Love Life with Matthew Hussey - Are You Mistaking Red Flags for Chemistry? | Rewind

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Have you ever wondered why you can feel so much chemistry with someone who's inconsistent, unavailable, or clearly wrong for you... yet struggle to feel the same spark with someone who actually treats you well?You may genuinely want a healthy, stable relationship. But when you've become accustomed to the emotional highs and lows of unpredictable relationships, healthy attention can feel strangely unfamiliar—and sometimes even boring.So does that mean you have to choose between chemistry and a healthy relationship? Absolutely not.In this episode, I'll show you three ways to build real attraction with the right person, including:Why emotionally unavailable people can feel so addictiveHow unpredictability can get mistaken for chemistryWhy someone being consistent doesn't mean the relationship has to lack excitementThree ways to create attraction without relying on games, anxiety, or emotional highs and lowsThe good news is, you don’t have to choose between feeling a spark and being with someone who treats you well. You can have both. And once you learn to feel attraction without needing the emotional roller coaster, it can completely change who you choose next.---►► Break the Patterns That Keep Leading You to the Wrong People → MHRetreat.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you ever feel like the people you get attracted to are always the bad boys, or they're always the projects, the fixer-uppers, the ones that either treat you badly or the ones that you end up coaching through their problems, playing mentor and therapist to? When a good guy comes along who's actually figured out his stuff, who doesn't need you to fix him, who doesn't treat you poorly and oscillate in and out of your life, when you finally find out of your stuff, when you find out of you. When someone like that, you think, wow, what a great guy, I don't want to sleep with him. You ever feel like that? Isn't that annoying you? The problem that so many people have is that what they actually get attracted to is what's not good for them. There's the psychology behind all of this, but then there's just real life, which is, Matt,

I get it. I get that there's some psychology going on in my world. wiring that keeps making me go for bad people, but the point remains, I keep going for bad people. So what do I do about that? How do I rewire my brain so that I get attracted to this instead of this? That's what I want to talk about today. Can you make that which you do not find exciting? exciting. I believe that there are legitimate reasons, or perhaps what can we say, good reasons, that you get attracted to these sort of bad boy types who always wreak havoc in your life, and then there are the smoke and mirrors ways that you get attracted to those people.

And I want to differentiate between the two. The legitimate ways might be that, you know, they're bold. There is a kind of. of confidence about them that you find attractive. They seem to know what they want in life. There seems to be a natural charisma that they have. These are things that you're not wrong for being attracted to. And then there's the kind of bullshit ways that we get attracted to people like that. And that might be because they're mysterious.

Have you ever seen models, male or female, who just don't ever really smile that much? You know, those celebrities in interviews that don't really have a lot to say. They just, there's this very, the strong, silent type who just say a couple of words. You know, like, I never know what they're thinking. What are they thinking? You know, who are they over there behind the scenes? If that's what you're attracted to, then you're not attracted to that person. You're attracted to what you don't know about them.

If you're attracted to someone's mystery, you're not attracted to them. You're attracted to their mystery. Because you know what? To people who actually know them, There's no mystery. It's why we've, increasingly, when we see certain celebrities go on social media, they just seem goofier and goofier, the more they do it, because you go, oh, you've seemed so much cooler when you were talking less. Mystery is a very dangerous thing to become attracted to because mystery is smoke and mirrors. And then there's, I get attracted to these people

because they're, you know, sort of, they keep me on my toes. What is it to be kept on out of? What is it to be kept on out of? toes. Often we're describing someone who's there one day and giving us lots of attention and then disappears. And when they disappear, we feel this yearning for them, not just because they've disappeared and, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but also because you think, well, if they're scarce, they must be valuable. The person who's not available must be valuable. We think like that in life in general, don't we? Think about going into a shop and you think, oh, I like that jacket. And then someone says, it's the last one. You go, give me that jacket. You go, give me that jacket. immediately that jacket's value goes through the roof. When we think something is scarce,

we immediately put value on it, whether it has value or not. That jacket didn't become any more valuable because it was the last one. But psychologically, it feels that way. Well, when someone is making themselves very scarce in our life, all of a sudden, they feel valuable. It has no bearing on their actual value, which is the sad part, isn't it? Because someone who's actually there for you, someone who's willing to show up for you and communicate well, that's valuable. That's actual value in your life. But because it's abundant, you go, yuck, this is everywhere. This communication's everywhere all the time. I don't need this. It's cheap. This person's never there. Diamonds. That's the difference. So we have to be very, very careful of that instinct, because that has nothing to do with

sexy qualities. If the sexy quality is my emotions are all over the place, that's a problem. Martin Snow, my boxing trainer once said to me, you always have to question, are you in love with their presence or are you in love with their absence? Now, I want to talk about how we can start to actually make the people that are good for us more exciting, too. us. Firstly, we should start to value the right things more. Okay, the right things are good communication, someone who shows up for us, someone who cares, someone who's thoughtful, someone who listens to our needs and responds to them, someone who acts with integrity, someone who respects us. These are all good things. By valuing those things more, our life will get better. And it may not

