How to Break the Cycle & STOP Chasing the WRONG Person | Matt Monday

When you talk about dating, people like, oh, dating, I don't want to date. But when you talk about finding love, it's hard for people to say, that's not something that's important.

Isn't it interesting that there's a lot of content on the Internet at the moment about dating, mating dynamics and stuff? Almost no one ever talks about love. Like, it's very rare. If you look at the most popular channels on YouTube, even mine, to some extent, you know, it's this quite sort of sterile, transactional, commercial value for value exchange. That's what people are talking about. They're talking about it in this sort of, like, performatively autistic. Like, you give me the thing and I give you the thing, and our values meet. Like, it's like it's a currency of some kind. And so rarely do we actually talk about, all right, yeah. And, like, how does this make you feel? And what's the love between you two people like? And I think. I think that that is a conversation that's wildly missing from a lot of. A lot of this talk.

It's why I. I've started talking in terms of finding love because I just, you know, for me, most people who genuinely, deeply want to find love, they don't really want to date. You know, like, they. They don't. They want to find love. I didn't want to, you know, like, when I was being more intentional in my love life. It's not like dating was the most appealing thing in the world to me. I didn't. I'm an introvert. I don't want to leave the house most of the time. So the idea that I have to go and talk to a person in order to end up in a relationship with them is like. Feels like an annoying step. But finding love is something we, I truly believe, pretty much all of us want. Like, we. On the deep, deep human level, we want to find love. And. And when you frame it, when you. When you talk about dating, people like, oh, dating, I don't want to date. But when you talk about finding love, it's hard for people to say, that's not something that's important to me. And the whole point of this book was to show people, even if you've struggled for years and years in this area, even if it feels like nothing's working, or if it feels like what you are trying to find is eluding you, what is a better path to finding love? How do you do love better? And that's what really excites me now. And I think that goes much deeper than strategies that gets into like, what's really going on with us, what's going on with me that I keep getting attracted to this kind of person that is chaotic. What's going on with me that I keep chasing these people that aren't really investing in me or that make me feel really unsure of myself. Why do I find someone more attractive when they don't text me back than when they do? What's going on there? And those have become the fascinating questions for me. And it's not our reality. The one we've experienced our whole life is really just our reality. It's not reality itself. And I realized this more and more in my life where I would just look at people who experienced life differently than me and go, what's, what are they doing or thinking that is different from the way I'm doing it or thinking about it? That means they have a different result. Like I have a whole chapter in this book called there's two chapters that live together that are two of my favorite chapters in the book. One is called never satisfied and the other one is called how to rewire your brain. And there's a, there's a part of the chapter on never satisfied where I talk about the reasons why we keep getting drawn to things that hurt us.

Why do we.

