Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 137: Does THIS Count As Cheating? + What It Means To Be Loyal In A Relationship

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

Matt and Stephen get into the topic of LOYALTY in a relationship. We discuss: Is it okay for a guy you’re dating to like a models photo? Is it okay for a guy you’re dating to like an Ex’s Photo?  What counts as micro-cheating? Do you have to be over someone before you can date? The importance of loyalty The difference between values and standards --- Follow Matt @thematthewhussey Follow Stephen @stephenhhussey --- Email us your thoughts at [e-mail] --- Don’t waste time & energy. Find love Faster: Download Your Free Guide to Learn the 3 Love Habits... → http://www.3LoveHabits.com

Hello there friends, it's Stephen Hussey here, setting up today's episode where I'm going to be talking with Matthew of course, all about loyalty. Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. It is a cornerstone of relationships, it is a cornerstone of trust, and without for loyalty. We, especially in this day and age, there seem to be a myriad of new ways that loyalty can be compromised. And we might ask the question, is it okay for a guy you're dating to like someone's photo on Instagram? Does it make a difference if it's a photo of a sexy woman in a bikini or just a friend of his? Is it okay for someone you are dating to like their ex's photo? Is it okay for them to even follow their ex on social media? Are these forms of micro cheating and what do you do when two people, they might both have the value of loyalty but they have very different criteria and standards for what loyalty actually means.

These are some of the questions we're going to be wrestling with today, especially the question of exes and whether you have to be fully over someone before you can move on and date and the standards of loyalty around that as well so this is the stuff of relationships though not just modern relationships but any relationship there's always these issues where we might both have the same values but we express them in different ways and we think well that's not the standard I have for that value and it can be very very difficult so I think this is a really important one. I hope you enjoy it. And please excuse Matthew's raspy voice, which we've been told has been quite sexy. So I'm sure he's pleased with that.

But he has been recovering from a bit of a bad cold. And so his voice is still a little on the croaky side in this episode so bear with us he is on the mend and i'm sure it'll be back to normal soon uh all right that's all from me uh you can drop us a line about this episode podcast at matthew hussey the email address podcast at matthewhussey.com uh or you can drop me a line on instagram follow me at steven h hussey and dm me if you want to tell me what you thought of this episode or comments on the podcast questions you have suggestions for future episodes uh let me know all right that's it over to me and matt i guess well we're back we're back in our london. You are here in the UK and we're cozy in unspecified London location. Another episode. Wherever it is, it's still the Love Live podcast. Of course. Welcome.

Well, that goes without saying. Well, it might be someone's first episode. Hello newcomers and welcome. Matt, you wanted to follow on chatting about simping it seems you hadn't had enough of the simp no i don't want to follow on talking about simping i want to talk about social media but last episode we talked about the concept of simping which is you you know, just to reiterate, the idea of a guy who is falling over himself to please a woman. And we talked about it first in a relationship where he's just running roughshod over all his own boundaries and standards and self-respect in order to please the deity

that he happens to be with the online version of course simp is often used in the context of the hundreds or thousands of men in the comment section of these women who are either hot or dance in tiktoks or whatever and there's all these guys that fall over themselves in the comments to tell them how wonderful they are even though they'll never meet this woman or hear from her the sort of modern day phenomenon i suppose but what we want to talk about in this episode is the phenomenon of men who are in relationships or i suppose we can expand that to anyone who's dating or in a relationship who is still liking photos of attractive people who aren't their partner on social media. And we had a question, Steve, that came into the inbox, which, by the way, for anyone who wants us to talk about a certain issue, wants to tell us a story, wants to ask us a question and have the possibility of having it answered, you can email

us directly for the podcast at podcast at matthewhussey.com. But as you've rightly said, Steve, please don't leave a three-page essay because those definitely won't. I'll tell you now, if you leave us a giant essay, there's no way we'll read it. If you leave us 250 words of an idea, a question, a story, there's every chance that we'll read it and use it. And we are reading those. But send them into podcast at MatthewHussey.com. This was one listener question. This person who will remain anonymous, I think she requested to be anonymous, said, I have been in a relationship which is relatively new. We're only together four months with a guy and everything is going great apart from one thing. I keep obsessing over a girl he was seeing previous to me. He dated this girl for four or five months right before we met. First, he said it was only casual. But then at a later date, he said it was very toxic and he didn't want to talk about it.

