The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Make Dating Fun Again—AND Meet The Love Of Your Life

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Matthew Hussey, a world-renowned dating expert and coach, discusses the challenges of dating today and how you can face them to find love–whether that be IRL or on a dating app! the secret to actually enjoying the process of dating (even when it sucks) how much to control your dating life versus let go  how to stop your standards from going out the window when you meet a new person how to know the characteristics your ideal partner needs to have for a successful long term relationship  tips for dating apps (to enjoy them more AND find more success) what to do if you’re in your 30s, you want children, and you haven’t met the right person yet how to heal from old relationship scars before they impact your new relationships what to do when it feels like there are no high quality men how to tell what are true red flags vs. nitpicking  and so much more! For more from Matthew, you can find him on Instagram @thematthewhussey or his website www.matthewhussey.com. You can listen to the LOVE life Podcast on your platform of choice and pre-order Love Life, out on April 23rd, where books are sold. To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order my new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  This episode is sponsored by: LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/LizMoody a to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order. AG1: visit drinkag1.com/lizmoody and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Great Lakes Wellness: use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first purchase at greatlakeswellness.com. ZocDoc: go to ZocDoc.com/LizMoody and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and book a top-rated doctor today. Osmia Skincare: get 20% off your first order at osmiaskincare.com with code LIZMOODY. Previous episodes referred to in this episode: Why So Many Young People Are Getting Cancer + What You Can Do TODAY To Protect Yourself with Dr. Sanjay Juneja Solving All Of Your Sleep Problems with Insomnia Expert Dr. Jade Wu 5 Proven Strategies For Getting Out Of A Slump + Answering Your Qs! The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life. Whether we're learning why cancer rates are rising in young people and exactly how we can protect ourselves, getting tips from an insomnia expert to solve all of our sleep problems, or talking through five proven strategies for getting out of our biggest slumps. And yes, those are all real episodes and they're linked in the show notes if you want to listen. Today's episode will completely change the way that you approach finding the love of your life.

I am so excited to welcome Matthew Hussie to the podcast. A world-renowned dating expert in coach Matthew is the New York Times bestselling author of Get the Guy, and he helps millions of people create the love lives of their dreams on his mega-popular social media channels, his podcast, and his YouTube channel. His newest book, Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily, No Matter what, comes out April 23rd, and it is a beautiful book. It's so full of vulnerable, personal stories, and really amazing, actionable advice. I will say I came into this conversation thinking it'd be more of a straightforward Q&A about dating. And while it is jam-packed with pragmatic advice,

really, really interesting tips that I have not heard anywhere else, it also ended up being deeply philosophical about how any of us can identify the life, we really need, we really want and actually create it. We get into the secret to actually enjoying the process of dating, even when it sucks. How much to control your dating life versus let go? How to stop your standards from going out the window when you meet a new person. How to know which characteristics your ideal partner needs to have for a successful long-term relationship. Tips for dating apps, both tips to enjoy them more and tips to find more success on them. what to do if you're in your 30s, you want children, and you haven't met the right person yet.

How to heal from old relationship scars before they impact your new relationships. What to do when it feels like there are no high quality men. This is a complaint that I hear from all of my incredible girlfriends. And I really pushed Matthew on this. So I hope that our conversation around this is helpful. How to tell what are true red flags versus nitpicking and so much more. It's funny. I haven't dated in years, but Matthew's wisdom is just so applicable to so many of the choices that we're making in our lives and the conversations that I'm having with my friends all of the time.

And I cannot wait for you to listen. Please share it with any of your friends who are out there dating and share Matthew's beautiful book with them and tag us both on Instagram and let us know your thoughts in the episode. I am at Liz Moody and he is at the Matthew Hussey. All right. Let's get right into it with Matthew Hussey. Matthew Hussie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I just want to kick it off by saying that one of my best friends in the entire world is the world's biggest fan of yours.

And she completely credits you with not only finding happiness when she was single and when she was dating, but also with finding a relationship that she's really, really happy and that she's been in for a few years now. You literally just summed up my new book. That's so funny. I've been thinking in these last few weeks, my elevator pitch for the way I described this book, because I've got so many things that I'm proud of in it, I've been wanting to have it be more succinct. But you basically just nailed it because it is the search to find love, which we all want. But also, how do you deal with all of the difficult emotions and feelings that you have on the road to finding love, which people really, really struggle with? You open the book by saying if you find love from reading this book, it's amazing,

but also if you figure out that you're happy or single right now, it's amazing too. So I do think the ethos of the book, did you mean it as a double entendre? Like, I want you to love your life and to have a good love life. Yes. Yeah, and that's a really strong. It really was intended to be that double meaning. I think there are three relationships that affect the quality of our lives. The first relationship is our relationship with other people.

The second relationship is our relationship with ourselves. And the third relationship is our relationship with life itself. And I'm passionate about all three of those because there are three relationships that you're always going to be in no matter what. Even if you don't have a romantic relationship, you're still in relation to other people in life. And so those relationships cause us a lot of pain when they're not right. And of course, when we want to find love and we haven't found love, it's not just our relationships with other people that are a source of pain in our life. But we always are. also start to suffer in the other two relationships as well, because you start to think there's

something wrong with you after a while. You worry that you're broken, and that affects your relationship with yourself, because it leads to a lot of self-resentment, self-hatred. Then there's, of course, the relationship with life that starts to suffer, because even if we're happy in our career or in other parts of our life, when we feel this absence, at the heart of our lives, when we feel like we desperately want to find love and we haven't found it, we can start to love life a lot less and we can start to be mad at life and we can start to feel like our life today bears no resemblance to where we thought it would be. So they're all connected. I love that you point that out for a number of reasons. One though, which I think is huge,

is that it points out that dating is an opportunity to develop a relationship with yourself, which means that you're not just dating towards an end goal, which means that if you're not at that end goal, you haven't failed at dating. Dating is an exploration opportunity to deepen your relationship with yourself, which I think is a really beautiful permission-giving reframe for a lot of people. You have to have that because otherwise, how will you keep going? How will you keep putting yourself out there? How will you keep subjecting yourself to possible rejection, poor behavior, the kinds of things we encounter when we are in the wild west of trying to find love? I try these days to some extent to avoid the word dating because the people I speak to, they want to find love.

