Crafting Lasting Love in Your Relationships w/ Matthew Hussey

0:07Welcome everybody to the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. if you have not yet done so hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode and i'm excited today i'm in the house of matthew hussey and we're going to be talking about his brand new book that is called love life how to raise standards find your person and live happily no matter what i've known about you for a long time man i'm excited to sit down and uh and meet you and get some time to talk to you ah the feelings mutual i've uh i've known about your podcast for a long time congratulations on it all thanks man and uh congrats on this book that's going to be coming out.

0:40I, uh, I want to talk to you about, we were talking right before we started about, um, it's really interesting. I think you, you kind of started off talking about like how to get the guy and you have a lot of female followers and about 65 % of the people who follow me are women. And so I think it's going to be really, it's going to hit home with a lot of women that are out there of how to, um, you know, be better in the relationships, how to find somebody. But I have a really stereotypical question to start us off with, but I'm really curious your answer on it. So my wife and I were driving a couple months ago, we were talking about a relationship that one of her friends is in, uh, and she doesn't really want to be married anymore, but she doesn't want to get out of the relationship.

1:19And, um, she's kind of in that stuck place that a lot of people find themselves. Right. And, um, and I said, she, she said, well, you know what though? She really loves him. And I go, yeah, but is she in love with him? And she goes, well, what does that mean? And so we had a really deep conversation around like, what is the difference between love, like loving somebody and being in love with somebody? And I'm curious your perspective as someone who's been a dating coach and done this for over 15 years, what's the difference between just loving a person and being in love with somebody romantically?

1:50Oh, big one. I, uh, that's a great question because in love is a, it's a very emotive term and it's also it could be a very dangerous term depending on how it's applied you know there are the people that chase this very you know this high that they get at the beginning of a relationship and there's this desire to sustain that and the kinds of highs that we're often trying to sustain aren't always the healthiest highs or even if they're not unhealthy they're not always sustainable at least in that form there's a difference you know the that it's a bit like i don't know the if you take the olympics the people who run the 100 meters are trained to run 100 meters and it's fast twitch muscle yeah but then there's the endurance uh training that is required for a marathon and if someone tried to sprint their way through a marathon oh yeah it would be it would be over very fast so you kind of come i think you have to be very careful about comparing what is an endurance sport of long-term relationships to that fast twitch excitement of a 100 meter fling or you know a relationship that maybe lasts a year and and one of the i think one of the dangers in general is that people compare what they feel in a stable and i'm not suggesting that's what your mutual friend is doing but people compare the what they feel in a peaceful healthy relationship to what they felt when they met someone on vacation and it just felt like it had all the promise of something perfect right or even not just a vacation romance but a romance that lasted a few months that the number of people that i coach in my line of work that are have created a story around how right someone was for them that they had an incredibly passionate three-month kind of i suppose we'd call it a relationship a situationship a fling whatever word you want to use but a passionate kind of love affair for three months and then that person disappeared decided that they weren't ready to commit decided that they really wanted to focus their attention on their work or on traveling or on something else and then they look back and they go but that was my person that was it felt so right i've never felt a connection like that before and the the truth is a long-term relationship is just so much more than that yeah it's you know it's loyalty and it's being capable of building something together and it's having a great teammate and it's having someone who who shows up for you on the good and the bad days someone you feel truly supported by someone who sees you someone who genuinely sees you and gets you and can make space for your darker sides that come out when you're actually being vulnerable in a relationship instead of trying to be impressive all the time right and and by the way probably in three months you don't even know their darker side you don't know who they are really you just know the impact they've made there's a big difference between the you know genuine character of a relationship and who someone is in that relationship and the impact someone can make in a short space of time early on impact is not character and someone comes off of a date and they go i had the greatest date it was incredible i just feel like there's something real here and it's like what you know and i'm not this isn't me being cynical it doesn't mean that that date might not lead to something very serious down the line but it's not something you should take too seriously right now because you don't know that person's character character can only be measured over time all you know is the impact they have made so i say that just to set up the context of when people are in relationships and they are longing for some kind of you know i want to re-experience that high i want to re-experience that passion i think we have to put things in their proper place which is it there's a different kind of energy required to run a marathon now that's not me saying you shouldn't have passion in a long-term relationship it's not me saying you shouldn't have chemistry with your partner and and i think that it's worth assessing is the amount if i'm deep into a marriage and it feels like there's a lot to lose here but i also don't feel satisfied i think it's worth asking is the amount of passion and chemistry and love that i have right now enough to sustain me over the rest of my life and if the answer is no i just can't be happy in a relationship that has this level of love chemistry passion then okay have i done anything to try to to create that you know when i look back on the last say three years or even just the last year of our relationship have we done anything to foster that yeah and the answer from your partner's side might be no but the answer from your side might also be no and when you're deep into something before we tear down the house unless it's a truly abusive relationship in which case there's a different answer but if it's just if you're not sure if it's good enough then i think looking at a period of time where you say what would it look like if i genuinely tried to create the kind of passion and chemistry and love that i want to have in this relationship and that can't be you know five years yeah because that's too long but it probably isn't one month yeah so i think figuring out that amount of time that you actually give your all to it and you also ask the same of the other person because i think you can get through a hell of a lot together if you have someone else who is also an incredible teammate in trying to create an amazing relationship that's why i think one of the greatest values in any relationship is just teamwork yeah if you have a someone who highly values teamwork you're going to be okay in a lot of ways because even if you're different and even if you come up against struggles and conflict you're going to be able to solve problems together and i think that what she's articulating is a problem it's like a yeah it's a challenge but then do i have someone who's coming to the table accepting that challenge and and we both sit together and go hey let's bring our all to this there's something missing right now from our relationship i'm not as happy as i want to be yeah i feel like there's something special that along the way we have you know detached from or we've you know lost sight of and i want us to bring it back and look in six months or even in three months you'll have a better idea of a whether that's possible but on an even more fundamental level you'll have a sense of whether the person you're with cares at all about trying right to bring that back with you and that is that's almost a bigger question to me in some ways because what the the real dead end is if you say that to someone and they look at you like you're a crazy person or they look at you with indifference or they pretend that it's not there because that that then is a real problem because what you can't have in a relationship is one person trying to solve a problem right and the other one being like if i just ignore this it will go away right or i don't really care that you're unhappy i'm fine and i don't want to do anything that that is a real problem and then you've got then i think you've got an even bigger question mark than the one you brought to the table at first yeah so it's a long-winded answer no it's it's really good there's a there's so many questions that come from that that are really intriguing to me so one of the things that I'm really curious of, and I get a lot of messages because obviously everything I do is mindset, self-development.

