If You're Worried You Invest in a Relationship Too Quickly. . . | Rewind

I invest too much too soon, I throw myself in and I always get burned or whatever, I suffocate the relationship in the early stages. We're allowing emotion to dictate everything. Welcome to the Love Life Podcast. It's me, Matthew Hussey. Enjoy this classic clip from our archives. And if you want to let me know what you think or how this podcast is helping you, don't forget to leave me a review on iTunes under the Love Life Podcast. Enjoy. There is a comment that I read an awful lot in our community. from women who say, Matt, my problem is that I invest too much too soon. My emotions get the better of me, I get carried away, and because I really like someone, I give a lot in the beginning. It's a tricky situation, even philosophically. You have the people who say, if you're feeling it, just go with it. If you really like someone and it feels great and you're in love and whatever, just go for it. and then there's this other group of people over here that say, no, no, no. If you over invest, if you give too much, then you're gonna ruin it. You need to hold a piece of yourself back. You need to slow it down. You've got people telling you to do a whole bunch of things that don't feel very natural for you to do in those stages when you just want to get carried away. It's fun to get carried away. It's romantic to get carried away. I fear that one of the inadvertent side effects of what we have been doing in this organization over the last 10 years is that I've turned some people into over analyzers. I've made them think so much about a guy's every move and about their every move that they've almost become too logical and they think too much. And that's never been my intention. My intention has always been to support romance, to increase that sense of fun, of joy in dating and relationships, to create more of a sense of freedom, not to stifle people with a bunch of, you know, rules and principles and things that they have to do or worry about all the time. I know that in my own life, I wouldn't want to be with someone where I was crazy about them and wanted more and more of them, but they were constantly holding back because even though they were crazy about me, they were worried that if they gave too much, then all of a sudden I would run away. I wouldn't want someone who was in their head thinking about it so much. But then where does everything we talk about here on this channel come in? Let's imagine for a moment that there is a difference between emotion and logic. Emotion is you just doing what feels good, what feels right. And logic is that voice in your head that is telling you what you should do in order to get the result you want. So that this isn't so abstract, let's take a couple of examples. Example one, your emotion is telling you to just spend as much time as possible with this person that's in your life right now that you're newly into and you really, really want to be around. So you try and spend every hour of the day with them, anytime you have free time, it's all dedicated to them. You don't ever want to leave their side. Now, that's wonderful. How wonderful to have someone that you feel that way about and who feels that way about you. But the thing that it's important for both people to realize is that time spent apart is actually important for the romance to thrive. Esther Perel talks about the difference between love and desire. Love is when two people are together, desire is created in the space between people. But when we're away from each other, we allow desire to start to grow and flourish so that when we come back, we have all of that energy pent up that we now give to each other. So emotion would say, don't separate. You know, I found this person I really like. Do not spend any time away from them now. Logic is the little voice in our head that says, hey, it would actually be a good idea if you guys had a night apart tonight or if you went and did some stuff on your own today and then came back together tonight or tomorrow. It doesn't have to be a ton of time apart, but just enough for desire to flourish again. So the way I like to think about logic and emotion in this scenario is that logic isn't the buzzkill that comes along to ruin your good time and tell you to hold back. I don't want you to think of logic like that. I want you to think of logic as that little wing woman in your mind that is actually showing you how to make it even more fun, even more romantic, that is actually there to support your goal of having something with someone, not to play games, but to drive you towards that thing that feels so good right now. Logic wants you to extend this romance, to extend the emotion, and it's showing you how. Second example is when we're early stage in a relationship, and especially if we really like someone, we want to please them, right? We want to do things that will make them happy. And so we go into what I call partner pleasing mode. It's the same as people pleasing, but it's in a romantic relationship. We turn into a partner pleaser. So someone says, what do you want to eat tonight? And you say, well, what do you want to eat? You know, because you just want to please them. Like, whatever you want to do is what I want to do because I want to please you because I want to make you happy. What do you want to do today? Well, whatever you want to do, what would you like to do? We, we suddenly start trying to find any way to please them. Now, this, in its best form, can be really attractive when we're caring about someone else's experience of life and we want to make them happy. The problem is sometimes us never having an opinion or never stating what we want as a person doesn't make someone