For one, it's what we know. So if something is, it's. I talk about like a dolphin in captivity, right? Because we're very good. We have a culture right now, self development wise, that anytime someone's going towards something bad, we say you have a self worth problem. But it's a bit, that's a bit reductive because if a dolphin in captivity learns that in order to get fed it has to do backflips, jump through hoops and swim up to humans and then it gets released into the ocean and it starts doing backflips for food in the ocean or it starts swimming up to fishing boats. We wouldn't say that that dolphin has a self worth problem. We would say the dolphin is just repeating what it learned in the tank. It's just familiar. So a big part of what we're doing is just familiar to us. And it becomes, you know, that classic kind of self development idea that the race car driver says, you know, Mario Andretti said, if the key to race car driving is don't look at the wall, your, your car goes where your eyes go. And when we realize that whatever is, whatever we've come to expect of life becomes our wall, it Becomes the thing we keep driving into, because it is what we know. I, you know, I tell a story in the book about. I grew up with a childhood that wasn't, you know, like, I worked in a nightclub from the age of 13. So, like, it was. My dad owned a nightclub when I was a kid, so that was like, not okay for me to be doing that, but I was doing that. And I used to experience a lot of, like, you know, it wasn't a night, like, I don't want anyone picturing, like a nice nightclub. It wasn't like a. This wasn't like a glamorous Vegas style. This was just a grotty, rough night club back in a local part of England. And it was rough. And, you know, people would get in fights and they get thrown out in nasty ways. And. And I. It put me on edge a lot, especially at a young age. And. And even in, you know, my own family, I was, you know, I have a interesting family. And, you know, I was around certain things and created a kind of hyper vigilance in me that really stayed with me. I didn't really. I didn't really lose it. I never really felt safe. So for me, going into a room, I was always scanning for threats. I was always scanning for where's the trouble gonna come from? And I remember being out with my two brothers. We were in a little tiny bar in Japan, and my brothers are having a great time. They're just chill. One of them singing like, hey, y' all on the karaoke machine and just like belting it out and carefree. And I'm like, looking, you know, I'm like, hyper vigilant. I'm having fun, but I'm also like constantly kind of a little bit on guard. And it was a person, a guy, a western guy who just kept staring at my brother non stop. And it got to the point where I just. I create a whole story in my head and went up and confronted the guy. The guy hadn't even done anything yet, but confronted the guy. And instantly was, you know, like, the bartender came around and no, no, no, no. Like, it was all fine. But I remember my brother saying to me, what are you doing? And me going, what do you mean, what are you doing? I was like, well, you don't understand. There's a whole thing in my head. It was like the scene had already happened. It's like, no, you. He was about to. And then this was gonna happen. You. And I remember thinking to myself, how do my brothers survive when I'm not Around. Meanwhile, by the way, my brothers are both bigger than me. One of them six three. The other one's the one six two. The other six four. Both capable of taking care of themselves. But in my mind I was like, how are they not constantly getting in trouble when I'm not around? But it's because that for me, that trouble was my wall. And everywhere I would go, I would like look for where's the. Where's the potential problem? Where's the trouble coming from? And they weren't looking for that. And it's not that trouble's not around. It's not the bad characters aren't around, but they're not focused on them. So those things don't find them. They don't even, they're not even locking eyes with those things. But I'm the one locking eyes because I'm the one looking for where's the vigilant. Yeah. And, and the sad part about that, this is the really tragic part, is that the I am truly, I have zero interest in trouble. I. All I want is a peaceful, lovely time with people I love. That's all I ever want. But there's something so tragic about precipitating the exact thing that you want less than anything, which is a fight, confrontation, aggravation. And when you look at people's love lives, it's the same thing. They, everyone has their wall and keeps crashing into that same wall. I keep dating people that cheat on me. I keep dating people who end up ghosting me. I keep dating people who end up being narcissistic in their tendencies or, or who don't invest in me or take advantage of my good nature or you just, you keep driving into that wall and learn. Helping people to reprogram themselves away from that, I think is one of the most important things we can do. Rarely does something come into my life that I immediately feel I couldn't live without. But one of those things that has come into my life in the last couple of years is the big ass calendar. This is a calendar that allows you to look at your entire year at a glance. And that's great for me because although I've always been good at planning my days or my weeks, I'm very bad at planning my entire year in a way that actually makes sense. I like to do a lot of things. I'm prone to over cramming things. This visual representation of the year is one what I needed. And maybe you do too. It comes with colored stickies that you can use to plan trips and events. It comes with pens that you can rub out because they're dry erase pens. So if you don't want to set something in stone yet, you don't have to. It is something that I have gifted to like nine different people in my lives and every single one of them can't believe they didn't have it before. I love this product so much that I reached out to my dear friend Jesse Itzler, who invented this calendar calendar and asked him for a discount for all of you. So if you go to thebigarscalendar.com at checkout, use the Code Love life and you'll get 10 off everything in store. I promise you, you will thank me for this. You will not look back, and you'll have one every year from now on. Thebigarscalendar.com is the link. Use the Code Love life at checkout for our exclusive discount.

So you're looking for partners that feel familiar, not necessarily partners that feel loving.

Yeah. Not ones that will make you happy. How does that feel? Comfortable. And comfortable is confused with happiness. It's not comfort can be misery. But when you know your way around it, there's something you at least know the, the territory.

Yeah.

