Discover How to Heal Your Heart, Find Love, and Truly Love Life with Matthew Hussey

I believe that there are three relationships that determine the quality of our lives. There's our relationship with other people, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with life itself. And those are three relationships you really can't get out of.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome back to the show. I'm really excited about this one. And you guys, if you are looking to improve your love life, your relationships, if you're looking for love, I've got the perfect person for you. Because he has helped millions of women get the love of their lives. He's also New York Times bestselling author. He has a brand new book called Love life, how to raise your standards, find your person, and live happily no matter what. My guest today is the incredible, one and only Matthew Hussey. On this episode, we talk all about how if you're already in a relationship, there are so many tools to improve. Improving your relationships and falling even more in love with your life in general. And Matthew also shares so many incredible perspective shifts on the relationship we have with ourselves, the meaning we give, our experiences in life, and how so many of us are chasing the wrong things to find happiness. I know that I have been so guilty of this in the past. I can honestly tell you I'm in one of the happiest places of my life because of a lot of what we talked about in this podcast that you will hear come out that I talk about. We talked about everything from overcoming heartbreak, dealing with loneliness, raising your standards, and how being happy enough actually positions you to make better decisions when it comes to relationships, romantically or in friendships. So you guys don't tune out if you already have your partner. Cause this is all about relationships that can be applied to all of them. And even my podcast team, who is a husband and wife, Dani and Brianne, they were behind the camera just like, yes, this is so good. They said they got so much out of as well, and so did I. You guys, let's get into the show.

Matthew, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Laurie. It's nice to be here. We've not been able to do anything in this capacity, but we've hung out. We've hung out, but we've never actually been able to do something on this level. I know.

I was just telling my friend, she was like, oh, how do you.

How do you know them?

And I'm like, oh, we got to be at this really cool mastermind together. And I'm like, we sat by each other.

Yeah, we were we were mastermind buddies. We were right next to each other. Yeah.

So for me, that was a big deal. I'm like, we got to sit together, so, you know, we got to know each other.

So.

And your beautiful, amazing wife, she's just like, she is such a light when she enters. You knew this. You found her.

She is, she, she loves you.

And Chris, oh, she's such a sweetheart. Literally obsessed. So you guys just got married fairly recently?

Yeah, we. We got married. God, when was it? It was like November, October, October of last year. Wow. We went on, we went on a honeymoon. It's been a little while. Yeah, we, We'. In a little while. It's been, it's been amazing. We. It's so nice to be married. It feels, it feels really nice. I didn't know if I would feel any different.

That's just what I was going to ask you. I. I felt different, but it was for different reasons. So what felt different about being married? Like, what changed for you?

I think that. Look, the reason I decided, I called a friend when I was thinking of proposing. And I'm the kind of person, I. I'm like, why? What's the point in this? And I, for many years, I didn't know if I entirely saw the point in it. You know, I knew I saw the point in long term relationships, but whether marriage meant something to me, I didn't totally, you know, I didn't have any reason in my background or my belief system that marriage should really matter. And the sort of rebel in me said, like so many people do, do I really need a piece of paper to, you know, say that I'm with someone and committed and do I need to? And I called a friend of mine and I said, you know, why should I get married? I said, is it. What's the difference? And I trust this person and I value his opinion. And he said, there's something about saying that it's you and me on that level. There's something about creating a situation where you don't just get to leave, where every argument isn't suddenly putting you into this feeling of is it going to work? Is it not? But you have a reason to stay. Your finger isn't just constantly on the trigger.

Yeah.

You put it. And you know, there's something about that that spoke to me. And when I got married, it felt like the reason I wanted to get married is I said, I want to. I feel like I really want to build something now. I felt like dating. I felt what I was resetting all the Time with a new person and a different situation. And it kind of felt like I was constantly hitting reset. And I liked the idea of building. And that's what I think shifted for me was this feeling of, now that we're married, it really feels like we're building something. And I'm not someone who, you know, I don't think anyone's going to find me on this podcast tour for this book talking about kind of evangelizing about marriage or why everyone should get married or anything like that. But for me, it's definitely. It's shifted something. It's felt like, oh, we. It feels like a safety to build because we've created this pact together, and now it's like, oh, it really is you and me. Let's build together. And I just. That feels fun to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like I kind of had a similar thing, and I didn't even know that it would happen. But I think what happened when we got married is we learned communicating, thank God, pretty early on in our marriage. I think that's from Chris's mom, who did a lot with just like, psychology and kind of. He just learned so much from her growing up. But what it did was it took off certain options off the table and language off the table. So there were things that we communicated about, like, well, now that you're married, you don't even. You don't fight and say things like, I'm leaving, or talk about divorce or. Like, there were certain things that were just. They're off limits now. And whether that changes. Changes with a piece of paper or not. I think what it did for us is it just had us, like, leap over this. This line that all of a sudden, oh, we've. We've gone into something where we're both committed. So whether that's marriage or not, which I'm. I'm very open for people, so many people now who are, you know, that maybe they don't believe in marriage because they have different things that in their background. I can understand that because. And I think you can still somewhat create that experience just through communication.

Yeah, And I think. Exactly. I really agree with that. And you get to decide what your relationship is going to be. I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about life. You get to decide what's important to you. And I think when you're in a great relationship, you get to decide together what's important to you as a couple. And whether that's marriage or a different path, I think that's up to everyone individually. And of course, so many people have been through it already. They've been married, and they have a lot of scars from that experience, whether they're men or women. And I have a lot of respect for that, and I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for that because, you know, to suddenly run around talking about the merits of getting married to people who may have spent the last 20 years married, and maybe it's devastated them financially in a very difficult divorce, maybe they found themselves in a very difficult or even abusive relationship for many years that they felt they couldn't get out of, certainly not easily or without blowing up their life in ways that were terrifying. That's. That's real. And it's very easy for someone at the beginning of that process to talk about how wonderful this thing is. And it's easy to forget there are people in all different stages of life that have had a different go of it. And so they have to do what's right for them in this chapter. And that's one of the things I'm excited about, about this book, is that it's not got an agenda. It's not about saying to people what they should or shouldn't do, that you should or shouldn't be in a relationship, that you should or shouldn't get married, or that you should have a family or you shouldn't have a family. There is no agenda. The only focus of this book is your happiness and your confidence within yourself. And what I've always found that love and what it does to us is a wonderful way in to all of the things that we might want to work on or heal within ourselves anyway, because it brings up everything.

