Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 22: 5 Causes Of Unrequited Love and How To Prevent Them

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

There’s a ridiculously simple principle Matt talks about in his seminars. So simple it seems kind of silly. Naïve even. But it’s actually great. It goes like this: “Make it a rule only to like people who like you back. If you can do that, you’ll never go wrong.” Sounds tough, I know.  After all, attraction isn’t a simple choice right? Many of us feel we have no control over who we become attracted to, which can often lead to that great generator of humanity’s worst misery and best poetry: Unrequited love. Unrequited love is when we fall hard in love with someone who don’t love us back. It’s the painful kind of obsession that keeps you awake at night, and sees you spending hours at your laptop obsessively scouring your crush’s Facebook profile praying that they don’t change their status to “in a relationship”, or that makes your stomach convulse at the thought of catching them kissing another person. If you've ever fallen hard for someone who doesn't return your feelings, here 5 reasons this happens and what you can do to get your life back...

Hello there podcast listeners, welcome back to the Love Life Podcast. I am your host Stephen Hussey and today I want to do something a little bit different than usual. Obviously usually we set up something with Matt in a clip or me chatting with Matt or something else but today I want to actually give you a little reading slash talk from a blog post I posted last week on the five common causes of unrequited love and how to prevent them. I think unrequited love is such a universal experience and one that I am constantly dismayed to see people go through again and again and they come and tell me about a friend who they're crazy in love with and they're not sure how to tell them or someone that they have had feelings for for a while and who doesn't really notice them at all, maybe at work, maybe somewhere else, maybe someone

already in a relationship, and they're pining after them, wondering, maybe after they go through this string of bad relationships, they'll finally turn and notice me, and everything will be like a wonderful romantic movie, and we'll finally be together. And if you've been there yourself, you know the tiny morsels of evidence that you cling to as hope, just tiny bits of hope that maybe they are coming around, maybe they're noticing me, they showed me a bit of attention today, and you go further and further down the rabbit hole. And of course, when someone occupies this space in your mind in such a vast way, there's a lot of dangers to it. So that's what I want to talk about right now. So I'm going to begin at the beginning of this piece

and just work through it and talk through some of the points as we go through. I haven't done a podcast in this format before, but I think it'll be fun to try and you can email me podcast at matthewhussey.com and let me know how you like it so the five common causes of unrequited love and how to prevent them there's a ridiculously simple principle matt talks about in his seminars so simple that it seems kind of silly, naive even, but I've come to think it actually distills great wisdom. The principle is this. Matt used to say, make it a rule only to like guys who like you back. If you can do that, you'll never go wrong. And we can obviously extend this to make it a rule to only like people who like you back and a noticeable bulk always ripples through the crowd when they hear this and i get it it sounds ridiculous on the surface

after all attraction isn't a simple choice right we're taught that attraction is a biological reaction in our brain that we can't control. Attraction is triggered instinctively when someone just inflames our desire and we can't resist them. It's like that moment you inhale the popcorn in the movie theatre, the scent of the popcorn and your brain tells you there's no way you're getting through the next two hours without a bucket of that sweet, buttery goodness in your lap. Many of us feel that we have no control over who we become attracted to, which can often lead to that great generator of humanity's worst misery and best poetry, unrequited love.

Unrequited love is when we fall hard in love with someone who doesn't love us back. It's the painful kind of obsession that keeps you awake at night and sees you spending hours at your laptop obsessively scouring your crush's Facebook profile, praying they don't change their status to quote in a relationship, or it makes your stomach convulse at the very thought of catching them kissing another person. But can unrequited love be avoided? Is it really completely out of our control? It's perfectly natural to want people who don't like us back, but some of us choose to actively pursue the situation even when we've received signals that there's no future hope for a relationship. We ignore the signs, shrug off

rejections, or we see our crush pursuing other people but think, they just need time to truly notice me, then they'll fall in love with me. Why do we get into this unhealthy fixation and keep pursuing someone who clearly doesn't want us back? There are many reasons, all of which can be traced back to a lack of confidence, lack of standards, or lack of other important qualities that prevent us from moving on from unhealthy situations. Unrequited love, like any love, is a complex topic, but here are some common factors that lead us to pursue a lost cause. Number one, you project traits onto someone that they don't have. This easily happens when we feel like we're in scarcity mode.

