How do you find out where you really stand with someone? This question is one of the most important in a relationship, and finding the answer early on can save you a lot of time and unnecessary heartbreak.

In today’s new video, I share 6 ways to know if someone is serious about you, no matter which stage of dating you’re in. By the end, you’ll know how to separate genuine intention for commitment from mere attention.

Matthew Hussey

In this video, I want to talk about the six ways to know if someone is serious about you. It is so easy to waste our time in dating with people who are not serious, with the time wasters. And it doesn’t just waste our time; it results in a lot of unnecessary suffering and heartbreak when we misread someone’s intentions with us.

So, I’m excited to go through this today. I think it’s going to make some distinctions that are going to really change the way that you date going forward or the clarity you have around someone you’re dating right now. 

Before I get into the video, if you haven’t already taken me up on our Black Friday offer for Matthew AI, I want to encourage you to do that because this is a way to get unlimited coaching from me for $19 for the entire month. We are offering 50% off your first month of unlimited 24/7 use of Matthew AI. You can text or call Matthew AI, and you will get my answer in real-time to your very specific questions. Go to AskMH.com, you can try it for free there. And if you like it, take us up on that 50% off offer, which allows you to get unlimited coaching from Matthew AI for just $19. That is just while our Black Friday sale lasts.

Before I get into the six ways, there is a crucial distinction we have to make. And that is the distinction between attention and intention. Attention is not intention. Intentions are about where someone intends for things to go.

And what we want is to find someone who is being very intentional about us, about their love life, and about wanting a relationship. What we come across far more often than someone who is being intentional is someone who is just giving us their attention. And attention is very dangerous because when we feel someone’s attention, it immediately gets us excited.

It’s like a pistol just went off at the beginning of a race, and we go careening into future projection and expectations about what this could be and how much we like this person. And a lot of us mistakenly invest based on someone’s attention. We feel excitement about the attention they’re giving us, and we start investing based on that excitement.

And because of that excitement, we start to make plans in our mind for this person. I hear this all the time when someone says to me, “You know, someone texts me every couple of weeks, they don’t really ask me out, or when we do see each other, it’s kind of sporadic. I don’t really know if it’s going anywhere, but I don’t want to see someone else because I really like this person.”

And what I know about that is that they have now started to make a plan for how important this person is and will be potentially, even though there is no evidence of the fact that this person has a plan for them. A plan is something we have to make with someone. It’s not something we should be making for someone based on some attention that they occasionally give us.

Remember, attention is a drug. What we have to do is take our focus away from that drug and reorient it towards people’s intentions. 

My intention for this video is that anytime you feel yourself getting distracted by the drug of attention that someone is giving you, you can always come back to this video as a way of re-centering yourself about how important you should be making this person.

So, the first way we can tell if someone is serious is by getting curious about them ourselves. 

Curiosity is strangely something we often don’t show enough of when we’re first dating someone. We are so busy being impressed by them or observing how attractive we think they are that we’re not actually asking the kinds of questions that reveal their intentions. Not for us necessarily, because it’s fair that they wouldn’t have any intentions for us on a first date, but intentions for themselves. And what we want to do here is adopt a kind of relaxed curiosity, one that is about having fun and genuinely just trying to get to know someone in a kind of neutral way.

Now, the reason we don’t do that a lot of the time is because we worry that we’re going to get taken advantage of. Someone has wasted our time in the past, and the way that we try to correct that is by over-correcting and trying to instantly get all of the information we need about someone to know whether we’re wasting our time by even being on a date with them. And often when someone gives us an answer we don’t like to a question, we start finding ourselves getting irritable and kind of mad and frustrated because we’re like, “Well, if you feel that way, why are you even on a date right now?” Instead, let’s take the mindset that someone can’t take advantage of me at this stage; I’m just on a date with them.

So, I don’t need to operate in a transactional way here, thinking that there are right and wrong answers. There are simply answers that mean that I wouldn’t necessarily be interested in investing any more time in this person, even if I’m having a good time right now, and answers that mean I would be interested in investing more time. When we approach it in this way, there is an added benefit, other than us frankly just being able to enjoy ourselves more: it’s that we start asking questions with a more neutral tone.

We start just being inquisitive, you know, asking them what they enjoy most about their life right now, what they might change about their life right now. If they could wave a magic wand and there was something they could have that they don’t have right now, do they get excited about relationships in general, or are they really enjoying being single? What does single feel like to them? What is their experience of dating?

A lot of people get obsessed with, “Can I ask that question?” but what they don’t get nearly concerned enough about is the tone when they ask a question. Because actually, tone can make a question that can feel very intense something that’s just good conversation, and the tone that we want to adopt is that neutral, curious tone. The kind of tone that says “There is no wrong answer; I’m just getting to know you, I’m just curious about you as a human being.” And when someone doesn’t feel like there’s a wrong answer, they’ll start to give you more truth.

And by the way, getting curious about someone else not only means taking our focus off of how impressed we are by superficial aspects of them, like how successful they seem to be or how good-looking they seem to be or just kind of their general charismatic energy, but it also means reducing our focus on worrying about how much we’re impressing them. Because as long as we’re afraid of whether they like us or not and we’re trying to say all of the right things, we’re not paying attention to whether they’re saying the wrong things, and we’re not paying attention to whether we’re even asking the right questions that will allow us to discern who they are and what they really want.

So, number one: if you want to know whether they’re serious, get curious.

The second way to know if someone’s serious is to look for that same curiosity in them. 

So, we want to bring an intentionality to dating where we get curious, especially, by the way, if you’re really looking for a great long-term partner. Why wouldn’t you be curious about someone else? You want to see if they’re going to be good for life, not just if there’s someone you’re attracted to or if they’re going to be a good teammate. But we want to be looking for the same thing in them.

When they’re on a date with us, does it feel like they actually are trying to get to know us? Are they asking us the kinds of questions that show that they’re trying to discern whether we would make a compatible partner for them? Are they trying to understand our values? Do they ask us about our background? You know, if family is important to them, are they asking us about our family? Are they asking us if we’re close to the people in our lives? Is someone asking you about how you like to spend your time?

It matters whether someone is trying to learn these things about you. There are plenty of people in this world who will go on a date with you and just seek to impress you. Now, even on the most generous interpretation, someone who’s just trying to impress you is behaving in an insecure way that still speaks to a kind of lack of intentionality on their part because they’re not thinking about you; they’re not really connecting with you. They’re just worried about trying to get you. But if we start to look at the more insidious side of the spectrum, there are people who only care about impressing you because they just get off on making people feel a lot.

“I want to have a date with you where I show you all of the amazing things about me, where I get you really excited, and then I know I’ve got you in the palm of my hand. And then, afterwards, I’m going to go and do that with someone else and I’ll reach out to you when I feel I need you again.” At the extreme end, you have the narcissist who just wants everyone to fall in love with them so that they can get the feeling of someone falling in love with them. They’re not really trying to learn who anyone is.

This is about finding someone who’s not just trying to be interesting, but is interested. This is a sign of curiosity on their part. If someone is being intentional, if someone is serious about what they’re looking for in love, then they are serious about learning who you are.

The third way to know if they’re serious is that they actually follow up. 

Having a great date is one thing, but them—or you, frankly, because if we’re being serious, we also are prepared to follow up. But the two people following up in tandem, and that follow-up resulting in real, consistent communication after the date, is a sign of seriousness. Because when someone follows up with us, it’s a way of them saying, “I am putting investment into furthering the conversation. I’m not letting that rest as just a moment in time where we had a great experience together. I am actually invested in continuing this, in making sure you know that I’m interested in continuing this, in maintaining a kind of momentum, a kind of rhythm.” They want that. They don’t want to leave that to chance—that they can just disappear for days on end, and you’re still going to think that they’re interested and you’re not going to date other people in the meantime and decide that, well, my attention is better served elsewhere.

And even if you grant them that, okay, they were a bit shy after the date, so they didn’t text me first, that’s where we can lead. We can be the one to text first if we want, but if that’s the case—that they were just a little shy but they’re still serious—then us giving them the permission, the green light, to continue the conversation should then activate them continuing the conversation. If it doesn’t, we can’t keep telling ourselves that, “Well, maybe they do really like me and maybe they do want to continue things, but they just haven’t texted me” because they are not showing us that.

Having this as a litmus test for how serious someone is is great because it gets us out of those internal, confusing conversations of, “Well, Matt, they watch my stories, so what does that mean?” Or, “You know, they like my posts or they still DM me sometimes—like, what does that mean? Why would they do that if they weren’t interested?” They’re doing that because they want to keep you in the game somehow, but it doesn’t mean that they’re serious about progressing things. And by the way, this doesn’t mean that someone is bad. It also doesn’t mean that, at some point in the future, this thing couldn’t pick up speed in some way. It means that right now, they are not serious about you.

The fourth way to tell if someone is serious builds on this idea of someone following up after a date, and that is that they are scheduling times to see you. 

Now, this is different from “They are planning to see you.” Planning isn’t scheduling. Scheduling is saying, “When are you free? What night are we doing? What time shall we meet?” That’s scheduling. And when someone is scheduling with you, that’s a lovely sign, because in order to schedule something with someone, you have to make a choice. You have to make a choice that, on that night, at the end of this week, I am not going to do anything else. In fact, Saturday evening, I’m going to say no to everything else so that I can see you, and that’s something that I’m willing to decide on a Tuesday. It’s not something that I want to wait to decide until one hour before.

It always stuck with me when Tim Ferriss said that for him, unless something is in the diary, it’s not real. When something is in the diary, it becomes real. And he was talking about that in the context of goals and things you want to achieve or make happen in life. If you think about why that’s so relevant in the context he was talking about, it actually gives us a real insight into seriousness in dating. Because if I say to myself, “I am gonna take a jiu-jitsu class,” but I keep talking about it with my friends and never doing it, that is an expression of my lack of seriousness about that. I enjoy talking about it more than I enjoy actually doing it. But when I put it in the diary, I am committing to that thing.

In our love lives, you have to ask yourself, “Is someone committing to the date in the diary with me?” If you want to know who’s serious about you, look at who’s scheduling something with you, not someone who’s getting excited about talking about plans with you that amount to no more than a role play about what could happen in the future, as opposed to a genuine commitment of what is going to happen in the future.

Now, as we get to number five, I want you to see the six points in this video almost as being things that we start to take as signs of increasing seriousness as things evolve with a person. So, you’ll see that this point number five isn’t something that would be relevant to someone you had just met, but it would be relevant to someone that you were dating, starting to get closer to, and starting to consider, “You know, if I keep investing in you, it’s because there’s something serious on the cards. Otherwise, what we’re doing right now really makes no sense.” So, with that said. . .

The fifth way to know if someone is serious about you is if they involve you. 

Now, the context I am talking about here is decisions that could affect what you have together or where it’s going. So, they will involve you in certain decisions that they have to make, would like to make, or intend to make, especially if those decisions could impact how much time you get to spend together, could impact this wonderful rhythm that you’ve built together, could take you far apart for a significant period of time.

For example, if someone is going to go through an extremely busy chapter because of a project that they’re embarking on for the next couple of months, and that means that you won’t be able to see each other as much as you have been, they will communicate with you about that. If they are thinking of taking a promotion that could take them out of town, out of state, or to a different city, they will discuss that with you. Now, someone involving you in key decisions and moments in their life doesn’t always mean that you get a vote on those, especially if it’s early in the process of knowing this person, but it does mean that there is a kind of intentionality about involving you in the conversation.

Maybe forewarning you of something that’s going to happen or help you understand the rationale behind a decision. All of this they do because they would never want you to question how interested in you they are or where they see it going. They don’t want you to see their decision as a reflection of how important the relationship is. Instead, they want to show you that you are a part of the conversation.

Here are some questions that you can ask to discern someone’s seriousness on this level: Are they actually taking my feelings into account in their decision-making? Are they concerned about ensuring that I’m on board, or are they indifferent to my reaction? Am I always the last one to know about the things that are happening in their life? Do I feel on the outside of the circle of information? Am I simply the collateral damage on their path until my hurt or frustration makes me impossible to ignore?

Now, I want to make one point about all of this, which is that most humans don’t get these things right all the time. It’s perfectly reasonable that sometimes someone behaves a little self-centeredly or they forget to involve us in something. These things do happen, but they shouldn’t happen all the time. They shouldn’t happen on everything. And when you do share your feelings about how it felt to be left out of something, your feelings will be met with compassion by someone who is serious about you. They won’t be seen as this eye-rolling inconvenience that they now have to deal with.

The sixth way that someone will show you they’re serious is by wanting to make you feel comfortable with situations. 

When situations come up that could make you uncomfortable—let’s say they’re hanging out with a friend, and they’re a little worried that you could feel that they’re attracted to that friend or you could feel that, you know, there’s something for you to feel insecure about about that friendship. They will actually tell you, “Hey, I’m really excited for you to meet this person,” or “I’d love for us to hang out together,” or “I’ve been friends with this person for a long time.” They won’t want you to, in any way, feel insecure or uncomfortable. They won’t want to leave any ambiguity that could suggest that they’re not taking the relationship with you seriously, and they’ll also do that most likely because they don’t want to have ambiguity in return from your side. They would hope that if it were the other way around, you would also be making them feel comfortable.

Someone who is serious about you is not going to want to engage in situations that could, in any way, threaten the relationship, but they’re also going to want to make sure that even if the situation is completely innocent, it’s something you feel comfortable with because your feelings matter. And because they would never want you to question how seriously they are taking their relationship with you.

The only true way to know if someone is serious is to look at these six things and say, “Am I seeing the right things in each of these areas over time?” I have to give it time because someone’s nature, their true character, can only be revealed over a longer period of time. But that doesn’t stop us from saying no to the people who demonstrate the wrong things in the short term. And this video, I hope, has given you some clarity on that—the wrong things and the right things that you can pay attention to when you’re giving your time and energy to someone.

I also realize it’s quite possible that this video has thrown up more questions for you about your situation, and if it has, I want you to go and ask the question that is at the front of your mind right now of Matthew AI. You can try it for free at AskMH.com. 