They don't want to date. You know what I mean? That would be the ideal, wouldn't it? I can find love without having to date to find. it. It's a hard thing. And it gets harder because our love life is the area we feel like we cannot control in the way that we control other areas of our life. It feels like if we want to lose weight, we can change our diet, we can train more, and our body will change. It may not change in exactly the way you want to the extent that you want, that your body will change. If you want to, you know, have more money in your bank account. There are certain things we can do reliably, whether it's saving, investing, creating something, selling something. There are things we can do to impact that. When it comes to our love life, we have no corresponding amount of control. We can

control some of the things that might generate opportunities, but you could go on a date every day for the next five months. And there's no guarantee that your love life will have changed, at least in the outcome by the end of that. You might not have found a partner. So you have to find more ways to see the value and the meaning in that process than simply the person that I end up in a relationship with at the end of it. I really believe that you have to see your desire for love, your search for love as just a part of your life,

as an expression of a part of you that won't be silenced. I've come across plenty of people who have had so much pain in their lives that they really feel like opting out of the whole thing altogether. And sometimes we need that for a while. But sooner or later, the part of us that wants to find love will reassert itself. It's like this limb that's there that eventually won't be ignored. It's still there. It's still a part of us.

and it's a crucial part of us. So how do we express that? How can I find a way to give love and to experience love and to still express myself sexually and romantically, even when it feels like the thing that I want isn't here yet? It's a tough question, by the way. I love the sentiment. We love pragmatic action tips.

We love to ground it as much as possible. How are we actually doing that when we feel like, We're in a state of waiting. Well, to me, there's always a sense of peace that comes from knowing you're doing everything you can. And I think a lot of us don't have peace because we feel like we're not controlling the variables that we can control. And then, like, every night we go to bed.

On some level, we feel like we let ourselves down a little bit because we can feel like we've almost given up on ourselves. We've denied ourselves the possibility. The regret of not having taken some form of action, I think, does add up. And eventually that regret, I think, is heavier than the weight of rejection in the short term. So right now, for anyone who's saying, truly I have a desire to get back out there. Maybe I'm afraid. I don't know how I'm going to do it.

But I know I would like to get back out there. Start with whether when you look at your life, you have the kind of life. that brings new people into it. Because it's all very well going out, you know, to your local coffee shop in a sassin mode, hoping that you'll meet one person that will be the love of your life and you just bump into them by accident. But it helps to have the kind of life that is self-regenerative in terms of bringing you new people.

And that might mean you have to break into some new communities. It might mean you have to break into some new activities. If you meet one person in a coffee shop, you met a person. But if you meet someone who becomes a great friend, who also happens to be a very social person who has a lot going on in their life, they might invite you to five different events this year. And in those events, you meet an entire new ecosystem of people. It's kind of no different to business, right? You can get access to just entire new communities of people.

And then that puts many more opportunities on the table for you. And of course, the next thing you have to ask yourself is, when I'm doing that, how proactive am I being in those environments? When I started writing this book, I was single and I was in a place of heartbreak. And I finished this book editing it on my honeymoon. and so I've been through every stage of pain and grief and healing and being single and loneliness and then finding someone dating and then getting married. I've been through every single stage through the pages of this book and people who read

the book will see a lot more personal vulnerability from me than maybe they have in the past. But if I even take the way that I met my wife, my friend invited me to an engaging party in London. It was his engagement party and I never even really see this friend. So it would have been really easy for me to say no. I live in Los Angeles but I was only home for a couple of weeks for Christmas. And he said, well, you come? And I said, okay, I'll come. I didn't really want to go, but I was like, it'll be fun. I'll see some people. And when I was on my way there, my friend who was driving me there said, there's this girl there that all the boys are in love with and they're all afraid you're going to steal her. And when I walked in, very quickly,

I was like, I think that's the person they're talking about. I think I have this right. She said the first words to me because I was watching boxing on a TV. There was a big fight on that night that I really was like, I didn't want to miss it. So I was watching this fight. And she asked me about the boxing. Something she's never done since, by the way. She's never shown one ounce of interest in any form of pugilism since that day. But she asked me about it. She asked me a question about how it all worked. And I ended up in a conversation with her and we ended up speaking for many, many hours that night, literally into the early hours of the morning. We ended up ignoring everyone else and just talking for the whole night. I just look at that and I go, what's the basic

structure of how that was possible? And by the way, for anyone out there who's listening to this, I hate dating apps. I just hate this current landscape where everyone keeps telling me I have to be on the apps. I could never be on the apps because my time as a coach helping people in their love lives, I started to get very known at the time where apps became the go-to place. So while everyone else complained about apps, I had FOMO. I tried being on the apps once for a day. And Elvis Juran, one of the biggest radio show hosts in the country who was a friend of mine who show I'd done a bunch called me live on the air. Oh my God. And said, so one of our producers has just seen you. I can't even remember what it was. I think it was Bumble or something. But they called me. And by the way,

in my head, I half had an excuse because we were doing some Valentine's Day. Oh, you're like, research. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, half true. Half true. We really did go on there for like, I want to see what's going on because I can't learn about this unless I'm. I'm on there, but also inside I was like, and also I'd really like to do this. Like, I really would like to be on the apps. I was on there for one day and he called me on the air and said, so we have learned that you are on Bumble, Matthew Hussie, and tell us about that. And it was like this funny, silly moment, but I was on there for five minutes and immediately

it became a thing. So I don't think I can use the apps. I don't think they're for me. But what it meant was I really had to go old-fashioned with it. Like my love life, it was about where I went, who my communities were, who I would meet in person. And when I look at the structure of how I met my wife, it was someone invited me somewhere. Okay, so for that to happen, I had to have a someone who was going to invite me somewhere. Okay, I then said yes.

So I had to be in a state of mind where I was not just taking. the easy road of staying in watching Netflix and being like, I can't be bothered to do this. Which, by the way, I have been on the other side of 90% of my life because I am not missed to like go out all the time, party animal, want to be sociable. I'm an introvert who really, really, really likes my house. Oh, there's a party going on somewhere. I'm there. That's not me. So whenever someone says to me, I'm an introvert, I struggle with this advice to get out there. I'm like, yeah, I get it. It took every ounce of energy for me to ever do anything. But I said yes. And then when I was there, someone in the dynamic had to say something. And how many

times do we find ourselves in a situation where we don't say anything? We censor ourselves and we get in our heads and we just let the opportunity pass us by. It's not like there was anything revolutionary about what my wife Audrey said that night is that she said something. And that something became an instant green light for me to actually engage. And by the way, if she hadn't said something, I would have said something. But that's not always the case. Sometimes you don't say something. They might have liked to talk to you, but they're also not going to say something. That happens more often than not. So for anyone out there who is saying, I don't want to wait around anymore, it's about looking at what are some of the fundamental things in my life that have to shift,

for more, I think of it as like atoms colliding, at some point the atoms have to collide. You and another person have to collide. And it has to be someone who's right for you with the right values, who's also ready, that means you have to collide with a bunch of people to get to that person. So is your life, your mindset and your social skills as well set up for those collisions to happen and to happen enough that some, Somewhere along the way, you're going to collide with the right person. And of course, one of the things I talk about in the book as well is how do you manage your

state of mind in the meantime so that you're not coming back to your house every day or night, just feeling unhappy until you find love, which we cannot do because life is too short. Okay, I have about a million questions from that. Let's start with the state of mind first, though. I'm friends with a lot of very successful, very intelligent women, and they're used to setting their sights on something and being able to go after it in their life. And I think there's a very tricky thing happening with dating, like you've said, where you only have so much control in the situation. So how much are we going out and we're just saying, I'm letting it go, I'm living my best life. And how much is it actually helpful to apply those same things that have brought success to the rest of our life?