10:52And what you're talking about specifically is both of the partners coming to the table and saying, we want to work on this thing, which I think is really important because if one person doesn't show up, then you kind of have your answer of how that person's going to be for the rest of your life. One question that I get a lot that's very similar to that, it's not necessarily specifically on the relationship. And I'm really curious your thoughts on this. People start listening to my podcast and like, I want to start working on myself. They'll work on himself for three months, six months, a year.

11:20And they're like, I really want my husband. I really want my wife to start getting into personal. I really want her to start growing. And, uh, and there's a lot of resistance most times of like, they don't want to change. I'm curious in your thoughts, do you think that it's possible for someone to be like really into wanting to learn and grow themselves and change themselves? And the other partner being like i just want everything to stay exactly the same do you think that that that's a a relationship that can last um i'm just curious your thoughts on it personally with that it's a great question i get this question all the time that all the time so like you're gonna you're gonna answer like thousands of people's relationship questions with this specifically so i'll come at it from two angles okay one is if we remove like self-development yeah as a kind of i don't know an entire kind of world of books and podcasts and this that and if we remove that from the equation and we just say do we have someone who is capable of evolving that to me is the biggest question can this person evolve are are they willing to be more self-aware do they take self-awareness seriously and self-awareness isn't they're willing to read the books i'm reading yeah self-awareness is they are someone who looks at themselves in the context of the conversation we're having and says that's an interesting thing you just said you know it's challenging to me because that you know you've just said something that you know you've just talked about something that you wish that i could do differently or that you've said something that you think is affecting our relationship can i put eyes on myself and try to improve that that to me is its own thing and that doesn't have to have anything to do with this person being interested in the same kind of tranches right of self-development you are they don't i think it's unreasonable to expect someone to care about the podcast yeah that we care about or to care that because we read a book on you know childhood trauma that suddenly is top of mind for us because we read it last month to read the childhood trauma book yeah like you now need to care about this like them reading a book on golf yeah and being like you now have to care about this you know like you need to come on golfing less golfing sessions with me now yeah and and almost i'm just i'm thinking of this in real time but if if they just read a book on golf and they want you to care about that that's unreasonable right but it's reasonable for them to want a partner that cares about their health or about being active because in a relationship where one person cares about health and being active and the other one is at the other extreme of just constantly you know damaging their body or doing being extremely unhealthy that is going to create some kind of conflict even in the kind of sense of like hey i'm you're i i'm doing all of these things to try to maybe be my best for you or i'm trying to do all these things to try and make sure i live as long as possible and i feel like you're not you're not and you know i'm gonna lose you far sooner if we're not careful then you're gonna lose me and that's you know i don't want that and there's there's like deep rifts that can come from that even in the way you raise children right but you don't have to care about golf right and so i i think that the reason i say this is because i think there is sometimes people get lost in the self-development world right and they start thinking that anyone who hasn't read this book there's a bit of a like oh you haven't read that but you don't know about attachment theory oh well like you know it's like they this person might be one of the wisest people you've ever met yeah and they've never read any of the books you're talking about because they've lived the life and they pay attention and they're bringing this beautiful experience to the table and this wisdom to the table and and and so i i just sometimes i hear people and it always like makes me like just tense up ever so slightly because i'm like when i hear people say you know i just i'm doing all of this self-growth work and they're not yeah it's like well that's good for you but by the way were you doing that three years ago right were you even doing it a year ago like it's as soon as something's top of mind for us we're like everyone needs to care about this and why haven't you read this and it's like it's all over our instagram and it you know we it's worth having some compassion for someone who maybe isn't at that place in the journey yet or hasn't even you know doesn't learn in that same way because in a way that's a form of having compassion for ourselves five years ago yeah or 10 years ago before we'd discovered any of that we wouldn't have wanted to be written off at a time when we hadn't approached certain things but and it's a giant but if you get the sense that the person you're with has zero curiosity and curiosity is a value that's important to you if they have zero openness and openness is a value that's really important to you because you're a very open person if self-awareness is not something they value if being you know having conversations with you about just different subjects you're not asking them to go read the book you just want to have a conversation about the things you're learning because you're excited about it if they can't if they're not interested in taking an interest in things that matter to you yeah then i think those things become the much bigger issue so yes someone who's growth oriented matters immensely i don't want anyone to come away from this answer going oh so i can be with someone who's not growth oriented no it matters immensely but have compassion for people who haven't done the exact same reading or learning as you because it doesn't mean they're not bringing something beautiful to the table and it doesn't mean they might you know if you've over indexed in a certain area where you know you you've done a lot of therapy and a lot of this a lot of that and you can you are fluent in those subjects well make sure you're paying attention to a wisdom or a way of seeing the world or a life that you have no reference points for sure that actually brings an awful lot to the table just in a different way You know, every wise person isn't on Instagram.

