The Subtle Signs You're Forcing a Relationship With the Wrong Person

This is an ad by Regain Couples Therapy and features real testimonials.

This was our first time trying therapy, and honestly, it was long overdue. Looking back, we just wish we had started sooner.

Regain's qualified therapists help couples when they can't get there on their own. We thought it was intimacy issues, but Andrea helped us uncover a deeper root cause we hadn't even realized was there.

Visit regain.com/couplespod to get 10% off your first month. Regain Couples Therapy that Works.

Welcome back to the Love Life Podcast with me, Matthew Hussey. Last week I brought you an interview I did with Ed Mylett in preparation for my book launch this year. This week I am bringing you an important conversation I had on the Know Thy Self podcast. I think you're really going to enjoy this part of the conversation. Check it out and I will speak to you at the end of of the episode.

One of the frameworks I really love in your book are the four levels of importance. So can you walk us through the importance of chemistry to compatibility and how what you feel like ultimately the most important thing is when we're choosing who's going to be our team partner in this life.

The reason I put together this model was because I just kept seeing people valuing, or I should say overvaluing, the wrong things. And when you overvalue the wrong things, you can get yourself into a world of pain. so I said, okay, we need to give ourselves a new model for what's worth our time, what's worth our energy, what's worth crying over.

Yeah.

The first level in these four levels is admiration. There's just you. There's someone you're aware of that you think is impressive, charismatic, attractive. There's something about them. You like their energy, their values, whatever. They may not even know you exist. You just. have an admiration for them. Obviously, in the four levels, it's not very important because there's nothing there. There's just interest from our side. The second level is mutual attraction. That's where we have someone that we feel connected to. They feel connected to us. There's attraction, there's chemistry. There's something there that's mutual. It might be superficial or it might be deep, but there's a mutual engagement. Now, that feels important to us because often we don't meet anyone we like. And when we meet someone we like and they like us back, that feels like the Holy Grail. That feels like lightning in a bottle. I can't let go of this. When does this happen? But that's usually the beginning of us getting ourselves into all sorts of trouble because we think that level two is really, really important. But level two is only made important by level three. Level three is commitment. Do you not just have mutual attraction, but the willingness to say yes to each other, to a real relationship? The number of people that are hung up on someone with whom they have mutual attraction, level two, but don't actually have a yes from that person. That person's still saying they're not ready, they don't want a relationship, they're confused, they're still enjoying being single, is profound. So you need a yes. Not a I like you so much, not a I just, we have such an amazing connection, not a I, you know, feel like we could be an amazing thing one day. But yes, I want to be with you starting today. There's also a level four, and level four is compatibility. Compatibility says we're not just saying yes to each other. There's actually a real, we work together. It works. There's a way that we think that is at least synergistic, if not the same. Our lifestyles combine well. We have a vision that we share for the future. We share a similar moral compass. These are all things that determine the quality of your relationship. Love isn't enough. Love is not all you need, right? Not when it comes to romantic relationships. We need compatibility. You can be in love with someone who lies all the time and you're going to be miserable, especially if you value honesty. You can be with someone whose idea of how they want to spend their life is to be constantly on the road, and that's your idea of hell. And there's a problem for compatibility. So you might be with someone who doesn't want kids and you do. There's a problem for compatibility. So, we have to start being honest with ourselves about what is worth valuing. And whenever I have been coaching people in their love lives to help them find love for 17 years of my life now, and I've worked with so many people, and the number of people that are hung up on someone who Isn't even saying yes. They're not even in level three with that person, let alone figuring out whether they're compatible is staggering. And what I tried to do is get people to shed a few less tears for something that is in level two. If someone's, if you reach level four with someone and then, you know, a tragedy befalls them and you lose them, That's a genuine tragedy. But if the person you keep saying is right for you is like shopping at Target right now and they're still alive, they're just choosing not to be with you. Tell me where the romance is. Tell me how that's your person. I struggle to see it. They're the one for me. I know it. If only they could realize. It doesn't work like that. It's a story we're telling ourselves, and we have to start telling ourselves better love stories, or we're going to make ourselves really, really unhappy. The right person for us is the person that chooses us. The person that doesn't choose us can never be the right person for us. It's just an idea, and ideas are cheap.

