Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 26: How to Keep the Flame Alive in Quarantine

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

I’ve lost count of what week of social distancing we’re in. But I do know that if you’ve been living with someone since quarantine started then you’ve had your ups and downs. We need space in our relationship for desire to thrive. But how do you create space with someone who is always there? If absence makes the heart grow fonder, how do you stay exciting to your partner if you're never absent? In today's episode, we talk about some simple, practical ways to approach this situation and avoid making the mistakes that are hurting good relationships... This isn’t just about getting space, it’s about bringing back the moments of magic, and romance, and love. Even if you’re not living with someone right now, you can use these ideas to make sure your long-distance situation stays vibrant and alive. Your situation may be different, but the psychology is the same. Thinking of you, friend. Matt ►► FREE download: “9 Texts No Man Can Resist” → http://www.9texts.com ►► FREE download: “5 Compliments to Get Him Addicted to You” → http://www.SayThisToHim.com Follow Matthew @thematthewhussey Follow Stephen @stephenhhussey

hello hello and welcome back to the love Life Podcast with your host Stephen Hussey. And that man is I. Or that man is me. I'm not sure of the exact grammar there. Hello, one and all. So on this most splendid of days, we are talking about what it takes to keep romance with the person you live with that is of course assuming that the person you live with is someone you are romancing uh you are actually in a relationship with or courting perhaps or perhaps in some various in-between stage it's no secret that we are living in strange times in 2020 with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Lots of people are spending a lot of time at home and in different stages

of their romantic life. Of course, we've talked in previous episodes about being single and trying all the various ways to still put yourself out there and date, whether it's through Skype, whether it's through meeting someone on Zoom and watching a movie, or if it's Tinder and swiping on dating apps and all that stuff. But there's also a whole bunch of people who have already been in relationships or were dating someone when this all started and for those people uh there's kind of a you know situation where maybe you it moved things much quicker than they were before and maybe you decided to quarantine with someone and spend that time in lockdown together i think the new yorker or was it the new york times one of those ran a piece about this, about how certain people were, you know, it was a thing to say, do you want to quarantine together? Like, do you want to

come and move some of your stuff in, bring a bag over and stay here for quite a while and isolate with me? Now, for some people, of course, they've been in a couple for a year, two years, longer, and they've got this other thing where they've already been with someone a while, but now you're finding you're together like 24 hours of the day. Whereas before, you might have had all this time to go off and have your own little adventures at work and go do stuff with your friends on the weekend and go explore things and come back together with your partner and share these stories and hey all these exciting things have happened to me this week what's been going

on with you that's so interesting honey sit down let's talk about it all that stuff that makes something exciting interesting you now might not have anymore so now there's that that comfort sets in where maybe you're walking around the house a lot, someone's walking around in their pants or I guess underwear, if you're American and listen to this, you're slobbing around the house in your underwear, your biggest adventure is going from the lounge up to your bedroom, then back to the fridge again and maybe for a little run or something and that's about it and uh you know that familiarity can breed a kind of well a kind of repetitiveness a kind of groundhog day scenario and we think you know all the thing

we think of when we think of romance we think it's novel it's exciting there's adventure it's new it's passionate there's mystery there's things I don't know there's things I'm learning there's things that are surprising and all those things are a little bit harder to get in this scenario but do they have to be that's the question we're looking at today and I want to jump into a clip of my dear wonderful brother Matthew talking about what it takes to keep that sense of novelty and adventure and romance during this tricky time. Check it out. Matthew did you ever think you would be giving relationship advice during a global pandemic? As a number of coronavirus cases soars above 3,000, elected officials taking unprecedented measures to keep people safe.

Cafes, pubs, bars, and restaurants to close. We direct a statewide order for people to stay at home. I'm in a couple in the quarantine, but I have to tell you, I've been a little bit surprised by how this has tested us. So if someone is in a relationship and decided to quarantine together, what advice would you give to them to maintaining the relationship? I would love if you could share like some of your thoughts and like how to get through this time. If you are in a relationship. We have people who are in relationships who some of whom are being driven crazy right now being in the house all the time with someone. Normally we'd go apart and have all these different activities apart. Now they're together. If you're stuck under the same roof with someone right now there are going to be times in

the middle of the day where you're going to get sick of them or you're going to be like oh my god I need my space now. In order to create desire, you need to create space. And if you live under the same roof as someone 24 seven, you're going to have to find ways to engineer space. In the middle of the day, you can have your day to go and focus on the projects that are important to you. And they can go and focus on the projects that are important to them. Your space could be you putting in your headphones and going into your own world. Now, the flip side to that is you also have to go to your partner and arrange mindful time together. Dating shouldn't go out of the window just because you're in the same house the whole time. Be really intentional about saying to your partner, hey, what about, why don't we do like a proper movie night tonight?

I'm going to cook you dinner tonight. Make it a beautiful themed movie night. Turn the living room into a theater. Go get groomed. Go like put on your nice clothes. Like do, get dolled up. Like feel good for that date and make an effort. Go hard on the detail.

Detail's romantic. Detail shows you care. Detail shows that you have an imagination. When you could take your partner into a world, that's magic. You're creating magic. That's really important. You can't allow working and doing chores and cleaning out cupboards and whatever the hell else you're passing your time with you can't allow that to essentially blind you to the fact that you're living under the same roof but not actually having mindful conscious time together that is it for today listeners thank you very much for joining us as always and you can get in touch with us hey if you're in quarantine right now in a couple or you know trying to somehow keep some kind of situation

or intimate relationship going on with someone you live with i'd love to hear about it message me send me an email at podcast at matthewhussey com. Let me know what's going on with you in quarantine in your relationship. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear the challenges you faced, how you've kept your relationship good in this time, if it's been struggled to keep it good in this time, if there's been new struggles you haven't dealt with before or you found out things about your partner that you didn't know earlier, let me know. Podcast.MatthewHussey.com. I'd love to hear from you there. And just a quick note, if you really feel this is the time right now, whether you're in a relationship or not, but you really, really

want to transform your confidence, you want to rewrite the script for your life, you want to start figuring out a new direction to head in, actually move forward, change how you feel on a day-to-day basis, rewire your emotions, all that, go to getcoreconfidence.com, check out the free training we have there and follow through on that video. That's going to get you started and actually let you take steps from right now. So instead of sitting in your hands and waiting for, you know, for all this stuff to be over and thinking, well, I'm going to work on myself when COVID's finally over, because who knows when that's going to be. If you want to say, I want to get started right now and not waste any time,

go to that page, getcoreconfidence.com, check out the video training there. All right, that is it from me. I am going to pop out now and head to bed because it's actually quite late where I am. I'm recording this in a little late night session. So in a perfect world, there'd be some smooth jazz behind me, just softly playing like a little late night radio station. But hey, maybe we'll get there in time with this podcast. All right. Thanks so much, everyone. You enjoy your week.

I will be back very soon. Take care.