Why You SHOULDN'T Always Trust Your Instincts In Dating

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NMLS 696891. I can look at many times in my life where my instinctive response to something made things worse. Sometimes in a relationship, our instinctive response is to say something mean. [Speaking of the] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Love Life Podcast with me, Matthew Hussey and my wife, Audrey Hussey.

Hi.

We are talking today about a chapter of the new book called Question youn Instincts. And I am so excited to talk about this because this is a chapter that, well firstly, I'll let Audrey speak to this, but she Initially, when I told her the name of this chapter, she... you didn't vibe with it. And you were like, There's a reason I... There's a very... It was a very specific reason why.

She struggled with it. I mean, you did call it at.

The time, Don't trust your instincts.

I stand by that.

Quick notice for everybody who has pre-ordered a copy of the book, Love Life, which is coming out April 23rd. Most of you know by now who have ordered the book. that you are gonna also get a ticket to an event that we are doing on May the 4th called Find youd Person. But what many of you don't know is that we are entering every single person who has registered their purchase of the new book into a prize draw where we're giving away tickets to the live retreat this September. The six days with me, with Audrey, with my brother Stephen, and all of our team in person in Florida on the beach this year, we're gifting one-on-one with me as a prize. We are giving away Love Life sweatshirts, Love Life t-shirts, signed copies of the book. There are huge prizes, there are smaller prizes, but there are actually quite a lot of them that we're giving away. So people have a decent chance of getting one. And every single person who registers their purchase of the Love Life book is getting enrolled in that prize giveaway. So go to, if you've already purchased, go to lovelifobook.com and make sure you have registered your purchase. You literally just take your receipt number from wherever you got it from. It doesn't matter. But put your receipt number in and you'll be in the runnings, not only for those prizes, but also for the free ticket to the May 4th event, which everyone is getting. And if you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can still get it in time at love life book.com. so go check it out.

You're gonna laugh. You mentioned the sweater. I'm actually a bit cold.

Jen, can you grab my sweater? Well, this is perfect.

Since we got our air conditioning fixed.

Finally, we have air conditioning back and I am blasting that AC, baby.

Yeah, and I am freezing.

You had your turn. The whole time it was broken, it was your house, now it's mine.

Sick of living in an igloo.

I think the correct term is igloo.

What did I say?

I don't actually know.

We are talking about a concept which when you first brought to me, as you said, I was very much like... You were horrified. I don't know if I like this. Well, because our instinct and our intuition and all of that stuff kind of sometimes can feel like that's all we've got, you know?

Yeah, we're taught trust your instincts, right?

Right, exactly. So I was a little bit, unsure about this concept, but then you explained it to me and it's actually now one of my favorite chapters of the book. So it's chapter three. And why don't you talk a little bit more about what it's like, what it's about? What do you mean by retrain your instincts or question your instincts?

Well, I think we have a lot of bad instincts. Our instinct is just what if you think about that word, it's what we do instinctively. And what we do instinctively isn't always helpful. I know we're going to talk about some of those today, but like, what's your instinct, for example, when you get scared? Does that instinct always serve you?

What is your instinct when you get scared? I freeze. I've realized this. It's the embarrassing one that I don't want to have. You know, you want to be like the fighter or the one who can actually run away and, you know, save themselves. I freeze. If there's like a big thing happening that's scary and dangerous, I just go and I just freeze.

I think mine is somewhere between freeze and fight. Like I think I dissociate.

Mm-.

But I'm also like on the, you know, I can go to fight.

Yeah, you do it like temporarily and then you jump to fight. Yeah. Jump into action. See, I didn't do that. You're gonna have to save me.

