Love Life with Matthew Hussey - Should You Stop Taking Dating Advice From Good-Looking People? | Matt Monday

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

This episode tackles a topic that’s as raw as it is real: “I no longer want to hear dating advice from conventionally attractive people.” That line, from a recent British Vogue article, struck a chord with many people, and for good reason. So much dating advice comes from people who’ve never had to face what it’s like to be overlooked or rejected again and again. When you’ve never had to climb from the bottom of the mountain, “just be confident” isn’t advice . . . it’s a reminder of how far the gap really is.This week, we’ll explore what dating looks like when the playing field isn’t level, and how rejection shapes our self-worth. It’s not about bitterness—it’s about honesty, empathy, and finding strength in our own story.---►► Find Your Person WITHOUT Having to Go Through All the Wrong People to Get There. Save Your Spot in My Free 60-Minute Training, Dating With Results at DatingWithResults.com►► Get Stephanie's Books at amazon.com/Fattily-Ever-After-Living-Unapologetically/dp/1784883441 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I no longer want to hear dating advice from conventionally attractive people. That was the title of an article in vogue that I read recently that caught my attention and I thought, I have to make a video about this. It's too important. It's too raw. It's too honest. And it is so many people's lived experience out there. If you are looking for love and you go online looking for advice about how to find love,

you are going to be met by an avalanche of psychologists, therapists, coaches and super hot 20-something TikTokers, all giving you their two cents on how you should be going about finding love. And when that person who's giving you the advice doesn't look like you has advantages you do not have, it can feel unhelpful, patronizing and borderline offensive. As someone who has been coaching people for nearly two decades of my life, I've worked with millions of people. I've written two New York Times bestselling books on the subject of finding, attracting, and keeping love. I want to bring light to this conversation because I think it's extraordinarily important.

Now, this Vogue article actually originated as a video on the Instagram account of Stephanie Yaboah. Stephanie, I hope I'm saying your last name correctly. We are going to play that video first before we dive into the article. I don't like hearing dating advice from conventionally. attractive people. And I've always thought this way since I was a teenager. It's like asking a rich person how to survive being poor. They've never had to live at that level so they wouldn't understand. I think that in itself is a very important point, the idea that if someone is standing at the top of a mountain, yelling advice for people trying to get to the top of the mountain,

but the advice you're giving is to people who started at a place in the mountain that you never had to climb in the first place because you started at base camp. then it can feel patronising and glib to the people who are like, I get that you have advice for how to get up this mountain, but you started higher on the mountain than me. So how is that going to help me where I am right now? People say things that can come across as really condescending, like, just be confident, put yourself out there.

And I'm sure that works. Of course that's going to work when people are already lining up to say yes to you. Confidence looks different when society already sees you as desirable. For a lot of us who don't fit into those conventional standards of beauty, the rejection can hit a little bit harder. That is a massively important point that we all experience rejection. No one is immune to rejection, but rejection mixed in with a bunch of successes and moments where you're made to feel desirable is a very different thing than the kind of rejection that comes on the back of a life. time of rejection. So that kind of rejection confirms the idea that we're not worthy, that we're not desirable in the world. But someone who does generally feel attractive can write off a rejection

more easily as a momentary setback on the road to yet another person who finds them attractive. I wrote a book five years ago called Fatally Ever After and in it I have a whole dating chapter where I have spoken to plus-size black women from around the world about their dating experiences and it was something that really helped me kind of think about how disadvantaged certain groups are when it comes to the dating game. And it's, you know, one of the reasons why I wrote chaotic energy where you have a plus-sized dark-skinned character who is the most confident person in the world. And she's always putting herself out there. But again, to no avail. I firstly, I'm going to link Stephanie's books up in the description so that if you want to hear more from Stephanie and you want to read more of Stephanie's work and character.

that you can relate to, you can grab those. I think that character that Stephanie presents of there being a woman of colour who is confident and does put herself out there, but to no avail, there are no, you know, it's not like, and therefore she gets all these results is a really, really important image to hold in our mind as we go through this video.

I just wish that there was more, you know, dating relationship content that didn't always have to come from the mouth of an object you know, very conventionally attractive person who gets by on privilege, whether that's white privilege, light skin privilege, weight privilege, yeah, all of that kind of stuff. I'm conscious, of course, of the irony of me making this video right now talking about this subject when Stephanie and some of you may feel I tick some of the boxes that she is talking about. I never want to not make a video that I think is important.

If I think that it's truthful and I agree with what someone is saying on some level, I want to bring light to it. So that's what I want to do with this conversation today, especially for those of you who feel marginalized by regular dating advice or by who it's coming from. So let's get into the article that Stephanie wrote because there's some really, really important lines in this article. Stephanie talks about the reaction to that video that you just watched.

She said, the comments are telling, some are urging me to lose weight if I want to find a man. others are dismissing my perspective outright by insisting I am conventionally attractive, an assertion I strongly reject, and one that erases years of traumatic dating experience that say otherwise. You may have experienced this from your family or from your friends who, whenever you have a bad dating experience or one bad dating experience after another, keep telling you how beautiful you are, how gorgeous you are, how everyone is insane for not seeing it. But really, it just kind of gaslights you on the experience that you're having, which is maybe a different one from the experience of the person who's saying this to you.

She goes on to say, so when I reject dating advice from conventionally attractive people, it isn't a show of bitterness. It feels more like clarity. I'm aware of the terrain I walk on, full of obstacles and pitfalls they've never had to face. And in a dating world, this uneven, I'd rather take advice from those who know what it means to stumble, to be. overlooked and to still keep going because at the end of the day, I don't need another TikToker telling me how to find a man. I need voices that recognize the battlefield I'm already on. What a beautifully written piece, by the way. Here's the reality of dating. Confidence is easier when the world already affirms your desirability. Pretty privilege is real. It creates an

invisible buffer from rejection. The advice economy on social media, does often reward aesthetics over genuine meaningful insight. And for many people, rejection is not neutral. It is cumulative and often traumatic. For people who have lived through that, the advice to just be confident can sound like, ignore all of the evidence that you have experienced that the world treats you differently.

