Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 210 | when the dating coach gets married

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

This show is sponosred by AG1! ▶ Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase exclusively at https://www.drinkAG1.com/COUPLETHINGS. ���Today we got to interview the one and only Matthew Hussey, a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and coach who specializes in confidence and relational intelligence. Matthew is known by millions for his guidance on relationships and his YouTube channel is number one in the world for love advice! Today we got to pick his brain on all aspects of finding and staying in love and whoa we learned A LOT! Whether you’re single, dating, married, trying to put yourself out there or just looking for ways to improve your everyday relationships and live a more fulfilling life...this episode is for YOU!  Love you guys, Shawn and Andrew  Matthew’s newest book, “Love Life - How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person (And Live Happily No Matter What)” is available April 23, 2024! Pre-order your copy below! LoveLifeBook.com  Follow Matthew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/thematthewhussey/?hl=en Subscribe to Matthew’s YouTube Channel ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9HGzFGt7BLmWDqooUbWGBg Follow the Couple Things Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/couplethingspod/?hl=en Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Shop My LTK Page ▶ https://www.shopltk.com/explore/shawnjohnson  Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/AndrewDEast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to a couple things. With Sean and Andrew. A podcast all about couples.

And the things they go through. Today we have Matthew Hussey again. This is one of our first repeats. I know. And it's been shockingly over three years. That's nuts to me. Yeah. We had a phenomenal conversation with him last time.

Yes. This one blew that one out of the water. By far. No shade to that version of Matthew Hussey or the shade to that version of us. It just was amazing. He got married. His wife's name is Audrey. How exciting is that?

So exciting. Welcome to the married life. The reason for our conversation was because Matthew came out with a new book called Love Life. Yes. How to Raise Your Stand. find your person and live happily no matter what he took us through this whole journey and roller coaster of writing this book he had gone through every kind of phase of life while right while writing this book so he said the highs of highs lows of lows dating life single life engaged life

now married life all while writing this book which is really cool especially from his perspective of being like the dating expert that's right he's been doing this for 15 years and obviously when you talk about something that much for that long you have a lot of interesting insights so whether you're dating or looking to get married or married i think matthew has some interesting thought-provoking things i know i learned a lot we hope you do too if you want to find out more about matthew what he's up to or get a copy of his book called love life we'll link that down below and matthew thank you as always congratulations without further ado we bring you Matthew Hussey. I've been dying to ask you ever since that I saw you got married. Is your career

about talking about relationships? Has it changed? How is marriage? Like you made it across the finish line. Do you feel like you're giving different advice now? Do you guys feel like you crossed the finish line when you got married? I think we we unfortunately thought it was the finish line and then you realize it's the starting line. Right. Right. Yeah, that's what I thought. I don't feel like I've crossed any kind of finish line. I, you know, I just think it feels like a continuation of a, what was the most healthy and peaceful relationship I'd ever experienced. And it, you know, it was exciting to me to get married. I think before then I felt really, it was always just this big thing of, do I even want to get married to someone? I wasn't, marriage wasn't something

that, you know, for me was like, I must get married someday. I didn't know if I wanted to get married. or even if I believed in, you know, needing marriage to kind of cement my relationship in any way. And I, it was kind of, it snuck up on me a little bit. You know, I felt like, oh, okay, like I, like this feels really exciting with this person. I felt like I was ready to build something. And it, you know, I don't think anyone, I don't think everyone should get married or anything like that. I think people can figure it out for them. what's right for them. But for me, at least, I asked a lot of friends where the marriage was

something, you know, I asked happily married friends like, why? Why bother? Like, I just needed to like debate it out one last time. I was like, what's the point in this? I know I want to. I know I feel like proposing, but like, but why? And I had a couple of really close friends whose opinions I trust give me really good answers. And I was like, That makes sense to me. And so it just felt like a natural progression. It's funny, you know, the one thing I didn't want to do, I've been coaching people in their love lives now for 17 years of my life,

which is wild. And so much of what I've done is help people find love. But the truth is, on top of that, it's always been about relational intelligence, you know, helping people in relation to another person. I mean, half my work has been helping people have hard conversations. with someone you know if there's someone where you if you're in a casual relationship and you don't know where you stand how do you have that conversation with the person how do you ask them

where you stand or how do you tell them where you want to stand in a way that's bold and confident like it's all challenging conversations and a relationship is just new sets of challenging conversations at varying, you know, depths of a relationship. So I don't feel like a lot has changed. I feel like people very quickly were like, can you now talk about marriage or whatever? And I was like, guys, give me five minutes. Because it's not like I don't believe in speaking as an authority about things that are new to you. It's like someone trying a new diet and it works for them. And all of a sudden a day later, they start an Instagram account talking about that diet. it's like you've been on it a week it's not like by all means talk about this thing that you're

