In this week’s new video, we share a test that can help you tell the difference, so you can weed out the love bombers and focus on someone who shows you genuine interest.

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Audrey:

Is it appropriate for someone who you’ve met-

Matthew:

No!

Audrey:

Yeah.

Matthew:

No, no, no, no, no. There’s very little about what was just said that’s appropriate.

So for this week, I thought I’d do something a little different. I have a club called the Love Life Club, and every month, I answer questions of my members. This one caught my attention as something that would be fun to bring to all of you here. It was someone who asked, “How do you know the difference between someone who is love bombing you, and someone who has real intentions?” This was my answer. And by the way, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell, so that you get notified the next time we do a video.

Audrey:

Can we do one final question?

Matthew:

Please. Yeah.

Audrey:

From someone called Tamila; “How do I differentiate between love bombing and genuine attention? I met a man online,” in brackets, “I’m traveling out of country. He was pursuing me, and is waiting to meet when I’m back in the US. We’re in different states, and he’s organizing a date in his city, San Diego, in a month. In his text, there’s a lot of “us” talk, talk of living together, how many kids I’d want, asking me for my preferences on houses, calling me wifey, et cetera. Help. How do I differentiate between love bombing and genuine intention?”

Matthew:

How long has she been speaking to this man?

Audrey:

She met him online.

Matthew:

But how long ago?

Audrey:

It doesn’t say. But is it appropriate for someone who you met-

Matthew:

No!

Audrey:

Yeah.

Matthew:

No, no, no, no, no. There’s very little about what was just said that’s appropriate. That has love bombing written all over it.

Audrey:

How do you not get swept up? Because it’s a lovely thing to hear, right? You meet someone you find attractive, whatever, and they’re saying all the right things, and they’re saying all these . . . How do you stop yourself from getting carried away in those kinds of words?

Matthew:

Here’s what you hear in your head. Imagine someone just rang your phone, it was an unknown number, and you picked it up, and it was a automated message, and it said, “You have been selected from a random pool of people to collect $2 million. All you need to do to collect your winnings is to speak now with your bank account details, so that we can deposit the funds.” That’s what you imagine being said. Because if that happened, we’d all be like, “Hang up. This doesn’t make any sense, why you’re giving me $2 million right now. I’ve never been that lucky in my entire life. It doesn’t add up. $2 million is not that easy to make. No.”

If someone, out of nowhere, starts saying “Wifey this, wifey that, we’re going to have this many kids, we’re going to live in this house,” either they are projecting to a scary degree, which means that there’s something unhealthy about them, and they believe they’re this in love with you, and they’re mistaken because they don’t even know you. So that love isn’t real, and you’re dealing with a really unhealthy person. Or you’re dealing with a scammer. What they’re scamming you out of, it might be sex, it might be money, it might be just all of your energy, and they’re not going to give you anything in return. They’re just going to bring you out to San Diego, and have fun with you, and then send you back and be like, “What are you . . . Wifey? What? I didn’t say any of that. I don’t remember any of that.” They’re trying to get something. They’re trying to get something.

So you have to start seeing it for what it really is. It feels nice to be told you just won a million dollars, but you can’t trust it. And it’s the same with this. How can you feel this way about me? You do not know me. You have no idea who I am. So either take the time to actually get to know who I am and let’s start again, or I’m going to see this for what it is, which is either a gross projection or a manipulation. But someone can only know you over time by asking questions, by taking the time to actually get to know you.

And by the way, be careful of traveling to see someone who you don’t know. In general, are they willing to make an effort to see you? Could they meet you halfway? Is there a way for the two of you to meet in a way that requires at least some mutual investment? Because the “Fly to be with me in my backyard” is a very easy thing to say to someone. And I’m not saying that means they’re dangerous or evil, but at the very least, it’s a lot of work for you and none for them.

Audrey:

I think that’s such a good point. We’ve made it before, but when somebody asks you to fly to see them, it feels like investment, because you go, “Oh my God, they really want to spend all this time with me.” But actually, it’s no investment if the person is thinking, “Well, I’m going to have a nice weekend, I’m going to get sex out of it, and then they fly home and I never have to think about it again, or I certainly don’t have to think about it further than that weekend until I decide.” But we think it feels . . . Because it feels like investment, right? It feels like it’s something serious, because you think, “Oh, this person wants to spend a weekend with me.”

Matthew:

Exactly. Exactly.

Audrey:

So yeah, I think that’s really interesting.

Matthew:

What it is, is you’re depositing a whole lot of money for very little investment on their part.

Thank you so much for watching. Before you go, if finding love is a priority for you this year, I have something for you that is brand new, I’m really excited about it. It’s a training that’s completely free, that you can do right now, that shows you how to avoid casual situations, how to finally find your person, and how to get the commitment that you deserve with them. It’s called Dating With Results. Thousands of people have now been through this training, and it’s available for you to watch right now, at DatingWithResults.com. Go check it out, I can’t wait to see what you think, and I’ll speak to you soon.

The post This Romantic Gesture Is Actually a Sign He’s NOT SERIOUS appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

In today’s video, I show you how to navigate this confusing situation and take back control of the situation.

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Matthew:

Before we get into the video, I have a big announcement today on April the 13th, I am holding my now famous 30-day Confidence Challenge. This is a live coaching experience that kicks off with me on April the 13th. For anyone who wants to graduate from just watching me on YouTube to an actual coaching experience that I have created and it’s free, join us for the 30 days. Build your confidence. Go over to MHChallenge.com. You can do it while you’re watching this right now, just open up a new tab on your browser. Type in MHChallenge.com, type your email address in and I’ll send you all of the information. Did you do it? Did you? Great. I can’t wait to see you on the 13th. Now let’s get onto the video.

Over 15 years I’ve been doing this now, and that means that I have heard just about every excuse that has ever been made for why someone isn’t ready for a relationship or why someone can’t give another person what they want, and still, because I have a whole membership called the LoveLife Club, I have thousands of members who every month on our live coaching calls will at some point give me another excuse that someone has given them that they are taking at face value and there are just so many. What are some of the common ones, Audrey?

Audrey:

I can’t be in a relationship because work is so busy right now.

Matthew:

Okay, so I can’t be in a relationship because work is so busy. What else?

Audrey:

Oh, I know this one. I like you too much.

Matthew:

I like you too much.

Audrey:

Yeah.

Matthew:

Okay.

Matthew:

I can’t be with you. I just like you too much. What else?

Audrey:

I’m just really confused right now.

Matthew:

I’m just really confused right now. I was hurt in the past. That’s another one.

Audrey:

Yeah, I was hurt in the past.

Matthew:

I got hurt.

Audrey:

And I’m afraid to get hurt again.

Matthew:

I don’t want to get hurt again. You have a little thing you do, don’t you, when you are talking about people that give these excuses that often are about being confused. What is it you say?

Audrey:

Well, it’s like I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the confused guy or I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the busy guy.

Matthew:

I’m not the bad guy. I’m just a confused guy. Like that. She hates when I do that.

Audrey:

I like that.

Matthew:

I’m not the bad guy. I’m just a busy guy. I just got a big business. I got to do a bunch of business stuff.

Audrey:

It’s not how it goes.

Matthew:

I’m not the bad guy. I just got a bit my heart break in the past. I got… I’m not the bad guy.

Audrey:

I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the hurt guy.

Matthew:

I’m not the bad guy. I just don’t want to take you to Italy, give you a little pasta, a little trip. Maybe say I want to marry you. I don’t really, but what’s the problem? I’m not the bad guy. I’m just a confused guy. When someone is telling you something that seems to either defy logic completely or just seems to be making life too complicated, instead of trying to work out how to solve their problem, when someone says to you, “I’m too busy for a relationship,” that’s what they’ve concluded. Either it’s true or it’s not, but that’s what they’ve concluded or they’re just telling you this because it’s easier than being the bad guy.

That’s what it’s coming from. We have to be very careful. The number of times I have been coaching someone and I watched them trying to solve an unsolvable riddle because the problem isn’t even real in the first place. The problem is just something someone created so that they could create an element of confusion while keeping the door open. It was an open loop. It’s a way of saying you don’t go anywhere, but I am going to give you some kind of logic that removes me from the game so that you stop asking for as much. It’s like that person wants to leave the door open for maximum options in the future while monopolizing your attention by making themselves the only person you can think about. Have you got someone in your life right now who’s giving you a kind of convoluted excuse or some intricate reason why they can’t give you what you want?

I want you to apply a principle called Occam’s Razor, which I have in a book that just happens to be by my feet. Occam’s razor. Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. Named after the medieval logician William of Occam. Occam’s Razor is a general rule by which we select among competing explanations. Occam wrote that a plurality is not to be posited without necessity. In other words, we should prefer the simplest explanation with the fewest moving parts. If someone says to you, “I like you too much and it scares me, and for that reason I just feel like I can’t go any further,” you have to ask yourself what has to be true for that to be true? Well, this person has to like me so much that they’ve literally decided that this thing that brings them so much joy is not possible.

That they have to go in search of someone they like less so that they can be happier. Or you take the view that this person is just saying the easy thing. Which one is more likely to be true? Occam’s Razor says it’s obviously someone just saying something that makes their exit easy, but not just their exit easy. Something that makes their re-entry easy because at any point they can come back, send you a little text and be like, “I can’t stop thinking of you. Remember when I said I just like you so much? Too much? Well, that’s happening to me right now. I like you too much to let you go, but I also like you too much to be with you. I’m a confused guy.” Occam’s Razor says that is hokum. Nonsense. Bollocks. How is it that someone who is selfishly dishing out a logic that they think is palatable to us allows them to remain the hero or at the very least a sympathetic character and allows them to come back in whenever they want?

