How do you find out where you really stand with someone? This question is one of the most important in a relationship, and finding the answer early on can save you a lot of time and unnecessary heartbreak.
In today’s new video, I share 6 ways to know if someone is serious about you, no matter which stage of dating you’re in. By the end, you’ll know how to separate genuine intention for commitment from mere attention.
Matthew Hussey
In this video, I want to talk about the six ways to know if someone is serious about you. It is so easy to waste our time in dating with people who are not serious, with the time wasters. And it doesn’t just waste our time; it results in a lot of unnecessary suffering and heartbreak when we misread someone’s intentions with us.
So, I’m excited to go through this today. I think it’s going to make some distinctions that are going to really change the way that you date going forward or the clarity you have around someone you’re dating right now.
Before I get into the video, if you haven’t already taken me up on our Black Friday offer for Matthew AI, I want to encourage you to do that because this is a way to get unlimited coaching from me for $19 for the entire month. We are offering 50% off your first month of unlimited 24/7 use of Matthew AI. You can text or call Matthew AI, and you will get my answer in real-time to your very specific questions. Go to AskMH.com, you can try it for free there. And if you like it, take us up on that 50% off offer, which allows you to get unlimited coaching from Matthew AI for just $19. That is just while our Black Friday sale lasts.
Before I get into the six ways, there is a crucial distinction we have to make. And that is the distinction between attention and intention. Attention is not intention. Intentions are about where someone intends for things to go.
And what we want is to find someone who is being very intentional about us, about their love life, and about wanting a relationship. What we come across far more often than someone who is being intentional is someone who is just giving us their attention. And attention is very dangerous because when we feel someone’s attention, it immediately gets us excited.
It’s like a pistol just went off at the beginning of a race, and we go careening into future projection and expectations about what this could be and how much we like this person. And a lot of us mistakenly invest based on someone’s attention. We feel excitement about the attention they’re giving us, and we start investing based on that excitement.
And because of that excitement, we start to make plans in our mind for this person. I hear this all the time when someone says to me, “You know, someone texts me every couple of weeks, they don’t really ask me out, or when we do see each other, it’s kind of sporadic. I don’t really know if it’s going anywhere, but I don’t want to see someone else because I really like this person.”
And what I know about that is that they have now started to make a plan for how important this person is and will be potentially, even though there is no evidence of the fact that this person has a plan for them. A plan is something we have to make with someone. It’s not something we should be making for someone based on some attention that they occasionally give us.
Remember, attention is a drug. What we have to do is take our focus away from that drug and reorient it towards people’s intentions.
My intention for this video is that anytime you feel yourself getting distracted by the drug of attention that someone is giving you, you can always come back to this video as a way of re-centering yourself about how important you should be making this person.
So, the first way we can tell if someone is serious is by getting curious about them ourselves.
Curiosity is strangely something we often don’t show enough of when we’re first dating someone. We are so busy being impressed by them or observing how attractive we think they are that we’re not actually asking the kinds of questions that reveal their intentions. Not for us necessarily, because it’s fair that they wouldn’t have any intentions for us on a first date, but intentions for themselves. And what we want to do here is adopt a kind of relaxed curiosity, one that is about having fun and genuinely just trying to get to know someone in a kind of neutral way.
Now, the reason we don’t do that a lot of the time is because we worry that we’re going to get taken advantage of. Someone has wasted our time in the past, and the way that we try to correct that is by over-correcting and trying to instantly get all of the information we need about someone to know whether we’re wasting our time by even being on a date with them. And often when someone gives us an answer we don’t like to a question, we start finding ourselves getting irritable and kind of mad and frustrated because we’re like, “Well, if you feel that way, why are you even on a date right now?” Instead, let’s take the mindset that someone can’t take advantage of me at this stage; I’m just on a date with them.
So, I don’t need to operate in a transactional way here, thinking that there are right and wrong answers. There are simply answers that mean that I wouldn’t necessarily be interested in investing any more time in this person, even if I’m having a good time right now, and answers that mean I would be interested in investing more time. When we approach it in this way, there is an added benefit, other than us frankly just being able to enjoy ourselves more: it’s that we start asking questions with a more neutral tone.
We start just being inquisitive, you know, asking them what they enjoy most about their life right now, what they might change about their life right now. If they could wave a magic wand and there was something they could have that they don’t have right now, do they get excited about relationships in general, or are they really enjoying being single? What does single feel like to them? What is their experience of dating?
A lot of people get obsessed with, “Can I ask that question?” but what they don’t get nearly concerned enough about is the tone when they ask a question. Because actually, tone can make a question that can feel very intense something that’s just good conversation, and the tone that we want to adopt is that neutral, curious tone. The kind of tone that says “There is no wrong answer; I’m just getting to know you, I’m just curious about you as a human being.” And when someone doesn’t feel like there’s a wrong answer, they’ll start to give you more truth.
