Sex With Emily - How to Know When Someone Is Actually Available

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

EPISODE SUMMARY Dr. Emily sits down with relationship expert Matthew Hussey to decode modern dating, from confusing chemistry with compatibility to knowing when someone's actually emotionally available. Matthew breaks down why we keep choosing the wrong people, how to set boundaries without sabotaging connection, and the texting behaviors that reveal true interest levels. In this episode, you'll learn: • The difference between chemistry and compatibility—and why excitement often masks anxiety • How to identify emotional availability in the first few dates • Why having standards matters more than having a "type" • The art of expressing needs without coming across as needy • Red flags in texting culture and what silence really means • How to break patterns of settling and choose better partners • Why vulnerability creates attraction (and how to practice it) • When to walk away from situationships that aren't serving you • How self-worth directly impacts who you attract and keep • Strategies for building sexual tension while deepening emotional intimacy More Dr. Emily:  • Shop With Emily! Explore Emily’s favorite toys, pleasure accessories, bedroom essentials, and more — designed to support your pleasure and confidence. Free shipping on orders $99+ (some exclusions apply). • Join the SmartSX Membership: Access exclusive sex coaching, live expert sessions, community building, and tools to enhance your pleasure and relationships with Dr. Emily Morse. • Sex With Emily Guides: Explore pleasure, deepen connections, and enhance intimacy using these Sex With Emily downloadable guides. • The only sex book you’ll ever need: Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure • Want more? Visit the Sex With Emily Website • Let’s get social: Instagram | X | Facebook | TikTok | Threads | YouTube • Let’s text: Sign up here • Want me to slide into your email inbox? Sign Up Here for sex tips on the regular. This episode is sponsored by…  Bellesa  "EVERYONE who signs up wins a FREE toy or gift card! https://www.bboutique.co/vibe/emilymorse-podcast" Qualia Magnesium, multiplied. 10 forms for total support. Go to https://qualialife.com/SEXWITHEMILY to get 50% off and save an extra 15% with the code SEXWITHEMILY. Timestamps:

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It thought it was the world. You're listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily, and I'm here to help you prioritize your pleasure and liberate the conversation around sex. Today's episode is really special. As I get to talk to my friend Matthew Hussey, he's a return guest on the show and the leading dating expert and confidence coach, who quite frankly is loved by everyone, because honestly, he is the real deal. We discuss his latest book, Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, find your person, and live happily no matter what. We talk about what we have in common with dolphins, how this one text message changes life, why we need to learn the difference between our intuition versus our instincts, and how our own beliefs and stories get in the way of finding

love. Please rate and review sex with Emily. Wherever you listen to the show, it really helps get the word out to help more people. All right, everyone, enjoy this episode. Today, I have the pleasure of having my friend Matthew Hacian. He's not only a best-selling author, speaker, and coach who helps people build confidence and build relational intelligence, but he's someone who's been on this journey to really understand how to truly be happy and thus find our person. I really respect his work. He's authentic and it's been so inspiring watching him evolve both personally and professionally. What I love is that he shares the good, the bad, and the ugly of his life road trip and gives the rest of us hope that we too can be the person we want. He's so talented.

I love listening to him. And such a wonderful coach and friend and welcome to the show. That was so lovely. Oh, I love seeing you. That really means a lot coming from you. You and I have had this friendship that we've now seen each other sort of through different seasons. Like it's been long enough now that like you've come to my house. I'm in your place. We've like seen you through a book.

You're now seeing me through a book. I know. And this is what I love about what you do is I've actually really experienced your coaching being part of your community and doing the talks at your house. You're just so passionate and you really care and you're really in there to have. people like you're in it to win it for people you take the time and you're patient and thoughtful all right thank you i've been doing this in years now which is kind of crazy and just seen up front how hard things are for people experience some of it myself in different ways in my life and i've seen

the pain that people go through and i think a lot of a lot of what i see out there doesn't necessarily fully acknowledge how much of a struggle it really is for people yeah for people to find well now I love the, to not only find, to date, but to find love. To find love, to be single, to be, to feel lonely, you know. I had a woman say to me, how do I kill the desire to find love? She didn't say, how do I find love? She said, how do I kill the desire? Because if I never find it and I hold on to this longing I have for it, I'm going to be

sad for the rest of my life. That's a heartbreaking question. That is so real. So real. Because it had been so painful. This is not someone in her 20s. This is someone, I think she's in her early 60s, perhaps, and had never found the thing that she was looking for and wanted so badly to still find it, but also found that wanting to find

it was kind of ruining her experience of everyday life. What would you say to that? There's no easy answer to that. The truth is that life goes in all sorts of directions for people. some people find love and then lose it you know they find this person that's the love of their life and then life takes that person from them some people have amazing passionate love affairs that never last some people struggle to find a person in the first place some people go most of their lives feeling invisible and that's real what i said to her is that that pain because what she's feeling

is at its core pain and that pain has kind of a physical component is a You know, you lay in bed and it's whatever time it is. And the thought pops in and you think, I want to meet someone and I still haven't met someone and it's never happened for me. And you think about that and you feel lonely and you feel this pain of loneliness. But that pain is accompanied by a lot of story. And the story around it takes what is a very physical pain, you know, whether she felt it in her chest, her throat, her stomach. There's a place that she feels that pang of loneliness. But then there's the, I struggled with chronic pain for many years and physical pain.