to our dating life. For some of them, let's say they find themselves in sales or at least in the business of trying to win business. How would they go after that person or that company that they really want to do business with? Now, you might say, well, they'd be really hungry and dogged about going after that person. But actually, there's a point at which if you keep calling that prospective client, they're going to start to get angry, frustrated, or eventually they're going to go,

I'm not sure what you have is as valuable as you keep saying it is because you do not let up. And it makes me wonder if you have anyone else to talk to. You can apply a lot more pressure when it comes to a business context. But even then, at a certain point, if a potential client feels desperation, they are going to get turned off. They are not going to want to do business with you. It's so interesting though because I feel like that can also show supreme confidence

in your offering. I always tell my friends if it's not a no yet, it's not a no. Like if you have no response, keep following up. I've gotten yeses on my 15th email. I have a life motto that's never be the one to say no to yourself. So I'm kind of like, what's the difference between desperate? and just being so confident that what you have to offer is good and the other person just needs to see it. But my guess is your advice to them wouldn't be only call this client.

Yeah, true. Okay. Right. You'd be like... Diversify. Yeah, there's a hundred other people you could be calling right now. So if you've become obsessed with this one client who doesn't actually see the value right now, then you might be getting skewed in how powerful or important you're making this one client. An abundance mindset would be, this isn't the only person in the world. There are other routes.

There are other avenues. We're in Hollywood right now. It's no different to the cliche of, you know, no is the sexiest word in Hollywood. When someone's asking you to be on a TV show and you're like, well, what's the whole deal first? Tell me what it's about. Tell me what the brand of the show is. Tell me what the tone of the show is. When you start asking those questions, immediately you become more attractive to that person.

Because the person who gets offered a TV show and immediately says, yes, oh, thank God, I was waiting for someone to ask. Immediately a producer is looking at that going, well, this person will do anything. We can get them to do anything because they just really want to be on TV. This is what we're really talking about here. What are the standards you have for yourself and for what you want going in? The subtitle of my book is how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily no matter what. Now, the raise your standards part begs the question, how do you start to raise your standards? What does that even look like? Part of the foundation of what gives us standards is a much deeper

level of confidence. And how do we access that confidence? Well, partly it's by not needing the thing that's in front of us. We may want the thing that's in front of us, but desperately needing it or, to be even more specific, needing it in the form of this person is a big part of the problem. You can need love in your life, but the big mistake that gets made is someone shows me a bit of attention. I happen to be really attracted to this person or think they're great or think they're admirable for whatever reason. They're charismatic. They're sexy. There's their heart. There's something about them. And immediately, if I'm not careful, I can obsess over this person. I can think I would do anything just to keep this person's attention.

And that's even worse if you now have elected them to be the highest potential for this thing you want most in life, which for a lot of people is a long-term relationship, for many it's marriage, and for many it's having a family. So now when someone gives you a bit of attention and you happen to like that person, immediately we start to give them an importance that they shouldn't actually have yet. And when we give them an importance they shouldn't have yet, our standards begin to go out of the window. So in a way, the question is, how do I stop someone becoming that important to me that quickly? Can you give me just one or two pragmatic ways we can stop doing that? Well, firstly, slow down the storytelling in your mind, because there is a story being told in our mind.

There are four levels of importance in any relationship. Level one is admiration. That's just where you think someone's great or hot or charismatic. The second level is mutual attraction. You're both attracted to each other. For one, this person knows you exist, but they're also attracted to you. There's chemistry or connection or both. The third level is commitment. That is you're not just attracted to each other, but the two of you have actually decided to go on some kind of a journey together. You're going to be exclusive.

You've decided to call each other your partner. You are on the road. You're together. And then the fourth level of importance is compatibility. Now, two people can say yes to each other, but it doesn't mean that they're fundamentally compatible, which is why there are so many relationships that have real commitment but end up making. making each other miserable. That could be for any number of reasons.

It could be that you don't enjoy doing the same things. It could be on a more fundamental level that you don't share the same moral compass. One person thinks it's fine to lie and another person is truly honest all the time. So that's a relationship that's going to break down despite the fact that both people are saying yes. You have to have all four of those levels. admiration, mutual attraction, commitment and compatibility for something to be the true valuable thing you're searching for. And probably 90% of the mistakes that I see made in finding love happen and the

heartbreak that happens happens because people are taking level two mutual attraction and giving it the ultimate importance. when actually, yes, mutual attraction is a prerequisite for a relationship, but on its own, without commitment and without compatibility, it's worthless. But as long as people are telling themselves that that's worth something, they're going to be in trouble because the moment someone doesn't text you back, you don't say, oh, that's interesting, that person didn't text me back. I guess they don't actually want commitment with me or in general and therefore they absolutely cannot be right for me. Instead, they say, this person's not texting me back. That's so

sad because we're so right for each other. Ah, that's such a powerful reframe. The idea that if you don't have all of these things, it's actually not the right relationship. It's nothing to do with you. There's nothing that you can do to change that. It's just not the right relationship in this moment in time. Yeah. And I think this idea of right person wrong time, there's something a little silly. about it. Like it's science fiction. It's like saying if they were five years older and more mature and in a different place in their life, then we would have been perfect for each other. But you have no idea what they're going to be like in five years or what you will be like in five years. That's a huge part of the science fiction is that your projection of who they're going to be is accurate.

By the way, that happens in reverse two when someone broke up with us two years ago and we're still not over it and we're saying, God, I just missed them so much. Even that science fiction, because you miss a ghost, you don't know who they are today. You knew them two years ago. You have no idea the person they are today, the ways they've evolved. If you started dating them again today, you'd both be dating a different person. Well, and one of the things that I love about your work is that you really talk about the dynamics of a couple together. So you're not supposed to be looking for check, check, check, check, this in a person, this and a person, this and a person. So when you're saying, oh, my ex is this, or if they were this in five years, really it's about how are you two interacting together in the

relationship? And that's a much more tricky dynamic to say what would happen now or what will happen in the future. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I don't think people realize when they are obsessing over someone who doesn't want them or doesn't work with them isn't in the same place, etc, etc. I don't think people realize just how important it is to have someone who knows how to handle you,

who you know how to handle, and how much of a great relationship exists because of that. You can have someone who struggles to trust because of everything they've been through in their life. And they may come across someone who hasn't got the patience for someone who is struggling to trust.