Why do you think it's a positive thing? It's more of a trauma-based hypervigilance thing. But, you know, I can look at many times in my life where my instinctive response to something made things worse. What's your instinctive response to someone upsetting you in an argument? Does your ego take over? Do you lash out? Do you say things you regret? Sometimes in a relationship, our instinctive response is to say something mean when we're trying to win a fight. and there are, of course, some really dangerous instincts that we have during the dating process when we have some, especially when we have someone we like, we have some really bad instincts there that end up consistently driving us towards pain, towards the wrong people, or towards sabotaging something good. I remember speaking to someone who was dating someone that she was having a great time with, and by all accounts, he was great. like he hadn't done anything wrong. Then he had a little gathering with his friends on a Saturday during the daytime, and he didn't invite her. And it had a big effect on her. It brought up a lot of Abandonment, a lot of, you know, fear, this. This idea that he. I like him more than he likes me. It's. I'm gonna get rejected here. I'm gonna get hurt here. And her instinct was to push this person away without really giving him a chance to even talk about. why he hadn't invited her. Yeah. So she kind of rejected him before.

He could reject her.

Yeah, very much so. And when he asked if he could call her, she told him not to bother, you know? And so that was.

And of course, when you do that, all you want is for that person to call you. But you've just told them, don't call me. And they're like, how dare they not call me?

And I don't think anyone would argue that my instinct there was to. connect. My instinct was to disconnect. It might have been my deeper desire was to connect, but my instinct was something else.

You mean in her situation?

In her situation.

Yeah.

Yeah. Or anyone who relates to that situation. Our instincts don't serve us. So what instinct do you have? And that's what I want to invite everyone to ask themselves today when they listen to this or. Watch this YouTube. What's the instinct that you feel is holding you back or consistently getting you in trouble? And let's go through some common ones because I know we have some- Yes.

We have some written down. The first one is the instinct, very common, I would argue, instinct of doubling down on giving someone attention and love and like texting them and all of our kind of best energy when they're pulling away. So, you know, somebody maybe starts to text us less and less or you have a great date with them and then the next day you feel like the energy is a little bit off. Our instinct often is to kind of double down and try three times harder just to sort of get back to that status quo that we're used to with them. and obviously that's a very bad instinct. So can you talk to that?

Well, it's the very instinct that makes our value plummet as our feelings increase, which is a really dangerous combination because the more we try with someone when they're not trying with us, the more we're encouraging them to question our value. Because why would this person keep giving me more and more and more a time when I'm giving them less? Yeah. What does that say about this person? It literally is teeing ourselves up for that person to go, oh, this person must not be that great. Or there must be something going on with them. What is this thing? When someone sees an instinct we have to try harder in the kindest possible way, they may look at it and go, Wow, this person has some things that they need to work on. But in the least generous interpretation, that person we'll go, oh, this person's not valuable. It's a crude way of looking at it, but that's how the psychology of it works. And of course, what also happens is what people keep getting for very little effort, they start to take for granted.

You know, I saw somewhere recently, and I actually, I think I shared it with you because I thought it was so powerful. It was like an Instagram quote, but I really liked it. It said, you can't make someone love you by giving them more of what they don't value. And so in this instance, this person clearly is not valuing the energy that you're bringing to them and giving them more of that energy is not going to make them want you, even though that is the instinct. Right.

I would even give it. I would add a line to that quote, which is the more you give it, the less they'll value it. Not in a situation that's reciprocal, but the more you give energy to someone when they're doing nothing to justify you giving that energy, the less they'll value that energy that you're bringing to the table. I remember speaking to someone who her idea was that this guy who wasn't committing, if she could just get close enough to him, he would eventually see her value. So she kept trying and doing things that She kept seeing him, she kept spending more time with him, and he was happy to take up time and energy of hers. He was happy for the sex and for all the good stuff. But her sort of instinct was that if I keep getting closer to him, he's finally going to see my value. He's going to finally see that he doesn't want to lose this. But there was no, from her side, there was no like price of entry for him for that. So the only thing he really learned was that this stuff didn't have any kind of value on it. There was no price for all of her energy. It was just something he could expect. And so while she was thinking it's going to get me more and more valued, what in reality was happening was she was becoming more and more taken for granted.

