Love Life with Matthew Hussey - (Rewind): The Most Important Qualities To Look For In A Long-Term Relationship

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

Do you find yourself with enormous checklists for your romantic partner? Are you often paralysed by a list of standards that no-one can live up to? In this clip, Matt, Audrey, Stephen and Jameson talk about what matters most when choosing a partner and the long-term qualities we often undervalue. --- Follow Matt @thematthewhussey Follow Stephen @stephenhhussey --- ►►Transform Your Relationship with Life in 6 Magical Days Find Out More At. . . → http://www.MHRetreat.com

There's no amount of attraction, there's no amount of fun or excitement that could make up for that trait Hussey here. Welcome back to the Love Life Podcast. A fun, informative, insightful clip from one of our previous videos today. I think you're going to love it. Check it out. There's a scene from the movie Up in the Air that just always stuck with me where the older woman is talking to the woman in her early 20s. And she says to her, what do you, what do you want in a guy? And this young woman goes into a lengthy description of a guy who drives this kind of car, you know, this pickup truck. And the only thing he loves more than me is his golden retriever. And he's looks like this and he's got this education and he's you know like he she goes down this long list and then she says to the older woman what what do you want and she says

um someone who's kind um a nice smile someone someone who's from a good family she's like you don't realize how important that is until later but from a good family and she's like well you know a little hair on his head maybe but even that isn't you know even that isn't a deal breaker. And she just, she goes down this short list of things that are important to her. And, and the younger woman says, Anna Kendrick's character, the younger woman looks at her and she's like, God, that is so depressing. And the funny thing is that's the lens of this 20 something year old is that it's depressing. But what she doesn't realize is that it's not at all depressing to the older woman. It's not depressing.

It's that she's come to value very different things in a person. She's come to see that where it's at is not in any of that nonsense. And her lens has evolved to be much, much wider in terms of the kinds of people that she's willing to see in life, right? When you're that person who has that list of things that you've convinced yourself are really important, most people are invisible to you. Because all you see is this very narrow group of people that fit into this idea. The moment you start realizing that how many different ways people can be fascinating, how many different ways people can be impressive, how many different stories there are that are pretty amazing that people have lived through, been through, come through, struggles, you know,

all of these things, you start to just realize, whoa, like there are really interesting people everywhere. There are fascinating or impressive people everywhere. And a lot of them have done things we haven't. They've learned things that we haven't. And your field of vision just completely changes. I actually think that this opens up the playing field in terms of how many people could be great, how many people could be great to have a relationship with. I actually think that when we start to become more ready for a real relationship where we genuinely see and appreciate somebody else, I actually think that the playing field opens for who could be that person. And I'm not saying everyone could be great for us, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I think when we start being more compassionate towards other people, less judgmental of other

people, when we start viewing them through a much more curious lens of what's interesting or great about you, I just think the number of options that we actually have of who we could have a great life with starts to become more promising. I think I want to push back just a little bit, just a hedge, because I love all of this, but I do think a couple of things have come up that I think are worth flagging, which is, first of all, I think it's great advice. This line came to me where it's like, lose the list, but do react to resentments. Like you have to do, you should probably look inside and see if there's some of these underlying traits

that are causing you some resentment inside yourself. Because what happens, I think Audrey brought this up, is yeah, when you fall in love, like a lot of that stuff goes out the window, the stuff that bothers you. A lot of that, especially the superficial stuff, that will go out the window, because you're in love,

and that'll do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. But that will also do often too much heavy lifting sometimes. You'll start to just swallow some toxic traits as well because love is very, very powerful. And you see these people that are in marriages for a long time with like people who are proper psychopaths or narcissistic personality disorder people. But I do think listening to your resentments is important. And you have to kind of, you have to do a little dance between, am I being too judgmental? Or are these resentments something that are just going to, they're core to that person's personality? Like there's those big five personality traits that are pretty, that run pretty deep.

Like agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness. And so much of what we talked about today is about openness, really. If you can kind of just get in touch with how open you really are to different people and different experiences, you probably want to also get someone who is pretty similar to you on that spectrum of openness or pretty similar to you on that spectrum of openness or pretty similar to you on that spectrum of agreeableness. Because I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about this before. If you get someone who is totally disagreeable and you're quite agreeable,

over time you'll just think that person's a little bit cold. And you might be in love with them, but if you still have that resentment of like, why is this person cold in this situation? And you don't listen to that resentment forever, then that might be a true non-compatibility that is worth listening to as well. Yeah. I suppose that comes down to at the highest level, knowing the most important character traits that you're looking for for me kindness was the probably number one it for me if kindness isn't there there is nothing there is no other trait that can can make up for that not being there there's no amount of attraction there's no amount of

fun or excitement or that could make up for that trait not being there and i think we have to be honest with ourselves about those about those things that are absolutely essential to us and i suppose you know jordan peterson also talks about if someone is an extreme extrovert and you're an extreme introvert then if it causes such lifestyle conflict that you're always at odds like audrey and i we're audrey's more extroverted than i am but she also loves staying in and chilling out and you know just watching a movie or reading or whatever as as much as I do. So it's not like, even though she would probably be more extroverted than me in terms of going out and socializing, for A, it's not like I hate that and don't want to do that. So I'm entirely open to the idea of doing that, but it's also the case that she enjoys the nights

where we stay in. If I hated going anywhere and doing anything and she hated staying in, that would create a genuine lifestyle incompatibility. Before you go, I wanted to let you know that we have a program that is great for anyone in early dating right now who wants to make sure they don't keep ending up in casual situations, but gets into a relationship that actually goes somewhere. It's called The Momentum Texts.

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