18 Minutes to Move on From Your Ex
In this 18‑minute monologue, Matthew AI addresses people who are stuck on a past relationship and constantly compare new partners to an ex. He structures his advice around four core ideas. First, he uses the "vacation hotel" metaphor to explain that an ex who was exciting and chemistry‑filled is like a luxury hotel stay – enjoyable but not a place to live permanently; a true partner must choose you as a home. Second, he discusses the illusion of closure, arguing that seeking closure from the person who rejected you is futile because true closure comes from accepting the rejection, not from the ex returning. Third, he warns against the fantasy that the past relationship would have stayed perfect forever, emphasizing that we are unreliable predictors of how a relationship would evolve and tend to romanticize only the high points. Fourth, he highlights that our future happiness is unpredictable; our needs change, and we should not chase a replica of past happiness but remain open to new, possibly better forms of fulfillment. Throughout, he encourages listeners to "marry real life" – to stop living in fantasy, embrace the present, and be open to unexpected love. The talk also includes promotional mentions of Matthew AI, a retreat, and a follow‑up video.
Chapters
I have a really important concept today, especially for anyone who is struggling to move on from somebody. If there is an ex that you have not been able to get out of your mind, if there is someone you keep comparing people to in your life, anytime you meet someone new, this video is for you. Maybe you keep trying to find someone better than them, but it's not working. And it feels like you compare everyone to your ex and no one feels good enough and it never feels the same way as you did with them. I am talking about that person that was exciting. The person you had kept chemistry with, the person you fell head over heels for, but who ultimately said, I don't want to be with you. There are four things I want to say about this that I promise you are going to leave you feeling better by the end of this video. So first I want to talk about the concept of the vacation hotel. The person we fell in love with is like the vacation hotel. For argument's sake, let's talk about it as a really top notch hotel. This might be giving them too much credit, by the way, but let's make it a really amazing hotel like the four. Imagine for a moment that the person that it felt amazing with in the past, that it felt so exciting with, where you had incredible chemistry, where you felt like, oh my God, if I could be with this person forever, I would live in this constant state of euphoria and relationship happiness. This would be everything I need in life. You're on vacation, you're having the best time, you're like, I don't want to leave, I'm not ready to go home. But then we leave and we go back to our actual lives. The people that can't commit to us, or the people that only commit to us for a period of time, and then tell us that for whatever reason they don't want to be with us, they are that amazing hotel. They're like a place that we visited that was this amazing, gorgeous, romantic vacation. But we can't act like the Four Seasons was where we were supposed to live. In order for someone to become our home, the place we live every single day, they have to choose us. So if you're struggling to move on from someone and you keep comparing new people that you date to the person you felt extraordinary with in the past, remember that person showed themselves to be a vacation hotel. They are not your home. The second thing I want to talk about is closure. Look, when someone decides they don't want us and we've decided that we love them and wanted to be with them. We've decided that what we have with them is so special. We felt incredible when we were with them. When that kind of person rejects us, they take on a whole new and undeserved level of importance in our lives. All of a sudden, they became the thing we wanted that rejected us. And so now it can take on this almost supernatural level of import. We feel like we don't ever have closure because we never got to see what that relationship could have been, had it carried on for another six months, another year, another 10 years, or a lifetime. Who here, watching this video right now, has that feeling of, I don't have closure. They let me go and I feel like I don't have closure. I feel like that relationship never got to see what it could truly be. If you feel that, let me know in the comments. I want to hear from you. Because when someone rejects us, we feel like we don't have closure. And there's a danger with that. Now we go out into our lives and we look for someone new because we still want to find love. But no one we meet can give us closure because no one can be the person who created the lack of closure in the first place. So we end up giving them an impossible task. We're asking them to be the closure of the person who rejected us. But really what we want deep down is the closure that comes from the person who rejected us coming back and saying, I was so mistaken. You are the love of my life. I don't know what I was thinking. I want you. In other words, the closure we want is for the person who rejected us to come back and choose us. And so when someone new comes into our lives and they choose us right off the bat, it's almost like no matter who they are or what they are, they can't be enough because they can't be the close we're seeking. It's like we're on a date saying, you, new person in front of me can't accept me on behalf of the person who rejected me. And what I really want is for the person who rejected me to realize that they were wrong and come back and choose me. But you can't be that. And so I'm kind of angry at you. So no matter who they are, it's like we don't truly see the value of this person in front of us choosing