You know, it's so funny because, and I'm sure so many of our listeners will relate to this, but you know, what happens is what you think is if I can just see this person one more time, that will be the time where they'll change their mind about me. I just need to see them one more time. I just need to give them one more experience. They just need to see how awesome I am one more time. And we can do that for a really long time. That one more time can turn into weeks, months, years, as we know.

And by the way, it creates extraordinary resentment because when in yourself, because when at the end of all that you check in to find out that their feelings haven't moved an inch.

Yeah.

Or that what they're prepared to give hasn't changed. The resentment that that creates is really profound.

Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's so true. And, you know, the opposite of this instinct that we're talking about is the instinct to mirror a lack of investment and communication that we feel from somebody else. So you have one person who basically kind of doubles down and tries to, you know, make somebody love them by trying to give them more and more and more and more in the hope that they will eventually turn around and meet them.

That's the first instinct.

That's the first instinct. And then the second one is the opposite, which is if this person is going to take two days to text me back, I'm going to take two days to text him back, or I'm going to play it so cool. and I'm going to be cool girl and I'm going to be like easy breezy cover girl, no worries about me. And you do it in a way, you do it so much that you end up setting a standard that almost then dictates the level of investment they have to give you. I want you to talk about that and why that instinct is a bad one.

Yeah, this is such a, it feels paradoxical with the first instinct because you think, well, surely the opposite of that or the the antidote to giving too much and being undervalued is to only give what someone else is giving. If they text me every three days, then they're not going to get more than that from me. And that goes for how intentional someone's being to if they're not speaking about the future or if they're not talking about, you know, having deeper feelings or I'm gonna not talk about it either, 'cause I'm not gonna give them more, I'm not gonna show them more than they're showing me.

I'm gonna be cool.

Yeah. And which is why, by the way, a lot of people stop being cool when someone else gives them permission to stop being cool by the other person being vulnerable, the other person saying, I love you. The other person saying, God, I miss you so much. And then all of a sudden we feel like there's a license to say, I miss you too. Oh my God, I finally can say it, you know? It feels like the antidote to giving too much is to mirror somebody else. But there's also a danger in mirroring somebody else, because if somebody is being non-committal, non-intentional in the way they date, if they're being inconsistent, if they're only texting you and deep down you like to speak to them on the phone and have more connected conversations by phone, you're constantly texting and it never leads to a date. If you mirror all of those things, then you're actually, you're tacitly approving that level of communication. You're tacitly approving that standard from their side. You're saying without saying it, I'm okay with this level of texting. And it's a really easy thing to do. It's a really easy trap to fall into with our instincts, because when someone sends us a text after two weeks of ignoring us and says, How are you? There's an instinct for many of us to immediately just latch onto that as hope and to go, oh, I'm so excited they finally reached out. But what I don't want to do is show I care too much that they've reached out. And I certainly don't want to show them that I've been thinking of them in those two weeks and that I've been disappointed. So, when they reach out in a casual way, I'm just gonna send a message back in a casual way and be like, Hey, how's it going? Yeah, I'm all good. Just enjoying my Saturday. It's like you're now mirroring it. And the problem is by mirroring it, you're approving it.

And you're resetting it every time. You're almost resetting the clock because you're ignoring all of the dates you've had, all of the closeness you've had, all of the, in some cases, intimacy you've had. You're ignoring all of that and almost going, Yeah, I'm happy to treat this as if you've just met me and we've just matched on a dating app and there's no investment and we're at ground zero. And so you're kind of resetting the clock on the relationship each time you do that.

Yeah, so it's like the answer to not giving too much is not to then go the opposite direction and go to zero intentionality until someone else shows you. Because then you're mirroring, you're not modeling.

Okay.

You're following the culture of the way dating is right now or the way someone else is instead of adopting your own culture of what you want and then modeling that culture for somebody else.

