Matthew Hussey - What Makes A Happy Relationship?

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. I'm still at my wonderful friend's studio, Kate Dowdy. Today I bring you the first of a mini-series of episodes around relationships, which I have been waiting for for a while, but I couldn't start them without having my guest for today first. So my guest today is Matthew Hussey, who started from a humble beginning, you know, being a life coach on the cafes of London, to being the coach of Christina Aguilera, then having half of the corporate world listening to his advice, including Hugo Boss and others. And today he's just talking to us. So, hey, we're doing well. But the thing about Matthew is that in 2013, he had a New York Times bestseller called Get the Guy.

1:22And from there, he became more and more successful internationally with millions and millions of followers with events that change the life of thousands of people at a time. Wonderful human being. In the studio today, we have his wonderful fiance, Audrey, and my incredible ex-girlfriend and a true, true, true soul partner for me, Shelley. And yeah, their presence is to also show you what men do when they're afraid to say something that upsets the people they love. So if you find any awkward silences on my side, that's because I'm trying to find the exact words and to make sure that Shelley feels the love that I truly have for her.

2:08So with that, I think we're going to dive deep into relationships. You may not always like what you hear at those moments where you actually don't like what you hear. Take a note. It might actually be the one thing that you need to change. So, Matthew, you're here. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mo. It's been a while in the making. I am a secretive fan of the type that would, you know, like scream in the events in the background of your audience. But it's also because you tend to bring a very truthful point of view very gently. And I think that's really wonderful. Love and relationships in general, I think, is one of the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world today.

2:54You know, I attempted to write about the topic. I wrote a book called Finding Love six times, believe it or not. And on the sixth version, now 180 pages in, I decided not to publish it once again. Right. Which basically is because I found it very, very difficult to pinpoint exactly where things go wrong. You seem to be quite adept with that. So if I were to ask you first at the beginning of our conversation, why is it so difficult? Why is the is the love and dating world today so difficult? What a big question to start. Well firstly Mo I'm a huge mutual fan. I told you that as soon as I walked in.

3:36Audrey, my fiance and soon-to-be wife, she introduced me to your work and your book and it Solve for Happy was a book that was, for me, profoundly important and actually holds one of the great keys to love and finding love, I believe. But it really helped both me and Audrey. So I want to thank you for that work. I'm honored. Thank you. Why is it so difficult today? I think it's a cocktail of factors. If I start with one that I think you'll immediately latch on to, I think we're so overstimulated that we are, even if you, you know, I've been working on a book for the last year that's not done. And I, for the first half of working on that, I really struggled to sit down and write for more than an hour at a time.

4:26Yeah. I know the feeling. Really struggled and depressingly so. And And I started to recognize that I was so overstimulated. And I read a book called How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey that helped me with this. Really understood there's so many ways that I'm overstimulated in my life that sitting down to concentrate on one thing is really hard because as he would put it, my stimulation height was too high. and to sit with anything you have to lower your stimulation height yeah the distraction yeah and i think that there's a there's a parallel there when it comes to love that we are so used to our stimulation height being high that to sit with anything or anyone for long enough to really open up what's amazing about them what could be amazing about the relationship between you is really hard.

5:25Dating apps are, you know, when people talk about social media being like a slot machine, dating apps are too. You know, it's a very stimulating experience to be on there. And the dopamine hits are constant. So to actually wean yourself off of that and be on a date with someone and be present on that date and to give that date a moment to breathe before you get straight out on the next one it's it's tricky you know people don't not everything that's wonderful about a person or could be wonderful about a person is immediately apparent to us you know even the way we shop on dating apps is a strange experience because we're far pickier there than we actually are in real life most people have had the experience of getting to know someone at work and they didn't start by having a crush on that person but they got to know them they realized i'm really comfortable with this person at some point someone did something maybe there was a goofy moment a silly moment a playful moment a teasing moment and someone that never was quite on their radar in that way suddenly there was some attraction that was ignited and that's happened to people with their friends it's happened to people that you know tangentially in your circle but what you had with them was some time for things to breathe and to see some different sides of them even on a date you at least see someone animating on a dating app there's no animation yeah and the you know it's why i think it's always funny you know when friends say i had the most amazing date last night and the friends like the first thing is like show me a picture and then the you look at a picture and everyone's had the experience of their friend showing a picture of someone they had who they said was really hot and they had amazing time with and and they go because they don't they don't feel did you check your eyesight recently right but the truth is they were on the date you weren't yeah so aside from having different taste the big difference is that they were there they saw how that person moved and animated and interacted And what was the idiosyncrasies that make someone attractive?

