Know Thyself - E89 - Matthew Hussey: The #1 BLOCK Between You & Your Dream Love Life… DO THIS

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Bestselling author & dating expert Matthew Hussey reveals how to eliminate the blocks in your love life and magnetize your dream partnership. Matthew explores the balance between developing dating competency and doing the inner work to become a match to what you desire. He reveals the #1 reason people keep falling for emotionally unavailable individuals and how to choose the person who will be your perfect fit.  Matthew shares the 4 crucial steps to finding and identifying 'the one', explaining how to clarify non-negotiables and be sure about the person you're choosing. He also gives advice for healing heartbreak, accessing vulnerability, and navigating personal growth in relationship. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  2:10 Becoming Competent AND Magnetic in Dating  7:25 The True Secret to Attracting Your Dream Partner 14:26 Why You Keep Falling in Love with Emotionally Unavailable People 22:39 The Power of Partnership for Inner Growth 34:14 Accessing Our Vulnerability in Relationships 37:38 4 Crucial Steps to Find "The One"  43:51 Identifying Your Non-Negotiables & What You TRULY Want 56:40 The #1 Way to Heal Heartbreak  1:05:33 Inside "Love Life", A Guide to Navigating Relationships 1:10:46 The Value of Being Alone 1:11:22 What Men & Women Don't Understand About Each Other 1:16:08 What Chronic Pain Taught Me 1:23:35 Conclusion ___________ Matthew Hussey is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. His YouTube channel is number one in the world for love life advice, with over half a billion views. He writes a weekly newsletter and is the host of the podcast Love Life With Matthew Hus­sey. Hussey provides monthly coaching to the members of his private community, Love Life Club. Over the past fifteen years, his proven approach has inspired millions through authentic, insightful, and practical advice that not only enables them to find love but also feel confident and in control of their own happiness. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thematthewhussey/?hl=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/gettheguyteam Website: https://matthewhussey.com Pre-Order "Love Life": https://matthewhussey.com/lovelifebook-announce/ ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

Our past in our love life does not have to equal our future, but you have to find ways to start to create a different reality and the one that you've been experiencing for so long. There are three relationships we'll be in until the day we die. There's our relationship with other people, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with life itself. The quality of those relationships will determine the quality of your life.

A lot of us feel chronically dissatisfied in our love lives. When we say, why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep going for people that are bad for me? You're not broken. You're just the number of people that are hung up on someone is profound. It's an exercise in science fiction to ruminate endlessly about what could have been if the timing had been different. We need to give ourselves a new model for what's worth our time, what's worth our energy,

what's worth crying over. What do you say to those people that find themselves in that situation? We have to... Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Know Theyself. Today we're sitting down with one of the world's leading, dating and relationship coach. He's helped millions of people around the world cultivate their dream love life through his seminars, YouTube videos, and books. New one, Love Life.

I'm excited to dive into how we can magnetize our dream, love life, and the blocks that are stopping us from doing. So Matthew Husty, thanks for being here. Thanks, Andre. Good to be here. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this, man. I've been seeing your work for many years, and I feel like this conversation will be able to serve a lot of people. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. It's nice to be here in this very sort of moody and cozy space. A bit romantic one might say.

Oh, I like it. What tea is this that I have? I don't know, actually. What is it, Chelsea? Cacao Rose. Cacao Rose. First podcast I've done with Cacao Rose tea. First for everything. Well, maybe we'll fall in love by the end of this podcast. Yeah, right? I brought just a coffee, and now I feel like I've upgraded. So there's majestic, mystical tea. Well, let's dive right in.

I think in the relationship, dating, advice, kind of seen, there can be a lot of the, I guess, sometimes overly focus on the strategy and the tactics, which I think are very useful. I'm curious, what do you think about the balance between the strategy, the things to do, the places to go, the things to say, when trying to attract, you know, your dream partner, versus focusing on the inner work to become the qualities of the person that you want to meet and attracting them and essentially letting them come to you.

That's a great question. I think any part of life is a balance between competence and confidence. Competence is, you know, if you took public speaking, competence is knowing how to get on stage, use the stage, use your voice, project, understanding how the mechanics of kind of telling a great story, the power of metaphor, structuring a talk, you know, these are all competence-based skills that none of us have those when we first start public speaking. But what you're talking about, the essence of the message you want to get across, why you're passionate about it, why you feel the world.

needs to hear that, why you think you're the right person to speak that message, that's something deeper. You know, that goes beyond competence. In some ways, your ability to connect to your message and its importance can overcome a lot of lack of competence. You know, you can often, in public speaking, you can often make up for a lack of eloquence with passion. So in your love life, it's sort of similar. You know, there are things, I was remember when I was in my 20s, my girlfriend at the time at the beginning of our relationship coming back to my apartment.

And just there was just lights on everywhere. And she was just like, what are you doing? She was like, can we just create? And she started going around the room and like sort of slightly dimming. lights everywhere and creating a mood and just making it so that it felt like a nice space to be in, not a hospital. And she was like, she literally said this to me. She was older and she said, when you're older, you're going to understand how important lighting is. And she was right. I was lacking as a young man, I was like still in my head, I was still at uni where you just

have a light switch and you just turn it on and, dorm room vibes. Right, clinical lights come on. But you learn at a certain point that lighting matters. It's, you know, going on a date, you learn that asking questions is a polite thing to do, to show interest in someone else and some of the right ways to ask questions and so on. So I think there's wonderful things that can be learned on that level, but they can't make up for something that's lacking when it comes to our perception of ourselves on a deeper level, our value system, our character.