Literally, whatever question you’re like, “Matt, I’ve enjoyed this video, but, you know, it’s made me think of this, and what about this situation in my situation?” If you have that question right now, go ask it of Matthew AI because you can get my answer. AskMH.com is the link, and when you get there, like I said, there is a Black Friday offer on right now, just for a limited period of time, where you can get half price off of your first month, meaning you can use Matthew AI as much as you want for an entire month for just $19. 

Go check it out, and I’ll see you there. AskMH.com is the link, and thank you, as always, for watching this video.

The post 6 Signs They’re Serious About You appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

The rules are different when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist. You may walk on eggshells, question yourself, or feel like you can never do anything right in their eyes. And if they break up with you? It only leaves you with more confusion.

So what’s the right move in this situation? Should we stand up to them? Try to convince them with facts? 

In today’s new video, I give you 7 reasons why you can never expect to get true closure from a narcissist . . . and what you can do to give closure to yourself.

Matthew Hussey

What are the seven reasons why you will never get closure from a narcissist?  

Hello, I’m Matthew Hussey. If you’re new to the channel, welcome. Today, I want to talk about the subject of narcissism and why dealing with a narcissist can be so unbelievably unrewarding. Why when we deal with people like this, there is a complete and utter lack of closure, and how, in feeling that lack of closure, in feeling that there is no sense of completion in any of the things that we deal with with them, it can be maddening.  

The reason I wanted to make this video is because I want us to get out of the cycle of going back to these people and hoping for a different result, hoping that we are this time, going to go back and finally get the closure that we’ve always wanted from them. I hope that I can make this video in some ways so dismal, so bleak in its outlook when it comes to the outcomes of these situations that you will simply resolve to get out of them instead of trying to fix them.  

There’s a moment in Oliver Berkman’s book. I wish I could figure out who said it, but he was talking about someone who said, “My job is not to get people to lighten the load. It’s to make the load so heavy that they simply put it down.” And that’s what I’d like to do with this video.  

Why can you never expect to get closure from a narcissist?  

Number one: They will never take accountability.  

This is one of the most maddening things about dealing with a person like this, is that the idea of getting a genuine “I’m sorry. I did that. That was my fault,” is a fantasy. We will tell them everything they have done wrong, we will tell them everything they’ve done that has affected us tremendously. We can literally point out the chaos that they have caused, or we can point out how black and white, how wrong they are about something, but they’re not interested in that reality. They’re only interested in the reality where they are right.  

Bringing themselves to admit fault doesn’t fall within the normal laws of how they operate. And even if you manage to drag an apology out of someone like this, it will be an incredibly unsatisfying apology.  

It’s the kind of apology where you have been begging and pleading with them to see your point of view, where you have been spelling it out, where you simply won’t let them off the hook, and through saying all of this, you maybe get them to the point of such exhaustion of finally throwing their hands up and saying something like, “All right, I’m sorry. Okay. Is that what you want to hear? Like, what do you want me to do?”

That’s the kind of apology you get, and you tell me whether that feels like a satisfying apology that gives you closure.  

The second reason you’ll never get closure is because they will never truly empathize with your situation, because it’s not about you, it’s always about them.  

So when you’re talking about how something has affected you, it’s not just that you won’t get an apology, or if you do, you’ll get an unsatisfactory apology. It’s that you won’t even feel like they’re remotely connecting with your experience.  

When you talk to them about what you’ve been through, they’ll deflect. They might put it back on you. They might say that you’re being overly sensitive. They might say that you’re being dramatic and blowing things out of proportion. They might start talking about their own pain and, well, you don’t know what this has done to me, because it’s not about you. It’s about them.  

One of the greatest gifts in human connection is empathy. Empathy is a miracle.  

It’s like that moment in Inside Out, where, you know, Joy goes over to Bing Bong, the imaginary friend, the elephant, and doesn’t really show any empathy. She just tries to get him back on his feet and say, you know, “It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be fine.” And Bing Bong doesn’t feel good hearing that, because there’s no empathy. But then Sadness comes over, and sadness says, “That really sucks, that must really hurt,” and all of a sudden Bing Bong starts to feel better, because Sadness actually sees him.  

The narcissist will never see you. They will never be able to grant you the miracle of human connection that is empathy, and empathy is the root out of loneliness.  

The thing that makes empathy a miracle is that it transmutes pain into connection. It turns it into community. It makes us feel like we’re no longer alone, which exactly explains why being with the narcissist in any kind of an intimate relationship leaves you feeling so alone.  

You will never get closure, because they will never give you empathy.  

Now, the third reason that you’ll never get closure particularly applies to the more malignant types, the more antagonistic narcissists, but that is that by standing up to them, we’re just giving them more of what they want.  

We might have this fantasy of one day standing up to someone and finally telling them how we feel, and that that’s going to be so rewarding and that maybe we’ll stop them in their tracks when we finally stand up to them. But the truth is, in many cases, by standing up to them, we’re just giving them the thing that they want, which is our engagement.  

They want you to engage. They’re hoping that you will engage. That’s why people like this will often say anything they can to bait you. They will try to push your buttons. What’s the one thing they know they can say to get under your skin?  

You giving them that energy isn’t received as a standard. It’s received as energy. And I want you to connect to that point that what you may be speaking as a standard, what they’re experiencing is energy, and they’re going to do whatever they can to get more of your energy, because as long as they’ve got your energy, they’ve still got you. As long as they can get a reaction out of you, it’s like they’re still controlling you, right? This is about control. If I know I can say something and that’s going to get under your skin and that’s going to make you shout, I own you. I’ve got you.  

So we have to be very careful about what we think of as standing up to them, because standing up to them doesn’t work. It only gives them more of what they want.  

If you follow my dear friend Dr. Ramani’s work, you will hear her say over and over again, “Do not engage.” Very powerful phrase: “Do not engage,” because when we engage, we give them the power they are looking for, because that’s what they’re looking for—control and power.  

If I can get a reaction out of you, I’ve got power over you. If I can say something mean and get a rise out of you, I own you. I control you. We cannot give them that power.  

What do they say about colds and fevers? Feed a cold, starve a fever. Feed a friend, starve a narcissist.  

The fourth reason you’ll never get closure is because you will never teach them a lesson. “I have to stand up to this person. Someone’s got to teach them a lesson.” There is no teaching a person like this a lesson. They’re not operating in a world where they’re trying to learn a lesson like we’re applying our set of laws about how we live to someone who does not operate by those laws.  

We might think to ourselves, I like going through life learning lessons, or maybe I don’t like it, but when I learn a lesson, well, there it is, a lesson. I did something wrong. Someone called me out on it. I think, wow, I really learned my lesson. I gossiped about someone. It got back to them, and it hurt their feelings or and I’m like, “Oh God, I don’t want to do that again.” Oh, a lesson. I don’t want to do that again.  

We learn lessons because we’re the kinds of people who learn lessons, but with a narcissist, you’re dealing with someone who’s not trying to learn lessons. One of the signature features of many narcissists is incompetence. Why? Because it’s really hard to become competent when you can’t learn. When you think you’re right all the time.  

This is a person who’s not trying to learn like you or I are trying to learn. They are trying to do what’s best for them at all times. They are trying to do what’s going to give them supply at all times, whether it’s in the form of attention, money, adoration, success. This is what is driving them. What is not driving them is learning lessons.  

The fifth reason you’ll never get closure is because it will often appear when you finally leave someone or they leave you that they are then giving to the next person what they never gave to you. Many people have had that experience of going on Instagram, looking on Facebook, or hearing through the grapevine that they are now in this blissfully happy relationship with somebody else.  

Now first, let’s not forget that social media is never a good place to judge the inside of someone’s relationship, any more than it was a good place for other people to judge the inside of our relationship with this person.  

But let’s grant them that they actually are doing all of these lovely things right now for this new person. That doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. When a narcissist is in pursuit of something, they are a very different individual than they are when they have something.  

So let’s be clear, they may be showing a different side of themselves right now, but that does not mean that they won’t revert to type at some point and begin the cycle all over again. Remember, the greatest predictor of the future is the past, and that is especially true of these individuals.  

The sixth reason why you will never get closure from someone like this is because you will never win. If you do stand up for yourself, if you do take away their power in some way, if you suddenly feel in charge instead of feeling like you won, they will simply shape-shift. Narcissists are often master shape-shifters. When they’re in power, they’re a tyrant, they’re a dictator. When they’re not in power, they’re a victim, and they know how to switch like that, so they’re just playing a different strategy now.  

And what they know, because remember, these people want your energy, they know that they can simply convert energy. So they can take your anger at them being in control or being a menace in your life, and they can turn it into guilt by suddenly playing the victim when they’re not a powerful person anymore, or when they’re no longer in control. And weaponizing your guilt and your pity is narcissism 101.  

You have no business being a narcissist if you’re not weaponizing people’s guilt. You shouldn’t be in the narcissism business. What happens is someone knows that I can play on your ability to very easily feel like you’re a bad person. And why do you feel like a bad person? Because you have a really high standard for being a good person.  

So if you’ve in any way said something that could be hurtful to them, if you’ve in any way been cold or callous or merciless with them, in the way that you’ve parted ways, or in the way that you’ve put your foot down, they will find an in to turn that into you being a bad person. You being someone who should feel guilt, you being someone who should now feel sorry for them.  

And even if you don’t feel all of those things, even if you feel absolutely righteous in what you’re doing, when they become a victim, at the very least, they can become a kind of pitiful and sad figure. And that’s what happens to a lot of people who have aging parents who are narcissists. Is that over time, once those people almost become a bit defanged, when they’re no longer capable of quite the damage they used to do, they can end up representing quite sad and sorry figures, and that is why these relationships are so unsatisfying, even when we feel like we finally got to a point in our life where we took our power back.  

The seventh reason you’ll never get closure with a person like this is because they will never make sense to you. This is always going to be one of those maddening situations where the more you try to understand it, the more you’re applying the wrong kind of thinking to the problem in the first place.  

This person is a different animal to you. This person does not operate the way that you do. It’s like trying to use a ruler to measure sound. It doesn’t work. We will never fully understand these people. They will never fully make sense to us, because they do not operate the way that we do.  

And the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can give ourselves the freedom to not have to understand it, to simply accept that they operate in the way that they do. And that is not the kind of person that we can engage with in our life. And by the way, when we disengage from people like this, when we walk away from people like this, and I know you can’t always walk away, there are situations where we have to continue to engage on some level, but when we do, we will still feel a sense of injustice.  

That after all the pain someone has caused us, after all the damage they’ve done, after the utter lack of acknowledgement of all of those things, we’re the one that has to be the bigger person. We’re the one that has to radically accept the situation. We’re the one who has to grow. We’re the one who has to be higher frequency and not fight with them, but simply disengage or walk away or make peace with it.  

That can feel like the ultimate kick in the teeth. Is that “My reward for all of your bad behavior is that I have to grow? I have to be the bigger person, and that you get to never grow?” That can feel so unjust and unsatisfying. But the real closure is not any of the things that we might hope for if they weren’t all of these ways that I’ve just suggested.  

The real closure is the peace we have found or will find by disengaging with this person, the peace we find in the space between us and them, the peace we find in finally, no longer having expectations that this person will never fulfill, and if we’re lucky enough, the peace that we will find in walking away from someone like this so that we never have to deal with them again.  

Remember, peace is closure.  

I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to continue the conversation with me, if you want to ask me a question about what you’ve learned today, there is a place that you can do that right now. Go on over to AskMH.com and try Matthew AI. You’ll literally be able to text or call me. You’ll hear my voice answering your question, and you can try it out completely free.  

And if you enjoy it, take advantage of our Black Friday offering, where it is 50% off your first month of unlimited Matthew AI. So make sure you take advantage of that while it’s available, you can literally have me coaching you any time you want as much as you want.  

The link again is AskMH.com.  

Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you soon. 

The post 7 Reasons You’ll Never Get Closure From a Narcissist appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

How do you stop obsessing over someone you’ve recently started dating?

When someone seems to tick all our boxes, it can be hard to NOT become flooded with thoughts of a possible future together. We anxiously wait for their text. We put them on a pedestal . . . and as a result, potentially push them away.

In this week’s video, I share 5 things you can do to stop falling for someone too quickly. By following these steps, you’ll be able to keep your value and actually enjoy dating instead of getting stuck in anxiety.

Matthew Hussey

If you’ve clicked on this video, it probably means that you’ve met someone you like, and that person has taken over your brain.

We all know this feeling. You meet someone, you’re excited about what could be. They fulfill a lot of qualities that you want in a person, and you get that immediate excitement of, “What if this is it? What if this is the person I’ve been looking for? What if the key to my happiness and my future lies with this person?” We feel disappointed any time we get a text from someone who’s not them, secretly praying every second of the day that they are about to reach out to us. Anything that doesn’t involve them suddenly feels dull and gray, even if it mattered deeply to us yesterday.

And then we try to distract ourselves. We try to go to friends, family, work, anything that can get us out of this mindset. But I know the feeling. It can feel like you’re sitting with friends, trying to happily go about your day, and all you can think about is this person. It is maddening. It makes dating unenjoyable, because we live in that anxious state, and it can feel like if we don’t make this work, we’ll never be happy again. All of this leads to obsessive rumination, which at best makes it impossible to enjoy the process of getting to know someone and, at worst, risks pushing something good away.

For those of you that don’t know me, welcome to my YouTube channel. I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence, who for the last 17 years has been helping people find love. I’m also the author of the brand new book Love Life, a New York Times best seller, and today I want to talk about five things that you can do if you are struggling with this obsessive rumination about someone you like.

By the way, the third point I’m going to make on this might be one of the most practical things you hear on this subject anywhere. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to this channel. And if you haven’t already, I have a brand new private weekly email that I am sending out to people who are on my mailing list, where every single Friday, I send you my own personal writings. If you enjoy these free YouTube videos, that is something you should also be subscribed to, because every week, you’ll get something from me that you will really look forward to. Go to The3Relationships.com to sign up to that for free, and I will see you in your inbox this Friday.

First, let’s explore one of the key psychological phenomenons that is responsible for us getting too obsessed and too anxious about someone early on in the dating process. It is known as the halo effect. And Britannica defines the halo effect as follows: “The halo effect: the cognitive bias in which an impression formed from a single trait or characteristic is allowed to influence multiple judgments or ratings of unrelated factors.” What this essentially means is when we see a couple of things that create a positive impression about a person, we are far more likely to deduce, rightly or wrongly, other positive things about them from those initial impressions.