And it ruined my life for a long time. And I didn't know what I was going to do. I truly didn't know what I was going to do. It was the first time I went to therapy was because I. Because of the physical pain. Yeah, because I didn't know. I was truly despairing. I had reached a point of kind of hopelessness.

And I thought I'd thrown money at trying to fix it. Yeah. I traveled the world. You described, you had the tinnitus, right? I had tinnitus, which was a loud ringing in my ears, which is still there, that never went away. But I also had accompanying that I had all sorts of head, constant physical pain in my head, my eye and my ear that just never went away. It made me feel dizzy. It made me feel ill.

It was throbbing constantly. And it just took me out of every experience of my life. I felt like I was completely on the outside of my life. And the funny thing is, when I went to therapy, I said to this therapist, I've made a decision that I'm just going to live for other people now. I'm going to live for my family. I'm going to live for my team. I'm going to, in my company, I'm going to live for the people that I coach. Because I know I can make their lives better, but I don't enjoy my life anymore.

Even what should have been joyous moments with family at Christmas. I remember one Christmas Eve where I was in our local town and it was in a coffee shop and I got really agitated with my brother over nothing. I remember feeling the sense that something's really wrong. like I'm really angry at my younger brother right now I'm picking a fight and then I said to my I looked to my mom and I said I got to go home like it was Christmas Eve I can't tell you Christmas is a big deal in our family we we love it we make a big deal out of it it's the happiest time for us and I said to my mom I have to go I got up out of this coffee shop as I left someone like cut across me

and like you know kind of like and I like felt myself get so angry like wanting to fight this person angry and I thought oh something's really wrong with me like I'm not I'm so deeply unhappy and it frightened me and that was like an ongoing experience me for a long time was just trying to function with that pain and so when I said to this therapist if I have this pain forever I'll never be happy again so for as long as this pain is here I'm just going to live for other people that had echoes of what this woman was saying to me if I have the pain constantly of wanting to to find love and not finding it, I'm never going to be happy. So both of us are asking, how do I live and find happiness in the context of a life with chronic pain? One is physical,

one is emotional, but the chronic pain nonetheless. And what I learned on that journey for myself is chronic pain has the component, which is the pain. In my case, it was the physical pain in my head and my ear. In her case, it was the pain of loneliness. But then there's the relationship that we have with the pain. And what is that relationship? And what makes that relationship better and what makes that relationship worse? I told myself a lot of stories about my pain and those stories turned it from pain in the moment to intolerable pain that I didn't know how I was ever going to live with. Right. Because then you create stories. Like there's no way I can go on with this pain my life will be my life is i here's some of the stories i told myself my life is

over i'm never going to enjoy anything again i couldn't eat certain foods or even have a sip of wine so i was like even food is ruined for me and that was one of my few kind of like escapes and even that's ruined for me i'm never going to be attractive to the person that i because i was single at the time it was like i'm not going to be attractive anymore to women because i feel like i'm about to snap when did the pain start though what what is 20s 28 maybe okay okay it's it's became existential for me like I really have to figure out my relationship with this and I started to learn tools to manage it and those tools they were life changing for me because they got me to there's a chapter I write in the book called happy enough that phrase to me is a life changing phrase

because what I realized in my life is happiness is not something I can relate to right now that's how I felt I can't relate to happiness and anyone who's like you just have to be happy I was like, you know, like I, I'm not even close to that experience. Self-development for a long time made no sense to me because of the idea of like optimizing peak performance and whatever. I was like, you're living in a different world. I'm not, I'm not thinking about peak performance. I'm thinking about like how to get through the day and not hate my life.

So I stopped thinking about how to be happy and I started connecting with like if I could just get to happy enough. We all struggle in some ways, right? We all have, whether it's our inner voice or limiting beliefs or negative self-talk. So can you want to talk a little bit about that belief? How do we get happy enough? Well, I like happy enough because it's achievable. I've been working with people in their love lives for a long time.