7:46That takes being in the room with someone. And sometimes it takes a little time. And being in the room is something we're not good at these days. And taking a little time is not something we're good at these days either. Because we're looking for that quick thing that's going to be the answer. So I think that and then, of course, the paradox of choice is a problem. 100%. That's a real problem today. um and then i you know i think this isn't necessarily a problem of just our time but it's a problem in general is that we are we i don't think we've really decided in our love lives what's most important to us we we're going in hoping to be made to feel something by someone and and usually the people that make us feel something they're not always the best people we fit we put so much emphasis on feeling but we can feel the most intensely about the biggest narcissist about the person that we go on a date with and we go oh my god i felt amazing with that person but you know people certain people know how to give you an amazing date yeah of course they know how to be extraordinary they know how to create fireworks they know how to create maximum feeling but maximum feeling isn't the same as someone who's going to be an extraordinary partner and if we don't actually consciously say what are the things i most require what are the things that are the most important to me in a teammate then we're always just chasing you call them a teammate teammate yeah interesting okay let's go back to that keep going i think we're always chasing feelings and and we can't necessarily we haven't necessarily been engineered to be able to always trust the feelings we have that the you know we've all had a childhood that you know was probably less than perfect for a lot of us we've all had early partners that were less than perfect in terms of what they trained us to be receptive to and so our wiring actually can end up being kind of faulty where we keep chasing things that hurt us and we never we never actually learn to rewire what we're doing and that that i see is a massive problem because then you can't even trust your compass anymore yes people say you know just trust your instincts your boxing trainer of mine once told me your instincts will get you killed is that true yeah that actually is a very interesting if you if if in the ring someone throws a punch at you your instinct is not to block or to to slip your instinct is to blink and blinking is not going to help you when a punch is coming towards you in a riptide your instinct is to swim as hard as you can back to shore but your instinct can get you killed there because you have to swim out of the current before you swim in again it's a longer way but it's a way that will save your life and we have instincts in our dating lives that that you know emotionally get us killed every time because we we think oh it feels right i must i should go back if it hurts this much to leave this person yeah i should go back to them but those two that's a non sequitur yeah so so i think that we're also struggling from a lot of wiring that's not our fault but it's still preventing us from finding love today because we keep going down the wrong paths with the wrong people that's a lot of yeah i apologize i know i i i attempted to memorize all of them because i think each and every one of those points needs to be addressed you started from dating apps and yesterday i was with founder of muz the largest islamic dating app on the planet and islamic dating is very different than dating because Islamic dating has only one target theoretically, and the app is designed for that, which is to find a lifetime partner and start a family and so on.

11:45So, you know, his first comment was, Muslims don't date, they marry. So sort of it's an app designed for long-term engagements, if you want, for those who are very religious on one side. But he made the same comment that you did, which he said that most dating apps are designed very much like a casino. It's a game more than a utility. So, you know, the way you swipe, you know, the rate at which they show you a potential, a prospect that you would actually like is not every photo. If, you know, if they know that they have 10 that you may be interested in, they're not going to show you the 10 right away.

12:25They'll show you one and then three not interesting ones because you get the dopamine hit. If all 10 in a row, then you're, you know, there is no dopamine. It's like, okay, no, not this one, not this one. Oh, this is interesting. Maybe the next one will be interesting too. And then not this one, not this one, and so on. And that whole gamification of the apps is, in his words, and definitely for anyone who studied dating apps, is commercially oriented. They don't want you to find a partner. They want you to stay on the app. And when I was writing Finding Love, I have to admit, I did a ton of research on apps just to find an engineering method to master those apps.

