Love Life with Matthew Hussey - Your 'Type' Is Keeping You Single | Matt Monday

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Unfortunately, a lot of people are actually really bad at predicting what will make them happy long term. When it comes to dating, many people get stuck on a rigid “type” which is usually a checklist of traits they think their partner must have. But interestingly, research shows that while most people have a long list of qualities they want, they often end up perfectly happy with someone who only matches a few of them.So how do you figure out what will actually make you happy in a relationship?And how do you evaluate that when dating apps mostly let you filter by superficial traits like height, looks, or career?If you’ve ever wondered about this (or you know someone struggling in the dating world right now) Listen to it now, and share it with a friend who's struggling in dating right now. ---►► Watch My Free Masterclass: How To Heal From Heartbreak8 Proven Steps to Release the Past, Rebuild Your Confidence, and Thrive in Your Next Chapter: Heartbreakplan.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's popular advice online that if you want to meet the love of your life, it helps to create the exact list of physical and emotional traits you're looking for. The advice is well-meaning and of course on the surface it makes sense. It helps us zero in on who might be right for us in a sea of options and helps us recognise it faster when we see it on a dating app. But this advice can also hurt us and delay the process of finding someone who will actually make us happy. At least, that is the thesis of a recent article published in the Atlantic titled, Most people don't have a type. The journalist concludes, after pointing to research and speaking to experts, that many daters have a list of traits they're looking for in a partner,

but can be perfectly happy with someone who has few of them. As a coach who has worked with hundreds of thousands of people over the last two decades, I have seen this myself. The traits that people thought would bring them happiness in a relationship, actually didn't end up mattering at all. Now, you might be hearing this and thinking, but if I don't hone in on a type or a list of qualities, I risk swiping right on everyone on the apps.

I can't narrow down thousands of options if I'm thinking every single option could be the one for me. Or maybe you're someone who likes structure and planning, and the thought of winging it when it comes to your dating life gives you anxiety. In this video, I will show you how to stay selective without letting a rigid type quietly sabotage your love life. If you're still with me, hit subscribe and like on this video, and let's get started.

So one of the lines in this article is when people peruse dating profiles, they're often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities or hobbies. The article continues, but according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves, and a lot of haves they didn't think they desired. I think that it's a sign of healthy growth if our list of must-haves goes down as we age. We have to start discerning better what matters and what doesn't.

I wrote about this person that I met in my book Love Life and I'll read it to you because it's very relevant to this. I once spoke to a happily married man who told me that while he'd always chased after dancers, his wife is one of the least coordinated people he has ever known. He laughed when I asked if this bothered him. What percentage of my life am I on a dance floor? My wife is the best person I've ever met. She's an amazing mother and we adore each other's company. These things affect my life every single day. How often are we selecting for things when it comes to a dating app that aren't going to affect our lives every single day.

The article goes on, physical attraction matters too, far more than most people realize, according to the researchers I spoke with, I being the writer. If two people in a relationship are lucky, infatuation will set in an obsession-like mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them. Once that initial spark ignites, motivated reasoning, Essentially, seeing what you want to see, takes over. This is interesting, because it almost seems to conflict with the point about us going on apps

looking for someone who has certain hobbies or interests. What this seems to suggest is we go on there looking for hot, and then when we find hot, when we find someone that we have this giant crush on or obsession with, we retroactively convince ourselves that everything about them is great. This seems to me to be one of the more pessimistic, almost fatalistic points in the article, because while it's saying that we don't necessarily have a type, it's also saying everyone's type is hot. And if we find hot, we'll just make anyone our type. I don't like that interpretation of things because, well, for one, it makes us feel disempowered when it comes to attracting other people,

especially as we don't identify it as being animalistically hot to people. people, but it also, I think, validates our wanting to dig our own heels in when it comes to the people we're attracted to. You know, people want to say, Matthew, I'm attracted to what I'm attracted to. I like guys with tattoos and piercings. I'm not going to suddenly become attracted to some clean-cut, preppy jock. Now, that person might ask, what would you say to someone who very much has a physical type. And these apps, the dating apps, which are ultimately designed for you to judge someone on physique first, don't allow you to swipe for personality. Or someone out there might say, Matthew, I like having a plan when I'm dating. If I open up the pool too widely, I'm going to be giving

any man or woman a shot and I'm going to waste my time on hundreds of meaningless dates. I'm not saying we should date everyone, but we have to be careful of overfill. altering for trivia, whether it's height, whether it's exact personality adjectives, niche hobbies, micro impressions we have of a person, vibes that we get from one message, or even judging someone on a slightly awkward first date or a phone call. The solution to this is to narrow the pull by one effort. So do they ask thoughtful questions? Do they respond consistently? Do they suggest a real plan? The second is we can narrow it down based on emotional maturity signals. So in conversation, do they speak respectfully about past partners?