To what extent have we accepted ourselves by the time we go on a date? I think is sort of important because otherwise you spend your whole time sort of trying to portray something that you think other people are going to, like instead of bringing forward all of you. So I, yeah, I think there's a, there's a balance to be struck. When I started out, you know, my first book 10 years ago focused, I would say more on the kind of the elements of competence. And that was very much where I was at that time, is looking at what makes someone competent in their love life. But this book is much more of, you know, about the deeper reasons why we struggle to find love

and why we not just struggle to find love and find our person, but why is it we struggle to be happy in this area? Because a lot of us feel chronically dissatisfied in our love lives. And how do we find peace and happiness in this area? I'm much more preoccupied with that these days. Yeah, one of the quotes in the book that I really liked

was to have an exceptional, love life, we also need to cultivate a love for life. And I like as much as I can with the conversations that I have in this podcast and how I perceive my own actions in the world, this kind of first principles thinking of kind of going back into the place, the origin, as human experience is essentially 100% generated from within. Carrying that love for life genuinely out into the world can only bring us things that are more of a match to what we are really aligned with. And So any other thoughts there of this relationships that we, you know, seek externally in a romantic partner, for example, you know, every relationship that we have with anything in our life always

first stems from the place of the relationship that we have with ourselves. And so how much do you see this magnetizing or dream partner, if you want to call it that as an inside job? Well, I think, I always think about it. Like there are three relationships we'll be in until the day we die. There's our relationship with other people. our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with life itself. And those are kind of three marriages of their own. And the quality of those relationships will determine the quality of your life. But they'll also determine the quality of the other two relationships, right?

So if you have a poor relationship with life and you're dissatisfied with life and you're, you know, you're angry at life, for the hand you've been dealt and for where you are in your life, then it becomes harder in your relationship with other people because you can end up being a very draining presence and a very negative presence for other people. People tend to be on, want to be around people who carry the energy that they would like to have

and that lifts them up, you know, unless they're in a really difficult place themselves and they want to surround themselves with other people who are in that state. But, you know, it's very attractive when we ourselves are a life lover who gets excited about life, gets excited about the little things. You know this when you go traveling with someone and they're the kind of person that just gets excited with everything the moment they get off the plane. Like, look at this. Oh, my God. I'm so excited to be here. This is so much fun. I can't believe we're here. It's much more fun than someone who is complaining or, frankly, someone who's like, yeah, I've been here like five times.

You know, it's, I was excited five times ago. I don't care anymore. Like, that's not exciting either. That's not fun either. So being around people who have a great relationship with life is very, very, very attractive. If you take the relationship with ourselves, if that's not in a good place, if we're in a place of self-contempt or self-loathing, that will absolutely affect our ability to find our person because people take their cues from us. If, if we go into a situation looking for them to tell us what's great about us, we're not really doing our job. You know, we're not coming from a place of leadership. It's saying, I've, I've been around this, you know, this human all my life. And I don't like them. But I hope you do. You know, it's like it's a hard sell.

But if you come to, to the table as someone who has accepted yourself and there's a different level of peace that you carry within your relationship with yourself, then that's very infectious. A, because we're not giving, importantly, we're not giving people reasons not to like us. I always, you know, when we're not happy with ourselves, it's like we're giving people reasons not to like us. with with it's it's no different from going to bed with someone and you're in it you think it's exciting you think they're awesome and you think that you're just happy to be there and then someone as you

undress a part of someone they cover it up and they're like oh no I don't like that part of my I please I don't turn the light off I don't like it's like you didn't even have a problem with that part of them but now they've drawn all the attention in the world to the fact that they don't like it you start wondering if you shouldn't like it either right so we take our cues from other people. And then, of course, when you've accepted yourself and you, that's infectious too, because there tends to be a level of peace about you that other people want for themselves. You know, if they sense that there's a groundedness and a peace to you, well, the rest of us know that that's not easy to arrive at. So when you find someone who's like that, it's a very compelling thing

because you kind of want a bit of what they have. You want to be close to that. You want some of it to rub off on you because, you know, maybe in your own life you've struggled to find that. And so it's, again, it's very attractive. So these relationships feed into each other. Of course, again, the more you have a great relationship with yourself and with life, the more you're also coming from a place of not having to,

not coming to your love life as a kind of person in need of a lifeline. You know, you, I'm not a big believer in the kind of like, you have to come to a relationship fully healed and you have to come happy and whatever. You have to, the truth is you have to, I write about this in the last chapter of the book. You have to arrive to someone happy enough. You don't have to be blissfully happy or have figured everything out. I don't think anyone does. I just think you have to come happy enough.

Happy enough means you're happy enough that if you meet someone amazing, you don't think that this person is now going to, you know, if you lose them, they're going to take your happiness with you because you have enough of it on your own that it's okay. You want this person, you're excited, but it's also not life and death. Happy enough also means that you can meet someone who's not great for you, who treats you poorly, and you're happy enough to say, no, thank you. Thank you. Which is happy. No is only something you can say when you're happy enough.