us. Because we've told ourselves that the real value is being chosen by this person from the past. And that's the one thing we don't. We don't have. But the person who rejected us can have no value for us. It is its own form of closure when someone rejects us. Because the only person who can be right for us is the person who truly values us and really sees us both. Sees you for everything that you have to bring and everything that you are and says I choose that. I choose you. That's what love really is. So when someone rejects us, they're showing us that they're not our person. We have to stop looking for closure in them, coming back and accepting us. That is not where closure lies. By the way, if you are struggling emotionally with this right now, I want to encourage you to go try out Matthew AI. I created Matthew AI to be my best advice when you need it and it is available for as many hours a day as you need need. You can try it@askmh.com and you can even just go and enjoy it for free for a few minutes to see what it can do for you. I get messages every single day from people saying this changed my life. I underestimated what this could do for me and then I went and tried it and it was a game changer. So I want you to go and try it for yourself. What we need in these situations is not to hear the right thing once. We need to hear it a thousand times. We need massive amounts of repetition and that's what Matthew AI can give you. It can speak to you for as many hours as you need to feel better. So go check it out. AskMH.com try it for free and let me know what you think. I'm excited to hear what you get out of it. Now here's the third thing. When it comes to moving on from somebody, we have to remember that we do not know how that relationship actually would have turned out if it had carried on. This is a thing none of us know. You see, we are wonderful fantasists when it comes to what a relationship would have been if it had continued. We're fiction writers. We love writing a fiction about what it would have been if it had just carried on. I would have been blissfully happy and euphoric forever. This is a complete fantasy. All you know for sure if you were with someone for a glorious euphoric year is that you had one glorious euphoric year. If you were with someone for seven years, all you know is the seven years you spent with them. Relationships are a marathon. Lifelong relationships are like multiple marathons all strung together over a lifetime. There are so many things that can happen in the course of that lifetime. Isn't that true? How many couples do you know in your life where you could not have predicted where they are today? By what. Where they were five or 10 years ago? How many people. How many couples have surprised you? How many of them were not as happy as you thought? How many couples had issues you never knew they had? How many couples that seemed perfect together ended up not being together over a long enough period of time? You have no idea what a relationship will be. So why is it that we think we are an expert on how great our past relationship would have remained had it continued? And by the way, it definitely wouldn't have stayed the same. This much I know. No matter how good that relationship was, it would not have stayed the same. It would have changed, it would have evolved. Challenges you never saw coming would have occurred. There would have been all sorts of things that you'd have to deal with in the relationship. That's always true. So this idea that we are the expert on how great that relationship would have remained is nonsense. We are writing a work of fiction in our mind. If I could have just held on that. That relationship. You don't understand, Matt. They were the perfect person for me. And it would have just stayed as perfect as it was forever had they not rejected me, really. Because it couldn't even last longer than it did. If it lasted three years, then it couldn't last four. If it lasted six months, it couldn't even last a year. So what do we mean when we say it was perfect? And when someone rejects us, by the way, it's very easy to ignore the things that we were unhappy with in. In the relationship. Because our ego is so blinded by the rejection and not feeling good enough that all we do is glorify and romanticize the relationship we had. We don't put any focus on the relationship that we didn't have. We don't put any focus on the ways that it came up short or made us feel anxious or made us feel not good enough so much of the time. Or we were around someone who didn't make us feel more confident. In fact, being around them made us more insecure. By being with them, we actually felt like we'd became less confident because we didn't feel truly accepted or we didn't get our needs met. Instead, we put all of our focus on the chemistry we had or on how amazing we think they are or how special the relationship was in its peak moments. We don't think about what it wasn't. And that leads us to the fourth point, if you are struggling to move on from an ex, if you keep comparing new people to this person, or if you feel like I move, never going to feel again the way that I felt in the past. The fourth thing you need to know is that you have no idea what is going to make you happy tomorrow. When we compare other people to an ex, what we're saying is, I want you to make me happy in the old way, but there might actually be an even better form of happiness than the old way. There might be a different form of happiness that winds up being much more important to us. We are really bad predictors as human beings of what is going to make us happy in the future. So what we try to do is replicate what has made us happy in the past, not realizing that everything is evolving. We are evolving. We are changing. We may be changing in ways that we're not acknowledging yet, but we are changing. Our needs are changing all the time. How