18:40Yeah. Most of them aren't actually. You bring up a really good point, which is there's a phrase that I always, I remember, which is the most righteous are the newly converted. That's why I feel like most people are, you know? Um, and so I think the, the biggest thing to distinguish from what you said is it's not that they have to be interested in self-development just the same way that you don't have to be interested in golf. But if there are certain aspects of the relationships that you want to grow and improve do they have the self-awareness of they want to also improve it as well and also i guess the willingness to want to deepen the connection if there happens to be something that's kind of wedging in between the two of you yeah that's exactly right and i think to that extent to sum both of those questions up teamwork and and growth are i think two of the most beautiful values and perhaps two of the biggest predictors of the success of a relationship is is those two qualities yeah yeah it's it's funny when you say that because you know i've been i've been so into like working on myself and trying to heal my traumas and stuff for a long time and with my wife we've been together for 10 years now and i tried to buy her the books and i was like go to the conferences with me and she just wasn't reading it and then i was like all right i guess she just doesn't care no big deal i guess that's not her thing and then about five years into our relationship she just really got into it came out of nowhere you know and it was just like just worked the way that it was but we have an amazing relationship now and i can't imagine had i been like well she's just not interested in the same thing that i'm interested in this isn't going to work out you know and giving up within those first five years where she wasn't into it yeah i think that's a really really interesting point and the you know makes me think the the greatest uh the greatest transference of anything you've learned is just the way that you are and if you have done all of this work on yourself that makes you more peaceful for example because you used to be you know a very anxious person all the time and constantly afraid of things or stressing about things and now all of a sudden there's just a very peaceful energy about you people are gonna ask you how you did that right it's like when you lose weight and people like how'd you do it how'd you do it yeah you didn't and that's exactly right you didn't need to tell them about a program up front just people are like that's amazing and and i think the same is true of our energy you know we think about it in weight loss terms it's a very literal you know visual representation of change but we forget sometimes just how much someone's energy shifting is how powerful that is and when you're in a room where it could be a family member at christmas when you're in someone comes who you haven't seen in a while and they come to christmas dinner and there's just a different energy about them you want to know like what happened are you good like what happened that's some you seem like you're in a really good place you seem more powerful you seem more grounded and you kind of you know people who aren't curious people will you know not care or they may even try and rile you up a little bit because they don't you know it's just made them feel uncomfortable that you've changed but but curious people will want to know like that's amazing i i want more of that yeah and when you want more of something that someone else has you you do want to start knowing who did they go to right what did they read what are they looking at and that's to me that's the greatest that's the greatest sales that can ever happen in a relationship the greatest sale that could ever happen in a relationship is just your partner is impressed with who you're becoming and at a certain point someone's going to look at you and you know the right kind of person's going to look at you and go i want some of that for myself for sure or even i i need to step up my game a little here because i feel like we're out of sync you're in a really good place and i'm the one who's yeah kind of dragging behind so i think there's also in a in a positive way there can be a little bit of that too in a relationship and if you're the person that then says without any sense of i told you so if you're just the person that says i can give you their number or if you want to do it this is where i started and i really loved it you know if you can come to it with that kind of grace and right and generosity and humility that's a beautiful thing but i think when we're trying to pass tools to each other there's a gross lack of humility a lot of the time oh yeah for sure in the uh in the first answer when we were first talking You said you had brought up like having a fling with somebody in three months and how we can make it to be this amazing thing.

23:27And I'm really curious this question. What do you think makes? What do you think makes it so hard when you're in a relationship with somebody and there's unrequited love? Like, why is that so hard for us? Why is that so addicting? Why does, why do we, when we feel rejected, we have to go for that person. What's, what's the reason behind that? I think there's, um, I like to think of it in a couple of different ways. So there's the childhood trauma response that's happening where if we were abandoned, if we were made to feel like we had to earn someone's love in childhood yeah there is this pattern that it sets up for our nervous system it's not even a conscious pattern it's just a we our nervous system becomes wired in a certain way and you know you you take a example of a child who felt like they had to earn love and then every time they did the thing whatever it was their parents suddenly showered them with praise and love and it's that kind of linked something up oh i i need to do all of these things in order to be worthy of love you know if you had a parent that disappeared in terms of either physically or disappeared just in terms of their love towards you and then you you were anxious and you were scared and of course when we're at that age it really is like that's survival you you really feel like oh i'm gonna die if i don't have this love these are the people that are taking care of me are keeping me alive in the world when someone disappears and then they return and all of a sudden they give you love it's like yeah you can breathe again okay i'm okay i'm safe oh my god it feels so good and so that sets up a pattern for people their nervous system becomes wired for that and if and that oh that's what love is so now later in life you've got someone who is inconsistent with their messages or with the attention they give you and you get anxious and scared and you feel like you're gonna die if this person doesn't text me back i'm i'm you know how am i gonna get through this i can't sleep i can't eat i can't do anything i'm and then all of a sudden they say what are you up to tonight out of nowhere oh god i can breathe again yeah okay am i oh my god i really like this person it's it's you know our nervous system recognize it recognizes it and it doesn't mean it makes us happy but it's familiar and when something is familiar like that it you know that's what we gravitate towards i talk about this in the book that there's a chapter that i write called there's two of two of my favorite chapters there's they live together they could almost i feel like they could be a little book on their own but there's a chapter called um uh never satisfied and then there's a following chapter after that called how to rewire your brain and never satisfied the kind of crux of that chapter is we when we go through our love lives feeling like we're just never happy i'm either with someone who excites me who devastates me yeah or i'm with someone who feels like the things i should be going after but bores me to tears and i just can never find happiness anywhere and you know when people feel that there's a kind of desperation that comes it's like you know sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain and constantly getting away from him there's a um camus uh wrote a lifetime of futile labor is like the worst kind of punishment because it we become hopeless and it's for so many people in their love lives they become hopeless because they're like nothing works i'm either getting my heart broken or i'm constantly doubting if this person is the right person for me because i don't feel what i want to feel but a lot of the time when we say that it's that we we're not feeling what we're familiar with we're not feeling what we're used to what our nervous system is trained for so that the my first answer to that question is that we have to do that work to look at what is this thing that i keep chasing that my nervous system is responding to and how and is it serving me and how do i start to actually retrain my nervous system which is what the whole chapter how to rewire your brain is about how do i retrain my nervous system so that i start to value a different thing not just on a psychological level but on a on a physiological level sure and that requires retraining firstly it requires retraining in what we think is possible or what we think is even out there because if we keep finding people that don't want us don't like us back are inconsistent with their communication you know treat us as disposable we start to think that that's all there is right you know the the i that you know there's a idea that i write about in the book in a that's popular in self-development you know that idea of the race car driver on the track if you don't want to crash don't look at the wall because your car goes where your eyes go and i write about that in the book but in a kind of in a more nuanced way which is that what we have come to expect in life becomes our wall and if you keep training yourself to go for people who treat you badly you just start to think the world is full of people like that right it's like a guy who only hangs out in the vip section of nightclubs thinking that all women just really care about bottle service that you know like you you you are starting to think that your wall is the world right and it's not the case but in order to get ourselves out of that we have to start retraining what we respond to even before it feels good to do that and we have to start getting curious about realities outside of the reality we've been experiencing right for so long so so that's part of it the other part of it that we have to be careful of outside of the kind of trauma response that i'm talking about is just this side the basic economics that our brain does in life which is to say if something is rare it must be valuable and we look at that without being discerning or discriminating we just think oh it's hard it's rare it's valuable it's like diamonds and air you know we we're told diamonds are rare so we think that they're valuable meanwhile while when you look at the scale of importance between diamonds and air, right.