Now this is extremely dangerous. It can mean that we attribute all sorts of wonderful qualities to a person that they haven’t yet earned and have nothing to do with the original qualities that we were impressed by. 

The halo effect is extremely prominent in our love lives, where we meet someone who is charismatic or good looking or super successful, and immediately we take these qualities and use them to build out a 360-degree picture of a person that may be completely false. So let’s talk about the five things we can do to negate this effect so that we can bring a much more powerful version of ourselves to our love lives.

Number one, don’t optimize for looks, money, or lifestyle. There has been a TikTok trend going around of late about this idea of people wanting “Trust Fund, six-foot-five, blue eyes” as their description of the partner they want. I fail most of those tests? I’ve slightly blue eyes. That’s it. But most people, 99.9% of people, fail that test. That, to me, is an example of taking things that some people put a premium on, like looks, money, and lifestyle, and trying to maximize those things, instead of creating a baseline for what they want in those areas.

This is the difference, by the way, between maximizing and satisficing. Satisficing is when you have enough of something. Maximizing is when you try to get the very most you can possibly get of something. But this misunderstands the way human beings work, that we’re never getting a quality in a person. We’re getting an entire suite of qualities in a person—a package. So if we’re trying to maximize in one to three narrow areas, we are almost certainly going to ignore some major deficits in other really important areas.

The trick, in other words, is to know how much we need of a thing. Do I need someone who’s rich enough to buy a boat, or someone who’s made enough money that they don’t need mine? What’s the level that we need in those areas? I’m not a fan of advice that talks about these things being completely unimportant, because we have to work with ourselves the way we actually are as human beings, not the way we’d like ourselves to be. We all want chemistry on some level. We all want a feeling of security on some level. How much of these things we want is personal, and we have agency in it. We can decide when enough is enough.

If we don’t, we will always find ourselves over-indexing for certain things that actually drop in their importance past a certain point, because someone being the best-looking person in every room or the tallest person we can find is not going to determine your quality of life 5, 10, 20 years from now in a relationship with that person. But if we don’t think about that, we will end up chasing someone relentlessly who makes us very unhappy, someone whose character along the way we have completely ignored.

There’s a great moment in Catch Me If You Can, that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, where Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Frank Abagnale, talks about why the Yankees always win. He says it’s because the other team can’t stop staring at their damn pinstripes. And we act like that in dating as well. It feels like, in some ways, the people who are extraordinarily gifted with their looks or their bodies or with their finances can win because people are always looking at their pinstripes. They’re always looking at the surface. They’re never exploring the deeper character and values that would make that person either a wonderful partner or a terrible partner.

The second important way that we can lower our temperature and get less obsessed about someone in early dating is to lose the urgency. Urgency can quickly become our enemy. This is true in all walks of life. Advertisers can come along and try to make you urgently buy something. When we go on a date with someone, we can have our own internal sense of urgency that says, “I have to move fast with this person, because otherwise, they might get taken off the market.” We see this when we think, “I have to go on a date with this person tomorrow, because otherwise someone else might snap them up.”

We get taken out of the mindset of actually assessing this person, learning this person, and into the mindset of simply trying to get this person because we’ve already made our minds up. Another great example of this is when we go to rent a property or buy a house. If we walk in and we fall in love and we imagine a life in that house because it’s all so perfect, we stop paying attention to the house. We forget that, for all we know, there’s mold that’s going to create headaches for us for a long time to come trying to fix. It could be that there are expensive fixes or structural problems that the inspection is going to bring up when it happens in three weeks.

All sorts of things could still go wrong with this. But instead, we’ve made up our mind, and when we make up our mind, we suddenly get ourselves into all sorts of trouble because we think “I want it now,” and it doesn’t matter what comes up in the inspection weeks from now. We may even convince ourselves that even if something does come up in the inspection, we’ll fix it. It’s fine. The house is amazing.

Have you ever done that in a relationship? Have you ever done that in a dating scenario? “We’ll fix that part. This person’s amazing.” We stop paying attention because the urgency is something that often gets us into trouble, pain, heartbreak and suffering by giving time and attention to the wrong people, people we don’t even know we really want yet. 

This idea brings me on to point number three, which is one of the most practical things you can do when you’re trying to stop anxiously obsessing over someone: be less impressed.

In that urgency I was talking about, we very quickly form a story of how amazing someone is. But if we actually stop to pay attention, to become mindful and present with what’s going on in this person’s behavior, the way they show up in different moments—not just on that one amazing date we had with them, or in that amazing moment of love making—if we actually start to look at how they are holistically in their life, we will inevitably see things that make them human, and those things can make them less impressive.

And I actually don’t mean this in a negative way. I mean it in a very positive way. It’s not like we’re looking for all these faults with people so that we can tell ourselves that they’re awful. It’s that we need to take them off of the angelic pedestal and put them back on the level of human, because when they’re back on that level, we no longer have the same sense of fear in dealing with them. We no longer think that it would be the end of the world if we lost them, and we stop over-respecting this person like they’re perfect and we’re awful.

So start paying more attention to the moments where they say or do something that gives you pause, where they spoke to someone in a way that you go, “Oh, I don’t really like that.” Or they reacted to something in a way where you went, “That was a little strange,” or “I don’t like that side of them as much.” Start actually paying attention to those details, because it allows you to just bring the scales to a more level place. Even if they’re awesome, it allows you to bring the scales to a slightly more level place, where you can actually start interacting with this person as yourself again, not as someone trying to impress this incredible being.

And that ability to see them as they are, to distinguish yourself from the other people that they may have had in their lives that just have the halo effect where they see them as perfect, and instead be someone who sees them as they are—that actually makes you special to them. That makes you a more unique person, someone who sees them as they are. And that’s one of the things that makes relationships so beautiful, is being seen by someone and accepted for who we really are. You can’t give someone that gift if you’ve put them on an impossible pedestal.

It’s worth noting that when you do start realizing that people aren’t perfect, you’ll inevitably see that there are things that you might want to speak with them about, things that they did that you don’t like, ways that you’re being treated right now that you would like to remind them of your standard on. And a lot of people are intensely uncomfortable with the kind of awkward tensions and mini confrontations that can come from just speaking up about things that you don’t like in the dating process.

I haven’t got time in this video because this is already long enough without it, but this is where it’s crucial to learn how to have standards and boundaries and communicate them. So I’ve put together a free guide for anyone who has something they want to say right now but doesn’t know how to say it at BoldStandards.com. It’s free. Go check it out. It makes a great partner with everything I’m talking about here.

The fourth way we can eliminate our obsessing about someone is to stop burying the lead. In the last point, we talked about being less impressed, allowing someone’s imperfections to be as visible to you as the things that we think make them perfect, thus creating a more rounded human. In this case, I’m talking about imperfections that are actually things that disqualify this person or this thing from being capable of making you happy. For example, someone says to you, “I don’t want a relationship. I’m not at that place in my life right now.” Or they say they never want kids when that’s something that’s massively important to you, or they say, after their third date and having an incredible time with you, “I’m moving to Thailand tomorrow for the next two years.”

When you hear these things, it’s incredibly tempting to bury the lead. I have coached people for 17 years, and most of the time when people come to me, they will say, “Matt, I’ve met this amazing person. They’re incredible. We have amazing sex. We can’t stop talking to each other. The chemistry is unbelievable. I’ve never felt this way before.” And they’ll talk about all of these amazing things. I in the back of my mind, am always waiting for the but, because I know there’s a but coming or they wouldn’t even be asking the question. So they’ll say all of those things, and then after saying all of the things that make this person perfect, they’ll say, “but he’s moving to Thailand tomorrow.” That is burying the lead, because the headline of this story is person is moving to Thailand tomorrow, not worth having a relationship with them. But instead, someone has made the headline how they feel about this person, often because of the very qualities that create the halo effect.

I think this person is amazing in these ways. So the halo effect makes me think that they would be amazing for a relationship, but anyone who’s not available for a relationship can’t be amazing for a relationship. So we have to start asking ourselves, what is the lead that I’ve been burying that might make this person not worth stressing about at all? And by the way, and this is a video for another time, it’s worth noting that for some people, the reason they obsess in the first place is because someone isn’t available, which is an instinct that has nothing to do with valuing someone because of how inherently valuable they are, but instead valuing them simply because they are unavailable. 

All right, you’ve made it this far to point number five in how to reduce your anxiety and the obsessive rumination when you like someone. I want to talk to you about the goose and the golden eggs. Most people have heard the fable at some point or another. The goose is laying golden eggs, and the farmer thinks that this is amazing. You know, I’m getting rich off of these eggs. But at a certain point starts making the mistake of thinking that the value is in the eggs, not the goose who’s laying the eggs. 

We often make that mistake in our lives. We think that our value is in the eggs that we’ve laid. Now there are all sorts of golden eggs that we lay in our lives. Sometimes it’s a career opportunity that we went out and fought for and finally got that interview for that amazing job. Sometimes it’s money we’ve made, other times it’s a love interest. You know, we went out one night and we put on our nice clothes, and we made ourselves look good, and we have the courage to go and speak to someone. And because of that, we now find ourselves texting with someone, or we find ourselves on a date, and if God forbid we decide we like that person, we start seeing them as the golden egg.

But our focus of what’s most valuable shifts in a really dangerous way. We stop looking in the mirror at the golden goose, the one who actually laid the egg, the one who made it happen, the one who created the opportunity. Instead, we start looking at that name that’s in our phone of that person we’ve just texted, thinking that’s where the value really is. That’s what’s really important. In other words, we transfer our value from ourselves to something on the outside. But when we do that, our perception of what is most valuable starts to drift in a really dangerous way. 

When we start telling ourselves that the most valuable thing about me is on the outside of me, we transfer the locus of our power from here to here. To a person, a thing, an opportunity. When we do that in dating, we have suddenly made our entire emotional ecosystem beholden to how this person treats us, whether they text us back, whether they decide they want to be with us. Now to correct this, there’s two ways of looking at it, and both of them can be valid. 

The first one is to realize that if you laid one golden egg, you can lay other golden eggs, to realize that you’re powerful, that it’s not the case, that every great thing in your life you got through luck. You got it because you’re you, because you make things happen, because you’re wonderful, you’re awesome. There are wonderful things about you that attract other wonderful things in life. So you don’t need to freak out and worry that you’ll never be able to do this again, because you did it so you can do it again.

But even if you can’t quite do that exact same thing again, it still makes sense to see the value as being in the goose because the goose, us, is all we ever own. That’s what we take with us, no matter what happens in life, no matter what changes or who we lose or what we lose, we always take us with us to the next thing. So I like to be a little ruthless about this and say to myself, the real source of my value is me. And if I know that, I know that I can manage anything else in life that changes, anything that happens? Will I be hurt? Will I be heartbroken? But the source of my value and my power is still with me, because I’m the only thing I ever truly own while I’m still here. 

There’s a wonderful story of Margaret Atwood at a certain stage in her life, walking around her house and realizing that it wasn’t her house—that this place that she had called her own for so long didn’t really belong to her, that one day she wouldn’t be here anymore, and it wouldn’t be thought of as her house anymore. Someone else would be in that house. 

There’s something humbling about that, and many people may even see there being something intensely melancholic about that. But I also see it as a pressure valve—that when we realize that everything is transient, everything is borrowed or rented, we can stop gripping onto it so tightly. 

And even while we’re here, these things and people we acquire will come and go, but we are the thing that will always remain. So never, ever transfer your power and your value to the golden eggs. Always keep it with the goose. 

Thank you so much for watching, everybody. Don’t forget to leave me a comment before you go. Let me know what meant something to you, what moved you from this video, and I look forward to seeing you next time. 

For everyone who is signed up to my private emails, I will be sending you one this Friday, so watch your inbox. I have a good one coming this Friday, and I’m excited for you to read it. That link again, I’ll put at the bottom for anyone who does want to join us in that. For everyone else and all of you, I will see you again in next week’s video. Be well, my friends, and love life.

The post How to Stop Obsessing in Early Dating appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

THIS is one of the top reasons why a breakup can feel so raw . . .

You may have only recently let your guard down and shown your real feelings, only to have the other person end things. This can feel especially painful because it’s like they’ve rejected you for who you truly are at your core. 

But it doesn’t have to feel that way, because it’s not actually true. And in today’s new video, I explore 5 different mindsets that can ease heartbreak and restore confidence so you can find the right person faster.

Matthew Hussey

I think one of the most painful things about breakups is that they often happen at the very time that we feel we were letting our guard down and being more of ourselves, revealing more of who we are, or revealing more of our life. And when we get broken up with in those moments, it is a particular kind of painful, because it feels like we are being rejected at our core. 

A lot of us, when we date in the first few weeks and sometimes even months, it can feel like we’re sending out our representative on our behalf, to look as good as possible, sound as good as possible, be as easy as possible to be around, not bring any of the complications of our lives, our personalities, to the table. And of course, all of this is a time when we feel quite insecure because deep down, we know there’s more of me you don’t know, there’s more of my life and the reality of my life that you’re not experiencing. And we’re terrified that when they get to know all of that, that’s going to be the point where they decide that we’re not for them. So, in that moment where we finally reveal more, where we finally get comfortable enough, relaxed enough, feel safe enough to say, “This is me. This is my life.” And that person says, “Hmm, I don’t— I suddenly don’t want this.” It is like our worst fear coming true. 

So, I wanted to talk about this idea, and if you’ve experienced anything like this, give you five things that I think can make a huge difference, that can not only ease your heartbreak, but restore a sense of confidence that might feel like it was taken from you by someone leaving. 

If you don’t know me, I’m Matthew Hussey. I have been coaching people in their love lives for 17 years, helping them with both confidence and relational intelligence. While you’re here, I would really appreciate you liking this video, subscribing to this channel and hitting the notification bell so that the next time I release a video, you are among the first to find out. 

Okay, on to the video. I have five things that I want to say about this situation that I think are both going to alleviate some of the heartache you may feel and also help restore some of the confidence that you feel you may have lost. 