doing but you know i don't want to become an expert on something that you know i i just did five minutes ago so but i but i'll certainly talk about my journey and i'm happy to do that today as well yeah i actually am curious what were some of the piece of advice that you got from friends or or thoughts uh down the home stretch there that pushed you over the edge to want to get married I had one friend say to me, there is something to be said. He said, firstly, that it just does feel like this extra level when you do it. He said it, it just does feel like there's this extra level of safety, that there's a kind of a barrier to, you know, just walking out the door at the end of an argument.

being like yeah you know what i'm good it he said that to have that piece of paper that says i do give it a second thought we need that yeah because it's so easy to leave things these days it's so easy to call it quits on everything we do all the time and to just live in a place of constant novelty seeking and to be in a situation where you you feel like it's not just endable on any difficult thing there there is something to that and i think we have felt that we have felt that a there's this added degree of safety but be that there's a kind of it really feels like that commitment to building something you know like oh we're doing this like we're doing this together And I don't, again, I kind of want to talk about out of two sides of my mouth here because

I don't think you need that to say that, which is why I think it's a very personal choice. But for me and for my wife, it did feel good. And neither of us came from a place of religion, neither of us came from a place of being like, you know, wed to the idea of marriage. We didn't come into our relationship going, we both know we want to get marriage. She wasn't sure she ever cared about getting married, and I wasn't sure I ever cared about it, but we, you know, we found each other and it felt right. Yeah, that's really good. The psychology of marriage to me is super fascinating.

I was just reading about a study done with two groups that were each given the option to choose one poster out of 100 different options. And group A could switch their poster out after a couple days and change their selection. and then group B they had one pick and they couldn't turn back from that point and group B ended up being more pleased with their choice and like that's kind of what marriage is where it's like hey you burned all the other boats there's no other option so you better make the best

of what we have in front of you and I agree it's not like the whole formality and the legality of marriage might not be necessary but it's it's kind of maybe the most accessible way to unlock that type of of all-in mentality you know yeah I agree I there's a there's a framing that I've used in my new book that spoke to me because the the idea of like a lot of people I think struggle to make those decisions about who to be with because the biggest fear is settling right none of us want to

to get shortchanged in life. So we're all like people go through life going, did I settle? Could I get a little bit more of this or a little bit more of that? Could I get edge closer to this perfect relationship or this perfect ideal person for me? And we think of settling as a negative word. Like I settled. I almost feel like that word needs to, we need to change the association. that we have with it, but it requires a language change around it. So if you take settling for as a phrase, that's a negative phrase. That makes us feel like we've been shortchanged, like, I could have done better. If you take settling on, that has a very different connotation.

because when we settle on something, that requires agency. It implies real intent. It applies a conscious decision. You know, if you imagine people landing in America on the East Coast and those who traveled west, at some point, people who traveled west had to say, that's far enough. Like, I'm going to stop here. Montana. You know, like this is, I'm going to settle on Montana. I look around, oh my God, this is stunning. Look at these lakes and rivers and mountains and just knocked both my book

and my coffee over. Jeremy's going to have a field day on this because he told me I wasn't allowed coffee in this studio and he's just shaking his head like this is why I said it. It's fine. If you imagine someone in Montana going, oh, I have all these amazing things around me, I'm good. Let's settle here. That's settling on. And I always think about, I think about work and relationships like that. That is my work, is it my one true calling? I don't believe in my one true calling.

I think it's kind of nonsense. I think what I found was a career that I really, really love. It gives me deep satisfaction. It gives me deep fulfillment. I'm good at it. People get value out of it. It ticks so many boxes. It just makes me happy.

And I'm like, I'm good. Like, you know, there's other careers I could have done. There's other careers I could have enjoyed or been good at. But the only way to make a great career is to settle on a career and then make that as good as possible. You don't start with your dream career. And it's why so many people quit their businesses or their jobs because they never stay with them long enough to turn them into their dream career. You guys didn't start with this format and this version of what you were doing. Like you played and tried different things.

And every year you sculpted it more and more to be this career that you love. And along the way, you tried some things and you were like, we don't like doing that that way. Or that was like too much work and not enough payoff. That was, I don't like that anymore. Let's stop doing that. And you just keep refining it to being your dream version of it. And I think that relationships are the same way.