There'S so much to unpack within each of the levels there. I want to briefly just touch on the commitment piece, because that is a big thing, especially I feel like for men, there can be this juxtaposition also between the biological clock of a woman, the spaciousness that a man feels as he grows older. And I know it's probably one of the biggest things that you face working with, have worked with millions of women who feel that I want this person, he wants me. There's this attraction in chemistry. There might even be some compatibility, but yet there's this lack of I want you right now. I commit to a future with you and making actions in the real world where you're saying by saying yes to you, they're saying no to other things, right? Which is how that commitment is born. What do you say to those people that find themselves in that situation?

You have to, you're the first, I think you're the first man in all of the podcasts I've been on that has referenced the difficulty with the biological clock. And I appreciate you for that, because I wrote an entire chapter on the book called the Question of Having a Child to address what are often fundamental incompatibilities between people's intentions when it comes to having a family. One person wants a family, the other person doesn't. or that one person wants a family and the other one's just not sure, which might be okay for two people who are in their 20s. But when you get to an age where you're starting to, you know, your viable years for having your own biological child are starting to, are starting to go down, you better be with someone that you, feel confident is going to get there on your timeline because otherwise you risk giving up one of your fundamental goals for this life. And for many people, it's a fundamental goal in this life to birth a child. And I don't have any commentary on that. I, you know, whether someone chooses to, you know, whether someone decides that their vision is that they want to do it in a traditional family unit, and it needs to be their own DNA, or whether they are happy to adopt, or whether they're happy to have a child by themselves. I have no judgment on any of those things. My thing is you have to know. You have to know what's really important to you and just how important it is to you. Because if you haven't had that conversation with yourself, then when someone comes along who's Sexy and eligible, you are liable to forget about all of these things that are deeply, deeply important to you and be distracted by the thing that's in front of you. And the fact that it feels exciting and it feels like hope for your love life, and you can ignore all of the big warning signs that this person is absolutely not on the same page as you. So it's really important to decide our path going into our love life. Like we have to know, we don't have to know exactly what kind of package our person is going to come in. I think sometimes we do, we over prescribe that. And as a result, we say no to some great people because we told ourselves we have a type and it's this and anyone who doesn't fit that exact type we reject out of hand before we even meet them or we just, you know, Swipe, is it left for people we don't want? I think it's left. But we have to discard some of those, I think, superficial things that we've become preoccupied with having and start being laser focused on the things that really matter that we need. in order to bother investing time and energy in someone. And a lot of people have not done that. They have not gotten honest with themselves about how important something is. And then you get into trouble because if a woman, let's say, gets with a guy who just keeps kicking the conversation down the road about kids and she's got three years, let's say, to be able to do that, before it's no longer possible, at least biologically, then she's running the risk of running out the clock on something that she's, that is actually deeply important to her. She just hasn't, she keeps ignoring how important it is to her because she wants to hold on to a person. And I, I'm the person who meets people on the other side of that journey who are going through terrible grieving because this thing that was so important to them has now passed them by in the form that they wanted it to happen. And they end up deeply resentful towards the person that wasted their time and even more resentful towards themselves for not being, for not you know, staying true to the path that was really important to them. So I I. What I tried to do is get people to. In order to know if you have compatibility, you have to have a real sense of what's important to you, which doesn't mean a list. It just means what are the things that I really need for something to be worth my precious, precious time.

Yeah.

And, and that has to be the price of entry for, for anyone that stays in your life, you know, past the first few weeks or months. If you're enjoying this concept, I go into it in more depth on my free training dating with results. This is a one hour free training that you can take as a foundation. for getting back out there in your love life, creating more opportunities, and doing so with more confidence than before. Check it out at datingwithresults.com you can literally watch it right now or as soon as you're finished with this episode.