I didn't want to know anything about the girl because I prefer not to know about exes. But then I saw on his Instagram, he had a picture of the two of them with a heart. I found that strange because if it wasn't a relationship, why would you post that on social media? Then one night on a night out, we met a guy he knew. And he said, oh, are you still in love? Referencing his Instagram post. When I asked him about it, he said I'm reading too much into it and deleted the picture. I said, it friends and family hated the previous girl. I can't help obsessing over the girl because it's like I have these little snippets of information but not enough to give me a full picture so I create the story in my head myself. A few weeks ago I was feeling anxious and he was being off with me and ignoring my texts so I searched

her Instagram and lo and behold he had liked her most recent pic the same day. This drove me over the edge and I had a massive fight with him over it. He claimed he liked it by accident which is a complete lie and that it didn't mean anything. We eventually resolved the issue and are back on track but I can't help comparing myself to this girl and I can't stop wondering what went on between them. It's driving me insane. I don't know what to do. How can I get over this? I don't want my jealousy to ruin the relationship because other than that we have a great relationship i want to move on and just forget about her but i don't know how please help well thank you for a very honest and vulnerable question steven what are your thoughts oh man

that's that's a hard situation because it's like the genie is out of the bottle now. And she knows about this woman. And she knows that obviously her boyfriend had some kind of fraught relationship. Or there was some residual feeling. So it is one of those things you can't un you can't you can't unsee that well before we okay so maybe a nice place to start for this episode would be to zoom out a little bit and zoom well let's zoom back in on this woman's specific situation but just for everyone out there who is in this place of, is it okay for my partner to like pictures of other attractive people on social media while they're with me? What do we think about that? Because that's just a very

generic widespread issue of our time. You know, your partner that you're dating now was no doubt following other people before you were in a relationship. As a single person, they would probably be following other attractive people, liking various posts. Now you're in a relationship which comes with an assumed degree of loyalty, exclusivity and respect. Is it disrespectful? Is it disloyal to like other people's pictures? Is this a form of what people call micro cheating? Yeah, it's like as a blanket rule, it would obviously everything would be easier if you just assumed as a rule, it would obviously everything would be easier if you just assumed as a rule i won't do that like the gain is small from going and liking other people's pictures

other attractive people's pictures and there's a lot of potential downside so just on that basis if you're being rational you could just say just don't do that if you're in a relationship make your life peaceful and easier why why create even the possibility of that kind of conflict but it becomes like there's levels aren't there because it could also you could get into a relationship and you already followed some attractive women or men on instagram and then you know your partner might be like i don't like that you follow these sexy people why do you follow them you don't know them it's some person whose every shot is in a bikini so it's only you know a visual thing and then it's like you know should you be loyal and

unfollow them if that makes them uncomfortable it's like where do you decide your boundary is for loyalty right because there are there are a lot of people and we we get the question from people i've had it on tour before where someone said my partner follows a lot of you know bikini models and people instagram influencers who are influencers mostly because of their looks. Right. You know, my guy follows a lot of these people. Am I supposed to be okay with that? It makes me insecure that my partner follows all of these different people.

Yeah. So, I mean, what do you do? I can totally see a couple deciding like, we just don't do that thing. we just don't like other people's instagram photos and someone might equally decide what we for the sake of the relationship we don't have independent uh opposite sex friends that we hang out with one-on-one because we just don't create a situation where someone might feel uncomfortable or jealous i get that but i don't think everyone has the same rules and that's kind of where the problem is some people are just like it's not a big deal like i like people's i like

attractive people's pictures what does it matter so what do you do if people if people just don't see eye to eye at all on the same standard for loyalty well that's that that kind of cuts to the crux of the issue, doesn't it? We all have different standards in relationships, and it's one of the primary sources of conflict. It would be interesting, you know, you have values, and then you have standards, and they're not the same thing. They intersect, but they're not the same thing. They intersect, but they're not the same thing. A value would be loyalty, right? We both value loyalty. A standard is what loyalty means to us. I have a female friend from way back who i remember years ago said to me and she's in a long-term relationship she said oh going out and having a kiss with a stranger isn't cheating wow like on a night out her version of that was, oh, that's not cheating. If you go and have a snog with someone on a night out, that's not cheating.