31:03There's no comparison. Right. It's a, is anyone who sees it like that goes, that's hilarious. There's no, it's so ridiculous thinking diamonds are really important for sure. Compared to like this thing that's all around us. So we don't even think about it. Yeah. But if someone took away your air tomorrow. Yeah. 30 seconds to 60 seconds. So, so when you apply that to the world of love, are you chasing diamonds or air air is the thing that will keep you alive forever diamonds uh you know it's a it's a kind of idea it's a construct of something that feels important because it's rare because it you know and therefore valuable so i i do think even for people without trauma in that way there is sometimes the mistake that's made that says the person that wants me is available and therefore i can take that for granted but the person that i thought was great on a date that now isn't texting me back right that oh they're a diamond you know there's something there's that that person's important and we think and we have to suspect ourselves when they become important for no other or let's say they become more important when they become more scarce yeah because that's a pattern that will set you up for so much heartbreak and it by the way has nothing to do with the value of that person anyone playing hard to get is free anyone can do it and it has no bearing on their value yeah it's just a mind trick so someone can be and this is where it gets really messed up this is why this is a where our wall as i said can become our world let's say you constantly make that association that someone who's rare is valuable you might then encounter let's say someone who is in their like selfish phase of life most people have gone through it you know there are a certain point in life they're not ready to give or compromise for anybody maybe they're building their career maybe they're just high on life right now and they're just like i'm just dating whoever whenever whatever they are in a selfish phase doesn't mean they're a horrible person it just means they're in a selfish phase and you come across someone like that and in that phase it doesn't mean they're not charming it doesn't even mean they're not nice it doesn't mean they're not a fun person to be around it doesn't mean they weren't great to your family the time they met them it doesn't even mean they didn't introduce you to their family you know like oh they could do all of the right things but they're incredibly selfish right now and so when it really comes down to it you want them to come with you to the airport to pick up your sister and they're like i got like 10 other things that are more important to me than the thing that's important to you right and so they don't care or when it comes to i want to be in a relationship with you they're like yeah let's see i'm good for now because they're just not willing to do any of that now five years from now that person might be in a different place in their life let's say at the same time as you meet that selfish person you also meet someone who is in their non-selfish phase of life five years ago they were the selfish person you would have been really attracted to right but today they're they're actually in their available phase yeah but because they're in their available phase it's not it's not it's not as rare it's not as fun right it's not fun that way so we find ourselves going if this person that isn't giving me the time of day if this person that i really like that is i have such a great connection with was only ready right for a relationship i'd be the happiest person on earth but but we're not seeing all of the people that were there five years ago in that selfish phase and are available now because it just doesn't trigger that same mind trick of they don't feel rare they don't feel as important because they're actually turning to meet us yeah and so that's how you can have someone who consistently in a weird way that person can end up being not that every person who's selfish becomes non-selfish but every but every one of them who does it's like they actually can end up outgrowing us if we're in that place because they might end up becoming a more available person but people who are available are not on our radar in the same way that people who are not so i know that's a that for some people out there that might be a bit of a trippy idea but it's a good example of how it without even realizing it our wall becomes our world right man that's so interesting and um i'm like thinking back to relationships that i've had in the past i'm like oh shit man that makes so much sense now it it makes so much sense that that we go for something that feels more rare because it tends to be more exciting.

36:24And for some people they've been programmed for chaos based off of their childhood and chaos, even though it can feel chaotic, obviously can feel comfortable. Um, you said something that that's, that's really interesting. So you said that the two chapters, what's the name of the first one? Never satisfied, never satisfied. Okay. So I'm really curious. I'm, I was talking to my wife this morning and I was like, I'm so glad I'm not dating right now. You know, like we, we met in 2014. We've been together for 10 years. And, um, and one of the things that I did about probably five or six months into our relationship is I started, started unfollowing every hot Instagram model that I followed before we started in our relationship.