And when I would hear people say to other people, you just have to be happy and whole first before you meet someone. I would always cringe a little. Yeah. Because I'd be like, there's something a little disingenuous about this because half the people saying it weren't happy and whole at the moment they met their partner right right this person is like this whole thing that you need to become whole because then someone's going to fill this hole in you or something but we're always a work in progress so it's okay it's okay it's okay to be single and feel

sad about it yeah it's human it's more than okay it's actually human we all want to find love everyone and people want to find different forms of love and we find love in different ways but I truly believe what unites us is we all want to find love that is universal it's like the worst kept secret in the world that we all have to go around pretending we're indifferent to it because that's cool it's like I'm yeah you know if I find it I find it like I'm not in a right whatever and we all have to like feign indifference over this thing that we deeply want because there is this stigma this shame attached to looking for love. Well, I feel like that's what's so interesting about your evolution. And I love that you open the book being so real about that. Because again, you started at 19 and now you're

in your mid-30s. Like, that's quite a journey to be on starting out and being the expert and being like, you know, I don't have it all figured out, but you know, you can help people. And that I thought it was really interesting that you just said. Yeah, I didn't know. Like you were helping other people, but you weren't necessarily able to help yourself at that point. And I totally related to the part where people were like raising their hands like, why are you single? Are you single? And you're like, then you feel like imposter. Like I get this other night was doing a show, a live show. People were like, I'm talking like, are you married? Did someone say that? Yeah, they did. They did. Like, okay. I'm like, hey, but I can have sex

and not be married. That's a little different than Matthew Hussier because he's actually talking about really. But still, people, there's always this like trying to prove yourself, but we're, you know, we're just on a journey. But I love that like when you open your book, you like the pressure of being the expert and all that and how you, Just as sort of gone on from, to go back to what you said, like, getting the guy was your first book. And it was more about tactics and how to get the person, how to land the plane. But now you're like, well, what about when we reframe it as like, well, what about finding love? Like finding that person, like love, love life is a whole different thing.

It's a deeper journey. And it's, and it also deals with the complexities of life. You know, I never knew what to call myself, to be honest. I really didn't. I'm still uncomfortable with a relationship expert. I hate a dating expert. I didn't, you know, it never, what I was always interested in is how to, how can we connect more? How can we be happier?

How can we feel more confident? How do we find more peace in this part of our lives? Because life isn't simple. No one can tell you they're going to find you love in the next six months. We can, you know, I've created roadmaps in my career. for people to do that that massively up their chances of finding love faster but there are no guarantees in life so for me it was never i never saw myself as the expert in relationships i always saw it as i this work is deeply meaningful to me i i really really enjoy helping people who are in some

kind of pain find more peace that's always been my deep like i i realized that when My whole career, I've had people come up to me on the street and say, I found love because of you. I've married because of you. I've had that my whole life. But I started realizing I got even more of a kick out of someone coming up to me on the street and saying, you got me through the worst breakup of my life. Or I'm no longer, I was in a narcissistic marriage for 10 years. I'm no longer in that relationship because of your work.

That meant more to me. Something about helping people in pain meant more to me than just. the love stories of someone finding someone. That's so interesting that you get, okay, so what do you think it is about the pain? Why is that, have more of a charge for you? I think I have a healthy amount of, maybe a more than healthy amount of darkness. Yeah. In myself. And I know, we've talked about this too, because I have the negative self talk to and I'm really hard on myself. And I feel like we discussed this when I was on your show that it's kind of the same thing. And I think you also mentioned, well, I've just been listening to other things about like your

brothers too, like you're protective and you don't want anyone to be in pain. And so growing up an environment. I think so much of what you talk about your book, why I think this book is so different too, is that it talks about, yeah, we get all these patterns and we're dating the wrong people, but until we do the work and we look at like, where did this come from? And you were saying growing up an environment where you had to be hypervigilant, you had to see, is there something bad that's going to happen or how do I protect those around me? So maybe the connection there is that part of helping people from pain is that that was always like your first job maybe in your household. I think there's a lot of that. I think I grew up very fast. I've watched how bad

people's lives can implode. You know like one of my obsessions is there's so many of us find ourselves in these situations in life that we for many reasons find it hard to get out of or we find it hard to untangle from or to change from and in a lot of those situations they have dire consequences at some point in our life. Some people find that romantically. Some people have that with friend in their life a brother, a mother, a father, a someone. There's someone in their life. There's a relationship, a situation in their life that is like affecting them deeply. And what I've seen so much of in my life is that a lot of people need to have their life completely implode for them to decide to do something. So like they're kind of their rock bottom. Kind of, but the danger in Beth Macy, I think,

wrote a book. I want to say it's called Raising Lazarus, but it was about the opioid crisis. She was talking about this misconception about opioids that there is a rock bottom. You know, there's this kind of one, when people hit that rock bottom, they're going to ricochet back up again. And she said the problem with opioids is that when you hit rock bottom, you find that rock bottom has a basement and that that basement has a trapdoor and that, and you just keep going and going and going. And that is true of relationships too. When I'm in one of my events and a woman stands up and tells a story of a guy she has been seeing or a guy she's with or a guy she's married to or was married to or whatever, there'll be moments in the story where everyone hears the detail and says, and that was the moment you left. And then she doesn't say that.