You find something, you find a relationship and a person that have the right raw materials and that you have the right raw materials for. And then you sculpt that into something. amazing, but you can only do that by settling on something. If you think you're settling for, you're going to be in doubt, and then you're going to be searching elsewhere. I'm curious. So summarizing your dating experience and advice that you would give as a result, like what is the arc or the trajectory that you experience? Because there was some exploration, you know, you didn't just end up on the East Coast like the Pilgrims did. There was exploration of variety,

and from broad strokes saying i don't want this person i don't want that person but then at a certain point you were like no this is it i'm not exploring anymore uh i'm going in you know yeah well i i i think i much to my detriment and to the detriment of other people that were unfortunate enough to be in my path at certain points i think i you know i dated sometimes with a view to to say, I'll be here for a bit and try this, this city, this state. And, but, you know, like, when I first got to L.A., I never really committed to L.A. I remember getting here and going, I'll do a few more months. And then staying for those few more months and going, I'll stay till the end of the year.

And every time someone said to me, where do you live? I'd go, well, I'm in L.A. right now. I couldn't, I couldn't, like, just say I lived in L.A. I've been here 10 years now, and it took me a long time to be like, I live in L.A. So I think my love life was a bit like that, where I just, I could never bring myself to be like, this is the thing. And the problem with that is that when you never do that, you never, what's really unfair to the people that you date is that you never really get to see what it even could be. because you're never throwing you're never really giving your all to it and they're never even

really seeing you because they're not seeing the most vulnerable side of you they're not seeing all of you they're just seeing what you're showing them for that period of time so they don't even really know you and um and it creates this real it creates this real it creates this imbalance, they also never feel safe, right? Because people can tell when they're not fully safe. People can tell when you're not 100% in. So they don't even get to be the best version of themselves because no one can be the best version of themselves if they don't feel safe in a relationship. So it's a, it's kind of tragic that, you know, when we're in those states, I've been saying recently, like a confused person is a dangerous person. Because

someone who doesn't know what they want and someone who can't make themselves happy, they're certainly not going to be good at making you happy. And I think I lived in that state for a while. And then when I wasn't in that state, I was dating like an addict who just, you know, was like on the roller coaster and the short-term highs and the romance and the passion. And, you know, that's certainly not good either because then you're like giving yourself for this, you're living in this like chemical state constantly that leaves you with horrible hangovers because you don't feel, it's not like you feel like happy or peaceful.

You just, like for me at a certain point, I just felt anxious. I was like, I don't, this isn't going to work for me. Like, I can't do this. It's certainly not working for anyone else because I'm, you know, like I'm hurting people and breaking people's hearts or I'm wasting people's time. it wasn't something I ever did like intentionally but it's just a just the byproduct of of living like that so it was yeah I didn't I didn't make very many people happy and I certainly didn't make myself happy and so I had I had to shift the way I approached this part of my life

and that shift is kind of it shows up in this book because my first book 10 years ago was a lot of that book was about what would you do if you just wanted to create a lot more opportunity in your love life? What would you do if you just wanted to create more attraction? And that's kind of where I was at that time in my life. And since then, the shift for me internally was like, what would I do if I was trying to find happiness in this area of my life? What would that look like? How would I have to approach this differently? If I was really trying to find my person? What would that look like? And there were some really big differences. And I help people with those in the book because we're all facing that on some level is like, I'm just not, so many people

are not happy in their love lives. They're finding that they're either chasing someone who's not available, who excites them, or they're feeling safe with somebody that bores them, where they're constantly doubting whether this is the right person. And they cycle through that. loop over and over again, never finding satisfaction, never finding happiness. I'm wondering not just what, what's wrong with everyone else that I can't seem to find this person, but what's wrong with me? Well, I must be broken that I've got this friend who's been happy since he or she was 25 years old in this amazing relationship. And I'm 35, 40, 55, 65, 65 and can't seem to find happiness in this area of my life anywhere. That makes us feel

like there's something wrong with us and then we really start to start to panic um so that that's what that's why i wrote this book there's so many questions there i don't want to like give away the whole book because like now i now i need to read like the whole thing and all of our readers or all of our listeners need to read it but i'm really curious though in that vicious cycle like we even know friends who they just can never find their person. But if you're going back to, bear with me here, the argument that you can't ever truly feel safe or show a potential spouse or partner yourself

until you have gone so far into your relationship that you've given that, then how do you convince these people? people who are 35, 45, 55, to, like, truly take a chance on someone. If they're not checking off a box on the, like, beginning of it, how do you get them to say, okay, I'm actually going to give it a go long enough to give someone a shot? I think we have to figure out the difference between the, I think people have

ridiculously high standards for things that don't matter. and they have no standards very often for the things that do. So, you know, someone will be like describing to me why they like someone. And they're, you know, I just find them really impressive. And I just, you know, they're like this really creative person and they're really, you know, they just are so sexy and they're this and they're that. And it's like, well, what's the problem? And they're like, well, they don't know if they want me.