37:05Not she never told me to do any of that stuff, but I started to notice myself comparing. Right. And I was like, I don't want to compare. It's not, it's not, uh, it's not valuable. It's not doing anything for me. It's not doing on Instagram. They're always seeing edited people and people traveling to all these great places. And they can kind of get people on an app tonight if they want to almost like Uber eats, like if I'm hungry, I can just get some, some food here. Um, do you find that, you know, if you've been doing this for 15 years, social media has been around for around the same amount. Do you find that, that social media and these apps are perpetuating the feeling of not being satisfied with people?

37:43Cause there's always someone else that could be out there. 1000%. Yeah. you know you can't your brain isn't capable of like just seeing these things over and over and over again and not internalizing it as some kind of reality or standard that you should be comparing either yourself to or your partner to or your relationship to or your life to and and yes we can be we can train ourselves to be as aware as possible right but so much slips through our defenses and i i can't even trust myself to go on instagram without and stay on it for the amount of time i said i would stay on it because you're on it 20 minutes later on accident right what what am i doing yeah and so you it starts with deciding what's most important to us and then guarding the gates to that thing if peace is important let's go all the way up to like the clouds if peace is important to you and being single and hooking up a bunch has never brought you peace and so you say where i really am likely to find more peace is by being in a loving healthy stable relationship then you might say okay then i need to find that but one of the threats to that is this dopamine fueled roller coaster oh yeah of new attraction and gorgeous people and you know so you go okay that's that's something that is a threat to that piece in the same way that you know drugs are a threat to a life lived you know a more stable manageable level of happiness it's like that's a that's a temptation i'm i'm gonna understand that as a temptation and i'm gonna take it seriously therefore i think that's a big thing that a lot of people don't do is they don't take it seriously enough that this this gets into my mind and it it's like inception right it plants this idea it's like a virus yeah there's oh there's these extraordinarily perfect and beautiful people out there and and then the comparison that that invites and not just comparison entitlement the level of entitlement that it creates it's one of the reasons i don't think this just affects people in relationships I think it's such a dangerous thing for single people.

40:25When I see, both men and women, when I see like anger online, I see in their love lives, I see a lot of entitlement. You look at communities of men that are really resentful and bitter. There's a lot of entitlement in those communities. there's a lot of i should be with this kind of person this this level of attractive should want me this is the only one that i deserve yeah this type of person exactly and and i think a lot of that entitlement comes from a standard that gets set online that is completely divorced from reality and while we're very savvy these days and certainly even younger people than us are in some ways even more savvy than us to how much bullshit there is online there's still our brains don't filter everything so there's still just a level of beauty and a level of excitement and a level of body and that we start just thinking is more normal and it takes us out of the reality of our life so yeah i think it's a i think it's a problem and i think if if you're not taking it seriously then it's a problem that's probably going to creep up on you without you even realizing it and i think i i i don't have data on this but it it seems just clear to me from the from watching it that it must have created a much much greater level of relationship dissatisfaction for sure for people to be looking at that stuff constantly yeah and even comparing themselves to the relationships they see not just oh i there's this really hot person online who i think is hotter than the person i'm with and does that mean that i should be making different decisions does that mean i've settled does that mean like there's all of those thoughts that happen for people but it's more than that it's we see someone else's relationship and they just seem fucking happy all the time right and it doesn't register for us that that's not real yeah you know our brain doesn't just go that's not real our brain especially by the way you might look at someone who very clearly has this very fake and manufactured life or body or whatever it may be and you go oh that's fake but when your favorite couple online oh my god yeah is posting pictures and videos so happy oh you don't think of that as fake you just think of that as a relationship that's way better than yours right it's like reality tv actually is that actually reality not really it's scripted and even if that couple is authentic the the moments they're posting might be authentic but that doesn't mean they're also posting the moments where they are authentically having problems right sure and that's not their fault it's not no we don't owe it to people me and my wife don't owe it to the audience to air our fight from last tuesday you don't instagram live your arguments no no you know like it's it's no we don't owe that but the mistake is in thinking we never have that right and only seeing one side of things and that's you know that's the real danger even people who are being authentic online are not authentically they're not portraying the other authentic moments in their life that would create a sense of balance right so yeah we're comparing ourselves to you know it's the ultimate it's the everything everywhere version of comparing you know your behind the scenes to someone else's highlight reel.

44:22We're just, we're just doing that in every single way. Yeah. And it just leaves us thinking our life sucks. I think you, I know. Right. I know you, I think your phrase of entitlement is actually really, it's interesting. Cause I'm like, we're in Hollywood right now. I've been here for a week and there, if you see people that are like online, they're the most beautiful people in the entire world. Right. I haven't seen that many good looking people since I've been here, but you would think they would be here somewhere. Right. Like, and it's funny as, as you're talking about, I'm like, yeah, there's, I don't know the last time I've seen someone that's like as beautiful as some of the people that you see online.

44:51So it's like, okay, so maybe that's not reality. That's the first thing. And the second thing that the entitlement is hilarious. Cause it's like, even if they did exist, you probably couldn't pull them in the first place. Right? Like if that person did exist and then, and then the last piece I think is really interesting is I think there's also studies that show that people who post online about the relationships all the time, usually are in worse relationships. Like people who are the happiest relationships don't tend to post that much yeah well that's kind of another version of the people that are most morally righteous or right usually the ones doing the worst things right behind the scenes of course you know it's like a it's kind of a truism of of life in general so no i i totally agree with that i think the people that have the people that have it are the they don't often feel the need to to post about it as much yeah uh no and and it is funny me and audrey kind of laugh like this there's this idea of like seeing people men or women and just going i bet they look amazing on instagram like i feel like that person looks great and by the way it doesn't mean they don't look great in real life it just means there's a you can see that there's a kind of way that they're presenting themselves or look that's engineered right for all of the ways that you can enhance yourself even further when you start applying filters and all of the things that you can do so yeah it's an interesting world now it's funny it's in person they actually look like a human which is what's great you can see their humanness um i'm real curious uh for you and uh i had one of the things you said earlier was um when you're around somebody you can feel like oh you're more peaceful and i um was over at lewis's house lewis house the other day and a few years ago So we were together and he was on my podcast.

