You know you have a lot to offer someone, but you can’t seem to get out of the cycle of dating the wrong people—bouncing from one emotionally unavailable guy to the next. 

In today’s brand-new video, I unpack the dangers of settling for casual relationships and how they can rewire your mindset in a way that has a lasting effect on your love life. Then, most importantly, I share how you can get out of that crazy loop and actually see the potential that’s waiting for you.

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Matthew:

Before we start today’s video, I want to encourage you to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell so that the next time I release a video, you get a notification.

Let’s begin. There’s a real danger of dating the wrong kinds of people. The wrong kind of person could be a person who doesn’t want what you want, someone who’s just in a casual phase of their life, someone who wants to pick you up and put you down whenever they want. Or it could be someone who’s even more egregiously bad, someone who outwardly disrespects you or is mean to you, someone that we might label toxic.

When we date people like this, it’s not just bad in the moment when we might be experiencing bad behavior, it also has a lasting, dangerous effect on our love lives, and the people that continuously date the wrong kinds of partners or the wrong . . . We can’t even call them partners because a lot of them don’t turn into partners, but the people that continuously date the wrong kind of people often end up rewiring their mindset in a way that has lasting negative effects in their love lives and keeps them single. I want to explain what this effect is because I think a lot of people listening to this won’t have thought about it this way, but before I do, let’s just talk about how we justify dating the wrong people in the first place. Some people justify it by saying, “I’m just seeing where it’s going. I know that this person’s not in the right place in their life right now. I know that they’re just looking for something casual, but I’m just seeing where it’s going.”

You might even say, “I know they’re emotionally unavailable, but I’m just seeing where it’s going.” Other people say, “Well, I’m just having a bit of fun right now. I’m not taking it all too seriously. I’m not thinking about it too deeply.” And so what we do is we often justify the kind of casual dating situations we get into in the short-term so that we can enter into them for what are actually deeper reasons. For example, we might want to date this person that we say it’s just a bit of fun with because deep down we are really lonely because deep down we really do want to find someone, because deep down we’re craving intimacy, we’re craving connection. It might be that we really like this person, and we want an excuse to keep seeing them even though outwardly to everyone around us, it seems like a bad idea or this person has admitted to not wanting the same things we want.

We’ve now decided, “Well, I’m just going to go along with this and say that it’s just a bit of fun, and I’m not thinking too much about it because I don’t want to let it go.” So what happens is we use these casual justifications for deeper motives, deeper needs or insecurities or fears that we are catering to by being with this person even though for some reason it’s not good or not working. Here’s the danger of all of this, because by the way, there are clearly times in our lives that dating someone who it’s not going anywhere with is more harmless. We see it as just, “Oh, I’m just having fun. I’m just casually hooking up with this person. I’m at an age where I feel like I’ve got time to spare. I am really just in that playful time in my life,” that’s fine. I think it’s interesting the idea of casual hookups and hookup culture because I think nine out of 10 hookups aren’t that casual by the time they’re finished.

One person might feel very casual. Usually, there’s one person in the dynamic who feels like they’re going to get their feelings hurt. Something could be a casual hookup for us, and for the other person they’re going to end up getting hurt in the mix. Or it could be the other way around, it could be us who ends up getting hurt, but there are times in our life where we might be in that mode. However, when we know that we are looking for something meaningful or serious, when we’re looking for a deeper connection and we keep gravitating towards these people that clearly are looking for something else, clearly are just using us, that becomes very, very dangerous. And the reason is, because it starts to blind us to what else is actually out there. What happens is you get used to the behavior they give you as normal. You start to think that, that’s just how people behave, and it’s almost like in life that’s the only behavior we begin to recognize.

So if you date someone who’s an arsehole, you are more likely to have arseholes on your radar after that because you can go into a room, and of course, there aren’t only arseholes in that room, but everyone else will be in this sort of dull color that you don’t recognize. The person whose behavior mirrors the kind of behavior you’ve seen before, that person will be in color. You’ll see that a mile off because that’s what your mind is trained to see. I think of it like the race car driving example. When a driver is on the track and their car goes off the road, and they’re about to crash into the post, they’re taught, look where you want the car to go or look where you want the steering to go, because if you look at the post, you’re going to crash straight into the post even though you don’t want to, and it’s like the love life equivalent of that.

This person whose behavior we don’t like and we complain about all the time has become the post, and even if we leave them, we’re still focused on that post, that behavior, that dynamic is what we know. We’re not looking elsewhere. Our peripheral vision shuts down, and so when we see behavior like that, we somehow drive straight into it again, and that’s how you say, “How do you keep finding people like this?” Have you ever had someone like that where they keep dating these terrible people? Maybe you even relate to it yourself, and you go, “How do they keep finding these terrible people, let alone date them? I don’t even know where they find them. They seem to always end up with these people who do this exact same thing.”

That’s because those people have become the post, and the problem is if you continue to repeat those patterns with people, it no longer seems like a post, it seems like that’s life. That’s just what’s out there, and that’s when you hear people make generalizations like, all men do this. All people are like that. All dating is like this. We live in a world where there are so many different lives to be lived. There are so many different realities, but we get fixated on ours because it’s known to us, it’s familiar. One of the problems people have with this line of rhetoric is, “Well, that’s all well and good Matthew, but what do I do when I keep being attracted to these people? I feel myself drawn to the wrong people. I can’t control my attraction. I can’t control my emotions. It’s like that’s what I’m drawn to.”