13:09And then eventually, when I decided to write about it, I said, don't be on dating apps. They're not the right way to find anyone. What's your position on it? Here's the problem. I meet so many people who are now married and in relationships because they were on a dating app. Interesting. so i used to early on be a little bit more luddite when it came to dating apps so i really had my rebellion towards them but i i can't deny the fact that there are so many people who have found love that i think would have found love a lot slower or made it would have been a lot harder if they didn't have them.

13:55And where I really have a soft spot for dating apps is if I imagine someone coming out of a divorce, maybe in a later season of their life, they don't have single friends, they don't have a very active social life outside of their married friends, it's hard for them to go and just find communities to be in. And even if they found communities to be in, And it's not easy to isolate who are the single available people in those communities. It's even harder to find out who are the single available people in those communities that are age appropriate and also want me back. All of that is a real challenge.

14:37There's a lot of layers. And you can spend a lot of time in your life trying to engineer a life that makes finding love possible in an analog way. so when someone can be at home after a tiring day of work and understandably not feel like going out and being out there in the world and i relate to that as an introvert who half the time has dragged out of the house yeah yeah yeah you are a hundred percent you're a little actor you you know like i i enjoy i love people and i love i love connecting i always come away from a moment introvert character love connecting is very different yeah when i leave i always audrey will tell you this i always am i'm so glad i went yeah but getting me there is not easy so so i i really relate to that person who's in that position if that person can come home after a long day go on an app and find i met a woman just the other day she had she was in she's in her 60s now early in her 60s she had decided she wanted to start dating again after years of being single after her husband had perhaps had passed i can't remember but she said fine i'll get on one of the apps reluctantly she said this now this is not the norm but 15 minutes later the first person she matched with she's now married to that man and in a happy relationship and for her it apps are magic for her apps are yeah it's it's extraordinary it's hard to argue with that but we much like any other conversation about technology today we are talking about a tool and so long as you know i said to you before we started like i've really kind of eliminated so much of my phone addiction because my phone goes in a drawer now i don't use it regularly i check it a couple of times a day for messages and i really do see it as a tool oh i needed to come here to talk to you today i'm going to use it for a map but outside of that i am not on my phone trying to check what's going on or check the latest news or whatever i'm just not doing it i don't want to do that to my brain so i really am using it as a tool if someone can isolate dating apps as a tool and say i am just going to use them as a tool that means i might have a certain time of day where I check it or it could be a couple of times but what I'm not going to be doing is just scrolling.

17:24I might have intentional moments where I message back and forth with people because I want to connect with someone and actually move the conversation along instead of always being reactive and talking to someone for four weeks and never ending up on a date which doesn't serve me. If I can use it as a tool then it can be a tremendous benefit because if I go here's a good example if i go to my local coffee shop every day and that's like one of my outings is i go to my local coffee shop you probably interact with the same 10 people in that coffee shop every day if you're a regular yeah you wave hi whatever you know the faces the love of your life could be going to one coffee shop over and you never meet them because you happen to live on this street not on this one a dating app to me its greatest asset is that you'll meet you might meet the person who goes to a different coffee shop than the one you go to but how do you how do you find them how do you so what a dating app can do is allow you to meet the person who goes to a coffee shop that you don't go to that to me is the major benefit the enormous downside if you don't really consciously monitor the way you use dating apps and you don't get intentional is that what starts as a tool becomes a crutch and also a fix right an addiction an addiction 100 100 percent yeah i remember vividly back in 2019 you know when i started to research dating apps i just moved to london i was maybe interested in dating but i had this startup that was very demanding and so on and I was doing the early research for finding love.

