You’ve been dating someone for months and you’ve gotten into a pretty good rhythm, but at the same time, things aren’t really moving forward either. You’re wondering: “Do they like me? I feel like they do, and yet, I don’t know whether this is going anywhere . . .”

In this week’s brand-new video, I give you 3 specific things to look for when you want to know if someone’s serious (or headed in that direction).

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Matthew:
So we have to stop asking whether someone likes us and start asking, “Do I see genuine progress?” So I thought I’d do a video today where I just pointed out some of those quiet signals, those unconscious things that we may feel but not necessarily be able to put our finger on, that show that someone isn’t serious so that you can not waste any more of your time on that person. And by the way, I want to take a moment to ask if you would like this video, subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell so that the next time I release a video that could help you or someone you love in your love life or with your confidence, you don’t miss it. Okay, let’s do this. The first subtle sign that somebody isn’t serious is inconsistency in communication or inconsistency in energy. Let’s start with communication. It may be that you’ll have a two-day period where they’re really active and then two weeks where you barely hear from them.

When someone is serious, there tends to be a sense of them at the, they may be busy, they may have a lot going on, but there is the sense that they want you to know that they haven’t fallen off the radar. There is the sense that they want you to know that they actually like you and that they’re interested in seeing you again. When someone feels like they’re very active in communication in one minute, and then they fall off the radar the next, that usually is a sign that they’re not serious about showing you that they want to be an ongoing person in your life. And that they want progression, which is a very important word, progression. Now, that inconsistency of communication also extends to inconsistency in energy. When you notice that there are quite significant or even drastic changes in someone’s energy, that’s often a sign that they’re not serious.

It’s usually a sign that this person enjoys having an experience with you but doesn’t actually want to create something with you. So I’ll give you an example. A very common thing I come across coaching people is they’ll talk to me about a date they went on where the person they were dating said very grandiose things. That person gushed a lot, told them how amazing they were, maybe told them that they haven’t felt this way before, made them feel really, really special and warm in their glow, and then they didn’t hear from them again for a week or two after that. Or it was really hard to get that person on another date. It might be that a month later, after not seeing each other for a whole month, you get back together with that person for a date, and all of a sudden you hear all of those same things again, and you feel amazing again because you feel their light, you feel their attention.

These are drastic changes in energy, and they’re usually reflective of someone who is enjoying the experience of very intense emotions when it suits them, but is only looking for that feeling. They’re not looking for a relationship or something they have to actually invest in. And by the way, this isn’t me saying that when there’s a burst of energy in the right direction and it feels intense that that’s a bad thing, but those bursts of energy tend to then represent a new level in the relationship, and they don’t go backwards. If you are constantly feeling like there’s this kind of burst of forward momentum, this burst of passion and excitement and adulation, and then all of a sudden it goes backwards, that’s a bad sign.

The second sign someone’s not serious is if they’re unwilling to project into the future. You only exist in the “now”. Now an example of this might be him talking about how great his brother is, and you say, “Your brother sounds amazing. I can’t wait to meet him at some point”, or “I’d love to meet him at some point”. And he says, “Yeah, he’s great”. Then you know that there’s a dismissal of that possibility because he doesn’t see you doing that. You only exist in the now. If you were talking about a place that you wanted to visit like Morocco, and he was saying, “I really want to go there too”, and you say, “Oh my God, we should do it together, that would be so much fun”. And he says, “Yeah, huh. So yeah, there’s a bunch of places I want to visit”. Then you know again, there’s a moment where he’s made you feel uncomfortable about suggesting something in the future. By the way, you’ll know this if someone has almost trained you to not talk about the future, because you know that every time you do, he goes quiet or makes you feel uncomfortable.

Now, obviously, I’m not saying that in week two of dating someone, you should say, “I can’t wait to meet your mum”. That’s going to freak someone out. But if you’ve been dating someone for some time, a series of months, and you still feel like you couldn’t say something like that, then there’s an elephant in the room that’s not being acknowledged.