And by the way, getting curious about someone else not only means taking our focus off of how impressed we are by superficial aspects of them, like how successful they seem to be or how good-looking they seem to be or just kind of their general charismatic energy, but it also means reducing our focus on worrying about how much we’re impressing them. Because as long as we’re afraid of whether they like us or not and we’re trying to say all of the right things, we’re not paying attention to whether they’re saying the wrong things, and we’re not paying attention to whether we’re even asking the right questions that will allow us to discern who they are and what they really want.
So, number one: if you want to know whether they’re serious, get curious.
The second way to know if someone’s serious is to look for that same curiosity in them.
So, we want to bring an intentionality to dating where we get curious, especially, by the way, if you’re really looking for a great long-term partner. Why wouldn’t you be curious about someone else? You want to see if they’re going to be good for life, not just if there’s someone you’re attracted to or if they’re going to be a good teammate. But we want to be looking for the same thing in them.
When they’re on a date with us, does it feel like they actually are trying to get to know us? Are they asking us the kinds of questions that show that they’re trying to discern whether we would make a compatible partner for them? Are they trying to understand our values? Do they ask us about our background? You know, if family is important to them, are they asking us about our family? Are they asking us if we’re close to the people in our lives? Is someone asking you about how you like to spend your time?
It matters whether someone is trying to learn these things about you. There are plenty of people in this world who will go on a date with you and just seek to impress you. Now, even on the most generous interpretation, someone who’s just trying to impress you is behaving in an insecure way that still speaks to a kind of lack of intentionality on their part because they’re not thinking about you; they’re not really connecting with you. They’re just worried about trying to get you. But if we start to look at the more insidious side of the spectrum, there are people who only care about impressing you because they just get off on making people feel a lot.
“I want to have a date with you where I show you all of the amazing things about me, where I get you really excited, and then I know I’ve got you in the palm of my hand. And then, afterwards, I’m going to go and do that with someone else and I’ll reach out to you when I feel I need you again.” At the extreme end, you have the narcissist who just wants everyone to fall in love with them so that they can get the feeling of someone falling in love with them. They’re not really trying to learn who anyone is.
This is about finding someone who’s not just trying to be interesting, but is interested. This is a sign of curiosity on their part. If someone is being intentional, if someone is serious about what they’re looking for in love, then they are serious about learning who you are.
The third way to know if they’re serious is that they actually follow up.
Having a great date is one thing, but them—or you, frankly, because if we’re being serious, we also are prepared to follow up. But the two people following up in tandem, and that follow-up resulting in real, consistent communication after the date, is a sign of seriousness. Because when someone follows up with us, it’s a way of them saying, “I am putting investment into furthering the conversation. I’m not letting that rest as just a moment in time where we had a great experience together. I am actually invested in continuing this, in making sure you know that I’m interested in continuing this, in maintaining a kind of momentum, a kind of rhythm.” They want that. They don’t want to leave that to chance—that they can just disappear for days on end, and you’re still going to think that they’re interested and you’re not going to date other people in the meantime and decide that, well, my attention is better served elsewhere.
And even if you grant them that, okay, they were a bit shy after the date, so they didn’t text me first, that’s where we can lead. We can be the one to text first if we want, but if that’s the case—that they were just a little shy but they’re still serious—then us giving them the permission, the green light, to continue the conversation should then activate them continuing the conversation. If it doesn’t, we can’t keep telling ourselves that, “Well, maybe they do really like me and maybe they do want to continue things, but they just haven’t texted me” because they are not showing us that.
Having this as a litmus test for how serious someone is is great because it gets us out of those internal, confusing conversations of, “Well, Matt, they watch my stories, so what does that mean?” Or, “You know, they like my posts or they still DM me sometimes—like, what does that mean? Why would they do that if they weren’t interested?” They’re doing that because they want to keep you in the game somehow, but it doesn’t mean that they’re serious about progressing things. And by the way, this doesn’t mean that someone is bad. It also doesn’t mean that, at some point in the future, this thing couldn’t pick up speed in some way. It means that right now, they are not serious about you.
The fourth way to tell if someone is serious builds on this idea of someone following up after a date, and that is that they are scheduling times to see you.
Now, this is different from “They are planning to see you.” Planning isn’t scheduling. Scheduling is saying, “When are you free? What night are we doing? What time shall we meet?” That’s scheduling. And when someone is scheduling with you, that’s a lovely sign, because in order to schedule something with someone, you have to make a choice. You have to make a choice that, on that night, at the end of this week, I am not going to do anything else. In fact, Saturday evening, I’m going to say no to everything else so that I can see you, and that’s something that I’m willing to decide on a Tuesday. It’s not something that I want to wait to decide until one hour before.
It always stuck with me when Tim Ferriss said that for him, unless something is in the diary, it’s not real. When something is in the diary, it becomes real. And he was talking about that in the context of goals and things you want to achieve or make happen in life. If you think about why that’s so relevant in the context he was talking about, it actually gives us a real insight into seriousness in dating. Because if I say to myself, “I am gonna take a jiu-jitsu class,” but I keep talking about it with my friends and never doing it, that is an expression of my lack of seriousness about that. I enjoy talking about it more than I enjoy actually doing it. But when I put it in the diary, I am committing to that thing.
