Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 235: THIS Is a Common Tactic Used to Avoid Commitment

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Matt and Audrey sit down to discuss the problem of settling for someone else's lack of commitment simply because you can't let them go, how to set boundaries, and what is required of us to choose the right person. ►► Get Your Free Ticket to Find Your Person LIVE on May 4 PLUS a Chance to Win a 1:1 with Matthew & SO Much More! Pre-Order Your Copy of Love Life Before April 23 to Enter the Love Life Giveaway. Learn More At. . . → http://www.LoveLifeBook.com ►► FREE Video Training: “Dating With Results” → http://www.DatingWithResults.com 

But I invested a year of my life in this person. Why didn't that count for something? Yeah, I gave them everything. Yeah. But you didn't give them boundaries, and people need boundaries. You gave them everything for free, and then asked them to value it. welcome back everybody to the love life podcast with me matthew hussey and audrey hussey to my left hello everybody now before we get into it if you have not already pre-ordered your copy of love life how How to Raise Your Standards, find your person and live happily no matter what.

Now is an amazing time to do this. We are doing an entire prize giveaway for everyone who gets a copy of the book. We're giving away live retreat places so that you can spend six days with us this year in Florida in my deepest, most immersive coaching program. We're giving away some one-on-ones with me if you want a private coaching session with me. We're giving away some love life sweaters. We're giving away, what was the other thing, Jeremy? The really exciting thing? Oh, some signed books. You reminded me of that the other day. You were like, you never talk about the signed books. They're amazing. We're giving away some signed books and some other prizes.

And of course, everyone who gets a copy of the book is also going to get an exclusive invite to an event I'm doing on May the 4th called Find Your Person, where we take the ideas from the book and we bring them to life in a practical way for your life this year in helping you find your person. There's even a couple of other bonuses. I won't get into them. You can get it all at lovelifebook.com. An incredible time to pre-order the book. So many goodies when you do. Lovelifebook.com is that link. We have something cool today because we wanted to talk about a subject that i know is going to appeal to a lot of people and it's going to resonate deeply with a lot of people in terms of

where they have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived at in their love lives with a certain person. And we're even going to do an exclusive first time reading from the chapter of the book that pertains to this subject. So what is that subject? Well, let me ask you a question. Is there someone in your life right now who, before you met them, you had a vision for what you wanted in your love life? Maybe you knew that you wanted to find a deep connection, a beautiful teammate, a real solid relationship that you could count on where you felt safe and you felt like you could really be yourself. Something that you could talk about to your friends and family with joy and pride that I have this amazing person in my life and we're building something together. And yet now it seems like what you have with someone is a far cry from those things.

Maybe you don't feel safe emotionally because you don't really know where you stand with this person, even after months or even years. You don't feel like you can just talk about freely your relationship with people in your life because you feel like you're kind of treading on eggshells about what it is exactly and people could ask you questions that you don't have good answers to like so what are you guys now or so where is it going Or why isn't this person here with us right now on this occasion, at this dinner, at this birthday party? And you don't have good answers to those things.

So instead of being this proud, exciting thing in your life that you get to talk about, it feels like this thing that you have to couch in constant caveats maybe when you really pay attention to what your experience is with this person it's a long way away from what you originally wanted and we don't necessarily connect with that consciously because it's very painful to connect with that consciously so we it's not just that we shield other people from the truth of the situation it's that we start to actually shield ourselves from the truth of the situation because if we were really honest with ourselves about how far we are from what we originally

wanted we might have to do something about it we might have to make a decision or it might just make us feel really it might make us lose our respect for ourselves in some way or feel shame because we might have to ask ourselves why am i putting up with this? We tend to fracture ourselves and practice cognitive dissonance, blinding ourselves to certain elements of this thing so that we can keep going with it. Does any of this relate to you and your situation? situation. There is a chapter in my new book called Do Not Join a Cult of Two. And I want to read you a moment from this chapter because everything I've just said is epitomized by this particular woman's story, Cora. In one of our webinars, a woman named Cora appeared online to ask, well, it was hard to know what she was asking. She presented her relationship of nearly a year

as one between two entrepreneurial people with busy schedules who find it hard to see each other or speak on a regular basis. It was starting to bother her that her friends, who could probably tell she liked him way more than she was letting on, kept wanting to know what the nature of the relationship actually was. As she described how the two of them related to each other, there was a strange absence at the heart of her question, as if she was selling me on something that she wasn't entirely convinced by. So I finally asked, is the reason you don't want more because you're happy for things to be casual and finding love is a lesser priority to you than your work right now? Or is the truth that this is how he feels and you're using the same excuse when deep down you do want more from him, but you're just worried that if you ask for