The third sign someone isn’t serious is if you get the sense that you are standing still, and you may have had this sense for a little while, maybe for months, that there’s no real progression. I speak to people regularly who say, “I see them once a week. It’s really nice. We have a great connection, but I just don’t really know what we are, and I don’t know where it’s going.” And when I hear that, I almost get the sense that it’s almost a bit too structured.

“I see them once a week”. Well, why do you only see them once a week? Why don’t you see them twice a week? Why isn’t it you see them four times one week and two times the next and three times the next? And why is there this kind of pattern in this relationship where it never seems to move forward? It doesn’t ever become more intense. There’s not more of an integration in your lives. That to me, starts to become a giveaway that what’s happened is there’s this stagnated solidified dynamic that never really shifts. So think of it like groundhog dating, right? There’s this just over and over and over again, this is our pattern. When you really like someone and when they’ve started to become a bigger part of your life and you think there’s a movie you really want to see, what do you go, you want to see The Little Mermaid. You go, “I want to see it with that person.”

I don’t want to see it with anyone else. I want to see it with them. We just talked about it last week and how much they love that film. I want to go see it together. You think like that when you’ve got an event to go to, you think I want them to come with me. There’s not this sense that, oh, they’re one thing you do in your week. If you are honest with yourself, do you feel like you’ve been standing still for a while? And if you are really honest with yourself, is that standing still a big part of the reason why you don’t feel comfortable asking where it’s going because you haven’t felt any progression in some time? Look, when any of us are questioning where something is going, whether we should keep giving our time and energy to it, how much hope we should hold onto for what this thing is going to be.

One of the questions that we end up centering our attention around is, “Do they like me?” And we look for evidence that they do like us. And when people speak to me, they say, “But Matthew, they’re clearly doing things that show that they like me”. And that’s what’s creating the confusion is “They like me, but nothing more is happening.” “Do they like me?” is the wrong question to ask altogether, because someone can like you and want to spend a weekend with you, someone can like you and still want to have sex with other people. Someone can like you and have no intention to have a real committed relationship. Someone can like you and not be capable of having a committed, strong relationship. Someone liking us may be a prerequisite for a relationship, but it is not an indicator of a forthcoming relationship. So we have to stop asking whether someone likes us and start asking, “Do I see genuine progress?”

And if we can’t see progress, then we have to start valuing our time more than continuing to give it to someone who only likes us.

Now, I don’t want this video to suggest that if someone is showing some of these signs that they’re a complete write-off because we live in a world today where we tend to oversimplify things in that way. If they do this, then you should be out the door. And the reality is life is always more nuanced than that. But it doesn’t mean that we have to sit around and wait for an answer. We can be proactive. And the way that we get proactive is in doing all of the things that I coach people in that create a dynamic that we actually want and create a culture that we want. And then we see if someone can live up to that dynamic and that culture.

And if they can’t, then we move on. But the problem is a lot of people in their fear, in their tiptoeing around someone, in their scarcity mindset, they don’t actually proactively create the culture that someone else has to buy into. We all, I want you to understand this. I’ll make this point in a bigger way in a different video, but we all have the power to create our own culture. And that culture is what other people around us start to change to adapt to, or they don’t survive the culture. But we need to know how to create that culture. What do I say in early dating? What do I do with the amount of energy that I invest? What’s an inappropriate amount of energy to invest before I get more commitment? We don’t know the answers to how these things look specifically unless we learn them, and I want to invite you to learn them because all of your power is in the practical.

I have a dating training program called Dating With Results that shows you exactly how you can get something that actually goes somewhere instead of wasting time in something that isn’t. And it’s not just a training that shows you signs. It’s a training that shows you practically how to actually influence the result. And the best part is it’s free. So go to DatingWithResults.com and you can sign up right now. It’s going to change your dating life I promise you that. I’ll see you there. Thank you for watching this video as always, and I’ll see you next week.