Yeah, I partly bring it up also because a woman I was seeing maybe a year ago, this was a conversation where I could recognize the hard conversation that needed to be had even early on because of the potential for the road that was going and for whatever better, for worse. The reality is, I don't know, I just maybe find. I find emotional maturity very attractive in women that tends to be older than me. So this woman was older than me, and that was a real conversation that I think she was having with herself that I wanted to bring more and more because I didn't want her to resent this or herself and. made the tough decision to have that conversation.

But also because you were on different timelines. Yeah, like she was now and you were later for that.

Yeah. Because she was like, you know, 10 or 11 years older. And she's like that. That went. That's very much so strong desire and calling for her. And the truth, if I were to tune in right now is it's not for me at this moment in my life, for sure is at some point. I'm excited to be a father one day, you know, but it, I think it's also upon the responsibility of men to take that ownership to, to the best we can detect where those uncomfortable conversations that someone's not willing to have to bring them up.

Yeah, because you, you, you know, I think we, it's part of being kind and conscientious to each other that we explore those things together because it's, we're playing with live rounds here.

Yeah.

Like, it's not, we don't get the time back. It's, it's real and. We, I've hurt people in the past, you know, where, you know, I feel like, and not in the sense that, you know, I stayed with someone past their ability to have children, but I just, I know that there were relationships that I stayed in a year too long. And I already knew it wasn't right, but I kept going.

Convenient.

It was comfortable. And, and I. I don't have, you know, I. I have real regrets about those moments, but no matter how much someone regrets staying with you too long, they don't have the ability to give you back that time. So you have to protect your own time and not. We have to take accountability for ourselves and not. expect someone to be more responsible for our time than we are. It's a lovely thing that you were able to have that conversation because you also gave her a gift in her being able to go and find someone who's right for what she wants. The danger in situations like that is that people go away saying, that was my person, but for this incompatibility in our timelines. And I think that we have to, that's another story that we tell ourselves that I don't believe in. I think we have to get rid of those stories. The idea that we would have been ideal if only blah, blah, blah. Well, the if only turns it into science fiction. If only you were born five years earlier. What is that? It's a parallel universe where your parents met five years earlier and even then it wouldn't have been you that they produced. So it's like, it's an exercise in science fiction to be like, to ruminate endlessly about what could have been if the timing had been different. No, it wasn't your person. Your person, by definition, is the person who is the kind of personality you want. has the same vision for their life, is ready, is on the same timeline, whose lifestyle is compatible with yours. Like that. All those things is what makes the right person. If you've got one of those things, it doesn't make the person the right person. It just makes it disappointing. And there's a big difference. I think that's a crucial shift for overcoming heartbreak. Because disappointment is a lot easier to get over than the chronic grieving that comes from telling ourselves a story that we found our person and that they're still out there, but the timing was wrong. And we'll never get over it because they're the right person. We have to switch From they were the right person to it's disappointing that they weren't the right person.

That's such a powerful shift. There's this quote from my friend Peter Crone that I love, says, what happened happened and could not have happened any other way because it didn't.

I believe that.

It's like just physics, really, right?

It's kind of... Yeah. Yeah. That's how the dominoes fell. Yeah, I don't. Even when I'm beating myself up for. I wish I'd said something different. I wish I'd. It's like, fine, but you. You weren't gonna do anything different. You did exactly what you were gonna do. Yeah. Like, it wasn't. If you were gonna do something different, you would have done something different. I I view life through a bit of a deterministic lens in that sense that, you know, I. I was doing the best I could at that time, even if my best was horrible. That was my best move at the time. And so I think when you look at things through that lens, it's just the idea of ruminating over doing something different is, again, it is an act of, it's like science fiction writing.

Yeah, so a lot of people do struggle with the heartbreak and the story really they attach to it of somebody being who they thought was the right one because they ticked all those boxes. But I loved how you spoke to it. It clearly wasn't the right one because they didn't choose you. And that's the crucial element to the unfolding of you and your partner.

It's quite important.

It is quite important that they actually choose you as well.

