees the same disappointing results you’ve been getting.
• How building dating confidence affects every other part of your life.
• Why dating is a skill — and how to master it with structure, accountability, and practice.
• The “Biggest Loser” metaphor for personal growth and why small wins still count as success.
• My own history of repeated failure — and why it made me better at love (and at coaching).
• A pep talk for taking action now so you can create the love you deserve.

Full Episode Transcript:
Exciting episode today. Sincerely excited because it’s different. It’s not just dating advice today.

This is much larger. So, I’m really going to encourage you to stick around. And this is based on a conversation I had with a current client who’s working through her fear of failure.

So, the truth that I understand about most people who are listening to the Love U podcast right now is that they would invest their hard-earned money for dating coaching. They’re not worried that I’m an unethical operator. Their biggest fear that, again, I’m discovering late in life, their biggest fear is that they’re going to hire me as a coach and nothing is going to change.

So, if you’ve ever listened to this podcast and thought, maybe I should hire him, but I’m really worried that it’s not going to work, I want you to listen to this podcast and I want you to hear why I have a 100% success rate. Stick around. My name is Evan Marc Katz.

This is the Love U podcast. I thank you for listening. If you haven’t already, subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, leave us a positive review, go and tell a friend about us.
We’re making a small difference in our corner of the internet here. Just a reminder that next installment of the Extraordinary Love Series is this Wednesday. I’m doing a Zoom call followed by a live Q&A.

The topic is what high-quality men want in a long-term partner. If you haven’t already, go to extraordinaryloveseries.com, register for free, and I’ll see you in class. It should be a lot of fun.

So, a few months ago, I did an episode of this podcast on fear, why it’s a real thing, but fear is always the problem and never the solution. So, we just have to kind of talk about fear because it undergirds every conversation about dating, relationships, sex, and men. It’s generally not men that my clients are afraid of.

It’s failure. It’s putting themselves in another situation, making themselves emotionally vulnerable, and ending up right back where they started, right? Feeling bad about themselves, feeling bad about their prospects, feeling bad about men. So, we can understand the thought process here.

What if I give everything to this process and I still end up alone? What if I do the work and nothing changes? So, any person who’s listening to this podcast has thought of that, but it’s not entirely different than the why would I go on this diet or why would I hire this personal trainer? Why would I go to a shrink, right, when I’ve been depressed on and off for my whole life? It’s the assumption that nothing ever changes, and that’s not true. We know that’s not true. You’re a different person than you were five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

You’ve changed and evolved. Maybe this one issue hasn’t sorted itself out, but things change all the time and we have the capacity to change all the time. So, let’s acknowledge that fear of some process not working, any process not working, is valid and understand that no one in my shoes ever gives a money-back guarantee.

I don’t think they can give a money-back guarantee. No more than your lawyer can guarantee that they win your case or your shrink could stop you from being anxious or a doctor gives their money back if you come to the ER and there’s a complication. In a service-based business, you provide your work.

So, why does anybody hire those people? Why would I hire a general contractor to redo something in my backyard? Well, it’s because that person has a body of work and they’ve proven to do it time and again and they come recommended by someone else and I can’t necessarily do it myself. So, that’s why we hire specialists. We pay big money for specialists.
I don’t want to tell you how much my backyard cost. So, the question isn’t whether someone’s going to do their best or do their job competently, it’s whether you’re going to be happy with the results. That’s the important part.

You got to be happy with the results. So, I’m going to bring this back to you listening right now. Smart, strong, successful woman, decades of dating and relationship disappointments in your past, not confident based on your life experience that anything is going to work.

Most of your relationships are a testament to how relationships and men are ultimately disappointing and make you feel maybe it’s better to be alone than to be in another bad relationship. We’ve talked about that a million times on this podcast. It’s the middle.

Well, being alone and not getting hurt by a guy is better than being devastated by a guy, so I think I’m going to be alone. And what we never do is avail ourselves to the possibility that, oh, I could actually be happy with a guy. Relationships don’t have to end up in disappointment or failure.

That’s a huge concept, the idea that, oh, of course it’s better to be alone than to be in a relationship where I’m verbally abused and neglected. Well, sure, that’s a no-brainer, but that’s mostly like getting rid of a disease. Well, now you’re better off than you were before.