I'm like, yes, my. I mean, my marriage every day is always just a constant reflection of me, myself, and what that I'm working on. Truly. It's always making decisions for, you know, loving myself in the relationship. So let's talk about your book, because I love the title. We were just talking about how great the title is in the double meaning love life. Why. Why this book right now for you?

I wanted to write a book that. My last book came out over 10 years ago. Wow. Yeah.

Did that fly by or.

Not really.

Well, I know it's like Parks did.

Parks did it.

I've been humbled a lot in that time.

Okay.

I was a 20. I was 24, I think, when I wrote the book, the original book. And there are things you say at 24.

I was just going to say, have you gone back and read it and.

Been like, you know, the Surprising thing is I run a retreat that I've run since I was 21.

Wow.

When I was 21, I ran it with six people and we took over my friend's house in the south of France and I did a five and a half day retreat for these people in the south of France. And I got this house for free because he was just doing me a favor. And I've run that retreat every year since. And now there's many hundreds of people in that program. And we do it at a resort in Fort Lauderdale in Florida. And it's a very different thing. And it's grown and grown. But, you know, one of the surprising things about that program is that a lot of it hasn't changed. When I go back and read the original book, the surprising thing about it is actually how much I agree with.

How much the structure works.

Yeah. But, you know, I think of giving any kind of advice, which is a really precarious position to put yourself in in life, is to be any kind of an advice giver. I think you grow into a lot of the things that maybe you say early on. You know, they're like a bit of pair of shoes that are too big for you. And you. Maybe there's a lot like, I want to be this.

We're teaching it because we want to.

Do it and because it's. There's truth to it and because it makes sense and. And then you. You know, I feel like I've spent. I've obviously had new insights in that time in the 15 years that I've been doing this, but I've also, I feel like grown into those shoes a lot more. And the things that now I Maybe once said 10 years ago, I feel like they resonate differently for me at this point in life. So this book was a chance for me to say what I wanted to say. Now I've been working with people in helping them find love for 15 years of my life. This is my entire adult life has been dedicated primarily to women in helping them find love. What do I know today? And how could I put it all in one place? And you know, one of the big. The reason I called this book Love Life is because I believe that there are three relationships that we. That determine the quality of our lives. There's our relationship with other people, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with life itself. And those are three relationships you really can't get out of. You know, we don't live on an island. We live amongst other people. We're always going to be in relationship with ourselves until the day we die. And we're always going to be in a relationship with life until the day we die. And those relationships get very fractured at different times. You know, especially if your relationship with other people is not great right now, or let's say you don't have a romantic relationship and it's something you deeply, deeply want, then it's quite likely that you're also going to have a fraught relationship with life. Because if you really. If your dream was to find love and to get married or to have a family of your own, and that didn't happen in the way that you wanted it to, you thought you'd be in a different place in your life right now. This does not match your blueprint for how you thought life would go. Then you can start to dislike life. You can even start to hate life. You can also start to hate yourself because you think there's something wrong with you. I'm broken. You know, I'm never going to find it. And this book deals with those really difficult questions that people face. You know, what do I do when my life didn't. Didn't pan out by today the way I wanted it to? What do I do when I feel like, because of the years that this hasn't worked out for me? Or maybe it did seem like it was working out and then somebody left. Mm. You know, or they turned around and said they didn't want a family after all. And now this person I've been with for years, I feel like I'm having. I've left because there's some vital part of me that wants to be expressed in having a child, but this person didn't want that with me? What do I do? What do I do when I feel like I'm getting older every year and the number of people that are available to me seems to be dwindling? Or I'm increasingly feeling invisible. My friends are all pairing off or have already paired off, and, you know, I feel like I'm the only one left at the party. Yeah. How do I cope with those feelings? And even if I can cope with the egoic elements of those feelings, which are that, you know, I feel like a bit of a spare wheel with my friends who are all in couples, or I feel like, you know, my family at the Thanksgiving table wants me to find love and I haven't, or that I feel strange because I'm at this age and I haven't found love, even if I can deal with all of those outward facing concerns about what people think. How do I deal with the internal chronic pain that can come from loneliness? How do I cope when it feels like there is an absence at the heart of life for me? These are big questions and these are the kinds of questions that this book attempts to deal with for people.

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I think that there's this conception that we, you know, we have to make ourselves ready and we have to do the work first before we go out there and find someone. And I. I've always found that to be almost a slightly righteous idea that is often in some way put forward by people who have already found love, who are in relationships and certainly weren't enlightened and had it all figured out at the time they met their partner.

I'm like, thinking. I'm like, you're right. I was, like, a mess when I met my husband. Like a mess.

Yeah.

And we sorted it out together, so.

Yeah, exactly.

And it worked out.

But that we sorted it out together is very powerful because, you know, and I'll come back to your question, but I almost want to create a pressure valve for people who feel like I keep being told that I've got to go work on myself and I've got to make, you know, get to a point where I'm ready and I'm. And. And we all come to our love lives with scars and some kind of baggage, some Kind of healing we haven't done. And I think the right partner is the person we heal with. We don't heal before we get there entirely. At least we find someone who's good at handling us, someone we're good at handling. Or at the very least, two people who are capable or patient enough to handle each other. And then you have a chance at healing together. Especially if you're with someone who accepts you, Especially if you're with someone who offers that latitude for your darker sides, your more difficult sides, your more flawed sides. That's a very healing experience. You know, you learn. Look, the game for all of us in life, I think, is to. Is to find a level of acceptance within ourselves where we have accepted who we are, who we've been. What caused us in life to be that even in our moments of greatest shame or regret, what was going on with me, that. That brought out that action, that behavior, that decision that I now regret or feel deeply. Shame over what. What was going on there? There was something going on. It wasn't out of nowhere. And I was. You know, I think we're all doing the best we can at any given time. Even if our best is awful or terrible or causes great pain to others. I think that we're doing the best we can with the tools and the resources and the learnings that we had. And I think the game is to get to a level of acceptance where we can find compassion for ourselves in all of that, and that's an internal game. But sometimes finding someone in life who models that kind of acceptance for you, whether it's a friend, a family member, a therapist, a partner, it becomes a kind of external representation of the internal place that we're trying to reach and can reach. It just models it from the outside. Ideally. What we don't want to do is wait for that kind of acceptance from the outside, because you never know when it's going to come. Yeah, I got very lucky in a sense, that my wife, Audrey, modeled that kind of acceptance for me early on. That allowed me to feel like I could be more of myself around her. And by the way, that was, for me, a cue to. That was a kind of green light to keep going. It was this. Oh, I feel at home with this person. I feel I could. This person makes me more of myself, not less of myself. And that became a real green light for me. And I hope that more of us can use those things as green lights. As opposed to. The green light is this person is hot and cold, and it makes me want Them even more. Or this person is. Is, you know, making me feel anxious. And that must. That kind of feels like passion. And I really want to get this person. I think we use the wrong things for green lights. And we, as my wife Audrey says, we chase the wrong things thinking they're going to make us happy. Yeah. So I think a huge part of it is learning to chase the right things. To come back to that question of where does someone start? I think it is a place of compassion for yourself that, you know, there's a reason that you're in this place you're in right now. You have had experiences in your life that have, in your own ways, made it hard for you. Now, those could be experiences from childhood that have meant that you've had a more difficult go of it because the love you received, the kind of love you received or the love you didn't receive, has predisposed you or your nervous system to a certain. To being attracted to the wrong things.