How is it that we can so easily end up believing the things that they’re saying and then trying to solve a problem that’s not real in the first place? “Well, if you are too busy with your job, I would support you. We could see each other after work. We can see each other in the cracks of time. I feel like we could make it work.” I think that that’s trying to solve a problem that’s not real in the first place. Why do we do this? Because when we really like someone and when we really want to find love and when we feel that there is a glimmer of hope in this situation, we want it to be true. We become a biased judge. We contort reality in whatever way we have to do it, pretzeling the situation into some form of sense that allows it to be true in our mind.

That is where we end up saying something to somebody else going, “Well, they said this” and our friend says, “You believed that? That’s mental.” But we’ve all believed something like that in the past, haven’t we? Haven’t you had a moment where there was someone in your life and they sold you on a logic that felt true at the time, but it wasn’t because it was really true, it was because you wanted it to be true? We’ve all been in that situation of believing the ridiculous, of believing the convoluted, the complex, instead of applying Occam’s Razor. And I’m not saying that every person who doesn’t give you the real reason that they don’t want to have a relationship with you has these sort of manipulative intentions to come back into your life whenever they please, while also keeping you at arm’s length. Some people are like that and other people, they just don’t want to be honest because being honest is hard.

It’s hard to tell someone exactly why you don’t want to continue with them. We all at times want to go down the path of least resistance and the path of least resistance is often in breakups or telling someone that you can’t give them what they want. The moment where you tell them something that’s easy to say regardless of whether it confuses them, but what you have to take from this is when someone gives you something that’s confusing instead of trying to make it not confusing, instead say to yourself, confusion is closure. When someone doesn’t know what they want, when they have a reason why they can’t be with me, it’s not my job to fix it. It’s not my job to take it on board and try to figure out what I can do better or how I can be enough or how I can solve the logistical problem they’ve handed me.

My job is to just interpret all of this as someone who actually isn’t in the market for a relationship in the way that I am. That’s it. Confusion is closure, and remember I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. I think it’s one of the most important lines I’ve ever said in this area. When you imagine talking to someone like this, imagine yourself saying “You have your reasons, but I have my reality. Whatever your reason is for why you are the way you are or why you are treating me the way you’re treating me, my reality is that my needs aren’t getting met and I’m looking at a person who doesn’t see the decision to be with me as a simple one. That’s all I need to know.” Let them walk away with their confusion. You walk away with the simplicity, that confusion is closure. Now go find someone who knows what they want.

I hope you like that video. Before you go anywhere, let me tell you a little bit about what we are all going to do together in the 30-day Confidence Challenge. So on April the 13th, I’m going to be joining you live for an hour where we are going to be talking about five specific missions that I’m going to give you and you are going to complete over the 30 days as part of a private community that I am creating for this. So we’re all going to go through it together, holding each other accountable and completing these five missions that are psychologically designed to measurably improve your confidence in these 30 days. Go over to MHChallenge.com now if you haven’t already, sign up for free and I will send you the access details for the live session with me on the 13th and a link to the private community where we’re all going to hold each other accountable. I’ll see you over there. The link again is MHChallenge.com. I can’t wait. This is going to be fun.

The post The Truth Behind WHY They Won’t Commit to You appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

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Matthew :

Ready?

Jameson:

You going to do the video sat like that?

Matthew :

Yes. What’s wrong with this?

Jameson:

It looks awkward.

Matthew :

It’s comfortable, Jameson. I’ve been making videos with you for over 10 years now. Can I be comfortable just once?

I got a question recently and I thought I’d bring it to you today because I think it’s going to help a lot of people. This person said, “I feel stuck. Last May, I got out of a 10-year relationship I was in since I was 19. I’m doing a lot of self-development and I found that when it comes to love and dating, people don’t seem to be attracted to open, good communication at first. I’ve been told I get into deep talk really fast, but then I keep getting friend-zoned by really attractive people because of it. Wouldn’t it be better if I could just be this healthy, communicative, open person, and then attract that kind of person? Or are flirting and good communication often at odds?”

I thought this was a great question because the answer gets to the heart of why so many people do not get the call at the end of a first date. We all have our superpower, the language we know the best, and that superpower can be an incredible thing. In this woman’s case, it’s her ability to go deep. It’s her ability to empathize. It’s her ability to be sincere and to have meaningful conversations. But when taken to its extreme, it can become a disadvantage.

In her case, you hear she’s getting friend-zoned by people she’s attracted to. I want you, as I start talking in this video, to think: “What’s the language or the superpower that I know or have, that I can do really, really well? What’s that thing for me that comes out when I’m on a date?” The problem with having a superpower like that is that we tend to rely on it, we lean on it, and we can be too much of it. And we forget that for someone to really find us irresistible, they need to see more than one of these components.

For her, she had good communication, but communication isn’t the same as attraction. Communication is understanding someone and being understood. Attraction is creating desire. She was communicating but not building attraction. There’s a principle I want to give you. Contrast creates attraction. When we are one thing, let’s say in this case we’re able to have these meaningful conversations, but then we can switch gears to something else, perhaps being flirtatious, teasing someone, being playful, all of a sudden there’s a contrast between those two things, and that contrast is sexy. That contrast is unexpected. That contrast is engaging.

It’s like having this meaningful conversation with someone sat at the bar and then they go to the bathroom. And when they come back, you all of a sudden take them in as a person, as a romantic interest and you see them walking back to the seat and you realize that they’re attractive. There’s something about their figure or the way they’re dressed or the way they carry themselves that is attractive. And when they come back to their seat, instead of just re-engaging on a deep and meaningful level, you take a moment just to say to that person, “I really like your outfit by the way.” And in that moment, you are feeding that attraction, not just great communication.

It is the same thing as they’re being, I don’t know, a ping pong table in the room and you saying to this person, “Are you good at ping pong?” And they say, “Yes.” And you go, “Me too. We can’t play.” And they say, “Why?” And you go, “Because we’re going to fight. I’m going to win obviously. And then we’re going to argue about it.” That moment where you tease them or create a little tension, it’s playground stuff, but it works for a reason because it creates this role play that’s in a different gear than just sincerity.

Now you wouldn’t want to be this all the time because it would be exhausting and it would come across ultimately as insecure. That would be too much. But sprinkled in, it can be very powerful. I call these things unique pairings. When you have two different qualities that you don’t normally find in the same person, in the same person. So now you have someone who’s not just playful, but they can be sincere. You have someone who’s not just sexy, but can be intellectual. You have someone who is not just deep and meaningful, but can tease you five minutes later. Unique pairings are what make us think I need to be around this person. At the extreme, they make us feel like someone is irreplaceable.

If you’ve had an ex in your life that you struggled to get over, my guess is they had certain unique pairings that you felt would be difficult to replace in somebody else. Well, that’s actually the effect we want to have when we’re dating, is that someone meets us and they have one great quality that they see, but then they see something else and they go, “Oh my God, those two things together, that’s the sweet spot, that’s irresistible.”

I remember Jameson telling me a story of when he first realized that he liked me, not just as someone he worked with, but as an actual friend. We were on a plane on the way back from Seattle to LA. We were sat in the emergency row on the plane, but he was sat in a seat that didn’t have any room in front of him. And I was sat in a seat where strangely, there was no seat in front of mine. So I had not just a bit more legroom, but double the legroom. And at a certain point on the journey, I was on my laptop working and I just shot him a little look and I went, “So hard to concentrate with all of this legroom.” And I said it completely deadpan.

And he laughed, and I forgot this moment. This wasn’t obviously like a big moment for me. I forgot it completely. But the reason I know the story is because years later, he told me this story as a moment where he realized A, oh, he’s funny, and B, we’re going to be friends. Now think about it. It’s not like I suddenly had to be a jokester the whole way back. It was just a moment that appeared in contrast to the quite serious person that he had seen up there on stage being a professional. Now he got to see a different side of me, and that highlighted a unique pairing.

Now, some people will listen to this and they’ll think, this sounds like so much work. I have to be all these different things. And some people will even say, “I have to be things I’m not.” Firstly, I want to challenge the idea that you are not these multifaceted things. We all have these parts of ourselves. If you don’t associate with being sexy, well, have you ever been turned on? Then you have sexuality. And if you have sexuality, you can be sexy. Have you ever had a funny thought? Have you ever made your best friend laugh? Then you have a sense of humor.

A lot of the time, what we think we don’t have are just muscles we’ve never worked, and we overdevelop the muscles that we’re most comfortable with. To the point of, “Well, it’s just so much work having to do all of this.” It’s not. You don’t have to be all of these things all of the time. There are certain things we want to be as much of the time as possible, like kind and compassionate, just a genuine, authentic person. But there are other things like being funny or flirtatious or teasing, creating tension, sexuality that they’re like seasoning, we just add a little bit here and there. And a little bit is enough. It’s almost like just showing that we can be that thing.

You have a playful moment with someone and someone goes, “Oh, they can be playful.” You show a little moment of . . . you give someone a compliment in a flirtatious way and they realize, “Oh they can be sexual, they can be flirtatious.” It’s just showing someone we can go to that beat and that we don’t keep going to the same beat all the time. So unique pairings are the answer to how to get that phone call after a date. How do you keep someone wanting more? How do you make them want to go from date two to date three, to date four, to date 10. And ultimately, I believe that the people we end up marrying are the people that we see as having a collection of unique pairings that we never want to give up.

This is my instruction to you today. Ask yourself two questions. What muscle have I overdeveloped that I’m using too much? Which by the way is a good thing. Me having that muscle is a good thing. I always think about it like this. Learning a language is an amazing thing, but don’t stay in that place so long that it becomes the only language you know. And the second question is, what muscle has atrophied? What muscle has become weak from not using it? Or maybe you feel like you’ve never used it. It doesn’t come out on your dates, it doesn’t come out around people you’re attracted to. I want you to answer that question in the comments.