feel all the time the same way. If we're addicted in our dating lives to the spikes all the time, then we're going to be very disappointed when we get into a healthy long-term relationship. We just are because it's not the same thing. If you are used to eating pizza all the time and suddenly you start eating healthy, it's not going to taste the same. But what happens when we start eating healthy is we start to train ourselves to want a different feeling, to value a different feeling. When I eat healthy, I feel better. I don't get the spikes. I don't get all those highs, but I also don't get the lows. I actually feel better. And when I feel better, I'm able to enjoy life more. So I enjoy this new lifestyle, not because it tastes the same as pizza, but because

actually, over the long term, it feels better than pizza. Certain people might give us these crazy spikes, but there are other people who just make us feel better. And if we value feeling better over the spikes, we will start to go for a different kind of person. But if like me, you really like pizza, do you have to just say, I'm going to settle for this nice, boring person and have a better life and a more peaceful life? Or can you actually say, I can find a good person who sometimes is still pizza. I have three things I want to say about this. Number one, stay curious about who the good people actually are, because they may be good, they may have character, they may have integrity, they may have all of the markers of a great human being. But they will also have ways that they

surprise you in sexy ways with their strength, with their charisma that doesn't announce itself so loudly at first, but is actually there. They may be people who are wild in bed and you don't even know about it. They may be people who are strong in ways you've never experienced before. Because you've been experiencing all of this fake strength from people who are the bad boy. But actually, this is someone who's genuinely suffered or been through things in their life and is a mind Jedi at what they're able to do in life and what they're able to deal with and what they're able to create.

And that is incredibly sexy to you once you get to know that side of them. People are very surprising. And I think that in our own arrogance at so narrowly defining what sexy has been to us in the past and therefore thinking that that's just what sexy is, we have neglected all of these other more interesting, people who are just as sexy, but outside our version of sexy, and therefore they are just not known to us.

Number two, we have to give people roadmaps about how to turn us on. There will be things you know about yourself that you find a turn on. Communicate those to the person you're with. If you've got a good person and you have a good conversation and you have a great time with them and you think they're wonderful, help them by communicating what turns you want. What if they did it would be a massive turn on to you? And that doesn't just have to be a proactive thing. It can be a reactive thing.

If that person does something and you're like, oh, wow, that tonight they wore a shirt that kind of got me going a little bit. That's when men wear those kinds of shirts, that does something to me. If you know that about yourself and he wore one of those shirts tonight, point that out. Say, that shirt, you look damn good in that shirt. That's like, good job tonight. Because when you let them know, what you're doing is you're saying, remember this, is that this is a way to turn me on. You can use this again in the future. And you

could do that with things people say. You could do it with things they wear. You could do it with ways they behave. What this means is graduating from what is a very kind of naive and juvenile view on attraction, which is that someone is supposed to just get me. You're supposed to know all of the things that turn me on and just do those naturally. It gets out of that. And it says, no, no, no, I can actually empower someone to turn me on, especially if it's the right kind of person, and it's the kind of person I want in my life, I can actually empower them to turn me on by the clues I give them as to what my buttons are. Number three, give someone a long enough leash to be dangerous. Now let me explain this. When we are insecure, when we are craving safety, we tend to start trying to control someone.

We want to round their edges. We want to make them conform to the things we need in order to feel safe. Text me all the time, be with me all the time, do all the things I say that I want you to do. Don't go there. Don't wear that. Don't be with those people. And when someone actually does all those things and we get this ultimate feeling of safety, we get bored. So we actually become responsible for our own boredom through our demands.

The irony is that the person who's the bad boy is someone who doesn't respond well to that stuff, who doesn't care about your needs, is selfish. So when you say, I want this, I want that, I want you to do this, they don't do it. And so they never have their edges rounded. And therefore, they remain this thing that's just out of reach. And we keep reaching for that safety and keep reaching for it and investing more and investing more. and when they give us even the smallest hit of safety, we suddenly feel blissfully happy.

And we go, God, I must be so into this person. But actually, what we're in is this toxic cycle of searching for safety and not being given it. Meanwhile, the people that give us safety, the people that actually take up face value all the things we say we want them to do, we get bored of and we let go of. We have to not round someone's edges

if we know that rounding their edges is going to make us feel bored. we have to be prepared to live a little more dangerously. You want to go out with your friends, and that gives me a bit of a feeling of, where are you going to go? Are you going to be talking to someone else? Are you going to encourage it?

Men, your woman wants to wear something, and it gives you a little bit of a feeling of people are going to be looking at her, and, oh, that's going to introduce an element of competition. Encourage it. Because actually not having that feeling at all might be the kind of safety that leads you to taking this person for granted. Don't punish people who make you feel safe by being bored with them. Instead, encourage those people in small ways to still breathe just enough danger and mystery

into the situation that allows you to still feel that desire that you want to feel in a safe way. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this one thing today. I promise you that every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I send a private email to a group of people

who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the three relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve in the three core areas of life. your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with life itself. People really look forward to this email. It's not the kind of email people skip. People look forward to it in their inbox every Friday. Go over to the3relationships.com to sign up for that email for free. By the way, the three in that domain is the number three, not the word three. So the three

relationships.com. And I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thank you for listening, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life.