The way I think about that is how I think about trying new foods. There is a food that at some point you did not know you liked. It wasn’t even on your radar, and then someone said, try this. Now, emotionally, it’s not like you wanted to try that food. Emotionally, you will have been drawn to whatever it was your favorite food was at the time. When we all look at a menu, what do we do? We scan a menu in a restaurant, and even though there are 30 options on that menu or 50 options on that menu, our brain scans the menu for the thing that we know we like, and we find that and we order it, which is why at whatever restaurant we go to, nine times out of 10, we order the same thing we order in any restaurant. It takes effort and curiosity to order something on the menu that is unfamiliar to us, and we’re not attracted to it because we don’t know we like it yet.

But when someone says, “Have you tried this before? And you go, no. Usually you go, “No, I’m, I’m good,” and they go, “No, try it. You’re going to like this,” then we try it and we like it. All of a sudden that can become something that when we see it on a menu we go, “Oh, I recognize that. I see it.” It’s like that part of the menu lights up to you differently because you actually know it. Sometimes what we’re attracted to is what we know, it’s the familiar. What we need to do is have a curiosity that drives us in a different direction that has us trying something new. What if I rejected this bad behavior outright? What if the moment I saw someone has different intentions than me and isn’t in the same place as me, I saw it as a cue to go for something different. And what if I started paying attention in my peripheral vision to people that I would not normally pay attention, to situations that I would not normally pay attention to, and that will be uncomfortable.

Someone very close to me in my life said to me . . . She was dating this guy in the early stages, and the previous boyfriend she had was awful to her, he treated her really badly, he was really mean to her, really disrespectful. And then she started dating this new guy, and it was almost unnerving to her that he was being nice. She didn’t know how to handle it, and she went to her mum and said, “Mum, I don’t get it. He’s being really nice to me,” and her mum said, “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” but for her, that hadn’t been a reality until then. For her, it was an alien concept. And even if something is good, if it’s not known to us, it can be uncomfortable. We can be fearful of it. It’s unmapped territory for us, so what we have to do is be curious enough to explore those new pathways.

When we start to get curious, it doesn’t involve believing something different is possible. It simply involves us becoming a bit of an experimenter in our own lives. What happens if I date a kind of person that I haven’t dated before, and really get present with this person and really explore what’s interesting or sexy or unique about them? What happens if I have a different standard with this kind of person in my life? How would that change things if I had a different standard and I stuck to it? What happens if I take a step back in my life and date no one right now? The curiosity, not the belief that it will definitely result in something better, but just the curiosity of, what could be different? It might look like being brave enough to say no, even though you’re attracted to someone when it’s obvious that, that person wants something different than you do or when it’s obvious that this person’s behavior is not the kind of behavior that you want in a long-term relationship.

And if you’re getting it in dating, then you’re going to get it in a relationship most likely with this person if you ever get there. It might look like going on a date with the kind of person that you would never normally go on a date with, trying a new food and seeing if it’s possible that if you actually get present with that and truly experience it, maybe it becomes a new favorite food, and it shows you that you are capable of being attracted to more than what you’ve been attracted to before. And when we get a new result, it’s a new reference point, and that result might be good, it might be bad, it might just be different, but what it does is, it shows you different is possible. It gives you a new reference point for how dating can be.

Oh, that’s weird, I just went on a date with someone who’s actually a really good human. Oh, that’s weird, I had a conversation that was much deeper than I normally have over here. Oh, that’s weird, this person’s completely different level of trustworthy, or this person keeps their promises, that’s new to me. And when you experience new like that, it gives you a reference point for a new belief that other things are possible, and that’s the beginning of a different kind of love life than the one you’ve had so far that keeps you in the cycle of dating the wrong people. People who waste your time, people who waste your energy, people who break your heart, and as I’ve been trying to highlight throughout this whole video, people who by being with them, literally wire your brain only to see people like that and not to see the full spectrum of how many incredible people there are that would make you so much happier than the person you’ve been going for all this time.

I have a program that I want to tell you about if you haven’t got it already. It is called the Momentum Texts. And this program is strangely relevant to this video because sometimes when we are trying to do something new, we need a very literal way of doing that. If you just stop here at this video, you might be left wondering, “Well, what does that mean I do? How do I get curious about another experience, another person? How do I take risks in new ways to meet new kinds of people?” The Momentum Texts is a program that gives you 67 messages that I’ve created that you can send to people, either the same people you’re messaging right now to get a different result or brand new people in your life so that you can see what else is out there.

These messages literally put you on a different path in your relationships, and sometimes when you don’t know how to do that yourself, seeing how I would write something, even if you make it your own, even if you put it in your own voice, that shows you, “Oh, okay, that’s how it looks different to what I’ve been doing.” So it’s a highly practical program, and it’s one that not nearly enough of you have yet. I know so many of you watch these videos. I’m asking you to get off the sidelines and come do something really practical with me. It’s $7, by the way, so this isn’t a big ask, but come over to momentumtexts.com and join me there for that program, and see what a different style of interaction and communication looks like that can put you on a completely different path in your love life. I’ll see you over there.