You meet someone who ticks a few of your boxes, i.e. nice, smart, attractive, and over time, we fill in the blanks and build a fantasy image of them in which they represent our version of total perfection. So this is often very much when if you've been like six months without meeting someone you really, really like, and the first person you meet who seems just to kind of generally fit the bill, even you just think, wow, they're hot and they're a nice person and they

seem to be nice to me, you can suddenly build an entire image that this person is a complete unicorn. And because you haven't met anyone else in a while that you really, really like, they are your vision of perfection. You think, I must have them. And of course, then you've lost objectivity. You stop seeing this person as human as i.e a flawed person and begin seeing them as an ideal this leads you to feel crazy about them and completely overlook the potential negatives they might have now this isn't about some just always looking for the negative in people but it's about having a sober view of the person in front of you and not filling out just because you've had a couple of interactions with someone that have

been good assuming this person would be an amazing fit for me in a relationship because until we have that we really don't know and I see way too many people get excited about someone where they're basically in the dark about how this person is in their day-to-day normal mundane life and that's what you need to know before you can actually decide you're crazy about someone you need to know how are they normally not how are they once a week and I occasionally see them or maybe at the office like what are they actually like on a day-to-day basis so that's the first one projecting traits onto someone they don't actually have and believing in what they

could be on paper number two you focus too much on impressing them instead of whether they meet your needs the classic victim of unrequited love is the person who spends all their time dreaming up ways to win over the object of their affection or scheming about how they can find excuses to be alone with them and try to adapt themselves to their likes or dislikes in order to become the perfect partner. In all of this effort though, they forget to think about their own needs. They are simply investing and investing. They think if they push hard enough, they will logically convince the guy or girl to fall in love with them. The best way to combat this, crazy as it sounds, is the principle we talked about at the start.

Like people who actually like you back. Or more specifically, invest emotionally in people who emotionally invest in you. This is easier said than done. It's a hard mindset to get into initially, but once you do, this is one of the most powerful mental spaces you can be in. To do it, you need to have A, a clear picture of all the things you need in your ideal relationship or even in as a base level for any relationship you would be in i.e real affection trust loyalty someone who loves you for who you are someone who reciprocates your devotion and gives you

the affection you need in return someone who meets your needs without having to be cajoled or persuaded to, someone who sees your inherent worth and value and makes it their mission to make you a priority in their life. Second, you need a strong sense of what you deserve. So your mindset is this, I need to be with someone who is crazy about me, who can see what an incredible catch I am and who puts in the effort to appreciate and invest in being with me, who shows affection and who recognizes on their own how happy they can be with me in their life. That should always be our standard for falling in love. Instead of just, I really, really really really like this person even if they barely notice my existence even if they date other people while I sit on the sidelines even if they overlook me and

show no romantic interest that mindset is a recipe for massive pain and is often an indicator of our own low self-worth and low self-esteem which causes us to have low standards in the kind of people we're looking for today so if you don't feel like a catch right now that's okay that's another issue but this may be the wake-up call that you need to work on other areas of your life in order to feel truly worthy of someone amazing and to work on your own things that give you that sense of inner self-confidence and self-worth and practicing self-love on a daily basis, ways that you actually take care of yourself, treat yourself like your own best friend. Okay, number three cause of

unrequited love. You are substituting falling in love for something missing in your own life. So that links on from the point I just made. People who frequently fall into unrequited love hope that their crush will fix certain areas lacking in their own life. This might be known as the wanting to be saved syndrome and it happens when we latch ourselves on to people that maybe we perceive as having it all together or having qualities that we'd like to have in our own life and we think if I'm with that person then maybe just by proximity you know kind of their greatness will seep into me and they'll kind of save me from my humdrum existence that I'm in right now and you know maybe it's a guy who just