Like, they don't know if they're ready for a relationship or they just, I feel like, you know, they don't treat me very well. And yet that person will still continue to invest in that person, they'll still keep trying with that person. And it's like, why don't we have as high a standard for being, at least as high for being treated well as we do for how tall, they are. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. This fall get double points on every qualified stay. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. Oh, this is it, the day you finally ask for that big promotion. You're in front of your mirror with your Starbucks coffee. Be confident, assertive. Remember eye contact, but also remember to blink. Smile, but

Not too much. That's weird. What if you aren't any good at your job? What if they demoed you instead? Okay. Don't be silly. You're smart. You're driven. You're going to be late if you keep talking to the mirror. This promotion is yours. Go get them. Starbucks. It's never just coffee. Like, why don't we at least make being treated well as important as how tall they are or how, you know, exciting their lifestyle is or, you know, how sexy we find. them. Like, why is it that one seems not to matter at all until we're in such agonizing pain with this person that we can't get out of bed? And the other one is like, I, it matters so much that I won't even swipe on someone if they don't have these things. You know, so I think that we have to, I think that we have to give things a chance to the extent that we stop taking our initial

judgmental impressions of people so seriously. Because I'm not someone who says chemistry doesn't matter. I'm not someone who says sexual attraction doesn't matter. I think those things matter immensely in a long-term relationship. They certainly matter in the beginning. But who we can feel chemistry with or sexual attraction with is often much wider, much broader than we actually give it credit for when we're swiping on a screen. We don't realize how many people we might actually, why is it work romances happen the way they do, where it's like you've known this person for six months before anything really happens. It's because it actually, like, you spent time in an office together and you got past the initial like if they were on a dating app i guarantee you

may not have even swiped on them but because you're working with them and in week seven they did something cute you're like hmm and you start looking at them a little differently and you're like oh or they show up to the office party three months later wearing a certain outfit and you're like i didn't i didn't even know you could look like that i didn't know you could look like that i didn't know that you had that kind of, or you see them move or dance or something and it makes you see them in a certain light. We're not seeing any of that in two dimensions on a screen. So I'm not like, hey, stay, date someone for five dates if in the first four, you felt absolutely nothing. But I do think that we have to question how many people we rule out because we're being really intensely

judgmental up front because we're dating just from ego where we're like do they look the part that you know is this the person my friends would see me with is this the person that i would feel good posting about is this the put like do they fit the type that i've gone for in the past i think there's a lot of that ego weighing into our decisions that we don't realize and it's it's killing our options with people that would actually make us very, very happy if we could start dating from a place of what's going to make us happy, not what's going to feed our ego. Yeah, that's really good. It kind of sounds like you are an advocate for marriage now, Matthew. All these things, it's like, it seems like you're kind of a big fan.

Don't you pigeonhole me, Andrew, as a married guy now. I, uh, no, I, you know, look, I'm an advocate for depth and I think that we have a world today that is everything is pushing us away from depth everything's pushing us away from depth of friendships everything's pushing us away from depth of intimacy everything's pushing us away from depth of work

and actually doing some meaningful work instead of posting some like random bullshit it on Instagram that qualifies as work. It took you two seconds to think up. Like, everything is pushing us away from actually going deep on something. And I think so much of the benefits of life come from going deep on something. And it, you know, we're in a, we are in like a really, I think we're in like a, I don't want to be alarmist.

I just, I think when it comes to like dopamine, we're in a little bit of trouble. Yeah. Because I think that it affects everything in our lives. It affects our ability to sit there. Like this book required me to do the most uncomfortable thing in the world, to like put my phone in a different room and to sit in front of a laptop and write for hours at a time. It was excruciating.

