Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - The Chemistry You’re Chasing Might Be the Problem

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

What if the electric spark you feel on a first date is not destiny, but your nervous system recognizing something familiar, and not necessarily healthy? That rush. That pull. That feeling that says, this is it. Most of us have been taught to follow the butterflies, chase the spark, and assume intensity means compatibility. But what if that chemistry has been pointing you toward the wrong people all along? In this episode, I sit down with Amy Chan, founder of Renew Breakup Bootcamp and author of Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts, to explore what really changes when you stop treating chemistry as the ultimate signal and start asking what it is actually built on. This conversation is not about abandoning attraction. It is about learning to see it clearly, so you stop confusing activation with alignment. Because real change in love does not begin with choosing differently. It begins with recognizing differently. We explore what becomes possible when emotional safety is no longer dismissed as boring, and consistency is no longer overlooked simply because it does not feel like a spark. What you will discover in this episode: Why the early “spark” may be your nervous system recognizing a familiar pattern, not true compatibility How inconsistency can become addictive, and why stability may feel strange when chaos has been your normal Why calm connection can feel underwhelming at first, and how to tell the difference between boredom and emotional safety How old relationship patterns keep repeating, even when you are aware of them Why choosing based on chemistry alone can quietly lead you back into the same painful dynamics How to begin recalibrating attraction so healthy love can finally feel exciting too If you have ever found yourself repeating the same relationship pattern, feeling pulled toward unavailable people, or wondering why stability feels unfamiliar while intensity feels magnetic, this episode will help you understand what has really been driving your choices. Because lasting love is not just about finding a different person. It is about becoming someone who can recognize love differently. Ready to date smarter? Amy's book Unsingle will help you break the cycle for good. Grab her free first-date and partner evaluation worksheets at missamychan.com/unsingle and follow her on Instagram @missamychan, and for deeper work on building secure, lasting love, explore Quantum Love Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, and for more than 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better across every kind of relationship. My intention on Language of Love Conversations is simple, to help you learn to love and be loved better, deepening your relationships, expanding your capacity for connection, and living with more presence, honesty, and love. Let's get fluent in the language of love together. This episode of Language of Love might ruin dating for you, but in the best possible way. Because that electric spark you feel on the first date, that instant chemistry that makes your stomach flip-flop, that feeling of this is it, this is my soulmate, it may not be destiny. It

may be your nervous system recognizing a all-too-familiar wound. My guest this episode is Amy Chan. She's a relationship coach, founder of the Renew Breakup Boot Camp, and now author of the new book, Unsingle, How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts. For over a decade, she's helped thousands of people rebuild after heartbreak and break destructive dating cycles Defying Love, and her work has been featured in outlets like the New York Times, Vogue, Psychology Today. What I really appreciate about her approach is that it blends psychology, self-awareness, behavioral science, and real-world pattern recognition. Amy's journey actually began with a psychic revealing to her that her partner was cheating. P.S. turned out to be true, and that

moment didn't just end the relationship. It forced her to confront love addiction, codependency, and uncomfortable truths that she was confusing anxiety and attraction. In Unsingle, she introduces bold ideas like why the first month of dating actually doesn't count, how to stop falling for the quote-unquote dangle, you'll find out what that is, and why the number one trait you should screen for is not chemistry. It's actually something very different. This is not about settling. It's about recalibrating your chemistry compass. We're getting into all of it, helping you find love on the language of love. Amy Chan, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, full disclosure. So guys, Amy and I met briefly when this really beautiful resort

chain, I guess, a resort company was reaching out to both of us. We haven't done anything with it yet but they introduced us and we were all talking about potentially doing something some sort of event or retreat together and I feel like Amy like we were like okay we don't know that much about each other like maybe we did a quick peruse before we had this meeting but we were both kind of like who are you and what is this about you know and I didn't really know you that well I'd seen some of your videos but I gotta say that reading unsingle I kind of fell in love with you a little bit. Thank you. Thank you. So several things I like about you that came through in the book. I'm just going to start here, tell you how much I like you, but basically, so first of all,

you are clearly someone who is like a systems person and someone who like, I do the same thing. So I recognize that you see systems, algorithms, pictures. I'm not saying that's how you wrote the book. But I could tell that you took all of your pain and everything that you've learned and you sort of made yourself what Malcolm Gladwell would call an outlier in dating. Like you saw you were struggling and we're going to get more into this. And you really kind of navigated it, created these systems, these terms, these programs that really help people. Not only there are a few suggestions that we'll get into about how to navigate dating, but so much of it, and this is the other reason I was so appreciative of you, is that so much of what you're sharing in Unsingle is around

what's underneath. Yes, there is strategy involved and real strategy that you get into when it comes to finding love, but so much of it is what's going on inside ourselves. And I so appreciate how honest you were and how much you shared of your own wounds and stories. Because for me, like this whole idea of some sort of guru is BS. Like we're all healing, learning, teaching. None of us is perfect. And I, these guys know I am someone that often talks about my own journey as well. You know, I'm wearing the clinical hat as well as, you know, a human hat. And I think that makes the story so much more relatable and the guidance you're giving so much more relatable. because you share so much of your lived experience. So I just wanted to give you kudos for all of that

