Love Life with Matthew Hussey - (Rewind): How to Stop Obsessing Over Someone You Want

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Have you ever created an entire relationship in your head before going on a date with someone? Perhaps you’ve been texting with them for weeks and have already deduced they could be “The One,” or maybe you live for the two minutes of conversation you have with them before spin class. Unfortunately, living in our heads in this way can turn into obsessing, and render us incapable of feeling excited about anything other than seeing or hearing from that person. In other words, they occupy a space in our minds they’ve not yet earned! In this week’s episode, I share with you the mindsets that can both help and hurt you in dating, as well as the best way to determine if you and this person could really work out. Tell me what you think in the comments.   --  ►► Discover the ONE Crucial Step to Reclaim the Power in Your Love Life FAST Join the Love Life Reset Now for Free at. . . → https://www.LoveLifeReset.com   ►►  Grab your in-person or virtual ticket to the Weekend Retreat: MHRetreat.com   ►► Join the Love Life Club: JoinLoveLife.com  

This video is for anyone who gets too caught up on someone, too obsessed, too worked up about the potential of something too quickly. This is such an important video, it's such a common thing. I'm sure like me you have had times in your past or present when you have done this and it really is poison to our love lives if we want to find something real and meaningful. So many of you know I have a club, the Love Life Club, where every month I answer questions live, do coaching with people in this exclusive group. This month, one of my members came forward

to ask me a question about a guy she had been obsessing over. She started with this. Have you seen West Side Story? And I went, ooh, tell me more. Knife fights, homoerotic police officers, dancing. I was waiting for some drama, baby. But the drama never came.

Turns out, this was a gentleman with whom she had exchanged some looks at the gym. It didn't go much further than that. There wasn't some big ending to the story, but in these looks that she had exchanged with someone, looks that she said carried that sense of flirtation and attraction, not just from her side, but from his. She had built an entire world. She had asked the receptionist for his name because she didn't want to ask. him or talk to him so she went to the receptionist at the gym and said what's that guy's name and she ended up getting his full name and then using that name to go and find out all about who this person was she even

asked a friend of hers who happened to grow up in the same area as him if she knew him and that friend happened to know him and then gave her lots and lots of information about him so by the time she was finished with all of this research, she actually knew quite a lot about this guy's life, his family, where he grew up, the kind of person that he was by somebody else's account. And I said, well, so what is it you want? She said, well, I want to ask him out and I have this whole plan. So then she revealed her whole master plan for how she was going to ask him out. And I'm going to, you know, time it so that he's leaving his class at the same time that I'm going into mine. And when I catch him in that moment, I'm going to

talk to him about the weekend and then based on that. And she even had a plan for if he said no or if he said he had a girlfriend how to give herself a soft landing where it didn't look like she was asking him out romantically, but just as friends. The amount of time and energy that she had spent on this guy was astounding. This is, albeit a story that will make some people go, wow, that's a lot, a very common story. of us, to differing degrees, have our version of this. We see someone we like, and it might be someone we see regularly and therefore have time to consistently build up a story around, or someone we see once in a coffee shop, and for that 10 minutes that we see them in the coffee

shop, we're thinking about them and the kind of person they are and what it might be like to talk to them and where it could go. And all of this thought becomes incredible unproductive, incredibly quickly. Because instead of engaging and participating in real life, it has us all of a sudden engaging in an idea of life, a future projection, a hope, a fantasy, a dream of what it could be. The interesting part was when she found out information on this guy, there wasn't just a dream element to it. She also heard things she didn't like. She heard things that she thought might be caused for concern in the future. And so now she's also future projecting all of those things.

Again, the whole time, she's never actually been on a date with the person. It's just thought on thought, on thought. I respect the fact that we may in some cases want to do a little bit of homework on someone from the point of view of feeling comfortable about who they are. in a relationship, and that we like the kind of person they present themselves as online. To me, that is akin to seeing a teaser trailer for a movie and going, okay, I'm in. I want to see that movie. It's a different thing when you see the teaser trailer, you start to get excited about the movie,

and then you go, I'm now going to do every bit of research possible. You know what? Let's take a look at the reviews. Jane, have you seen this movie? You start exploring online all of the different media about the movie. they had an off-screen romance. He said what on Twitter? I've got to find out more.