46:46And then after we were talking about relationships and I could tell like there was some chaos and stuff, right? Like he was just, he was saying it to me, but there was an underlying energy. And then when I just saw him this past time a couple of days ago, I said, man, like you feel different. Like your energy feels different. Not like there's anything wrong before. You weren't saying anything wrong, but like you just feel more peaceful in general. And he's like, yeah, man, I just feel more peaceful. Like there's not, you know, it's not like everything in business was great, but then there's chaos in relationships.

47:16And, um, I think that's a really big point that that's interesting for me of like, I always hear that relationships have to be hard. And we had this conversation, Lewis and I, and I'm curious, um, your thoughts on it. Do you feel like a good relationship has to be hard? Cause anytime I hear someone's been together for 40, 50 years, like, oh yeah, it was so hard. it was so much work not saying that it wasn't that it doesn't require effort but do you think that a great relationship has to be hard like that's a prerequisite firstly it's so funny you say that about lewis because he i i actually when i was talking about that idea of going home for christmas and you know people around you notice you're more peaceful i was had lewis in my mind really because he we went to a mastermind last year and there was just a very similar vibe of people just really admiring the peace that the the energy that he brought so he was so funny you had the same experience that's immediately popped into my head he said peaceful like he's way more peaceful now 100 and and by the way when you see that the first thing you ask lewis is what did you do what have you been doing yeah yeah so i'm not a lover of the phrase when it's right it's easy because i think it it can get applied in the wrong way it can make us feel like there's something wrong if we're having an argument there's something wrong if we're really butting heads over something there's something wrong if we're you know like we're struggling through something together and there are you know some of the best relationships i've ever known have those people have struggled through some really difficult things together and not just facing a challenge outwardly together but facing a challenge towards you know within them right but the relationship i suppose it depends on what kind of hard exists right the if you goes back to the teamwork point if you have two people who are a team and they're like wow we really don't agree on this but i love you and let's figure this out i'm really struggling with you right now but i love you and let's figure this out what can we do and we both really are seeking to solve this problem together that's one thing but when you're in a relation i was with um dr ramani last night um the world leading expert on narcissism who just wrote a book called it's not you and i was moderating her book event here in los angeles and one of the things she was talking about was this idea of love as sacrifice compromise and accommodation you know the belief that love is giving your all is something that takes a very dark turn in narcissistic relationships because if your if your relentless propensity to give and to accommodate and to compromise for someone and to sacrifice for someone meets a force that endlessly takes then in a relationship like that it's not one day i'll give enough that they'll finally see my value one day i'll compromise enough that they'll finally compromise too that they'll finally reciprocate it's just a vacuum and it will devour you it's a it's like um oh who's the there's a woman who wrote the book on the opioid crisis i wish i could remember her name but she said you know the with with opioids people think there's a like the typical thing with drug addiction is that there's a rock bottom when you hit that rock bottom you ricochet back up but with opioids there is no rock bottom there's you find out that rock bottom has a trap door and that trap door has a basement and it just keeps going and and that that is the same in these kinds of relationships yeah there is no there is no rock bottom this person will destroy your life so some beautiful relationships are very hard at times because life is very hard and there we all come and get up against situations where life offers challenges to our relationship you two really love each other and you want to be together but you know you've got a while that you have to do long distance before you can be in the same place you know me me and my wife audrey we were long distance for a good two years her being in london and me being in los angeles nothing about that was easy it was hard but it was a hard that we were willing to do together so if we'd have told ourselves if if it's you know you know if it's the right thing it should be easy we would have missed out on the love of our lives but what's the hard and do you whether the hard is out there or in here and between each other how do you approach the hard do you approach it as a team do you approach it with a growth mindset because if you do i think that hard becomes it because it actually ends up becoming the thing that you look at as a representation of how strong the relationship is without that hard you you often never really know for as long as it's just plain sailing.

53:28Yeah. So it's, it's, it's good. Cause it doesn't have to be easy. It doesn't have to be hard. But the main thing I keep hearing behind everything that you're saying is there needs to be somebody who's on your team and needs to be a joint venture. And you've both got to be willing to, to put in the effort when the effort is needed. And, um, I think what's really important about that is, you know, I think one of the things that holds a lot of people back in relationships is, is communication and vulnerability. Um, I think that a lot of relationships that I had in the past that I, I was a part of a ruining was me not being able to open up because of, you know, childhood trauma that I had, you know, I had, I kind of had this subconscious feeling of like, if someone loves you, they're probably going to leave you just because of patterns with my dad.

54:15And so that was something that I had to really work on with, with my wife and, um, and being like, she's not leaving. This is crazy. like this is, but she, she loves me. She's still here. And, um, and it was like a, like you're saying, it was like a repatterning of me actually more than anything else, repatterning my nervous system to be like feeling safe in non chaotic situations, which doesn't seem like you would need it. But I think a lot of people do need it. And, um, and I'm really curious your perspective on it with, uh, with people who are out there. And, uh, I'm thinking specifically about someone that I know who is going through relationship problems, you know, the husband, um, emotionally cheated on her, uh, with somebody else and, um, they want to work on it, but they're still not opening up and communicating.