up front. Thank you. Oh my gosh. Can we start every interview like this? It's amazing. I know. I figured I, I mean, I could have told you at the end, but why not just tell you at the top how I feel, but let's get into it a little bit because you know, even you start, you started the book And I think a large part of your journey into becoming this dating expert love coach that you've become is this journey kind of began with a psychic reading where you were essentially told that your partner was cheating. So let's start there, because I love how you eventually said, you know, you go on to say this was like the most heart wrenching, heartbreaking thing, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. to you? Yeah. I mean, back then, I think I call it like the iteration of myself, the 1.0 version. My dream was just to get married to a rich guy and I would eventually have kids and I would write on the side for fun. And I was living that dream. I snagged a man and we talked about our future and

that's what it was going to look like. And I got laid off from my job and that caused me to have to move out of my apartment and move in with him. But I was like, Oh, score. I just, you know, like help develop the timeline faster. And I went to a psychic to find out what was going to happen with my career. And before I could even sit down, the psychics, like the man you're with, he's not for you. There's another woman. I'm like, what, what are you talking about? And I was like, he's never even had another girlfriend before me. And she just kept insisting on it and kept saying it over and over again. And yeah, eventually that I would find out that my psychic was correct and he was cheating on me with a former coworker of mine and my whole world fell apart. And it wasn't just

the relationship. It was the dream that shattered. It was my financial strategy. All of it was gone in an instant. And I just didn't know what to do with myself. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you, it was so powerful the way you tell the story and that what ended up happening is, and this wasn't automatic, right? But you went, you kind of, you were struggling and then you had this brainstorm. And I believe it was around this point in the story where you're like, wait a minute, I need guidance here. I got to figure out what's going on. Right. And so you started to, you started to unpack a strategy and even started the inkling of the vision of helping other people. One of the things you talk about is this idea that breakups don't just break your heart. They expose your

emotional blueprint, right? The patterns that, and this took you a while you went through, you know, it wasn't like you went right from this breakup to uncovering your patterns. You have to have, you had to have like many of us, a few other AFGEs, I call them, another growth experience, a few other breakups before you kind of were finding like, I'm getting my ass into therapy. And I'm figuring this out because this isn't just about strategy. This is about what I'm attracted to and what I'm attracting in your quote unquote blueprint. Right. So you share so much and so beautifully and honestly about your childhood, which is yours uniquely. But I think there are so many common denominators with mine and with so many others, you know,

the love addiction, the chaotic childhood, the codependency, the rescue fantasy, all of that. Like, I'm wondering if you can speak to that a little bit and also in the context of how we all kind of have, I call it sort of a love map. You probably, you know, I think call it a blueprint, but we all sort of have this blueprint, as you might call it, of what we're attracted to and what we're kind of what I would say a vibratory match for. Yeah. I feel like that breakup, I spent two and a half years blaming him for all of my pain. And I was so angry at how unfair everything was. And I realized that that breakup was just really like the bandaid that ripped off. And I had to deal with all the stuff that I've never dealt with before. And I think it really started with the relationship with my father, which was very tumultuous. He gambled, he was a very angry person. And I didn't know that as a child, I hated him,

yet I also yearned for his attention and love at the same time. And growing up, I would be drawn to these people that looked very different on the outside, like some of them were DJs and tech CEOs, but the emotional experience was exactly the same. One of constant anxiety, one of constant trying to prove myself to get some little morsel of attention or validation or love, and then getting a little bit of that and then feeling, ah, and then I'm back in that cycle again. And that chaos and that dysregulated nervous system, I confused with chemistry and attraction. Yeah. So let's talk about that because you and I agree on this and it is somewhat controversial. This idea that chemistry is sometimes just trauma recognition. Yeah. And

I feel like people need to know to wait to see if your chemistry compass, which is a term I use in the book, is your chemistry compass is pointing you towards the people that you're drawn to. And some of us have a perfectly working chemistry compass. If you look back at your last couple of relationships, you feel chemistry with people, they're relatively healthy. That's great. But for many of us and most of us, that chemistry compass is a little bit broken and you can look at the last three romantic connections you had and, and see, like I have my clients do an exercise where they have to write down what were the main emotions that they felt with each different person and then circle what was the common thread. And to determine looking at the data,

are those healthy partners that I'm drawn to? Or is there an emotion that keeps popping up, anxiety or fear or stress? And that might give you a clue that, oh, my chemistry compass is actually not working. So when I feel that 10 out of 10 attraction, instead of being like, oh my gosh, that's a green light. That's my soulmate. That might be a sign that this is just pattern recognition of a familiar wounding from the past. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, therapists call this repetition compulsion, right? Cause the unconscious wish is this time I'm going to make it right. So let's say you grew up with an addict, right? And you all the pain of addiction, and then you end up falling in love with someone who's an addict. And then you wake up and you're