19:17And at the end of the day, I recognized very clearly that I went on dating apps when I was bored. It's like I'm sitting back home after a long working day and it's like, yeah, it's interesting. Like swiping on Instagram and getting interesting videos, you simply are just like, oh, she's cute. Oh, why is he here? Simple, huh? And yeah, it's very, very unintentional and very wasteful and almost in my my my experience it's almost demoralizing because after a while you go like this is not working at all and it's just there i'm just there because i'm bored right yeah demoralizing is a good word because people burn out on those things and it this is what i mean by when we're not intentional because i had i had to delete instagram from my phone because I would realize like I'm 30 minutes into the discover feed and I didn't even remember going on Instagram yes exactly so it'd be like how did I get here and nothing that I just did made me feel good I'm leaving feeling worse than yeah when I came yeah and what is intentional on a dating app what how do you be intentional I think it's if I'm bored that's not a good reason to go on if i'm going to actually seek connection and say you know what i'm going to figure out who here could i be attracted to feasibly not who's the most attractive person on here but who could i be attracted to interesting differentiation yeah and let me message them and have an intentional conversation meaning see if i can have a fun exchange with this person see if i feel like there's a kind of respect in the way that they message you know because you can't find out who a person is through message but you can certainly find out if they're not respectful or if there's a kind of energy there that you that gives you a warning sign um do i is there a sense of progression because this is a very underrated word in dating in general these days and in dating apps is progression is I literally just had a woman on the street on the way here a woman came over and said I love your work you know you're you're you've really helped me can I ask you a question and I said sure she said I'm seeing this guy we've only met up twice he's in another country we text and we still talk I think we had the most amazing connection on the date?

21:58I don't know if I'm imagining it, but I feel like we did. Is it pointless? And I said, it's not pointless if there's progression, but has there been any progression? Progression can mean many different things. Progression can mean we've been texting and now we're on the phone together and we actually speak regularly and we're actually hearing our voices or we're FaceTiming, we're actually in each other's lives a little more. Progression is that this person and I decide that we're going to meet again and make a plan. And by the way, that the plan isn't just that I come to them and deliver myself to their doorstep.

22:38There's a, some kind of, we both have some skin in the game and we both have to put in a little effort. Progression is if we did that, are we planning on the next time that we're meeting while we're together or are we just seeing what happens again if it stays the same then that's a form of closure people need to start seeing an unevolving story as closure in itself yeah and what that's not what happens people see a unevolving story as a story with a story without an ending and i still am trying to get to the ending so on dating apps to me intention is let me be intentional about looking for stories that evolve.

23:23And if I notice that stories aren't evolving, if three weeks later, I'm still texting someone who shows no signs of asking me on a date, or if I say, let's go meet up, they also are kind of elusive and busy and whatever. Let me start seeing that as closure instead of seeing it as one more open thread in my love life. but then you know i think these uh this is a sign of i'm afraid i'm gonna lose them they might be again it's part of the gamification of you know just one more you know draw on the slot machine and maybe that is the one that's going to work right and and it's very difficult and you can see that fear in so many other ways like especially my lady friends who are on an app or going dating because they want to start a family, for example.

24:12And they are afraid to ask the question, are you interested in starting a family? And you ask her why. And she says, oh, because maybe I'd scare him away. And I'm like, yeah, isn't that the intention, right? Can we progress to finding out if this is on the cards or not, right? So there is that fear constantly, even though the market in my economic view is a market of supply, because there are so many opportunities out there people behave like buyers and they say they think that this is the only person that they'll ever meet yes well you know what's interesting when i hear what you just described i hear people being behaving only like sellers yeah exactly because if i'm always in sell mode i'm not worried about whether you can give me what i want i'm just worried about getting you interesting and that is a mode that when we're insecure in our love life when we feel like we don't have options when we feel like time is running out when we want a family biologically and our window is closing we start going into sell mode because we're just like i just need to try and get someone take it off the shelf yeah and buying implies that i go into this with a set of requirements and that if those requirements are my are my filter for how much i invest so many people as you rightly point out are not doing that i come i have the the people that come to me who are 35 and talk to me about how they want marriage and kids and they're currently entertaining a charismatic 22 year old okay maybe you found the one in a however many hundreds of thousands of 22 year olds who are ready they're in the same place you are and they don't just think they are right now but they're going to stay there yeah in 10 years maybe or maybe right now this is just a distraction and it's actually taking you away from a path that's really important to you because it feels fun to have something.