Yeah.

Or to things that continuously hurt you. You know, my friend Dr. Ramani in her book talks about the. It's not you. Her book is called. She talks about the happy family vulnerability. That for some people, because they're from a happy family, when they come across a narcissistic person, they. They can't spot it. It's like an animal in the wild they don't recognize. Yeah. And then they end up in a deeply painful and abusive relationship for many years. That changes them. It changes their confidence. It interesting. Makes them lose themselves. And there's a lot of rebuilding that has to get done after that. And if you're a victim in a situation like that, then you've had a harder go of it than certain other people. But even that idea that you've had a harder go of it, we have to remind ourselves that, you know, I don't know, someone's 55 and they find themselves back out there again after a divorce. And they have a story around that, like. And let's say part of the story is that I'm behind. Well, behind who? There are people that are married today who you're comparing yourself to who may not be married in five years.

So you're actually ahead because they're about to get divorced.

If you look at it that way. Yeah. You've got five years head start on finding love after this person even knows that they're not going to be married anymore. It's a weird thing, this ahead behind game that we play. I. I really loved Anthony Bourdain, you know, I. I used to watch Parts Unknown all the time. And the more I learned about Anthony Bourdain, that was kind of inspired by the fact that he never. He didn't. He was still broke, working in a kitchen, I think, in his early 40s. And then he got a book deal, actually. Funny connection got my publisher, Karen Rinaldi, at HarperCollins. She wasn't at Harper then, but she was the one who gave him his first book deal for Kitchen Confidential. And I think he was 43 at the time. And for many people, they would say, oh, that feels like that's. You know, I would have to have my big break earlier than that. But he was 43 and then didn't go on to become the rock star that so many people knew him as in Parts unknown until his 50s. And, you know, I do Brazilian Jiu jitsu. He started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I think, when he was, like, 58. Wow. Started and went on to get his blue belt. And I looked at all these things as this incredible inspiration for so many people and myself who may have at some point felt like, oh, I'm still behind. I haven't done that. I haven't done that. And I looked at him as this example of someone who had a growth spurt later in life. And then, of course, you know, we all know the story. He took his life and. And was he ahead at that point. And, you know, clearly there was a lot happening for him that made it feel like living was intolerable. And I don't know this, you know, I can't know what was going on in his mind at the time, but it must been an extraordinary amount of pain. And yet there will have been so many people looking at him in that moment saying, he's ahead. You know, he's a rock star. He's got everything anyone could ever want. And I think we play this game in love, too. And we're constantly looking at other people and what they have. We don't know what's going on with other people. We don't know what the inner workings of their relationship are. I know many people who are more successful the day they leave a relationship. And I get as excited by the people who come up to me in the street and say, I left someone because of you, as I do the people that come up to me and say, I found someone because of you. Because I know if you leave the wrong person, that can be life saving. Yeah. Let alone time saving. So I think the first thing is to start to detach from the Story that is making this way more painful than perhaps it needs to be. In the book, I talk about my relationship with chronic physical pain because in my late 20s, I developed a ringing in my ears that was very loud and didn't go away. Tinnitus. And on top of that, I developed pain in my head and my ear that really affected my life to the point where I couldn't see a way forward. I was like, this is. It didn't make me miserable over weeks or months. It stayed for years. Wow. And, you know, five years into a pain like that, you identify with it. You're just like, this is my lot, and I'm never going to get over this. And what am I going to do? I'm. I can't do this for another 50 years. And I know so many people have that experience with physical chronic pain. But emotional chronic pain has a similar kind of structure and resonance. Because when you feel like you are always lonely and you're chronically lonely, or when you feel like you're chronically anxious or chronically depressed, you don't just feel the pain of the thing. Your pain is made worse by your relationship with that pain. You have a relationship with it.

Yeah.

And. And that relationship is the thing that ends up making life feel really intolerable. My relationship with my chronic pain was that it made me unattractive, it made me weak, it made me unable to achieve things because it was just took up. Took up all of my focus. And if I didn't achieve things, then I wouldn't be loved or I wouldn't be worthy, and it would never go away. And if it never goes away, I'll never be able to be happy again. And so I had this whole relationship with that suffering, and it made it so much worse. And what I learned is if I can take control of that relationship, then the suffering itself actually massively lessens. And that was what happened for me when I realized I couldn't change my physical pain or that I didn't. I tried everything, and nothing made it go away. I went into a place of, let me change my relationship with this thing. And by changing my relationship with it, it started to decrease. The same can be true in our love lives.