And by the way, if you love this concept and you’re like, “I need to build my unique pairings, but I don’t know how, or I want to be more flirtatious and playful or sexy, but what are the practical ways that I can do that?” I have an entire group of people that I work with exclusively every month in the LoveLife Club and you can join them. We do coaching calls, I do masterclasses, interviews with other experts that I bring you and have access to. There’s a whole community inside an app that you get on your phone. It’s an amazing place to be. And you can join for a 14-day free trial by going to joinlovelife.com. You can set up your free profile in minutes and come join us and access all of the content that’s in there for my members. I look forward to seeing you in there. Thank you for watching this video and I will see you next week.

The post Wondering Why You Never Got a Second Date With Them? appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

I wish there were an easy answer, but this is definitely one question that isn’t “one size fits all.” In today’s brand-new video, I show you how to explore what that looks like for YOU so you’ll be ready to act (or not act) the next time you’re in that situation.

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Matthew:

This month I had a question from one of my LoveLife Club members who asked whether it was advisable to sleep with a guy after a second date. Now, she did also caveat this by saying, “I am coming off the back of two years in a friends-with-benefits situation that I don’t want to repeat.” So here’s what I hear in this. I hear someone who has slipped into a dynamic with someone where she’s sleeping with him regularly or every time they see each other at least, but it’s not progressing and that’s probably a dynamic that she ignored very early on in that situation. And I also hear someone who is looking for something serious in her life. She wants a real relationship where she can be intentional.

Now, I think sometimes the argument of “Can you sleep with someone on a first date or a second date?” quickly becomes this almost political, gendered thing that becomes quite a misnomer. Hopefully, all of us here in this particular space can agree that it doesn’t matter from the point of view of “Can you? Is it okay to?” whether you sleep with someone after one drink or six months? I don’t have an opinion on that other than of course it’s okay. The question is, “Does it serve you and does it serve the path that you want to be on?”

Now, I just said that what I picked up from this question is that this person is being intentional about wanting to find a relationship. So what we have to do then is ask ourselves, “Is what I’m doing the behavior of someone who is being intentional? Does that communicate to someone else and to myself that I’m being intentional?”

I recently was in my local coffee shop and there was a guy in there in his mid-20s, really lovely guy who recognized me and started speaking to me. He started telling me about this person that he’s dating and how, because he really likes her, even though inside there’s all these feelings he has about this person and I’m paraphrasing what he said to me here, but he essentially said, “I might want to scream, ‘I love you, be with me forever.'” But given that he really likes this person, he was evolved enough to say, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do that. Instead, I’m going to go at an organic pace with this person to see what it could actually be.”

Now, that brings up an interesting distinction, doesn’t it? There’s what we feel like doing and there’s the behavior that actually serves us in our intentions. For him his intention was to have a relationship with this woman that he was seeing. So suddenly telling her, “I love you, and oh my God, I just want to be with you all the time,” and doing all of these things. If it communicates an intensity that would no longer feel organic might it might actually disrupt this thing that they have together. It might not if you get two really intense people together and they love saying all these things to each other, then it can be quite fun. But it can also lead to an inorganic pace.

What is a love bomber? When we talk about love bombing and the danger of love bombers and some of you have been in a situation where you feel like you’ve met a love bomber, someone who showered you with praise and grandiosity and statements about the future and about how into you they were and they’ve never felt like this before and drop everything and take a trip with me. The love bomber is really someone who has minimum intentions disguised as maximum intentions because all of that grandiosity seems like all the intention in the world, but actually there’s very little substance behind it. The love bomber is just indulging their feelings without any regard for the consequences of how that might feel to somebody else or how much it might hurt them when they’re not able to back it up. It has no regard for, are we at the same level here? Do we have the same intentions here?

I actually believe that you can look at sex through the same lens of intentionality. You may have someone that you’ve been on a couple of dates with and you feel really excited about this person and from a sexual perspective you feel really turned on by this person. So the combination of, “I like you, I feel connected to you and I am sexually really drawn to you and I’m horny.” That combination of things at the end of a second date might have you saying to yourself, “What I feel like doing is going home with this person.” So your feelings are telling you, “Yeah, absolutely go do that thing.” And there’ll be some people that say, “If it feels good, do it.” But we know we don’t apply that to everything in life. It would be really bad if we said, “If it feels good to punch that person who’s just wound you up in the coffee shop, do it.” We don’t say that about that thing, so we should be careful of just applying that to romance. People do that with romance, don’t they? “If it feels good, just do it. Just enjoy yourself.”

But we have to ask ourselves, what serves the path I want to be on? If I’ve been on two dates with someone and I like this person and I want to see where it could go, then actually the most important thing on my mind right now is not jumping into bed with them. The most important thing on my mind is, “Is there actually some compatibility between me and this person? Does this person have the same intentions as me in terms of what they’re looking for in their life right now? Are they on a similar path? Are we in alignment in what the two of us are looking for in life or the way that we think?” And if we start to bring compatibility forward and we recognize that, “Okay, by the way, it’s a great thing that I’m attracted to this person that’s really wonderful,” but that ultimately is not going to be the deciding factor in whether this works. It’s, “Is there a level of compatibility that I can find with this person?”

And if I show that person that I like that what’s more important to me than rushing to go home with them is to get to know each other on a compatibility level and to assess whether we’re on the same page about what we’re looking for, then I’m communicating my intentionality. I’m actually making that clear to someone. And if I’m making clear my intentionality, then there’s a much higher chance that that person will take me seriously. I want to be clear about this because I don’t want anyone watching this video to think that this is coming from a prude or this is coming from someone who’s got some tilt in a religious direction of waiting or I don’t have any of that. I totally understand the urge to rush home with someone because you are attracted to them, and this isn’t some sort of prudish, “No, you should wait because you shouldn’t give that up to somebody too soon.”

It’s more me saying, when we’re at a stage of our life where we know that the game isn’t, let me just get my short-term needs met, the game is let me actually see if I can find a person I can build with. Showing someone that the most important thing to us is not the euphoric high, be it sexual or otherwise of early dating, but instead a sort of honest assessment and pace in regards to what we actually have or don’t have together, that’s the most important thing to me because that’s what I’m looking for. And it should be said that our perspective there, our clarity there can quite quickly be muddied by sex because then we can feel a bit closer to someone than we really are. Then we can have the highs of that that are very distracting and an escape from reality.

We can find ourselves in a situation where all of a sudden there’s strange emotions like this person, if they now don’t call me, I feel used, and that now brings this sort of strange entitlement dynamic into the situation. Instead of just being able to organically see where it’s going, I’m now thinking, if it doesn’t go anywhere, I’m going to feel used or I’m going to feel like there’s something wrong with me. It’s really going to, I’m gonna feel shame that I did that. Those are all more ways that we complicate a situation that we don’t even know is right for us by just acting on our feelings too soon.

So don’t see sex as a special category of things, necessarily. See it the same way you would any other thing that is important to you, your time, your energy, the kind of statements you make to someone, the kind of promises you make. What we feel like doing . . . And we all know what we feel like doing when we’ve had a great date, we feel like marrying them immediately. But what we feel like doing has to be separated from what serves the path we want to be on. If you want to be on a path to a real relationship, to a life of building with somebody, then your ultimate priority right now is not acting on feelings. Your biggest priority is assessing whether you have a viable builder that you should be investing more time in.

If you enjoyed this video and you want to continue the journey with me beyond this video, I have a free tool on my website at YourDatingSolution.com where you can input your dating challenge right now and it will recommend the best of my solutions from the last 10 years to help you with what you are going through. Go check it out at YourDatingSolution.com and I’ll see you over there.

The post Want More Than a Situationship? DON’T CHASE, Do This Instead appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

This week’s new video will allow you to finally rid yourself of the hold this person has over you, so you can begin to sculpt your life the way you want it. And don’t miss the “value exercise” I share at the end. I know you’ll get a lot out of it!

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Matthew:

Before we get into the video, so many of you have been asking about what the dates are for the Virtual Retreat in 2023. They are now confirmed. They’re from June the 2nd to the 4th. And for one more week only, we have early bird tickets on offer. That is a deeply discounted ticket that is only available for one more week. I don’t want you to miss out. Go over to MHVirtualRetreat.com to get yours. And let’s get on with the video.

Have you got someone in your life who isn’t stepping up in the way that you would like? Have you got someone that’s blowing hot and cold? Maybe you have a great date with them, and then they fade out. Maybe they made promises that they didn’t keep, and you are left wondering what is going on.

Well, one of my clients recently asked me a particular question that I think is going to help a lot of you in this respect. She said, “How do I deal with a guy who keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up? I know, I know . . . dump him.” I like that’s the impression she just has of what we do is just, I know what you’re going to say, just dump him. “But I really like this guy. We have chemistry when we are together. We have common goals. It feels like we have everything we should have. But once I’m out of sight, he seemingly forgets about me. Just when I’ve decided to move on, I hear from him, and he lures me back in. I’ve continued dating, but nobody measures up.”

Let’s just break this down a little bit. How many people have had the experience of someone who says they’re going to do something, and they don’t really follow through? They sound very promising and like this is going to be a great romance, and then that person’s energy drops off after a date. And yet, it becomes impossible to forget about them and move on because every time you do, all of a sudden that person reappears somewhere on your phone. They’re either texting you, sending you a message on Instagram, or the most confusing of all, they just continue to watch your stories. Why, oh why, are they still watching my stories if they’re not interested?

One explanation is that they are madly in love with you. They can’t get you off their mind. They realize that though it’s hard to text you and reach out because that would be an act of vulnerability, the one thing they could do to stay in your life and to stay in your mind is to continue watching your stories just as a way of connecting to you from afar. Another possible explanation is that they were pooping.

What I know for sure is that it is a complete waste of time trying to figure out which of the two it is with someone who’s not actually trying. But there was a part of this that I thought was really interesting where she says, “We have chemistry when we are together. It feels like we have everything we should have.” Now, I want to take that idea of chemistry and just break it down a little bit because chemistry is the justification for so much. When someone feels like they have chemistry with a person, it’s like that person becomes sacred, especially because many of us don’t feel chemistry very often, so when we get close enough to someone to feel chemistry, when it feels mutual, it suddenly feels like this rare thing that I have to hold onto.

