The Danger of Putting Your Love Life “On Hold"

[Speaking of the podcast] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Love Life Podcast with me, Matthew Hussey. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, or if you watch it on YouTube, thank you for watching. We are really excited about the podcast this year, and I wanted to start by announcing that next month I am injecting fresh life into this podcast along with my team and some names that you know on my team to create something that we believe is gonna be really, really exciting for you. I won't say more about it now, but it is in the works. When we have our first air date, I will let you know in advance so you can tune in to that launch of the new version of the Love Life podcast. But it's something that internally we are all really looking forward to, and I can't wait to share it with you. I also am going to be releasing a series of a different kind of episode on the podcast, and you can tell me whether you enjoy it or not. But for the last year and a half, I have been writing a letter to my mailing list. every Friday called the Three Relationships. At the end of 2023, I finished writing my book, Love Life, and I took on the task of having finished a book, writing a letter to my audience in my private newsletter every single week for the next year, which ended up being equivalent to writing a whole new book. I didn't frame it to myself like that at the time, but that's actually what happened as a result. And actually some of my favorite pieces of writing came out of spending many hours a week writing these pieces for that audience. If you missed them, by the way, and you wanna get on my newsletter, you can do that by going to thethreerelationships.com, it's free, I send it out every Friday. But some of them had so much work put into them that It felt like I needed to share them with you. And so, I want to take the podcast as a place, a vehicle, where I can share these pieces of writing with you. And I know that so many of you like to listen to the podcast because you're walking around the house tidying, or you're on your way somewhere walking, or you're in the car driving. Some of you, which is a lovely compliment to me, say that you love listening to them in bed because my voice helps you fall asleep. I think that's a compliment. But, you know, that's beautiful for me. It's kind of like I get to be with you in story time. So, whether you see this as story time with Matthew Hussey or you see it as, you know, a wonderful thing to just listen to and be engrossed in as you walk somewhere, or you just want to watch this on YouTube, I think that this will be something a bit different that a lot of you are going to really enjoy. Today's piece is a piece that I wrote having just done an intimate event in New York for my Love Life members. And there was a moment that happened in the event that gave rise to a whole concept and an insight that I believe can help you, not just in your love life, for many of you who are struggling and feeling challenged by the concept of meeting someone, but also those of you who just have goals this year that you'd like to achieve but are perhaps struggling to fit in or get to amidst all of your other responsibilities. So this is the dangerous illusion of beginning a new chapter. So the piece that I've adapted for you today is something that was born out of an event that I did late last year where I found myself in a little venue in Williamsburg, New York, giving a talk to around 70 of my Love Life Club members as part of our Love Life Live series. This is a series of small events we do for our members over the course of a year where people get together and hang out and I get to do a little bit of talking, not quite as much as people are used to with me. Some of the people that came some were locals, others had ventured into the city from elsewhere. But having managed to snag two quick slices of pizza in a Brooklyn pizzeria nearby when in Rome, I took to the stage to answer some questions. I imagine Tony Robbins must have a similar routine of stuffing his face with pizza before he gets on stage. When I was up there, a woman in her early 30s, we'll call her Rosa, for the purposes of anonymity, began thanking me for encouraging the conversation around women's fertility. Many of you will know, of course, from my new book, Love Life, I wrote an entire chapter on what I called the question of having a child, which dealt a lot with the decisions that people make around their own fertility at different ages. This woman, Rosa, had frozen her eggs as a result of me having those conversations around fertility and was now planning to get pregnant using a sperm donor so that she could be a mother without having the pressure to find the right partner to do it with. She wasn't against co-parenting in the future, but she felt she could no longer date under the time constraints of biology while attempting to remain the best version of herself in the process. I applauded her bravery and for taking the decisive steps towards doing something that was clearly one of her most important life goals. She then went on to explain her new anxiety that by taking this path, her dating life would inevitably be postponed for some years, at least two. She seemed to be looking for some comfort that it wouldn't be too late to pick up dating again once she was through the time that she had bracketed for early parenting. My book publisher from HarperCollins, Karen Rinaldi, who if you've ever been on one of my live retreats, has been a speaker on my live retreats before. I have known this woman for many, many years since publishing my original book, Get the Guy Together, over 10 years ago now. She happened to be in the audience that night. At the end of the evening, she, Audrey and I found ourselves in the back of a taxi in search of more pizza and Karen, a parent of three children of her own, couldn't help but revisit Rosa's question. She said, the whole business of not being able to date for the next two years because she's having a baby. Where did she get that idea? Since when can you not date because you're pregnant? Karen has this wonderful directness that exposes one's private arguments to the harsh light of day in a way immediately has one attempting to reverse out of them. In this case, she pushed back on this idea that Rosa had an inevitable multi-year void where her dating life would have to pause until further notice. No doubt many will attest to Rosa's logic. Many of you, I'm sure, listening will cite the improbabilities or impossibilities of caring for a newborn and finding the time to meet up with a stranger in the process. There's also no doubt that for some, this reality is felt far more acutely than others. But how often in life do we make assumptions about what can and can't be done based on an idea we have in our minds about what a time period of our life is going to be like? I know that when I was thinking in earnest about writing my second