The first thing I want to say is that it’s all data. When someone sees a part of your life or a part of your personality and decides that based on that they don’t want to be around anymore, that’s data, and it’s data that this person either doesn’t really see you or sees you, but doesn’t accept you. And the ultimate that all of us should be aspiring to in a healthy relationship is that someone gets us, someone sees us in our life and says, “I want that.” Not that we have to constantly hide things from someone for them to continue wanting us. 

So, rather than thinking “This person was the right person, and I blew it that weekend, you know, when I took them home to my family, or where we spent time together, and I actually let them in on the way that my disability makes me tired or the way my chronic pain affects me, or I finally let them stay over for the weekend, and they saw me caring for a sick relative that is the reality of my life,” whatever it may be. If someone at that point says, “I can’t do this,” then that’s data that they are not the right person for you. 

I think that we spend so much of our dating lives worrying about the parts of us that are going to scare someone away, instead of realizing that all of these different parts of us that get revealed over time are really an opportunity for us to gather data about how right for us someone is. If we show a part of our lives, if we invite someone home for the weekend and they meet the family and they go, “I can’t do this. I’m out,” then that’s a crucial piece of data, especially if your family is really, really important to you. If they can’t even stick around for that or at least respect that relationship and say, “You know what, God, you have a crazy family, but we’ll figure it out,” if they can’t deal with that part of you—and it doesn’t have to just be something external, it could be something internal, you revealing more about yourself—then that’s a great data point that this person doesn’t really see you and doesn’t really accept you. That’s really, really important to know. 

So many of us look at these moments that feel like it all went wrong after that moment, after I revealed that thing, after I spoke that insecurity, after I introduced them to this part of my life. My reality of the fact that I am a single parent, the reality of the fact that I have a disability that can make life difficult for me sometimes and that I have to manage, or the reality that I’m looking after a sick relative. When we introduced people to a part of our lives like that, and then, as a result, it looks like they bolted—that was the moment they broke up with us—we pinpoint that as the exact moment where somehow we screwed up, where, if I’d have just not introduced them to that, if I hadn’t said that thing, then they would still be with me. I screwed up, or my situation is bad. Instead, we have to start flipping it and saying “That was a chance for me to see if this person really accepted me in my life.” And if the answer is they didn’t, then this isn’t the right person for us. You didn’t screw it up by introducing them to your life. You got the piece of data you needed to discover they weren’t right for you. 

Number two. In order to get that data on whether someone is right for us, we have to actually introduce someone to our real life. We should ask ourselves the question, “Why is it sometimes it’s so long before I realize that someone doesn’t actually want to sign up for my real life or my real personality?” and the answer much of the time is because we took so long to close the gap between what I think of as our dating life and our real life.

There’s a big difference between the representative of ourselves and our life that we often send out on the first few dates or weeks, or even sometimes months of dating, whose job it is to show us at our best all the time, to be as low maintenance as possible, to not bring any of the dramas of our life into the picture with a person, to keep them away from every crazy aunt and uncle and difficult challenge we have in our life, and just keep them in this bubble of romance where they can keep seeing us as this wonderful person to be around. But at a certain point, someone—if we’re to determine whether they’re really right for us—has to be brought into our real life and our real selves. 

I think of this as being epitomized by the difference between what we want and what we need. When we’re only acting out of what we want—which is a shiny, charismatic, exciting, sexy person with lots of great stuff going on in their lives—we try to be what we think we need to be to attract that person. But when we’re coming from what we need, we do something very different, because what we need is to feel loved and accepted, and you can only feel loved and accepted if you show who you really are. So in order to follow what we need, we actually need to show people our real life. 

So, in summary so far, when someone breaks up with us because they learned something about us and they decided that wasn’t for them, that’s crucial data, that they’re the wrong person for us. And if we want that data six months in, not three years in, then we need to start exposing more of our real life to someone earlier in the process. 

Okay, but what if you revealed more about yourself, and as a result, it ended the relationship, or so you think, and you’re still blaming yourself for that? You’re saying, “I got the data, and I’m heartbroken. I hate the data.” Well, firstly, let me say, if you felt safe enough to reveal more about yourself, to show more of your life to somebody. That is a beautiful thing. There’s something lovely about that. And you should celebrate that moment in yourself that I felt, I felt safe enough, I felt relaxed enough in that moment to really be myself, or to invite someone into my world, that it backfired in this instance, doesn’t change the fact that that’s a very beautiful thing. 

But the other thing I want to say about this leads on to point number three, which is that when we diagnose this moment where we caused the breakup as being the reason why we broke up, we are often not viewing the relationship in a large enough context. Imagine that if they were ever going to have a problem with that part of your life or that part of your personality, or just you being you, that was always the case. Since day one. You might be finding out about it now, but that was always the case. It may even be that along the way, they felt this on some level before, but they never communicated it to you. I’ve dealt with that with many, many people that I’ve coached through breakups who, on the day of the breakup are like, “I just discovered this thing that, you know, they said they can’t do. They can’t do it. They met my kids, and they hung out or whatever, and all of a sudden they’re like, ‘I can’t do this. It’s too much.’” But that may not be the first time they’ve been feeling that, they may have felt it before, and in many of these cases, they’re just not communicating that they felt that before. 

So, often, what we blame on ourselves at the time of breakup, we could just as easily blame, perhaps even more so, on their inability to communicate those feelings that they were having way earlier in the process. So the result, by the way, is that it feels at the time of breakup like we’re just learning this information that they can’t handle us or our life, and they’re not even really giving us a say in the matter. They’re just saying, “I can’t do this,” and then they leave and we’re like, “But I didn’t even get a chance to do anything about that again. I didn’t get a chance to improve on it. I didn’t get a chance to show up differently or to alleviate your concerns.” And that can feel like a really awful lack of closure. I could have supported this person differently through this if I’d have known, but they didn’t even give me the benefit of knowing. They didn’t give me the benefit of supporting them.

So, how do you view the breakup in a wider context than the moment it seemed to occur in? You ask yourself, “What am I blaming on myself that is really about someone else’s inability to communicate their fears or their concerns at an earlier stage, a stage where maybe I could have been a genuine teammate in helping alleviate those fears and concerns?” And the second is to stop seeing it like we were wrong for that person on the day that they broke up with us because of something we did, but that they have been wrong for us all along. We’re just learning about it now.

Hey guys, I’m interrupting my own video. How annoying. Except what I’m interrupting it with is really, really good for you. If you have a question for me that you want to ask me right now, go to AskMH.com and you could either speak your question to me and hear me answering your question in my voice with my content, or text the question and get a text response. It is called Matthew AI. It is brand new, it is revolutionary, and it is blowing people’s minds. So go check it out. AskMH.com is the link. Go ask your exact question right now, instead of waiting for me to make a video about your specific situation, which might not happen for another seven years. All right, back to the video.

Now, the fourth thing I want to say is a little bit more of a an idea for you to play with for the future, as opposed to something to do right now. We may be asking at this stage, “Well, what can I do about it if someone isn’t communicating with me along the way? How do I account for the fact that someone might never speak about the things that they have a problem with or are not sure about, and then on the day that they break up with me is the first time I’m hearing about it?” 

Well, we can’t take responsibility for other people’s inability to voice their fears or to express unmet needs that they have along the way, but what we can do is we can encourage conversation from our side about things that they may be living with as fears and anxieties about the relationship in their head. That might look like saying to someone, you know, I’ve worked with many, many single parents, it might be saying to someone: 

“Hey, look, I know that I am not someone who comes on my own, I come as a package deal with a big life already. And I want to just say that if you ever want to talk about that, if you ever have thoughts, or you find it a bit overwhelming, or you just want to express something that’s on your mind in relation to that, please know that you always can. You’re not gonna upset me. I have broad shoulders about it. I would rather we just talk about it if any part of you has that on your mind. And, as much as I come with a life, I also respect that you come with a life, and I want you to be happy, and I want you to be able to get your needs met, always. And I want to be a teammate to you in that, but I can’t be if you keep it in and vice versa, you can’t be a great teammate to me if I keep things in. So just please know that you can always talk to me about that stuff.” 

And sometimes you can be more direct about things. You can ask people along the way, “Is there anything about our relationship that you’d like to change, or is there anything that you feel you want more of? Is there any need that you feel like you don’t get met enough in our relationship?” That allows someone to come in and say, “Well, you know, in truth, I’m a bit worried that I’m not getting enough time with my friends, or I am trying to work on this big project right now, and I feel like I’m letting things slip because we’re spending so much time together,” whatever it may be. It allows someone to voice that, and that allows you to come in and say, “You know what? I respect that, and I really appreciate you telling me. I really want to support you in that. So, let’s figure that out. Let’s make sure you get enough time for that.” 

It allows you to be a teammate with someone, and that allows someone else to see you as a very, very rare bird, because they’re like, “No one’s ever given me the space to say these things before. I’ve always felt like I’m just going to be hurting someone’s feelings, or it’s going to turn into an argument, but this person’s actually made space for this, and I voiced these needs, and they’re now supportive of them, and they’re trying to help me meet those needs.” 

So while you can’t turn someone else into a good communicator, and that’s not your responsibility, you can encourage the kind of conversations that allow you to ward off certain issues before they turn into these demons inside someone’s head that, in some cases, make them end things because they’ve made them too big in their mind, and the result is them just saying, “I just have to go.” 

It’s like the person who has the fear or the challenge in their head sees the other person in the relationship as the opposition. Like “I have this challenge, and you’re the cause of this challenge, and the only way to eliminate that challenge is to lose you.” But instead, we want to create a team with someone where it’s us and them against the challenge. Whatever the challenge may be. The challenge might be, “I can’t get enough time with my kids.” The challenge might be, “We’re spending too much time with your kids.” The challenge might be, “I’m not getting enough time on a project.” The challenge might be that, “I’m not getting enough intimacy in this relationship.” But if two people can look at the challenge together and say it’s—if we can talk about it and be a team in solving it, then the two of us are looking at the challenge problem solving together, instead of me seeing you and the challenge as being the same thing. And encouraging conversation in the way that I’ve been saying is exactly how to do this. 

And the fifth and final thing I want to say is that we often see our situation as the obstacle to us finding love, but your situation is not the obstacle. It is your filter. It’s not going to prevent you from finding the right person. It’s actually going to be the thing that leads you to the right person. It’s going to reveal the right person. Because the right person, the person you need, the one that’s going to love and accept you is going to see your life and they are going to be the one that opts in for that life. If your life and where you are today is something that pushes someone away, then that person is not right for where you are today. We have to lose the insecurity about our lives and start seeing that our life and living it more authentically with someone is actually going to be the thing that reveals who the right person is. 

And remember, the person who saw more of you when you started to feel safe and let your guard down and let them into your world and left has given you the data to show they are the wrong person for you. The right person for you is still coming. And when you feel the kind of love and acceptance of being who you are, and feeling someone decide that they want that, that will blow that situation out of the water, and you’ll be able to look back on it with a smile and maybe even a laugh at the idea that that thing, that person, was the real love you were looking for. 

Thank you so much for watching the video, as always. If you’re finishing this video with more questions, which is often the case, you know, you may be thinking of a very specific scenario that you’re in right now that you really feel like you want me to weigh in on. I have a way that you can do that right now, literally, where you can get my answer in the next 60 seconds. Go over to AskMH.com because we have a brand new tool called Matthew AI where you can speak your question, and you can take as long as you want and give as many details and as much context as you want, and you will hear my voice answering your question. 

It is extraordinary how sophisticated this is. It’s trained on 17 years of my content. So you’re not just getting any answer, you’re getting my answer to your specific challenge. If you’re in pain, especially right now, I promise you that by the end of your conversation with Matthew AI, you are going to feel a lot better than you do right now. So go to AskMH.com and you can try it out. You can try it out for free, by the way, so there’s no cost just to trying it. And let me know how you get on. I’ll see you in the next video. Be well and love life.

The post 5 Essential Lessons on Heartbreak Everyone Needs to Hear appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Tired of dating the wrong people?

When we really want to find a relationship, saying “no” to the people who don’t align with our core values can feel scary . . . especially when we’re not meeting a lot of people we connect with. We may even start to loosen our standards and become attached to someone who’s only giving us crumbs.

In today’s video, I dive into the subtle-but-profound difference between those who successfully find love, and those who continue to remain in limbo. You’ll also learn how to cultivate the right culture in your life to attract a lasting, fulfilling relationship (plus I share a story from my younger days as a DJ). Let me know your thoughts!

MATTHEW HUSSEY

I want to talk about a subtle-but-profound thing that people who successfully find love do that other people don’t. And by doing this, it allows them to find the right kind of person far earlier, where other people keep running into the wrong kinds of people.

If you’re new to the channel, welcome. I’m Matthew Hussey. I’ve been doing this for 17 years—helping people find love through increased confidence and relational intelligence. I’m the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Love Life, and for anyone who wants to join me for one of my events, you’ve just missed one. But there’s good news. We have a replay of it. It happened on the 22nd of October. It was all about how to go from casual to committed in a relationship. So, if you want a long-term relationship, check this out. The replay is only available for a few more days. Go to lovelifereplay.com to watch it right now.

So the subject of today’s video came out of a live I did on social media this week where someone asked me this question:

“An acquaintance of a few years has been texting me every day for weeks. And when I tried to ask him out a week ago, he said ‘no’ and said that he’s dating someone. He continues texting every day. What to do?”

Have you ever been in a situation like this that you find confusing, where you’re wondering what to do? Why is someone behaving like this? How can I get their attention? How do I get them to actually go out with me if it seems to be stalling in this way? Do you have a situation right now in your life that you’re finding confusing and are trying to work out what to do next?

All of those questions are the wrong question. What I know about the woman asking this question is that she is ignoring something fundamental. There’s an implicit, “Why is he doing this?” in her question. There’s an implicit, “What do I do now? What do I text him back?” And there’s also kind of an implicit, “How do I get him to actually go on a date with me?” 

But while her focus is clearly being monopolized by all of these things, there is something she is not focused on, and it’s the most important thing there is when it comes to choosing a partner for our love life: his character. And his lack of character is being revealed in the way that he is dealing with her.

This is a man who was texting her when he was dating someone—clearly seriously enough to say “no” to a date—and then when she asked him on a date because she was reading his signals as him being interested, he said, “No, because I’m dating someone.” And then even after being very clear that he’s dating someone, and therefore, can’t go out with her, he continues to text her every day.