like, okay, I'm not dating anyone who drinks or does drugs. I only am going to date sober people, no more addicts. And so you, you find someone, you, you feel that feeling like I have known you forever. You get butterflies, which by the way, I find and truly believe is the body's warning system. Like butterflies are anxiety. It's not, that's, you know, when you meet someone who's really a good fit for you, it should feel like you're coming home. You're about to move into your dream house, not like you're about to go on a roller coaster, but they, you know, they'll say, okay, this person is amazing. I feel like I've quote unquote known them all my life. They, my life, they feel so familiar, but they don't drink and they don't do drugs. They're for me. And then

it turns out they're a gambling addict or a sex addict or some other kind of addict because we unconsciously are attracted until we resolve those traumas and those pains were unconsciously attracted to it. And what I also love about your story and also your journey, and you kind of just referred to it too, is that you, you finally realized, right? So I always say that trauma and even grief, they love an open door. So the trauma and the grief of that relationship ending, you would have never, or those relationships, other relationships after that, that ended, you would have never gone down the path of recognizing those earlier wounds that were underneath your attraction because when the trauma and the grief comes up from that breakup

all your old trauma comes up to be clear as well and that to me is like one of the key invitations of breakups and breakdowns and big things that happen to you whatever they are that are painful There are also invitations to look under the hood and to start healing something so you can shift those patterns. So you touched on this, but how would you define like the difference between one piece is like looking, okay, what's my track record here? But to tell the difference between compatibility or chemistry and compatibility, because obviously you want both. Yeah. So I introduced the dating funnel in my book and there's five stages to it. And the first stage is prospecting, right? Lead generation. It's just like getting as many leads as possible. And then the second stage is discovery. It states one to two. And the third stage is evaluation. And this is states three to 20 or around three months. And I feel like a lot of people skip the stage. And especially if you identify like how I used to, which is like, I met my soulmate, right? Like 22 times, I would just feel the chemistry and then make up my mind.

And I would commit to them even if they never committed to me at all. And I think it's extremely important that we don't rush this experience of the evaluation stage. And this is when we determine through experience and time, what are their core values? Not just what they're saying, but what they are showing. And is there a compatibility in your fundamental core values? Is your life vision the same? You want children, they don't.

Like we can justify as much as we want, but that usually doesn't end well in the long term. And so I look at for a healthy long-term partnership, there needs to be four pillars. There needs to be chemistry. Yes, connection. There needs to be timing. The perfect person at the wrong time is the wrong person. There needs to be compatibility, core values, vision. And the fourth one is mutuality. Two people who are equally invested in building. And that is another one that I know for myself as a former codependent, very anxious person, I missed because I would just, you know, be the glue when someone else wasn't pulling their weight or making any effort. Yeah, yeah.

And you also say, I think that's so important. And you also, I love to say, like the first month when you start a relationship with someone doesn't count because you're both flooded in dopamine and you're both showing your best self right and showing up as your best self and see each other through those rose-colored glasses yeah for sure and like I think sometimes you'll I hear this a lot from clients like I'm dating someone in the beginning I was like a little hesitant but then once they got me something totally changed and now they're not making plans I'm the one chasing them down and i don't think necessarily these are evil people some sure maybe they are players or or whatever

but i think for the most part people are intentionally wanting to just be romantic and then completely just ghost you but it is like in the very beginning all those love chemicals dopamine which is motivating you to get more whatever feels good it can put you in a conquest mode. So even if you're the most avoidant person, non-intimate person, non-communicative person, all those love drugs can make you motivated and act in a way that you normally wouldn't. So I just say that so that we can be realistic with that first month and understand that that doesn't set precedent for how the relationship is going to be. Yeah. And you talk about, I can't remember what you called it. I want to ask you about this. I can't remember the pillars you just mentioned

of what you're looking for. But this idea, in addition to chemistry and shared values and being in the right timing, is this idea of not only being able to communicate, which is so key, and not everybody knows how to. So to me, it's also just being willing to learn, open to learning and growing. That's how I define it. Like that is so key. That doesn't mean you have all the answers or you grew up in a family or you've learned how to communicate effectively or how to argue well. But it means that you're even if you're a little defensive, that you can put down your defenses enough to get curious about what you don't know, to be open to new ideas, to be open to learning and growing, because that's what you're going to have to do if your relationship

is going to go the distance. Both of you. Yeah, for sure. I don't believe in this idea that you need to be healed to be in a relationship because you're always healing the next thing, right? Yeah. I agree with you. It's like, we need to be ourselves willing to grow and repair. And you need to also be with someone who is willing and invested in growing and repairing. And that means there's going to be a lot of bumps. It's not going to be perfect, but that willingness is there. And that might mean you determine like, okay, we can't do it on our own. We need a third person. We need a therapist to help us out. And that's how you can create these emotionally corrective experiences in your relationship. Yeah. And you say, you know, people can be great at dating, but terrible