Now when we think about chemistry, I truly believe we often confuse chemistry with anxiety. What we’re really feeling a lot of the time, especially in a situation like this where this person is blowing hot and cold, they’re having a great time one minute, and then he just disappears. He doesn’t follow through. What we’re really seeing there is a situation that could easily make someone anxious, a situation where someone is pulling away, and our instinct when someone is pulling away is to do what? Invest in them more. We want to text them. We speak to our friends about what it all means. Even that is a strange form of investment, isn’t it? When you sit with your friends and you talk about it. But why did they just pull away? We had such a great time on the date. All of that is a kind of psychological footprint that this person has in your mind, and that’s a form of investment. Even if that person doesn’t feel it, even if you’re not texting them, you’re investing in them mentally.

And then of course, the more you think about them and the more you stress about are they going to get back to me? Are they not going to get back to me? Are they going to ask me on another date? All of that is a kind of investment. And we start to crave this thing that we don’t have, and it’s hard at that point to separate how much of the craving is to do with it being so out of this world great, and how much is to do with the fact that we don’t have it? How much is to do with the fact that this person is making us always second guess ourselves? There is a kind of game that we are in that is keeping us fully occupied.

We always have to suspect ourselves if we haven’t actually got someone, if we’re not actually with them in a committed and secure relationship, and yet we are saying that we have the greatest chemistry with them. You always have to suspect yourself if that’s going on because there is this whole artificial element of excitement and mystery that’s being created by the space between you and by the uncertainty of the situation itself. And by the way, everyone is more mysterious with space. Entire celebrity culture plays on that mystery, plays on my hysteria of you can’t get close to me, but I’m going to feed you just little details that make you think I’m compelling, mesmerizing, exciting.

The people that we think are mysterious, do you think Prince was mysterious to the people that knew him best? To his best mates, do you think he was mysterious? No. He was just a guy, a talented guy, a guy with a lot of success and fame, but to them, he’s just a person. And the real test of what we have with someone is at the point of them becoming boring, how do we feel about them then? Is this someone we want to be with at that point.

This person isn’t close enough to this man to find him boring. I believe that there’s this whole element of anxiety that she feels that she’s confusing with chemistry. And that feeling that there’s so much chemistry is what leads us to then overvalue somebody, put them on a pedestal, put the connection, the attraction on a pedestal, say things like, I’ve tried dating, but no one measures up. How can someone measure up? How can someone measure up to not there? How can someone measure up to what you have in your mind, in your imagination? I’m not saying that you imagined the moments where it was exciting, but you can have that excitement with many different people, and that excitement always seems more thrilling when you’re in that feeling of I don’t know where I stand, I don’t know what it’s going to be, that phase.

You have to think about it this way, in a relationship, people don’t live in that phase for the rest of their life where there’s always this sense of, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” That’s not a sustainable place to be. It’s not to say there isn’t passion in a relationship, but that initial not knowing and that first kiss and the feeling of chemistry that comes about in those first few dates. For people who end up together, that shifts. That’s an impossible thing to measure someone against. No one deserves that. That person you have the peak experience with can’t even live up to that. The only way they can live up to that is by not being around.

The second thing I want to address, “He keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up.” What we’re seeing there is this is a pattern that keeps repeating over and over and over. The first thing you can ask is why, if this is a pattern that keeps repeating over and over, is this even a question?

Another way to look at it is, okay, something can’t be a pattern in your life if you don’t allow it to be a pattern. Something can only be a pattern if you are the dance partner. A pattern needs a dance partner. It needs someone to participate in that dynamic. He can’t keep coming back and doing the same thing if you demonstrate real consequences for his behavior.

What this is really about, what it comes down to me is culture. What culture do you want to have for not just your romance but your life in general, for the friends you have? Culture is everything, and we have to start taking culture really seriously for ourselves. What’s my culture that I want to have in my life? It’s no different to an organization. In my organization, we have over 30 people. That’s a lot of different dynamics, but the one thing that unites that group of people is culture. Different personalities, same culture. And if someone isn’t the right culture, they don’t last.

By the way, sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes someone’s brought into that world, and we only discover after a few weeks or even after a couple of months, oh, this person doesn’t vibe with this culture. They spoke like they did, but in actually watching their actions, they don’t. And in those moments we make hard decisions. It’s not easy to let someone go, but we do because the culture is king. The culture is what we’re protecting. And culture isn’t free. It’s sculpted. It’s sculpted by releasing the wrong people. It’s sculpted by having hard conversations, sometimes even with the right people, in fact, inevitably with the right people. You’re still going to have cultural clashes. You’re still going to have moments where you have to have a hard conversation with that person, but every hard conversation sculpts the culture of what you get in an organization.

Your love life is like an organization. Who are you letting into that organization? Who are you partnering with in the business that is your life? Who’s getting through the door? What’s your filter like? And that culture has to be made clear. In this case, the culture is I want someone who’s consistent. Now what I’m reading from this question is this isn’t culture. It’s a hope. I hope for someone who’s consistent. I would like someone who’s consistent. But for me in my organization, I don’t think I would like someone who’s kind. It’s an absolute non-negotiable. It’s culture. When someone says they’re not consistent by keep letting them back in, I know it’s not culture.

So we have to start taking our culture really, really seriously. And that means saying to someone the next time they tried to come back and say I want to see you this weekend after they disappeared off the map for weeks on end, or they underdelivered last time when they said they were going to do all of these things, and they didn’t, you say to that person, “Hey, listen, I really do want, some part of me really wants to see you, but the reality is you’re so inconsistent that I don’t know what you want. I don’t know where we stand with each other, and what I want in my life is someone who is consistent because I know I have so much to give. What I’m prepared to give someone, what I have to bring to the table to someone is incredibly valuable. I know that. So it’s not something that I’m just going to give to somebody when I don’t feel like that person is showing up in the way that I’m showing up. And I don’t feel that with you.”

There’s a lot that’s right about that. You’re showing that you take your culture seriously. You’re actually telling someone what that culture is is consistency, is someone showing up in the way that I show up. And you are also doing something that demonstrates incredible confidence. You’re saying, “I know that I bring enormous value to the table. I know that I have a lot to give that’s valuable. I know that. I don’t need you to tell me that. I know that. My life has taught me that. The people around me have taught me that. My belief in the value of the things that I’m giving in my life has taught me that. I know that independent of you. And I’m not going to give that to someone for free. That has to be earned. It doesn’t have to be earned in some convoluted way like you chase me. No, it has to be earned by you being prepared to meet me there.”

And when you do that, it A, it says to someone, whoa, I’m missing out on a lot by letting go of this person because it does make you think twice when someone says something like that to you. When someone says, I know how much I have to give, and you can tell they believe it, you do think twice because you think to yourself, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to lose all of that.” There’s even maybe a competitive element of you that goes “Someone else is going to get all of that, and I’ve got this amazing person in front of me. I don’t want let them go.” But it also shows just incredible confidence, and that makes you attractive. You believe in your own value. That makes you attractive.

What I see in this question is someone who’s not believing in their own value right now. At the start of the question, “How do I deal with a guy who keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up?” You deal with them by showing that you have this incredible value, and this, what they’re giving, that’s not it. That’s not what you need to keep giving this value. This value has a way higher price than that. No one is going to be serious about us if we are not serious about ourselves.

So I want to give you an exercise to do. I don’t normally give you exercises in these videos, and this is probably something I would do more on one of my programs or in my membership, but do this with me. Write down what the things are that you have that give you tremendous value to somebody else. What are the things that, in your personality, in who you are as a human being, in what you’ve learned over the course of your lifetime, in how you’re prepared to show up for someone, the amount of effort that you are willing to make to truly see someone and look at them through a compassionate lens or to help and support their growth or to just be an amazing teammate or your ability to be playful or have fun or have an amazing sexual connection? What are the things that you know give you so much to offer somebody?

Write them down and really connect with them. If you don’t feel connected to it, don’t write it down. If it’s something that doesn’t really, you feel like you’re saying it, but you don’t really believe it, don’t write that down. But do write down the things that you know in your bones are true because the next time you go to the table with someone, that’s what you need to be connected to, not how great they are, not the fear of losing them, not the worry that you’ll never get someone with that much chemistry again. I want you to be connected to the value of what you are bringing to the table and to not allow anybody to keep getting your time and energy whose actions show that they do not respect that value.

I hope you enjoyed that video. Before you go, like I said, the early bird tickets to the Virtual Retreat are only available for a couple more days. This is three days of live coaching with me and my team, not just for your love life. This is not a love life retreat. It’s a life retreat. And we’re going to spend three days analyzing the patterns, the behaviors, and the habits that are going to get you where you need to be and get you to experience the peace and the happiness that you want to feel.

Come check it out at MHVirtualRetreat.com while those early bird tickets are still available. And I’ll see you there.

The post Why Do They Always Come Back? appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

In this brand-new video, I give you three reasons why someone might do this, what you should do when it happens, and the strange reason why they may choose to ghost but leave the door open. You can’t miss this topic!

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“Why do men ghost?” says Kelly. “I had a whirlwind romantic weekend with a guy where he did basically everything but tell me he loved me, and he insisted that we date exclusively. I’ve barely heard from him since. I didn’t come on strong at all, and in fact, I told him we should probably take things slowly, but now he’s the one who disappeared. What happened here?” Let’s deal with the best case and the worst case scenario of who this human being is and why they came on so strong only to disappear. And then I’m going to give you the three honest reasons why people ghost. The best case scenario is that this was a person who got carried away with his feelings. It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? Sometimes we get carried away. We trip over our feelings in real time as we’re experiencing them.