I realized how much my attention span has been destroyed over the years when I had to sit down again and write for hours on end without distraction. And if I didn't allow, if I didn't write without distraction, if I kept getting distracted, my writing was crap. So that's the effect we're seeing everywhere is if we're addicted to dopamine in our dating lives. We can't, we that feeling that we get on an app that just gives us a little hit, it doesn't feel like happiness, but it feels like something. It feels like little like, oh, someone's liked me. someone's texting me, oh, and now this third person is doing it, and they have a slightly different face, or they have a different body, or they're, like, it's, it's like collecting

trading cards, you know, and it's like, it appeals to all of our, like, all of those, those chemical responses that we like to collect things and we like to get instant gratification. And I just think, you know, it can be said for marriage, at least, that there is a kind of extreme opposite to that about marriage and marriage is like a really potent thing right marriage is capable of of like creating an extraordinary amount of depth because of the potency of what you've said you're doing or the promise you've made but it also is insanely potent when it comes to the negative effects of it if you marry the wrong person and what that does to people and how deeply unhappy it makes people. So my my yeah I think one of the things I find challenging on the

married side of things is that like there's just especially these days there seems to be like a you'd think that we'd progress to the point where this wasn't the case but there's almost like this pendulum swinging back to this very puritanical righteous preaching about marriage. that I'm allergic to because I'm allergic to anything that starts to sound like that. And I also think that a lot of the people who are like preaching marriage as the answer are missing the point of the actual problem. It's like it's fine to preach marriage is the answer. But it can feel a little bit like someone preaching that having millions of dollars is the

answer. It's like, okay, fine, but tell me how to make the million dollars, because if you don't tell me how to make the million dollars, it's irrelevant how many times you tell me my life's going to be better with a million dollars. I feel like that about people preaching about marriage. It's like, oh, people should, there's books written at the moment, like some big books out there on like why people should get married. And it's like, you, you kind of can't write that book without addressing the real issue which is that it's not that no one wants to get married these days it's that people are actually struggling to find people they're struggling to find other people who want to commit they're struggling to find other people who are their match or have the same

values as them or think the same way about relationships and I think that that's the part we have to really address because people are struggling out there I don't it's not like when I come across people who have decided to be single parents. Most, I've never met someone who started out at 21 saying, what I want my blueprint for my life is to be a single parent. What happened is that they started out with this idea that they'd really like to find someone that they could do that with. And they didn't meet that person in the time frame that they needed to have a child. They didn't they didn't find their person they it was a real struggle love was hard and it was very disappointing for them and so it just to tell that person like you should get married is a

it's a bit like saying to someone who's who's on the street you really should have a million dollars you'd be much happier i um well a couple thoughts in response to what you just say because it's it's really i think good what you just what you just talked about and it's almost like someone described parenting as all joy and no fun right and it's like that that is a real thing where it's like it's such depth there's such involvement there's such commitment and there's not a lot of variety or dopamine whereas like almost dating is is in a different way all fun and no joy where there's like oh sweet i can see a bunch of different faces or I can sample this person's comedy out or this person's philosophy out.

I love these conversations with her. And like you can kind of just jump around and not and not go deep, which is what marriage in a different way is, you know, dating is exploring horizontally and broadly and marriage is exploring like deep. And both are exploring. And I think it's really exciting when you get to a point in a relationship, whether it's marriage or whatever, where you're like oh no this is actually really exciting and I'm more excited for my thousandth day with you than day one with someone else because like eight years into this thing right now still we're we're finding out a lot about each other which is which is really exciting the other the other thing that comes to mind is uh you know why are people so concerned about height

more than, more than these, uh, optics, like values or, you know, the, the, the, the, the style that someone approaches life with. And it's like, we've noticed this in parenting where you talk to someone about, you know, how's the newborn doing? And they'll answer with all these tangible things that come to mind first. And it's almost like type, like thinking fast and slow where you are more easily, uh, able to reference the tangible things where it's like, well, we're not getting a lot of sleep. The baby cries a lot. It's pretty loud.

It's hard to travel. And those are all like really tangible, easy to reference things where, and just like height is when you're dating of, well, he doesn't have the hair color I want or he's not strong enough or whatever the thing is. It's way harder and it takes way more work, I think, on the surveyor side to say, oh, do I agree with you know his how he wants to parent or

do I like how he treats his friends like that that is way more work to sort through and so it's just again it's almost like a psychology thing and then the last thing a little pushback for you Matthew because

Sean and I are in counseling right now and I'm realizing a lot of a lot of the issues are me you know and you mentioned let's talk about how he's treating you or they're treating you. And I think that's really important, obviously. Like, it needs to be a healthy relationship. But it is a shift when you go from, hey, this relationship is to serve me, right?