more, he'll freak out. She laughed and said, yeah, I guess if I'm being honest with myself, it's probably that. She had appropriated his excuse in order to stay in rapport with him and in doing so had silenced her own voice. When she was speaking to her friends, it wasn't Cora speaking, but the guy who was ventriloquizing her to maintain a status quo that he was happy with. Even though Cora's case might sound unusual, her predicament is not uncommon. But complexity is so much harder to confront. Situationships like hers are the opposite of love at first sight. There's strange compromises that get created incrementally. You get nudged over and over until you can in this chapter. I want to hear what you have to say about it after listening to that. We want someone so bad that we almost just shut down all these little parts of us and all these little needs and all these little dreams or big dreams that we had because we're so afraid of losing that person. behind why we do that because if we felt like in Cora's instance if she felt or was told by him

by the way I'm never going to commit to you I'm never going to give you what you want we'll never get married we'll never have kids I will probably leave you in a few years just so you know if she heard that I don't think she would stay I think she would leave but the reason she's not hearing that is because she's not asking the right questions because she's afraid of the answers to those questions but what's happening is she's almost creating this false reality within herself and it's almost it's crazy because deep down if she was to check in with how she felt do we think that she would go oh no no I really think one day he's going to turn around and meet me where I'm at or does she deep down kind of know that he probably isn't, which is why she's not speaking about it? I'm just, I don't know, like, I don't

have the answer. I just think it's so interesting, the reasons why we do the things we do when it comes to those things, because we're really capable of looking at other people and going, oh, this person should absolutely break up with him. She's wasting her time. What an idiot, what is she doing? You know, like, that's such an easy thing to do when you're on the outside of it and then a few months later we find ourselves on the inside of that situation and we're like well they're really busy you know there's this they've just come out of a relationship you know they told me the other night that they could really fall for me. And they do all these things and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, it's different.

It's different with my situation. And I'm just curious as to why you think we do that. Why you think we do those things? Why we make those excuses and join those cults of two? We have to start from a place of understanding that from the beginning, we are in danger of being a biased judge because we're trying to preside over this relationship this person this situation in an objective way so that we can decide oh this is good and this is going to be healthy and this is worth investing

time in or no this is not go a different direction but the problem is we're both the we're a judge who actually wants a certain result so that compromises us from the beginning. When we go on a date, so often, unless we're coming from an intensely avoidant place where we're looking for reasons constantly why someone is wrong, which is more associated with a kind of avoidant attachment, we are on a date wanting someone to sweep us off our feet. We're wanting for this to be fruitful, for it not to be a waste of time. So if we see early signs that someone represents some of the things we want, like we find them attractive, they have a certain charisma about them. They seem eligible for any number of reasons. From that moment on, when we've realized there's a kind of like,

like a passable level of attraction and therefore excitement from that point forward, we want it to work out. And it's the wanting it to work out that can remove our objectivity. Yeah. We then, if we're not careful, start to view everything that happens through that lens of wanting it to work out. There's a similarity between that and what we can do with business deals and opportunities or career opportunities is when something presents as exciting or an opportunity that might get us out of a bad situation or might get us into an incredibly exciting situation we want it to work we want it to be right and the wanting it to be right can make us stop paying attention to these little

warning signs along the way that something is a bit off or that we're being pushed to do something we don't actually want to do or this feels off brand Matthew McConaughey in his book green lights talks about a you know trying to get out of romantic comedies and into more serious movies. And that required a lot of bravery because during that period of his life, it was only romantic comedies that were coming through the door. You do forget that about Matthew McConaughey, don't you? That he like was all these rom-coms

and that's where we all know him from. Yeah. We were growing up, like the 12 the 12 weeks no tears and all of those kinds of movies and it's easy to it's easy to take for granted that it was never a given that he was going to become an actor that would be chosen for all of these very serious very deep roles it that was never a given and i I had the pleasure of speaking to him and interviewing him for our podcast, which is for those of you that want to see, we'll leave it in the show notes, the particular episode that the Matthew McConaughey episode is. But what was clear is that it was a

very intentional thing for him to start to direct his career toward more weighty roles the reason it required bravery is because during that time none of those were coming in and he was giving up paycheck after paycheck and potentially risking his entire career because there was a chance those things would take years to come and in the meantime he'd become irrelevant but this right here is exactly where people get stuck because you just said it you run the risk of ruining your entire career and your career is one thing i mean obviously your careers are super important but you can have another career you can become a baker you can start a new life