she says and that was five years ago and then what happened is and you you keep hearing the next part of the story and the next part of the story thinking and that was the moment you hit rock bottom and you let but it wasn't it was there was still further to go and and i have watched so much i've seen so much pain in my life of people not you know hitting what we would think is rock bottom and then and then something even worse happens and then something even worse happens and and sometimes people go to the grave never getting out of those situations in fact it's quite common and some people's lives have to completely fall apart they have to go through the ultimate pain of losing everything of having their finances devastated of having their life devastated of having their trust

devastated of having their confidence devastated before they will be forced in many cases to do something different and that's my obsession when I say I have an obsession over this my obsession is what can I say or do to get someone to be brave enough to light the fuse to detonate their own life before an even bigger implosion is coming because that's what it takes. We have to sometimes be brave enough to light the fuse to detonate our own life. That is so hard. When someone breaks up with us, it's kind of like with a victim and we get to say,

they broke my heart, they cheated, they left, they went with someone else and now I'm on my own. But there's this kind of closure in that they killed it. But there are many situations in life where that person will never kill it. And you're going to be in this loop with someone. And for some people, this is a very, like, dramatic thing of being in a narcissistic marriage and all of the devastation that comes with that. And for other people, it's a different kind of implosion. It's from the age of, you know, 35 to 45, they had this person in their life that they were on and off with that they always had hopes for. They always thought this person would come around, would finally commit, would finally want the same things.

This person never went away. they never gave them the closure of just enough to keep them hooked to keep the micro dosing on them for 10 years 15 years and then all the while this person deep down is like my ultimate dream is to have a family and then as it does the year comes that that's no longer possible and then the person leaves too and they realize that not only have I given up this dream of mine and missed that window but the person I was doing it for turns out to not even be here anymore. That's another kind of implosion. So these are the kinds of things that this book is dealing with.

I mean, we just got right into it. It's like this is the book is like, it's sort of like if you've been in unhealthy relationship patterns, if you've been suffering either you're the one who's broke up with someone or you're the one who does the breaking up. Like it's still, it's suffering all around. But I love like, what was your implosion moment? because you do talk about how you went from being less vulnerable, you know, because of so many, and then you grew into being a more, the vulnerable man that sits before me today.

So can you talk more about what your moment is? Because you also, like, in your book, you say, unhealthy dating patterns are a way to keep us from our emotions. And that was such an interesting way to think because you were like, why do I keep dating bad people? Or why am I only attracted to the narcissists, you know? We get into unhealthy relationships and we just keep from. We just stay with things that don't work. So it's the cycles. And I'm wondering that's also related to maybe your own patterns too.

There's a way to connect all of that. Yeah. I've had, I think, a few implosion moments and some I've talked about publicly, some I haven't. I think for a long time I was running in a certain direction very fast. And things were working on the surface and that masked a lot of things that weren't in relationships or even in life i was like winning you know like things were going well and it looked like things you know it just looked like oh things are working for this guy and it was a good cover for things that weren't working under the surface and for things that i think i'd been running away from

for a for a very long time you know i think one implosion moment for me was getting to my late 20s and and realizing this this was even like before my chronic pain and some would argue it something to do with it but I realize I'm not feeling how I'm supposed to feel right now how I feel is not in line with I'm supposed to be happy right now this is supposed to be good this is supposed to so many of the things that I thought I wanted life to be about or I wanted to be able to do in life have happened is that when you started then on your journey like to therapy and realizing it no it took me it took me well close to it took me look getting to a point of this physical chronic pain getting basically ruining my life that that's what made me

I don't would ever know that you were suffering I never talked about I mean like you're doing videos you're prolific millions and millions of subscribers this last two years is like I think the last six months maybe even it's like the first time I'm ever really talking about it because for seven or eight years it was the one thing in life I was trying to forget and I thought if I talk about this publicly I'm going to get people kind of come up to me on the street and they're going to ask me about it or they're going to say I have chronic pain too and I was like I can't take it yeah I can't this I spend my day 24 hours a day I spend trying to forget this if people start coming and reminding me of it yeah trying to give me like try this thing

for it try this thing yes I'm gonna snap so I was like I can't I couldn't speak it anywhere because I was so afraid of it's suddenly becoming something that people talked to me about and the last thing I wanted in the world was people to talk to me about it I truly couldn't talk about it without breaking. And that's why I mean by happy enough, by the way. Because I got to happy enough, I was able to then make an impact. I couldn't make an impact with this thing when I was in the dark place that I was in all the time. So that was a big moment.

