Cathy: So, are you ready now?

Reid: Ready now.

Cathy: So, one of our viewers said “I’m travelling in Thailand right now and I have made a relationship with a wonderful girl here. We’ve spent a couple of weeks together and have had a great time, but she knows minimal English and I know very minimal Thai. I’d like to learn Thai and she wants to learn English. But do you think we can have a good relationship over the course of learning a whole language and not being able to communicate well in the meantime?” This is Reid Mihalko from http://reidaboutsex.com/.

Reid: Cathy Vartuli from https://theintimacydojo.com/

Cathy: And I’m curious about your answer.

Reid: This is like a novel! Like this is like Eat, Pray, Love.

Cathy: This is great!

Reid: But the Thai version with learning languages. And Ryan Gosling could play the guy here learning Thai, see it now, big Hollywood blockbuster.

Cathy: Could be!

Reid: I mean, who knows?! How do we know what is gonna happen? It does sound exciting. It sounds adventurous. It sounds like you’ve met somebody who’s maybe a good fit for you. I mean dating your species has been not translated into Thai yet, then you’re welcome to go to http://reidaboutsex.com/ and look on the search bar “dating your species”, and figure out whether you guys are actually a good fit for what relationships mean to you. But having a shared project brings people together, so you two being each other’s cheerleaders for…

Cathy: And practice what it is

Reid: And practice what it is for learning each other’s languages sounds freaking romantic as hell! But then of course, in the third act of our movie, they find out as they learned how to talk each other’s languages that they were all misunderstandings that could only of course, happen because you didn’t know the language. That being said, I still think it has a happy ending. Because even if you realize you are not supposed to be together, duration is not the metric for success anymore in relationships – it’s about depth and transparency…

Cathy: And you get to learn a new language.

Reid: Yeah

Cathy: I think one of the things I’d encourage you to watch out for is human beings have the tendency with lack of information we tend to paint what we want to see in there. So without the communication to be able to check in, do you like it when I do this or what do you feel about that? Just be aware of where you may be filling in the blanks without actually knowing things. And that’s I think that’s where a lot of disappointment comes because if we don’t know, it’s really easy to… a lot of people have crushes on TV stars or romantic. They feel romantic towards them because they are assuming they would fit what their inner needs are, because they don’t know like, do they leave their socks on the floor at night? Or do they leave the toilet seat up? Those kinds of things are not filled in and we just fill nice things because the person unto us is handsome and pretty…

Reid: Plus if you’re in love, we have brain research now that says that the brain centers in your brain that are active when you are in love are the same brain centers that are active when you are high in cocaine. So, you’re basically stoned out of your mind. And you don’t see all, it’s like Barbara Walters special with that beautiful lens in the good lighting and you don’t see all the flaws.

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: So understand that if you two are in love with each other, you’re not gonna like photoshopping each other to begin with and you don’t know how to communicate in each other’s languages yet. So you’re probably missing a lot of new understandings, but if you’re having fun, if it’s consensual, if you’re being realistic that you don’t know what you don’t know yet, then stacking the deck in your favor using the languaging that you will be learning to continue to build good communication and be really clear with each other. Also calibrating for cultural differences, right? You have to think of as an English speaker from a different culture, what are the Thai assumptions or pre-conceptions in relationships? Like… and I don’t know Thai culture but insert any culture like how forth-right can somebody  talk about what they’re really feeling in certain cultures. Here in America, not everybody was taught that it was okay to actually say what was going on. Like you grew up in a family like that.

Cathy: Yeah, so. We wish you luck. We hope that does sound really exciting and romantic and we’d love to know how it goes if you want to tell us.

Reid: All we ask is that when you write the book and it gets turned into a movie that you write us into this in our…

Cathy: Do we get some to play ourselves?

Reid: I don’t think we can get to play ourselves.

Cathy: Sad

Reid: Yeah. Oh, my god. They’re going to cast Ryan Gosling so that’s disappointing. Who would play you? Who would play me?

Cathy: Leonardo Di Caprio.

Reid: Would play you? That’s something casting.

Cathy: Oh me, yeah of course!

Reid: He’s got range, he’s got range. Yeah, you know I think I’ll be The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. Alright! Comments! Good luck!