55:07And it's really interesting because they are, uh, they're married, but they're not getting themselves to a place where they can communicate and they're not communicating at the level that they could communicate. And I think a lot of people are really afraid of being vulnerable, even with someone they've been with for like 10 or 15 years, like thinking to themselves, but if they really knew me, like they'd probably want to leave me. Do you find that pretty often with people, even if people have been in relationships for a while, if like, if they only really truly knew me, they probably would leave me.

55:37And so there's, there's like, you kind of know me 90 % of the way, but you don't know that 10%. And I found that me communicating that 10 % took a lot, like a lot to get out of me, but we think someone's going to leave me when they don't, you go, Oh, holy shit. I am safe. Do you find that, that a lot of people are holding back in their, their closest relationships? And do you find if somebody really does allow themselves to go to a hundred percent that it, it makes them, I don't want to say the phrase lock in or last because whoever knows what's going to happen, but do you feel like it makes that, that bond tighter?

56:13well i want to commend you on saying what you just said firstly rob because it's really that's really really powerful what you just articulated and your audience is very lucky to have you in that respect because that's a very healing thing what you just said and it's so it's so honest and it's so vulnerable and it's so human and it's that there aren't enough especially men out there let alone women who are willing to say those things not not least in front of a giant audience hundreds of thousands of people yeah genuinely i'm really that's really just impressive thank you i had the same thing yeah your wife's giggling in the background that's the best part she knows this all too well no i i the truth is rob i always thought i was a vulnerable guy i never i never associated with not being vulnerable you know i i guess i would hear bernie brown stuff and i'd be like yeah awesome oh yeah yeah it's great i don't i i think that it's taken me a long long time to to truly be vulnerable it both publicly and privately you know i think i spent my 20s trying to feel like i knew it all or at least trying to portray that image of knowing it all yeah and and it wasn't that i was you know what i was doing i was i was very aware that what i was doing was helping a lot of people but i just also knew that there were parts of me that i was worried the audience wouldn't right like me or love me anymore if they knew those things if i showed those weaknesses and those flaws and i i also didn't realize the extent to which i was doing that in my personal life i think that what i i was always telling stories about myself and thought i was opening up when i did that but we can all tell stories that make us look great of course yeah you know like i said it's sort of the funny it's kind of the funny thing about a lot of self-development right is that our stories just they're all a hero's journey story they're not a story of i've got this deep dark thing that i think makes me weak or pathetic or hideous and if i tell you i don't know if you're gonna still be here it's not that it's always like you know i was struggling and now i'm doing great yeah here's how i developed the habits that i made me a millionaire yeah exactly but here's how how bad i was back then it's always back then right yeah so that that that's not real that's not vulnerability right that's i'm awesome look what i've done vulnerability is so much you know vulnerability because it's scary when you do it you don't know how it's gonna go you hope it's gonna go the way you want but you don't know you're just you're just allowing yourself to be seen and that took me time i remember it early on in our relationship we you know i remember getting like at the very beginning of our relationship getting jealous about something and picking a fight over it there was i can tell you right now rob there was no vulnerability in the way i had this fight yeah it was just my worst side coming out right It was me being judgmental and a little controlling and a little, um, uh, and, and just hotheaded.

59:58And, and I just, I look back on it and I'm just like, if I look back on that guy in that moment, it's just a scared person. Right. Or it's a person that feels like in that moment, they're not enough, but they're threatened their safety is threatened and god forbid you know any of that about me because if you knew that you'd think i was pathetic yeah and weak and ugly and you know and yuck you know and i don't want that by the way i'd even had that in the past i'd revealed something vulnerable in a situation just like that and and the fun the irony is i had tried being a little more vulnerable and it backfired i i someone literally looked at me and told me that it made me unattractive really oh so it's even worse and it really for a minute there it really messed up my it it took the most scared part of me and it rewarded its belief that if you let this stuff out that this is going to go horribly for you people say they want vulnerability no they want great they want strong they want i'm a warrior who cries in sad movies sometimes and i am never doing that again yeah that is the last time you know and and so it that that unfortunately kind of re-wounded me in that area and And it, I had to learn that with my wife in, when we were dating, that I could be more honest about something that had hurt me or scared me.

1:01:51And that she wouldn't, not just, she wouldn't run away, but she wouldn't stay and now think that I was unattractive. because that was a in some ways just a big of just as big a fear right right you'll you'll still be with me but now you'll be looking at everyone else's more exciting than me yeah you'll lose respect for me in some way and now the outside world other men will remain mysterious and attractive and strong from a distance and i'm the weakling that you know you know like that's the the core of this thing and and and if i'm that then it confirms everything i think about not being good enough and you won't think i'm enough and you'll eventually have contempt for me and you'll leave me or you'll cheat on me or you'll flirt with other people or whatever there's a whole thousand teenage feelings yeah of course in there and and i i had to bit by bit learn to allow myself to actually be seen and to understand that by being seen for those i want to say darker parts of me but not just darker in the negative sense but just those those more raw and vulnerable parts of me i had to learn that it it she wouldn't just stay but that it wouldn't erase all of the other things she saw me as it wouldn't erase all of the times i had actually been very sure of myself or confident or you know playful or sexy or you know bold it wouldn't suddenly make her go no none of those things are true now but i've seen this yeah it would just be a way of her fully holistically seeing me and integrating all of that is it you know it's work that that there are psychologists out there doing with people is that you know shadow work that helps them integrate their darker parts into themselves right so that when i look back on that thing that i did that i feel shame for or regret for instead of detaching myself from that and fracturing myself i can view that holistically and i can view it as part of me and integrate it i can see what was going on behind that that led to the action that i now regret or despise or don't you know can't stand to associate with but i see the me behind that and what was really going on and i can integrate that part of me and still find a way to love and have compassion for that part of me well what if you applied that to your partner too What if you gave them the opportunity to fully integrate all of you into their vision of you and the relationship and who they see you as and to truly view you holistically?