If you're not happy and you're like, I just need, I need something to help me. I need something to save me from this dark place that I'm in on my own. Then you'll take whatever you're given. And that's a very, very dangerous place to come from. Yeah, there's nothing I find really attractive about somebody who's like compulsively choosing based out of a scarcity paradigm to need. need somebody in their life, you want somebody to consciously choose you. And I guess you can only do that to the degree in which you actually really know who you are and what you value. I think ultimately we're

really attracted to confident people, people who radiate that confidence that I feel is often born from that deep self-acceptance that you were mentioning. That example you gave of the woman with the prosthetic, I think was a great example of that. Angela, yeah. When you come to that place within where you deeply accept yourself and that when there's no part of you that you're not willing to love and accept and look at, then all of a sudden it doesn't become this scary barrier between you and connection with other people. Yeah, that's exactly right. So now we kind of spoke to, oftentimes we get what, like,

we get what we are kind of familiar with and what feels safe to us oftentimes. And when we're seeking for a partner or somebody to unconsciously fill the need within us sometimes, we might seek somebody who actually is emotionally unavailable because it feels familiar and safe to us. When we might declare externally that we want this ideal romantic loving partner who has these qualities and can show up for us. So what is the, what's the black there for most people? I think it's, it's, it's always good to just have in your mind the principle that we tend not to, opt for things that make us happy. We opt for things that make us feel at home and comfortable and feel familiar. And the things that feel like home to us or familiar to us couldn't be

terrible. You know, depending on how we've grown up or what influences we've had, our normal can be really, really tough. It could be something that, it could be chronic anxiety. It can be chaos. It can be someone making us have to earn their love. It can be someone who's inconsistent. And, you know, it goes cold for days on end

and then gives us a little hit of affection and it feels amazing. And that can be what we're used to. And so when we say, why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep going for people that are bad for me? It's, it's, there's nothing, you're not broken. You're just doing what we all do, which is, you know, I list in, in a chapter called Never Satisfied in the book. I list some of the reasons why we keep gravitating towards people who are bad for us. One of them being a scarcity mindset, as you mentioned, that when we think

nothing else is coming along. We tend to settle for what's right in front of us. When the second reason is we choose bad people or people who treat us poorly because it's what we know. And that's not just like some self-confidence issue or a self-worth issue. It's a, you know, if a dolphin in a tank might grow up learning that to get a fish, it has to do back flips or jump through a hoop and then humans will feed it a fish with that dolphin was released into the ocean tomorrow and it started doing backflips or swimming up to boats for food that could be fatal it we wouldn't say that the dolphin had a self-worth problem we would say this dolphin is doing what it knows yeah and it doesn't differentiate between the ocean and the tank it when we were

growing up in the tank in our own lives. The tank was the ocean. The tank was life. The tank was the world. So we go out into the world sort of looking for the experience we had in the tank because it's what's familiar to us. Even if we see friends who are in healthier relationships, who are with people who don't cheat or don't treat them badly or make them feel safe, don't belittle them or demean them. If we've never experienced that, then it's not reality for us. And we have that kind of myopia that it's, yeah, I know that's their life, but it's not my life. It doesn't feel real to us. What feels real to us is, is whatever we've come to believe is, you know, whatever life is to us, whatever is our experience. That's what's real to us.

And we go looking unconsciously, we go looking for that experience out there in the world. We, I write in the book about the, you know, the race car driver Mario Andretti and how he said, his, you know, tip for race car driving was don't look at the wall because your car goes where your eyes go. And that always, that's not a throwaway thing to me that, what he said there. I really, it's kind of a mini obsession because I just, I think of so many places in my own life where the wall has been something I keep crashing into. And how it takes, it takes something very intentional to get,

to kind of orient our eyes away from the wall. I, my whole life, I had a hard time really trusting people. And I kind of grew up in an environment where, you know, there was a lot of, you know, a sense of, agenda and waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so for me in my adult life, I found it hard to think that someone could be doing something just in a pure way or that it could be reciprocal. Or even just that people don't, you know, it's not people aren't just going to take what they can get and they're not going to just, not everyone is a bad person or out to get you.

they're just people like you. They have good days and bad days. And some days they're more selfish and other days they're more generous and they tend to be more generous when they feel more safe. And when they feel like they're not being taken advantage of and it's hard to make someone else feel like they're not being taken advantage of if you're constantly in protection mode and you're constantly kind of monitoring how much you give because you're worried someone else is going to take advantage of you. You end up creating the wall. You literally end up. creating scenarios where you either find people you can't trust or you turn, you know, by the way that you are in relationships, you create this very transactional relationship because you're worried

about getting hurt. And so you, you know, you end up precipitating the very thing you're most afraid of because it's, that's your wall. And I've become fascinated with how our past in our love life does not have to equal our future, no matter how long it's been that way, but you have to find ways to start to create a different reality than the one that you've been experiencing for so long that your brain has started to think is just reality. Because if you stare at the wall long enough, you won't know it's the wall anymore, you'll just think it's the world. And so what I help people to do is to start to use curiosity. which I think is a really important gateway drug to new beliefs to help people start to see that

there may be other ways of being in the world that create new results than the ones they've gotten. And when you get a new, even a slightly different result than the one you've gotten, it's a kind of a mind-blowing thing because you realize there's, you suddenly, it's like it becomes apparent to you that there's a different way of being and there are other realities. outside of the one you've been living for so long, then the world life becomes really expensive and you start to realize there's so much more possibilities