When that's the primary driver versus how can I serve the other person? It's like, it's such a fragile, delicate, almost unnoticeable thing. But what I'm trying to do is make it way less about how can Andrew be served and way more about Sean. And I think that's, I think that's going to be our next iteration. It's super fascinating to see how our marriage has changed me. And like people talk about, people talk about ice bass being uncomfortable or doing, you know, the workout that you want to do being uncomfortable in that helping shape shape you but like bro what about the most uncomfortable thing ever is your eight years in the marriage and your wife has given you some

constructive feedback and you have to not just be defensive like you instinctually are and I'm saying this from my standpoint but like look at yourself in the mirror and say dang maybe I do need to change something about myself anyway that was a diet that was that was a tangent but I'm freaking fired up because like look you're on the hell anyway well i think back to your back to your book you're you're absolutely right because um you know that's what i i think that place of ownership is the only place to come from in life is what can i do to make this thing better and what am i bringing to the table, I think I'm obsessed with that. You know, I never, I never stopped thinking about that. But I would argue, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, Andrew, that the reason that you're

able to think in those terms is because you trust that Sean has got your back and that she is thinking about your needs, she's not, she's someone you trust not to simply take. And therefore, when you go into a mode of, I'm going to give and I'm going to look at what I can do to show up as a better man, as a better husband, as a better partner. You don't have the concern that she is a bottomless pit of taking who does not have your best interests at heart. And what I see over and, and by the way, that's what makes you feel safe to show up like that. Because there's a big part of it that's like, she's got me. So given that she's got me, let me now think about how I can show up better to this relationship.

So many people find themselves in situations where that person does not have them. that person does not have their best interests at heart that person is a bottomless pit of taking and always will be and so when the the thing that enables for example narcissistic relationships to occur and to stay alive for as long as they do is because one person has an endless capacity for taking. And the other one has an endless capacity for giving. And there is no end to the pain and the misery that happens in a relationship like that. Because you're in a relationship like that, your empathy, your compassion, your ability to go into extreme ownership of what can I do better, actually ends up being weaponized by the other person and ends up being the thing

that enables a cycle of abuse. So this isn't a, but this is a yes and to what you're saying. I agree a thousand percent with what you just said. But what we need to have is accountability for how we show up for the other person. but also accountability for whether we ourselves are able to get, not on a day to day, like, did I get my needs met today? Oh, no, I didn't. Then I'm out. But if I look at the average of this relationship, do my needs get met in this relationship?

Is this person thinking of me the way I'm thinking of them? because that what you just said is a very specific way of thinking it's a it's a beautiful way of thinking is this person really operating by the same set of rules or are they on a different planet altogether and you're pretending that you both think like that those are the kinds of relationships I try to prevent people from getting in or from staying in because they are the root of some of our worst pain in our love lives and they're the root of the most wasted time, which is the other thing. I'm not just trying to save people from pain that's unnecessary. I'm trying to save them from years or decades or in some cases an entire lifetime of time spent with someone who never

deserved their time in the first place because all of that takes away from time you could be spending with someone who is the kind of partner that you're talking about, Andrew. That was really good. Really good. You mentioned you allude to rock bottom in this book. What did that look like for you? Oh, God. I hit a couple.

There was a couple of rock bottoms for me. One of them was, I would say there were three different rock bottoms I hit. one was being one was being truly heartbroken and realizing that I had given I had made every mistake that I advise other people not to make you know making my own life unimportant and making someone else is the most important devaluing myself um being just constantly anxious in the relationship and instead of saying I shouldn't be in this relationship it makes me deeply unhappy saying I need to try harder even though I my needs weren't being met like every mistake that I say to people don't make that mistake was a mistake

I made and I paid the price for it I got I got really hurt the other rock bottom was being single and dating in a dopamine-fueled way and becoming increasingly unhappy and anxious and realizing like, oh, there's an addiction to this that is like every other addiction in my life. Like it's, there is a, there is a pattern to the way I'm showing up here that is a, uh, it has, it's not its own thing. It's the same way I have shown up in other areas of my life where I'm addicted to this short-term high, this feeling, and I get left feeling awful at the end of it. And starting to wonder like, oh, this is like I'm, I don't know if I know how to be happy here. And I'm not sure I'm like, am I ever going to be happy here? Like, am I

ever going to find what I'm looking for because when I'm single, I'm not happy, but when I find people, I don't seem to be happy either. So, like, I'm, I'm, I'm in trouble. And the, the third rock bottom I hit was with physical pain, um, with, I developed chronic pain. Uh, there was a combination of tinnitus, which was ringing in my ears, um, and physical, uh, ear, head, pain that was a combination of symptoms that started around 27 and didn't go away. I mean, I lived with them for years and I gradually sunk lower and lower because I tried to do everything to improve, you know, these things and to get rid of them. I'm a Taipei person, you know, who has always been able to grit my way out of

