Matthew AI explains why we over-invest emotionally in new romantic connections. The problem isn't the other person's actions but the internal story we tell ourselves about their importance and our worth. The fix: rewrite that narrative and stop inflating the stakes.
And that's what we do, isn't it? Whether we see someone across the room or we see someone on a dating app that we think is really attractive, and suddenly they become so important, and it really hurts us if we don't get a message back, or if it's after a first date and we go, I had the most amazing first date. And all of a sudden, we raise the stakes of what we have with this person to an impossible degree. And when we raise the stakes and we say it's really important, what do we do? We start investing. A lot. I. A lot more than the situation actually deserves. And it's not them that's made us invest. It's because they haven't done anything that wonderful, and they certainly haven't invested in us yet to the degree that we often invest in them. What's making us invest is our internal story about this person. So think about it, right? We just talked about rewriting our story. This is rewriting the story of how unattractive or unimportant or unworthy we are. This is about rewriting the story of how important we've made them.