than the ones you've been telling yourself are available to you. So beautiful. Thank you, man. Thank you for sharing. I hope that wasn't too abstract. No, I think it hits it right on the head because it's, you know, I guess the cliche of like looking at life through our color tinted lenses,

then our eyes adjust to just think that's the way that life is. And I love one of my favorite quotes from Wayne Dyer of when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. And it's coming back again to that first principle of seeing how we look at things. And oftentimes we can't always see the things that we're perceiving about reality that become the default way and the wall that we're staring at because it's become so normalized for us. It's just the ecosystem in which our consciousness is an inhabitant in. And so I feel like relationships. relationships often do because it's like you feel good enough, happy enough to go into relationships that can give you the opportunity to reveal those blind spots because I feel like that is ultimately

and I want to dive into how really relationships do become that mirror for us to see those spots where we're not fully aware of because we do live in this realm of duality where we relate to things and that's how we can see the reflection from other people and romantic relationships got to be one of probably the most trying, testing, potent reflections there could be. Yeah, which is kind of why it's at a certain point you have to be in the game. Because the idea of like healing yourself and doing all of the work in isolation is like the one hand clapping. Right.

You know, it's a certain point. You're going to have to meet the frontier between you and another person and all of, the, you know, frictions that occur on that frontier. The early in my relationship with my wife, when we were just dating, something happened that made me jealous. And it kind of came out of nowhere. It like really snuck up on me. And I felt immediately unsafe and not that I, in the moment, I would have framed it in terms of I feel unsafe. It made me mad. Yeah. But, But really beneath it, I was unsafe and afraid and maybe felt slightly emasculated. But in that moment, I kind of shut down.

I became passive aggressive and probably a little controlling and just not a good version of me. Not a version of me I would ever want to air publicly. and we probably argued for a couple of hours. I mean, it was like just clashing for a while. And eventually I kind of shut down and just was like went completely avoidant. And I think after a while she kind of, she came to me in a very compassionate way and was like, look, I want to understand what this made you feel and where it's coming from. I hate the idea that I would never want to make you feel that and so on. She also said,

you can't bring it to me in this way. Like, so she's compassionate, but with a standard at the same time, which was important because it wasn't okay the way that I handled it. I was very activated. And eventually I shared with her what I had felt and why it made me feel that. and maybe where it was coming from. And I got a little vulnerable. And she was really loving and compassionate. And then I shut down again. Because I was like, I should never have said all of that.

That was, like, in my mind, I was like, that wasn't sexy. I've now, like, gone from being this heroic, masculine, in-control person to, here's all of my insecurity and here's all the things I really feel and I shut down. I had like a vulnerability hangover. And it's so funny because I can think back to a time in my childhood when I was playing outside with my brothers and a couple of my friends, Alex, one of my best friends at the time. I was probably about 11 years old. and we were all at our house and I can't remember what happened but something maybe my mom came out

and yelled at me about something something happened that embarrassed me and made me feel vulnerable and I went up to my room in the middle of this beautiful sunny day we were all playing outside I went up to my room and I shut the door and I wouldn't let anyone in and every like my brothers, my friend Alex, his brother would all come up one by one and be like, come out. Like, we'd be, you know, we're having fun. We're going to do this. And we're going to go on the trampoline now. We're going to. And I was just like, no. Like, I'm good. I'm fine. Then my mom came up. Matt, come on. Like, come play. Like everyone's having a good time. No. And I was just in my, you know, this was my way of reacting to me being hurt.

to try to punish everybody else. God forbid I actually tell anyone I was hurt or embarrassed or ashamed. And then I remember a couple of hours later, they came up and they went, we're all going to go to Alex's house now for the night. We're going to like carry on the sleep over at Alex's. You know, come on, let's go. And I was like, no. One by one, everyone came up, no.

My mom came up. Matt, please, come on. They're all going. don't do this. Like, everyone's having a nice time. I had no enemies in the house. Not one. Everyone loved me.

But I shut everyone out. And I'll never forget the next day when my brothers came home from that sleepover. And they were like, oh, it was so great. We watched movies. We did this. We ordered pizza. It was just this, like, oh, it was so good. And inside, I felt sick because I'd miss it.

out on something that I couldn't get back. Like, I'll never have been in that sleepover with my brothers and my friends and had that moment. Not because anyone was against me. Everyone loved me, but because my inability to share what I was feeling or to just be vulnerable about the fact that something had affected me made me punish everyone. else, but really I wasn't punishing anyone. I was punishing myself. I deprived myself of that moment. And I look back on that moment with Audrey and it's my wife Audrey, when I pushed her away, first I wasn't vulnerable because I did the same thing, right? I shut myself in the room and told her to go away. And then when I finally did get vulnerable, I was like, what have I done? This is not, I'm not lovable.

now. And so I shut down again and went, well, at least you're not going to hurt me because I'll just now go quiet on you before you can tell me that I'm now not sexy. And so I tried to shut her out again emotionally. And she said to me, I ended up confessing to her that I really felt like now that I'd said that, she would look at me differently. And she said, oh my God. That is so crazy. I think you're amazing and I love getting to know you better. And the more I know you, the more I just feel like I know who you are. And what I understand you better, I have context for you.

It doesn't change all the other stuff I know about you, all the amazing things that you are. And it doesn't change any of that. It just means I know more about you. and I love getting to know more about you. And it took me, like, I don't know if I really believed her in that moment, but over time, I started to realize she meant that. And that became this incredibly corrective healing experience for me because I actually realized, oh my God, this person really does.