So you still have the pain, though, when you're managing it. But this is right? I changed some things about my life. I changed some things. I started looking at some of the chronic stresses in my life, some of the situations. in my life that were chronic stresses and I started to do things I hadn't ever been able to do and remove certain things. And that had a profound impact, weirdly. I mean, I never would have believed in that mind-body connection stuff in the same way that I do today. I truly saw that as

almost like the woo-woo side of things and I have an allergic reaction to anything that I consider to be kind of out there and woo-woo. But like it was truly apparent to me that, oh my God, so much of this is to do with stuff I haven't been dealing with and situations I haven't been dealing with. And now the ringing in my ears, I still have. We still have. But the other stuff is by doing the work, whatever it is, body work, that could be a whole another show. But going back to Happy Enough, that's also related to you're never satisfied, which I also love,

is that what is never satisfied, the journey being like, we're never going to get there, right? We're never, same kind of condition, right? Yeah, and that was, for me, I got to a point being single where I was like, well, The way I'm doing my love life is broken. Something's not working about it. I am, you know, going about it in a very dopaminergenic way. I'm like, I'm not, you know, I had come out of a relationship where I was anxious all

the time and where I was like. That relationship brought out your anxiety. Oh, for sure. Before that, I was, I've always been anxious. Right, like, let's be clear. No, no, no, but long before I even knew what anxiety was, I look back now and I'm like, oh, I've been anxious for a long time in my life, but I never called it anxiety because I just did, I never, if you just said to me at 25, you have anxiety, and I've been like, no, I don't,

what are you talking about? I don't identify with that. You didn't normalize it then. But I didn't, I've had, I've had anxiety in my whole life. That's been my constant, like, challenge. And, um, and so I think for a long time I chose relationships that made me feel like it never brought that out and then you know I think I had a relationship where I thought I felt very anxious and I was very much not in the driving seat and I thought this is good medicine for me like I need this

but I took that way too far okay you're like this is great this is something new now I'm the anxious one but no this isn't right either because it because the pendulum swung too far the other way where I had no safety and I felt completely at the mercy of this relationship and I lost myself and I detached from the things that were important to me and the things that made me me. And I started to feel unimportant. I started to feel like I'm, you know, I lost, I lost my confidence. I lost myself. I was like, God, I'm just so not you. Not me. And I, you know, people around me at that time felt that it wasn't me. And they were like, oh, you know, our Matthew is not happy. And I couldn't, just for me, I was so in it at the time that I didn't, I couldn't connect to the fact that I,

everything I told people not to do when I was coaching people was what I was doing in this relationship. You're doing, but you're like, I know, like, I sometimes are going through things. My friends will say to me, what if I called into your show, Emily? What would you tell me? You know, and I have to think, like, I do have the right answers here, but sometimes just because we know all the answers or we know what to help other people, it's just a lot harder to help ourselves, which I think is a lot of what you're sharing now.

And everyone, everyone has their thing. I think of it as the wall. You know, I talk about it in the book. There's a race car driver, Mario Andretti, who said, his tip for race car driving was, don't look at the wall. Your car goes where your eyes go. And that metaphor for me has always stuck because I realized in, oh my God, I keep crashing into the wall. Like one of the things that for me has been hard my whole life is trusting people.

And there's reasons for that. And I have deep history with that. But it's like, I really struggled to an extent I didn't even realize until in the last few years, but I really, really struggled to trust people. And that has affected me my whole life. It's affected my friendships. It's affected my relationships. It's affected how much I give to people because I've spent my life being worried about being

taken advantage of. And so. And that's why we do that. just to explain it like i think this is again why it's similar like we give to people healers basically helping people but so we're not going to take it like if we give we won't be able to be taken advantage right because that's not a relationship where you have to worry about that yeah i realized how much i struggled with trust and that was the wall that i like just kept crashing into because i kept you know you if you if you focus on the wall all the time you'll

find it you'll find you'll find that thing and you'll find the person who's untrustworthy you'll find the situation where you gave more than someone else did you'll and you'll focus on that and you'll say see this isn't why i don't do this i started to see that not just with myself but i saw it with people in relationships everywhere i coached a woman who said you know he's been growing great with this guy but then he didn't invite me to this thing with his friends on a saturday in the daytime he had a little gathering and he didn't invite me and it brought out all of her abandonment wounds and everything she was worried about with being her again and comes from deep history for her but on the day that he had this little get together, she texted him and she said, why didn't you invite me?

And he said, I'm so sorry. I was just having a little gathering with my friends. By the way, before this, even by her account, he had been great. It's not like he had had a history of being difficult or being untrust. She got triggered because like, she got so triggered. And he said, can I call you later? And he's texting her this while he's with his friends. He said, can I call you later? And she said, don't bother.

And then, of course, that's what happened was her wall is I'm going to be abandoned. and she's staring at that wall all the time. She's always looking for the place that she's going to be abandoned is what we're saying. Right. Like if we're looking for someone to take advantage of us or to abandon us or to gaslight, we're going to find that. We're going to find it. Yeah, we're going to find it.