That is too much. And the more we obsess, the more we think about someone, firstly, the further we deviate from reality, and secondly, the more we build everything up. So now we have more fear by the time we speak to them because it's already become this epic drama in our mind with this perfect stranger in the gym. We set ourselves up for more heartbreak,

How is it that I could possibly get any form of pain emotionally in any deep sense from someone that I literally haven't ever been on a date with? Well, it can feel like heartbreak if you've had a relationship with them in your mind. And number three, you're liable to waste an incredible amount of time. This is all time and energy spent on somebody. There are mindsets in love that help people find love quickly. or much more quickly, and there are mindsets that derail people constantly and make it hard for them to ever find love. One of the mindsets that makes it hard for people to find love is when, instead of going and finding out if someone is available, instead of going to find out if someone might like them enough to go on a date or has enough chemistry or attraction with them to go on a date,

Instead of actually learning what they have with someone, they ruminate about that person. They obsess over that person. They stalk that person online. They go down the rabbit hole of who they are and how good we could be together and how compatible are we. What kind of person are they? They go down that fantasy and all of that is wasted time. The productive mindset, the good mindset for finding love, is to say, I'm not going to waste my time

fantasizing about someone. I'm going to go find out. If I think they're intriguing, if I just exchanged a fun, flirty look with someone in the coffee shop, in the gym, in the book shop, at my local club, whatever, I'm going to go over and say something. It doesn't have to be as extreme

as I'm going to go straight over and ask them out, but I'm going to just get my feet wet, right? This is like going in through the shallow end of the pool. I'm just going to go and get my feet wet. I'm going to participate in a real way in the exchange and see what it is. It might be after months of engaging in her mind in this way with the guy,

it might be that she speaks to him and says, hey, do you want to do something sometime and he says, I have a girlfriend? And you realize, oh my God, months, months of thinking, months of West Side Story, months of playing out this movie that never even existed only to find out he's in a relationship

or he's not interested or he's leaving town next week forever. The people that get results, The people that find love faster are the people that actually go find out in real life instead of asking questions in their mind. And that means being this like stream of water that's just flowing. You can't be stopped. I'm just going to go find out.

If I hit a rock, someone says no to me. Someone says, oh, I'm not available. Someone says, I'm not really interested. Then we just flow around that rock and we keep going. What we don't do is stop the stream altogether and just sit there and go, we're just going to chill here for a few months and fantasize. That is a recipe for wasted time. And your heart can repair itself.

Getting a no, getting a rejection, getting your heart broken, the heart can repair. People get their heart back. The thing they never get back is their time. That is the thing that you will never, ever, ever have returned to you. So all of that time fantasizing is wasting the most precious resource you will ever have. And if you want to find love faster, you have to be willing to discard the wrong people quicker. And that means going and finding out in real life. Now, that may be disappointing.

To actually find out what you might have with someone, to actually find out where it could go or won't go, can be very, very disappointing. The person who is working with me in my writing said to me, Matthew, you have to remember, anytime you're afraid to put words on the page, any time you have writers' block, you have to remember that what this, perfect book you have in your mind is never going to be as perfect on the page. You're going to write and it's going to feel like a poor representation of what you had up here. But the only way to get it close to what you have up here is to work it, to write and edit and go through the

painstaking process. But at the end of it, you actually have a book. And that book is worth far more than any idea you have in your head. And this is what I want to boil it down to right now, Because there are people in life who would rather have a relationship with the fantasy than be a participant in real life. And the reason that we are reluctant to be a participant in real life is, one, because we're afraid. And ironically, the more we build something up, the more afraid we become. It's actually we can be less afraid when we don't build it up. when I just say, oh, there's an attractive stranger, I'll say something to them and just see what happens. They're nothing to me right now. They're nobody to me. I don't know them.