That doesn't count. It's like there are people who think stuff they do on their bachelor night doesn't count. Or, you know. Now, she would never, I know, she would never have said, I don't value loyalty. She would have said loyalty is important. But the point is that she had a different standard for loyalty than I do. Yeah. So we're in a position when we look for a relationship

or when we assess someone who we're dating, we're not just looking for synergistic values, but we're looking to align on what the manifestation of that value actually looks like what's the standard we have for that value yeah that's where so many people butt heads two people value loyalty but they have a completely different idea of what it means. Now that's why conversation so early in a relationship is important. It's why not avoiding things and stewing with things is important because the first few months of dating is where you talk about those things. It's where,

you know, in the case of this person he has liked a picture of his ex who she already has an issue with and her ignoring that comment which she hasn't obviously she talks about having had a big blow up with him over it but ignoring that isn't the right thing. Also, there's a way to bring it up that just causes destruction. But what we want is to be able to bring our partner that and say, here's why I struggle with that. Here's the problem with that for me. And here's how it makes me feel.

And it's not my version of of what loyalty is and i do think that to get into the weeds a little bit of whether liking somebody else's post is a version of uh disloyalty is it i kind of think okay well there's you may say we have a standard for our relationship where if we were in an airport and we walked past a magazine stand and you saw the person on the cover of Maxim or FHM or whatever and said, man, she's so hot, you might say, that's one degree of disrespect. It's because why would you say that to me?

But at least in that situation, you could say you're interacting with the magazine when you like someone's picture on social media you're you're not interacting with a magazine you're interacting with a person yeah and the communication is open for it to be two-way someone could see your like and respond to you they could dm you there there's many more open possibilities you you have whether or not they ever see it is a separate issue but you have put yourself on their radar right when we walk past magazines a magazine stand we're not putting ourselves on someone's radar but on social media we are it's an it's maybe a one-way interaction but it's an interaction and of course in the case of it not being a well-known influencer or celebrity in the case

of it being an ex that now becomes something that that can be reciprocated and maybe it is even likely to be reciprocated and and at the very least seen and acknowledged yeah it's a little different than liking a billy eilish photo where she might have 30 million people right following right and but even that some people may just be like i don't like you liking sexy billy eilish pictures or something you know everyone might have a level where they're like i don't like that either she's not wearing a hoodie in that photo um i but you know that that's an that's also an interesting distinction because you could say you could say my standard is not that my partner never likes a picture of of a someone of my gender yeah you could say my problem is if they like

something that is quite obviously just a post that is about this person's attractiveness you know if billy eilish i love that billy eilish has become the if billy eilish releases you know a solid new record sure and someone likes it or you know billy eilish has just won an award you like it i just love the james bond song he's come to celebrate it's just cool that she won that award i'm like it also i mean even that you know i mean i i can't the idea of liking something that's just not even in your world, it just seems like a pointless waste of energy. But even that, it's about the work.

But if Billie just puts up a photo of Billie in a bikini on the beach that says, you know, hashtag hot girl summer. She wouldn't put that. She wouldn't. Billy would never do that. But if she did and you like that one, then that's a different, you could argue, well, now you're just liking something that's in that context.