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When you find yourself at a certain point in life where you're back out there again and you didn't think you would be, you're going to experience all sorts of pain. Now. Some of that pain is going to. It's. You're going to feel it physically. You're going to feel a loneliness or you're going to feel heartbreak. Now, in a heartbreak, you feel physical pain. But what makes that physical pain intolerable is the story that goes with it. I'm never going to find anyone like that again. I'm never going to be this happy or as happy as I was again. I'm too old now, so no one's gonna want me. I'm gonna be invisible to people. I'm. There's all of that story, and the story is what turns the physical pain into something unbearable. But the story is the part that we can actually change. When you feel. When you lay in bed at night and you feel heartbroken, you feel a sensation. You might feel it in your throat, you might feel it in your chest, you might feel it in your stomach. But if a sensation is just a sensation, like any other sensation, if a bee came and stung us right now, we wouldn't have a load of story to go with it. That made it intolerable. It would be painful. But you go, oh, my God, a bee stung me. That's so unfortunate. Yeah. You wouldn't be like, I can't believe. Yeah. Or I was. I'm so stupid. Why was I sitting in this part of the room where a Bee could easily access me. And, like I'm saying, such an idiot. This is what I always do in my life. I always, like, we wouldn't have that story. You just go, the bee stung me. It hurt. That's annoying for me. You might even feel some compassion for yourself. Like, this sucks. I got stung. But in a breakup or in a heartbreak or in a being lonely again, at a certain point of our lives, we don't just have the sensation. We have the story. And the story makes us so unhappy. So my. This is a roundabout way of saying that in answer to your question, when someone gets themselves when they're in that situation, look at the story that you're telling yourself around this right now. And when you realize that that story is the part that you can actually change or see differently, and you can start to just look at the sensation in your body as something that can be treated separate to the story by the way that you show up for yourself or the way that you breathe or the way that you regulate your nervous system right now, then starts to become something you feel like you have an awful lot of control over. And I would say that's something you can do before you ever worry about getting out there again or. Or dating again, anything like that.

This is so great because it's so similar to if. If anyone's not necessarily in the dating pool right now. This is so similar to friendships. And literally what I had to do before I could even gain female friends. I made all my friends more in my, like, early 30s, like, all of my really good girlfriends. And so many people look at me and they're like, oh, I'm so jealous of your girlfriends. I'm like, I just got these, like, not that long ago. But I had to change my story. I had such a painful, negative story around female friendships. And so I carried that into every single encounter with a woman. I was like, well, I'm more of a guy's girl, because they're not catty. They don't, you know, use things against you. I feel like if I'm vulnerable, that's just gonna be used against me for later. So I would always have a wall up. And so I just carried this story over and over until one day I had to learn I have to view this in a different way in order to, like, even be open to anybody, because all I would do is put that story on every single person. Whether they were amazing, they wanted to be friends, they could have been my best friends, friends. But I just. I couldn't see past. I Couldn't let that guard down.

Yeah, there's a, there's a. Such a great example. I'm so glad you said it. There's a, a chapter in the book called Never Satisfied. And I talk about the challenge of us feeling like when we're never happy, we always, we are, you know, in love. We either go for the exciting person who feels like they hurt us, us, or we find someone who doesn't hurt us, but we're not excited by them. And that kind of pattern that we're constantly finding ourselves in. And I talk about this idea of never satisfied, and the feeling of never being satisfied often has us chasing the wrong things. And I break down the reasons why we do that and what's going on with us. But one of the things I talk about is this idea of staring at the wall when we have had an experience over and over and over again in our lives. It's the, you know, we've probably all heard some version of the self development analogy of, you know, the race car driver being asked, what's the key to driving that fast and not crashing? And they say, don't look at the wall, because if you look at the wall, the car's going to go straight to it. Well, in life, we all have our wall. For you, it was that if I make female friends, they're going to turn on me at some point and they're going to me and ultimately they're gonna capitalize on that and they're gonna hurt me. I can't trust them. And so, of course, when that's your wall, you, you look for it everywhere. And I tell a story in the book of, you know, my wall growing up around kind of either the threat of confrontation or violence or the reality of it, and, and making me very hyper vigilant to bad types. And, you know, being in a bar in Japan with my brothers where everyone was just having a good time and me ending up kind of attracting a confrontation with someone who I thought was looking at my brother and continuously seeing him look at my brother, look at my brother, look at my brother. And because that's my wall, you know, my wall is, we're not safe. Yeah, we're not safe and there's danger in every room and we have to be constantly looking for it and hyper vigilant. And, you know, for me, that night, it made me see this person and think, this person's about to harm my brother. I need to go over there and do something first. And, you know, I luckily never turned into a fight because Someone came and, you know, separated the two of us. But I remember going over there and. And kind of essentially precipitating the very thing I want the least.

Right.

You know, there's nothing I want more than a peaceful, fun time with the people I love. And my fear that we're not going to have that because there's some sort of threat of violence or danger in the room is what makes me actually attract it and precipitate that. And if you're looking for the wall, you'll find it. Wherever you are, you'll find the woman that betrays you. Yep. And it will become the evidence. And at a certain point, we've focused on the wall for so long that we don't even realize it's a wall anymore. We just think it's the world.

Yes.

And for me, I had to realize, oh, there are other realities than the one that I have told myself is the world. I grew up distrusting people a lot in a. In a. Perhaps a slightly different way to you, but I grew up with real trust. I didn't really realize they were trust issues at the time, because when you're looking at the wall, you don't realize it's. Yeah, yeah, I don't have trust issues. It's that you. You know, everyone has an agenda.

Exactly. Totally.

And I. I had to make friends with people. And one thing I've been good at in my life is paying attention to other people and what they're doing differently. And I had to make friends who I realized didn't not trust in the way that I didn't trust, you know, our mutual friends, Lewis, friend, Lewis Howes. I. I would be around him in the early days of knowing him, and I would see him doing things for people that I would be too distrusting to do for people. And. And I would almost get curious about that. And I would go, louis, when you do that for someone, are you not worried that they're going to take advantage or that they're going to, you know, not give and just take and take and take? And. Because that had been my experience in life, is that people will just take and they'll take until you've got nothing left and you're burnt out and you're. And so I would ask him those questions, and I'd see a different belief system than the one I have. You know, I might hear him say, well, you know, you. Yeah, there's always the possibility of that, but I get more by giving or, you know, if I notice that, then I just. You Know, I steer more of my attention and generosity towards the people in my life that are reciprocal relationships. But I also make peace with the fact that, okay, that was a situation where I gave more than I got and that's okay. Yeah, it's like I would realize, like, oh, there's a different way of thinking here. And he's not obsessing over this in the way that I might obsess over this or whatever. And, and that was very powerful for me because I went, no. Oh, there's other, there are other ways to live. And especially when you see other people living in those ways and, and it's working for them, you know, you go, well, maybe I don't want to be my way anymore. Maybe it's not serving me. And I have found the most powerful thing in the bridge between where we are now. Look. Staring at our wall, making our wall the world. And a different kind of life is curiosity. It's not, I don't think it's belief. The self development world is often kind of obsessed with, with the idea of just believing. If you could just believe, then. I don't know, I've never been able to do that.