and do something different especially if you're already known there's lots of things that you can do so I'm not saying what he did wasn't brave because it was unbelievably brave but when it comes to our love lives it can feel especially when biology is involved it can feel like there is only one chance and one window to get those things that we want so what if risking that relationship means risking your chance at happiness and connection and love that gets into a whole other i mean to speak in terms of the book that takes us to like a whole other chapter of the book called for the again for those of you who have ordered the book just make a note right now if you want to if you want the answer to what audrey is saying it's in a chapter called how to rewire your brain but i'll give you a taste of that it's

we have to get clear enough about the pain of continuing to do things the old way. Now what Matthew McConaughey had in that time of his life was this high degree of certainty that he just couldn't keep doing the old thing. That even if it meant risking these jobs and not getting a better one, he just, it was like this visceral reaction to continuing to do that same thing there's a great

moment in a movie um called i heart huckabees you ever seen that movie jeremy i knew you would love that movie i knew jeremy would love that movie i've never even heard of it it's a it's a movie by a director that i david o russell is a really interesting sort of there's a movie by a director that I, David O. Russell, is a really interesting sort of, there's a lot of philosophy in this movie. And there's the character that Jude Law plays, who is this typical, like, extraordinarily charismatic person who knows how to charm people. Classic Jude Law role. Classic Jude Law. But he, like, goes into every room and just can seduce a room full of business people with his stories and with and he keeps telling this story about shania twain because he's got this one

shania twain anecdote that he just tells over and over again and there's a moment in the movie where he's sort of starting to re-evaluate who he is and the kind of person he wants to be. And he's in a room with a bunch of people who still think he's the old him. And they're like, tell the Shania Twain story. You know, like you got to tell it, you got to tell it. And they're trying to impress these new clients. So the people next to him are like, Hey dude, we need you to tell the the story because you do your thing where you do your like dance and everyone thinks we're amazing and tell the shania twain story and he's like no no i i let's talk about something and he starts like asking them questions like so tell me more about this thing that's really interesting and they're like

no no yeah tell tell the shania twain story and he's like pressured into doing it and then he finally starts telling the story and in the middle of the story he throws up and it's like this visceral body physiological reaction to like being the old him wow that he can't handle and i say that because i believe that we have to get to a point where it's almost like there is a this we feel it in our bones i can't do that anymore that's when change happens in our life and that's when we really can say no to to what are inherently the most difficult things to say no to when someone is in front of us in our love life and they're presenting as exciting or there's elements that present as what we think we're looking for you know oh i have a certain amount of chemistry with this person or when we're together it feels really good and we

could talk about anything and it's fun and it's exciting or at the very least it just offers the promise of something if we haven't had anything in a long time and now we find someone that we're attracted to and it just offers the glimmer of hope that maybe one day it will be something. It's very tempting to hold on to that. And the more this person presents as the kind of things we think we want, the harder it is to say no. And the more visceral the reaction to who we used to be and what we used to accept needs to be in order to say no. But that in that Matthew McConaughey example, the reason I gave that example is because he talks about a script that he was given where he was offered like, I'll get the numbers wrong, but it's, I'm in the ballpark. He was offered like $5 million to do this movie and he read it and it was the same old rom-coms that he'd been doing.

And he had that visceral reaction where he's like, no, I can't do this. And he read it and it was the same old rom-coms that he'd been doing and he had that visceral reaction where he's like no I can't do this and he said no and then the offer came back again and it was like now it was eight million dollars and he's looking at it and he was going oh no I can't do it and then the offer back again. And it was like they'd added another, like it was over 10 million or whatever it was. Like it was an ungodly amount of money that they came back to that was way above what they'd originally offered him. And he said, the craziest thing happened. With that amount of money that they suddenly put in front of me, I read the script again and it was funnier. He said the script was better. Oh, my God.

And he had to get, he still ended up saying no. Like he had to get to a point where he went, this is an ungodly amount of money to say no to but i have to if i want to get to where i'm going but he said the effect of being offered that much money made the script better that's so funny now you look at that in your love life the effect of someone being intensely charismatic or attractive to you or it could be the other thing could be the effect of feeling like you're running out of time more than ever the effect of wanting a family and feeling that your biological window is is or knowing that your biological window is slipping away. Those things can make someone appear more attractive.