pretty much every challenge or problem in my life and then something came along that I couldn't grit my way out of it it didn't the more I clenched the worse it got I no solution that I could find helped and so it just made me it put me in like a deep deep depression um and I I didn't know how to get out of it for a long time so that was that was a very very of all of all the rock bottoms that one was the darkest because I didn't I truly got to a point where I didn't know if the pain was there my whole life I thought I'll never be I'll never be happy again I'll never be able to experience joy again because this is my every waking thought 24 hours a day no matter what I'm doing no matter what nice family moment I'm in no matter what joyful moment no what vacation I'm on

no matter what work high happens I'm I'm I'm all I think about is this pain and that that that was extremely dark for me. And it actually inspired a whole chapter in the book where I compare the chronic pain that I felt and that duality between feeling utterly hopeless. And yet the hope, anytime I had it, actually being an additional source of misery because the hope would make me think it might get better. and then when it didn't get better, I would just be crushed all over again. I compare that to what a lot of people feel like when they can't find love.

And when they deeply, deeply want to be partnered and want to find somebody and have so much love to give and have no one to give it to. And the chronic sadness, the chronic loneliness, the chronic fear that results from being in that state over a long period of time is it has all the same hallmarks as the physical chronic pain that I had because of our inability to control it or to figure out like to just make it go away. And so I wrote a whole chapter giving the tools that I learned to find a place where I was, I call it happy enough, where I was happy enough with my chronic physical pain, I show people the tools I learned to manage my relationship with that so that they can use

those tools to manage their relationship with the difficult emotions, their feeling around wanting to find love and struggling to find love, which I think that part of the book is just as important, if not more, as the parts of the book that are actively showing you how to find love. Because we can't, A, even if we find love, we don't know that we're always going to have. it and b we can't defer our happiness to a time that we do find our person but i also understand the exquisite difficulty of trying to find happiness in conditions that consistently make us deeply unhappy and and so that whole section is about navigating the paradox of that yeah the title of your book is Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily, No Matter

What. It feels like a bold claim, but you feel like it's substantiated. It was the most, to me, I wrote this book to be a co-pilot to anyone looking for love so that they could, all of us could do love better and also, frankly, find love faster than we would on our own without this book. but that claim of finding happiness no matter what was the most important claim of the book because it the others to me are irrelevant without that if if we can't learn to be happy enough and this is why I wrote an entire chapter called happy enough not happy because I don't happy is an intimidating thing especially when we're in pain.

And I know that at the height of my chronic pain, anyone telling me to come along and telling me you just need to be happy, I would have wanted to punch in the face. Like it didn't, I would just be like, you just don't get me. You don't understand. Like you just don't get it. So this isn't a conversation worth my time. But what I did discover is using the talk.

that I put in this book, I could get to a place with my chronic pain where I could be happy enough, where I could get to a place where I was like, you know what, maybe I would be happier if this chronic pain went away. But I actually am happy enough that if it never went away, I could, like, I actually can live a really great life from this place right now where I am because of the tools that I had on how to manage it like I I know it's like I found my I found a superpower that's how it felt like oh I'm bulletproof because I know I can figure out now how to be happy enough if nothing changed and I think that is a superpower for people who are single to is if you can you don't have to get to a place where you're blissfully happy and the truth is

you can even admit that, yeah, maybe if I found the right person for me, maybe I'd be even happier than I am today. There's no shame in admitting that. But if you can get to a place where you go, actually, I'm happy enough that if this was my life, this would be an amazing life. That is a superpower. It means that when someone shows up who's wrong for you, you can say no, because happy enough gives you the power to say no. It means when someone is a superpower. right for you that shows up. You can bring your best self because you're in a state of being happy enough, not a state of ultimate pain and fear. And it means that you can show up truly as your authentic self because you're not thinking if I lose this person, they're walking out

the door with my one shot at happiness. And you're much more likely to attract someone and much more likely to create a real authentic relationship if you're showing up from that place than if you're showing up already acting like that person has a gun to your head when it comes to your happiness. I agree with all of this. I love it so much. And I love that you've written a book again. I always love our interviews. I still can't believe it's been three years. Who's writing this book then? That's crazy. Think about that. But your book is released April 23rd. 23rd it's uh it's called love life how to raise your standards find your person and live happily no matter what um i'm really proud of it guys i i you know i think this has been like that all of my