Not only do they accept me for all of me, but this idea I have in my head that if you know these things, you'll change the way you see me and you'll never see me as this other person again was completely false. And that actually what made her love me more was seeing me as a whole person. But that corrective experience helped heal me in that. I take some credit for it because I had to do what I hadn't done before, which is to actually come forward with how I was feeling

and how something had made me feel. I give her an enormous amount of credit because the environment she helped create for me to do that made me brave. And then how she responded when I was brave made me even more brave, made me feel accepted. So that's what I mean when I say the kind of one-hand clapping thing because that's not something I could have achieved

in a room on my own. in the same way as having, it didn't have to be with someone that I was romantically engaged with. It could have been with a friend. It could have been with a father figure. It could have been with someone else. But I needed some kind of corrective experience that helped me to question that belief that I wouldn't be lovable if I started speaking about some of these things. And Andre, it's so funny. There's something so meta about the fact that I'm even telling this story right now because honestly if I'd have done this podcast five years ago, I wouldn't have told this story. I really wouldn't. Like I would have brought a more heroic

version of myself to this conversation. But because of that healing, I now am much braver in the world because I have accepted myself differently. I've made peace with parts of myself. I give myself a completely different level of compassion for where those things come from. Because by the way, if I was doing that at 11 years old, that was deep stuff. That's not new in my life. I've been doing it my whole life. If it was easy for me to change that, I would have changed it years ago. How much have I cost myself in my life by being that way? Like this is, I need to give myself compassion for wherever that comes from because it certainly got wired up in a time when I wasn't making conscious decisions about how I was getting wired up. So that's how I think about these things.

And I think when you're able to give yourself that compassion, by the way, you're able to give someone else a completely different level of compassion. We're very, in trying to find love especially when we're out there dating, we tend to be much more judgmental of other people when we're not offering ourselves any self-compassion. So yeah. I resonate with it wholeheartedly, I feel, especially as men, there is this unwillingness often to access and share our own vulnerability. And I just see such a big theme across the board.

And I feel like it's becoming more popularized or I guess supported or celebrated. to be able to have these conversations as men in particular, because I think fundamentally, at least I know in my past, I've just had the fear of being wrong, let alone, you know, the 11-year-old that still lives within myself. And there's something so powerful about that shift and that insight that you shared, how often the thing that we think we fear is going to be the barrier to more intimacy actually becomes the very thing that brings us closer together. And it reminds me of that scene at the end of 8 Mile with Eminem.

You remember when they're in the rap battle and he's like, I am what? I am a bum. I do live in a trailer park with my mom. And he like goes on and he says all these things about him. He's like, okay, now what? Like these are, you can't, you can't roast me on anything because I just laid it all out there. And there's a part, I accept that part of me. And you can't help but like him more. Yeah. As a result. You like him more. He's, you instantly, there's a, there's a great book on writing, one of the seminal books on writing. nonfiction by William Zinser called On Writing Well. And when he's reading other people's writing, he said there's always the first paragraph or two where he just feels the writer trying to impress and trying to be clever with their opening and sentence structure and their use of language. And then there's a moment, a couple of paragraphs down where the writer will include a detail, a little moment that Zinsa will read and he'll think, ah, a human. And he said that's the moment when he knows, ah, the writer's now finally onto something.

Like the moment where you say, aha, a human. And it's, that's kind of that moment in eight mile. You know, he suddenly says something that makes you go, ah, a human. And then you connect. And I think that's one of the things that we feel the pressure to do in our love lives is impress. And we don't put enough emphasis on the connecting. And then we wonder why we don't feel real intimacy with each other or, you know, why we keep feeling like we don't match up to someone or why we keep intimidating everyone else.

It's because there's so much emphasis on the impressing or the insecurity that someone else is more impressive than me. And there's not an emphasis on actually connecting with each other. I think it goes right back to, you know, whatever you approximate to what enlightenment is, I feel like can really only be tested when you more strongly have the contrast of what your neuroses and appetites are. Like if you're in a cave in the Himalayas, for example, versus, you know, clapping your own one hand versus you're in the real world and you're in a relationship where, you know, you really have to hold space or you know you have kids and like that's really where you're tested to see who you are if you're if you say who you are who you say you are all of these things

I find is so fascinating and and so it is important and so much of your work really is helping people clarify how to do this inner work but then also choose who this teammate in dance partner you're going to live your life with because it's obviously one of the most important decisions we can make 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? Well, the four levels are about, 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. 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 I like you so much. Not I just, we have such an amazing connection. Not 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. And 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 you know 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 befores them and you lose them, that's a genuine tragedy. But if the person you keep saying is right for you is like shopping up 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, tell me how that's your person.