That's what's comfortable to us. Yeah. And especially because we live in a world where it's complicated and people are messy and people aren't perfect all the time. And there's like she found her wall there. And instead of like, check. to see like, oh, well, let me actually have a call with this person. Let me explain that today got to me in a way that I'm, maybe I'm a little embarrassed to say,

but I was really hurt that you didn't invite me to your thing. And I don't know if I have a right to be hurt, but I was hurt. And instead of having that conversation, she said, don't bother. What she did was she took the car and she said, well, if there's a wall, I'm just going to crash into it myself. And she abandoned him before he could abandon her. So everyone can relate to this stuff. And again, like the thing that I am fixated on with people right now is we all have our, every one of us has our reality and we don't realize for the most part that it is our reality.

We just think it's life, right? And that's not our fault. When a dolphin grows up in captivity and learns to do backflips for food and jump through hoops and a human gives it a fish, if that dolphin was released into the wild tomorrow and it started doing backflips, flips in the ocean for food or swimming up to boats thinking that those humans were going to give them food. We wouldn't say the dolphin had a self-worth problem. We wouldn't say the dolphin was broken. We'd say, no, no, no, this is the behavior the dolphin learned in the tank. And when the dolphin was in the tank, it didn't know it was a tank. It thought it was the world. When we grew up in our tank, we didn't think it was the tank. We thought it was life. So we go out into life and we keep doing the same things over and over, thinking that whatever our experience is is how life is. And at some point, if we can just develop the humility to say, my experience of life might not be the

only experience of life. There might be other people who are having a different go of it than me. And if they are, what could I be curious about in learning? I think curiosity is a very powerful word. cute yeah let's get curious what are my what are my beliefs yeah what are my beliefs and why are those people having a different experience than me what's going on over there don't think you have to believe something new that's the hard part like when people are like you just have to believe i'm like give me a break you know how hard it is to change a belief that was apparently what we're just going to adopt like go to the buffet of great beliefs and just go i'll take that one like it doesn't work like pretty wired if you've been cheated on your whole life or betrayed your whole life you don't

people can't just go to the buffet of beliefs and go, I'm just going to believe that people are amazing and that people can be trusted. That's not what your wiring has told you. Your nervous system is built to expect this. So what we can do instead is just get curious. I remember I grew up and because of my trust issues, jealousy was like a thing for me. I would get jealous and I would like look for ways that I was going to get betrayed or that I was going to. And I remember I had people in my life that didn't get jealous, who were in healthy relationships. And I'd be like, I would sit there and I would ask them dumb questions. I'd be like, so wait, what would you, if your partner was doing this and whatever, what would you do? And they would tell me their answer. And I'd realize they thought

completely differently about it. And I'd go, oh my God, they have a relationship I value. I admire these people. And when they get to that junction, I go left and they go right. What if I went right? Yeah. Just to use that example, jealousy isn't my trigger. I haven't had that a lot, but I know that people do. So I'm always so, aren't you jealous? Don't you worry? And I don't know why? Because my tank I grew up in, that wasn't part of it. Like sometimes I think people have jealousy because like their parents were jealous or the mom was always like, you better watch out for that neighbor. they're going to steal your husband or your partner. And I never just had that.

For whatever reason, everyone in my family was out for themselves. So, you know, it is interesting to look at, I don't have to live in this way just because I have jealousy or I've trust issues or whatever it is. Like, what you talk about is that we are not set. Like, just because it's the way it's been or we always date these kind of people, we are part of that problem or that pattern. And so if we, you talk about retraining our instincts, right? like our instinct might be to do one thing, but we can retrain ourselves, right, to think another

way. Is that? Yeah, there's a, we have to start seeing our instincts as just the survival instincts we learned. They're not the truth and that doesn't make them the best instincts we could have. It's, you know, whenever I hear like, trust your instincts, I'm like, yeah. It's a hard one for me too. I'm like, I know. Is it my thought?

Is it my obsession? Am I anxious? Well, I would say that it's a better phrase to say trust your intuition. but the problem is most of us aren't in touch with that. What we have is instincts. And our instincts aren't as trustworthy. No. Our instincts are what we learned to do to survive in the tank.

What we learned to do to survive in the tank, it might have been a really weird tank. Yeah. And it might have been like, those aren't good survival skills if you want a healthy relationship. So you have now people who someone pulls away from you and stops texting you and your instinct is to text them twice as much. that's a bad instinct. Because you want to feel safe in that moment. Yeah, so you form and you're like, you know, trying to just get them to like you and you try and you value the, you know, the instinct when someone becomes scarce to value them twice as much. Because you think that if they're hard to get, they must be valuable.

That's a bad instinct. Yeah. And those are the people who say they're dating the toxic people or they're why do I keep dating the bad people or whatever. It's because it's that instinct from childhood, from wherever it feels familiar. There's an instinct that when we. have a crush on someone and we have a great date with them to just essentially drop our entire lives. Right, exactly.

I don't need those classes. I don't need this job. All I need is to hole up in a love nest with this person. Oh my God. Because it feels so good. Yeah. We can normalize all those feel good hormones too that are going on that also aren't real. It's very hard.