What are you liking except this person's looks at this point? You know, there's a context to that so even within liking pictures you can argue us about context there are some people who are in a world where i'm sure they argue professionally it's important for them to be able to like other people's photos you could get someone who's a personal trainer who's like i'm building my client network right and the more people i engage with the more people follow me and see me as a trainer and want my services but that can be hard for the person who's dating that person who says okay you can always claim that this woman in a bikini could be a client one day or that she could give you a repost or

whatever but it still makes me uncomfortable and then further nuance may be required where you go well look i understand that you want to make connections on social media but can you maybe be a bit nuanced about what you choose to like did you have to like 500 pictures of women in yoga pants? Was that absolutely necessary for your career? Yeah, and by the way, for the record, Dan, your career is training people who want to get their bodies in shape. Why are all the photos you're liking people who clearly already have a trainer? These people clearly are not trying to get in shape. They are already there.

So, yeah, I think that it is. And that's, but that's where intention matters. And over time, we, if we truly get to know someone beneath the surface, we talk to them. We get to know their behavior. We start to understand more and more about their intentionality. Is this just some way of, you know, justifying, constantly liking attractive people's photos so that I can continue to sort of flirt from a distance

and have this cheap thrill whilst justifying it through my work or connections or whatever else we can try to justify it through these days or is it genuinely no this is you know me and you know that this is just you know I I'm trying to build something and there are certain things that help me build that. But you can see the context. And when someone is very open in general and when someone, you get the impression that someone's not hiding things from you, that starts to become, you can grow more comfortable over time. I think one of the hard things about the beginning of a relationship is that we don't know someone's intent so trust is something that's built slowly it's not built quickly you don't just go into a relationship trusting everything you trust is built and accumulated slowly now later on there

may actually be things we'd be less cool with in the first three months than we're cool within year three right because we in year three we're like no i know i know this person right i know who they are i know where this comes from so now they go to dinner with that friend that in month one i would have been like you can't go to dinner with that person now in year one or year two you're like this doesn't feel like such a big deal, but that's because I know you. What we class as a trespassing on our boundaries or over our boundaries is relative. It changes over time as our trust for someone changes. What you have in this question is a woman who's saying

i was already inflamed what i had was a guy who already i felt a little bit insecure about this person he dated why well because he said it meant nothing but then he also described it as really toxic so now i'm worried that it did mean something because maybe you still have some emotion around this yeah and especially if it sounds like it was a dramatic end it feels like oh well he must have felt strongly about her because he's you know saying how toxic and difficult it was exactly so now you have a situation where you go oh all the emotion from this hasn't been released now some people won't agree with me on this, but my personal view on this is this idea that you have to be over the last person

in order to be with someone else, I think is kind of, we're way, way, way too black and white about that. Well, the problem is, like you said with this guy, she doesn't know yet if this is just the very tail end last burning out of that relationship you know yeah what what happened or is it to her she's like is this a pattern is he the kind of guy who clings on to exes and is gonna always be one foot, you know, potentially liking an old flame's pictures.

It's hard for her to tell at this stage. And she doesn't know if this is coming from a place of desire to be with this person or just residual anger over having been mistreated or, you know, we can carry feelings with us. You know, we can, we can become parents in life whilst still being angry at our own parents. We can get into a relationship while still having some residual resentment or anger about how someone treated us in a previous relationship. Just because we haven't worked through everything

about our past relationship it doesn't mean we can't have another one if that were true my god the amount of new relationships that would happen would diminish very very quickly right but intention is a different thing if my intention is deep down i would love to be back with this person. Now you have a bigger problem because now it can become a real insecurity for the person that you're with. Well, what if this ex of yours turned around and said that they wanted you again? Where would that leave me? Now I don't feel safe. So I think that we have to be careful about making these blanket statements about, well, you're not over your ex. It's okay for there to be residual emotion. I do think good advice for someone who has residual emotion within a new relationship. A good vice is not to spotlight

that, not to focus on that, because what can it do for your current relationship really? It's okay to have a conversation about it and to be like, yeah, you know, it hurt me then, or I struggle with that then, or, you know, yeah, you know, for a long time, maybe even still, it makes me a little angry from time to time, but it has nothing to do with wanting I struggle with that then or you know yeah you know for a long time maybe even still it makes me a little angry from time to time but it has nothing to do with wanting to be with that person I just feel something you know it's okay to be honest about that but my advice for anyone in this that situation is don't go and live in don't like go live into that emotion don't go adopt it and now get frustrated and get angry and because now it's like well now you're just living there it's not that it's there and it's just something that