seems stable or he has a great lifestyle or he seems to have a good family or, you know, whatever it is, it's often an indicator. And if we find ourselves fixating on that person in spite of them showing us nothing in return, it may just be that we fixated on the fancy of what they represent. And we think falling in love with them will somehow fix holes in our own life and kind of give us those things just by osmosis. So again this is the wake-up call that we need to actually say hey what am I doing to actually make my life an amazing fun exciting thing that I love waking up to that I actually feel I have to offer to someone else so that I'm not looking for someone else to fill a hole in my existence number four number four cause of unrequited love

you're confident enough to you sorry you aren't confident enough to show romantic interest so you always fall for people who see you as just a friend. So this is obviously a very classic trap that people fall into as just being seen as, hey, you're a great pal. You're a great buddy. I love spending time with you. You make me laugh. But I don't see you in that way. I don't see you as someone I can actually be with. And this is often a confidence and a self-worth thing where we keep our desires, our real desires concealed, maybe because we're scared of rejection or, you know, we're terrified of what if I actually be vulnerable, put myself on the line, what are people going to say if it doesn't go right? What people are going to say if I get rejected? And so we go

for a kind of trying to get a relationship through the backdoor approach killing them with closeness and hoping that just spending more and more time together will magically transform into love so part of fixing this one is tactical i mean it may just be that we're not very good at flirting and we don't really we haven't really exercised that muscle very much we don't really have those skills and for that obviously there's hundreds of other articles you can find on our website howtogettoguy.com on how to flirt better how to get out of friend trap and do all those things so there's what you know our how to talk to men program covers that there's plenty of that in all of our material online uh whether free material or actual products um But it may also just be that, again,

you haven't built up the confidence and self-worth to actually put yourself on the line. And you need to start practicing in very small doses, taking those little risks and just you know exposing yourself to small amounts of pushback whether it's on you know online dating and where you can just practice from your phone and just flirt with someone and if if it doesn't go well you can say oh well and just swipe left on that person or if you want to just you know when we can leave our houses again after covid19 actually practicing on just you know giving someone a little cheeky compliment, a little flirtation when you're at the coffee shop, you know, say something nice about their eyes

or their smile or, hey, I love your hair, I love your shoes, just practicing little moments of showing flirtatious interest so that you don't get stuck in that trap. Finally, final cause of unrequited love. Number five, you are unable to accept rejection. So some people fear rejection

and never expose themselves to it. Some people are not good at accepting rejection. So even when they get a rejection, they continue to pine over the same romantic interests instead of taking no for an answer and again this is often this is often an issue to do with because if you value yourself this is why it's often an issue of self-worth because if you value yourself and feel like you're deserving of great treatment the fact that someone rejects you should cause something in you to actively be turned off or to shut down or to be like ah okay it's like it

really if you have really high self-worth it it kind of should just be an indicator that ah this person's not for me because i need someone who thinks i'm awesome and if this person is not excited about me right now or is not even attracted to me in that way then you know it's not my job to win the person over and it's not that you have to you you don't want to be like crappy about it and be like fine you're not attracted to me it's you know it's not nothing in it is personal it's just completely objective but it should more just be an indicator like if someone it's like I used to when I was younger I used to have this thing of thinking if someone rejected me

it would make me put them more on a pedestal and I think wow they must be above me uh you know a level above me and the fact they're rejecting me you know if only I could win them over and as you you know as I got older and more confident it was a case of feeling like you know if I if I when I was in London and dating you know if I'd get like a flaky tinder conversation and that person would just kind of be on and off and hot and cold I'd just be like ah what is this like delete and that would be it it wouldn't be it wouldn't be some ordeal it wouldn't be some commentary on me it wouldn't be me sort of suddenly projecting all these things onto them it'd just be like oh like i don't need this like there's plenty of people i am their cup of tea they think i'm the