And if we’re not disciplined about what we say, we could end up saying some pretty crazy things. Have you ever been so attracted to someone or so into someone that if you let your mouth just run wild with the things that your brain wanted to say, you’d sound like a crazy person? Well, some people lack the impulse control to stop themselves from saying those things, so they’re on a weekend with you, they’re having a great time, they have that flood of chemicals that makes them feel like, “I love this person.” And then they actually say those things. They say the things that the rest of us think, “I’ll probably wait a week and see if I still feel that. In any case, it would be irresponsible to say that right now. In any case, it would seem mad if I said that to this person right now, and I don’t want to seem that way.”

Some people lack that restraint, so they just say those things. Now, if we aren’t the kind of person who moves that fast, even if internally we can get carried away, externally we don’t show that, it can feel like a very rushed pace, and it can feel… I mean, sometimes it feels really good, doesn’t it? It can feel really good when someone really wants you and when someone is giving you this unbelievable amount of energy and attention and is zoned in on you. It can be very easy to get swept up in it. That’s why I actually want to commend Kelly in saying to him and being brave enough to say, “I think we should slow things down.” That takes guts, that takes courage, that takes character to do that.

Nonetheless, some people want to have that frenzied experience, and it doesn’t necessarily come from a bad or malicious place. It’s just something that they’re feeling and they’re going with it. The problem is they can’t back it up because when they’re away from you and their emotions settle down, there’s a very good chance that that person goes, “What have I done? Why did I say all of those things? I can’t back that up. I don’t know if I’m actually ready to be in a relationship with this person that I’ve just spent a weekend with.” Now he freaks out and he starts backtracking. That is one possible explanation. We could kind of, I suppose, just define that simply as impulsive.

The worst possible explanation is that he’s just a love bomber. This doesn’t come from a good place. Either bad intention or simply, really, truly selfishness around it that makes him say, “I don’t care what happens to you in all of this. I am just going to dazzle you and make you fall in love with me over the course of this weekend and say whatever I need to say to get the absolute zhuzh of your attention.” Do you know like in Monsters Inc, where they have to… In the beginning of the movie, they have to make the kids scream and cry, and that’s what fills up the energy tank. That’s what they power their electricity on. The love bomber is like that. It’s like the monster that comes out of the closet in the middle of the night, but to make you feel as much love as possible because that’s how they fill up their energy tank, and then they get back in the wardrobe and disappear. That’s the love bomber.

That person, there’s a real deep, deep selfishness to it, almost a solipsistic nature to it, that, “I am all that matters. My feelings are all that matter, and I want to feel really, really intense and have the best weekend ever. I don’t care what happens to you after this. It’s about what I want to experience.” Now, the really insidious thing about that is how it leaves you feeling at the end of it. There’s a beautiful Oscar Wilde quote. Wilde was writing to his past lover Bosie while in jail, and Bosie had treated him so badly, so poorly, used him for his own ends, used him for his own status and frivolity, but never really… As soon as Wilde was in jail, Bosie didn’t care anymore, was just out of the picture. And there’s this beautiful line that Wilde uses when writing this scornful letter to Bosie. He says, “The thing that you have personally long ago forgotten or can easily forget is happening to me now and will happen to me again tomorrow.”

Doesn’t that just describe the effect that someone like that can have on us? Someone who can so easily come in, do this damage to us, and then leave and carry on with their life as if nothing happened, but we will be experiencing it today and tomorrow and the next day. So why is it that this person, even if in the best case scenario they just got carried away with themselves because they’re impulsive, would just ghost or fade out in such a dramatic fashion with no real explanation? A complete Jekyll and Hyde scenario, two personalities, one where last weekend you wanted to be with me and be together and be in a relationship, and then the next week where I barely hear from you. I believe there are three primary reasons why people do this.

Number one, they want to avoid a difficult conversation. Having the conversation with you where they say, “Hey, I got really carried away. I didn’t mean those things I said, and I know that’s hurtful to you, and I’m sorry. I got too carried away, and I need to be honest with you because I don’t want you to truly think that that was an indication that I want us to be together.” Or, “Hey, I got carried away. I went too fast. I’d like to slow things down, but I do like you and I want to keep seeing where this is going. I apologize for letting my emotions get the better of me over the weekend.” Someone doesn’t say that because either way, it’s a difficult conversation and it might hurt you, and no one wants to be in that position of having a difficult conversation.

The second reason is it makes him look bad. No one wants to have a conversation that makes them look like they’re reckless, look like they’re selfish, look like they’re impulsive. No one wants to do that, especially, by the way, people who have that narcissistic streak. They’re not going to have a conversation with you where they have to admit fault and risk being criticized in the process. The third reason people do it is because they want to keep the door open. Now you may say, “How on earth does ghosting me keep the door open?” A lot of people who ghost other people have actually learned that if they ghost someone, there’s a kind of gaslighting that goes on there. Last weekend I made you feel like this love was something special, that we were going somewhere, that we had something, and then I disappeared with no explanation.

And I’m almost relying on the next time I reach out to you, you not actually having the guts to say anything about that. You being passive, you ignoring it, you being so happy to hear from me again, because now that represents hope, that you brush it under the carpet and I get to say, “Hey, you want to do something tonight?” And you say, “Yeah, that sounds really nice.” And now we go out. The elephant in the room is you thinking, “What the hell?” But he’s relying on the fact that you’re not actually going to say that. And that’s what people do all the time. They rely on the fact that you really, deep down, more than you want to have standards, you want them back. So in that moment, when they reach out to you after having disappeared for the last two weeks, when they say, “What are you up to tonight?” The wanting them back, the wanting the attention, the wanting for it to go somewhere is going to be the primary driver, and that’s going to make you say, “Yes, I’d like to see you.”

They’re relying on that. They’re banking on your passivity. They’re banking on you ignoring your standards, shunning your needs. Ghosting can actually tick a lot of boxes for someone. I don’t have to have a hard conversation. I don’t have to have my own problems reflected back at me in the way I treat people. And there’s a good chance that by not having this conversation, the next time I ask you out, you’ll say yes, because I haven’t presented you with any actual information. I have plausible deniability. I thought we were good. You didn’t say anything. This gives someone away to keep you potentially on tap and withhold closure. With Kelly in the situation with this guy. It wasn’t one bad thing that happened. It was a couple.

One of the things that was bad was him going at break next speed on this weekend that he couldn’t actually back up, saying to her on this weekend that he had really strong feelings, saying to her that he wanted the two of them to be together. So his first bad was going so fast and not backing it up. But the second thing he did wrong was having no ownership of that. No moment where he said, “Hey, I just want to talk to you about the weekend.” Now, if you take an impulsive nature, and impulsive people can be very attractive, can be very exciting, but they can also be incredibly reckless, if you take an impulsive person and you marry that with a lack of accountability, that becomes a very dark pairing, because you’ve got someone who’s reckless and doesn’t own the consequences of their recklessness.

In psychology, there’s that term, the dark triad, that’s narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and that makes an incredibly dangerous person. Well, in our love lives, there are people with dark pairings. You will, if you know my other videos and you’ve followed me for a long time, know that one of my ideas, one of the things that I talk about is the idea of unique pairings in attraction. These are a positive thing. When you find two different things in a person that are both attractive and you don’t normally find those two things in the same person, that person becomes uniquely attractive and much more irreplaceable. A unique pairing. You’re sexy, but you are also funny? Wow, that’s a unique pairing. You’re clever, but you’re also humble and a good listener and curious? Wow, unique pairing, really attractive. Unique pairings are good.

Dark pairings are like the inverse of that philosophy. Dark pairings is when you find two things in a person that are both bad, but together they make someone not just bad, but dangerous. This person is demonstrating a dark pairing, and all of this, hopefully all of this information will help you realize that this person, even if you suddenly start getting attention from them again, is actually a dangerous person to invite into your life. All of this entitles you to be very direct with this person if they do reach out again asking for something instead of trying to be too clever or too charming or too charismatic, and, “How am I going to send this person a message back that’s going to get them to try harder?”

That’s not the mission here. The mission here is to communicate to this person, “This is not okay. This is not energy that I ever allow into my life, and this is behavior that I find deeply unattractive.” So if that person ever reaches out to you and says, “Hey, what are you up to?” You can either ignore it completely, and if they text again and say, “I wanted to see if you were around, I’d love to catch up,” you can then say, “Hey, it was really strange to me that we had such an intense connection over the weekend, but then to barely hear from you afterwards. And for me, the kind of energy I want in my life is from people who are consistent, people who are communicative, and people who I trust to be in my life day to day, not in my life one day and out the next. The things you said and how strongly you came on only to disappear was deeply confusing and had a real impact on my trust. So I don’t know what else to say to you, but I wanted to be honest about that with you.”

When you say that to someone, you’re telling them in no uncertain terms, “This is not acceptable to me.” None of this is me saying you should try and get a person like this back. This is me saying to you recognize dangerous combinations, dark pairings, when you see them. Now that you have the information of why someone might do something like this, don’t spend a second longer analyzing it. Go live your life and direct your energy to people who deserve to be taken seriously. If watching this video has already been a bit of a pressure valve for you, and you want to build on that and get stronger, I have a free video for you at MoveOnStrong.com that is going to help you do that. So go check it out now. It’s free. It’s a great video. It was taken from a private session I did, not for the public. It’s called MoveOnStrong.com. I will see you over there.

The post He Said He Wanted You Then Pulled Away? HERE’S WHY . . . appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

In this week’s video, I’ll give you 3 ways to create real attraction with the right kind of guy . . . because glorifying unavailable people is a recipe for heartbreak, so instead, we can start learning to enjoy healthy attention and find a loving partner.

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The post Keep Confusing Red Flags With Excitement?! WATCH THIS appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

But there is a way out, and in this week’s video, I provide you with a preliminary blueprint to freedom. I’ve carefully designed these 7 steps to address the stages you’ll go through—in the exact order they’re likely to arrive.