And by the way, I'm so aware that many of my videos on looking for the wrong behavior, being aware of incompatibilities, unequal investment, looking for consistency in someone's behavior, all feel completely irrelevant and redundant if you never even get to that stage. The reality is life isn't fair, and various forms of privilege are not distributed equally. That can make one feel like they want to check out of the process altogether. And I think it's completely understandable. I never, I never judge people for thinking or deciding. I'm done. I'm done. I don't want to date anymore. I'm not going to have relationships romantically. I'm just going to have my friends. I'm going to go through life

taking that expectation off the table so I can breathe better, be at peace, not live in this constant hope, which is after a while a form of chronic pain. We always think of hope as a positive thing. But hope can become a form of chronic pain over time. I don't want to live in that place anymore. So I'm just going to eliminate the possibility in my mind of ever finding someone. But even that can lead to contempt of other people. Because even if you're talking to people with no intention of it being romantic, just the idea that you would be treating me better right now if I was more conventionally attractive, if I aesthetically looked the part, can make us not like people, can make us hate people even. I think partly this can be solved with a kind of empathy that we

develop on a very advanced level for other people, where we realize that human beings often fall into the trap of overvaluing superficial qualities and reacting too much to superficial qualities. we ourselves have probably fallen into that trap before but it does also inform what we're looking for which is people who on some level have transcended that people who do actually look for the deeper qualities in life who have very consciously maybe through experience and making the wrong choices decided to value something beyond aesthetics above aesthetics guys while you're watching this video i wanted to bring you something you could do after this video that really related to the content of the video. And I know that when we're in a bad

place, our defenses are low in dating. That's when we invite the wrong kind of person into our lives. We over invest, we give too much too soon, we obsess over someone, and often we enable their bad behavior. What I try to do is train good instincts that not only help people attract the right person, but protect them from the wrong person. I have created a free training called dating with results. Hundreds of thousands of people have been through it. I'm very proud of it and it's helped a lot of people. I'd love for you to try it as well. You can try it for free at dating with results.com. And if you're not ready to give up on love, it is a wonderful place for you to start after you finish this video. But what does all of this mean for what dating advice is actually

useful versus only being applicable for the already privileged? First, I think it's important to recognize that love is not a popularity contest. Thank God. There's no points for being the most popular person when it comes to the game of love because if you're looking for a long-term committed relationship, you're not looking for the world to love you or for hordes of people to want you. You just want one. Now, I realize that having hordes of people who think you're attractive makes it easier to find that one. But at the end of the day, all of us who want a committed relationship are looking for one person. So you only need one. One person who truly gets you. One person that truly wants you. And in order to meet that person, the hard part

is that our light has to shine. There has to be a level of warmth. or playfulness, we have to find a way to keep our spirits up because that's how that person is going to see us. And when we do meet that person, even if it's one in a thousand, we want to meet them as a version of ourselves that they're actually going to pay attention to. This is obviously going to be harder to keep our spirits up if we keep facing rejections. And we're going to have to source our confidence from somewhere else than the average person. But imagine that there is someone out there who is looking for you. And even if you feel that you are not conventionally attractive, I still believe that there are many possible ones for you who are looking for someone

like you. But that person might need to be a special kind of person. They need to be a special kind of person. They need to be the kind of person that doesn't value looks and someone being conventionally attractive above all else. They need to be the kind of person that values what you have to offer. Finding love is not about trying to create mass appeal. Finding love is about fit. We're trying to find the right fit for us. And when we do find the right fit for us, it can even bring out a kind of confidence that

we've never had or that has become lost to the rejections of our life. It's one of the most beautiful things about the right relationship is we can actually shine more brightly. We can become more confident because of the acceptance and the love and the validation that we are given by somebody else. It's not the same as relying on it, but of course it can change our confidence to be with someone who really sees what's valuable about us. In the meantime, before you find that person, if you're struggling because of everything you've been through to locate that confidence, I think one of the most important pieces of advice is to do things and to live in such a way that you make yourself proud, that you like the person that you show up as, that the way you put

one foot in front of the other in life, the way you treat people, the things you do, the small and big challenges that you conquer, make you a person that you are proud of. And that personal pride that comes from that can engender a kind of confidence. And when we go out into the world as a person who's proud of themselves, we carry ourselves differently. And when we carry ourselves differently, we're far more likely to show up on the radar of that person who will appreciate us. Resilience is one of the most powerful human traits there is. There's an argument to say resilience is the most powerful human trait there is. If you've experienced 99% or 99.9% rejection in your love life, it takes a whole lot of

resilience to continue to believe that the right person is out there for you, that someone will one day accept you and love you for what you present and what you have to offer. My experience of resilience is that it tends to be the thing that shows up when there's no other option. And when you know that human connection is something that you deeply value and deeply, deeply desire, regardless of how much rejection you may have thought, faced, resilience you may decide is your only option because giving up on human connection makes even less sense than continuing to put yourself out there in the world to get human connection. But if it requires extraordinary resilience for you to do that, if nothing else,

remind yourself that resilience might be the most powerful, transferable skill that you can ever develop in life. And if this is where you end up building it, so be it. Whoever you need to hear this message from, whether it's me or somebody else, I just appreciate us having the conversation because it's real, it's honest, it's truthful. And those are the only kinds of conversations I want us to have. I'll see you next time. Thank you.