shit they think i'm awesome i'm going for them and the people who don't it's like okay there's the pile of people who don't get it that's great they, there's the pile of people who don't get it. That's great. They can go do something else. The people who want to play games, people want to be hot and cold. Great. They're over there. I'm looking for the people. I want to be amongst the people who love what I have to offer. And the more you gravitate to that, the happier everything gets. It suddenly, things feel so much easier and healthier and better. And you think, why didn't I do this before? Why did I, you know, the really messed up thing is some people think that if they get rejected, that, yeah, they think inherently

that person is worth pursuing because, oh, if they rejected me, they must be above me. And that must mean they're a prize. And that means I need to find a way to hunt them down or to catch them or to make them see my value as well that's messed up that's a messed up behavior pattern and it leads people to relationships where the other person's not as passionate about them and they're constantly fighting for their attention they're always worried about whether that person's gonna lose the spark for them and

get bored of them it's a terrible place to be And it all starts because we went for someone in the first place who wasn't super passionate about us. So go for the people who are super passionate about you. Yeah. And once you're able to accept rejection, once you're able to just accept that you know different people have preferences people are making choices all the time based on reasons that aren't always to do with me and you know what if they are to do with me that's fine some people don't want what i'm offering that's cool there's a bunch of people who do and if i keep working on myself if i keep building a life that i love someone else is going to want to be a part of this and someone awesome is going to want to be a part of this. So once you have that mindset, you're invincible because you're not going to get yourself into these toxic scenarios or these

scenarios where you're with a flaky person and trying to keep them by all these tricks and techniques and whatever it is, playing mind games to try and make yourself seem less available so that they'll want you more unrequited love is not something in our own lives to romanticize it might be fine in films and entertaining to watch the person who's pining over someone and vicariously live through them and you know you get the hollywood thing where maybe they turn it around and the other person does notice them most of the time it's a massive waste of energy emotion and time and it leaves you feeling worse it leaves your self-worth going lower and lower and it can lead you to pursue unhealthy dynamics of relationships.

And unfortunately, it does get very much romanticized and mythologized in modern society, and people think, well, I'm going through all this pain, and so there's got to be something to that, and it's poetic, and you have all this literature written about unrequited love. And again, that's all fine. But actually living through it, you can feel like you wasted a hell of a lot of time. Some people I've seen waste years on someone who never really wanted them back.

And that's a tragedy. That's not something to indulge in and celebrate. I think Alice Hoffman said it really well with her sobering words. She said, unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue black sky is for suckers or maniacs. I think Hoffman's quote is too narrow. All forms of love lead us to act like suckers and maniacs at some point, but at the very least, when we find healthy reciprocal love with someone who shares our feelings we get to enjoy the madness with someone who feels the same all right that's it for this week uh i hope this has

helped you if you are in a situation right now where you are pining over someone who doesn't know you exist or who doesn't show you any affection in return. I hope that this helps you see the light. I hope this helps you move towards a better situation to actually choose yourself instead of choose waiting for that other person to choose you. There's a big world. There's a lot of people. There's people who are going to want exactly what you have to offer you're going to be someone's vision of oh my god where has this person been all my life that's the person you want to hold out for and i'm not talking about a fake they walk through the door and you lock eyes and there's love at first sight and blah blah no i'm talking about

someone who actually you know upon they get to know you, they're interested, they're showing you the right things, they're actually texting back, they're excited to arrange a date with you and things move forward in a healthy, easy way. And that's how it should feel. It should feel, oh, this doesn't feel like I'm having to play games. I'm getting to be myself. I'm getting to be the best version of myself. And this person likes it. And it feels amazing once you have it. So that's it for me. If you enjoyed this format, let me know at podcast at Matthew Hussey dot com. And I'll sprinkle a few more of these ones in where I read a blog or talk about a particular monologue on a particular topic for a while. That's podcast at matthewhussey.com. Okay. And if you also are wanting to move on, you know, dating after heartbreak, you're looking to

actually rebuild your love life again, check out our free guide at 3secretstolove.com. 3secretstolove.com. You you can download the free guide get started and get your love life back today all right well i can hear the birds are chirping uh we're into a nice uh another spring english day so i'm gonna go and enjoy that and i wish you well wherever you are have a wonderful weekend I'll see you soon.