Just go into it.

Yeah, I've never been able to just believe that something is possible for me that I've never had or never experienced or don't have any reference points for. The idea of just believing has always left me feeling incredibly inadequate because I go, wow, other people must just be better at believing because that's not possible for me. But curiosity for me became the gateway to believe because curiosity would make me observe other people and life and see that there are other ways of being. You might have observed that there do seem to be women who have really beautiful female relations.

Very similar story. Or just.

Yeah, and what is that? And, and, and okay, I'm not there. But. And it's not been my reality, but what is going on there? There seems to be another reality. And then when you do that, you do things a little different. You might say, okay, I'm just going to experiment. If I'm being curious, I might not know the way to do that, but I might just experiment with some different ways of being. It's the same in our love lives when we're dating. I had a woman who I coached that she was dating a guy and it was going really well. And I tell this story in the book.

She.

And she really liked him. And then one day he had a barbecue with his friends. This was early on. Okay, he had a barbecue with his friends and he didn't invite her. And she was. It triggered everything for her. The wall for her was like, you know, it was abandonment. It was rejection.

Like, I'm not good enough.

I'm not good enough. Exactly. And so when she didn't get invited to this barbecue, she sent him a message in the middle of it and said, why didn't you invite me? Yeah, right. So already there's an energy there that she's bringing to it. And he said, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. You know, the truth is, I just haven't seen these friends in a while. Really excited to see them and. And get some quality time with them, but can I call you tonight? And she wrote back, don't bother. Now, she had a right to be hurt that she wasn't invited. But the way that, again, this was her wall, the way that she interpreted this meant that she then precipitated the kind of division that she didn't want.

Right.

She didn't want to feel separated. She didn't want to feel abandoned. But then she said, don't bother. Went straight into this avoidant place. Yeah. And then every day he didn't call, she felt validated, you see?

Yeah.

This is exactly what people do. But she had told him not to.

Call, and he's like, but I'm doing exactly what you told me to do.

Yeah. And I. You know, I don't like. I. And this. And of course, the energy that she's bringing him is a very difficult one at that stage. It's not an energy of vulnerability, because vulnerability might have been. You know, it's probably nothing, but I. I felt hurt that you didn't invite me. And it. You know, it made me feel. It made me feel unsafe or it made me feel. It brought up some stuff for me. And, you know, it'd be great to speak to you later, but I just wanted to be honest with you. Or maybe she'd say that when she got on the phone to him, I actually felt her earlier. I probably don't have a right to. We're just getting to know each other. I just. You know, I felt that, and I wanted to share it with you. That would have offered him a chance to know her better, to have compassion, to maybe even see himself in that, because maybe there's situations like that where he's felt that in life, and he goes, oh, I relate to that feeling. Maybe he sees that and says, that's so interesting. The last three people I dated, when they felt like this, they lashed out or they did something spiteful in return or they went cold on me or. But this person just brought vulnerability when he sees that maybe he sees someone who's unique or different or going to create a better life around with him than the people he's dated in the past. So there's all these different ways that could go, by the way, he could also. She could say that and he could go, yuck.

Right, Right.

I don't want that. Like, I want someone who's perfect and doesn't have any of these flaws, by the way. That would say a lot about him and, you know, the level of growth he's at in his love life. But. So he could have been turned off by that too. It's not that you try something different and it's guaranteed to get you the result you want, but it's what it does is it gets you a different result than the one you're used to. And when you get a different result than the one you're used to, you start to develop one foundational belief that I think is actually the gateway belief to all others, which is, oh, there are other ways of living this life than the way I've been living it. There's a different way to play the game. There's a different way to show up. And it creates different realities. And I. It sounds so simple, but there's something mind blowing in that idea that the reality that we have been living in for so long is not the only reality that is available to us. It creates this feeling of expansiveness about life.

I know. I love that part. And it's hard because you also. It's hard in the best way. Like, you know, if you have that conversation where you're authentically you and you say how you are, I think sometimes it can feel scary because now you're actually being rejected for you and who you are. Like, oh, I got vulnerable with them. I showed them how I really felt or that I didn't want them doing that thing. It really hurt me and they still rejected me. And at least before, it was kind of for, like, not who I was or I could put up, you know, something that just felt like I was stronger and they weren't actually hurting me. And I think that's the part that. That's the challenge is like, getting through knowing that if you really show yourself, you could really be rejected. But also people can really accept you. Yeah, you can, like, really find love and you can really find those friendships.

You find your people, you find your people. You find your people. And. And I, you know, I. I would caution anyone against thinking that your stuff is worse than anyone else's stuff. You know, other people might be less vulnerable about their stuff. They may not talk about it as much, or they may have a great Instagram profile or a great dating profile that puts their best foot forward. But we've all got these things. Everyone. Everyone's got things that they're ashamed of. Everyone's got things that they wish they had done differently. You know, we live in a bit of a world of like, hashtag, no regrets. But, you know, David White, the British poet, said that, you know, if you. If you have no regrets, where have you been?

That's true. That's true.

You know, you can't live without having some regrets. And by the way, regrets, they're useful. They. They inform what you do next. If you don't regret anything, then how do you ever learn anything? So it's. We all have these things. You're not. You're not strange. Everyone thinks they're strange. No, you don't get it. If you really.

If we really.