you're processing you're you're living there and that's not productive to your new relationship it takes the focus away from your new relationship but there is a difference between feelings and intentions now the problem is that this guy that she's dating if she said well he said it was casual but then he said it was toxic so i'm sensing feelings around this that's one thing that's kind of like a moment where she goes okay that's a marker that's made me a bit feel a bit funny and of course that it seems like it wasn't far behind them meeting and she's still early on with him so she's understandably not feeling particularly secure right now so that because the roots of the relationship. Aren't deep.

And that's something we all. We have to be kind to ourselves. Sometimes when we see something early on. And it inflames us. Part of it is that the roots of this relationship. We're in now aren't deep. So this isn't a tree. That's been growing for a while.

And is really you know. Plugged into the soil. And whatever storm comes along this tree is sturdy it's got a thick trunk no i i am inherently trying to nurse and water and grow this very young plant so i guess what it can become i guess then she the question she would probably want to say to you is like well she said he's a great guy in other respects right they she said they they seem to have something you know special but it that for her it's like do i take the risk though on this

patch of soil is this patch of soil gonna turn out to be soil you know poisoned and i shouldn't risk everything on this like how much risk should i take at this stage that's exactly right and what's now made it worse is that it's not just him saying well it was toxic and maybe i hadn't been fully transparent about how much that affected me at the time but she now goes out and she they spump into his friend and his friend says i mean what kind of idiot friend says this but his friend says in front of her oh are you still in love which is a weird thing for a friend to say in the context of you being out with a new person yeah but let's say the friend has made a clumsy comment but that clumsy

comment has further inflamed what she's already worried about now in a sense that's not his fault right not in a sense i mean it kind of it really isn't his fault his friend has said something we've all been in a situation where we're with someone we really like and we're around their friends and their friend says something clumsy yeah that hurts our feelings yeah maybe it alludes to an ex of our boyfriend or girlfriend it alludes to who they were before it alludes you know there's some detail that you're like oh that stung yeah we've all been in that situation it's not our current partner's fault that someone said a clumsy thing that was about a time before you but where it becomes problematic is when she realizes oh he's liked her picture so now it wasn't just something his friend said that stung is something he actually did. Not the hugest deal in the world.

He didn't go and sleep with anyone, but he did like a picture of someone that he said he's completely done with. And what makes it worse is it's during a time where she wasn't feeling good communication from him. So, of course, that's salt to the wound. makes it worse is it's during a time where she wasn't feeling good communication from him so of course that's salt to the wound not only were you not texting me back but you somehow found the energy and the space in your mind to like a picture of someone you said means nothing to you at this stage then she confronts him about it and he lies. He says, I hid it by mistake.

We don't know that's a lie, but it seems pretty close to a lie. It would be quite the coincidence. Now, in a sense, this is what I think is very important. Are either of those things a complete dead end for a future relationship? I would argue no. He lied. Saying something that we say because it's kind of convenient to say it, especially in the first few months, isn't uncommon amongst people.

If they're in the first couple of months and they're thinking, oh, I just don't want the aggravation of being completely honest about this at this stage, I'm going to say something that's easier. Or we say something as a reflex defensive response and later on we kind of have that pang of, oh, that was a lie. And I kind of don't like lying, but I did lie.

And, you know, many people, if they're honest, have been in a situation where they didn't tell the truth. Yeah. Or they obscure the truth. They're like, oh, that was ages ago or that, you know, that was, you know. And so can he be better? Likely. Well well not likely he it's possible there is the robert green thing i heard robert green say no one does something once so if anyone if if you ever see someone do something never assume that's the only time they've done it right This is something they do.