Even if you’re not in this situation, learning these principles in advance may save you a lot of time and grief down the road. And if you are going through this right now? Please know you’re not alone. I’m right here with you.

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What happens when the most painful relationship you’ve ever had is the one you’re still in? And yet you cannot seem to leave. If you are that person, you know how it feels to be with someone who consistently doesn’t meet your needs. And doesn’t just fall short of them, disregards them, gaslights you, and makes you feel insane for wanting or needing those things.

Someone who lies to you consistently, and yet something inside you continues to hold on, continues to hold on to the hope that one day this person may change. Holds onto the idea that you can weather the storm, or that enough therapy will help you get strong enough to deal with it, or help them to change these patterns that have always been there. Holds onto the idea that if you could just fix this one thing about this person, you would finally have the life you want with them.

I want to give you seven things that are not only designed to help you in a situation like this. But if you listen to all seven in order, do not skip ahead in this video, watch it in order, and do not cut this video off halfway. Because I have thought about this a great deal in my life. And the seven steps that I’m about to give you model the different stages and the thoughts that you go through in the order that they arise.

Number one is assume this person will never change. Now, why do that? I come from a line of work where I have to believe that people change. Otherwise, why would I do what I do? My whole speaking career, writing career, YouTube career is all predicated on the idea that people can change. And yet, being in a situation with someone who has shown us the same patterns over and over again over a long timeline, and thinking that they are so suddenly going to behave out of character, is one of the most dangerous things we can do.

My dear friend, Dr. Ramani would say that when it comes to narcissists, they will never change. And you have to accept that about them. Now, this video isn’t designed to be a video about narcissists. But no doubt, so many of you will relate to what I’m saying here through the lens of having dealt with a narcissist. What I want us to do is act more empirically.

Empiricism is acting on experience. What is my experience of this person? When I look at all of their behaviors over time, have they really ever deviated from these behaviors? Maybe after certain arguments, or after certain threats, they deviated for a moment. But if that was just a momentary spike on the graph and then they returned to their baseline and that baseline is what they’ve been over time, then whether or not you ever see them as a narcissist, you can empirically say, what makes me think that they are going to be any different just because a new year comes around? Or just because I argue with them a slightly different way.

You’ve probably done all the things that you could do to try to motivate this person to change. You’ve probably shown them tears, anger, depression, sadness, fear, every different range of emotion that could show them what their behavior does to you. And they haven’t changed. What new emotion do you have up your sleeve that is going to make them change this time?

Narcissist or not, with enough empirical evidence, you have to assume they will not change.

Number two, in a romantic relationship, empathy can become extraordinarily dangerous and it can be weaponized against you. Dr. Ramani told me personally, she said, “Matthew, people who are narcissists are attracted to people with extraordinary empathy.”

And I know that in my own life, empathy has been something that if I’m not careful means that in a relationship, there’s no limit to how far I can fall. Because if every time someone comes back to you and they do something wrong, you are able to process that by saying, well, yes, that was awful. But I understand why they did that, I understand where that’s coming from. I know all about their terrible childhood and what they’ve been through. I know about that awful, cataclysmic event in their life that precipitated this behavior.

We can do that with every possible thing a person does. Even if you decide someone is a narcissist, they are absolutely a diagnosable, narcissist, empathy doesn’t stop there. You can still look at a narcissist and go, they can’t help it. This is something that they were either born with, or that they developed at an age where they were still developing. And it’s made them into this person who does these awful things, who acts so selfishly, who’s always about themselves, who disregards my needs, who cannot see me and my pain. But they can’t help it. They are doing their best. Quite literally, this is the best they can do. And I still care about them, and I don’t want to abandon them.

So your empathy can produce that mutated kindness and that guilt with absolutely anybody at the most extreme possible levels of bad behavior. And by the way, people with the most insidious behavior know how to mobilize your empathy. If they know this is someone who lets me get away with murder, so they know that you’re going to congratulate yourself on the fact that I know him or her better than anybody else. I know why they are this way, I know why they’re doing this. I know it sounds terrible to all of you out there judging my relationship and judging me for staying in it. But you don’t understand. It’s more complicated than you realize.

You, in a sense, score points by being the expert historian on this person. I uniquely understand them and you don’t, and that’s why I’m enduring all of this. But that person also knows how to weaponize it in the other direction. So if you, all of a sudden are calling them out on their shit, if you are calling them out on their bad behavior, they know how to say, see, I knew you wouldn’t understand.

They know how to weaponize it to make you guilty for not having enough empathy. At a certain point, the empathy has to hit a floor. That floor isn’t you becoming a less kind or less compassionate person, it’s recognizing that, oh, I can’t be empathetic with you in close proximity. I’m going to have to trade my empathy for a distant compassion.

You can leave someone and say enough is enough, I can never let you into my life. You can have a distant compassion that says, I understand this person. Or even at the very least, I can pity the fact that their brain is wired for this kind of behavior, which means that they’re always self-sabotaging for themselves, not just hurting me or somebody else. But I can’t have them in my life.

That’s the difference. Having empathy for someone doesn’t mean keeping them in the kind of proximity where they can do so much damage. And it has to be said, life is complex. There are different kinds of people in our life. You might have a son or a daughter, you might have a best friend, a brother, a sister, a parent who shows these kinds of narcissistic tendencies. In those cases, it might be easier to have them at arms length in your life, where you can still have a kind of relationship with them, but not one that relies on them for anything meaningful. And not one that lets them close enough that they can do all of that damage.

Romantic relationships are much more binary. You can’t have an arms length romantic relationship, not a truly happy and connected one. When it comes to a romantic partner, you are in or you’re out. And if you can’t trust that person with your time, your energy, your future, your heart, then it has to be out. Regardless of your level of empathy. Trade your empathy for a distant compassion.

Number three, and here’s where it gets really interesting. Do not allow your empathy to become the cover for your fear. You have empathy. And that’s part of the reason that you stay. However, we also do a very subtle slight of hand where we use our empathy, one of our best qualities, to justify our existence in the relationship. When really so much of our staying is about our own fears. I’m terrified of losing this person. I’m terrified of being alone. I’m terrified I’ll never have this connection again. I’m terrified to admit that I’ve wasted all of these years with this person. In a sense, our empathy becomes the righteous excuse for avoiding our fears.

It’s more noble to say, “I uniquely understand this person, and must stay out of loyalty and care for them.” Than it is to say, “I’m terrified of being on my own. And that’s why I’m staying.”

Number four, we have to be willing to light the fuse that blows up our own life. Now in order to do this, it requires a genuine acceptance of where you actually are. I am alone. I am alone, and I’m going to have to meet someone again because I don’t have the relationship that I’ve been telling myself I have for all of these years. Even though I’ve been in this situation for 10 years, and I’ve been pretending I’m in a working marriage, or I’ve been pretending that I’m in a functional relationship, I’ve been pretending I have a future with this person, I am now accepting that I’m 50 and that I’m starting again in this area of my life.

I am accepting that I have to let go of the image that all of my friends have of me, as someone who’s got it together in this area. As someone who’s in a happy relationship, I’m going to have to give that up, and reset my image with the people that know me and where they think I am in my life. I am going to have to accept that the years I invested in this relationship were not in service of the relationship, and it’s continuing into my future. It was in service of my own confidence, of getting to a point of realization where I now understand it was never going to work. I was never going to be happy here.

This is acceptance. And I believe that one of the most important gifts of acceptance is that when we accept where we really are, progress actually feels like progress.

How do I put this? If you tell everyone that you have a hundred grand in the bank, but really you have 20 grand of debt, no matter what you do right now to earn more money, you are not going to feel any progress. Because as far as you are concerned, the image of you is that you have a hundred grand in the bank. So even if you wiped that debt out, which would be an amazing thing, you don’t feel like you’ve made any progress compared to that image. If you accept and own where you are, I’m 20 grand in debt, but I’m working on it. Then if you halve that debt, you suddenly feel good. You feel excited because you’re like progress.

And as Tony Robins says, “Happiness comes from progress,” right? It doesn’t come from getting everything we want. It comes from feeling like we moved forward. In order to actually feel the gift of progress, we have to start accepting where we really are instead of pretending we’re somewhere we are not.

Number five. When you begin to freak out about making this tough choice in your life, your mind will trick you into thinking the status quo isn’t so bad. You’ll start thinking about everything that’s coming. All of the pain that’s coming, the grieving, the sleepless nights, the dark nights of the soul, the looking for somebody else, the disappointing dates, the feeling alone, the feeling like you’ve been set back in your life. All of it will become so overwhelming, and scary, and dark to you that you will start to convince yourself that where you are isn’t so bad, and that maybe all of this is just really dramatic.

Maybe you just need to have a conversation with the person. Maybe you just need to reiterate your needs. Maybe you just need to go to therapy to learn how to deal with it, how to cope with it. Because you don’t need to lose this person over this. That would be crazy. You’ve spent so much of your life with them. They’re one of your closest friends, maybe your best friend, your closest companions, your confidant, someone you’ve been through so much with. Are you really going to give up all of that history, all of that life, all of that investment for the complete unknown? And that is what returns you to the status quo.

Which brings us onto number six. You have to connect with the idea that if you remain where you are, you will never be happy and you will never be at peace. I’ve had private clients my whole life where, anytime we reach this point in the process, thinking about they’ve got to blow up their own life, they will start coming back to me and saying, it’s just, we are really great together. And I hear them start to resell themselves on the status quo to avoid doing that thing.

And then I remind them, I didn’t bring this to you. You brought it to me. You didn’t come to a session with me, and I started poking my nose into your relationship and telling you, you were unhappy, and telling you that this is what we’re going to talk about today. You brought it to me. Fighting back the tears, fighting back the unhappiness, fighting back the disappointment, the depression, the anxiety that you feel on a daily basis. But no matter what you do it is spilling out of every part of you because you just cannot contain what this is doing to you, emotionally. Remind yourself you will never be free, you will never be happy, you will never be at peace so long as you stay in this situation.

