Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 5 Counterintuitive Ways To Transform Your Life In 2026 Matt Monday

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

What if the fastest way to meet someone this year isn’t trying harder—but stepping back? In this week’s episode, Matthew breaks down a counterintuitive idea that could completely change how you think about dating in 2026. It’s not about forcing chemistry, endlessly swiping on apps, or summoning more confidence than you actually feel.Instead, he shows how small, everyday shifts can quietly create the conditions where connection happens naturally. If you’ve been doing “all the right things” but still feel stuck, this video may explain why . . . and what you can do differently starting now.---►► Set Yourself Up to Attract Real Love This Year. Sign Up to Attend my Free Event on January 20th at MHYearOfLove.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is something counterintuitive you can do to meet someone in 2026, and that is to stop focusing so much on meeting someone in 2026. But that is so hard, Matthew, it is what I want the most. How exactly would I even do that? And how will that even help? I'm going to show you in this video. And the answers are, well, unexpected. The economist John Kaye put forward the counterintuitive theory of obliquity. The idea that our most valuable goals in life, like finding love or building a thriving social life, are rarely achieved by pursuing them directly. They are actually best reached obliquely, meaning indirectly.

When we pursue love directly, for example, by saying, I want to meet the love of my life this month, or I want this person back, it leads to narrow thinking, short-termism, and unintended bad consequences. but indirect pursuit, focusing on the deeper activities, values and systems that create those outcomes is far more effective. It means instead of trying to find love by chasing it and obsessing over that outcome in a way that actually makes us more anxious, we need to create the conditions in our lives that attract love. And I am on a mission this month to show you how to do that in 2026, starting with this video where I am going to show you four unique ways you can start.

And make sure you stick around for number three and four because they are backed by 18 years of research I have done as a coach to hundreds of thousands of people. And if you're new here, I'm Matthew Hussey. And what we do here goes beyond just dating. It is about how we take control in each of the three major relationships in our life. Our relationship with others, with ourselves, and with life itself. And how to use proven psychology to build deep confidence and find the love we deserve. So let's dive right in. And give this video a quick like so that it can reach other.

people who need it too and subscribe with the post notifications turned on so that you never miss these videos in the future. So if we are following the theory of obliqueity, the indirect approach to getting what we want, here is the first oblique way that you can reinvent your love life and your social life this year. Practice micro interactions. Now what are micro interactions? They are the almost imperceptibly small actions that open life-changing, in our love lives and our social lives. We are living in a time where it has never been more necessary to practice micro-interactions.

Most of us can relate to having atrophied socially on some level. A dangerous combination of a hectic work-life, Netflix and dating apps give us the perfect excuse never to leave the house. One of the traps we've fallen into is a particular cognitive distortion called all-or-nothing thinking. We turn our love lives into a false choice

between bravely striding up to someone and seducing them or sitting in the corner of a room with our phone and our coffee watching the world go by without us. The antidote to this social stalemate is to start thinking smaller, not bigger, to stop thinking in terms of courage and to start thinking in terms of casual social moments. Instead of checking emails while your barista makes your coffee, maybe you say one human sentence. A quick, how's your day going? Maybe you see someone yawning in your day and you say,

long day or just getting started. which gives them permission to say something to you the next time they see you on a different day. These things feel so small it is hard to imagine that they're going to change anything in our lives. But over time, they exponentially increase the chances of serendipity working in your favor. Think of our old friend the butterfly effect or chaos theory as it's scientifically known. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. Well, you are basically doing the huge. human equivalent of flapping your wings when you apply micro-interactions to your life.

You can never predict how the smallest moment of connection could lead to the love of your life. The trick is to start giving the butterfly effect hundreds of opportunities to work out in your favor. It's minimal risk, outcome independent. In other words, it's not designed to get something, which is why it's so much easier to practice. And lastly, it's broader than trying to hit on someone that you know you want. It is socially connected. And it warms the world up to you by putting out an open and receptive energy. So let's move on to the second oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026. When your confidence fails you, find a new place to draw your confidence from. One of the hardest things about wanting a better life for ourselves in 2026 is that we bring

last year's confidence with us, along with whatever has knocked our confidence. It is so hard to feel confident when the bedrock of whatever confidence we did have has fallen away. And by the way, some people can't even relate to having had confidence. They've never felt it. They've tried in vain to have confidence about things like their looks or their charisma, but they can never get over the fact that they do not match up to society's expectations of those things. But there is something people do not realize about confidence, even if we have always struggled to have it, or when it's been shattered in areas that we had come to rely on, we can choose to derive our confidence from different things than we used to. The Oxford Dictionary defines confidence as simply a feeling

of certainty about something. That's why so many of us find it hard or impossible to feel confident. Either the source of our certainty has been rocked, or we're trying to find certainty in an area where we've never had it, like the idea that people find us attractive, even when our experience has taught us the opposite. If we are continuously trying to base our certainty on something that is inherently uncertain, then it's no wonder we're struggling to be confident. So what are some better places to start deriving our certainty and therefore our confidence from? Well, for one, it could be a new area of competence in your life. Maybe you just got divorced and your confidence took a huge hit in the process, but now you're living on your own for the first time,

and there's a new sense of personal empowerment and independence that's being born out of that. Or you can find confidence and acceptance, or surrender to what is. I went through a time where for years I was plagued by chronic physical pain, so much so that it slowly eroded my confidence, and it made me long for the person I was before that pain started. I found this entirely new source of confidence