I haven't thought about it very much. That's the best time to say hi. Before you've done the whole dance in your head that suddenly turns it into, I'm no longer walking in through the shallow end of the pool. Now I've gone straight to the deep end of the pool and I've created this high dive that I've got to jump off of to talk to this person. And the more you build it up in your head, the greater the collision with reality when you engage with it. And it's easier for me to wrap myself up

in the blanket of the dream, in the blanket of the fantasy and just enjoy that for a bit longer before I go and douse those flames with a cold, hard bucket of reality. And that's the thing, right? When I thought about this woman's story, I thought,

She had a moment where she could have gone to talk to him, but instead she chose to talk to the receptionist and find out his name. That is avoidance. And every time you dig a little deeper on someone and you look them up online and you go down all of their pictures and now all of their tagged pictures and you find out more about them and so on, instead of engaging with that person, it's always just a nod in the direction of avoidance of fantasy

instead of participating in real life because real life is scarier. Real life might come with a no. Real life might come with a disappointment. So there's that fear. And I think that the close cousin to that fear is a kind of disappointment in some way with real life or a reluctance to engage with life on its terms, a reluctant to be present with life. You know, there's some similarity between it and the person who jumps out of every relationship after six months because every relationship never lives up to this romantic ideal they have in their head.

sort of becomes an insult to people who are married for decades and weather the storms together and go through difficult periods and come to make peace with each other's flaws and they get through the hard times and the arguments but they come out stronger they come out these sort of war wounded veterans who love each other so much and have this badge of honor in their marriage to show for it because they've been through all of that they didn't bail and and there are people that just always bail the moment it's not perfect because they'd rather live with the idea of this perfect relationship in their head, then participate in life on its terms, sculpt a relationship the way that a great book is sculpted by shitty paragraphs and average writing that we

work on and we make better and better by doing it. There are no points in life for winning in the fantasy world, but if we can be an active participant in life, if we can see someone, And rather than live with the idea of what it could be with that person, we can go and get a yes or a no and then proceed or move on accordingly. If we can do that, then life will be kind to us in bringing us love faster. But if we stall because we become addicted to the fantasy, then we are liable to be condemned to that fantasy, to become a prisoner to it for the rest of our lives. So here's the crux of this video. Stop guessing, stop assuming, stop fantasizing, stop future projecting, and give yourself a new motto.

Go find out. If you want to know if someone could be someone in your life, go find out. If you want to know if they're attracted to you, go find out. If you want to know whether you could have a date with them, go find out. End the fantasy. Participate in real life. The results when you get them will be real. While we're all together in this moment, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you about

something I have coming up in the middle of September. It is called the Love Life Reset. I work with people year in, year out, who I know in my bones can find the love that they're looking for, but have kind of become stuck. they've become stuck because dating can suck really really bad they've become stuck because they keep getting the same results over and over and over again and that creates its own kind of anguish and disillusionment with the process it feels like we can't keep up our resilience anymore in just working through the rejections or all the times when we're trying with someone but they're not

putting in any effort, we can get stuck because we've just lost the belief that this is going to happen for us. But what I am fascinated by and excited by, and I find to be a very empowering thought, is that we can actually adopt a fresh way of being in this area of our life and a new mindset that can radically change the results. that are available to us. And that's what I'm going to be doing with you in the middle of September on this free live training

called the Love Life Reset. I'm going to be spending time with you, giving you a completely fresh approach to your love life. Even if you feel like you've been banging your head against the wall, nothing's been working, you're sick and tired of it, maybe you even feel close to dating, burnout.

You really do want to find love, but you feel like I just can't take more rejection or more disappointment or more people who just aren't even trying. You know, it can feel like it's hard to get someone to go on a real date, let alone commit to an actual relationship. But I know that when we step outside of that frustration that we've gotten locked into, because we get very tense in this area of our life after a while, especially when it's not been going the way we want, if we can step out of that and into a completely fresh approach, a calm approach, an empowered approach where we can take control again,

things change and they can change quicker than you'd ever imagine. So this is my formal invitation for you to come and join me on this free event that I have put together called the Love Life Reset. It's happening in mid-September. It is my last big event of this kind for the entire year. So please don't miss it. I promise you, it's going to send you into the last quarter of this year with a completely different level of energy and hope and excitement for your love life.