It's not on their radar. They don't get it. They don't understand it. They don't have the empathy for it. They don't have the generosity of spirit to make space for the fact that you need a little more sensitivity around certain things. That doesn't make that person a bad person, but it does make them wrong for you. And yet we focus on, well, they have this, they have this, they're my dream person.

I'm so physically attracted to them. but we should be looking for compatibility in these things that we really need compatibility in. Yeah, someone who gets us, someone who sees us. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out are good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline, and what I've learned has

genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient, more get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to

fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains Eurolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondure increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this,

and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support your cells and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies.

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I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference and you're kind of like, do, do I? Do I? And this I genuinely do.

Because it's clearing the senescent cells, it doesn't just target one thing. So my skin looks firmer. It looks glowier. The texture feels dramatically smoother. And I feel like you can see that too. I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that like sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on.

this does not do that, but it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. One Skin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies in over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up. For a limited time, get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at Oneskin.co with code Liz. How do we know what those things are? The things that really matter for us in a relationship. A really good question you can ask.

A lot of people's painful cycle is going from somewhat exciting people who make them miserable to people who feel safe who make them doubt whether they would the right person. They oscillate between those two things over and over again. They're either safe and bored or they're excited and miserable and suffering with someone. In order to find a healthier kind of love, we have to rewire ourselves because a lot of us have been chasing the wrong things our whole life. And that's not our fault. The way that our nervous system has gotten wired up, our models for love, the way we react to

what we think is attractive and what's not. that got wired at a point in our life where we were not making conscious decisions. It just happened. And then we pay the price for that in our adult lives. And we feel broken and we feel like there's something wrong with us and we feel crazy. But we're not crazy. We're not broken. It's just that we've developed some bad instincts.

And our bodies are reacting to the wrong things through no fault of our own. Now, if all of that happens unconsciously, the way out is consciousness and intentionality. The first thing I say is you don't have to believe you can change or that you can find something different. You just have to make change necessary because you have to at least know that you can never do that again. That thing that crushed you, that thing that hurt you so badly, that kind of relationship with that kind of person.

you just have to know for sure that you can never do that again. And when you come to that conclusion that was a special kind of hell you can never go back to, you don't need confidence. People like, if you were more confident, you would change. Actually, if you're in enough pain, you'll change. It has nothing to do with confidence in that moment. You just think I never can go back to that. So that's the first step is make change necessary. So if change is necessary, then we have to ask ourselves, to what? What's the thing I'm going for? next time that's different to what I went for last time. And a really good question to ask yourself as you start that process is this. What was missing last time that by missing that thing,

I was utterly miserable. It was a kind of hell. What was the thing that was missing? And by the way, that doesn't just mean in a relationship that you couldn't wait to get out of. I'm talking about the relationships that you desperately held on to. The ones that you were white knuckling where you thought, I can't afford to lose this person, where you didn't realize how deeply unhappy you were because you were so busy trying to still secure this person. And when all of your bandwidth is taken up by trying to hold on to someone, you're not even thinking about how unhappy you are. Everyone else in your life is, they all can see it.

They can see how miserable you are, how you're anxious all the time, how you're not yourself anymore. They can see that. But all we can see is, I cannot lose this person. Well, when you look back to that relationship, what were you missing? Was it loyalty? Was it a true teammate? Was it someone who considered you in their decisions? Someone who paid attention to your feelings.

Someone who met your needs. Someone who gave you empathy. someone who truly accepted you for who you were and made you feel comfortable to truly be the most vulnerable version of yourself versus having to constantly live up to some idea of something you thought would impress them all the time. What were you missing? It's a very, very powerful realization when you can look back on a certain relationship with someone that you thought you would die if you lost and realize even though I thought I would die if I lost, person, there was something I was missing in it that made it impossible for me to be happy while I

had them. And when you know that, you go, oh, so actually, even someone I'm desperate to hold on to is worthless to me when I'm missing that crucial ingredient. And when you know what that crucial ingredient is, that has to be the new price of entry for any relationship you have ever again because you realize that no relationship can have any value for you, no matter how shiny someone is, no matter how attractive they are, no matter how impressive they are. No relationship can have any value to you if that quality or trait is not present. I also wonder if there's some exploration you can do of your childhood and your past and your history. When you said you need a partner who can handle you, I immediately thought of, I had sort of an undone,

stable childhood. I don't have a secure attachment style, all of these things. And my husband is so securely attached. He's so stable. He will tell me he loves me, even in the middle of a fight, which I'm always like, whoa. And he's like, we're on the same team. We're like fighting for the same stuff. And I'm like, right, right, right, right. I think things for the reminder. And I met him when I was very young. So I didn't know I needed that. But that is the thing that's made our relationship so successful over the year. So I think sometimes even if you are dating and you don't have a lot of past history to look back on. You can look back on what was that thing you really needed in your childhood that you didn't get. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right.

And a lot of people have never done that work to understand themselves. And, you know, obviously therapy is a wonderful path for learning those things. But you can also just start to pay attention. Pay attention to the times in life where you've, feel like you're triggered and you keep recreating the same kind of patterns in your life. Because you can sense those, even if you've never had a serious relationship, you can sense that in early dating if you get overly anxious anytime someone doesn't text you back. Well, it's such an important point that we need to be looking for the person, again, that can handle those parts of ourselves, but we tend to, because of the way our brains work, look for the person who triggers all of those

parts of ourselves. Because we gravitate towards what is familiar. We can struggle to make sense of that. Why would I keep going towards what it is I say hurts me or what I don't want? When I talk about that chapter never satisfied, the whole point of that chapter is to be a pressure valve for people in helping them understand. Why is it that we keep being drawn to these things that And I use the analogy of a dolphin in captivity. A dolphin that's grown up in the tank who's been fed fish by humans and taught that in order to get a fish, you have to do backflips and you have to jump through hoops. You have to do all of these fancy things.

If that dolphin was suddenly released into the open ocean and that dolphin now didn't know how to find food, thought that jumping through hoops or doing backflips, would help and started swimming up to boats with humans on that, by the way, could be fatal, we wouldn't say that that dolphin had a self-worth problem. We would say, no, the dolphin is just doing what it knows. It associates humans with food, so swims out to humans. It thinks that you have to do these tricks in order to get fed. So keeps doing those tricks. It's just what we know. And I think that that is a real route to compassion for ourselves. We continue to recreate this world for ourselves because A, it's what we know. And B, it's what we've come to believe that we

are worth on some level. Because if I was worth more than this, surely I would have gotten it already. But this feels like it's my level because, you know, that's what I've always gotten. It takes an interesting mix of curiosity and a little bravery to start to explore other ways of being. That could get us a different result. Because right now, our brain doesn't know a different result is possible. We may even see that a different result is possible for other people. But for ourselves, we go, that's not my life. That's not me.