at relationships, right? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we can get very duped by the person who's really great at dating because they come, they're, they're charismatic, they're funny, they're probably exciting, adventurous, and it just hits us in all the right buttons and we're excited and it gets that chemistry going, but that person might not necessarily have the skills for a long term relationship. So we need to be aware that they're two separate sets of skills. And that means someone who doesn't have those skills of being very, you know, smooth in the first or second date, but they might be really great relationship material. They might be quieter than you planned. They might be more introverted, but they might be high integrity, reliable,

consistent and we want to make sure we're not just over optimizing for the things the shiny qualities that won't matter in a long-term relationship and actually pay attention to the quiet qualities that do matter yeah I think that's so important and you talk about this with regard with your current partner I think no I don't remember if this current part maybe it was your last relationship it's my current one yeah how he was not you thought he was like a not not charming enough, not gregarious enough. He was quiet. He was kind of in the background. He didn't seem as confident. He wasn't your usual type. And also, I want you to speak to that idea, but also I love, because I agree with you a hundred percent, what you say about the height

requirement or even the status and lifestyle and all of those things, but in particular, the height requirement that so many women have. Yeah. I mean, when, when I have clients who are like, I'm ready for relationship. I mean, those tears, I want a family. And then they tell me that they need someone who's six feet or taller. I'm like, you're either feeling lucky. Like you're going to win the lottery or you're really bad at math because in North America, it's approximately 14% of the population is six feet or taller. And if you take away the partner ones that drops to about 7%. So you eliminate 93% single men, if you're a woman and your dating pool turns into a puddle. And like all these people are gunning for the same people. And we know through research

that height actually has no predictive power of a happy or healthy, stable relationship, but we put so much weight on that. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to me. And I have a lot of tall girlfriends who will say, and I'll have this argument with them. They'll say, I'm just not attracted to it. I feel like I'm dwarfing him. I'm just not attracted to it. And I think we're just kind of conditioned for that. One of the things you speak to, and this isn't just about height, this was also about your current relationship when you were describing it, is this idea of you accident. I think you accidentally did this. You were kind of friends at first. And this happens to a lot of women in particular for men, too. I think this happens,

but I know it happens for women that if we like you as a person and especially if we think you're funny. But if we like you as a person, you become a lot more attractive to us. Yeah. A lot of the relationships I was just interviewing. I just did a book event with a woman who wrote a book about 250 questions you can ask to really get to know someone in love. And she was describing how she the man, you know, she was looking for love, looking for love, looking for love. She finally meets this guy, he now finds out he has to move overseas. She's thinking, oh, this relationship is never going to work out. So she decides to just be her true authentic self. She is not necessarily putting her best. She's not trying to be what she thinks he wants. She's just being

herself and getting to know him and getting to know him and liking him more and more because the pressure's off. Right. So I think there's something really cool there, both in your story and hers. And I know you speak to this in this book, even like the I don't know if this is part of your nine date suggestion or that's about going on nine different dates, maybe because I know you speak to this in this book. You go out with someone and you don't necessarily want to, quote unquote, rip their clothes off. That's always a phrase people say. I don't I don't want to rip their clothes off, but that you keep dating them to see how does that. So I in the funnel for the second stage, which is discovery, which is dates one to two, I suggest that there's only two

questions you want to answer. Am I having fun? Do I want to see this person again? Because the brain sometimes takes time to determine what type of connection that is. And so if you felt out of a scale of zero to 10, zero being discussed, you don't go again because it's extremely hard for humans to bounce back from discuss. If it's a five in connection or above, you go again. And because of what is called the mirror exposure effect, like we just talked about, the more you see someone over time, it amplifies the base feeling. And you might find after three days, you're like, oh, actually, this is totally in the friendship bucket. Or you might be like, oh, I don't know, like, but I'm really enjoying this conversation. Like not my type, but I'm

having fun. And so you go again. I think the problem is because we're so short on time these days we really want to maximize our date so we want to know right off the bat on date one okay could you be my future baby daddy like is the timeline there like and we are getting out of the present and we're future tripping and seeing where they fit in our future and when we do that we are conquesting them because we're no longer connecting human to human we're like oh you are an object and you're a means to an end to satisfy the plan that I have in my head yeah yeah and it makes total sense. So in this funnel, right, it starts out really wide. You're just prospecting through online dating, friends, taking your face out of your smartphone and actually having

conversations with people and looking around in the world and engaging in clubs and community meetups. And you're trying to meet a lot of people. Right. And then you kind of the funnel gets a little narrower where you're going on those one to three dates with people, even if you don't necessarily want to rip their clothes off at first. But by the third date, you're going to decide whether you want to kind of move into the evaluation stage where you're really getting to know them better. Now, how many people are you in the evaluation stage with at once? So this is a dating experiment in my book. They have to date nine different people. And so not at one time, they could space it out. I'm typically working with someone between

six months to a year. And they have to date people outside of their type because it's very easy for me to be like, just date someone outside your type. It won't register. And I have them optimize for the things that matter. Kindness, integrity, swiping on people they normally wouldn't because they had these ideas of who they should be dating. And they get to experience people who they normally wouldn't give a chance to, but there isn't the pressure of having to find the one because one of the main rules of the dating experiment is they can't get into relationship with any of them. This causes them to not put pressure on that date. And it also helps them not jump in with two feet way too early before they even do the evaluation stage.