This is not a one-off. This is a pattern for them. If you're seeing it, it's a pattern. And I think that that's an incredibly profound and useful bit of life advice. And you could easily say, you're within your rights to say, if he's lying now, then he's likely a liar he's someone that will lie to make things easier for him and that doesn't bode well for you later on but we're a little philosophical here but what's tough to me is that

just because you lied once it doesn't mean you'll always lie. If that's true, then none of us will ever be better people because we've all lied. So I, I think in a way that both are true, much like, you know, my, one of my favorite phrases is why can't both be true? Anne Lamott says all truth is paradox. You know, it's both true that if someone does something, probably that's not the only time they've done it. It's a pattern. It's also true that people grow. Now, is it a big enough lie

to completely end everything on? Maybe not. Is liking a picture of his ex in month four of seeing you a relationship ending situation? Maybe not. Maybe if you want to just cut and run, maybe. But the problem is in general that, and I, by the way, I want to make something very clear if she decided based on all the things she's intuitively feeling i'm gonna really back away i would understand yeah and that's the thing sometimes this it's like the evidence stacks exactly and sometimes you're like well this is one thing but everything else has been great and trustworthy. And so I kind of want to separate this into two categories of advice.

For her, I would completely understand if she said, I'm going to cut and run. The evidence of what I'm seeing doesn't look pretty. And I feel like there's pain on the horizon because this person is not over this person. I'd understand. The more generic advice I'd give for people in situations where they see something that they don't like is, you know, human beings, that idea that we're programmed to,

we associate, right? right so and we associate for survival if i hear a rustling in the bush my brain says get away because it might be a lion and it might just be the wind but i still run because i'm like it means lion now i haven't seen a lion i just hear a rustling in the bush but it's enough to create that association it's enough to trigger danger warning the downside is big if it is a lion the downside is big in in in that case yes now in a relationship where we've experienced something before, maybe, you know, if she's experienced in her previous relationship, she was with someone who kept saying about somebody else. Oh, they're a friend. Don't worry about them. They're a friend. They're a friend. They're a friend. And then all of a sudden he left her for that friend. The next time she's in a relationship and she has a little bit of a funny feeling, it's that rustling in the bush. Oh, that means lion. So now before she even knows,

she cuts some runs. And, and we've've all had that or most people have had that experience of i should just cut and run because i heard a rustle in the bush the problem is your spidey sense goes up right but the the tough part is you can you can hear so many rustling bushes at any time in any early relationship that you're always running. And now it turns into avoidant behavior on our part. So we sometimes have a tough time figuring out what the midpoint is between true intuition and this false danger that is triggered by our trauma. The rustling in the bush where there was no lion, but we ran anyway because now even rustling bush is terrifying.

It's starting to sound euphemistic, I realise. Rustling bush. Now you are,, I realise. Rustling bush. Now you are, now you keep saying rustling bush. The last time I'll be able to say rustling bush now. But that's the interesting part of this to me. Now, someone might say, well, what's the answer to that? Whilst I say she would be well within her rights to say, on the basis of everything I've seen, I don't want to take this risk,

she might also take a different approach and say, I am going to use this as a cue to recalibrate how I feel about this situation and what I believe to be the trajectory of this situation. So I'm now not going to see my goal here. My intention here is no longer to fall in love as quickly as possible because this feels so awesome and this person's awesome and I can feel it all going in the right direction. No, she's now been presented with something that requires either that you run away or that you stay and ignore or the option, that you recalibrate. Because what you can't do, if you stay there,

I think there's an interesting conundrum. She needs, we could argue, more data. He said, no, it wasn't intentional, and it doesn't mean anything, and I'm really happy with you. She now needs more data to see whether his future actions align with that truth or whether they show him to be exactly what she was worried about. The question is though, even if she does that,

that's a very logical answer. We're emotional people. So she's now going to be in this situation saying, I need more data. But in the meantime, her anxiety is going to be flaring up like crazy. And that's going to have an impact on the relationship itself. Because her anxiety now is going to be a presence in the room. So how do you manage your anxiety while you're waiting for more information? You won't have such anxiety if you lower the stakes of the quote relationship in the first place. If you make a switch, for example, from saying, you know, what if this person I want to be with turns out to be someone who's still in love with their ex and hurts me? If you make a switch from that to I'm assessing whether I want to be with this person. I'm information gathering right now and watching and seeing if I want to be with this person. That takes a lot of the anxiety out of it. Because I'm not making a decision that I want this person and now I'm terrified I'm going to get hurt and lose them.