Can they express something beyond surface level banter? Do they handle disagreement well if any kind of friction comes up? And three, narrow it down by baseline attraction. Not is this person my normal type? Not is this person my fantasy? Not do I think they're insanely hot? Just could I see myself kissing this person? If the answer is no, don't proceed.

If the answer is yes, explore. So instead of ruthlessly filtering at the front end, a better way of thinking about this might be, be selective about someone's behavior, but be curious about their personality. You may be watching this video knowing that you have ended up with the wrong person in the past, even though they were completely your type.

They had all the traits you look for. in a person, but ultimately, they couldn't make you happy or worse, they made you utterly miserable. Maybe you're heartbroken over that person right now. If that is you and you're going through that heartbreak right now, I have a free webinar called heal from heartbreak. You can watch it today at heartbreakplan.com. In this training, I give you some of my best advice for moving forward from heartbreak. This is stuff that I used as a personal survival strategy when I went through the worst heartbreak of my life.

I promise you at the end of this hour, you're going to feel a lot better than you do right now. So go check that out at heartbreakplan.com. Now, some of you at this point in the video will still be shouting through the screen, but I don't want to be attracted to a different kind of person. I want my type to which I say, are you trying to satisfy your ego or find love? because the strategies are different. One of the things I encourage people to look at when trying to dislodge from this over-concratized idea of their type

is to help them realize you don't have a type, you have a story. A story of the way your life was supposed to go and who you are supposed to end up with. And it's really hard to unshackle ourselves from a story about where our life was supposed to go. But that kind of adaptability is where happiness lies. We may have thought that we were going to meet someone that looks like this or who lived on the other side of the world

or who was nothing like the people that we grew up with. And then we could meet someone who lives three streets from where we grew up and is totally right for us. The question is whether we can be flexible enough in our vision for our life to allow ourselves to love that person or to even get to know that person in the first place. This is the kind of flexibility in our vision that creates happiness in life. But to develop those feelings, we often need to be in person with someone. For a number of reasons, firstly, animation creates attraction,

the way someone moves and gestures and emotes. We need repeated exposure because you often need to see someone in multiple contexts to see what's attractive about them. And we also, and this is the big one, need to get over ourselves. Because perhaps the number one thing getting in the way of us finding love because we're a slave to our type is ego. Ego gets in the way. Ego makes us settle in all of the wrong ways and it stops us settling in all of the right ways. It's almost the logical inverse of what's talked about in the article,

is that if I have a crush on someone, I will justify everything else about them because in context, I'll see it as great. When we don't immediately feel fireworks with someone or there's something about them that we don't quite think is right for us and our type, we swing all the way to the other side where we become a judgmental asshole about that person.

Here's a good litmus test. If you're on a date and you find something you don't like about a person, ask yourself, am I immediately writing them off for something, that should not be a deal breaker right now. And am I only turning it into a deal breaker? Because I'm frustrated and annoyed

that I'm not feeling exactly what I want to be feeling at this stage. We also have to factor in that a huge amount of our ego comes from social pressure. Our ego feels a desire to conform to the kinds of people our friends have seen us with or going for in the past. We have this problem in life of being observed. We don't get attracted to people in a vacuum.

And this is even worse, by the way, in the age of social media and soft launching relationships on Instagram. There is now a much larger pool of people who can judge you for your choices. Even if they never say it out loud, it might be in our heads that we're being judged for our choices. And it's worth asking yourself, if no one was watching or judging,

would I be as invested in trying to maintain this type as I am right now. Whether it's because of outside social pressure or it's because of our own internal pressure of who we think we should be with, who we feel entitled to or who we think is going to make us enough if we can get them. So much of who we pick is not about who is right for us. It is about our insecurity. And our concept of our type will expand as our insecurity lessons in life. know that this video isn't going to make you magically go out into the world and be attracted to different people. That's not how this works. My hope though is that it helps you unclench your fist a little bit when it comes to what you think you're looking for, that it creates a bit more

room for curiosity, that it encourages you to follow interesting feelings that you might have with someone you wouldn't normally expect to be attracted to, even if you don't. fully understand it and to give yourself a lot more leeway to spend time with these kinds of people. Have you ever been attracted to someone who was not your type? Leave me a comment and tell me about it or tell me your favorite part of this video. I will be in the comments reading and responding right now. I look forward to reading them.