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Check it out. Let me know what you think. OK, so after you dated for at least nine different people over whatever time frame you want that and they got to be people that are outside your norm, at least all not if not all of them, most of them. then you get to the discovery. I mean, the evaluation stage right now, you're so you're going on one to three dates with nine different people. Yes. Unless you have discussed and then you are. Yeah. Yeah. And then you move into the evaluation stage and hopefully you're not by now you've pared it down and you're not doing the evaluation stage with nine different. Yeah. Hopefully that would be a lot. And so what, where does, do you have a, I mean, cause I have a feel

a position on this. I'm curious if you do around when sex should come into it. Ooh, I think that if you tend to get very attached to someone after sex, that was me. I could have sex with someone one time and want to marry them. You should hold off on sex and you should let the trust build and the emotional connection build. So I do believe that it's better to wait a bit. I don't have a certain number, like is it date three or is it date five? I think you do a check in with yourself of like, okay, if I get physically intimate with this person, can I trust that this person is going to treat me with respect and answer my phone call the next day? If you cannot answer that question, you probably don't want to give them access to the most intimate parts of

yourself. Yeah, that's the bare minimum. I mean, I'll tell you my position, which is different than yours. But if you are looking, this is for people who are looking specifically for a long term monogamous relationship. If that is what you want, and you can say this to them on the second, third date, you can say, look, I'm really attracted to you. And I'm someone who actually enjoy, you know, really enjoys a sexual relationship, but I don't have sex with anyone until I'm pretty sure that neither one of us really wants to date anyone else for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean we don't change it. We can't change our minds. That doesn't mean we're ready to move in together or commit to one another, but that we're really kind of giving this

a solid chance. Now, that doesn't mean you don't make out with them. You don't feel out the chemistry a little bit before that, but it does mean, because you're absolutely right. I don't think it's just you, Amy. I think it's women in general. There are very few women I meet. What happens, especially if we have good sex, especially if there's an orgasm involved, our brains and our bodies get washed in oxytocin. That's the chemical of attachment that breastfeeding mothers release to bomb them through their babies. So you're having a one night stand, or you just think this guy is hot and you're not even sure if you maybe never want to see him again or maybe you're doing this you're in that discovery stage and you're thinking maybe but I don't know

there's some red flag but he's so hot I'm just gonna do it yeah it feels right the problem is that if it's good even if you didn't intend to get attached there is that attachment there and so I think and it definitely muddies the waters it makes you let them off the hook about a lot of things. It makes you read into things that maybe you shouldn't be reading into positively or negatively. So for whatever it's worth, guys, that's my position, which I don't think conflicts with yours. But yeah, yeah. So there's lots of ways that you talk about. And this is what I love. You know, you create this system. There's this funnel. There are these phases. There's this way to understand how dating can unfold in a conscious way. And you go into where

people sort of sabotage themselves within the funnel, right? So let's talk about some of them. One of them you say is getting exclusive too fast. Another, which I feel is really important, you gave a lot of examples of this, is ignoring the data. You know, and you were describing doing this, right? When you really wanted relationships to work and they would just kind of give you a crumb. Yeah. You'd be like, okay, they really love me. Yeah. I feel like exactly what we're talking about, right? The rose color tinted glasses that we have on. And when we are really into someone and they are giving us love and attention in unpredictable reward schedules, it really can cause us to get hooked like a gambler at the slot machine. And right when we

don't know when the reward is going to come, we know what happens to our brain. It causes us to get a huge rush of dopamine when we do finally get that Instagram like, or they saw your story. And then there's a huge crash that comes afterwards. And then we get obsessive over what we can do to get that next hit. And all of that obsession causes this person to take up a lot of headspace that then causes us to then associate, oh, they must be so important. They must be my soulmate this connection is out of this world for me to feel this strongly when no they just have you on an intermittent reward schedule and your brain is hooked yeah and by the way if one more person tells me that that is their twin soul I'm going to shoot someone

not twin flames stop twin flames oh my god oh my gosh and twin flames and twin flames are freaking toxic. That does not mean you are supposed to be together forever. That means you're supposed to trigger the shit out of each other so that one or both of you are finally catalyzed to heal. It does not mean that you are supposed to. And I know you say many times in the book that you don't believe in soulmates. I believe that we have many, many, many soulmates at any relationship we have is a soulmate because we're growing and evolving our souls while in relationship. Because when we have a relationship with someone, what we're really doing is having a relationship with ourselves through that other person, you know, so we're always growing our souls.