It's not possible for me. And we have to start to teach our brain a different lesson that other things are possible. And then you have to say, well, how do you teach yourself that something else is possible? Advice that just says, just believe, incredibly unhelpful. Because I don't know what special power other people have to just believe things. I don't have it. If I've never done something before, just believing I can does not come naturally to me. What helps me is having reference points for a new belief.

How do I create new reference points? I have to deviate from my normal programming and do something I wouldn't normally do. I had a client of mine who was dating a guy. By all accounts, it was going very well. Even she said, like, I couldn't fault the guy. It was great. And then one day, early in our dating, he had a gathering with his friends on a Saturday and he didn't invite me. And she said, it really hurt me.

For her, from everything she told me before that, it was very clear it, like, activated a core abandonment wound for her. And she almost dismissed him altogether, but then she got so angry and hurt that during the day, when he was with his friends, she sent him a message and said, why didn't you invite me? And he said, oh my God, I'm so sorry. These are some of my close friends I haven't seen in a while. I was just really excited to see them. Can I call you tonight? And she said, don't bother. Now, obviously, she was just hurting and scared.

And so she pushed him away. And then four days later, when he still hadn't called, it just validated her idea that everyone would eventually abandon her. You know, she was running the same script she had been running her whole life, one that expected to be abandoned because of what she'd been through in her life. and in expectation of being abandoned, one that pushed someone away before they could do the kind of damage, she was afraid that they were going to do inevitably. And so she just kept recreating that same result in her life.

And this was like a nice little example that I was able to point out to her and say, you know, this was you on script. Now, the truth is, we don't know why he didn't invite you. We don't know anything about that. And unfortunately, in that situation, we didn't get to learn. because the response was just pushing him away. For her, one of the ways to start shifting is, well, like I said, first necessity. Once you get to a place of enough pain where you go, this has not worked for me, I have to do something different. Well, then you say, okay, what do I do differently?

It almost doesn't matter. Anything different is better than running the same script over and over again. Because when you do something different and it gets a different result, it's, sends a message to our brain, which to me is like inception, to plants a new core belief, which is something different is possible. So that's like I wouldn't text him and ask him what's up now, but I'm going to try it, or I wouldn't express how I'm feeling, or I would get really angry. I'm going to try walking myself back from that, literally any deviation from your typical reaction to the situation. Yeah, let me do something different. What if I just sent him a text and said,

I don't know why you didn't invite me, but I just feel hurt that you didn't. Or if instead of just saying, why didn't you invite me, you just said, I feel hurt that you didn't invite me. I guarantee you that would get a slightly different reaction, maybe a very different reaction. Yeah. And I'm also a big believer that if that type of text scares somebody away, that's probably not going to be somebody that you want to build a life with. If you go through a health issue in the future or you have a newborn baby, like if they're

scared away by a text that says, I felt hurt when you didn't invite me out with your friends. I don't want to go through the hard times of life with that person. Yeah. And the hard part about life is that sometimes you'll get difficult reactions to the thing that you did. I was in a relationship where I was vulnerable with someone and I did something I was very afraid of in the moment. I told them something I was insecure about, something that had happened that had made me insecure.

And it went against all of my instincts to voice this. Because what I had learned is you can't be that vulnerable. And I was that vulnerable. And she said to me, I find that really unattractive. Oh, my gosh. And it crushed me. What did you do? I was so upset.

What would you say? as you, the wise Matthew Hessey who coaches all these people, what would you say to somebody who was in that exact situation? That that person isn't capable either in general or with you of being with a whole human being. And thus, that person is not your match. Like, that's great information to have, even if it's wildly painful information. They might not be a good match for anyone right now. But certainly they're not a good match for you.

because it's not someone who sees you. Or it's not someone who sees you and accepts you. Did you guys break up as a result of that? Oh, yeah. No, no, not as a result of that, but it didn't work out. Yeah. Well, obviously. Yeah.

Audrey's one of my two wives. It didn't not work out that day, but it really, for a moment, it broke something for me. And unfortunately, at the time, it didn't break something with me with that person. Oh, no. It broke something inside me. And that is something so many people can relate to is in the moment taking the wrong lesson from the situation. The crazy part was I was shocked by that person when that happened because I was so horrified with the response.

And it was so confirming of all of my deepest, deepest insecurities. We think other people see us better than we see ourselves. So when they say these things, it validate this thing. If this thing that I think makes me unlovable that I'm now going to be vulnerable and share actually made me unlovable, it is a special kind of painful confirmation. And I was angry with myself. I went away and like I was tyrannical towards myself after that. I was like, why did you say that?

That was so stupid. You knew better. You knew that would make you sound less attractive. You knew that would change the way this person saw you. And it did, idiot. I really thought to myself, I am never doing that again. And it took a lot of healing for me and self-acceptance to get to a place where I could start to be vulnerable again.

And thank God because the vulnerability that I've expressed in my relationship with Audrey is responsible along with her. her vulnerability for creating by far the greatest relationship I've ever had in my life and me being married now. But that at the time, I was in danger of learning a lesson that would have pushed love away. What did that healing look like specifically? Because I think a lot of people carry the scars of old relationships and they don't know where to start to feel whole and confident and worthy of love again. Firstly, being in communities where people actually speak up about real flaws and vulnerabilities, I've always found really, really powerful. Anytime I was in a men's group,

for example, where people actually shared, men actually shared the insecurities they had, or the vulnerabilities that they felt, that was healing for me because I was able to see I wasn't the only one. Whatever I had felt shameful about or regretted, or, or considered unlovable parts of me existed in those other men. That itself was very healing for me and it modeled the kind of vulnerability that I wanted to, you know, part of me wanted to express myself even though I was afraid to. Having conversations with people who loved me and viewed me holistically was powerful because I, my kind of, that inner tyrant for me did not view me holistically.

The kind of dark thought was that whatever was your worst moment, whatever is your most insecure face, whatever is your most shameful moment, whatever, that's the truth of you. That's who you really are. and there was no space for the whole me. It was just, this is the truth of you and you can't let that out. And it's not just people who love you who can help you to develop a different view of yourself. It can be a therapist because that's someone who can view you holistically. They may not love you, but they can view you holistically.