26:25Here's a big one. For so many of us, we have this bigger goal of what we want, but then something comes into our love life. Someone. And maybe we haven't had attention in a while. Maybe we're feeling lonely. Maybe we're feeling anxious. And this person presents as a distraction, fun, maybe sexy. there's the addictive kind of romance period of it all and so we settle for the the drug because the drug just takes us out of our fears for a moment it take it won't keep us out of our fears the longer we take that drug the more we'll get anxious and we'll worry and we'll realize they're not in the same place we are and now we can't get to sleep at night because we're worried that we have misaligned intentions but we don't know how to bring it up to this person because we're worried if we bring up our intentions they're going to go away it's a kind of user's mindset of like i need my fix and i don't want to give up my fix by saying what i really want because i don't i i just can't bear to go back to the painful feelings i'll experience if i lose whatever story i have in my love life right now because at least it's a story If I don't have a love story at all going on, then what do I have?

27:49Just myself. So people will settle for a love story instead of what they really want, because at least a love story is something. and and i see i really empathize with that because that's a hard thing to say no to it takes such strength and knowledge of what you want that to to have something alluring attractive interesting present itself and to still say no because it's actually not the thing that i'm looking for That's hard. And my view of seeing endless numbers of people going through this and making decisions based on that is that the only time people tend to actually change and start getting very, very intentional about who they let into their lives is when they have undergone enough pain that they say, this doesn't work.

28:49yeah the the to me the beginning of change is not a uh belief we we spend so much time especially in the self-development industry on on the power of belief but for me when i witness human nature belief is actually rarely the impetus for change necessity is the impetus for change interesting yeah you know the the plato said our our need will be our real creator when when we get to a place of, I can't stay this way anymore. It's too painful. I keep dating these people that don't give me what I really want, that don't really commit, that don't want what I want. And every time I come away from it, I get my high and then I come away from it hating life, hating myself, hating this person, feeling worse than when I came to this relationship.

29:43when people have enough of that pain there's a there's often a moment where they realize that the drug is no longer working and that i can't eat i can't settle for any less than the standard that i'm setting for myself for what i really want and nothing entertaining can distract me from that because it's a it's now a deeper standard that's founded on the knowledge that doing the other thing never works for me. I think that's very profound. I think that in my mathematical mind, I think this is the core of where things go wrong. Because if you say that there are 10 people in your vicinity that you may be able to accept to belong to one of, but there are 100 people that you can choose from, every one of those 100 people that you get into that adventure with takes six to eight months of your life.

30:38And we don't have those many years, right? That's by definition from the texting to the romance, to the high, to the realization, to the breakup, to the mending of your heart, to your getting ready is eight to 18 months sometimes. And each of those cycles, if you're in your thirties, basically gives you five of those, right? And from a dice point of view, if you're trying to find 10 and 100 people, then you need five throws of the dice if you want to be, if you're lucky. And it just becomes very unlikely because you're wasting time and your time is the most interesting thing. And yet, I think most people, I don't know how to say that, are deluded by Hollywood and by their one friend that happened to find that thing work, right?

31:31Like I used to have a person that tells me, oh, but, you know, he was a world famous opera singer and she was a new, you know, student of opera and then they got together. But, you know, he's like 60 years older than her or whatever the numbers are. And look, it is possible. And I'm like, yeah. I mean, how many opera singers, other opera singers do you know that had that experience? It's one and one is not a proof of a trend at all. So how do you change that mindset of even though your best friend ended up being picked up on a white horse somehow in the middle of the Zahara Desert and then got married in a beautiful wedding?