It's very tricky. How do we become the person to attract the person? Like, how do we be the person we want to find? Like, that's the bigger picture. Are you saying like we got to work on all of our stuff? Like, how do we do? that like do we have to become the person well i think that we i'm a big believer in no one will value you if you don't value yourself and valuing yourself is an interesting thing you have to start

we're most of us go through life looking for the world to tell us what our worth is and it's completely backwards we have to tell the world what our worth is it's not don't wait for anyone to tell you what you're worth they're waiting for you to tell them and the way you tell them is by having standards and boundaries, things you will and won't accept behavior that you want to be around. And if you don't get that behavior, you stop being around that person. And a huge part of that comes from, you know, you go, well, where do standards come from? How can I be brave enough to have standards? How can I develop my self-worth to the point where I can actually have standards? We'll be back with more Matthew Hussey after the break.

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Thanks to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. In this book, there's a chapter for everyone who gets it. There's a chapter called Core Confidence. I promise you it will change the way you look at confidence forever because it has an uncommon way of looking at where self-worth can come from. A lot of us, when you think about self-love and you say to people, why should you love yourself? People will say because they'll start coming up with reasons, like logical reasons, like well,

because I'm a good person and I'm kind and I take care of people and I go out of my way for people and I'm a good person to my family and I work really hard and I they they come up with all these reasons and I always think that's a trap because if you give yourself if you think you need all those reasons to love yourself then what do you do when you're none of those things yeah what do you do when you have a bad day what do you do when you're a little selfish what do you do when you screw up are you not lovable then so we have to have a more robust system for loving ourselves It has to come from something much more fundamental. Now, what is that thing?

I believe we don't need to think we're special in order to love ourselves. That's the mistake. We think, in order to love myself, I have to start telling myself I'm special. And it's really hard to believe you're special because guess what? We're one in eight billion people on the planet. Like, none of us are that special. Right. We all want to be special, don't we?

We want to be special, but our brain logically goes, you're one of eight billion. And there's lots of people who are really good at shit and they're really good looking. and they have loads of great stuff going for them and they have like we don't feel that special so we go well how can I love myself I really don't feel special in comparison to everyone else it's the wrong way to look at it the right way to look at it is this out of eight billion people on this earth you are the only one the only person out of those eight billion who is responsible for the human that is you you're the only one who has custody of that particular human being And if you look at it that way, what you realize is your whole job in life is to give that

human the best life you can. It's not to judge this human. It's not to look at what this human has in relation to other humans. It's kind of pointless when you realize I can't exchange my human. So if I can't exchange my human for another human, it's irrelevant. My only job while I'm here is to give this human the best life I can. And it's a bit like, you know, when you ask a parent, why do you love your child? They don't say because they did well in English class yesterday or because they were really kind today. They say, what are you talking about? They're my child. Right. And you're saying, so I love this reframe. It's like, we are our own children. We love ourselves like we love our children. Like we shouldn't even have to. And if we could give ourselves

that kind of love or even like, like you say we don't always like ourselves, but we should love ourselves. But it's okay if some days we don't like ourselves. You don't have to like yourself to love yourself because loving yourself is not a feeling. It's your job. It's our job. No one else is going to ever care for us the way that we do. But yet, we can be so hard on ourselves and we keep pushing ourselves, but literally it's our only job. And of course, if we have kids, we're a better parent. I really enjoyed that point because it's like if we really think of it that way, it's like the whole putting your own oxygen mask on first, I think people have kids sometimes like, well, that's the great love, but then we're still hard on ourselves. So to say, no, my job here is

Like, I have to love myself. Yeah, you don't sleep on the job. Yeah. Don't leave your post. You got, like, where have you been? This human is suffering. Your job is to take care of this human. And if you wake up tomorrow and you go, how do I give this human the best experience of

life today? How do I take care of this human, nurture this human, stand up for this human today? What would I do today if I was trying to give this human the best life possible? We will make a lot of. of different decisions to the ones we made yesterday. Suddenly that toxic person who's coming in and out of your life, you'd be like, I'm never fucking texting that person again. Why, I'm not letting this person near my human.

How have I given, how have I let this person be near my human for the last five years when all they do is poison them? And that's like getting them out of their tank. They don't deserve it. It's still loving themselves, right? Like, it's like when people go cold or they ghost or they blame themselves. You spend a lot of time talking about how we, in the book, about how like we like don't even try to investigate why you got ghosted like you don't even

need to go down a road and say like maybe this happened maybe that's like you'll remember one you'll probably never know but number two it's usually not it's probably not even about you and just move on right in a way like you I just think we have to get good in life at giving ourselves closure it's not closure is kind of bullshit closure is not coming from the outside and and there are some people who will intentionally never give you closure. You know why? Because they want to leave the door open so they can come back. So of course they're not going to give you closure. Why doesn't someone give you closure when they ghost you? Because they might want to come back. So they're not going to give you closure. They're not going to say I'm not interested because then you might not respond when