If you really knew what I was like, if you really know what went on in my head, if you really kn. What I've done in my life, the things I am ashamed of, you would run for the hills. And it's kind of like we all think that way or a huge number of us think that way and not realizing that everyone else is having the exact same thoughts and experiences of life. And so I think that you're in good company if you. If you feel a little, you know, or a very screwed up. If you feel like there are a ton of things that you. You're having to work on. If you. If some part of you suspects or worries you're broken, you're in great company. And there's something about being real in the right cadence. Right? It's not like we show up on a first date and we bare our soul in all of these ways because it wouldn't be appropriate to do that. We do that with people that we increasingly learn to trust and feel safe with, and we show a little more, and that's rewarded on their side by them also being more vulnerable. And that's how connection is built. But the. The ability to do that with people is the route to real connection. And we. We spend so much time in our love lives looking to impress instead of connect. And that's one of the reasons I think, we feel so disconnected all the time. It's one of the reasons why, you know, that it's almost like There are, there are different ways that we do this. Some people go on a date constantly looking to show how great they are. This is what I've achieved and this is who I am, and this is how funny I am, and this is how learned I am. And these are all the books I've read that I can quote and look at me and how many books I've read and how knowledgeable I am. And you know, that we should. We constantly is like a show and tell of how great we are. And that's a bid for control. If I can feel like I'm powerful and I'm high status or I fight, then I have leverage in this situation. And then, you know, people go away and they say, I never really feel, I don't feel connected to that person or I felt intimidated by that person. You know, there's a constant, it's okay to intimidate a few people. You're always going to intimidate a few people if you've done anything in life. But, but if you're intimidating everybody, then there's a pattern there that's worth exploring. Am I just, am I seeking to constantly impress as a bid for control or am I really connecting? Another way we don't connect is, you know, through people pleasing, you know, and being passive on a date or never really offering our opinions or never really taking the stage on a date and talking about, you know, so it's a, a, it's a problem. But through, through authenticity and being who we really are, that's what makes someone connect with us. There's a book called On Writing well by William Zinser. And he said this is where he gives advice to non fiction writers. And he said that there's a moment when he's reading an article written by somebody where at the beginning he often finds that there's a kind of desire to impress. The writer is trying to use overly flowery language, clever sentence structure. It's a kind of look how impressive I am as a writer. And he said, somewhere down in the article, there'll be a moment where the writer says something authentic, reveals a detail about themselves or the way that they're thinking, a vulnerability. And in that moment he sees that and he goes, aha, a human. And he said, the moment where I feel like, aha, a human. That's the moment where I know I'm on that. That writer is onto something. Yeah. It's worth us asking ourselves when we're out there trying to find love, at what point does someone have that moment with Me, at what point are they reading the article of my life, my thoughts, me on a date, and suddenly having a detail said that makes them go, aha, a human. And of course, at what point are you feeling that with them? That's where you know you're connecting. So. And that connecting comes through in vulnerability and relatability.

That's so good. I can think of so many conversations just, I've been with so many different people lately. And there's that moment that you're like, okay, now the conversation doesn't feel forced. It feels like you can connect person to person. You know, when it stops having that pushing energy and all of a sudden it just like takes a life of its own. I love, I love that moment. And it's always. Because they share something.

They share something. And, and it's, and it's easier to do that when you've accepted those things in yourself.

That's so true.

You, you know, if you have not. If there's a part of your story that you have not processed yet and you feel shame around it, then you're either not going to talk about it or when you do talk about it, you're going to talk about it through squinted eyes and almost like that feeling, you know, that you. The other shoe is going to drop once you said this, and they're going to look at you differently and they're going to judge you, but what you're really afraid of is that they're going to learn this thing that you already think about yourself, yourself, that I already don't like this about me. And once you know it, you're not going to like it about me. And it's going to validate the fact that this is shameful or ugly or pathetic or unlovable. And so that part is where the self acceptance can become really powerful because it allows you to. It's a way of processing the stories of your life in a way that allows you to come to a place of compassion for yourself. Why you did those things, how you arrived in that place. A kind of acceptance that I believe is true, which is that you couldn't have done anything different than you did, that you really were doing the best you could at the time. Maybe your best is better now, but at the time you were doing the best you could. And the acceptance that there have been things that have come out of that that you wouldn't give up. And once you've been through that processing, it's kind of a way of rewriting the script and the story of your life. Through a different lens, a more loving lens, a more compassionate lens, then you no longer say these things in the same way to people. And it's funny. People take their cues from us in life. They learn how to think about something by the way that we say it's it so true. Yeah, there's a. I remember seeing an interview with Daniel Radcliffe. Not that I want to draw any more comparisons between me and Harry Potter, but I.

No, I'm like, now, you know, I.

Can'T unsee why I'm not doing myself any favors here. There's a story of. He tells of him. I think it was going to Japan to promote one of the movies in the height of the Harry Potter hysteria. And there was a giant crowd there, far bigger than anyone anticipated. And they hadn't brought enough security. And he was with his parents. And he describes this very scary experience of having to move through this crowd and get to their car and it being something that's potentially quite harrowing. And then the car doors closed and he sat with his parents and he said he looked at them almost waiting to see how he should react. And then he said, my parents burst out laughing. And he said, when they burst out laughing, I started laughing. And then we all laughed together. He said, that was a very instructive experience for me because had my parents freaked out? Had they been afraid? Had they, you know, gone a different direction with that, it might have changed the way I saw the whole thing. But when they laughed, I laughed and it became this funny situation. I had two women take my program many years ago, and this was back in the days. Now we, you know, when we do an event, it's a lot of people, but this was back in the days where it was like a kind of weekend style boot camp almost. And we'd take people out and get them to actually like practice talking to us. And these two women had both been out the night before, and the next day they, they came in and one of them said, you know, it was a lot of fun, but I had a really hard time with something. I said, what's that? She said, well, I have kids. And it never left my mind. Like, like, how do I talk about the fact that I have kids? As if she had like Darth Vader work waiting at home for any guy that would come over. You know, it was like you. But to her it was, it was baggage. She said, how do I talk about it? Two or three people later, a woman put her hand up and she said, I don't have a question. I Just want to tell my story. I started talking to this guy and ended up exchanging numbers, and it was a great experience. And the whole crowd applauded. And she was. I was like, so what happened? She said, well, I went over to the guy and I said, he had a chin dimple. She said, your chin dimple is, like, really adorable. She said, it's not quite as adorable as my daughter's cheek dimples, but it's adorable. And it was this fascinating moment where she. She didn't even realize she wasn't saying it as an example of I did it differently. She didn't realize there was a connection between what she had done and what the other woman had asked. But one woman said, how do I bring up the fact that I have kids? Yeah. And the other woman mentioned her daughter in the first sentence of speaking to someone, not in the context of saying I have a daughter, but in the context of flirting. She said, your chin dimple is adorable, but not quite as adorable as my daughter's cheek dimples. She had communicated that she had a family in a way that she was actually flirting. One of them signaled, I can guarantee you, if she brought up her kids, the former woman, if she brought up her kids, it would immediately. Even if he was questioning, should this be a big deal to me, it would immediately become likely a big deal to him because of the way that she had internalized it.