They can make someone appear more perfect for you. They can make someone appear a better prospect than they really are. And they can make us stop paying attention to all of the ways that this is taking us away from the path that we really want to be on or the kind of relationship that we really need to, not just want to, need to be in, in order to be happy. I.e. one where there's consistency and a sense of safety and a sense of certainty about where it's going and someone showing up in your life or being present or treating you the way that you want to be treated. So all this goes back to that point that we are a biased judge when we really want to find love. And in the beginning, I think we have

to give ourselves a sense of compassion that it's not always immediately clear if the ways that this person is showing up or not showing up as the case may be are a sign that this is not going to be what we're looking for like it's not always obvious you know let's take a practical example someone is in a busy chapter of their life. And so for this month or for the next couple of months, they're just very, very busy. It's not immediately apparent necessarily that this is a sign of things to come or if this is just a busy chapter for them and so it's hard sometimes to go in with this ruthless black and white approach especially with someone that we feel really attracted to where they also seem to be attracted to us and giving us some of their time and energy. So I think we have to be compassionate about,

yes, sometimes it's not always, you can't always know. But the mistake we make, I think, is not so much that we make a bad decision in the moment about who to invest our time and energy into. It's that we don't pay attention to the trend of whether things are actually improving or not improving. And the danger, of course, is that week after week, the more we invest in this person, the more we say no to everyone else. The more we imagine a life with this person, the more we think about them, the more we have conversations with them that make us feel bonded to them. And spend time with them and get intimate with them in ways that make us feel bonded to them the harder it is to reverse out of it and i think also on top of that the more you do that the more you reaffirm and validate their right to treat you like an option you know the more you say it's

okay that you're not committing to me it's okay that you can only see me once a week when you have time it's okay that you plan dates the next day because you're busy the more you're saying it's okay to treat me like that and I think that has the reverse effect what we're trying to achieve is this breezy easy I don't want to make your life harder because you're a busy, like important person. So I'm just going to slot in and I'm going to be really cool and really chilled. That's the kind of like we're trying to achieve. And then what we end up, what we end up doing is actually creating a dynamic where that person doesn't really respect us our time our energy

and there is obviously there are people who do that very consciously where they go great this person is allowing me to be disrespectful and do whatever there's also people who do it very unconsciously because they don't even think that you are that bothered about your time and energy because you're not really giving any signals that that's the case you're absolutely right and then of course when the more you entrench that dynamic the more they feel entitled to that dynamic that becomes an expectation that you're okay with this level and then they leave you for someone who is asking for more respect and you're left going but i invested a year of my life in this

person why didn't that count for something yeah i gave them everything yeah but you didn't give them boundaries and people need boundaries people respect boundaries you gave them everything for free and then ask them to value it yeah exactly and we think that the more we give the more they're going to value it because there's just going to have this massive wake up call. But that doesn't tend to be how things work. What tends to make someone have a wake up call is when they realize that it's not just the way it is. You know, it's like you as a kid, you don't you don't you value Christmas. You like the feeling of Christmas, but you don't value your mom's effort that made Christmas, Christmas. When you're a kid, the decorations

at Christmas just appear, right? They, they, they're like things in the house just start changing in really exciting ways but someone had to put all those up someone had to put in the effort to make it christmas someone had to cook the dinner like these are things that a lot of the time you never appreciate because you're not part of that effort and it it for you as a child it like arrives for free so you like the effect of it but it doesn't necessarily make you value your parents yeah that's so true right it's later that you value how much your parents did to make chris if god forbid you lose a parent or if you know that

parent stops doing those things you're like oh my oh my God, the reason it was Christmas was because of them. That was what made it feel like that. They put effort in to create that atmosphere and that mood and that energy and that excitement. So we have to get out of this idea that if we, if we just give enough, someone is going to respect us. They're going to value us. They're going to have a wake up call. What makes someone value something is when they realize that they can't, it's not just a given, that they do have to show up in a certain way to keep getting that. And of course, the real, the, you know, the reason I called this chapter, do not join a cult of two, is because the really insidious part about it is we become their ally in the

situation that they have created. When Cora told me, this was someone who came to me for help and said, we're just both busy entrepreneurial people. She was co-opting his excuse and owning it as if it was their excuse, as if it was like their reasoning. Yeah, it's hard because we're both really busy entrepreneurial people. Yeah, I get that you're a busy entrepreneurial person, but you would make time for a relationship if this person was making time. The difference is this person isn't making time for a relationship. And it's easier for our cognitive dissonance to say we're busy entrepreneurial people than it is to say this person doesn't like me as much as I like them. This person doesn't want a relationship with me and I really want a relationship with them. That's a hard thing to admit because that comes with a lot of pain and a feeling of rejection. And for many of us,