We want to get you to a higher plane. And so, all of this work that we’re doing is about the idea of taking you to a higher plane. And so, everybody who’s listening, and again, I’ve been doing this for 22 years, I mention that a lot because it’s on my mind a lot.

I have a blog that’s got 35 million plus readers. This podcast has reached 3 million people. You know I’m not working with 35 million people or 3 million people, right? I’m working with a tiny, tiny percentage of people, most of whom have never, like most of the listeners have never hired me.

So, they couldn’t possibly know whether this would work for them, right? But structured, immersive dating coaching done right is very much different than whatever you’ve been doing on your own. Therapy, self-help books, Instagram reels. So, if you’re sort of like listening to this over and over week after week and nodding your head and feeling a little triggered and challenged sometimes but knowing that ultimately I’m just trying to speak my truth and try to be compassionate to where you’re at and show you a way out and flip your negative to a positive.

So, we’d start with a rhetorical question if you’re afraid that working together would not work, right? What’s the alternative? The alternative is what you’re doing right now. Maybe doing nothing, not dating at all, sort of hoping that the right guy meets you in real life through your normal interactions. Maybe swipe sometimes, maybe just sort of stay stuck learning about dating and relationships, listening, working on yourself, right? And it’s all very passive, which is fine.

There’s a time in your life to be passive. There’s a time in your to heal. But understand that what we do here is far more than hand me a man, right? This is about self-awareness, right? You understanding you, your belief system, how you show up in the world, what you think of guys, how you show up on dates and within relationships and you communicate.

It’s about replacing limiting beliefs with more powerful and effective ones. It’s about recognizing patterns that we’re all too close to see our own patterns, right? How do we know that? Think about one of your friends, right? One of your single friends. Why is she still single? You know the answer to that question.

You don’t have to be a dating coach to do it. So, we could always see people more clearly than they can see themselves. That’s the value of having a respected third party.
And it’s about learning to trust yourself. The thing I see most with women is not that you don’t like yourself. Most of my women have confidence in either their kindness, their intelligence, their work ethic, their acumen, their friendships, their parenting skills.

I work with women who have confidence in every arena except this one arena, dating relationships and men. So, we need to restore your confidence to this arena so you could be the kind of person who gets a quality man to want to commit his life to you. Confidence is a really attractive quality.

And when you’ve been hollowed out by bad relationships, it’s hard to have confidence. It’s a bit of a negative feedback loop. So, when people come here, you know, I use for YouTube people, you could see, I always use a post-it note.

We talk about a post-it note and the post-it note is the destination. It’s where you’re going. So, when people come to me, they’re generally stuck and we need to get them unstuck and on the road to success.

So, I would ask you if you came to me as your coach, and again, this is the real solicitation. You could listen to this podcast for free in perpetuity. But if you came to me for coaching for six months, one year, by the end of our time together, you didn’t meet your husband, but you stopped choosing emotionally unavailable men, you set healthier boundaries, you were more confident in your ability to date online and communicate your needs.

Was our effort a failure or was it a success? And that thing that I just mentioned to you is something I can virtually guarantee to everybody. That if you and I work together for six months, you will be less anxious, you will be less negative, you’ll be more confident in your ability to attract a quality man, weed out the bad ones, and make the right one want to stick around forever. I just can’t tell you when that man comes along.

So, the what if I fail thing, which again is always lurking underneath this talk about dating relationships and men, is what if I fail? Well, the counter arguments are pretty simple. I’m going to run down them. Again, I know when I’m doing this, I’m using logic rather than emotion.

Emotion is more powerful. Risk aversion is more powerful. I would rather not date at all than to take the chance of opening my heart and be in love.

I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than to admit I need help and hire a dating coach. That’s far more emotion than logic because nobody wants to be alone for the rest of their life. But then again, nobody wants to hire a dating coach either.

Because what if I fail? You see how these things tie together. So, right now you’re not where you want to be. So, if you’re not where you want to be right now, doing nothing pretty much guarantees that you stay on the same path.

That’s inertia. That’s everybody, definition of insanity. Clarity is power, whether you recognize that or not.

Once we work together, you know what kind of man works for you, what kind of man is a waste of time. You take the principles that you’re learning from the Love U podcast in Love U and you apply them in your real life. So, it’s not just book learning.