Yeah.

The other woman, she was sending a very clear message that this is just part of my life. And what he was more focused on was her energy, her charisma, and her. Her kind of fun, flirtatious way than the detail that she had just given, which it was quite clear wasn't baggage to her. So that's it. You know, it would be worth everyone listening to this or watching this, asking themselves, what's the thing that I have told myself is going to make me unlovable if someone learns it? If. And that's usually the thing we keep locked up in a cage, and we don't go there. And we try to fracture ourselves, in a sense, so that we can be this other person in the daylight. And then we could go home and feel our shame on our own at night. And God forbid anyone ever come to that room at night and learn these parts of us. Some of the most beautiful and impactful work we can do is to go towards those things and to start to change the narrative that we have around them and the acceptance we have around them. Because if we can do that, the things you once thought were baggage can not only be not important, they might actually end up being the reason that someone falls in love with you as deeply as they do.

That's so true. I love hearing that.

I.

It's like I can think of all of these stories that used to stop me, whether it was in, you know, wanting. I'm sure you can think of this when you wanted to go out in the world and share your own story. You have all of these ideas of why you're not going to be lovable.

Sure.

It's so crazy to think, think some of those stories are probably things that inspire people now in your life. Like, I, I didn't graduate high school and I hadn't told anyone until like three years ago. I even took me two years after we were married to tell my husband. And now that's something that so many, like, so many people relate to me and they're like, oh my God, this is so much freedom. Because I didn't either. Like, I had no idea. The thing that would be. Is the most shameful is something that people actually love about my story now. And it's giving them permission. And this is in everything that we do in all of our lives. So most likely the thing that someone is sitting there so afraid of is going to free someone or you're going to connect or you're going to gain a best friend or you're going to gain, you know, a partner or whatever.

That looks like and, and, and you're going to turn off the people that totally don't get you. And that's okay too, that there are going to be people who don't get you. Everyone has to get you. Life isn't a popularity contest. It's not about finding as. Collecting as many people as possible. It's who gets you. Not everyone will get you. It's not everyone's job to get you. It's not everyone's job either to even forgive you for things that you feel like need forgiving. It's, you know, to. There are people in life that we, that we hurt, and it's not their job to forgive us. It's our job to forgive ourselves and to find new people or to find other people who can view us holistically because they weren't maybe so in the firing line of a previous version of ourselves, you know, so it's even. That can be a liberating thing that to go, no, not everyone has to get me. Not everyone has to be okay with everything about my life. But I, I'm looking for the people that are I'm looking for the people that see how far I've come. I'm looking for the people that can view me holistically in light of my life and what they know, which is that are only things they know if I tell them and if I share them. And this isn't. This is an ongoing thing. I. I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that I've done all of this for myself. I am recontextualizing my own stories in real time right now. There are many stories that I tell that. That have been a huge sigh of relief because I go, oh, I was able to share that, and everyone didn't hate me for it. You know, some people judged me, and that's fine. And then other people felt even more connected to me, or I was able to help people even more as a result of saying that. And there are. There are other parts that I'm still contextualizing. I'm still on the road to going, oh, I. I still feel shame around that, or I still am holding on to something around that. I need to. To. I need to go towards that, and I need to start to view myself more holistically in light of that and more compassionately. And if I can do that, then it becomes this new thing that I can share without the fear of. Yeah, someone coming along and conferring, confirming that this makes me unlovable because I've already found myself lovable with this. That's true. I've found. I've found. I've managed to come to a place where I find myself lovable with this thing, and now I don't need the world to find it as lovable as maybe I needed to when I was hoping that they would validate that I was, you know, not a terrible person or not unworthy in light of this detail.

So what are we gonna get out of the book? Like, what. What are you hoping when you were writing this, people would ultimately feel? Cause you've poured your. I mean, it's been 10 years since your last book. You poured all of your lessons. You're now a totally different person. You're in a totally different place. Relationship. All of the things. What are you hoping? Like, who is this for and what are you hoping people get out of it?

Great questions. Who's it for? It's for anyone who wants to find love, first and foremost, if. If you want to find love. I think this book is a wonderful, wonderful resource, and I hope it becomes an indispensable resource for people. I hope it gets Passed between people who are in different stages of finding love. And whether it's finding love, you know, in their romantic lives or finding love for themselves again or some combination of the two, I hope it. So it's for anyone who's trying to find love is for anyone who feels like, you know, they don't know what's holding them back or they don't know why it keeps not happening the way that they want it to. And they want to understand what maybe the deeper reasons are that you can't get from just looking for some dating advice or you can't get just from asking a friend what's happening. They're more nuanced answers and they're more deeper answers is for anyone who's struggling with their story around their love life. You know, many people have a story. I'm always the woman before the woman that they marry. I'm, you know, always the friend and never the leading role. I'm, you know, they always. They never commit to me. I'm always the person that they date and have fun with but never commit to, you know, or I never get past the second date, you know, whatever it may be. We have a story. I'm too old. I'm invisible now. No one's going to want me. I. This book is a great place to come if you've got a story that you've developed over time that has now become your enemy in this area. And it's also for people who are struggling with the feelings of loneliness and unworthiness that come about when you're looking for love. You know, I really want to. There's a lot of shame around looking for love and a lot of feeling judged. Like, this is the thing for many people, it's the thing they want more than anything in this world. They want it more than they want money. They want it more than they want a thriving career. And they don't want to admit that to the world. It's easier to focus on the other things. No one judges you for going after your career aggressively, but the moment you say, I really want to find love, and you start to go after that aggressively, people start to look at you like you're desperate. Yeah. And, oh, you need to just chill out and let it happen to you. It will happen when the time is right. It will happen, you know, when you least expect it. And you kind of get shamed by a lot of people for looking for love, which is absurd because love is this thing that it's beautiful whatever form it comes in, whether it comes in the form of friendship or family or whether it comes in the form of a romantic partner, you know, love is for me, I don't think there's anything more important. I know if my career went down the pan, if everyone decided that they didn't want to hear from me anymore, I would have the people I love in this world totally. That's what I would go back to. What could be more important than that? I need food and I need love.