book, Love Life, I had decided that it would be a time when normal life, whatever that is, would go on pause to allow me to sit in a quiet room and write for a year. This, as you probably already guessed, did not happen. Life turned out to be stubbornly unwilling to simply tuck itself away in another room for 12 months so that I could produce great work. I still showered most days, took the odd jiu-jitsu class, was required to meet with my team every couple of weeks, and made appearances in the lives of my friends and family. The extent to which you agree or disagree with Karen about Rose's situation doesn't really matter. The point is that it's almost never black and white. Karen saw that this woman had turned the next two years of her life into an oversimplified abstraction from her actual life. The perfectly packaged period of time that she was referring to would in fact never exist. It would certainly never be felt in the way that she was referring to it. She wouldn't cease to be a woman who wanted connection during this time. Nor would there be an obvious moment years from now when an internal green light would magically turn on, signaling that life had opened up for her to date again. She was entirely capable of finding herself standing in a coffee shop three months pregnant, making eye contact with an attractive stranger. She could still let her circle know that she was open to meeting someone. Life would go on as it always had, only with a new layer of responsibility. Would there be a story for her to tell if she met someone? Absolutely! But isn't there always? The British poet David White once said of his own work as a writer, Work is achieved not by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything. David has come to laugh affectionately at the rules that he had created for himself in the past about the conditions he deemed necessary to write, that he have two weeks of uninterrupted time and a week on either side of that to work up to it prior and to decompress afterwards. The truth about our life is that we will always be living it nel mezzo, that is to say, in the middle. In the middle of financial challenges, in the middle of family obligations, relocations, mental health fluctuations, physical changes and major projects. When will this not be the case? Has it ever not been the case for you? Once we realize this, it frees us up to stop thinking in abstract chapters, each of which must be neatly concluded before another one can begin, and to get on with the messy, multifaceted, and ongoing conversation that is calling for our attention. The process of actually living. It's like Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada. Now, I don't know this film well, so please don't start quoting me on this. But what I do know is that she is a powerful CEO who walks through her offices in stereotypical fashion, constantly being pounced on by people needing to let her know about some meeting she has to attend or requiring her to sign off on a design for the COVID of the magazine. Her life appears utterly unrelatable until we take a closer look. Because when we do, we'll see the relentless nature of our own lives. You are the CEO whose time and energy are being called for in myriad ways every hour of every day, whether it's to side on a gift for a loved one, RSVP to an invitation, wrap up a piece of work before a vacation, take a shower, find time to work out, pay the electricity bill. Will there be times when certain priorities, like giving birth in Rose's case, are the headline? Yes. But beware the tempting but entirely theoretical Exercise of hermetically sealing off portions of your life in ways that bear no resemblance to the manner in which they will actually unfold with or without your permission. Date, work out, meet up with a friend for coffee, start the creative project you keep putting off, give yourself permission to layer in the parts of your life you told yourself wouldn't be possible. And on the days or weeks when they're simply not possible, give yourself permission to be okay with that too. So what about you? What things have you been putting off instead of finding a way to crowbar them into the middle? Nel mezzo, as David White puts it. Yes, of course there are things that are making it difficult today. But on some level, that will always be the case, won't it? And if that's true, you might as well give yourself permission to start doing a couple of them now. What would be one thing that you would do today if you were no longer telling yourself it was impossible, or were no longer waiting for the perfect amount of time or space to do it? Could you be okay with doing it imperfectly now. Now, one of the themes, one of the big themes of my year and my coaching this year, as I'm helping many of you out there, because I know many of you are not just watching me on YouTube, you're taking a much more intimate journey with me in a coaching process. One of my big themes is this idea of Nell Mezzo. There will never be a perfect time. and we can't keep delaying our life and the things that we want to do until some later date. It's going to be one of the big themes of the retreat that I do this year. For those of you that are joining me in October, and for those of you that don't know or are just learning about it, on the 18th and the 19th of October, I am going to be hosting for the first time ever a weekend retreat. I used to run a six-day retreat, and this is now going to be a weekend retreat that people are going to be flying from all over the world to be part of with me. And the reason I mention this is because this retreat is designed from start to finish to be something that actually shows people how to make changes in the midst of a busy life, in the midst of responsibilities. and not just in the middle of a busy life, but in the middle of a complicated self. I think one of the problems with New Year's resolutions and, you know, we're now into February, or somehow already is mind-blowing that we're here already. I don't know about you, but for me, January just did this. I was on vacation for the first week. I came back into the LA fires. and then got sick for the last week of January. And so, my plans for January ended up being very, very different in reality than the ones I had in my mind. And that's probably true whether you live in LA or not, or you got sick. I'm sure on some level that's true for you too. You had this idea of what January was gonna be like, and then it just disintegrated before your eyes as quickly as it arrived. But what I know in January is that we create these resolutions, many of us, and these resolutions don't take account of the fact that we are beginning in the middle, both in the middle of our life and bills we have to pay and responsibilities that follow us into the new year and don't just cease to exist at the end of December. But we also begin in the middle of of ourselves, our personality that comes with us into the new year and importantly, our wiring that comes