by accepting my new starting point and focusing on mastering my relationship, with my pain. Another source of confidence can be just making yourself proud. This is one of the great ways to build confidence from wherever you are now. Wherever you're starting from, you can ask, what small actions could I perform today that would make me proud of me? When people feel confidence coming off of you, the very energy of it is what makes you a magnet. So don't ever think that because you don't have what someone else does, you can't be attractive. Confidence is the great. equalizer. And if you can't get it one way, there's always another way you can. The third oblique

way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026 is to stop sharing your love life like it is news and gossip. I get it. One of the ways we stay sane when we're single is by sharing dating stories with other people. The problem is when those stories aren't something that happened in the past, but are instead a running commentary on your love life in the present. Why is this a problem? Well, sometimes we share the highs of our love life in a way that makes our friends and family get over-excited, which amps us up even more, and then all of a sudden we're getting ahead of the situation we're in, and we're putting way too much pressure on it at a premature stage. Other times, and more commonly, we are sharing the lows,

or just the minute details of everything someone did on a date that we are forming opinions on. And this has some very negative side effects. For one, it invites in more opinions than is helpful, which can make you, you overreact to things that someone has done or judge them too quickly based on the personal projections of people who weren't even on the date with you. There's nothing wrong with inviting people's opinions where you need them, but make sure you've given yourself a chance to be present first and to really know how you think and feel about someone. That's what gives you the opportunity to form a real connection. But there's another more subtle danger. It kind of pits you against

the person you're dating. Instead of being present with them, connecting with them and learning more about them through deepening the conversation, you're having those conversations behind their back, and often in a judgmental way. And it becomes a substitute for actually communicating with them. Because communicating with them is what gives you the chance to show that you're capable of being on the same team as them, or at the very least, communicating with them when something is up,

instead of with your friends where it just becomes fodder for gossip. You only have to ask how you would feel if the situation, were reversed and someone was talking to all of their friends about something you did on the date. And then there's the final danger. Identity. When we treat our love life like it's a dating horrors magazine column that we write where every headline is akin to, you won't believe what happened. You're creating an identity for the author of that column. You. You are cementing your story in a way that says, classic me. And that keeps the story alive. And it will have you unconsciously looking for more situations that provide evidence for that narrative.

This is your life. It is not other people's entertainment. So be present with it rather than feeling the need to report it in real time. Before we get any further with this list, leave me a comment letting me know what's resonated with you if you have made it this far into the video and how you're going to apply it. Your comment might be the thing that someone else needs to hear or it might give them an idea. The fourth oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life this year is to make your mind your temple. I have always had the belief that learning equals impact. The more ideas you have in your head that are interesting,

the more you can be an interesting conversationalist, a surprising conversationalist. But in order to learn, you have to be able to focus. And that's one of the big things that's been eroded for us these days is the ability to focus. I have always been so grateful for the hours that I focused in reading a, great book, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, watching a debate on YouTube that changed me

somehow or put really interesting points of view in my head, it's always given me this kind of superpower, this edge where I can come along and I have a unique way of saying something or a unique, a unique reference that I can bring into the mix. In order to have that, we have to have to have stored that information in the first place. We have to be engaging with new information this year. So my question to you is, in 2026, what information are you taking in? And this is really relevant today because there are a couple of things working against us. In 2025, the Webster word of the year was slop. Not surprising for many of you who know that AI slop, as it's known, flooded the internet. Studies have shown that AI generated videos are hurting our brains. So this is a problem. We're getting

watered down, in many cases, bad or even just wrong content. On top of that, we have short form content that can be equally damaging. It's not necessarily presenting us with deep ideas. We're not coming away with a real rich sense of knowledge. We're just coming away from our phones with a thousand different influences that don't get stored anywhere. They just end up being things that zombify us in the moment and then aren't accessible as useful information later. It is not making us more interesting in conversation. It's making us a lot less interesting. We're becoming consumers. We're not espouses of ideas. We're not people who are actually bringing thought to the table. That is why I'm saying you should treat your brain like it's your

temple. Choose your sources of information wisely. Choose your influences wisely. Which brings me on to point number five in the oblique approach to creating an amazing love life this year, choose your mentors wisely. There are so many mentors these days. The creator economy is so full. We are saturated with content. There's a hell of a lot of grift. There are a hell of a lot of mentors who look like one thing on the surface and are a very

different thing behind the surface where values don't align with what's actually said. We have to find people. that we really believe in, people whose message really rings true for us. I'm a humble student in life. I love learning. I'm an intensely curious person. I'm a real snob when it comes to who I take advice from. I see it like I have a board of advisors in life.

And the people who sit around that table are the people who really in many ways dictate the quality of my life because they dictate the quality of the advice I take, the ideas that I take on board. And your board of directors isn't just made up of people that you get influenced by from afar through YouTube or books or anything else. Your board of advisors can be friends, they can be family. And sometimes we allow people to be close to us who have really bad ideas about things, bad ideas about love, bad ideas about the, you know, about people in general, or about men or about women.

We have to choose very wisely who it is we're going to allow close to us, who we're going to take a from because those people are dictating your reality. So what kind of life do you really want? Who represents that? Not just front of house, but in the values that they have in general in their lives. Find those people, make friends with them or make them your mentors and get as close as possible. This is about building a year that is going to make finding the love you want as close to inevitable as possible and building an extraordinary social life along the way. Let's do it together and I'll see you this month for the year of love.