It's true.

Food, air and love, you know, and it's like. And then for the people that feel like they're not finding it, they get increasingly more scared because every disappointment, every ghosting, every flake, every non committal person who ends up breaking their heart every time they get cheated on is just another confirmation that it's not happening for me and that maybe it will never happen for me. And, and if it never happens for me, one of my greatest life goals won't be realized and I'll be sad for the rest of my life. I had a woman who said to me, Matthew, this was the question she led with. I get goosebumps as I say it. She said, I need to kill my desire to find someone because it's not happened for me. And if it never happens for me, but I hold on to this desire, I'm going to be sad for the rest of my life. So the only way for me to be happy, I believe, is to kill my desire to want someone who could hear that and not feel a sense of heartbreak. For the person who has arrived at that conclusion, there is nothing shameful about wanting love. There is nothing shameful about trying to find love. And I hope that this book creates a place where people who are on that path feel like they're not alone, that there is absolutely no shame in it, and that there are reasons to be optimistic. That doesn't matter what your story is so far. The past does not have to equal the future. In this area, new things are possible and you might actually be able to find more comfort and peace and even happiness along the way than you felt was possible before reading it. And it's why I was very careful about how I named the subtitle of this book, how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily no matter what that was. Those three lines were very, very important to me. They weren't arrived at lightly. You know, raising our standards means recognizing that our needs have to be more important than the target of our affections or desire. Too many people have that the other way around. It's more important to get the person than it is to have my needs met. It. And then they find that they get the person, and they're deeply, deeply unhappy. That relationship is a kind of hell. And I've been in a relationship like that where it was. I was miserable, totally lonely in a relationship. I was lonely. I was in excruciating anxiety day after day where I didn't feel good enough. I didn't feel my needs were met. And, you know, I remember a friend of mine leaving a lunch with me who hadn't seen me in a long time. And they said, they didn't tell me this until after the relationship, but they said, I saw you that day, and I realized, oh, he is not happy. But my mind was so focused on trying to hold on to something that I thought I wanted, that I thought would make me happy, that I didn't realize how miserable I was. And that was because I put a person before I put my own needs. So raising your standards means flipping that on its head and saying, my needs come before the person, and they have to. Because if I get the person but my needs aren't met, the person becomes worthless to me. Yeah, it's true. I'm miserable. So how to raise your standards? Find your person. Because I don't believe there's one person. I believe it's finding our person. And our person is the person that wants to build with us. It's not just someone we think is awesome. It's someone that actually wants to build with us. The right person is both right and ready. They want the same things as us. Us. And our person isn't perfect, but they're great at handling us, and we're great at handling them, and we build something beautiful together, and then, you know, live happily, no matter what. Because I really. I really believe that happiness can be found on the path. And that's not me saying, learn to be happy by yourself. It's a. It's actually subtly different. It's learning to be happy enough. Happy enough is a. Is one of my favorite phrases. And me 10 years ago probably would have looked at that, like, with a type A mindset and said, that's settling by another name. But these days, I don't believe that at all. I think happy enough is a superpower. Because when you're happy enough and happy enough says that if I. If nothing changed from the way my life is today, I will be fine. And when you have that, you can say no to the wrong behaviors, the wrong people. Happy enough is like the basis of having standards. Because you realize I'm happy enough, you can even acknowledge that I would be happier if I found an amazing person to share my life with. But I'm happy enough even if I don't. And I show people in this book how they can reach a point of being happy enough that will become your ultimate power in finding love. Because to me, one of the master keys of. Of finding love is loving your life and. And loving yourself and being happy enough even before you found it.

Well, this was so good. I just slipped into a little vortex with you. And honestly, it doesn't matter if you are dating looking for love. Everything that you said resonates with me deeply because it is loving who you are, and it affects and impacts all of your relationships. So I'm so grateful for you coming on the show. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And for anyone out there, I'll say this. I have really. I've spent a lot of time with people in all different phases of their life in this area. And there are going to be chapters in here that this is. This is one of those books where you could buy it for a single chapter that I believe is going to. Gonna change your life. You know, we have a chapter on the question of having a child and all of the experiences people have that make them make bad choices in dating because they're in a rush to create a biological family. Yeah. And how do you deal with that when you feel like you're in a rush, but you're not meeting anyone? So there's a whole chapter on that. There's a whole chapter called how to leave when you can't seem to leave, which is aimed at narcissistic relationships or abusive relationships that you, you know, this chapter is designed to be the thing that. That someone can read that will give them the strength and the courage to actually leave a situation. So if you're even thinking about that for yourself, get the book just for that chapter. There's a whole section on the book for confidence that anyone who's not even looking for love could just take on its own as a. As a model for becoming a more confident person in their lives. So it's. It really is a book that's designed to, you know, there's a whole book on a whole chapter on heartbreak and how to overcome heartbreak. It. I think there's something for everyone in here and anyone who's thinking this would be just a book for someone finding love. It's certainly the number one audience for this is going to be people who are looking for love. But it, I think it's going to find a huge outside audience of people who want to be happier, more confident, and also be capable of having hard conversations with other people in life, which is another huge, huge section of the book. But.

I could talk to that one all day long. So grateful for you. Again, where's the best spot for us to go grab your book?

So the best spot would be lovelifebook.com and the reason is because you can not only get the book via that website, but we have a couple of very cool bonuses to go along with it. The one that's timely right now and if people wait a few months, they'll miss this one is a big live event that I'm doing on the 4th of May for everybody who's got a copy of the book. And it's going to be an incredible event. We're going to be doing it worldwide. It's going to be virtual and it's going to be, you know, a show that normally would be a significant investment. And we're doing it. You know, I haven't written a book in 10 years. I just want to, I want to do something really, really big and exciting for people as my thank you for this one. So that's on the 4th of May. Anyone who gets a copy of the book now before then will get an invite to that event. But you can find out all the details if you go to lovelifebook.com and you can still order it from wherever you want, whether it's Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any of your local bookstores. But you'll see the details on that page. For once you've ordered the book, you can go there and get your ticket to the live event for free.

So fun. That's going to be so much fun. You guys go grab the book. All you have to do is go down to show notes. You can go and check that all out and grab it now so that you can be a part of that event. Thank you so much for coming on and you guys, so grateful for you as well. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye, everyone.