About
The Person Behind the Book
A little context about who wrote this, and why.
Who I am
An inadvertent expert on all the wrong choices
I'm not a pastor, a therapist, or a relationship coach. I don't have a degree in psychology or theology. What I've got is a long history of doing things the way that seemed to make sense, messing it up, and thinking I'd learned my lesson — only to have something new go wrong next time.
In my 20s and 30s I was a hedonist. A combat veteran and personal trainer for over two decades, I was driven, competitive, and relentless — and I brought that same energy to my romantic life. Hundreds of dates, several long-term relationships and everything in between. I was extremely good at "the hunt," and extremely terrible at understanding what I was doing to myself and others in the process.
The damage from those years didn't just stay in the relationship department. It showed up everywhere — in my finances, my friendships, my career, and in ways that will probably surprise you. It took a long time to understand why, and even longer to connect the dots back to the source.
This book is what I wish someone had put in my hands as a young teenager.
Why I wrote this
Because a vacuum will always be filled
Young people are going to learn about sex, relationships, and love from somewhere. If it's not from the people who care about them, it'll be from the internet, from friends, from culture — sources that are often incomplete, misleading, or outright harmful.
I wrote this book because I didn't want one more teenager or young adult to spend a decade learning what I learned the hard way. The principles in this book are real. The consequences of ignoring them are real. And the good news — that there's a better way, and it's not too late — is also real.
"There is a way that seems right to a man — but its end is the way of death." The book of Proverbs said it long before I figured it out the hard way.
Growing up, the religious people in my life told me to deny my urges and acted like they'd never had them. The only explanation I got was essentially "because God says so" — and that was it. No context, reasoning or acknowledgment of how powerful those feelings actually were. For me, and for a lot of people I know, that wasn't enough.
If you're going to ask someone to make hard choices that go against everything they're feeling — especially a teenager — a lot of us need to understand the why behind it. Not just a rule, but the reason the rule exists and what actually happens when you ignore it. What you're protecting yourself from, and what you're protecting yourself for. That's what this book tries to do.