many of you have the Same needs at 35 as you did at 22 or 45 as you did at 35? Our needs change. What will make us happy changes. And sometimes we haven't caught up to what our inner voice knows is going to make us happy today. And sometimes it's because we're so busy trying to get something we think we want in life that we don't ever stop and listen to what we actually need today. Sometimes it's because we're following our ego. And egoically, as we said earlier in this video, we are so stuck on trying to resolve something from the past, like a rejection that we've experienced. So now, instead of trying to find someone who's going to make us happy, we're trying to find someone who makes us feel we're enough. Big difference. And we go chasing after some old model of happiness. We have to start making space for the possibility that happiness may arrive in a form that we did not anticipate. It may arrive in a type of. That we did not ever associate with being our type. It might arrive in a personality that is very different from the kinds of personalities that we have been with or been attracted to in the past. It might arrive as a different feeling than the feeling we were used to. We have to start making space for that. And we get worried, like, this person's not going to check all of the same boxes that the last person did. Well, maybe they're not supposed to. Maybe they'll check new boxes that your ex didn't have and you'll come to realize that those new boxes are where it's at. Those new boxes are far more important than the boxes your ex checked. So we have to recognize that we have a limited vantage point from where we stand today. We don't necessarily know what's going to make us happy tomorrow. We are not the expert on what might make us us happier than we have ever been. There's one more thing I want to say before you go. So many of us are so busy wishing to go back to something in life, to go back to an earlier time. Wishing something had happened differently in our lives. And when I find myself doing that, I am always reminded of one of my favorite movie clips of all time. Frodo Baggins in the Minds of Moria with Gandalf. Frodo says to Gandalf, I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had ever happened. And Gandalf says to him those immortal words, so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us. We can spend our lives wishing things had never happened. I wish this person had never broken up with me. I wish that relationship was still going on. I wish I could go back in time and be living that life again. I wish I'd never made a certain mistake. I wish I didn't have this regret. But the reality is, this is all a kind of fantasy in which we are wanting a different universe to exist. A universe where the person we dated was ready sooner, the one who couldn't commit. A universe where that person we fell in love with was actually emotionally available after all. A universe where we had been more secure in a relationship and hadn't pushed someone away with our controlling or needy or jealous behavior. A universe where someone didn't betray us or cheat on us. A universe where we had been enough for somebody. We're wishing for a universe to exist that did not exist. That is not the universe we are living in. I remember making this point recently and one of my followers, Amanda, said, I wish I'd never met him. Even that is wishing for a different universe in this universe. That's not what happened in this universe. You met him. But what's going on right now with everyone who is here, everyone who is watching this video is that you are alive. You. You are watching me right now. You are hearing these words. And that means that while you're fantasizing about the way you wish life could have been or would be real life is happening and life gets better the moment you decide to marry your real life. Instead of fantasizing about a life that doesn't exist. That means not fantasizing about living at the Four Seasons. That is wishing for a reality that doesn't exist and it is a denial of real life. Instead, we need to make a commitment to ourselves and our lives that we are actually going to lean into real life. And when we lean into creating new opportunities and fully experiencing the love that is waiting for us, if we start opening ourselves up to it, life starts to get really, really good. Our job is to divorce the fantasy and marry our real life. Tell yourself I am here now. And there are stories that begin precisely where my feet are now that I couldn't even conceive of. There are people that can come into my life who are so amazing I couldn't have imagined them. That's the beauty of it. But you can't see all of that stuff in front of you if you're focused on the past. You can't see all that is coming for you if you're still in a dreamlike state, glazed over, focusing on an idea of what a past love was supposed to be instead of the expansive reality right in front of you, bursting with possibilities. Marry real life. That's where the good stuff is. It's not in the fantasies. It's in the love we never saw coming, the love we didn't expect, the happiness that a formerly heartbroken version of ourselves was simply not equipped to see. Thank you so much for watching. Leave me a comment on what this meant to you. And by the way, if you want to come and do some deep work with me to feel better, to work on your patterns, to build a new life for yourself. Going into a new chapter. I'm doing a two day retreat in Miami this October on the 18th and 19th. Ticket information is@mhretreat.com this is the pinnacle of what I do, so if you want to experience the best of my coaching, this is it. I really hope to see you and meet you there. And by the way, if you want a video that follows on really well from what we've been talking about here, go check out this one here, okay? It'll pair really well with what you've just learned. I'll see you soon.