they reach out again. But if I ghost you, I confuse you. And then when I come back four weeks later and say, what's up? How are you? I'm relying on the fact that you're confused and that you're not going to speak up for yourself. I'm relying on the fact that you're going to go along with this weird situation and pretend it's okay and just see me again. And by the way, that's just happening in dating all the time. You're talking to someone every day and then for two weeks they go cold and then two weeks later they message you and say, what are you up to tonight? They're relying on the fact that you are going to think that it's weak for you to admit that that hurt you or that that was strange behavior to you or that that's not enough for you,

and that instead, you'll think that the cool thing to do is feign indifference to their behavior. So you'll now come back instead of being like, I'm not going to tell them that this has affected me. Instead, I'm just going to be cool. So they send you a message and say, what are you up to tonight?

And you go, eh, I'm just seeing friends. What are you up to? And they're like, cool. You've just tacitly approved this entire dynamic. We think that we're holding the power by mirroring their bullshit behavior. but instead we're enabling this bullshit behavior.

We're approving it by not pointing it out. Because we don't feel, yeah, because we're trying to play it cool. Like, oh, no big deal. But what the right thing to do there would be like, thought we were having a good time, whatever, not cool, have a nice life. Shine a giant light on the elephant in the room. Yeah. Be like, oh.

Don't let there be an elephant in the room. Shine a light on it and be like, you know, that thing's weird, isn't it? Yeah. We were having a good time. I didn't hear from you for two weeks. Now you're texting me again. Like you have to be willing to shine a light on it. Yes, we have to.

Mitch Album said, if you don't like the culture, don't buy it. Create your own. Create your own. I love it. And in our love lives, we have to start, you know what's a word that's not used enough in a love life context? Leadership. We rarely ever use the word leadership in a romantic context, in a love life context.

We talk about it in business all the time. We talk about it in personal leadership all the time. Not many love life books talk about leadership, but leadership is the ability to lead with your culture. We have to go from mirroring to modeling, mirroring other people's culture and the behavior they bring to us to modeling the kind of behavior we want to see from someone else. So we lead by being it first. And I'll tell you right now, this is going to, people I'm sure will be tickled by this.

I was dating my wife Audrey, I was the guy for a minute who left, I went back to America, we met in London, I went back to the States and I was like, I can't do that, I can't do a long distance relationship. And we were dating at the time. We weren't in a relationship, but gradually she started to feel me pull away. And it got to the point where I pulled away so much that it was like there was nothing there anymore. I then sent a message to her and I roll my eyes at it now, but I sent a message to her saying, I miss you. And this was after like a couple of weeks of no contact, nothing, not trying, like very bare minimum. Now, if she was mirroring me in that moment, she would have been like, I miss you too. How are you?

It's been like, you know, what's going on? She didn't do that. She, I'll tell you, she modeled the culture she wanted to see. She sent me a message and she said, hey, I hope you're well. I don't really know what to say when you send me a message like this. We haven't really been that close for a while now. And rightly or wrongly, this message comes across as a bid for attention. It was one of the most brilliant, brave, leading messages that I've ever received in my life. And if you look at the language of that, everything about it was powerful. Firstly, she's still warm, right? If you look at the best, people who have the best standards who are really grounded in them, they don't lose their warmth and their kindness when they're having a standard. They can maintain all of that

beauty at the same time as having a standard. So she said, hey, I hope you're well. There was still warmth there. But then she said, when you send something like this to me, I don't really know what to say, which is her way of saying, this is really confusing. Yeah, we were having a good time now it's been a few weeks right and and and what you're saying is completely out of sync with your behavior you're saying you miss me but i barely heard from you she then said we haven't been that close for a while now so that's her shining a light on the elephant in the room and then she said rightly or wrongly and then she said and rightly or wrongly and i think she put those in like parentheses rightly or wrongly is a beautiful phrase by the way because it takes ego out of the

equation. It's her way of saying, I'm not judging you and I'm not pointing at you and saying you're a bad guy or that, you know, you truly meant to do this in a malicious way or anything like that. She's just going, rightly or wrongly, I could be wrong. Rightly or wrongly, this message comes off as a bid for attention. She's saying, I might be wrong, but it feels like that's what this is. Tell me if I'm wrong. And it was, I remember feeling completely kind of naked with that message. Okay, now I'm going to ask your five quickie questions we ask all of our guests. Quicky, ready?

Whatever answer comes to your mind first. What's your biggest turn on? I think like mentally connecting. Yeah. Yeah. Biggest turn off. Unkindness. What makes good sex?

No judgment. Something you would tell your younger self about sex and relationships. You're not perfect. so be compassionate towards the imperfections in other people what's the number one thing you wish everyone knew about sex that it's play yeah have more fun i love it that's good thank you matthew that's it for today's episode thank you so much for listening to sex with emily and if you love the show please like subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcast and hey share this with a friend or a partner, it might just spark something. It usually does.

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