And I think that this is why I never, when I was coming up, I never used to understand fear of success. I understood fear of failure, but I didn't intuitively understand what was meant by fear of success. And these days I'm like, it's all just fear of the unknown. It's all just fear of being somewhere you're not comfortable. It's actually the same thing. It's. I've always had fear of success. I told myself I didn't. Like I, I, you know, fear of success isn't something I understand. The truth is, I've always been afraid of success. Anytime I step into a domain that's new to where things get a little bigger than I've experienced before or a little more like, oh, God. I immediately get uncomfortable because it's just unexplored terrain. The same way that if you're, if you sink too far down, that's unexplored terrain as well. You're like, this isn't me. I've never sunk this low before. And you get afraid of that. But it's all just domain. You don't know. And I think so much of life is, how can I make what is deeply unfamiliar to me, something that becomes home to me and sit with it for long enough that it, that it eases up? And so much of finding the right kind of love is that you will, you will find that there are certain aspects of healthy love. If you've been constantly gravitating towards unhealthy love, there'll be or unhealthy attraction, there'll be aspects of it that feel alien to you.

How do you become more comfortable with the alien ness?

Well, first connect with the pain that the other has brought you. I think that's really important is you don't have to believe something better or more exists for you. You just have to know I can never do that again. And I always encourage people to say to themselves what was missing the last time you were with someone in an unhealthy dynamic? What was missing that made you miserable? And you might have been white knuckling it, trying to cling on for dear life, trying to make it work, but. And telling yourself it was the most important thing in the world and you die if you lost it. But when you were in it, what were you missing that also made it hell to be in. And for a lot of people it's, you know, let's say I never felt safe with this person. Like I, I constantly was made to feel like I wasn't good enough, that I didn't match up, that this person might be out the door at any minute or I just constantly felt insecure because they just never, they never showed up the way I was showing up. When you connect with, with how bad that made you feel, hold on to that and take that with you. Because you don't need self belief if you have necessity if it hurt that if you don't need like it, if I put a flame to your hand right now, you wouldn't need self belief to take your hand away. You just, it's I can't keep my hand there, it's going to burn. Is the same in love if, in relationships what has caused you so much pain that you can never be in a situation like that again? That's the starting point. Make change necessary. You don't have to get more confident, just make it necessary. And the next thing is decide the path that you actually want to be on. And one of the quickest ways to decide the path you want to be on is figure out what was missing last time. Okay, that's going to have to be up there with the most important things I look for next time. No matter how sexy or fun or seductive or impressive or charismatic or whatever it is someone is, if I don't find this quality or this value or this way of that they interact with me. None of that matters. It's all irrelevant. It's worthless without that thing. And you stay with that truth even when it feels uncomfortable. And, and also I believe you have to give your nervous system time to adjust because it's not. If you take a drug addict and on the day they quit, you ask them to sit and appreciate a sunset, it's going to mean nothing to them. It's going to feel like the most boring thing in the world because it can't compare. How can the gorgeous beauty, the understated, like transcendent, existential connected, awe inspiring beauty of a sunset compared to just this crazy high that someone was on yesterday? It's not the same thing. So a huge part of it is telling ourselves it's not. I'm. I can't chase that thing in this thing because it's not the same feeling, is a different kind of feeling. It's ultimately going to be much better. It's going to bring much more peace, much more happiness to be with a healthy person, to be in a place where you feel safe, to be in a place where you feel truly seen, to feel in a place where you feel at home, to be with someone who accepts you. But for a while, your nervous system might not respond to that because it's so used to the, the drug of the other thing and that takes time for your body to adjust. Leave me a comment on this video before you go. I love hearing from you. And by the way, if you're watching this and you really want to find love and you see other people around you pairing off and finding what you've been looking for for a long time and you're feeling like when's it going to be my turn? How might I be getting in my own way? Is there something I'm doing to sabotage my chances in this area? How can I find, finally find what I'm looking for? I am going to be helping people uncover their deeper patterns, understand their blind spots and find what they're looking for this October at my retreat. If you haven't got a ticket yet, you can get your tickets@mhretreat.com and don't worry if you can't make it to be there in person. In Miami with us, there is a virtual ticket that means you can participate in this event and get the content from from it from wherever you are in the world. Go check it out@mhretreat.com, grab your tickets and I can't wait to see those of you who are coming.