a feeling of not being good enough and disappointment. So it's easy to put ourselves on this. This is the really messed up part. In an effort to kind of put ourselves on the same level as someone, we accept way less than we actually want or deserve yeah and what we get is the superficial feeling of being at the same level but what we get internally is this horrible chronic pain of abandoning our real needs and our real vision for what we want. And people do this

for years and years and years in their love life. Yeah. Never really admitting even to themselves that that's what they're doing. And so I want anyone out there who's listening to this, who relates to this. And by the way, if you, if there's someone in your life that you know is also struggling with this or that you know has really drifted further and further away from what they originally wanted, please send them this episode. Because this might be, this might be the moment that they really connect to what they really want and what they deserve. But in order to get to that place, we have to start to get honest with ourselves about what we want and what we originally wanted.

We might have to reconnect with it because we might have drifted a long long way so we have to reconnect with that part of us that wanted something very different than what we've allowed ourselves to settle for we have to get really deeply connected to the pain it's causing us because if we're not in touch with our feelings, then we don't really even consciously know we're in pain. We may feel anxious all the time. We may feel sad a lot, but we don't really connect to those feelings, and we certainly don't use them as the justification

for getting out of this situation or for telling this person that we need something different we just ignore them in service of trying to hold on to this person so it requires us to connect with the pain of the situation we're actually in and if we get really honest with the pain especially if we future project that pain and we go, what is this pain going to be like over the next five years? What does this pain look like in 10 years? What does this pain look like if I just stay here forever? When we start getting really connected to that, we then might just be able to get ourselves to that visceral response where, you know,

if we continue with this, we're going to be the one throwing up. We're going to be the one unable to tell this story. Imagine yourself right now telling the same story to your friends about why it is that it's not the right time for the two of you and yeah it's complicated and you know we're just both so busy or it's just you know and like imagine yourself telling that false story that takes you further from what you want and just throwing up in the middle of it because of how untrue it is because it is not who you really are and you cannot any longer pretend to be this person you're not or play this role that is not suited to you and your deeper needs and when you can do that it gives you it gives you a different kind of bravery in

stepping out and having a standard telling this person what you really need once and for all and being willing to walk away if that's simply met with resistance or gaslighting or someone telling you that you're demanding too much then you you get the bravery to walk away because the beginning of bravery in situations like this is not confidence this is one of the things i talk about in the book we the final third of the book is about how to be the most confident version of yourself on a deeper level. But what I talk about before that is that you don't need confidence to be brave. You need necessity. If the pain you have becomes intolerable, especially when you project it out

over the course of the future years of your life and what it's going to cost you, if the pain becomes intolerable, then bravery becomes necessary. It's not that you're confident enough to be brave. It's that it's so necessary to get out of this pain that you're in that bravery is your only option.

Yeah, it's beautiful. So let us know what you thought of this podcast, this episode. What did it mean to you? Email us podcast at Matthew Hussey dot com. We would love to hear from you and do send this on to anyone you know it could help. And if you haven't already, pick up a copy of the book because we're officially in the month of launch. So you don't, you know, in previous months when I was talking about ordering the book or pre-ordering the book, it would be months to wait. It's now upon us. You're going

to be getting it delivered to you on the 23rd of April this month. And what is in this book, I know is going to change so many people's lives because it's going to give you a foundation for a different level of self-worth, a foundation of necessity by getting honest with yourself. That's going to lead to a different level of bravery even while you're working on your self-worth. And it's going to help you reconnect to what you originally wanted in your love life

and start actually making the right moves and the right steps that are gonna lead you to that instead of being led down the false paths that can just crush our spirit, waste our time and energy and put us in a perpetual state of unhappiness, anxiety or dissatisfaction in our love lives. You deserve more than that. And life is short. We got to go out and, and find the thing we're really looking for and not some

poor false substitute. Thank you so, so much for listening. If you want to grab your copy of the book, lovelifebook.com is the link. Like I said earlier in the episode, there's some wonderful prizes and giveaways that we're doing for everyone who does get a copy of the book, including a free retreat, some one-on-ones with me and some other goodies as well.

Plus the bonus of the event on May 4th, which I can't wait for you to join us on. So go to lovelifebook.com, grab your book, and we will speak to you in the next episode of the Love Life Podcast. Be well, our friends, and love life. Thank you.