32:12Yeah, that's the only time that that has ever happened. And that's not a trend at all. You have to, I think, get to a point where you say, you know, I was talking about this in the context of in business. there are certain employees along the way that you it's not been working out with and i have in the past suffered oh yeah trying to figure out like what am i supposed to do here do i let this person go it's not working out there's a chance that more conversations might make it better i already had five but there's a chance that next month is the month where they turn it all around and that I just haven't quite communicated it the right way yet.

32:55And I said to an advisor of mine once, what if I'm wrong and what if this person turns out to be great? And he said, if you were speaking to your clients, the people that come to you for help in their love lives, what would you say? And I said, I mean, I'd say that the chances of them changing are one in 100. And he said to me, well, here's the view I take, Matt. I'd rather lose the one in 100. Than wait. Than have to. The 99. Yes, exactly. Potentially slow down, cause disruption or even chaos in my business. Yeah. I'd rather lose the one. And in our love lives, I think that's the mindset that we actually have to take on, is that love is hard because love is one of those things that we need a teammate for.

33:55So we can't on our own guarantee its arrival in our lives or guarantee it's staying in our lives. That's hard. That already puts us in a place that we're not comfortable with, which is one we can't control. We can control our bodies to a large extent if we want to go and lose weight. We know the certain things we can do, the levers we can pull. In our love life, we know all the things we, well, what I coach is all the things you can do to influence the result. But you can't guarantee the result. But I think that we can create inevitability on a much greater level than we ever realized. I agree.

34:34And the enemy of that inevitability is chasing the one in a hundred result. Correct. Because as you say, you know, if the right person is on is number 35 and this is speaking crudely, but if they're number 35 and what has to happen is you need to get through the next 34 to get to that 35. If you get stuck on number three. You're screwed. And and that's why there has to be people have to start looking at that in their mind and going. and by the way i'm i've got no problem with people changing this is this is what i always try to help people understand is that when people say but but maybe they'll change fine the burden of proof is them yeah like if they're changing we wouldn't be having this conversation i totally agree they're not changing which is why we're having this conversation and you're forced to defend this position that they may one day change.

35:41If they were changing, everything would be fine. They're not changing. And, you know, as my friend Dr. Ramani puts it, you know, in the case of certain people, they're so far from where you need them to be. Yeah, that it takes years of change. If they changed by 1%, it still wouldn't even be close to what you need. And there's a lovely way that she puts it which is that consider how hard it is for you to change anything yeah exactly consider how hard that is it is the the idea that yumo could suddenly stop being a thoughtful person or a compassionate person or grow hair or grow hair there you go right it's possible by the way if i really invest in it it's possible but would i right right yeah i think that's the whole point that when we realize i every year i want to be in the best shape of my life but when i think when every year it turns out to be way harder than i ever thought and i really want to so now you're dealing with someone that probably doesn't even want to you know what my crude very harsh mathematics when you say one in 35 i picture two dice right the chances of getting double six is one in 36.

36:58Okay. And I find that people sometimes throw a four, three, and they go like, yeah, yeah, but it's just two steps away from the six. And like, maybe if I just keep pushing the dice a little bit, they will turn and be sixes, right? How often have you ever seen that? It's just realistically unattainable. And you're stuck in that four, three, getting a seven instead of a 12 by the way which is almost 60 percent or 55 percent of what you need in your life and you're just hoping that one of the dice will tilt and and you'll get what you're looking for that what you just said is is profoundly important because when we're telling ourselves we're we're close we usually are not close at all no what what we mean is that we found someone that we really enjoy talking to and let's say we have amazing chemistry with them but it turns out that person is a horrible teammate they are not someone who is kind they're not someone who shares your vision for the future they are terrible in arguments they're not think they don't think of you when you're not around or they're not they don't anticipate your needs at all so when someone says oh if they could just be this people have to understand is that if you're missing something that's fundamental to what you need to feel peace within a relationship then you're about as far off as you can be the fact that you have chemistry you know that i always talk about there being four stages of importance in a relationship there's admiration which is literally you know you can know someone and admire them it doesn't mean that they've noticed you it doesn't mean that there's any attraction it just means that you from afar feel an attraction for them not important the second one is mutual attraction okay now you know you're aware of my existence i'm attracted to you you're attracted to me we call this chemistry we We call this a sense of connection, but a physical attraction.