And anytime someone does that and they can contextualize who you are, why you are the way you are, Where that comes from, even in your worst moments in life. Where was that coming from? Because it would be a mistake to spend the rest of your life identifying with that mistake. Where did it come from? That's the more interesting part. What was behind that at the time? What were you trying to get that you didn't have?

What were you in need of? What was it a response to from the past? We can start to give ourselves the self-compassion that's necessary. I talk a lot about self-forgiveness, which was really hard for me. I had to develop a very robust model for myself for self-forgiveness because I did not forgive myself easily. I really held on to my mistakes and punished myself for them and talked to myself horribly. I mean, all the stuff that I teach on core confidence and how to change a relationship with

yourself is very real to me because I struggled with that relationship for a long time. And in that model for self-forgiveness, one of the things that helped me was I've worked very well with metaphor and analogy. And I would imagine myself like I was a series of runners in a race, like in a relay race in the Olympics, four runners, one race. And they're all on the same team. but they're different runners and I would look at myself from 10 years ago and let's say there was something I was still beating myself up about from 10 years ago some mistake I made him but by the way I coach people who do this all the time because the number of women I'm working with who when they find themselves not in a relationship right now they really want to find love they

really want to have a family and then trying to find a way to blame themselves for all of it. If I haven't found love and I don't have the children I wanted to have and it's all because of me, is all because I messed up, I stayed with the wrong person, I didn't take enough risks, whatever it may be. And I would look at myself like if there was something I did 10 years ago that was still beating myself up about or didn't do a decision I made, whatever, I would say that was an old runner. That was like a runner from 10 years ago. I would start to imagine that every year a new runner woke up.

And then I would go even further. I'd be like every day a new runner wakes up. And we're all in this same race. All these Matthews are in the same race together. And I'm responsible for fixing the mistakes of the old runners because we're all in the same race. So if an old runner put me in a difficult financial position, I'm the one who has to fix it. The same way that if you're in the relay race and the second runner trips up, if you're the fourth runner, you're still the one who has to make up the time.

But it would be strange for that fourth runner to go home that night and yell at themselves in the mirror for the way that the second runner tripped up. I have a couple of recipes for myself for self-forgiveness, but that has been one of the major ways that I've been able to forgive and accept parts of myself is that I am not the runner today that I was 10 years ago. I have had access to new tools, new mentors, new learnings, new life experience, all of which has helped me to arrive in a place today that I was not equipped to arrive at five years ago, 10 years ago, or maybe even last year. So instead of constantly judging myself based on

something that an old runner did, I'm able to say that was an old runner. Today's runner is a very different Matthew. And so it makes no sense for me to saddle this Matthew with all of this package and self-loathing and judgment. Because actually this Matthew today, he's still got a difficult race to run. He needs to be as light on his feet as he can possibly be. And I need to set him up to win. And this runner deserves to run a fresh race unencumbered by all of that baggage. That's such a powerful metaphor.

You said earlier that we need to have an abundance mindset so we don't get hung up on this one person being the person that I need to cling to, that I need to spend all my sales calls on, et cetera, et cetera. One of the most common things that I hear from listeners, from women in my life is that there are so many high quality women out there and no high quality men. Like the numbers are just not there. So when you meet a man that feels like they even pass a minimum bar, you got to hang on to them because there's not even many of those out there.

How do we cultivate an abundance mindset when the evidence is telling us otherwise? We have to make peace with how hard it actually is out there. It's why going slow to go fast is actually really important. Because if we are also in a race to get somewhere, that's when our standards start slipping. And that's a whole other conversation, how, especially when biology is working against you in certain ways, how do you not be in a race to get somewhere? How do you not feel in a panic that makes you say yes too quickly or project onto somebody what you don't even know about them yet because you want them to be the right person or hold on to the person that is good enough?

We can talk about that. But that's a very real challenge. I really believe we have to go slow to go fast. I do think that there are really great men out there. Am I being naive when I say this? I'm not sure. I worry about the story that there's all these. amazing women out there and there's a lot less great guys out there.

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up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer in there. Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. Do you think, though, that there's a truth to, like, women are raised with more permission to express their emotions? Yes. Women are more educated than they ever have been before. Women have more opportunities than they have been before.

I feel very lucky that I'm with a partner who's very emotionally evolved, but I feel lucky because that does feel rare sometimes when I look around. So I think sometimes women are also experiencing these very status. find connections in their female relationships and they're like, well, if I can't have a real emotionally open conversation with the guys that I'm meeting, what am I even doing? Yeah, that is a difference. I think that there's less guys who have reached that point of being able to be vulnerable, being able to express, have kind of an emotional vocabulary.

I think that's true. And it gets really tricky because I do think that a lot of women find themselves in a situation where with those opportunities, with that education, they climb ladders, they create businesses, they make things happen, and they often find no rewards for that in the world of attraction. 100%. My sister didn't put on her dating profile that she is pursuing her PhD because she found that she got less messages when she did. And I'm like, those are the messages you want to get is from a person who's comfortable with the fact that you're pursuing your PhD. And she's like, No, I'll slip that in later once they already like me.

Yeah. I believe that it's true that there will be a decent number of people who will be intimidated or turned off by any sign that you could be playing at a level that they are uncomfortable with. And it is truly unfortunate for women and kind of a novel challenge that we're like seeing play out in real time as more and more women. get to those positions and they outpace guys and guys find themselves in a situation where they're not there with those women. We don't know where that ends up and it is going to have to be some kind of evolution in the way men see women and the way women see men as well. I think that's going to have to be an evolution on both sides because men are going to have to adapt. They're going to

have to learn to find their power in other ways. A friend of mine said recently, men have to on some level feel powerful. It's one of the things that makes them attracted is just the feeling that they are powerful. And I don't believe that every man needs to find power over someone, but they need to feel powerful. And I think there's some truth to that. I think it gets overblown in certain circles. And I also think that it gets used as an excuse for all sorts of bad. But let's just take that as some kind of a given. Even if you did it on a human level, said everyone needs to feel special. And men have traditionally felt special by being a provider, being someone who can show up for someone and protect. And now they're looking at their normal tools for feeling important or

powerful, and they're not there in the same way. That's a challenge for men, because they're going have to adapt, where do I get the source of my power? It's no longer enough to come home and like, you know, put my bread winner. I just like putting money on the table. Yeah, and it was, the bar was pretty low in a lot of ways, right? Like as a guy, I just got to come home from a long day of work, ignore my wife and say, well, I put food on the table, so that's my value. Well, now that weapon has been taken away. And I think that's a tremendous thing. I think that's a very, very good thing because it forces someone to have to evolve. It forces someone to have to bring more to the table. That imbalance in power has allowed men to get away with giving so little.