How does this add up to the character of a person who is good to date? It clearly doesn’t make him good to date for the person he’s dating—a person who I can almost guarantee doesn’t know that he is texting his acquaintance every day despite the fact that that acquaintance clearly asked him out and has romantic feelings for him.

If she was connected to the ways that his character wasn’t living up to the character of the person she’d want to share her life with, she wouldn’t be asking me a question about this man in the first place. But she is by no means on her own in asking this kind of question. In fact, it’s incredibly common for me to field questions like this. Why is that? 

It’s because, for so many of us, we are not taking “culture” seriously. What do I mean by culture? The culture we create in our lives is really an external representation of an internal value system. We develop and cultivate a culture in life by the choices we make and the people we let close to us and surround ourselves with. And creating the right culture takes discipline precisely because we have to make hard choices that may involve saying “no” to people who feel attractive, interesting, or like they’re giving us some kind of short-term seductive reward, but don’t actually live up to the values that we hold dear.

When I was a teenager—many people don’t know this about me, but I used to be a DJ, and deejayed for about 10 years. So, I was playing out one night and there was a group of older guys. I was a kid, albeit a kid that was sort of dressed up in gold chains and whatnot. I was doing the whole look with a hat and everything. I was a late bloomer, so I was also quite small at that time.

So this group of guys came over to me, and was sort of hovering around me, close to the DJ stand. At first, it was intimidating, because I was like, what’s this group of guys all doing standing beside me the whole time I’m deejaying? But then one of them, a sort of—I feel like we can throw out some sort of Jason Statham-esque image, you know, that kind of character—leant over and said, “You’re all right, boy. Got some skills there, ain’t ya? Good DJ, yeah? Listen, we’ve got a pirate radio station and I’d love to get you on there. Big opportunity.” 

And when I said to him, “I mean, that sounds really exciting . . . like, wow. That sounds fun,” I was just giddy as a teenager.

He was like, “See? I knew you’d love the opportunity. You’re sharp as a tack, aren’t you?” 

This was someone, by the way, who simultaneously, I felt so excited to say “yes” to and felt it would be a bad idea to say “no” to. But I skipped home. I remember going back and talking to my dad about it: “A group of guys came over to me. They’ve invited me to go and have my own slot on this pirate radio station. It’s a really big deal.” I knew the station and was already a fan of it.

But the further away I got from that conversation with “Jason Statham,” the more I came to realize that this wasn’t a crowd that I necessarily wanted to be around—that there was something about the value system of this group that my intuition picked up on that wouldn’t be good for me.

James Hollis has a question—a question I was turned on to by Oliver Burkeman, who wrote the new book, Meditation for Mortals. (Great episode with him coming out on the podcast, by the way.) He has a question that goes like this: 

“Will this opportunity diminish or enlarge me?”

And obviously, as a teenager, I wasn’t asking myself that specific question. But on a visceral intuitive level, I had this sense of “this isn’t going to be good for me. This isn’t going to bring me into contact with the kinds of people who will enlarge me—that this has the potential to diminish me, or even immerse me in a culture that I don’t want to exist in.”

My point in all of this is that throughout our lives, culture is actually one of the hardest things to cultivate. It takes real effort, it takes real energy, and it often requires us to say “no” to things that our ego wants to grab.

The way I see culture is that if we keep feeding the right culture, if we keep paying attention to that intuition, if we keep paying attention to people’s character, to people whose values reflect our highest values, and people who don’t seem to have those values, and we make decisions on that basis, our life will get better and better over time.

Sometimes it feels like in the short term, we’re taking a step backward. In the case of this person whose question I answered on the live, I know that my answer to her meant that in the short term, she would stop texting someone she had come to enjoy texting. Even though it wasn’t ultimately satisfying to her, there was some kind of reward it was giving her on a daily basis. So it doesn’t feel good to stand behind the culture we want to create.

But long term, our entire world becomes a real, tangible reflection of the values we hold dear and the people in our lives—from the person we choose to spend our life with romantically, to our friends, our colleagues, or the people we hire if we have a business—everyone will end up being a reflection of your culture . . . a culture that your life is evidence of you taking seriously.

Have you ever had a friend or someone you know who has introduced you to different people, and every new person they introduce you to makes you realize more and more that this person just surrounds themselves with amazing people, kind people, interesting people, lovely, compassionate, warm people? Have you ever felt that? I know I have.

What you know is that that person takes the culture of their life seriously. And then from the outside, you end up going, “Man, how is it that everyone you know is so lovely?”

It’s because they’ve cultivated that over time.

The people in life who not only find love, but find it with people who make them happy in relationships that last, take culture seriously. They are disciplined and willing to be ruthless and do the hard things when it comes to saying “no” to people who may feel sexy and exciting or rewarding in the short term in favor of waiting for someone or proactively searching for someone who actually represents the values they care about.

And that doesn’t just take effort and discipline. It takes guts. It takes guts to say “no” to the opportunity that’s in front of you, resting only on some kind of faith that at some point, someone better, someone with more character, someone more in line with the way you are, will come along. But I believe that if we can create space in our lives, that faith gets rewarded, but the right person can never come in if we never create that space. Love needs space.

To this day, one of the greatest compliments I ever received about my relationship, my marriage to Audrey, is that along the way, the people who knew me the best and the people who cared about me the most, when they met Audrey, said, “That makes sense. It makes so much sense why you chose Audrey and why you two are together.”

Even to the extent, by the way, that the people who know me best in my audience . . . one of the loveliest things is how many of you listened to Audrey on the podcast and then emailed us and said, “Oh, my God, it just makes complete sense.”

That’s because Audrey and I have the same culture. And sometimes you have to wait a little longer to find that person who fits with your culture. And you have to say “no” a little more. And when nothing’s happening in your love life in the short term, that can feel like a thankless task. It can feel like a thankless thing to have to do to keep saying “no” when it doesn’t feel like there are any other opportunities around. That’s what makes it brave. But the rewards for being brave are profound.

For those of you who want to be brave in your love life and want to find not just a relationship, but a relationship that lasts, because the person you find fits with your culture, go over to lovelifereplay.com, because the entire session that I did on October 22 live with thousands of people was really at its deepest level about finding someone whose character fits with the culture of your character, your life. And when you find someone like that, those are the relationships that go the distance.

So, come join me if you’re sick and tired of coming up against the wrong culture in dating and the wrong people, but you want to find the right one and know how to bring an energy that creates more commitment, come join us. I look forward to seeing you there. And thank you as always for watching this video. I look forward to reading your comments.

The post #1 Question to Ask Yourself Every Time You Meet Someone New appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

Why is it that we seem to be attracted to certain people who only give us scraps of attention? It often happens when we tell ourselves that someone is so rare and desirable that they’re worth holding on to even if they don’t want the same things as us.

In today’s video, I’ll show you the trap that many people end up falling into, plus one key quality that results in more commitment. Whether you’re sick of superficial situationships or want to learn how to grow closer in your relationship, this is for you!

MATTHEW HUSSEY

There is a quality that if we adopt it can change our lives when it comes to the willingness of other people to commit to us for a real relationship. There’s also a trap that so many of us are falling into that is consistently leading us towards casual relationships or flings or being used in situations that never go anywhere.

In this video, I’m going to start with the trap and then I’m going to talk to you about the quality that you can adopt today that will begin to change everything. If you want a long-term relationship, this video might be one of the most important videos of mine that you have ever watched.

Now, before we get into it, I just want to say hello to anyone who’s new to the channel. I am Matthew Hussey. For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people find love through relational intelligence and confidence. I just wrote a brand-new book called Love Life, and if you want to do a live training with me, I have one coming up in two days on October the 22nd, all about getting into a real relationship. So, if one of your big goals right now is finding a committed, long-term relationship, this should be essential watching for you. And it is only happening live this once. You can join this event for free by signing up at LoveLifeTraining.com. It would take you seconds to do that, and then come back, and then watch the rest of this video. LoveLifeTraining.com is the link. Go there now and I’ll see you in a second.

Okay, on with this video. Why is it so many of us are struggling to find commitment?

Well, let’s start with where many of us are beginning—wanting a relationship, maybe wanting it more than anything else in the world right now. But also, feeling like a relationship is really hard to find. Maybe even more than that, that attraction is really hard to find.

So, now, what happens is, when we find some attraction or when we find even the slightest hope of something that could lead to a relationship, we cling onto it. Why? Because when a deep desire for a relationship meets a scarcity mindset around the possibility of getting one, that leads to a sense of panic, desperation, and lowering our standards.

Now, what happens is we meet people who are only willing to give scraps. And those people, when they see someone who’s willing to lower their standards, realize that this is a match because they can continue to give little with all the things they want to get—sex, intimacy, in many cases, true emotional connection, emotional support, companionship. But they never need to give real commitment. They never need to make the sacrifices or the compromises or the true investment necessary to have a real relationship.

So, this ends up creating this worldview for people who want commitment, that no one wants commitment because their fear makes them lower their standards and lowering their standards makes them attract the very people who only want to give scraps, and then by investing in people who only want to give scraps, they start being convinced that the only people around are people who give scraps.

Now, people who give little have a vested interest in convincing you that you should accept little or that you’re not worth more than that. And that starts to feed into our own insecurities that maybe we’re not worth more than that. Maybe I’ve never quite felt enough. Maybe I’ve started to convince myself I’m not attractive anymore now that I’m older. Maybe I’ve been told my whole life that I’m odd or not the hot one or someone who’s always going to have a hard time in love.

But I have an internal story of insecurity that starts to meet an external force that is validating that story. But that external force doesn’t just come from the people we date. It can come from society and it does. We live in a world now where, to a scary degree, arguments are being put forward about the reality of the dating marketplace, and how all men just want a woman who is young and hot. All women just want a guy who is tall and muscular and has made a lot of money. And everything you need to know about how attractive you are in the world, you can break down to these kinds of metrics. And they also can point to why you’re having such trouble because you’re missing these key ingredients that make you attractive.

This, to me, is yet another form of messaging that argues for you to lower your standards. And I’m not talking about on superficial things like looks and status and how successful someone is or anything like that. I’ve long argued and do so in this book that those are the wrong things to chase. By all means, make sure that when you go for a relationship, there’s some chemistry, but chasing those metrics, I have been arguing for quite some time now is the wrong approach to finding happiness in love. But lowering our standards for how someone treats us or how much they invest in us is a losing game. And when we keep hearing these messages from society, that we’re not attractive enough, we’re not young enough, we’re not successful enough, we’re not something enough, we start to feel like lowering our standards is the only way we’re ever going to find some form of companionship, and that maybe a relationship isn’t possible anymore. So, I’ll just take what I can get.

I don’t believe in this world that is being put forward by people who talk in this way. Is it true that there is a reality where those things are the laws that govern people’s behavior in dating?

Of course. In the same way that for a gangster, their reality is crime and not being able to trust people, and always looking over their shoulder. In the same way that reality for a Silicon Valley start-up is one of an obsessive focus on unlimited growth that never ends.

Saying everyone cares about these things and if you don’t live up to this idea of what is attractive, you’re in trouble and you’re going to have to start really lowering your standards. To me, that’s like making a universal statement like “All anyone cares about is money.”

Now, there, of course, are realities where that’s true. There are enormous number of people who are driven predominantly, in some cases, solely, by money. But clearly, we don’t live in a world where everyone only cares about money. We don’t even live in a world where everyone is driven by money. There are plenty of people who live lives who have no care for having more money than they actually need to get by. There are plenty of people who choose jobs that are eminently capable of doing other jobs that would make more money but do this job because it feeds their creativity or it feeds their passion or their soul.

So, we don’t live in a world where everyone cares about money. But it is true that many people are motivated by money, and it’s also true that there are people who only care about money.

My argument is not that those worlds don’t exist. It’s that those aren’t the only world. There are multiple realities all going on at the same time. And we get to choose which one we want to live in and which one we are going to engage with.

I submit to you, are there people you know who have made choices in love, not based on all of these factors but based on how incredible the person is that they’re with? What an incredible human being they are or what an amazing teammate they are.

The fact that they’re buds, you know? This idea of, this is what you have to have, to have a relationship or to be worthy in the marketplace, is an insult to the things that transcend all of that, that are actually the things that make a great relationship, that you’re buds, that you’re in it together, that you’re a team. That you have something that’s bigger than all of that.

And by the way, it better be because since we’re talking about commitment, commitment doesn’t exist if it’s purely predicated on these transactional factors of you staying as hot as you are today, you looking as young as you look today, you having as much money as you had on the day I met you, what kind of relationship is that? What that means is what, the day I lose money, you’re not going to be with me anymore? I have to start to losing sleep at night, not knowing if you’re going to stick around?

Then what we had wasn’t love. What we had wasn’t a real commitment. It’s ironic that the very thing that people talk about are the things that will get you a relationship, these metrics that if you don’t live up to them, you’re going to have a really hard time and you’re going to have to settle for less, are the same things that make a relationship so wildly insecure because now, based on that idea, you have a bunch of people who are in relationships, thinking that what they have is love, when in actual fact, what they have is complete and utter superficiality masking as love that only exists as long as those superficial metrics are maintained.

And the subtext is always that you should accept what you can get and be grateful for it.

Now, my argument is that that is a reality and why on earth would you want to date someone in that reality? But that there are also other realities, realities that are far more beautiful, that look at human beings with a far greater respect, that are far less ugly and crude in their analysis of how we make decisions. And that there are people in that world that are absolutely worth meeting and dating and falling in love with.

So, now, we arrive at that quality I was talking about that can lead to more commitment in our lives. That quality is discipline.

You see, in order to not fall prey to a reality that doesn’t serve us and to only align ourselves with a reality full of people that do serve us, we have to be disciplined about being able to say no to short-term reward because often, the people who are giving us scraps are still feeding some kind of dopamine cycle for us. They’re still feeding some kind of hope that one day, the situation will change and we’ll finally get what we want. They’re still giving us a sense of progress, at least, in the very beginning when we feel like at least we’ve met someone and it’s not the case that I have no one. At least they give us a story. We can tell our friends that something that’s going on in our love lives, and that can feel like a form of progress. 