I agree with you entirely. But that's really, it's an instinct that's, you know, trying to keep you safe, right? You're trying to not embarrass yourself. You're, in a lot of cases, you're trying to not ruin it because you're afraid that if you do show intentionality, you're going to ruin something. Like, how do you actually overcome that instinct and instead do something that, quite frankly, feels much more scary to do?

You have to, there's like a third instinct that you have to be willing to override, which is you can model the kind of communication you'd like to see from someone. Which is a proactive thing. I think it's an empowering thing to know that you can do that. But if that person can't meet you there, if they're not responding to that culture, then our instinct might be to hold on and to keep hoping because of a connection that we had with them on a date. or because of the great times we've had, or because it just feels really, it feels important when we talk about this in the chapter of the book, How to Tell Love Stories, that it feels important when we have mutual attraction with someone, but it's not that important if someone's not showing up the way you're willing to show up. And so the instinct is, oh, my God, this is, and we see this all the time. This might be like one of the top three instincts I see. and have seen for 17 years from people is when someone finds a person that they are attracted to who's also shown some interest in them, the instinct is to hold on to that thing, to lower one's standards in order to keep it, to continue to hold on to the hope of it being something. And we have to override that instinct if when we model Someone doesn't mirror. Someone doesn't then give us the same back. We have to then override the instinct that says, Try and find another way with this person.

Yeah, try and find a back door.

Yeah, and instead go, oh, the reality is that I thought this had value. It clearly doesn't have value because this person's not, they don't fit with my culture for the way that I want my love life to be or for the energy that I want to bring into my love life, the level of kindness, consistency, you know, effort that I'm willing to give someone. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna break it off, and I'm gonna break it off before it feels like it's dead. You know what I mean? Like, a lot of us, we. The reason we obsess over closure is because we want someone else to confirm the body is dead. You know what I mean? We want someone else to say it's dead. And that's in our minds that comes in the form of them finally telling us once and for all, I don't like you and I never want to be with you and it's never gonna happen.

Which would hurt so much if someone actually did that.

And also, no one's ever gonna do it. It doesn't happen. What happens is people fade. They move on without us really knowing they've moved on apart from their actions and the fact that they're not trying. And so we have to do the thing that goes against all of our instincts, which is say, if this isn't meeting my needs, if this doesn't fit with the culture of what I want, then I am going to release it before getting the ultimate closure from this person that it's dead.

Okay, but I have one last one.

Okay.

Because that's true. But what about the instinct of closing yourself off to dating entirely and actually cutting things off before they've even begun and just being very kind of jaded and negative about the whole process? Because that's also an instinct when people have got hurt a lot or they just, you know, maybe are trying to protect their hearts or their ego or whatever it might be. They, you know, could be in a situation where their instinct says, everything out there is a danger. Everything is a red flag. And I'm not even going to bother putting my true authentic self out there because I'm afraid that will be rejected. And we talked about this in the last, one of the last episodes we did. It's a really common thing. So to that point, how do you know how to calibrate that and not go so far the other way that you're actually in that camp that I'm just speaking about?

So that's. So I'm glad you said that one, because it's a. If nothing else, what you just said goes to show that our instincts can be wildly different from each other. And that's because so many of our instincts are what we developed in order to survive. Think of that phrase, survival instincts. Someone has good survival instincts.

And like me, I freeze.

We forget that we all had to do different things in order to survive. because we all had different environments. You had one environment growing up. I had a different environment growing up. Other people have had a different environment. So we learn different survival instincts. We all learn to survive, right? But we develop different instincts for survival. So one person's instinct is to go all in. and to try to do anything possible for this person to make them love them. And another person's instinct is to say, Fuck you. You're not gonna get close to me. I'm not gonna let you get anywhere near me. I'm gonna reject you before you can reject me. Different instincts, both focused on survival. So the question I have for everyone out there, and I'll come back to that recalibration point you just made, which is a really important question, is what survival instinct did you develop that at one point in your life was what was needed? It was your best attempt at surviving. It was your best attempt at getting through the circumstances in which your nervous system was created.