Yeah. But if we can't jump in and say, we want the world to evolve, we want the men to evolve, how could a woman listening deal with the fact that we are in this new moment in history. You have to work with the reality you have and say, what I ultimately want is a great teammate. What is a great teammate? A great teammate is someone who sees me, someone who has compassion for me, someone who accepts me, someone who helps me to see how great I am when I can't for myself, someone who sees how special I am, someone who helps me feel special as well, these are all great ways for someone to be a teammate. So if you say that's the kind of teammate, I'm looking for. Then you can also say, okay, that's the kind of teammate I want to be. And then I think that

allows you to say, okay, so who am I working with? I'm working with people who definitely want to feel special, who definitely want to feel needed, who are trying to figure out what their place is in the world and where their value comes from. And a lot of them are very confused about where that is and how they fit into it. They are afraid that they're going to date and that she's going to see him as insignificant. I mean, look, let's be real for a moment. I had a person come to me recently and say, I have a lot of money. This was a woman. I have a lot of money. And I find myself just not attracted to guys who are on my level. If they don't earn as much as me, it means I'm the one paying for the holidays. when I want to stay in a nice hotel, I'm paying for it. And even though I say I'm okay with paying for it,

sooner or later I feel like I'm not okay with it. That confirms a very real male insecurity. Right? That's a real thing. And that's not coming from men. That's coming from a woman. So what we have to figure out is there's not just an adaptation that's required on one side. There's an adaptation that's going to be required on both sides to some extent. And I want to say this as well, because I think it's important. Some of the greatest couples I know in my life have a woman who is higher up the organization, significantly higher up the organization, and earn significantly more money than the guy she's with. It doesn't mean he's not got a job, but there's a big disparity.

And the reason it works is because never does that. get in any way from her side used to leverage power or to make herself feel more than. And from his side, he is an extremely secure person who is able to manage that situation without thinking about it as some kind of reflection of his value in the relationship. It just feels like a unicorn scenario though. Because I see this in so many of my friendships. I've even seen it in my own relationship to an extent. men are told so much that their value from the time that they can receive messaging is about being a provider.

And society just tamps down on that. They make you feel bad about that imbalance. And then I think often men will take out that on the partner that they're with. Yes. There is no easy answer to this question. On one hand, I will say there's a phrase that a friend of mine who's a doctor uses in a morbid sense, that statistics don't matter to the individual. If you have a disease that's one in 10,000, but you're the one who has it, you don't care about

the statistic, you've got it. But I think in a more positive sense, the same can be true in our love life, that when you find someone who doesn't fit that mold, it doesn't matter to you what the general trends are. You have found someone who doesn't fit that mold. And I think you have to leave yourself open to that. I do think we have to widen our field of what we say we want because if someone earns less than you and you have to pay for some of the trips because you like staying in a certain hotel, then do that.

And you need to work on not finding that unattractive or having yourself be susceptible to that same messaging of what masculinity has meant historically. You absolutely do. I think that there is an arrogance that so many of us have. have who have either had the privilege of doing interesting things with our life, of having a business that's worked, or the benefit of parents who landed us with money, or grown up in a school district where we had access to great contacts or whatever it may be, that has landed us in a position where we are fortunate enough to be someone who now is in the position we're in,

there is an arrogance at thinking that someone else is in any way less than because they have not done the same thing. There is also an arrogance in judging someone who decided that it wasn't nearly as important to them to achieve that. Because some of the happiest people I know are people that just decided to do something they really like doing in life that they are good at, that didn't make them rich and they didn't care because they never needed to be rich. And some of the richest people I know are the most terribly insecure people I know. It's what made them rich is that they were so insecure and felt so insignificant that every day for their entire adult life,

driving message internally has been, I'll show you. Why should the person who's done all of that, who in their own way might have some real healing to do? And if they had done that healing earlier, never would have made as much money. Why should that person think that that other person's way of living is in any way less than? It is an arrogance that we have, men and women. It is a tremendous Societally. My wife Audrey led a completely different life to me. For her building a business and being an entrepreneur, didn't even register. She worked hard in her 20s, did something she really enjoyed, spent more time building friendships and beautiful relationships than I did. And because of that, we're in different places when we met. The things that she brought me in the

relationship, the peace that she brought me, the kindness, the empathy, the sense of community, the fun, these are things that if she was like me, she would never have been able to bring me. And I can't think of anything worse than being with another me. Right? I need someone who brings something different to the table. You need somebody who can handle you to your earlier point. Someone who can handle me and be a yin to my yang and I bring something to her too as a result of that. That's what makes it special.

Let me just make a crude example, but it works a lot. The guy who was so secure in who he was that honestly he never felt the need to like turn himself into somebody. He's just happy. That might be the greatest partner in the world for you because maybe you have been. striving and striving and striving and striving and striving out of some kind of deficit. And this person's going to bring you a different way of seeing life. That can be the most beautiful thing in the world and it can be the ultimate sign of strength. My God, if we are taking how much money someone earns or how far up the food chain they are

as a sign of strength, we are in trouble. So I would encourage people to start to view the world as a little more interesting than that. Because some of my favorite people in the world are the people who are nothing like me and haven't done any of the things I have done with my life and whose name doesn't come up when you put it into YouTube. And the fact that it doesn't for some of them is my favorite thing about them. I feel like one of your thesis is that you're looking for the wrong things. Like you need to take a really good chunk of time to look inside of yourself and say not what do I think I want, but what do I actually need?

Yes, that's exactly right. We are not finding love because we are chasing the wrong things. And many of the wrong things that we chase are driven by ego. And ego is your enemy. Just as it shows up as the enemy in so many other parts of our life, when you are trying to find love, ego will have you chasing the wrong things all day long because you think that this person is not going to be impressive to your friends or your family because they don't look like the people that you normally date.

So much of our ego takes us away from what makes us happy and towards what we think is going to make us feel enough. A hundred percent. Okay. Last question. And then we'll get into some quickfire questions. But I do want to touch on the biological element, which you've alluded to a few times. If somebody is in their late 30s, they want a partner, they want kids, they want a family.

This is the version of life that they have always envisioned for themselves. What should they do? What would you tell them? How do they not lower the bar? Should they lower the bar? Should they have a kid on their own? What if that's not the family they envisioned? What would you say?

This to me gets so much to the core of for so many women why they are either unhappy or making some really dangerous choices. that I dedicated an entire chapter of the book to, it's called the question of having a child. And I always knew that that was like a risky thing for me to take on as a man, but it's not my first time talking about it with people. I've been talking about this with audiences that are 100% women for many years. I just haven't been doing it on YouTube.