We have to have the discipline to be truly connected to what it is we want in this life to what feels good to us, to the kind of relationship that is going to make us happy. And then be disciplined about saying no to what clearly does not represent that. Even if there’s not someone else to say yes to right now because even when it feels like there’s nothing but blank space in our love lives, if we are saying no to the wrong reality, we are still saying yes to the right one. We are saying yes to the kind of culture that we want to create in our love lives. We are saying yes to the kinds of relationships that are beautiful to us, that are deep, that are magical, that are predicated on the right things.

And when we’re able to be disciplined in this way, what we get is more respect. We are respected for being someone who is aligned with our intentions, for someone who has the internal sense of integrity that says, “I’m not going to be way late from the thing that really matters to me, the kind of relationship that I really want.”

And that respect ends up being one of the primary reasons that we get attraction, and that we get other people’s discipline in continuing to invest in us. This is one of the great ironies is that I believe on our part, we need more discipline in sticking to what we actually want. But what we also need is someone who has the kind of discipline that makes it possible for them to have a real relationship. Because one of the things that a long-term relationship requires is discipline. It requires someone to show up day after day, and the days where they don’t feel like it or when the honeymoon period has worn off. That’s when commitment actually matters. Commitment doesn’t matter when there’s just this velocity to the attraction because everyone’s really excited and it feels good and our dopamine is just firing constantly.

Then you don’t need commitment. There is just this force pulling you forward toward something. But when that force subsides in the same way that at a certain point when you have a great business idea, at some point, the reality will set in of running a business is no longer an idea that you’re excited to talk about, that’s when commitment steps in. And commitment, at that level, requires discipline.

The most powerful quality will wind up being the respect that you engender in other people through your discipline about staying true to what you want. 

And by the way, the respect that people have for us when we’re like this, when we have that discipline, is evergreen. That is something that can last a lifetime, which cannot be said for many of these other qualities we’ve been talking about. Our looks will fade. We may very well go through ups and downs financially. Men, we will not look as strong and as manly as we do today when we are 80. We are not going to maintain these things. But respect is something that can be maintained.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t work on the things that you can work on. Work hard if you feel inclined to. Put yourself in a nice position financially. Become as hot as you can be without doing anything that compromises your values or obsessing over it.

Do what you can do to become attractive superficially to a wide range of people. There’s nothing wrong with that. But never be under the assumption that if you don’t match up to other people in those areas, there is going to be no one in the world that sees your value, a value that transcends all of those things.

I would argue that for me, what is absolutely a truth is that the person worthy of your commitment is, by definition, the person who sees your value beyond those things. So, you have to 1) give yourself more credit for being attractive beyond those things that the world is telling you or certain people at least are telling you, you have to have or you’re worthless. We also have to give a little more credit to the world that just because some people in the world tell us that this is all that matters, it doesn’t make it true. That there are many people in the world who don’t think like that. And there are many people in the world that can’t wait to give you credit for how amazing you are as a human being and that the ones that do are the ones that you will have the greatest relationships with and the ones that don’t are people that you should be thankful you missed out on along the way.

Now, if you want to come and work on this with me in a practical way, because this video, I’ve been putting forward a point of view, but my work in my actual coaching is showing people how to make this practical in their lives. I want to show you how to do that. And in two days, I am running a big live event on exactly how you can apply the things that I’m talking about in this video. It is called “Casual to Committed: The Three Core Principles for Getting to Commitment without Games and without Ultimatums.” And we have many thousands of people already signed up for this. It’s a free event, but it’s an event that is only happening this once.

So, come and join us. If you’ve never done a live coaching session with me, then you have to come. And if you have come before, well, you have to come again because we worked really hard on this one, and it’s my final one of the year.

So, come join us. Go to LoveLifeTraining.com to sign up for free. I will see you there on Tuesday, in two days’ time, and I can’t wait. Thank you so much for watching. As always, be well, love life, and I’ll see you on Tuesday.

The post How to Attract People Who WANT Commitment appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

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Have you ever found yourself in the “casual zone” with someone you’re dating . . . and it seems impossible to escape it? When it started, you were fine with them saying, “Let’s see how it goes,” but you soon found yourself stuck in limbo with all your friends asking if you were in a relationship . . .

While there are many positive reasons to take things slow when dating someone, there are 4 specific scenarios where “just seeing where something goes” can lead to heartbreak.

In today’s video, I walk you through each situation so you can figure out where you stand and move things forward. The sooner you watch this, the faster you’ll know if a relationship actually has potential.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

One of the challenges of dating today is that so many people want a relationship and keep ending up in casual situationships of some kind. 

Is there anything that we ourselves might be doing to contribute to being put in the casual zone without even knowing it? That is what this video is about today, and I think it’s going to help a lot of people. 

I am Matthew Hussey, by the way. If you’re new to this channel, I have a New York Times—I have two, two, David, New York Times best-selling books. One of them is called Love Life. The other one is called Get the Guy. It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago. Go get it, though. It still matters. I mean, I worked very hard on it. But we also have done lots of live events over 17 years, including retreats, and tours, and webinars. 

And why am I telling you all of this? Well, because before you watch this video, you might be thinking, I want to come to one of your live events. Well, you can. On October 22nd, I’m doing an online event that is all about getting to commitment. 

If you are sick and tired of this dating culture where nothing ever seems to materialize into something real, and you want to make sure you’re one of the people that actually does find a real and lasting relationship, you have to be there. It’s going to be super practical. It’s going to make a big difference. I really believe it’s going to be a game-changer for the people that are there, and it’s free. 

So you can go and sign up right now at LoveLifeTraining.com. Open a little browser, type in LoveLifeTraining.com. It will take you to a registration page. You can just join right now for free, and I will email you the details so that you know how to access it on the day. That link again is LoveLifeTraining.com. Now let’s get to the video. 

There was a story I heard recently from someone who asked me a question, some advice for their love life. I was actually on the podcast “Fake Doctors Real Friends” with Zach Braff and Donald Faison, which was really exciting because I grew up a very big “Scrubs” fan and well, there were the “Scrubs” lads sitting in front of me. 

But midway through the podcast, their producer joined to ask me a question and she said, “Well, I’m dating this woman who lives in another town. It’s long-distance. And while, you know, I want some advice for the situation,” and I said, “Well, what do you want?” She said, “Well, I’m just seeing where it goes.” And I said, “But do you like this person?” And she said, “Oh my God, she’s amazing. You know, she’s hot, she’s sexy, she’s fun, she’s charismatic, she’s intelligent.”

She reeled off all of these wonderful qualities of this person, and she lit up as she was saying it. But when I asked her what she wanted with this person, it was almost like then she became very small and, kind of,  almost afraid to say it. And I said, “So you’re just—do you want a relationship?” And she said, “Well, I’m open to it with the right person.” And, I thought this whole conversation was very indicative of our dating culture these days, whereby a lot of us, maybe deep down want something more, but as a kind of protection mechanism, have shielded ourselves from that wanting. 

And by the way, I just want to say this both for her sake and for yours, there’s nothing wrong with just seeing where something goes. I think that there’s a beauty to that. 

I was speaking to Esther Perel, the world-renowned psychotherapist on the Love Life podcast, just last week. I don’t know if the episode is out by the time this video comes out, but, you know, you’ll see. Go check the Love Life podcast and you can see if the episode with Esther is there. It was a good one. But Esther was saying that back when she was dating, there was a kind of organic nature to dating. You’d go on a coffee date with someone that you thought was interesting, and then if it went well, you might see them again. And if that went well, you see them again. And, you know, in a sort of process that was rewarding, and surprising and fun, you would gradually end up in a relationship. 

And I think all of us deep down, wish that life was just like that all of the time, that we didn’t have to make very clear our intentions or discover theirs. And, you know, ask them what their intentions are. We could just let things unfold. And for those of us that don’t feel like we’re in a rush, or we don’t have the anxiety of wanting to get married and having a family sooner rather than later, maybe we can take that approach. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. 

But there is obviously a point at which that approach becomes a problem because we can find ourselves at a point where we’re investing a lot into a person that we end up wanting more with. But by constantly adopting this mindset, this posture of, “Well, whatever, you know, I don’t mind. We’ll just see.” We’ve actually inadvertently ended up in the casual zone with this person and find it hard to get out of that place. 

Hands up in the comments, by the way, if you’ve experienced this. If you’ve been with someone for months or years and still find yourself in a place of complete ambiguity about what it is and where it’s going. There is a point at which our indifference can backfire. 

And so, what I wanted to do today was, not denigrate the idea of seeing where it goes, but instead encourage everyone to think about a few scenarios where the “Let’s just see where it goes” approach can actually start to become more dangerous. There are four in particular I want to highlight in this video. 

The first scenario is when it means not being honest with yourself. 

So, I look at this on two levels. There’s one just being honest with yourself about wanting a relationship. If that’s the case, not lying to ourselves about how much we want to find love. Owning it. If I want a relationship, if I want to find love, I’m going to own that. I’m not going to hide it or pretend to be indifferent. But it’s also owning and being honest with ourselves about our feelings towards this person, which might have become very significant. And if we’re not careful, there becomes this real disparity between what the casual nature of it that we claim to be fine with and how we actually feel about this person. 

So, here’s a good question to ask yourself. If this person that I am like, “Oh, let’s just see what happens,” if they started dating someone else tomorrow, how would you feel? If you found out they were dating multiple people in addition to you right now, how would you feel? And actually, while we’re on the subject, how do you feel about seeing other people yourself right now? I mean, if it’s just a casual thing or if it’s not that big of a deal in the first place, then why not go date other people? Why spend all of your time and energy on this one person alone? Why not keep your options open? And if that, to you, sounds like something you don’t want to do, then you have to suspect yourself. Why is it that this person, where I’m just seeing where it goes, is the only person I want to keep seeing? Right? There’s a difference between what we’re feeling internally and what we’re saying externally. 

So, to recap, “Let’s just see where it goes” can be dangerous if over time it masks our true feelings towards wanting a relationship or this person.

The second place that it becomes a problem is if saying we’re just seeing where it goes is a strategy to attract this person, not the truth of how we feel. In other words, it’s not that we feel indifferent and casual about this person, it’s that we think that playing indifferent and casual about this person is going to attract them more. That there’s some element of being chill, maybe even a little bit hard to get, not stating our intentions, that’s going to make us more attractive. 

But by doing so, by employing this strategy, even if it kind of works on this person, who wants a relationship where the thing that works is not being available? That’s a bad relationship to end up in. Because what happens when you are available? There’s a very good chance that you’re going to lose this person’s interest, because the interest they had was never in you. It was in the dynamic that you had created. Never get yourself into a situation where someone is more in love with your absence than your presence. This is the problem with using it as a strategy. It is a flawed strategy because it gets you the kind of relationship you wouldn’t want in the first place. 

The third thing that makes the “Let’s just see where it goes” approach dangerous over time is that we’re not actually properly assessing the opportunity cost of giving this person energy. 

In the case of this person that I was talking to, I asked her, you know, “How often do you speak to this person? I bet you have some pretty long phone calls with this person.” There’s a time commitment to keeping this person in your life. Maybe you’re arranging to see them at some point soon. That’s both a time commitment, a weekend commitment, and a money commitment because they’re long distance.

Based on how passionately she spoke about this person, I can guarantee this person takes up a pretty decent amount of her mental and emotional bandwidth. In other words, this person is on her mind a lot, so that takes up energy. And, perhaps most importantly, when we like someone in that way, it gives us a kind of tunnel vision. 

That means that even if they don’t take up a big physical footprint in our life, even if we’re not spending a lot of time with them, they take up a big psychological footprint. And when we’re suddenly in the coffee shop and someone cute walks into the coffee shop that we might actually like, that we might have a real relationship with if we got to know them, if we were brave enough to say hi, but it represents a little activation energy to say hi to someone and be brave and risk rejection. Instead of doing that, we go for the easy path, the path of least resistance, which is texting the person we already know. Texting the person that we’re already flirting with, that we already know we like, even though we’re not actually getting what we want from this person. 

So this person now, who you’re not in a real relationship with, where you’re just seeing where it goes. I keep saying it in that way, David. We just have to create some kind of a loop of that—seeing where it goes, seeing where it goes, seeing where it goes. Could we create a four-hour loop of me saying that as our next video? 

The person that you’re just saying “We’re just seeing where it goes,” that person is actually taking up a big part of your life, and they are denying you other opportunities just by this dynamic existing. 

So, if you’re going to be casual with someone. If you’re over time going to keep saying, “Well, we’re just like, you know, we have this thing and who knows what it is. We’re just seeing where it goes.” Be honest about the true cost of this thing that seems really easy and light-hearted and low-maintenance, and I promise you, you’ll start to see it as less low-maintenance than it really is. 

And the fourth situation that can make the “Let’s just see where it goes” approach dangerous is when you’re using being casual as a cover for your fear of rejection. 

What you really want is to be able to have more with this person because you think this person is awesome, but what’s really scary is getting rejected by someone you think is awesome. And so, it’s easier to play indifferent and to keep them at arm’s length and to say, “I don’t really care. We’ll see what happens” than to actually state what we want and have that person reject us. We have to be very careful about our indifferent facade being a cover for a much deeper fear of rejection. 

And by the way, this becomes a form of rejecting ourselves, doesn’t it? Because we’re not even giving them a chance to reject us. We’re rejecting ourselves. We’re saying, “I’m not even going to try.” And we may not even be honest with ourselves about the reason we’re not trying. We may not tell ourselves “I’m afraid of rejection.” We may simply say, “You know, I’m just one of those people. I just—I don’t get that involved. You know? I just have fun. Whatever. You know, everyone takes it so seriously.” When deep down, you’re like, “I really want a serious thing with someone. God, I want a long-term relationship. God. I want to feel safe with someone.” But it feels very unsafe. It feels very dangerous to approach the thing that you really, really want. 

Now, look, I get it. We live in a world where I think dating has become really confusing. It’s become hard to want a relationship, to have maybe tried to have a relationship before, but to have met people who are non-committal. Who look like they’re someone who has a lot of potential, and then all of a sudden reveal that they weren’t serious all along, or that they’ve changed their mind, or to get rejected by people. It hurts. And when we get enough of that hurt, we become afraid of putting ourselves out there. And it becomes easier just to numb ourselves, to dissociate, to keep people at arm’s length, or to just start saying that we don’t really care that much what happens anyway as a way of protecting ourselves from all of that. 