No more than reading about washboard abs is the same as having washboard abs. You’re actually applying it and you have someone who’s holding you accountable to it. Then the idea that when you learn all of this, when you know as much as I know about dating and relationships, sincerely.

You could practice law for 20 years and there’s still a growth curve. If you’re taking my course and you’re working with me, I could teach you literally everything I know in six months. Then you will know as much as I do, which is cool.

My expertise goes really deep on one narrow, narrow subject. So, that’s the exciting part is you will have the confidence and the clarity to be your own dating coach by the time we’re done working together. That is a gift.

That is the gift that keeps on giving. That is teaching a woman to fish rather than catching a fish for her. Also, by doing dating coaching, you gain experience.

A lot of people, again, are kind of like armchair experts. They’ll read and they’ll go to therapy and they’ll heal, but they don’t actually get boots on the ground experience.

here’s a lot of dating coaches who don’t insist on dating.

They do some sort of therapy. They’ll talk about who hurt you in the past and your attachment style. It’s all past stuff, which is relevant.

We’ll spend about the first month of coaching on your past and on your confidence. Then we’re going to start dating because if you go on a date a week between now and the time we’re done working together, you’re going to find a guy that you like if you do the things that I ask you to do. It will happen.

It’s not if it’ll happen. It’s when it’ll happen. A lot of people like dating, the idea of finding love in theory, but don’t want to put it into practice.

When people come to me, there’s accountability. You have to put it into practice. If I’m the personal trainer, you kind of have to come to the gym.

You can’t just read the book at home. Then you also stop outsourcing the most important thing in your life to luck. That’s what most people want, like winning the lottery, like a safe with money coming down.

That’s miraculous. It’s wonderful if that happens. I don’t like that model to build wealth.

I want to be more on top of my own income and savings in 401k and 529 and all the things that I do to make sure my family is secure. It’s much more systemized and strategic and a slow burn. That is exactly what dating and relationships are.

It’s building up that muscle instead of sort of hoping to get lucky. That very, very passive way that most people try to approach love is essentially luck. I’m just going to live my life and I’m going to go to pick a ball and I’m going to go to salsa and if I meet him, fine.

If I don’t meet him, fine. How many dates did you go on with that strategy last year? One? Two? You’ve gone on two dates. You work with me, I’ll get you on a date a week.

Which is going to produce results faster? Seems pretty obvious. What if you keep on doing what you’re doing for the next five years, for the next 10 years? What if you’re like the woman I mentioned in the last podcast who joined my mailing list and listened to me for 10 years, went from 50 to 60? It is harder to meet men when you’re 60 than when you’re 50. It’s harder to meet men when you’re 50 than when you’re 40.

We know this. There’s literally no better time than the present, presuming you’re in a decent place in your life and you’re healthy and you’re financially secure, of course. But there’s no better time than the present to have the highest market value, I hate to even use those terms, to the kind of men that you want.

So you don’t want to miss out on love. It’s out there. There is some guy out in the universe who has no idea you exist and he can’t find you because you’re not dating.

You’re a product that’s not advertising yourself actively and you’re wondering why nobody’s buying your product. So my job is to help you market your product in the most effective way so that your target market wants to buy it and does. That’s a very, very achievable goal and we get to do it here all the time.

Go to my website, go to Love U love stories, read for yourself. There’s a hundred wedding photos on there. I have 500 more where that came from, where people won’t let me use their photos because no one wants to admit they had a dating coach.

So believe you me, this is not an if, this will make a difference. It’s a when. So there’s no failure in seeking love with intention and we know this about everything else.

You don’t want to be the what if person. What if I tried out for the school play? What if I wrote that novel? What if I asked for the race? You never want to be the what if person. You want to raise your bar high because if you raise your bar high, the worst thing if you raise your bar up here is that you achieve here.

But you grow, you evolve, you become the kind of person that attracts the kind of man that you’ve always wanted. But it doesn’t happen by thinking it, it only happens by doing. So I always use a bunch of broken metaphors in my work.

You’ve heard it here before. So I’ll use the biggest loser metaphor. Now I know better than to ever compare my clients to the biggest loser.