But I'm wondering if you could speak to that, too, because I know you say that many times that you don't believe in soulmates. Yeah, I remember meeting this guy, met him on an app. And yeah, like he lived in the UK, had five children. He would come to New York sometimes. I hooked up with him. And in between when he was away, I would just fantasize about him and this life we would have together, not knowing that this was getting me more and more attached. So by our fifth date,

he's back from the UK. I've already married him, opened an ashram with him in Bali, had five more children with him. And he's just figuring out what side to have with his steak. And our energy was really off and like i didn't think about how we like lived in different continents we had totally different lives different wants in our lives and so i remember messaging my sister i was like alice i met my soulmate no this is the one trust me it's very different and she's like uh amy you said this like 20 times before i'm like no this one's different trust me it wasn't different guys didn't end up well yeah yeah and and I think that's an easy thing for us to do you talk about I love the dangle talk about the dangle yeah I feel like when we're you know on this journey of

growth this is totally not scientific but I swear it's true yeah the universe is going to just you know put in front of you a dangle and this is some sort of temptation that is going to make you think about oh maybe I should just go back with this person one more time it's going to tempt you to go back to an old pattern and that is when you have there's a fork in the road and you have to make a choice do I go back to what I used to do or do I do the hard thing which is take a different path and I make a different choice and it's not going to feel good in the moment but I know it's healthier for me and that is really the universe testing you and when that dangle comes it's like it's helpful for you to identify like, no, this is not my soulmate. This is a dangle. I'm going

to make the healthier choice for the future that I want to build. Yeah. You gave an example of this guy who had finally, you were coaching him and he'd finally left the toxic relationship, the one that got away that he'd kind of pined for who hadn't treated him well in the first place. And he'd met someone, he'd done, you know, the nine date thing. He dated someone who was kind of out of his typical, he started to really connect with her and was into her. And then the ex shows back up saying how wrong she was and, you know, saying all the quote unquote, right things, even though she was still married. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that was a great example of a dangle, right? Like how's he? And I saw him recently. He's, he made the better choice of not going to the dangle after

our emergency coaching session. And he's now in a healthy relationship. It's been two and a half years. He didn't do the dangle. Yeah. The other term that I love, and I know this term from Love Addicts Anonymous is, and you, we were alluding to this earlier when you were talking about the way that we can be kept hooked in these toxic relationships or in these relationships that don't serve us is this idea of the qualifier. Yeah. Yeah. I, I had someone in my life who I constantly had the intermittent reinforcement with, and this went on for years and I thought he was my soulmate so I would date in between but he always had my heart and I learned the term the qualifier and it's like that person it doesn't matter how much you block him or like take time

from them whatever mental gymnastics you do when you are in their presence you get sucked back in like a black hole and so the only way to stop is to completely stop the cycle and that was extremely helpful for me because I had to quit cold turkey, that drip feed of attention for years for me to finally break it. I've used this example so many times in books and with my clients. And I saw you referred to it as well, this idea, there was these, the experiments they do with rats and with mice where they give them food consistently when they push the button and then they give them no food when they push the button. So they go off and do their other things. And then they really mastermind evil, but they start giving them intermittent random food. So sometimes when

they push the button, they get a food. Sometimes they don't. And then what happens is that the rats then just avoid everything else. They become obsessed with pushing the button. Will the food come or will it not? Will that breadcrumb come or not to the point where they die of thirst? They stop drinking. They stop doing anything to care for themselves. And it's like a, you know, it's true. It happens with these poor animals, but it also happens with us on a different level. You know, we really, that's an addictive pattern. So many of us, you talk about seven relationship patterns that kind of stand in the way of really reaching for healthy love. There's the chaser, the pleaser, the one who distances themselves, you know, the perfectionist, you know, the hero,

the workaholic, the jokester. Is there one you see more often? I mean, we don't have to go through all of them, but maybe some of the more common ones or some, or we can go through them all, however you want to tackle them. But I want to speak to those because they're a way that we kind of protect ourselves and also sabotage ourselves. Yeah. I think one that I see a lot in my male clients is the jokester. And so this is the archetype of person who they might use humor as their way to get someone in the door. And you can replace jokester with money or status, whatever it is. This one thing that they've been validated for becomes their crutch. And then they don't let the other person see any other side of themselves. So there's no depth and

relationships don't work because it stays on the surface level because this person is trying to keep this kind of front and it's a way of really keeping intimacy away and so I think that is one to consider because maybe it's not jokes you're using maybe it's beauty maybe it's money and then I would say another one that comes up a lot is the chaser and it is there is an uneven power dynamic and the natural thing to do is like well I want to get it back to where it used to be because in the first month, there was all that connection and we were making mutual effort. And now that it's gone, I am going to take two steps for every step that they're taking. Eventually that becomes four steps for every one step that they're taking. And the power dynamic becomes so imbalanced that

you're constantly grasping for their love. And the answer to that is not to put your foot on the gas pedal and give more. It is to stop and pause and actually allow space for the other person to take steps and have the conversation and communicate and recognize if they are unwilling to make an effort that you probably need to exit the relationship or what they'll do. And I forget which one this was, but what they'll do is say they may not respond at first, but when you finally are like, and you mean it, you call it their bluff and you mean it, you're like, okay, I'm out of here. Then they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. I see the error of my ways. I'm going to do different now. And maybe they'll do better for a week or two or a month or two. And then they go