I struggle to see it. I just, they don't realize. They're the one for me. I know it. If only they could realize. It doesn't work like that. There'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 impact 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 saying, I want you right now, I commit to a future with you

and making actions in the world of 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 are, 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, you know, 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 fun. 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're starting to, you're starting to go down. You you better 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, you, 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 overprescribe that. And as a result, we say no to some great people because we've 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. You know, but we have to discard some of those, I think, superficial things that we've become kind of preoccupied with having and start being laser focused on the things that really matter that we need in order to bother investing time and anything. 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 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'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 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. And that has to be the price of entry

for anyone that stays in your life past the first few weeks or months. Yeah, I partly bring it up also, a woman I was saying 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 resolve. this or herself and made the tough decision to have that conversation but also because you were on different timelines like she was now and you were later for that yeah because she's like you know 10 or 11 years older and she's like that that when that's a 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 of my life for sure is at some point I'm excited to be a father one day you know but um it I think it's also upon the of men to take that ownership to the best we can detect where are 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 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 don't have, you know, 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 it's a lovely thing that you were able to have that conversation because that's you also gave her a gift in her being able to go and and find someone who's right for what she wants and the danger in situations like that is that people go away saying that was my person but for this you know

incompatibility in our timelines and i think that we have to we 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. Yeah. If only you were born five years earlier. Like, what is that? It's a parallel universe where your parents, you know, 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 to to to to ruminate endlessly about what could have been if the timing had been different. No, it was 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. 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. It'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 gone. It's kind of, yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's, 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 going to do anything different. You did exactly what you were going to do. Yeah. Like it wasn't, if you were going to do something different, you would have done

something different. I view life through a bit of a deterministic lens in that sense. That, you know, I was doing the best I could at that time, even if my best was horrible. That was like, 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 that 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've loved how you spoke to.

It clearly wasn't the right one because they didn't choose you. And like that's a crucial element to the unfolding of you and your partner. It's quite important. It's 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 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, the embedded in there is like, in a way, it's not just the... 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 a 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 to be. That's a that's that's that still requires grieving,

but it's a different kind of grieving. You know, we're we're grieving our, we're grieving our disappointment. So I think it's really healthy and important to allow ourselves to feel that and to even, 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, you know, just crestfallen that that's not going to happen in my life. Embrace that disappointment, surrender to that disappointment. 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. It's 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? You know, 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, 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 it, you know, 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 going to be a year from now. You just have no idea.

You don't know what's going to 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 happen 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? You know, whether it's in business or in love or in friendships or, you know, 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 favorite human beings that, you know, I, God, you know, we've been, find an amazing person, we've become friends over a year and you go, I can't believe you didn't exist. existed 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 that 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. I find so much freedom in those three words. I don't know. For the better or the worst, you don't know what's going to happen like you said, a best friend that's yet to be met,

a lover that's going to be the mother or father to your children still have yet to be met. Or for the worse. You don't know if some tragic accident will happen in our life. We're bound to experience something that in many ways we might wish to have exchanged our current moment experience for that, you know, at that time. And so it creates a lot of freedom, I guess, in an invitation to presence, which is really beautiful. And with that, we get to discover the mystery of what might surprise us in the next moment. So that's absolutely true. And remaining just curious and open to that mystery is really important. It's not, again, you don't have to believe something better is coming. You don't. I don't think belief is, belief is not easy. I find that there's a lot

of flippantly telling people that they just have to believe something. Yeah. That is really unhelpful because I've never been someone capable of just deciding to believe something because it would be helpful. My brain doesn't work like that. I need reference points to hook on to for a belief. But curiosity really is the gateway drug. It's the gateway to new belief. Because curiosity just says maybe something outside of my reality is possible.

And you might do new things as a result of that curiosity that just mess with your existing belief. And I find like that's half the battle. Just have some almost fun messing with your beliefs. It turns life into this very unexpected and fun experience. And then on top of that, as you said, you might come across a situation that really makes you look back on today and go, oh, that was pretty good. I mean, I know you know Sam Harris, he said if you think this is the worst thing that could happen to you, that's just a failure of imagination.

Which is a depressing and dark observation, but it's also true. It is, yeah. So powerful. Matthew, I really enjoyed our conversation today and I'm excited to just build our friendship and run it back in the future. I have a few last rapid fighter. questions that I want to throw away before you wrap up. And before we do so, where can people find Love Life, which is your new book available everywhere. Yeah, so it's this book right here, Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What. And for anyone who's looking for love right now, I think, I want this to be a companion that you

take with you everywhere. I want it to be your co-pilot as you look for the love that you want. and also, you know, an invitation to a deeper relationship with yourself that makes you feel more at peace and confident and happy in general. There's a website, lovelifebook.com, where people can get a copy. The nice thing is, firstly on that website, you'll be able to get it from wherever you want, whether it's Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other retailers. But when you get your receipt, come back to that website, and there's a place where you can put in your receipt number.

and I'll email you a ticket to an event that I'm doing on May the 4th called Find Your Person. And this is going to be a big virtual event. I'm doing only with people who have bought a book. So it's just for people who have got a copy of the book. But I'm going to be doing this session with them exclusively to take all of the ideas from the book and turn them into a path that you can then use for the year going forward. Almost like if I were to design your year

around finding love, what would I do? And so that's what that event is about. And it's going to be a really nice pairing with the book itself. So make sure you do that. Wherever you buy the book from, even if you didn't go through that site, that's fine, but still come back to that site, lovelifebook.com, and just make sure you claim your ticket for that event because it's going to be a really fun time. It's on May the 4th. And I'm really proud of this book. So I really, I know it's going to help so many people. It's really helped me. I did not write this book as a married, know it all. I've started this book from a place of being heartbroken. There's chapters of this book that I wrote in the worst heartbreak of my life. I wrote chapters of this book as a single

person, not knowing if it would ever happen for me. I wrote this book having met my now wife, Audrey and dating her and going through my own commitment issues and figuring those out. And then the final edit of this book I did for two days on my month long honeymoon after getting married. So, you know, I've really have lived this and I understand how hard it is. I really do. I understand not just because of my experience, because there are people that have it far harder. But I've spent my life working with people in this area. And I know the terrible pain that

people experience when they want to find love and they're struggling to find it, when they worry that they're broken because they still haven't found it and all of their friends have. When they fear the notion that they may never find someone and they may end up alone, it's a really scary thing for people and there's no shame in wanting love. You know, we're not, it's a human thing. We all want it. We may be afraid to admit it because culturally we're told we're desperate for admitting that we really want to find love or friends and family might tell us to relax or whatever, but it's hard to relax when the thing that you want most in the world is something that you haven't found. So this book is for everyone out there who can relate to anything that I've just said.