1:04:52What I learned was that rather than make me, rather than this one thing that came out in that moment becoming the truth of who I am, like, oh, she found out. yep instead it was oh no i saw it's like i have this you know object and i turned it and it shined differently on this side and if i turn it again it shines there and oh this is all of you it didn't erase the other parts it just allows me to see you for the whole that you are and and love you even more and when she extended compassion even to the parts of me that i was at the time unable to extend compassion to myself for that for me was an extremely healing thing and it makes me sad to think of the version of me that never experienced that you know if there was a world where i never came across the the person the learnings the tools to do that and went through life thinking that i was having these kind of open vulnerable relationships but never really getting to the good stuff never feeling totally seen never feeling totally accepted it makes me feel so sad for that version of me and and i feel sad for that in other people who are in marriages who feel like god if you if you only knew you would hate me or you would despise me or you i wouldn't be good enough for you anymore if we can start to encourage people to you know first try to make peace with those parts of themselves so that they can begin to view themselves holistically instead of allowing this thing to be the one truth of who they are and even to have compassion for the thing that was behind that action and where that came from um if we could do that for ourself first and for many people they're able to do that through therapy then it also allows them to bring that to their partner in a way that your partner's still some of that they're going to have a reaction to and let's face it some of us some some of us have done things in relationships that that would hurt our partner to know or it would you know it's like even more difficult when it's like the thing that i am judging myself for is something that could damage our relationship or will damage our relationship um but but the pro the the danger is that we spend our whole lives having fractured ourselves and our and never giving our partner the chance to see who we really are and and the irony we could do a whole other episode on this but the irony is that when someone when we're able to truly be vulnerable not just i did this or this is something in my past but this is all of me that was behind that and this is you know where i believe it comes from for me and this is what i'm scared of and this is what i'm still scared of today and this is then it allows our partner to actually start to contextualize some of the things that we have done in our life that we have maybe hated ourselves for or regretted or felt shame over for a very long time but with greater context someone else can help us also to offer some compassion to ourselves yeah that's so fucking good just like because because when you actually sit and think about it it's like what we're all looking for is love and what we're really looking for most of the time is just love from ourself and i think a part of that is just acceptance of all parts but sometimes we need someone to mirror to be our mirror and And I think that maybe one of the highest, maybe one of the most important parts of being in a real deep intimate relationship that nobody actually ever talks about is that if you can get yourself to the point where you can speak vulnerably fully 100%, the parts that you don't love and accept, if you can see that person love and accept that part of you, it allows you to get the healing that you are never able to get to yourself.

1:09:30yeah yeah we do have to do a whole other episode you're you're you're exactly right that's that's exactly right and really all that person is doing is is mirroring the kind of uh corrective relationship that has to happen within right yourself but they become a kind of representation of that and and it's you know it's a bit of a chicken egg thing right because we we don't always have the luxury of having someone like that in front of us at this moment which is where i think you know therapy or coaching can be really valuable because that can that can kind of be an interim before having found a relationship with someone that beautiful in spirit um but it can come i think it's one of those things that can come from either direction You can start from the inside out.

1:10:26You can offer yourself the possibility of it happening from the outside in, but you, you can't give yourself that opportunity unless you're prepared to be brave in the first place. Yeah. We're going to have to do another episode, everybody. If you guys are on YouTube and you want another episode, you're going to have to comment to down below. So the book, everybody is love life by Matthew Hussey, how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily. If you listen to this the day that it comes out, this book comes out tomorrow. tomorrow and uh you can pre-order it and for everybody that pre-orders uh there's a a free live event that comes with right yeah we have an event on the 4th of may which is uh going to be this incredible worldwide live virtual event and it's the kind of event people would normally have to invest in this is for me a celebration i've the last book i wrote was 10 years ago and this is it's a bit it's a big moment for me i'm much more vulnerable in this book than i've ever been you know it's a lot of stories from my personal life i dig in much deeper to the things that hold us back in love to the reasons we struggle to find love to the reasons we struggle with our own confidence and and ultimately why we struggle with our happiness because i i'm a big believer there's three relationships we're always going to be in one is a relationship with other people the second is a relationship with ourselves and the third is a relationship with life itself those are three relationships you're going to be in until the day you die in one way or another and the quality of those relationships is going to be the quality of your life yeah so undoubtedly the the biggest audience for this book are going to be people who want to find love but people are going to people are going to get so much out of this coming from wherever they're coming from there's chapters on overcoming heartbreak there's a chapter on how to leave a toxic or abusive relationship there's chapters on purely dedicated to your relationship with yourself and your confidence or what i call core confidence um you know the whole book finishes on a chapter on what i call being happy enough um even even while you're on the road to finding love so it's both a very practical book but also a very mindset based book and um and it's a celebration for me because it's the kind of first time i've released publicly in written form that kind of deep work that i'm now doing with people and um and so that event on the 4th of may is a celebration of all of that and there's you can't buy into the event literally the only way to have a ticket is to buy a book and um you'll get the book delivered this week but you'll also have your invite you can come over to lovelifebook.com you can buy the book through there through whatever retailer you want but then when you get your confirmation receipt about your order just come back to that page lovelifebook.com and put the order number into the page and we'll email you a ticket to the event on the 4th of may and you can join me live amazing matthew appreciate it man this was great thanks for having me man we're uh i think we're gonna have to probably do another one and go even deeper as we uh as we started to go in towards the end so i appreciate I've been doing a lot of podcasts recently, Robin, and I genuinely, this has been one of my favorites.

1:13:44Really. I've loved it. Oh, thank you. All right. Thanks, brother.