work for 17 years of coaching people in their love lives has been leading to this piece of work like everything that i've done and i wanted to acknowledge in this book that it is hard out there for people. It's not easy to find love. And there's nothing wrong with you. If you found it hard, it's A, just hard. And B, we all have challenges that we may not be aware of that are getting in the way of us finding love. And so I really did design this book to be a co-pilot for anyone who is struggling. And I think people are going to find that this is different from from anything else they've read on this subject. I think they're going to see that it's very much its own thing. I did not write this as a married person. I wrote it as a part. I wrote

chapters of this book when I was single. I wrote chapters of this book when I was heartbroken. I wrote chapters of this book when I was first dating my now wife, Audrey. I did the final edits of this book on two days of our honeymoon. So like this book has seen me through every phase. and you'll see that in the pages is very, very real about my own life and, you know, I think you'll see yourself in these pages, whoever you are, because it acknowledges that the struggle in our love lives is real. And there's, there's no shame in wanting to find love. There's nothing shameful, desperate about admitting that you really want to find love. And if you do really want to find love, you might hate dating, by the way. That's okay.

You don't need to want to date to like this book and to get benefit out of it. most people I come across, they don't want to date. They want to find love. So this isn't a dating book. This is a book about finding love and what can get in the way of us finding it and what we can do to find it faster and to be happier along the way. And one of the cool things is, I'm doing an event on May the 4th called Find Your Person that is an exclusive event just for everyone who has a copy of the book. If people go to lovelifebook.com, you can order the book there from any retailer you want. But in addition, if you come back to that page with your receipt, you can enter the receipt code for a ticket to my event on May the 4th called Find

Your Person. The book is designed to be all of the ideas and then the event is designed to be the event that actually then puts you on the path to using those ideas over the next year of your life to find your person. So that link is lovelifebook.com. It's really cool. Do you think that it was serendipity that you met your now wife while writing this book, or do you think the book made you into the type of person that was ready for that? Oh, 100% like the two go hand in hand. The path that I was on and the work that I was doing on myself at the time,

which I detail in this book, is the kinds of things that I was engaging with myself, is the reason that I didn't blow it. Because I almost blew it, guys. I mean, it wasn't like smooth sailing. I met Audrey. She was awesome, and I needed work. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days, delivered with Uber Eats.

What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groom lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no, but a banana. That's a yes. A nice tan. Sorry.

Nope. But a box fan? Happily, yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and vary by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca slash y annex and uh it it like i did i i really put my money where my mouth is in terms of the work that i'm asking other people to do and the questions i'm having them ask themselves are all questions that i had to ask myself this all work that i did with you know on on my path in the last few years and and it made all the difference. I mean, it really did. I'm in the most peaceful happy place I've ever been in in my life. And that's not just because of the relationship I'm in.

That's been a huge, huge part of it. It's also just because of the work that I've been doing to reach that place myself. So, yeah, it's very, this book is very, very real to me. It's why I feel so fluent on it is because I know, I know it's going to make a difference for for other people. I've coach so many people in this, everything I talk about in this book at this stage. And I've been through it myself. Man, well, it's a, it's a tall statement for you to speak so proudly of it. You're already in New York Times bestselling author. Your YouTube channel obviously has had massive success. You've been doing this for 17 years. So, um, very excited for you. And what I love about your whole approach and philosophy is I think the most powerful dating advice or the most

powerful business advice or even fitness advice is not about like it's using the that surface level topic uh to convey and learn deeper deeper lessons through and you do a great job at that um so congratulations well done i'm already excited for our next interview yeah and uh and uh yeah i'm really proud of you man thank you i really appreciate that andrew and i always appreciate the time with you guys you you both ask such great questions and there's such a i feel like there's not a lot of people out there doing it the way you are um there's a real presence to the way you show up and a thoughtfulness and it's just so it's so clear that you guys have have like done deep work yourselves and ask difficult questions of yourselves and i always just think the greatest the greatest ad of

advertisement for any kind of growth is seeing the effect that it's had on people. And you two are an amazing advertisement for everything you've learned over the years because the way you show up, there's an authenticity to it that you just, you can't fake that and you can't shortcut your way to that. You guys just have it. And I actually look forward to learning more from you guys over the years. and I'm sure as I go through different phases of my life, I'll be coming to you guys with lots and lots of questions of my own.

So be prepared for those phones. Well, I'm excited for it. For those listening that want to know how to raise your standards, find your person, and live happily no matter what. We'll link the book link down below as well as the lovelifebook.com for the event. And yeah, that's all we got. Matthew, thank you for the time as always, and I hope to speak soon.

Thank you guys.