back to the regular behavior. Yeah. And I think that's an important skill for us to have is to be able to recognize when something is a blip or a pattern. A blip is, you know, their mom got really sick and they were unavailable for a period of time and they recognize what happened. they come back and recommit to the relationship. A pattern is, oh my gosh, no, I'm going to lose you. I'll do really well for a week and then I'll do the same thing over and over again. And when it's a pattern, the only way to interrupt this thing is to stop the pattern and get out of it. Yeah. Cause they're not going to change. I mean, Maya Angelou, right? When they show you who you, who they are, believe them. And it's the same thing when people cheat on you. I can't tell

you how many people I work with who take someone back after cheating on them just because they are so sorry you know and I'm like that that's not gonna be enough like if you're gonna take someone back not only is there all this reparative work we have to do but they have to get so clear on why it happened and what is underneath it and what they're running from or running to and what is going on within them or within the relationship that made this relationship vulnerable to that and they're not willing to really do that deep work you know just saying I'm so sorry I don't want to lose you. I made a mistake is that you can be guaranteed they're going to do it again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The feelings of guilt will pass. So what do you got then?

Exactly. And when I was listening to you, I was like, oh, gosh, you know, I think a lot of people, myself included, are probably a combination. Like I would have been in the past a chaser, a pleaser and a hero. Right. Like the hero wants to rescue the ones that have all or how about all the excuses. Which one is that? The one that makes all the excuses? Like I see that so much with women, you know, he's had, or sometimes guys do it too, but he's had such a hard life. Yeah. Or the reason he behaves this way is because he was abused as a child, which of course we have compassion for, but that's not enough. It's kind of like the cheating thing. So then what, you know, what are you going to do about it? Yeah. And I feel like this is a hard one,

because we want to have compassion for people's histories and their trauma, but we also don't want to take on the role of their coach, their mother, father, or therapist. That's not our job. It's also not sexy and it's not going to be sustainable long-term. And someone to be in a committed long-term relationship, not everyone is equipped for it. That is okay because someone not only needs to have intention to want the relationship, they also need capacity and ability and if you don't have capacity or ability you can't just have feelings of wanting to be in a relationship right because you can't carry it out no you can start one but you can't sustain it talk about the shit bucket theory of that so another totally non-scientific analogy but it's

totally true when you stop dating you know the terrible people and you're dating relatively healthy people and you get into a relationship, you have to recognize that every relationship will come with a shit bucket. And that means 20% of this bucket is going to be filled with shit. And that is a stuff that is super annoying, right? Like they're messy and you're OCD clean, they're introverted and you're extroverted. These are things that are annoying, but they're not deal breakers. And so if you understand that there are for every quality, there is a light and a dark side. And you have to be able to tolerate both sides of those qualities. Because if you don't recognize there's a shit bucket, then you're like, oh, I don't like how introverted

they are. I'm going to go over to this person who's adventurous and extroverted. And then you're dealing with the dark side of those qualities. And then it's its own shit bucket, just a different flavor. So there's a point where instead of having an existential crisis of doubting your relationship every single time, you recognize there's just going to be a percentage of stuff that's going to be annoying. It doesn't mean you can't have conversations about it or negotiate, but it's being realistic about our partnerships. Yeah. And recognizing what shit you can deal with and what you can't. Right. And you speak a lot and write a lot in the book about getting clear about you even have little worksheets for getting clear on what your, you know, real deal breakers

are. I always say you should just have no more than five major deal breakers. You know, like for me, it was addiction, active addiction, emotionally or physically abusive, infidelity, you know, those like I had major things, but the rest of it. And I do think that we're going to even with when we're friends with our shadows and we've done our work. This is what one of the coolest parts of relationships to me is that we are going to be attracted to someone who is going to be, our partner is our greatest teacher, right? So recognizing that those things that may trigger us are actually portals to growth. Like could be example, I can give you from, you know, my relationship as I, my husband, you know, my nickname for him when our kids were small was

Mr. Protector because like he would see danger wherever it lurked and it was so freaking annoying because like he wouldn't even let them jump on a trampoline because you know trampolines kids break bones and like you know he would give me the statistics and whatever else and that you know if they were swimming if we were swimming in the pool or the ocean you had to hold them at all like he was so scared so protective about every little aspect of their physical safety and it used to annoy the crap out of me until I suddenly one day I was playing with the kids and being silly with them. And he was there watching and guarding. And I suddenly realized, why does this annoy me? Like he I am totally free to be the spastic parent because I'm just here having fun.

I mean, obviously, I'm being careful, but like I know he's the vigilant one. He's watching out. So if he's here, I get to just relax and play. And then a few years later, I was talking to my youngest son, and I'll never forget, he was just saying something in passing. And he said, yeah, daddy's the safe parent, and you're the fun parent. Oh, my gosh, you get to be fun parent. I get to be fun parent. Yeah. So that was that, you know, that changed the way that I saw, you know, and I saw the wounding I came from, and I saw the way the love that was rooted in. And so I think you can look at those things. You can look when you see the shadow of it. You can also see the light. Right. Just like the light side has a shadow side. The shadow side has a light side. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that's a really important 20% of your bucket will be the shit bucket.