39:09But okay, great. So there's a mutual draw there. It's necessary for a relationship, but this stage is not an important stage in the sense that you still don't have nearly as much as you think you have. Because the next stage is commitment. We have mutual attraction, but we're both on top of that saying yes. Yeah. Right. Very important stage. The number of people that grieve over being in stage two and not having that person. I sometimes want to say to people, so many tears are wasted on this stage. If you were in love with someone and you had the most amazing relationship and you both were committed to each other.

39:58And then that person gets hit by a car tomorrow. That's a tragedy. That is worth your tears. But when you like someone or love someone and you can't be together, apparently because of them. And you're not with them and you're not with the love of my life. And they're shopping in Target today. They're like they're going, they're watching a movie. They exist. They're on the planet. They're just not choosing you. So you don't have that crucial third stage, which is commitment. and then the fourth stage and this is the one people forget because when people say oh we have commitment that's the kind of love is all you need mindset right as long as we're committed as long as we say yes that's all we ever need but you also need compatibility yeah and compatibility is a much ignored fourth stage of importance which is why people get into so much trouble because there are plenty of people who have said yes to each other and then found out that their values are very different seasons seasons are very different the way they want to live their lives is very different and so they're just not that it doesn't work and saying yes doesn't make it work saying yes is is that okay we're entering into this but now we find you know if your idea of what you want to do with your life is you want to go out clubbing till 5 a.m every night my thing is i want us to wake up in the mornings and go and hikes and do this and do that and because of that we never see each other and we don't respect each other's way of life then we may have said yes but we're making each other miserable so those four stages are all important what i try to encourage people to do is stop obsess i'm not saying level two isn't a prerequisite for a successful relationship but stop obsessing over level two but it's intoxicating level two is just oh my god like so much joy so much excitement so much endorphins you know so much fun so much discovery and a lot of people will just find themselves in that stage and say that's it yeah but we don't give like a special significance to heroin yes we don't do you know what i mean talk to them it's not like we look at we look at certain things certain addictions or drugs or whatever we don't look at them and go oh if it really hurts that much to give up this drug maybe you should go back to it we don't say that a good way of saying it but in love we give things a kind of transcendent righteous label of experience where we put them in a special category and i i do like like rare rare heroin it's not it's not just there it's like this is yeah this is a very you know that dealer only made four of them exactly yeah it's not it's just to me and i i don't mean this quite as literally as it sounds but it's just another set of chemicals and it is very intoxicating it for sure it is and my god do i sympathize with i had someone come to me and say like nothing has happened in my love life for a long time and the idea of just waiting around for something to happen a certain point i might as well just enjoy the quick fix because it's all that's coming along so who are you to tell me i shouldn't enjoy the quick fix i kind of understand that yeah what would you say to that i think you have to be honest with yourself about whether the quick fix is serving you on the level that you really think it is because i think there's a lot of lying to ourselves that we do that you know it if we're not careful it becomes an excuse to settle and to kind of it becomes a bit of a cop-out because everyone is capable of finding the kind of love that they want you believe so i think that that people have to be willing to say it doesn't always come in the exact package it doesn't always come you know like to me part of growing up is that you all those things that you thought you needed when when a woman says i want him to be six foot two at a certain point you start saying this is ridiculous totally it's not going to make me happy totally but the longer we hold on to all of those things the longer we keep ourselves unhappy and and to me everyone can find the kind of love that they want but a certain point we have to start asking ourselves to define more carefully what that kind of love actually means because if we hold on to our fantasy idea of every little thing that we were with that we wanted or trying to get that's what makes people incredibly unhappy the same is true anywhere in life if you look at people starting businesses one of the struggles for a lot of people starting businesses is they apply the kind of the mindset of the one that they apply in their love life they apply that to business too yeah like i'm trying people sometimes say to me like matt you've it's so nice for you you've found your calling in life and i understand what they're saying but I almost always want to push back when they say that because really what I found is a career that exercises my abilities that I have I had some raw talent in and nurtured that talent into something that was useful that I enjoy that gives me variety it meets a lot of my criteria this is not the only path that could have met my criteria correct it could have been several different it couldn't have been anything yeah but it could have been many more things than this one yeah and but but when i see people trying to start businesses and they're looking for this idea of like the one in business what's the business that when i start it i'm suddenly gonna feel like everything just fell into place and it's exactly what i wanted no you you it's messy And it won't come in exactly in the form that you wanted.