Which brings us onto number seven, realize that both paths will be terribly difficult. But only one of them leaves a possibility of your future happiness.

If you stay, it’s going to be incredibly difficult. If you leave, it’s going to be incredibly difficult. But one of those two paths has guaranteed misery. And one of them opens up a world of possibility in terms of your happiness. Either way, it’s going to be brutally difficult. Which difficult do you want to choose?

Until you face yourself, you will never be out of a situation like this. As we have come to realize in this video, the initial empathy, and the martyrdom, and the endless capacity for generosity and suffering is all a righteous mask for our own demons. The things that, if we do not fix those, will always prevent us from leaving. Will keep us a prisoner in this relationship. The healing has to be done in ourselves.

If you want to do that with me, in November, I’m going to be spending three days with people on my Virtual Retreat where we are going to do this kind of work together. The kind of work that makes you so strong that you would never allow this to happen to yourself again. That you will finally get the courage and the confidence to move into a new chapter of your life without being paralyzed where you stand by fear.

Go to MHVirtualRetreat.com to learn more. And look, whether you do this with me or with somebody else, know that it has to be done. I know of what I speak in this area. I have seen the wasted lives and the regret that comes with that, at knowing you could have had so much more happiness and so much more peace in your life. But you kept yourself a prisoner all of that time. If you are in this situation, there is nothing more important than coming to the realizations that we’re talking about in this video. I hope to see you on the Retreat. But if nothing else, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

The post Is the Person You’re Dating a Narcissist? appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Six years ago, I made a controversial video tackling this very subject, and it went viral.

So this week, I decided to make a reaction video to my own video. Do you remember watching this video the first time around? What are your thoughts? Tell me in the comments.

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Matthew:

Man humbles room full of women.

So we made this video years ago, back in 2016. We were on tour at the time. I remember this event, Jameson, we were in LA. We were almost about to wrap up. It was literally the last question. I said, “any more questions, let’s do one more.” It led to us chopping a moment from this event and titling it for YouTube, “who should pay on a date?”

Well, the video went viral to the tune of tens of millions of views. Which I don’t know if I ever told you this, Jameson, but I ordered a pizza once. And the pizza guy saw me when he arrived at my house and went, “You are the who should pay on a date guy.” That’s how viral it went.

Here’s the crazy part. This video has really had legs because this year it went viral again. Now it didn’t just go viral, it went viral via several content creators who all titled it the same, “man humbles room full of women.”

Humbles, Jameson, I mean, they weren’t just a room full of women. They were actually our fans. They were people that liked us. So it was a tour of it. It was my tour. I didn’t just walk into a coffee shop and humble a room full of women. I’m always concerned about divisive language like this. Because our biggest ethos is about bringing people together, not dividing them. I want to bring men and women together. But we’ll see, I’m gonna see how much of this video I still agree with. Don’t forget at the end of the video to go to YourDatingsSolution.com, where based on your specific love life challenge that you enter, I give you the best one of my solutions to help you right now. OK

Speaker 2:

During the dating period, you know, after like four or five months of dating, I just wondering at what point does it get, do you have to pay, do the woman have to pay when they go out? The guy is asking that I should, there should be half and half at that point when you already-

Matthew:

At what point?

Speaker 2:

When you already been dating for four or five months.

Matthew:

Right.

Matthew:

I can immediately remember how I felt when that was asked, because there was something about the idea that after four or five months he had the gall to want to go halvesies that immediately irked me at the time.

Look, okay, to give you a quick answer on, firstly, I think we should just deal with the who should pay thing to begin with. When you’re on a date who should pay?

This is why I think this ended up becoming the video that it did. Because of the unanimous, I don’t think every woman in the room did say man to be honest, I think it was just-

Jameson:

Just enough.

Matthew:

There was enough. It was audible, it sounded like everyone in the room said it, but everyone in the room didn’t say it.

Speaker 2:

I know. I mean, that’s what I told him. You know, I’m sorry, I say, I’m dating, we’re dating, you’re the gentleman here, you should pay.

Matthew:

Yeah. Okay.

Matthew:

So she . . . I hadn’t remembered exactly what she said here, but she says, you know, basically “I tried to tell him, we are dating, you are the gentleman here, you are supposed to pay.”

And it’s that word that I think helped the viral quality of this video. Because I think that a lot of men hear that “you are supposed to,” and that’s what immediately gets their backs up.

Matthew:

He’s supposed to pay.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That’s what I told him.

Matthew:

But you are supposed to have sex with him whenever he says?

Speaker 2:

No.

Matthew:

I really went for that one, didn’t I? Look all the jewelry I’m wearing. Who did I think I was, Johnny Depp? I look like like an aggressive Jack Sparrow having a go at a room full of women for stealing his treasure.

Speaker 2:

Whenever  . . .

Matthew:

But where does this double standard come from? I’m sorry, it’s the reality. You guys can moan at it all you want. But the moment you say to a guy, “You have to fucking pay for my time.” You’re saying this relationship isn’t equal.

I don’t think I would deliver it with such anger anymore. This relationship isn’t equal, my time is worth more than yours, so you should pay for it. I wonder what paradigm that sets up.

The point that I was really making there is that entitlement on either side can become a really ugly thing. Whether it’s entitlement from someone who thinks the other person should always pay. Or whether it’s the entitlement of a man when it comes to sex and you owe me this because we’re at this stage in the process. None of us like to feel someone else’s entitlement. So we have to be very wary of that entitlement in ourselves.

Here’s my view. If you go on a date with a guy and you don’t offer to pay your share, you weren’t taught right. If you go on a date and he doesn’t pay, he wasn’t taught right.

I l broadly agree with this still. The idea that on a date, it is the polite thing to do to at least offer to pay your share. I also, by the way, think that you learn more by doing that. You learn that they didn’t do it because they had to, they did it because they wanted to. You also give them the satisfaction of being able to say, “no, no, I’ve got this.” That’s the most satisfying part is telling someone, “no, I’ve got this.” It’s not satisfying if someone says, “you’ve got this.”

Matthew:

I can tell you right now. If I was dating someone and they never offered to pay, I wouldn’t be dating them. I can tell you that now. If they never offered to pay, I would not be dating them because I’d say this is the most polite they’re ever going to be. And they’re not even trying to pay now. What does that say about my future?

The future point is an interesting one because Alain de Botton, I remember him once saying that when you have an argument with a partner about something they did that you didn’t like, it upsets us so much, not simply because they’ve upset us in the moment, but because we project into the future all of the ways that this behavior is going to affect us and continue to make us unhappy. So you’ve made me upset right now becomes you’ve ruined my life.

Similarly, in this context, he’s not just seeing a situation where you are not contributing right now, he’s looking at an entire future where he is the sole person paying the bills.

Let me come at this from a different angle. I would be treating . . . I will always treat my partner how I would treat my best friend. And I wouldn’t apply a different standard to my partner than my best friend. I wouldn’t go, I wouldn’t say to my best friend, “Let’s always go out to dinner and you always pay.”

That’s a good point.

I’d say, “Let’s be teammates here in whatever way we can.” And maybe by the way, proportionately what you can do is less than what he can do. That’s a different thing. If he says to you, “I want to go stay at the top hotel in Big Sur this weekend.” And it’s 1500 bucks a night and you say, “I don’t have the money.” It’s his job to say, “it doesn’t matter, I didn’t do it so you could pay. I did it because I want to go and I want to take you.”

That’s a good point. I think that point relates both to well into dating, but also a first date. If you are the one to invite someone on a first date then, it feels organic and natural that you would be the one to pay. Similarly, four or five months in, if you want to do a trip with someone that happens to be expensive and you are the one who says, “I want to do this trip with you,” or “I want to take you on this trip,” or you say, “I want to take you to this really fancy restaurant.” Then it stands to reason that you should have already calculated that you are willing to pay for that because you are the one who’s put forward the really expensive suggestion. That’s especially true if the two of you are in very different financial positions.

Great. That’s what that is, right? Or if you both agree to go on holiday and you have a fifth of his earning potential, you say, “I want to contribute to a fifth of this holiday.” It’s overly simplistic, but you get what I’m saying, right? I will contribute on the level I can contribute. Let me tell you what means something to a guy, trying. That means something to a guy. When he feels that you’re not even trying to contribute, that’s when he feels used. Because any guy who’s really confident and self-respecting, if the woman never is even trying to contribute, he feels like he’s being taken advantage of. And it has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the lack of gesture. So I would be looking at, if you like this guy, maybe if you’re in different positions, figure out what you want to contribute proportionately or what you can contribute proportionately, and treat him as you would your best friend.

It’s really sweet that idea of treating someone like your best friend. I really stand by that. Because that’s, I mean, what is our partner? But the person that has devoted their lives to us. Who has said that you are the one person that I’m going to be with romantically. Doesn’t that person deserve the best of our generosity? Don’t they deserve the best of our teamwork, of our support? Why is it, and this is I think a problem with so many relationships, is often the person that does the most for us gets the least from us. And we take them for granted.

I think about this video as a whole. And that idea of teamwork to me is the idea that stands out the most. Because we can have all sorts of rules around this, but rules can only get us so far. And rules really, when you have a rule, it’s only ever really getting at a principle. And the principle is the thing. The rules can be too rigid. Like, we shouldn’t have a rule that says every time someone pays for something, you contribute the amount that you can in proportion to how much you earn compared to them. No one wants to do that.

It might be that that person pays three times in a row. But then on the fourth time, you’re like, “I got this.” I mean, in any relationship, that’s what means something to everybody. Not just men. Is that feeling that somebody else is trying. And trying can come in different forms. Trying can come in the form of, you do something for someone and they show a lot of appreciation for what you just did. Trying can come in the form of, I’m going to contribute what I can because I want to try. It’s all in the spirit of teamwork.