It's definitely one of the checkboxes of a relationship.

So, on one hand, I really do believe that the anger, resentment, jealousy, these are in ways poisons that we drink and expect the other person to die, meaning we continue to beat ourselves up about the thing that happened. and it doesn't help the situation in any other way. It really just makes it continually worse. But there's also the natural grieving process that the heart does need. And so how do you help close that gap when, you know, it's the natural disappointment that you're speaking to, and there's the deep grief of somebody that you really love that is no longer now in your life. And how do you help people gauge what the natural healing process is? and not allowing them to ruminate on it continuously to continue to beat themselves up so they can move on, but also not to bypass the real experience of their emotions.

Well, there's always going to be a grieving period, even if it's, you know, my friend David Kessler, I don't know if you know David, he's one of the foremost experts in the world on grief. And he wrote a couple of the seminal books out there on grief. He said to me, Grief is a result you didn't want. And I think that that's really interesting because when you look at grief through that lens, embedded in there is like, in a way, it's not just the answer to why you're grieving. It's also kind of an answer to the way out. because instead of the story being I've lost my person, you can allow yourself to just grieve for an outcome that you didn't wish for. And that allows you to, in a sense, separate it from the person. You're grieving for yourself. You're grieving for your own disappointment, for the fact that life is hard. sometimes. And for an idea you had of where things might go, a future that you had in mind that is now not going to come to be. That's still requires grieving, but it's a different kind of grieving. You know, we're grieving our disappointment. so I think it's really healthy and important to allow ourselves to feel that and to even express, you know, to tell that story to friends, to express it to them. You know, I'm just so sad. You know, I really thought that that was my person. I really thought that we were going to end up together. I'm. I feel heartbroken. I feel so. I feel so sad. I feel. just crestfallen that that's not gonna happen in my life. Embrace that disappointment, surrender to that disappointment. What at some point in our grieving, we have to remember that this story isn't the story of our life. It's just a story in our life and that there are so many more stories available for the telling. And the beginnings of those stories are located right where your feet are now. And it's a kind of, you know, there's nothing wrong with sadness. Sadness is a big part of life. It can even be enjoyable. We watch a movie that makes us cry. Why? Why would we do that? It's like there's something cathartic about going to a melancholy place and indulging that feeling even by choice sometimes. But it's not the only story. And at some point we have to kind of lift our gaze. and realize there's more living to be done. You know, we're still here. So the story hasn't ended and this is just one story of your life. It's not the great story of your life. And if you go out there and live, you'll create a lot more stories and you have no idea. You have no idea. where your life's gonna be a year from now. You just have no idea. You don't know what's gonna be in your life five years from now that you couldn't even conceive of today. Like, we have to, we, it's a funny way to look at it for when we're in pain, but we have to have a little humility that we don't know what's coming. We just don't. It's one of the really exciting things about life is I just don't know. I just don't know. Anything could happen. I mean, when we all look back on our lives, we can find things that happened that we were completely unexpected, that we could never have seen coming. Some really good things. So by what logic do you think more of those things won't happen? Whether it's in business or in love or in friendships or, How many times in our life have we felt like we had our friends already? And then a new person walks into our life and we're like, oh my God, this is one of my favourite human beings. God, we've been finding an amazing person. We've become friends over a year and you go, I can't believe you didn't exist in my reality a year ago. I thought I had all my friends. Why is that not true for your love life? You know, what makes you think that you know everything about your story? What makes you think that this is the truth of your story, that you've lost the love of your life and that you know enough about your future to know that you'll never find anyone else and you'll never get over them and you'll never find someone better for you? It's just a story we're telling ourselves, but it's not the reality of life. The reality of life is far more interesting than that. And if you're still breathing, then there's so many more stories available for the telling than you could ever live in the time that you have left. Thanks for listening as always to the Love Life Podcast. If you ever want to send us an email, you can email podcast@matthewhussy.com Don't forget to check out Dating with Results at datingwithresults.com and I will speak to you in the next episode of Love Life.