And there is nothing wrong by the way, with not getting overly invested in the beginning. I’m one of those people who says that’s a good idea, not to get too invested in the early stages. And there is nothing wrong, by the way, with having such a happy life in your life already that you do feel like it’s okay if nothing happens with this person because you’ve already got you. You’re good. All of that is beautiful. 

But it does become a problem if it means that over time we stop being honest with ourselves about what we really want, and how we really feel about someone, and how much we could get our feelings hurt or heartbroken in this situation. It becomes a problem if we’re using it as a strategy to attract someone instead of being our authentic selves. It becomes a problem if we’ve not measured the true cost of giving this person our time, our energy, and our emotional and mental bandwidth. And it becomes a problem if all of this indifference is really just a cop-out for our fear of rejection.

And remember, at the end of the day, if you continue in a situation where it is just casual and you don’t know where it’s going, and you’ve initially sold yourself on this being fine, but over time you’re no longer voicing your authentic feelings, your needs, or what you would like to happen. You will lose yourself in a situation that is unfulfilling, unrewarding, and doesn’t meet any of your needs. But you will have ingrained a situation whereby the dynamic is, you not actually voicing these things in the first place. 

So here’s my question to you. What do you relate to the most in all of this? And if you’re being honest with yourself, are you in a place in your life where, despite wanting to go into dating in an organic way, you don’t ever want to cross that line into “I’m no longer being authentic, and I’m actually denying myself the experience I really want to have. I am putting myself in the casual zone instead of actually going for the thing I really want.” 

And if that’s the case, then my invite to you is to join me on the 22nd of October, because there I am going to show you a way to still go into dating in a relaxed, confident way where you don’t put too much pressure on something in the beginning. You’re not going on a date going, “So what are your intentions?” You’re not deciding you like someone and then the next minute saying, “So where is this going?” It can still unfold in a beautiful and natural way, but you can also direct the currents and you can direct them towards an actual, committed, long-term relationship with this person instead of just sitting back, being passive and hoping, which all too often leads to situationships that go nowhere. And, more than going nowhere, actually leave us brokenhearted at the end of them and having wasted an awful lot of time. 

Go to LoveLifeTraining.com. Sign up now. Come join us. This is really going to be a special event. We’re going to have people from all over the world joining us online for free to learn about how to direct their love life in the direction of their deepest intentions and desires. 

Thank you so much for watching this. Like I said, LoveLifeTraining.com is the link to go to to sign up now. Don’t go anywhere before you do that. By the way, if you click off this video, you’ll forget and then it’ll come and go and you’ll have missed it. So please don’t be one of those people. Get on board now while it’s on your mind and, well, I’ll see you there. Thank you so much for watching. Be well and love life.

The post The Hidden Reason They’re Not Committing to You… appeared first on Matthew Hussey.

“Were we even on the same date?”

I’ve heard this more times than I can count when people feel frustrated that their date didn’t ask them many questions . . . or in some cases, any questions at all.

In today’s video, I talk about how to tell the difference between someone who’s self-absorbed vs. someone who is just oblivious but really is interested in learning more about you. I also give you two sample scripts you can use when you want to bring up the issue in a high-value and low-pressure way.

FEMALE VOICE

No, because I actually did this and after the first date, and left me feeling like, I’m not even sure if this guy is into me because—

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Today, we are going to talk about the phenomenon of people not asking questions on dates, how frustrating it is, why does it happen, and what can you do about it. 

I am Matthew Hussey. If you are new to this channel, I’m the author of the brand-new book, Love Life, a New York Times bestseller. I’m also someone who’s coached people for 17 years of my life in relational intelligence and confidence and have helped people find love for a very long time. Welcome to the channel. Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell, so that the next time I release a video, you get notified.

Today, I’m watching a TikTok video about someone who was very frustrated with the lack of curiosity, shall we say, from the guy that she was on a date with. Let’s watch and see what she had to say.

FEMALE VOICE

If you’re going on a first date with a guy, sit, listen, and ask some questions—

FEMALE VOICE

No, because I actually did this and after the first date, and left me feeling like, I’m not even sure if this guy is into me because he didn’t ask me any single question on the first date.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Have any of you experienced this? Is this something that has been a frustration for you in the past? Someone literally sitting across from you, you feeling like you’re doing a great job of being a dinner partner and asking questions and being curious about this person in front of you because ultimately, that’s what a date is, isn’t it? It’s two people who are trying to get to know each other enough to know whether they want to do it again.

FEMALE VOICE

But I did agree to go on a second date and my best friend, Sophia—

MATTHEW HUSSEY

I always think it’s funny when people say that, stuff like that. “It was horrible. I did, obviously, agree to go on a second date and this is what happened on the second date.”

FEMALE VOICE

—this guy is into me because he didn’t ask me any single question on the first date. But I did agree to go on a second date and my best friend, Sophia, told me that any time that there’s silence, I need to learn to shut the F up and take a sip of my water and let him fill the silence and ask me questions. And then we—

MATTHEW HUSSEY

That actually is not bad advice. The idea that we, ourselves, might be talking too much to really create the space for someone to feel like there’s a part for them to play. When we are in the position of feeling like, if we don’t talk, the other person is not going to do all of the work for us. We’re more likely to step into that position of asking some questions. 

If you relate at all to being a people pleaser, to fawning as a behavior, to feeling like you feel awkward easily, then you may have a tendency towards feeling any silence, even before it’s occurred, making sure they never will be a silence because the idea of that silence is just so painfully anxiety-inducing for you. So, you say, “I’m just going to keep asking questions.” And then at the end of the conversation, you go, “They didn’t ask me anything.”

Sometimes giving them a chance to or putting them under pressure to can be a good thing. That doesn’t seem to have worked here though. Watch this.

FEMALE VOICE

—any single question on the first date. But I did agree to go on a second date. And my best friend, Sophia, told me that any time that there’s silence, I need to learn to shut the F up and take a sip of my water and let him fill the silence and ask me questions. And then we sat in silence for five minutes. And both times, as he followed up with that he’s had a really great time. And I’m wondering—

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Let’s keep watching.

FEMALE VOICE

I’m wondering if we were on the same date. Well, like, of course he had a great time. He was just talking about himself the whole time.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

I mean, it’s really good. It’s a great delivery. I love the idea that she left there be a silence and he just read, “Okay.” And just sat there and just kept sawing his steak. 

AUDREY HUSSEY

That’s something you’d do. 

MATTHEW HUSSEY 

Audrey said that’s something I would do. I do like not talking. Audrey, sometimes, does criticize me on dates for not talking at all. But in fairness, I think the charge I can avoid is the one where I’m just talking about myself. Audrey’s complaint is just that I’m not talking at all. Is that fair? Yeah, she’s nodding. Yes.

We do all have different communication styles. And I suppose to extract some value out of this situation, which so many people find themselves in, is worth figuring out how do we tell the difference between someone who is displaying very self-involved, self-indulgent, on the extreme and of the spectrum narcissistic tendencies to only talk about themselves? And how do we know if someone just has a different communication style than us, if they themselves are nervous and them ranting on is a form of nerves, and they’re never really getting around to a question because that’s their form of awkwardness?

Your form of awkwardness is asking lots and lots of questions. And their form of awkwardness is never asking any.

What I think we can stand to get better at is communicating, even hinting, at some of our standards in a playful way, in a non-combative way, in a way that doesn’t necessarily make things feel weird in the moment.

You should say, “Okay, I’ve asked you so many questions. I know so much about you by now. What do you want to know about me?”

And that’s a great way to actually, well, point out that they haven’t been asking you any questions albeit in a playful way. It’s non-combative. It’s also a great way of just forcing their hand and saying, “Ask me some questions about me. Are you even interested in knowing anything about me?” Which is a great thing to know at that stage.

Do they go, “Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay. Let me ask you. How about, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” Or, “Did you grow up here?” Or whatever they say. Do they actually seem like that woke them up out of a little spell, and now, they’re interested in asking you questions? Or does it now seem laborious to them and that they’re not interested now that they’re not talking about themselves which is a more troubling sign?

By the way, if you liked that script, that way of bringing it up, that was given to me by Matthew AI. And if you don’t know what Matthew AI is, it’s our brand-new invention where you can call, ask your question, and you will hear my voice giving you an answer to any love life question you have right now. ASKMH.com is where you can go and use this brand-new, revolutionary tool that we have available.

I do think in, not all of these cases, but in some of these cases, we need to take some responsibility for saying, “I am sometimes just going to take the mic.” If this person is willing to take the mic and talk about themselves, well, in some ways, what is a conversation? Yes, a conversation is an exchange of questions but it’s also just an exchange. If I ask you a question and you talk, at the end of you talking, I can then say, “Wow, that’s so interesting. Yeah, that makes me think about me in this way. That makes me think about that trip I took to Patagonia three years ago. And when I was there, I was really—”

You can then take the microphone and freestyle for a little bit.

Now, if they’re not interested in anything you just said, again, that’s a problem. But if they’re like, “Wow. Okay. Wow. That’s really interesting. So, how long were you there for?”

What you might find is, what it needed was for you to be willing to take the mic. Don’t always wait for someone to give you the floor. Instead, say, “Sometimes, I’m actually just going to verbalize what I’m thinking, what that makes me think about, how that relates to me.” I don’t want to excuse in any of this the kinds of people, especially the gentleman out there who this complaint is often levied against, I don’t want to excuse them of that really self-involved tendency to only care about what they’re saying and to only enjoy a date when they are talking about themselves and how impressive they are.

But I also think that there may be cases where the communication style is just different. I mean, if I look at the guys in my family even, a lot of the time, they’ll get together and their conversation will go something like, “Oh, so you play Mario Kart?” And the other person will be like, “Yeah, I play Mario Kart.” And then they’ll talk all about Mario Kart for the next 20 minutes. And they’ll come away from that and go, “I just met a really cool guy. I really enjoyed meeting him.”

Someone in our family will go, “Oh, where is he from?” “I don’t know.” “Has he got family?” “I don’t know.” “How long is he here for?” “I have no idea.” “What is his favorite character in Mario Kart?”

Let me tell you. Let me tell you the build on his favorite kart.

There’s a kind of exchange that goes on on that level, that doesn’t always take the form of factual information about the person. I’ll sometimes hang out with a friend for half the day, and I’ll get home, and Audrey will say, “How’s their marriage? How’s their thing? They’ve got this coming up. And how’s it—”

And I’ll go, “I don’t know.”

And she’ll go, “Well, what did you talk about for the last five hours?”

“I don’t know, babe. It was really good.” I was like, “We were just talking about ice baths and what they’re up to.”

It doesn’t happen the same way I know her conversations happen, which doesn’t make them worse. It does sometimes mean that the person in front of you needs to be educated on the communication that you want to have. Speaking outside of the context of the first couple of dates, if you are frustrated with how much the person you’re dating is taking an interest in parts of your life, things that are important to you, they’re not asking you questions about yourself, and you feel like you’re always the one who’s showing curiosity about them and never the other way around, that’s not something you should just ignore and say, “Well, we’re different communication-wise in that department.”

You have to also pay attention to what your needs are and say, “This is imbalanced. It’s not fair that I always take an interest in this person and that they don’t take an interest in me on this level.”

And that might mean sitting someone down or saying to them, “Hey, can we talk about something? Is now a good time? It’s not a huge thing. I just wanted to—it’s been on my mind, so I wanted to bring it up.” And saying to someone, “Is now a good time?” is great because what it says is, I’m not going to ambush you with this thing where you’re suddenly going to be like, “Well, why are you criticizing me out of nowhere?”

I’m actually creating a space right now, a compartment of time for us to actually talk about this. And you’ve given me permission to talk about it.

And if they say, “Okay, yeah. What’s up?”

You say, “Look, it’s not a huge deal but it is something that has been on my mind. And I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose but I did want to talk to you about it so it’s not just in my head. I feel like I ask you lots of questions about you and take a big interest in your life and in knowing you better because I want to get to know you better. I love getting to know you better. But I don’t feel like you do the same with me. You never really ask me questions about myself or my life. And I feel like at this point, I know a lot more about you than you know about me. And that makes me feel like you’re just not interested in me. And that may not be true but that’s how it comes across to me. So I wanted to just let you know and talk to you about it.”

Having that conversation, it brings it all out into the open. And it’s not making someone a bad person and it’s not making a huge deal out of it. It’s allowing them the benefit of the doubt, that they don’t mean badly, and it may not even be something they realize. But it’s affecting you. That’s the important part. Like, “It’s been on my mind.” This is your chance to educate someone on what you need. And in a sense, this whole video I’m making here isn’t really about who’s right or wrong although clearly, in conversations where one person dominates and only talks about themselves, there is a more selfish behavior on one side of that conversation.

But if we take it out of the realm of that which conjures up an image of a not so pleasant person, and we just look at, there is a big communication difference here and really, the only important thing is figuring out whether someone can actually start to adapt their communication in certain, important ways that can make me happy, that this person can hear something that is a challenge for me, and can respond with growth to that, can respond with adapting to that. If for no other reason, then deep down, they do actually really value what this relationship that we have and that they would absolutely not let that relationship go bad for the sake of forgetting to ask questions sometimes.

That’s what we need to figure out about the person we’re with.

And if it is still early dating and it feels too early to have a very intense conversation about this, and they ask you out on date 3 after this woman’s experience of feeling like dates 1 and 2 were just very one-sided—

FEMALE

Well, of course, he had a great time. He was just talking about himself the whole time.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

You can always just pick up the phone to them and say, “Hey, what’s going on? I hope you’re well. Hey, listen. I do want to see you again. And I have a great time with you. I think you’re super attractive and you’re funny and compliment, compliment. But I got to be honest. I feel like when we’re together, I ask you loads of questions about yourself and I’m super intrigued and wanting to know about you. And I always feel like I leave the date and you don’t know anything more about me because you don’t really ask me about me.”

That takes bravery. But when you’re at the point that this woman is, what do you have to lose? You don’t want to keep indefinitely dating someone where you feel unfulfilled by the level of curiosity and interest they take in you. But if you do think this person is attractive enough that you’re considering going on another date with them, then pick up the phone and have that conversation. And if you can still say it with a smile, if you can still say it with a little bit of a laugh and not taking yourself too seriously, you’re not lecturing them. It’s not your job to teach them anything. It’s just your job to find out if they know what they’re doing, and if they can respond to a little bit of feedback, that will tell you everything you need to know.