I always think it’s kind of nice if you are offering to do something expensive and someone else says, “}oh, that’s so much money, we could do something else.” Even if you know you’re going to do that with that person anyway, because you want to spend that money. Just the fact that they were watching your wallet for you is a beautiful thing. That shows me I’m with a teammate. And when we feel like we have a teammate, we start to trust somebody. And trust is the beginning of a real relationship.

I also want to say this. We live in a world today where dividing the genders gets more clicks than bringing them together. Jameson, you mentioned something before this video where you said I think on the Ezra Klein podcast, you heard that the difference between TV and social media is that on TV, you are rewarded for likability. And on social media, you’re rewarded for attention. Which if you think about it explains why man humbles room full of women gets more clicks than . . .

Jameson:

Guy makes a nice point about teamwork in a relationship.

Matthew:

Don’t get mugged off by the rhetoric out there that is designed to make you angry at other people. That is designed to make you angry about the opposite sex. It’s all designed just to get your attention. It’s not designed to help you have better relationships.

And ask yourself, by the way, if any of these videos that you watch are making you angry? Has getting angry ever led to a better quality of relationship in my life?

Before you go anywhere, go over to YourDatingSolution.com, where I have a tool that you can literally tell your dating issue, and it will recommend you the best solution to what you are going through from my archives. Check it out. It’s really cool.

And thank you for watching all of these years as I’ve been cursing and getting somewhat aggressive at times spontaneously. And all these years you’ve just been here. So I suppose tis I that has been humbled, Jameson, by all of your love. I’ll see you soon.

The post Man Humbles Room Full of Women . . . And It Was Me?? appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

In today’s video, I’ll share with you the #1 reason why people pull away and a high-value way to respond to it.

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Matthew:

Does this sound like a familiar story to you? You meet someone and you feel something that maybe you haven’t felt in a while. You feel attracted, you feel connected, and the best part is they feel the same way. And then just as you’re allowing your hopes to run away with themselves, you’re beginning to think about what this could mean, you start to feel that person pull away. Their energy changes, maybe their communication becomes less consistent, maybe their responses to you get shorter, maybe they stopped saying some of the intense things that they were saying in the beginning, those things that stoked your hope in the first place, the things that got you all excited, they stopped saying.

It leaves us wondering what on earth went wrong when everything seemed to be going so right. Now, I want to talk about one of the potential reasons that it happened, that they went cold. And I also want to talk about the biggest mistake that we tend to make when this happens. People pull away oftentimes because they have sensed something in us that is trying too hard, that has made them too important too quickly. And one of the negative effects of this is that someone begins to feel that we’ve made up our minds about them and who they are and how valuable they should be in our lives before they’ve really earned it. And when we do that and when they sense that, our value goes down, because they ask themselves the question, why am I so important to this person so quickly? What’s going on with them that I have suddenly become so valuable in their life, even though A, they don’t know me that well, and B, I haven’t actually done that much for them?

It’s not like I’ve invested a ton into their life. So why am I suddenly so important? And when someone feels that and your value goes down, there’s that combination of your value has gone down to that person but you also now feel very intense to that person, and so they start to pull back. Now, onto the mistake that we often make when we feel someone pull away. Because we’ve made this person so important, what kicks in when they pull away is a fight instinct. I am going to fight for this. I’m going to go out my way to try to keep this because it’s really valuable and it’s really important. Now, why have we made it so valuable and so important?

Number one, a scarcity mindset. If we don’t meet anyone we like very often, if we feel like love is really elusive, then if we even get a taste of being with somebody, we’ll do anything to keep it. Number two, impatience. We want the result today. We don’t want to wait another year or five years or more. We want it today. So if it feels like it’s right in front of us, I’ll do anything I have to to keep it. And number three, low self-esteem. We don’t believe in our own value. This is a really interesting one because what happens when we find ourselves fighting for someone who is pulling away from us is by definition, we have devalued ourselves and overvalued them and what they bring to the table. Let’s try and experiment for a moment. Pause this video for a moment when I say this and just write down what it is you are attracted to in this person and be really honest about this.

Don’t write answers that sound good. Write the truth. What is it about this person that you are drawn to? Now, pay attention to your answer, because often the answers are very revealing about something that we are overvaluing. If you wrote down they’re really attractive, if you wrote down their confidence, the connection you feel with them, or if you had trouble writing something down because you’re like, “I guess it’s hard to explain. I just … I don’t know. There’s just something about them.” Pay very close attention to these things because none of them are qualities that make someone an amazing partner. I shared the stage not too long ago with my dear friend Dr. Ramani and she said anytime someone says to her, “There’s just something about him,” she starts to see alarm bells because as she describes it, that is the definition of a trauma bond.

You’re not actually attracted to them because they have wonderful relationship traits that would make them a great partner or do make them a great partner, you’re attracted to them because of some ethereal hard to put your finger on feeling that compels you to keep trying. What are the qualities that make someone a great partner? Kindness, empathy, compassion. They show up for me. They’re reliable. They’re consistent. They’re a great communicator. They’re honest, trustworthy. They’re a great teammate. They care about my day and the challenges in my life and want to support me in those. Those are the kinds of qualities that make for a great relationship, but those are rarely the things people describe when they say why they can’t get someone off their mind, why they’re so attracted to that person, why they decided they were the right person.

Remember, none of the things like charisma, confidence, boldness, sex appeal, connection even, the fact that we can talk about all sorts of different subjects, the fact that I just feel so good around them, none of those things are things that on their own could make a great relationship. They’re great, wonderful things to have, but none of them are the really, really valuable things that someone shows us when we realize, oh, this person will be an incredible teammate. And if you are willing to be all of those traits that do make you an incredible teammate, you are trustworthy, you are committed, you are loyal, you are communicative, you are consistent, you are generous, you are a great teammate, then what you have is worth its weight in gold. That’s the really rare stuff. That’s the stuff of true character that is so valuable. So why are you cheapening that and making so important these things that you think they have?

One of the things I’ve come across more than anything in my career is people who overvalue someone that they have a great time with. I want you to think about it in a business context for a moment. I may really enjoy being around somebody, spending time with them, chatting with them, having a night out with them, but none of those things mean that person would be a great partner in business, if I wanted to build a business with someone. Well, a relationship, a romantic relationship is like a company. It’s a company of two. And just because someone is great company, it doesn’t mean they can make a great company. Just because someone is great company, it doesn’t mean they can make a great company. Someone can be wonderful to hang out with, but can they build an amazing relationship with you?

If they’re pulling away, we already know that’s not a good sign of someone who can actually build something with you. So the appropriate response, by the way, when we feel someone pulling away is to become less certain of them. The appropriate response is to say, “Oh, you are backing off, I feel you getting colder, I feel you pulling away, that’s making me reevaluate how right you are for me. That’s making me start to allocate more time and energy to other things in my life. That’s making me think, ‘Well, maybe it is time to start dating other people if you’re in that place.'” Someone else’s uncertainty about you is not an indication of your lack of value. Someone’s uncertainty should be an indication of their lack of value to you, because one of the greatest things you can have in a partner is someone who is certain about you.

Look, should you be willing to fight for someone? Yes, but here’s the right context for fighting for someone. When there is a hurdle that the two of you need to get over to be together despite wanting to be together. Romeo and Juliet wanted to be together, but they were from different houses and there was a politics around them being together. That was a hurdle that they both mutually wanted to get over. It wasn’t Romeo saying, “I’ll fight for Juliet even though she’s not sure about me.” Ask yourself, if you’re playing Romeo and Juliet with someone and the hurdle is their uncertainty. Because if it is, why are you fighting for this person? The only person worth having in life is a person who values what we have to give. And the great irony is that they won’t value what we have to give if we don’t put a high price on it ourselves. If we feel someone pulling away and instead of going, “Oh, you seem to not see my value, that makes you less valuable to me.”

If instead of doing that, we feel someone pulling away and go, “No, I’ll fight for you.” Then what they start to feel is, “Oh, this person’s willing to fight for me even when I’m not trying, even when I’m pulling away. Firstly, that feels very intense now, and secondly, what does that say about their value? What does that say about who they are and their confidence?” What we need to do is show someone that there are real stakes. There are real consequences to you not being sure about me. I may have been trying before, I may have been showing you my best and showing you what I was capable of, but the moment you start taking that for granted, the moment you start showing me that you’re not sure about me, you become less worthy of all of this effort I’m giving you right now.

You become less worthy of all of these wonderful things that I have to offer someone, which by the way are an incredible gift. You start making me question if you’re the person that I want to give that to. And if you really can see, oh, there’s consequences to me not trying, there’s consequences to me not being sure about you, then my value to you starts going up. What someone needs to realize from us is yes, I find you sexy. Yes, I love being around you. You turn me on. I find you fun. I find you exciting. I enjoy your company, but none of that is more important than what’s right for me. I may be attracted to you, but I am far more attracted to the life I want for myself. When I’m coaching people, it’s not just about telling them you need to be less intense. It’s about solving the deeper issue of why we are being intense. Being too intense is often a byproduct of overvaluing somebody else and what they bring to the table and undervaluing ourselves and what we bring to the table.

Now, look, I’m not saying that this person is a terrible person. It may just be someone who hasn’t had a fair shot at seeing your value yet, partly because in the process you didn’t value yourself. But whether your goal is to move on from this person or to finally have them see your value, the answer is the same. It’s taking big bold moves in your life to become strong and confident in a way that either allows them to see it and become newly attracted to it or allows you to move on and find the love you actually deserve with someone who’s right for you. And I have a way that you can do this. It’s a free video training at MoveOnStrong.com that shows you exactly how to build back that strength to be the most confident you after a difficult time like this where someone has either rejected you or gone cold or started to pull away. Go to MoveOnStrong.com and I’ll show you how to build that confidence again. I’ll see you over there.

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