and like I said, I think it will be a really valuable and compassionate and practical co-pilot in all of your dealings with love so that we can learn to do love better and also learn to be happier in the times we don't have it because life's too short to defer our happiness and our peace until the time that we find someone. So thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you, man. And there's this quote from Khalil Gibran that I really love that says work is love made visible.

And I just think this book and what you're doing and sharing with the world is such a beautiful representation of how your love is spreading in the world. So I really think it's cool to zoom out and just feel into the ripples that your work has made on people because it's tough to quantify. But all the relationships that have stemmed from women or men healing their stuff and shifting perspective that went on to meet somebody and create children with less trauma or create more beauty in the world, man. It's just so, so beautiful.

And so thank you for doing this work. Lovelifebook.com. People can check out, right? That's right. And last couple rapid fire questions, and we'll head out. Cool? Tell me. All right.

So you can just a sentence or a couple, a couple sentences. I know these are things that we could dive in much deeper. Maybe we will at another point. I'm going to try and excel at this right now because I'm the worst rapid fire answerer in the world. So I'm going to really try and actually do a good job. All right. All right.

Let's see if you can do it. What is one piece of advice you would have readily gave out in the past that is a personal failure of yours you didn't really seem to embody that much? Oh, probably being good at being alone. Yeah, learning how to be alone. I sucked at being alone. Yeah. I had to learn, you know, I had to really learn later on how to get through a weekend on my own

without calling somebody for some attention. So I think I was talking about that before I was embodying it. I think a lot of people can relate with that. After you're working with countless individuals, lots of women, millions of individuals, what's one thing that you feel like fundamentally men don't understand about women?

What a big question. I mean, there's so much rhetoric these days about how men and women are, you know, like, men are like this and women are like this and there's just, it seems to be a, like, new resurgence of content that is all about the differences between men and women, but I think that men don't appreciate how similar women can actually be to men. You know, they're, they're dealing with different things than we are. but it's like when we were talking about the you know having a child and the women's biology

firstly there's a big overestimation among many men about how well their biology is going to serve them you know and for how long yeah but secondly you know that the idea that women are so different in that department and they're just really in a race to get to that you know marriage and children and whatever. Well, they are because they're dealing with something different than we are. Like, they, you know, they, they, we would be, if someone said to a driven man, you've got three years to become the millionaire that you want to be and build a business. And if you can't do it in the next three years, it's off the table forever. Do you think that man's going to be chill? Like, do you think he's not going to act a little crazy in those three years? Like, it's, it's not the idea that just, you know,

they're so different. I just, the more I come to understand and know women, the more I realize that we've just tried to highlight so many areas of difference where there's not a lot of difference. I'm not someone who says there are no differences between men and women. I'm not trying to make that point, but I do think we have a way of othering women in a way that is completely unfair and unreasonable and really honestly shows a lack of understanding of, When I hear men saying certain things about women online, I find myself wondering if they've ever spent any real time with a woman in their life. Or whether they've ever actually spent time with a different kind of woman

than the one type that they've spent most of their life around, who by the way ends up being their wall. They keep finding their wall, and then they decide that that wall is how all women are. And it's just not true. Yeah, powerful. Okay, then on the flip side, it was one thing that you feel like after working with so many women that they don't understand

about what men specifically are attracted to in the courting phase and connecting phase with them. I thought you were going to ask me what's something women don't understand about men or don't both. I was going to say sensitivity. I think women really appreciate how sensitive men are. I think they think that they don't hurt the way they do. So if they dismiss a guy or if they stop texting a guy or whatever. It doesn't feel the same for them as it does for me because they're a guy and they don't care and they're just, well they do. We're very, very sensitive.

So I think that there's that. So the question was, what do women not appreciate that men are attracted to? Yeah, or maybe just don't understand about that attraction. Maybe, you know,

men get a bad rap for being just disproportionately attracted to superficial things. And I do think that that's true of a lot of men, but I don't think men often get enough credit for how much, when they find someone that they really gel with, that feels like they're just their best friend. And they feel like this person really sees me and gets me. I don't think men get given enough credit for how deep their choices can be about who they end up with. I don't think it's true that men just end up with the best-looking person they can get.

I think that men often forego someone that may have looked a certain way for someone who they really feel like this is someone I enjoy being in a room with. One of the last ones is I know that you have struggled with tinnitus in the past. I remember briefly just in passing at a dinner a few years ago, you hearing about some of the struggles you were going with at the time. I'm just curious how that whole experience, what it's taught you about your relationship to pain and presence. And I just love for you to share a little bit about that. Back when we were at that dinner, I was in a very different place emotionally than I am now.