I'm deciding whether I want the person in the first place. Yeah. And that means you can still bring your charismatic fun self to the situation but you are creating a little emotional space a little distance and if that person says i'm having a great time with you, but I feel like you're not as into me. You can say, no, I'm perfectly into you, but I'm just taking things slow because, you know, to be perfectly honest with you, that concerned me a little bit when you did that. I understand that you said it was a mistake, but it concerned me a little bit and i'm just i'm just protecting myself in this situation and and letting it unfold at an organic pace that feels good to me yeah that's what recalibrating is and for anyone out there who's like should i cut and run or should i stay you can always make the decision to gather more information. But in the meantime,

recalibrate your expectations of this relationship. Because if you go forward wanting to have the same view of it by the, the, the chasm. Yeah. The conflict. Between what you're seeing it as and what you're seeing in the real world, what you're seeing in their behavior. That's what's going to create their anxiety if you remove the image you have of what this could or should be and you just say i'm going to assess it for what it is right now that gives you freedom people people get to this stage don't know where they decide i'm in love and so it's like well i just have to fit things around that instead

of we are always even a few months into it i think people don't always like this because they think it sounds like an unromantic notion but it is still that reality is you are still learning things you are still choosing even when you think i really really, really like this person, want to be with them. On some level, you know, you are always, you're still choosing, you're still assessing, you are learning. It's like, if it's a few months in, there's still things you're going to find out about this person. You're going to have to decide, am I okay with that? Do I like that habit they have? Does that drive me mental? Or is that actually something i can let slide and i'm cool with it because they're amazing in so many ways but that's going on and it does pay to at least acknowledge

i've got some new information i've got to like i've got to sit with that a bit even while i i still think he's a great guy i am having a wonderful time or we have great time together chemistry sex whatever but i've got to assess the what you know that rustling in the bushes exactly that again before we go we're really enjoying the emails that you guys are sending us at podcast at matthewhussey.com. Tell us what you think of this idea for an episode, because also part of this is the comparison we make between us and somebody else. You know, we sometimes are afraid that if our partner likes something about somebody else, we don't have that thing and we can't compete or we look at somebody's ex and it freaks us out that we think their ex was something that was more handsome or

more beautiful than us or had something we didn't and we make that comparison if you'd like to hear us talk about that subject in the next episode send us an email comparing yourself to other people when you're in a relationship and how that insecurity affects your relationship. Let us know if you want us to talk about that. And I also want to stress to everyone that whilst Steven and I have a great chance to discuss ideas here on this podcast, the Love Life podcast. In our Love Life Club, we actually coach people. So if you have very specific questions you want answers to, if you want to be part of a community of people every month that are literally going to work on their confidence, their love lives, and their love for life, you're actually going through a coaching process, then the Love Life Club is a place where you can

do that. We have webinars every month. They're live. Stephen, you do webinars. I do webinars. We do joint webinars. And we literally sit with you on camera as a group and we coach. We get very practical, very specific about things you can do to improve your love life, whether it's improving your prospects or whether it's improving your relationship. And also very specific about things you can do to impact your confidence and your emotion management and how you feel about yourself. If you're not a member right now, you can join for a 14-day free trial. Go to askmh.com. You'll get a chance to ask a question that you'd like answered on a webinar that's upcoming, and you'll get a chance to join

for 14 days for free to try out the membership for yourself and see what it does for you. But just in the same way that we join a gym for our bodies, this is joining a club that is a workout for your confidence, your ability to handle difficult emotions, and your ability to have an incredible love life. Even if you've been single for a long time, or you're newly heartbroken, or you're in a relationship and trying to make it as strong as it can be. Come join us, askmh.com.