Love Life with Matthew Hussey - (Matt Monday): Give Me 10 Minutes...I’ll Save You 10 Years Wasted on the WRONG Person

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Are you stuck obsessing over someone who’s wrong for you? In this week’s epsiode, I dive into the concept of limerence—the unhealthy fixation on someone who doesn’t return your feelings—and how it can keep you chasing as your confidence falls lower and lower. I’ll show you how to recognize the signs of limerence, why it thrives on hope and uncertainty, and what you can do to break free and get your power back. If you’ve ever felt trapped in this emotional loop, this is your way out! --  ►► Discover What the Most Confident Version of You Can Really Do. Join My FREE 30 Day Confidence Challenge. It All Starts on July 15th with a LIVE Coaching Session Sign Up Now at. . → http://www.MHChallenge.com  ►► Want Your # 1 Dating Problem Solved Personally? Ask Matthew AI Your First Question Now at. . . → http://www.AskMH.com ►► Order My New Book, "Love Life" at → http://www.LoveLifeBook.com ►► Transform Your Relationship With Life in One Powerful Weekend. Learn More About my Weekend Retreat at →  http://www.MHWeekendRetreat.com

In the next few minutes, I want to help you avoid wasting precious years of your life thinking about, obsessing about, and pining after someone who is wrong for you. And I'm going to do it by talking about a concept that so many of you have been asking me to talk about for literally years. and that concept is limerence. This is the original OG book on limerence by Dorothy Tenov, Love and Limerence. I have been digging into this book on your behalf so that we can talk about it today

in relation to someone you may be thinking about right now. So let's start with what limerence actually is. Limerence is the obsessive desire to have someone who we have fallen for love us back. It is the relentless obsessing over this person, the desire to be with them, to own them, to have them yesterday, today and for all of time. It is the hope that this person is thinking about us in the ways that we are thinking about them and the inability to stop thinking about them in every moment we have available and even in the moments we do not have available. When we are at work, when we are supposed to be spending time with other people, when

we are supposed to be doing important things that move our life forward and we cannot focus, all we can do is think about and fantasize and dream about this person and what could be with them if they felt the same way about us. Now what is needed for limerence to take place? How do we become limerent about a person? We have to have two elements, hope and uncertainty. So what tends to happen in limerence is it's perpetuated by this hope that we're reading signs from this person that they're interested in us, the uncertainty of not knowing for sure if they're interested in us and the deep fear of actually acting on our feelings and ruining this idea of what we have in

our mind and the possibility of it going somewhere because we come on too strong and we scare someone away. The worst thing in the world for a limerent person is to be rejected by the person they are limerent about because at that point it turns into a full obsession. One of the most negative effects of limerence is on our confidence and our sense of self-worth. I have been there myself in a situation where I truly lost myself and in doing so, I lost connection to what was valuable about me, to what was important about me.

I put all the importance on the other person and it took me time to rebuild my confidence after that. If you are feeling that way and you want a plan for rebuilding your confidence and rediscovering your sense of self-worth, I am holding a 30-day free confidence challenge that starts on July 15th, where I'm going to be taking thousands of people from all over the world through a 30-day process of completing five missions that are designed to measurably increase or help rebuild confidence. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so at MHchallenge.com.

I'll leave a link below. Join the thousands of people that are going to be going through this with me. I've created an entire free community that you're going to get access to when you sign up and we'll go through it together. If you've read my new book, Love Life, which is behind me right here, you'll know that I talk in the book about the four levels of importance in any situation or relationship.

And they are admiration, mutual attraction, commitment, and compatibility. And as we go through these stages, we get to relationships that I believe we should value more. Admiration alone shouldn't be a reason to think that someone is right for us. Mutual attraction doesn't mean that someone is capable of committing, and commitment doesn't guarantee compatibility.

But limerence doesn't care about any of these levels. Limerence is something that typically takes place between level one and level two, between admiration and mutual attraction. Because between admiration, which is essential for limerence, is that we admire someone. And what happens with limerence is we start to idealize that person. As Dorothy Tenoff puts it, it's not that we make up good qualities about that person, it's that we over emphasize their good qualities while not focusing on any of the signs that this person isn't as great as we're making them out to be. But that is the admiration. Admiration is in full effect, it's mutated into an idealized version of that person. But the uncertainty is I don't know where I

stand for sure with this person so I'm not clear that there's mutual attraction but maybe there have been some signs that have led me to believe that this person does like me. And by the way here's the fascinating part about limerence. People can even think that the absence of obvious signs that this person likes them are signs that this person likes them. Because only a person who likes me would spend this much time trying to ignore me to pretend that they didn't like me. So we can find any justification if we want to for the idea that maybe someone does in fact like us. Which is why hope doesn't always come from the real world, it can just come from

our mind, our imagination, our perception of events especially if we have a strong desire to feel limerence, to be in limerence with someone. So limerence often takes place between level one and level two, between admiration and mutual attraction but here's the interesting part, limerence can even take place beyond mutual attraction even into level three commitment. What's fascinating about that is we would think that if we were in a relationship with someone if we had commitment from someone we would no longer be limerent because there would be no more uncertainty.

But even within a relationship both hope and uncertainty can be present. You may have been in a relationship before, I know I have, where you never really felt like you were safe, where you never fully felt like you had that person, where maybe you never quite felt good enough for that person, where you were always worried about your inadequacy, where you spent the entire relationship trying to impress that person or trying to maintain that person's love for you and therefore never actually progressed beyond limerence. You were stuck in a limerent pattern even in a relationship

where someone was your partner. If you have experienced that before leave a comment below right now and let me know so you can experience limerence even within a committed relationship. Now you may be wondering, in my four levels of importance, how does limerence relate to the fourth level, compatibility? And this part's pretty fascinating because limerence doesn't give a shit about compatibility. That's the bottom line. Someone can be completely wrong for you in every way and still become your limerent object. The person that you obsess over, the person you cannot stop thinking about, the person you think would complete your life. You may be able

to think of someone in your life from the past who at one point you felt limerent over and you can look back now and go that person would have made me miserable. I dodged a bullet by that person never reciprocating and wanting me. Well, don't discount the possibility that the person you may be feeling this over now is entirely incompatible with you. And if it helps, I don't believe that anyone who isn't actually reciprocating can be compatible with us because a huge essential part of compatibility is two people who mutually want each other and are committed to each other. One of the proven ways that people can start to lose their

limerence for someone is by getting out of the orbit of that person. Limerence is something that feeds on itself. When you're close to someone, when you're interacting with them, when you're able to perceive more signs of their interest, whether they're real or imagined, we give ourselves more and more ammunition to think about them, to fantasize about them,

to think about what could be, to write notes in our diary, to imagine scenarios in the future, and then those thoughts replicate and they feed on themselves. When we get out of the orbit of someone, we give ourselves space to have new thoughts and to have thoughts about them less, and over time, they gradually subside until the point where we are sober again. In the meantime one of the things that can actually help you develop the courage to do that is building your own confidence and your sense of self-worth connecting to what you are worthy of. And as I said earlier

in the video the place where I'm gonna be helping people do that beginning July the 15th is in the 30 day confidence challenge. The event is free so come sign up you have nothing to lose and especially if you're going through a hard time right now I promise you us going through this together is really gonna leave you feeling differently at the end of 30 days. The link to sign up is MHChallenge.com. It'll take seconds and once you're signed up I will send you all of the details for how to access everything.

Thank you for watching. Leave me a comment, let me know what you thought and I'll see you soon. you