with us into the new year. And this wiring that we have, this wiring that has us replaying patterns over and over again, responding in the same ways to situations, having emotional reactions to the very similar things or the same things we were having emotional reactions to a year before. This wiring has been shaping our whole life until now. This wiring has what's been deciding our results in life. It's what's been deciding the kind of relationships that we attract, the kinds of dynamics that we cultivate within our relationships, deciding you know, our finances, what we're earning, the jobs that we settle for, the treatment from other people we settle for, this wiring is determining our emotional states and how we feel day to day. This wiring is really controlling everything in our lives. And so one of the depressing realizations many of us have when we go into a new year is that while we may have these resolutions that often take the form of type A goals, like losing weight and making a certain amount of money and eating healthy and, you know, reading more books of whatever it is we decide for ourselves, we're gonna, you know, give ourselves that gold star if we do it. The reality with our resolutions is that there hard for many of us to achieve or to stick to, especially if they're the scary kind of resolutions that represent real change and not just something we're already good at. Resolutions are hard to stick to precisely because we take our old wiring with us into a new year. So it's no surprise, or it should be no surprise, that the same things we found difficult last year to achieve or to stick with or found it hard to be brave enough to execute. We are going to struggle in all of the same ways today if our wiring has not shifted. The good news is that the results we've been getting so far in our lives are not a reflection of what's possible for us. Those results are just a reflection of what we've been doing. so far. And what we've been doing so far is a result of our wiring, wiring that was created long before we had any conscious choice in our wiring. You know, the experiences of our childhood, the experiences of, you know, our early experiences of love, our early experiences of who we could trust or whether we could trust anyone at all, our early betrayals, our traumas, the lessons we learned from people who may or may not have known what they were talking about. And in many cases, shouldn't have been the ones teaching us or, you know, we could have been learning from better people. We learn these things early and then they end up dictating our entire lives, which is why unless we change our wiring, no amount of resolutions, no amount of, you know, telling ourselves, I'm gonna stick to this new habit or I'm going to you know, execute on this new goal is sustainably going to change our lives. We, in a sense, have to kind of, I don't know if I like the word in this concept context, but we have to kind of upgrade ourselves. We have to upgrade our wiring. Or perhaps it might be better to say we need to update our wiring. And that's what I'd love to help you do. I've been studying this for years. I've been studying it. you know, I've been running this Retreat program for 17 years of my life, and in its new form, this will be my first chance to take you on this journey. Because this Retreat happens to be more affordable than previous Retreats I've run. It happens to be available to both men and women. So I know that there are many men out there who have never been able to experience this coaching from me, and this is your first chance to do that. and I'm hoping that because it's a weekend and not a week, logistically, it will be far easier for many of you to actually get there and to find the time to make this happen. And for those of you that can't get there in person, we also have a virtual ticket available. So you can actually take this from anywhere in the world. And, you know, for some of you, you'll be on the easiest time zones for that. Others will be on the craziest time zones for that. But it doesn't matter. It's two days. it's two days, so you'll make it work for, for a weekend. But this is going to be a really, really special event. And we have early bird tickets available that we've extended, so those low prices are available for a bit longer. And we want to extend the invitation to you to come and join me because it's going to be really special and it's going to be the most powerful weekend of coaching that I do in the entirety of 2025. So a couple of things. Firstly, go grab your ticket at mhretreat.com so that you have your early bird ticket locked in, whether you come and be with me in person or whether you do it virtually. It doesn't matter. But I do want you to experience this weekend so that you can get the changes you want to make once and for all, whether they're for your love life because you really want to meet someone and you feel like you're getting in your own way or you blind to why it's not happening, whether you are not happy with your confidence in general in your life, and you want to take your confidence to a whole new level, whether you feel like you're just holding yourself back in your life. And like me, you value life and you want to make the most of it, but you feel like you're in danger of throwing it away. You're in danger of waking up five years from now and looking back and going, my God, I still. I'm still in the same place. I'm still sabotaging in the same ways I haven't. worked on the, that wiring that Matthew's talking about. This is for everybody, you know? So bring a family member, bring a friend, get the people that you know and love involved in this as well. That's step one. Go to mhretreAt.com and grab your ticket. Step two, let me know what you thought of this episode in general. I want to know what you think of this format. I put so much time and energy into these pieces that I wrote for people who are on my private newsletter. And I wanted them to be experienced by more people because I know these Concepts can really help people. And I spend so much time on them every week that it seems mad to me that more people aren't actually getting to experience them. So let me know what you thought of today's concept and this format in general. I'd love to know if you're on YouTube right now and leave a comment and I'll be reading them if you're listening to this on a podcasting platform then email me podcast@matthewhussy.com I'll be reading your emails and I'd just love to know what you think in by the way if you want to sign up to my newsletter come join us at thethreerelationships.com the three that's the number three relationships.com they're free to join and I send them out every Friday. And other than that, I look forward to sending you more episodes of the Love Life Podcast and next month launching a brand new version of the Love Life Podcast. In the meantime, be well, take care of yourself, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thank you for listening.