In our love lives, you have to ask yourself, “Is someone committing to the date in the diary with me?” If you want to know who’s serious about you, look at who’s scheduling something with you, not someone who’s getting excited about talking about plans with you that amount to no more than a role play about what could happen in the future, as opposed to a genuine commitment of what is going to happen in the future.
Now, as we get to number five, I want you to see the six points in this video almost as being things that we start to take as signs of increasing seriousness as things evolve with a person. So, you’ll see that this point number five isn’t something that would be relevant to someone you had just met, but it would be relevant to someone that you were dating, starting to get closer to, and starting to consider, “You know, if I keep investing in you, it’s because there’s something serious on the cards. Otherwise, what we’re doing right now really makes no sense.” So, with that said. . .
The fifth way to know if someone is serious about you is if they involve you.
Now, the context I am talking about here is decisions that could affect what you have together or where it’s going. So, they will involve you in certain decisions that they have to make, would like to make, or intend to make, especially if those decisions could impact how much time you get to spend together, could impact this wonderful rhythm that you’ve built together, could take you far apart for a significant period of time.
For example, if someone is going to go through an extremely busy chapter because of a project that they’re embarking on for the next couple of months, and that means that you won’t be able to see each other as much as you have been, they will communicate with you about that. If they are thinking of taking a promotion that could take them out of town, out of state, or to a different city, they will discuss that with you. Now, someone involving you in key decisions and moments in their life doesn’t always mean that you get a vote on those, especially if it’s early in the process of knowing this person, but it does mean that there is a kind of intentionality about involving you in the conversation.
Maybe forewarning you of something that’s going to happen or help you understand the rationale behind a decision. All of this they do because they would never want you to question how interested in you they are or where they see it going. They don’t want you to see their decision as a reflection of how important the relationship is. Instead, they want to show you that you are a part of the conversation.
Here are some questions that you can ask to discern someone’s seriousness on this level: Are they actually taking my feelings into account in their decision-making? Are they concerned about ensuring that I’m on board, or are they indifferent to my reaction? Am I always the last one to know about the things that are happening in their life? Do I feel on the outside of the circle of information? Am I simply the collateral damage on their path until my hurt or frustration makes me impossible to ignore?
Now, I want to make one point about all of this, which is that most humans don’t get these things right all the time. It’s perfectly reasonable that sometimes someone behaves a little self-centeredly or they forget to involve us in something. These things do happen, but they shouldn’t happen all the time. They shouldn’t happen on everything. And when you do share your feelings about how it felt to be left out of something, your feelings will be met with compassion by someone who is serious about you. They won’t be seen as this eye-rolling inconvenience that they now have to deal with.
The sixth way that someone will show you they’re serious is by wanting to make you feel comfortable with situations.
When situations come up that could make you uncomfortable—let’s say they’re hanging out with a friend, and they’re a little worried that you could feel that they’re attracted to that friend or you could feel that, you know, there’s something for you to feel insecure about about that friendship. They will actually tell you, “Hey, I’m really excited for you to meet this person,” or “I’d love for us to hang out together,” or “I’ve been friends with this person for a long time.” They won’t want you to, in any way, feel insecure or uncomfortable. They won’t want to leave any ambiguity that could suggest that they’re not taking the relationship with you seriously, and they’ll also do that most likely because they don’t want to have ambiguity in return from your side. They would hope that if it were the other way around, you would also be making them feel comfortable.
Someone who is serious about you is not going to want to engage in situations that could, in any way, threaten the relationship, but they’re also going to want to make sure that even if the situation is completely innocent, it’s something you feel comfortable with because your feelings matter. And because they would never want you to question how seriously they are taking their relationship with you.
The only true way to know if someone is serious is to look at these six things and say, “Am I seeing the right things in each of these areas over time?” I have to give it time because someone’s nature, their true character, can only be revealed over a longer period of time. But that doesn’t stop us from saying no to the people who demonstrate the wrong things in the short term. And this video, I hope, has given you some clarity on that—the wrong things and the right things that you can pay attention to when you’re giving your time and energy to someone.
I also realize it’s quite possible that this video has thrown up more questions for you about your situation, and if it has, I want you to go and ask the question that is at the front of your mind right now of Matthew AI. You can try it for free at AskMH.com.
Literally, whatever question you’re like, “Matt, I’ve enjoyed this video, but, you know, it’s made me think of this, and what about this situation in my situation?” If you have that question right now, go ask it of Matthew AI because you can get my answer. AskMH.com is the link, and when you get there, like I said, there is a Black Friday offer on right now, just for a limited period of time, where you can get half price off of your first month, meaning you can use Matthew AI as much as you want for an entire month for just $19.
Go check it out, and I’ll see you there. AskMH.com is the link, and thank you, as always, for watching this video.