I remember you feeling very defeated. Oh, man, I was in a dark place. Because I had not just tinnitus, which for anyone he doesn't know is a ringing in your ears, but I had all manner of head issues, you know, with throbbing and pain and dizziness and like a painful sensations in my ear, and it just never went away, and I didn't know how I was going to get through it. I honestly thought my life was over. And I put in the back of this book is a side note, but for anyone who's struggling with any kind of pain, whether it's chronic physical pain or chronic emotional pain. At the end of this book, I put around seven or eight tools that I

used to manage my relationship with my pain that changed my life. One of them being, I learned how to choose my pain instead of being a victim of my pain. There's a great experiment that I got told about by a psychologist about two rats. Rat A was on a wheel and was allowed to run whenever it wanted. And rat B was on a wheel that was connected to rat A's wheel. And rat A could choose to run whenever it wanted, but whenever rat A ran, rat B had to run because its wheel was hooked up to it. And rat A at the end of this experiment showed all of the positive markers of exercise. And rat B showed all of the negative markers of stress. And, you know, it's fascinating. because you look at that and you go, they were doing the same amount of exercise.

So what's the difference? Well, Rat A chose to run and Rat B was a victim to Rat A's, you know, running schedule. And it changed the result. And I think that in our own life, when we feel like Rat B, we really can do a number on ourselves because we feel so hard done by it. And we feel like we are a victim to the circumstance. but you know I I talk about in the in the book what I did to help become rat A in the equation even with something that I didn't originally choose by retroactively choosing it for

the unique benefits that it was giving me which have turned out to be by the way some of the things I treasure the most in my life is what I learned from my chronic pain I mean I hear I'm sure you do also so often to hear the biggest or the biggest challenge, then the biggest gift comes out of it. So that's so powerful. And I always, too, have felt like the biggest difference between solitary confinement and like doing a silent darkness meditation and retreat is like our willingness. And it's our choice. And it's like rat A versus rat B and how we choose to see things and relate to what's happening and transpiring in our life. So that's such a powerful note, I think, to wrap up on, man. And I'm glad to know that you've

gotten the gift out of that and it's still unraveling, I'm sure, of how you relate. to the pain, but then also how you relate to all life and the physicality of the pain, I'm sure, I think has diminished slightly. It has. And that was a combination of, do you know, here's what's really fascinating for, I learned the tools I give in the book, a tools that I learned to manage my relationship with pain. And that massively decreased. It didn't have the same effect on me anymore. I really had to kind of surrender to it and made a kind of peace with it. But on top of that, I started evaluating different parts of my life that I would realize

any time I was stressed or unhappy, my pain would get worse. And so an indirect way that I was able to help that pain was to look at what was making me stressed or unhappy. And there were a couple of sources of terrible chronic stress in my life and unhappiness that I removed from my life. And it's a very personal journey for me. But what I can say is removing those things from my life. It was weirdly, it was a sort of like, I still have ringing in my ears, but the other physical symptoms that I had that were crippling for me started to diminish to the point where I now barely ever have them.

think about them. And if you, I, these weren't things I had for a few months. I had these for around seven years. So I was pretty sure that they would never go away. And by removing some of the sources of chronic pain in my life, it, it was kind of, I would never have believed how much that would take away my pain. That, that mind-body connection is real. And it, you know, it's why people in narcissistic relationships. And I know you spoke to my friend Dr. Romney recently. It's why people in those relationships often develop illnesses and physical conditions because it has to find all that tension and anxiety and stress and unhappiness

finds a home somewhere. Even if we're ignoring it, it finds a place to store it. and I know that I believe now that it had done for me. So, you know, still, if I laid in bed at night, you know, and it was quiet, I still hear ringing in my ears. It doesn't bother me one bit. There was a time in my life where I thought this was, this spelled the end of my life because I hated it so much.

It now doesn't bother me one bit. And the physical symptoms that I had have now practically subsided completely, which is, completely crazy but it this there's an i'll just say this quickly there's one chapter in the book called how to leave when you can't seem to leave and i urge anyone who has a person who is a source of chronic pain in their life to especially if that person is narcissistic or abusive to read that chapter because that one chapter will change your life and it may be not just your life but your health as well. It's powerful and you mentioned to you how it's often not you know we often know the things that we want to do or we want to leave our relationships but it's like getting us to do the thing that we know

we should do and helping close that gap between knowing doing is such a powerful reflection and man and and just continuing to be like you mentioned in the with your friend in the back of the book about being an author of magic and how we choose to perceive these things just really ties a bow on this whole conversation man so thank you so much is there any last words you want to share before we close out no i i'm just i'm grateful to be here i've loved this conversation andre it's from really really powerful and and you're such a connected conversationalist and um you know you know someone who's a strong host when there it feels like a very connected conversation so you're doing an amazing job and um you know for anyone out there who if any of this has resonated

with you, grab a copy of the book. I've poured my heart and soul into this and you will read it and see a very vulnerable side of me as well and stories I haven't told anywhere. And come listen to our podcast as well. It's called Love Life with Matthew Hussey. So if you want to come listen to us, we're over there. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Thanks for the reflection. And you're an incredible orator and guests. So thank you for coming on. And yeah, everybody who's been tuning to this episode, please let us know in which ways this conversation has uniquely impacted you in your own journey. And I highly recommend Love Life. I read it and I thought it was great. So check it out. Everything will be linked down in the description below. Until next time, be well.