And that, and is it workable, right? Does it violate your core values? Is there accountability? Is it, you know, a big issue or is it something you can live with? Now, let's talk about this idea that, you know, we touched on this before, but I want to dig a little deeper into this idea that secure love, love that's really sustainable and healthy for you will often read as unexciting at first. Yeah. So if you have a history where you associated an activated nervous system with chemistry, that person who is maybe not healthy

for you, you'll have really great sex with. You'll feel all that chemistry, right? Your heart rate is going you're anxious and then when you then start dating someone who doesn't keep you guessing all the time it's so foreign that you might be like oh I'm bored something's wrong with this person I don't like them and it's part of why I I did the dating experiment on myself and that example you told uh discussed about the guy who I didn't feel any chemistry for I was doing this dating experiment and I was telling him about it and I was like no this guy's totally in my friend zone and I was like oh the dating experiment isn't working because I'm going out with all these guys and they're very kind and respectful but I don't feel anything for them and this guy after

like I think I was seven months into the experiment I started developing feelings for and I realized oh my dating experiment did work because now someone being kind and into me and actually liking me wasn't so foreign now that was what was familiar to me and it really changed my chemistry compass and so anyone I dated after that I just stopped feeling such a like I don't know intense passion for guys that like me just a little bit never enough yeah yeah so you basically are saying that you assimilated being with all of these guys who you didn't necessarily want to end up with, but having the experience of people being into you and seeking you out and complimenting you and being consistent and being dependable, got your nervous system more used to that so that

you were open. Yeah. Yeah. Human beings, we are drawn to what's familiar, right? Whether that's music or food or romantic partner. So if you've never had Chinese food in your whole life, I'm not gonna get you started with chicken feet right I'll probably have like say why don't we fry egg fried rice right get you used to that and then after egg fried rice sweet and sour pork right we go from zero to five and then you get that stops being so foreign to you it becomes more familiar and I swear like it's like exposure therapy yeah good people yes in reverse exposure therapy in reverse I like that yeah because I say to women all the time when they're like what they won't like the guy. They're not into the guy who's so into them. And what's underneath that

usually is such low self-worth. Like if he's that into me, something must be wrong with him. But even if you've done the work on yourself and you've built the self-worth and you've realized the wounding that made you feel that way, you still have to get your nervous system. You do it right. And that's what you were describing. You'd been doing all this work on yourself, but your nervous system was still attuned to and most responsive to that on and off attention instead of consistent. I read every self-help book. I did the therapy. A lot of it was very in my head. So logically I knew this one's bad, this one's good, but it wasn't aligned in my heart, body, and soul. And so I think doing the experiment was experiential. So it helped me

experience. Oh, this is what it feels like to feel safe and secure. I not wonder if someone likes me. Yeah. So that's why I highly recommend doing your own dating experiment. Yeah. And you describe about how to do it and unsingle. If it feels calm, what would you say is to recognize the difference between like good calm and settling? I see it often when people have had a very tumultuous relationship or maybe infidelity. And then they swing from one extreme to the other where they will choose someone that they don't like, they don't have connection with, but it's strictly so that they feel that they won't be abandoned. And you have to be able to do some self-reflection to see if that's where you're at. Like, are you with this person only because

you think they won't leave you? And that is a case of settling. And you're also ruining that person's life. Calm is different. It is like, oh, like I enjoyed our time together. And I'm not just, my mind's not racing about this person. It feels like peaceful. And that's what I felt with my now partner. Like he was someone that always returned text messages. He initiated plans. And I remember like, I didn't feel the need to announce to my sister, to the world of like, oh my God, I'm at the one. I was just like, I'm enjoying this. And it feels peaceful. It feels a bit different. Okay. I'm just going to see how it goes. I was a lot more present with it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes so much sense. So if you were to have a chance to go back and tell that

younger version of you who was clinging to that guy, Ben, I guess his name was the one that the psychic said was cheating, right? What would you tell her? I would tell her to build a foundation of self-worth and a full life and recognize that love comes in so many forms and romantic is just one of them and not to base your entire identity on if you can get romantic love. Yeah, that will set you free, friends. The book is called Helps You Find Romantic Love? Unsingle, How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts. We'll put the link to the book in the show notes. How else can people get in touch with you or learn more? Amy, we'll put the links in. Yeah, on Instagram, I'm at MissAmyChan. And I actually have the worksheet to assess a first date, if you should go again,

and then one to assess a partner in the evaluation stage. And you just go to MissAmyChan.com slash unzingle and you can get them there. Okay, we'll put the links to all of that in the show notes. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. This was so fun. It was fun to be with you. Thanks for all the wisdom.

I went to the doctor said I'm crazy for your love