46:17And the business won't be exactly what you anticipated. And you'll have to do things that you didn't want to do. And that's what it's like. And over time, you sculpt it into something that gets closer and closer and closer and closer and closer to the ideal of the way that you want to work and the way that you want to, what you want to create. And to me, love is no different. We will, life will punish us, I think, if we go into love with this kind of like wide-eyed feeling of this is, I want all of these things. If instead we go, no, no, no, what's the kind of partnership I'm looking for? And am I, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you could be with anybody, you can't.

47:01But does this person, are they made of the right stuff? Okay, interesting, maybe something could work. Am I attracted to them? because I need some attraction. Attraction isn't, by the way, attraction is not a sport that someone has to win. You know what I mean? It's not the Olympics. It's a box that needs to be ticked. Is it? Am I attracted to this person? Great. I ticked that box. But do you know how many people live for that sport? It's just crazy when you think about it. But we have to suspect ourselves if that's the only sport we seem to be living for. Because, okay, let's say in a successful relationship, what boxes need to be ticked?

47:43Well, okay, one is physical attraction. I even think sexual attraction is more important. Do you feel like there's a sexual chemistry there? The other, let's say another one might be we feel like we're loyal to each other. Okay, great. That's another box that needs to be ticked. We are compassionate towards each other. We accept each other. All of these are boxes that need to be ticked. When people go out and are constantly playing the sport of, is this the most attraction ever? I want to ask, are you doing that with all the other boxes? Are you also saying, is this the most compassion I've ever felt?

48:21Are you also saying, is this the most loyal I've ever felt someone? Are you also saying this person is the most supportive? Because if you're not trying to make someone win the sport of those ones, but you're always trying to make them win the sport of this one, that immediately suggests that you're not actually looking for a genuine, amazing partnership. There's something else going on. It's egoic. It's I want to be seen with someone, a certain kind of person. It's, you know, there's a shallowness to that. And I think that we pay the price for that. So let me try to organize this a little bit.

49:01You used the term the love of my life several times, right? You're going to find the love of your life. You're going to find the love of your life. I tend to disagree that there is such a term. The love of my life. The love of my life. As you rightly said, it is often described by terms and conditions that are not really necessary. Six foot two is like, I'm not six foot two. So anyone who has a six foot two on their list should change that. I wouldn't make the cut. Yeah, honestly. But the idea, I mean, is that's very shallow, right? Correct. And so that long list of things is also not the answer.

49:41So it's not the love of my life as like the only one in 7.8 billion that will suit me. But it's also not the list of 16 or 17 or 29 things that make it become impossible. what you're saying is it is a set of experiences that you're looking for that need to be balanced and work together. Okay. But at the same time, you're also saying, and you shouldn't compromise on some of them, that some of them really, really matter more than others. What does that mean? It means that people who believe that there is one person that can meet what they're looking for are wrong, but that there are 200 people in your neighborhood that can meet what you're looking for just compromise a little i think it means that the love of your life isn't found it's created oh that's so beautiful really is i yeah i truly mean it because i think that of those 200 there might be 200 people in the neighborhood who have genuine kind of raw materials yeah to be a great partner, but not all of them are going to go the distance with you.