And having your needs met.

And having your needs met that is no longer serving you or is actively hurting you in your current paradigm today. And when you realize something is the cause of, you know, what was the, one of the definitions of addiction or when you know you're addicted is what? When, when I forget the exact wording, but it's basically when it starts to become clear that the adverse effects of this thing in your life have that, you know, that this is having now an adverse effect on your life.

And you still don't feel like you have control over stopping it.

Yeah. When you see your, there are certain instincts you have that you get enough awareness that those instincts are hurting you. And it doesn't mean they're never helping you. You can have an instinct not to trust people, and there will be times where you're proven right in your instinct. and when that happens, it's very validating, right? You go, that's exactly why I don't trust people. But if you can point to enough times in your life where you've pushed away people unnecessarily or that you feel increasingly more alone in your life, and you see other people who are enjoying more love and more connection in their life as a result of having a different attitude towards trust and vulnerability, you start to get the sense that this instinct isn't just helping me sometimes, it's hurting me a lot of the time. And you're gonna go too far the other way sometimes, or sometimes you won't go far enough when you're trying to change an instinct. When you have struggled with vulnerability and now you're trying to be more vulnerable, there will be times where you are too vulnerable. And I mean that in the sense of you may overshare about something that someone isn't entitled to know about you this early on. Or there might be times where you try to be vulnerable, but you barely do anything at all. You're going to go too far. Always remember when I did that Australian TV show and I asked, I gave the person that I was coaching a mission to be more vulnerable because she was never vulnerable on the date. And the next date she went on, she told this whole story of how her dad had his entire life changed in a car accident that changed his life forever. That was a level of vulnerability that was, it wasn't the right kind of vulnerability at that time. It was like a, it didn't fit with the stage they were at. So, but that's okay, 'cause she was trying. So, and when we try, we'll get different results. And when we get different results, we'll start to realize that there are other ways of living that produce different results than the ones we have gotten our whole life. If you never trust anyone because you have an instinct that you're going to get hurt, and then sometimes you give a little more trust or you are a little more generous in the way you treat people without over obsessing about whether you're going to get taken advantage of. And as a result, people blossom around you a little more. You start to get a positive reference point for the energy that you can receive. from people when you trust a little more. The biggest enemy is you trying to get perfect calibration on a new instinct that you're training right now. You have to treat yourself like a toddler who's learning to walk in an area that other people are athletes because they don't have that issue. And when you're learning to walk, you're gonna fall, you're gonna stumble, you're gonna do it wrong. And that's okay. You're edging towards a new way of being, and a new way of being is the goal in itself.

[Tk].

By the way, for anybody who wants to know, because these two chapters of the book connect really well together. We've been talking a little bit about the chapter, question your instincts. There is another chapter later in the book that is called how to rewire your brain, which is a great partner chapter to that because it will show you the Practical side of how to train new and better instincts that bring you more joy, more happiness. more peace and more results in your love life. So when you get it, circle those two chapters because they live really well together.

This was so good. I really loved all your answers. And I think just if I can leave everyone with one parting thought is, you know, all these things feel really overwhelming and big and scary, but even just bringing your awareness to them and being conscious about why we do things and what's behind our actions can go such a long way. to us actually learning how to change them. So just that consciousness, just recognizing, seeing yourself doing it, identifying your patterns and going, oh, I did that there. Why did I do that? Oh, I was trying to feel safe. Oh, I was trying to get love. Oh, I was trying to do whatever. If you keep doing that and you try and pivot every time in one percent shifts, you can have extraordinary results after a long period of time, after six months, a year, two years. so keep going and I hope this was helpful to everybody.

I'll speak to you next time, everyone. Be well and love life.