So again, it’s the TV show The Biggest Loser where people go on and they’re 300 pounds and they have a personal trainer for like 10 weeks. So imagine they went to a personal trainer for like 10 weeks and in those 10 weeks you lose 100 pounds. So my question for you is are you a success or are you a failure? I think you’re a success.

Like obviously you lost 100 pounds in 10 weeks. Maybe you’re not bikini ready yet. Maybe you’re not going to win the Miss America contest the way it’s designed.

But if you’ve gone from 300 pounds to lost 100 pounds in 10 weeks, you’ve proven that you can take action, you can do hard things, that you can diet and exercise and see a tangible result if you stick with the process. So maybe I’m foolish or naive or wired a little bit differently. But I am far more comfortable, and this is me, Evan, trying, failing, learning, growing than the alternative, doing nothing, wondering what could be and regretting that nothing ever changes.

And failure is like that’s my default setting in life. I got fired from every job I ever had in my 20s. I wrote a dozen screenplays that didn’t sell and didn’t make me a dollar.
I went out with 300 women over 10 years of trying to get to where I am now. So I really, really know failure. I’m comfortable with it.

But what happened? I turned all of those failures, and it’s not to be self-aggrandizing, I turned all of those failures into a success, a career in writing, different than the writing I started with, but a career in writing, a career where I don’t have a boss and I can’t get fired. I get to make a difference on my own terms, and I get to talk about all the mistakes that I made in the process of dating 300 people to be evolved enough to choose my wife to have a happy marriage. So I’m like the luckiest guy in the world.

But it wasn’t luck. It wasn’t a thing that happened to me. It was a thing that I did.

And it was driven because I was more afraid of being alone for the rest of my life than I was afraid of failing at dating and relationships. That’s why I kept on going out with one or two people a week for 10 years. The goal of having a partner who loved me unconditionally was the most important thing by far.

So I know this whole thing comes off as a plug for my services. I get that. And I know that’s not necessarily like a good look, but it’s not about you hiring me.

This is about the pep talk. This is about the call to action. This is about being optimistic and love.

This is about smiling at strangers. This is about dating online with regularity. It’s about opening your heart instead of closing it.

It’s about trying different people on for size and seeing who fits and what surprises you. It’s about doing anything different than you’ve been doing or that you’re doing right now so you can meet a great partner and have a really great life. So if something I said inspires you to do something without me, great.

Go do it. And if you want a step-by-step template and someone holding your hand through the process because it is sometimes daunting and scary and we all have blind spots and fears, I’d be honored to hold your hand through that process. Go to evanmarckatz.com/now, book a time to talk with me and I will show you the way.

Just don’t be afraid of what happens when you reach out to me. I’m the safest guy in the world. I am not going to let you down.

You are not going to fail. You’re going to experience things. You’re going to grow.

You’re going to get more confident, more self-aware, more experienced, more discerning, more boundaries. You’re going to transform yourself as a human being and it’s going to filter down to every single aspect of your life, relationships with your parents, with your kids, with the people at work and especially your romantic relationships. My name is Evan Marc Katz.

This is the Love U Podcast. I thank you for listening to me today. I know it’s a lot easier to sell a podcast that’s five texts that you could send that are going to make him crave you.

I just don’t like to do those. I just don’t like that. I think they’re dumb.

Sorry all the people who do five texts that’ll make him crave you. I’ve probably done something like that but I really don’t like doing stuff like that. I like doing stuff like this because it’s more real.

It’s more authentic. It goes deeper and it cuts to the root of why so many more people watch and listen to my stuff than actually hire me and I’m doing fine. Don’t worry about me but for your sake do something.

Don’t listen and do nothing because I really want you to have the love that you deserve. That’s all I got for today. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Don’t forget to leave us positive reviews, whatever one does at the end of a podcast. Most importantly, believe that love is worth it. It is.

I’m surrounded by love every day. My wife, my kids, my clients, the people who are having success in these programs. I could do my next podcast.

I could do three success stories with clients that I’m working with right now. I’m not going to do that because I have another one scripted but just know you have the opportunity to take control of your life. I want you to take that opportunity for you.

That’s all I got. I didn’t mention the Extraordinary Love series. I did at the top but extraordinaryloveseries.com. If you join, I’ll see you on Wednesday and be able to answer your questions about how you could attract a high-value man.

That should be a fun conversation as well. Have a great day. Bye-bye.