happy. It actually makes them confused as to what we really want as to who we really are as a person, as to how to make us happy. Right? And also what it does is it starts to create a partner that isn't now worrying about our feelings or our emotions, but instead is always doing what they want to do. So we wind up in a selfish relationship that we have created. We created this scenario where they learned they never had to worry about what we wanted. So again, logic is that wing woman in your mind that says, hey, I know that it feels good right now to just do whatever they want to do because you want to please them. But guess what? They also want to know, even if they're not saying it, what would make you happy? They want to know what you would like to eat tonight. They want to know where you would like to go today. They want to know what you would want to do this weekend. And by telling them that, you're going to create more respect from them towards you. You're going to make your partner care more about you. You're going to show that you're a confident person who also has desires. That's going to be good for your relationship. logic is the wing woman that will tell you that. The third example is something I see a lot in early relationships and I've done the same thing myself. It's where you have things that you like doing, maybe as a single person you did them a lot, whether it was a class, some training you were doing, building a skill set, or even just your work, things that you were working on in your career, maybe even just friends and family. You get into a new relationship and all of a sudden, you don't notice it at first. It's kind of happens unconsciously, but you start to erode the amount of time that you spend doing those things every week. Now, some of this is natural, right? Some of this is just when you have a new relationship, when you have a great person in your life, naturally you start to give time to them. That has to be, has to come from some other things, right? Something has to give. And I'm not one of those people who says you shouldn't, like, Give up anything in your life for a new relationship because I think that's unrealistic. But what I worry about is when that slippage goes too far. Because again, what are our emotions telling us to do? Our emotions are saying the thing that's validating me the most right now in my life, the thing that is giving me the most joy, the thing that is this wonderful new part of my identity is my relationship. It's this new person in my life and it feels so good and we, our emotions tell us to just now derive all of our validation from this one source. But that's really dangerous because what that person was attracted to you, to in you in the first place was the other things that made you, you. The interests, the hobbies, the passions you have. It was those things that made you, you independently. And when we start to lose all of those things because we put 100% of our focus on taking our validation from the new relationship, this person starts to, and they won't tell you at first because they won't even know what's happening. But the more they see you let go of other things in your life that make you a rounded whole person, the less they'll start to be attracted because those were the things that really made you seem interesting and dynamic and unique. We must be careful not to lose all of those things. And again, logic is that little voice, that wing woman in your mind that will be telling you, hey, I know right now it feels so good to take all of your validation from this person, but guess what? If you work on this thing over here, this project, if you keep getting good at this skill, if you lose yourself in this passion, this person's going to see you doing that, and that's going to get them attracted because. Or it's going to sustain attraction, because what could be more attractive than someone in their element? doing things well, being a diverse person, being a rounded person who's interested in different things or who has a passion for something they're building outside of their relationship. That's really, that's a beautiful thing that keeps our partner engaged. For all of those of you who are saying, I invest too much too soon, I throw myself in and I always get burned or whatever, I suffocate the relationship in the early stages. We're allowing emotion to dictate everything. instead of controlling our emotions. One of the big reasons I built my retreat was to help people understand the relationship between emotion and logic in all areas of their life. Because most people are a slave to their emotions and we have to be the master of our emotions. Emotions are very powerful. They're very, very important. They're necessary and they're the greatest driver you'll ever have, right? It's not about removing emotion. It's about understanding how to wield emotion as a power. And the key to me to getting whatever you want in life, in any part of your life, is to understand finally how to control and direct your emotions instead of waking up each day at the mercy of whatever emotions come into your mind that day. I have my retreat coming up on the 9th to the 15th of September this year. We are down to the last few spots for this event. It has been a completely unique year in terms of how early all of these spots have been taken because of the new book, Love Life, coming out and the number of people that have found out about the retreat. So if you want to join us, now is the time to safely grab your spot before they're gone. Go to mhretreat.com to learn more about this six-day immersive coaching experience that I do with a select group of people in Florida this September. I hope to see you there. MHretreat.com is the link. Foreign.