And by the way, there’s every chance that that person says, “Oh, my God. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t even know I was coming across like that. Yes, I’d love to see you again and yes, be prepared because I’m going to have a hundred different questions for you.”

Or they’ll go, “Well, I wasn’t doing that. And I thought we were having an—sorry. I thought we were having—”

You’re going to go down that road and then you’re going to go, “Okay. It was nice to know you.”

If someone really makes you feel weird about having had that conversation, especially if you had it in a nice way, then you have even more of an answer about date 3 and whether you should go on it.

So, I hope this encourages a bunch of you to, well, a) realize that you’re not alone. If you keep going on dates and finding people are just talking about themselves, b) empower you to, on the date, not wait for someone to give you the microphone but to take the microphone and to speak and to take up space to make you realize that you can have standards as early as a first date but when you communicate standards earlier, it has to be more playful and it can be with more of a wink. And that there is a way even if you are someone who finds yourself in a relationship with someone to have this conversation in a way that doesn’t make someone a bad person but instead, brings attention to something that has been bothering you to see whether it can get better.

I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you though. Don’t forget to ask Matthew AI a question if you haven’t already, ASKMH.com is the link for you to be able to do that. If you finish this video, and you go, “God, I have a question I’d really love you to make a video on,” go ask Matthew AI right now. I guarantee, he, it, clone me, will have an answer for you.

So, go check it out, ASKMH.com. Be well, friends, and love life.

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Have you ever suffered a loss you’ve never really moved on from? It could be someone you loved. It could be a failure, or the loss of a life you thought you would have. It could be trauma that goes back to childhood. 

The good news is, you can heal. I had the enormous privilege of hosting world-renowned grief expert David Kessler at my Retreat in Florida this year. In this week’s video, you’ll hear his profound advice for what it really takes to move on and truly heal from our biggest losses.

Matthew Hussey  

Today’s video is going to be a really, really special one. A dear friend of mine, David Kessler, made a guest appearance on my Live Retreat in Florida this year, and he blew people away. David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief and the stuff he talked about in this session, it should be required listening for everybody who wants to overcome pain in life, heal from past grief, and move on to a happier life. 

David changed my life. We did a session together. There wasn’t supposed to be a session. I was supposed to be interviewing him, and in the middle of the interview, what he was saying just, I mean, it broke through any defenses I had professionally, and it allowed me to release some things that I’d been holding on to. So he just has that ability to break through.

See if this does that for you. I think it will. I’m so excited for you to watch this. This is David Kessler. 

I want to start on what may seem after so many years of doing this for you, David, like a painfully simple question, but why is it important that we grieve? You know, I know that everyone would have, you know, everyone in this room would have some kind of bumper sticker answer to that, a cliched answer to that, and yet so many of us avoid grieving because we don’t want to open that door. Whether we’re grieving a person that is no longer here, whether we’re grieving a person that is still here, whether we’re grieving a life that was lost, a job that was lost, a future that was lost, a family that we never had and lost the opportunity to have. We all have things every no one in this room hasn’t been touched by grief, and yet so many of us spend our lives avoiding it. 

And one of the things, David, that we’ve been talking about this week is that with anything that is difficult to do, if we don’t have a big enough why for doing it, we’re not going to do it. Logic isn’t going to get us there. We need a deeper reason that moves us to do it. So my hope with this question is that rather than everyone just going “Yes, I know it’s important to grieve,” everyone truly connects to the deeper why of why does life get better? How do we get helped if we actually choose to do the difficult work of grieving? 

David Kessler  

Okay, I’ll give you the bumper sticker, and the bumper sticker is true, and then I’ll go for a deeper answer. But the truth is, those who grieve well, live well. Those who grieve well, live well. 

Matt told you a little bit about my life, I want to also just say, not only did I have to say goodbye to my mother, and by the way, before I go into this, I want to just mention triggers. I call them activators, they’re those intense reactions. Our norm is if we are triggered, we often run. We want to protect ourselves. We want to step out of the room. “I’ve been triggered, let me walk out of the room,” because I might say something that activates you, that triggers you. 

I want to invite you to consider your triggers for grief, for trauma, for old wounds, whatever they may be for, I want you to consider them a map of where your pain is and a map to your healing.

And so, we all inherently know how to run out of the room if we get triggered, but I want to invite you to try to stay present and get curious. It’s so hard to do. I do this myself. When I go into a wound, I like, try to stop myself and go, “Oh, I’m in it. Like, I don’t always get a chance to be this deep in it with a pause. Let me pause and be curious about this pain I’m in.”

So, when we think about, why do this? One of the other things I think about is I’ve done many groups like this, and you come to a hotel, and I remember one time coming to a hotel and having my meeting room full of people, and next door was the realtors, and down the hall was the nurses, and around the corner was the Kiwanis Club and all that. At the end of the day, the staff came by as we were wrapping up, and they said, “What were you talking about in here?” And I said, “Why do you ask?” And they said, “Because your group was laughing the most.”

And I said, “Grief.” And they said, “What kind?” And I said, “The kind you have when there’s a change you didn’t want to happen.” And they couldn’t understand it. 

But here’s the thing, that group cried deeper and laughed hardier. Loss and grief and healing expand our bandwidth. 

I ran into in my neighborhood, a woman who worked with me years ago, maybe 30 years ago, and we’re just walking, I’m walking my dog, and I ran into her, and she says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been following your career. I did it.” I’m like, “I’m a neighbor.” And she said, “I’d love to be friends with you, but it would just be too depressing.”

And I said, and I actually thought this, I don’t know that I said it, but I thought “You’d be surprised if you’re with me, I think I’m one of the most fun, loving people in the world. I mean, I love joy, I love happiness, and I appreciate it and how fleeting it can be and how precious it is.” And I have been through I can remember in my childhood, we talk about the death and the shooting and all that of my mother. But before that—my son, obviously. But before that, I grew up with parents who had wonderful hearts. I can say that because I knew their hearts. But my father had such unattended rage, and I remember him coming in and being after me and running into the kitchen terrified. And I remember pulling out this drawer from the cabinets so that he couldn’t open the door, and him pushing the door and all the cabinets in the kitchen came down. That was his rage. And I remember my mother, who had unmedicated, we would call it bipolar now, and so, and with all that going on, I also ended up being sexually abused. So I have been a buffet of things. And you know, even with my own mother dying in that hospital when there was the shooting outside, a small note, my parents had me in the room when they had—and remember, this is a husband and wife, wife is dying—they had a monogamy discussion

Note to self, never have a monogamy discussion around kids. Not a good idea. Talk about screwing up relationships for a really long time. So I came out of this with a lot of abandonment issues, trust issues, abuse, I mean so much. And one of the things I have trained therapists for years, and they have always showed up and told me how they got into this work, or their helpers or coaches, because of what they’ve been through, and they were always evidence for me that healing is possible, and if I can hope for anything today, with me sitting with you, that I can be evidence that no matter what you’ve been through, and I’m sure it has just been brutal at times, that I can be evidence that you can find healing too.

So, why to live? To live fully? To enjoy this life we’ve been given in spite of the wounds of others. 

Matthew Hussey  

I love the line that you said, “Grief is a change you didn’t want to have.” 

David Kessler  

Yes. 

Matthew Hussey  

And how diverse of an umbrella, how wide of an umbrella that is for so many different experiences. 

David Kessler  

Yeah, we think it’s about death, and of course, it is, but it’s also about the parent. You didn’t have the childhood, you should have had, the relationships, all of those things, neglect. There’s a million grief and losses in the world.

Matthew Hussey  

So we talked about, why. How? How can we grieve? 

David Kessler  

What we run from pursues us, and what we face transforms us. What we run from pursues us and what we face transforms us. 

Now, here’s the thing people, probably outside of these rooms, don’t understand. People will go, “Oh, they’ve been through loss, they’ve been through grief. They’ve touched the pain. They touched the hot stove.” For a lot of you, the hot stove fell on you. You didn’t touch it. It fell on you. And so, part of this is, be with it. 

Now, here’s the thing, it is as simple and as complicated as feeling it, we can’t heal what we don’t feel. And one of the simple things to think about is we’re one of the first generations that has feelings on feelings, right? “Oh my gosh, I’m so angry. But angry is inappropriate. I shouldn’t feel anger. Let me toss it behind me. Half felt, Oh, I’m so sad. Oh no, but someone else has it worse than me. And what about everything that’s happening in the world? I mean, mine is nothing.” I minimize it. I toss it behind me. 

We have all these half-felt feelings behind us, and we never feel them. And what happens? People always say, “David, you don’t understand. If I started crying, I would never stop.” And I tell them, “I have sat with 1000s of people, and they have all stopped crying. They may cry again someday. I would imagine they would if they’re human. But they all stopped.”

You know, one of the things our wounds of our childhood does is, when we’re in pain, it whispers to us, “You might be in this pain forever,” and you’re like “crap”. And that’s not true. No feeling is final. No feeling you have is final every feeling is going to change. So it’s about being present and feeling it.

Matthew Hussey  

How do we create moments for that? Do we wait for them and when they strike, not run away? And what does not running away practically look like? Or do we proactively pursue those moments?

David Kessler  

You have to do none of that. What’s in front of you is your healing. Let me give you an example.

We’re judgment machines. We’re always judging. What if I walked into this room and I went, “Oh my gosh, I got to find an audience for my healing. Let me find, I need this specific—Oh, there you all are. Not the right audience. You’re not the right audience for me.” What would happen, even if I thought that subtly, so subtly, I thought that? You know what would happen? You would feel it. You would feel on some level “David doesn’t feel right about being with us.” And it would bring a disconnection to us. 

How do I know you’re the right audience today? Because you’re here, because you’re in front of me, you’re the ones that showed up to dance today. You’re exactly the right person. You are exactly the right audience for my healing. That’s exactly the right person for my healing.

You know, I remember that day we talked and on that walk and you said something about, you know, “I feel like there’s something here”, like, you know, “we’re going to be friends.” And I said “It can’t work one way. I can’t be here for your healing without him being here for mine too.”

And that’s true with every single situation, every single person is our healer, is our teacher. Doesn’t mean you like them. Doesn’t mean you approve of what they do or how they treat you. But there, for your healing. Every situation is a clue. So, the question becomes, “Here I am today. What’s up for me? What’s up for me today?”

Matthew Hussey  

For people who relate to feeling something and then they almost shut it down, we’re so used to that, right? 

David Kessler  

Correct. 

Matthew Hussey  

We start crying, and we wipe away the tears, and we say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We kind of immediately lock it up again. We snap ourselves out of it.

David Kessler  

Right. 

Matthew Hussey  

And for some people, they may not even get there. There will be people in this room who will say, “I just feel completely numb, like, how do I access it when I just feel numb, I feel so disconnected?” So perhaps that’s a two-parter. But what can people do who feel like something comes up for them, but there’s almost an instinctive and reflexive shutting of shutting down? 

David Kessler  

Because you needed to, because you needed to protect yourself in the past, and you’re trying to protect yourself in the moment. 

You know, we talk about, “Oh, I’m being triggered.” Your mind actually isn’t triggered. Your mind is predictive. Your mind is predictive. It’s this amazing computer that’s trying to predict the next moment to keep you safe. And what does it have to rely on? The experience of the past. So it takes the past to predict the future. Warning, warning. And we see danger when there’s not danger. So, to recognize, “Oh, that’s the protective part in me trying to run from this. That’s the part of me that’s just trying to take care of me.” 

Here’s the thing. I always tell people like, “Oh, we’re so judging ourselves.” And they go, “I’m not judging myself.” We are judging ourselves, but I won’t even explain that, because we all know we do, but this work isn’t self-help. This work is self-acceptance.

When Matt says, “Well, what if they’re feeling numb?” to go, “Oh, all right, I’m feeling numb. Numb is good. It’s okay to be numb today.” Because here’s the thing, when we accept where we are, it magically changes. When we fight where we are, it sticks with us.

Matthew Hussey  

Yeah, because that’s—there’s always been moments on a Retreat, where I know certain people feel there is a judgment that says “I’m not feeling what I am supposed to be feeling right now. You know, I can see other people around me getting emotional. I can see that just resonated with everybody, but for me, I don’t feel anything.” And then they go into a story of, “Therefore, I must be broken.” 

David Kessler  

But who’s going to do you if not you? I mean, I get she’s doing this and she’s doing but I got to be me. I’m not supposed to do them. I got to be me. “Oh, look how much they’re crying. Okay, look how much I’m not crying. I’m doing me perfectly. I am doing me perfectly.” 

Here’s one more thing I want to say about that people say to me so many times, “David, you don’t understand. I’m so good at my work, but I’m so screwed up in relationships.” Anyone ever thought that? Yeah, right? So, most of us. You were doing relationships 100% correctly.

Like, if I could grade all of you, and you shouldn’t be asking me for a grade, but if you wanted a grade, I would give you all an A+, you were doing relationships exactly right. Exactly the way you were taught. You were doing it by the imprint you were given. You’re following the imprint. The work. And the imprint has the loss, has the abuse, has the grief, has all of it in it. How do we go past the imprint to come into this moment and just show up? That’s where the new relationship begins.

Matthew Hussey  

Isn’t David brilliant?

I remember the first time I sat with David, I knew instantly, “Wow, this person has a gift.” And it’s one thing to listen to it. It’s another thing to work through the stages that David talks about, to work through the things that he’s saying.

If this resonated with you and you want to apply what David is talking about on a practical level to work through something in your life, David has a brand new workbook out called Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. It is a practical workbook that you can go through to actually apply what he is teaching. 

So, go check it out. I’m going to leave a link. Grab a copy for you. Grab a copy for anyone in your friend group or your family that you know could also benefit from this, and let me know in the comments what you thought of this session. It was very, very special for me and for the people inside that room. I hope it was for you too. I can’t wait to read your comments, and I’m excited to know the results you get from going through the workbook.

Be well. Thank you to David, my friend. I so appreciate you doing this, and thank you to all of you for watching be well and love life.

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