And I've spoken to fertility doctors and experts of all different, kinds and varieties on this subject, people who know way more than me about the actual processes that take place. But everything always ends up leading me back to the same conclusions and the same kind of structure of thinking around it, which is that we have to start by asking ourselves, how important is this thing to me really? What are my reasons for wanting this? And when I project forward how happy am I or what's the level of grief if this never happens for me and that's not an easy thing to answer but answering it becomes really really important and answering it honestly becomes really important because it truly informs what we do next and what we do next has to be an assessment

of what is plan A, and it might be that the obvious is true. Plan A is I meet the love of my life this afternoon, and within a certain amount of months or years, we have decided we trust each other enough and believe in this relationship enough that we would make great parents and we're going to have a child. That works out. And I'm sure this is true for people in your circle too. The number of people in my circle who have been with someone for a long time, who thought it would be easy when the time came around.

And then it wasn't. And they have had a painful, heartbreaking journey of trying to have a child that has still not worked out in many cases and shows no signs of getting better. That's a reality too. And so I think it's important when we're considering like what would my plan A be and also not to idealize plan A and tell yourself a story that it's all so hard for me because I'm single, it's certainly harder if you haven't got someone to try with, but it's still no guarantee if you find someone. So plan A is I find someone within the amount of time that my biology allows me

to have a child of my own and that we are compatibly fertile, we're both fertile, and that it can happen. What's plan B? What do I do if that doesn't happen in time? Was my moment in time, was my moment in time, where if I've decided that this thing is truly a life goal of mine that I cannot compromise on, what is my plan B and when does that kick in? At what age do I say, okay, I'm going to now go a different route. I'm going to have a child on my own. By the way, it's also possible that when you ask yourself the question of how badly do I want this, you say, I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I really want it. If people have made me feel like I want it. There are people that get pregnant almost as some kind of insurance policy against future regret, even though they don't want it that badly. It's a very confusing thing. And it might be the plan A right now, or it might be that one of the plans right now is to say, because I don't know, I'm going to freeze my eggs,

or I'm going to freeze embryos, and at least I'm going to have the option. so that if five years from now I would still want to do it, there's a possibility I still can. But I'm going to give myself some more time for indecision because really, truly, I don't know. But if plan A is meet someone, plan B might be, okay, yeah, I'm going to do this on my own. Plan C might be if I can't do it on my own, I'm going to adopt. You have to start looking at what those plans are. And then I really believe the key to being happy in life is that at any point you have to know, that if plan B has to become the new plan A,

that you can make that extraordinary. That there's a big difference between settling for and settling on. Settling for makes you feel like somehow your life didn't go the way you planned and you got shortchanged. But when you settle on something, it's decisive, is proactive, it's creative,

it is an act of imbueing the circumstances you have with a profound level of meaning that says, if plan B is where I end up, I'm going to make plan B even more beautiful. I'm going to make it so beautiful that I couldn't even ever wish that plan A had happened because of how stunning this is. That's the thing that changes a person's life. And I have watched women do this over and over again with their lives in the most beautiful ways. When someone says to me, Matt, I had a woman recently come to me and say, I don't know whether to have a child of my own or adopt. I said, the fact that you're even asking that question is powerful because what you've said is happiness doesn't have to come in one form. Inherent in your

question is the space to find happiness on two very different paths. And I think what makes us deeply unhappy and afraid is the idea that our happiness can only be found on one very specific path. So once we have laid out what our plan is, it doesn't mean you're giving up on plan A. But if you know this is plan B and this is plan C, and this is the time at which those kick in, then you can say to yourself, okay, now let's go pursue plan A. And I can now pursue plan A peacefully because this person I'm on a date with tonight does not hold power over my happiness. That's a powerful place to be. And I encourage everyone.

If you get this book for no other chapter than that one chapter, read that chapter. And there are people speaking in that chapter who know far more than me about women's biology, who I interview as part of that chapter and provide great expertise and experience in it. I'm aware of all of the challenges of the cost of egg freezing and embryo freezing and the ongoing cost of storing frozen eggs, the hormonal pain that many women go through. Some women find it very easy. Others find it very difficult when they freeze their eggs. It's a mixed bag. And I've spoken to people who find that the calculation of whether to do it or not to do it is razor thin in many cases.

It's a real debate. but many women end up still falling on the side of doing it because it gives them some comfort, some peace of mind. And even then we know that the numbers aren't amazing in terms of how much of that actually ends up working down the line. But life is all a game of these calculations. Christopher Hitchens said in life you have to choose your regrets. Because we're all going to have regrets. There's no life that doesn't have regret. But one of the most powerful things you can do today is face the hardest conversation, the one that you're most afraid of, the one that you have to have with yourself. And there's a lot of this book that's about how to have hard conversations with other people.

You know, how do you have those conversations early in dating about what this is, where it's going, all of the things I'm afraid to ask because it might drive that person away or it might ruin the party. But the hardest conversations are the ones you have to have with yourself. and the conversation around how badly I want a child and what's my plan for my happiness. If it doesn't happen in the way that I had originally conceived, I would like it to happen. And what happens if it can't happen in that way? Having that hard conversation with yourself will set you free. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with

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lessons for how to live. I love the idea that there are so many paths to an extraordinary life. I think it is such a powerful concept. And if we can all sit and meditate on the amount of shoulds that are dictating our choices, the amount of there's one narrative, there's one path to a happy life that's dictating how we feel on a day-to-day basis, I think we would find it's quite a lot and certainly not helpful. I just love using this experience of dating in a moment that might be feeling so hard and so difficult as an opportunity to learn one of the most powerful life lessons that you can learn, which is there are so many paths to an extraordinary life.

It's uncanny that you said that for me. I have a retreat program every year and I will walk people through this exercise who it's relevant to, but I'll say to the rest of the audience, pay attention to what's happening here in the room because even if this isn't you, maybe you already have kids or maybe you're past your window for having kids or maybe it's something you decided you never wanted. That's okay too. Whatever, even if you're telling yourself this isn't relevant to me, I promise you the process

that we do for this particular part of life is the exact same process that is required to be happy anywhere else. What I know is that there are certain criteria in life that I kind of need to tick in order to be happy. But what's reassuring to me is that those criteria can be met a thousand different ways. With so many different people too. Again, Back to the abundance conversation, there's so many people we can be happy with, especially if we really get in touch with what we want and need. Exactly. Okay, I'm going to do some quick fires.

We have so many questions that I didn't get into. It's such a good conversation. I really enjoyed it. Okay. This is from a listener. I always want to get past date one or two, but I feel like I'm doing something wrong because they never reach out after. I always encourage people to try to ask themselves, what parts of me do I find?

find hard to bring out on a date. It could be that you're very serious and it's hard for you to be playful. Maybe you're out of practice being playful. It could be that you are very good at talking about your work, but you're not very good at just talking about your life or the other parts of your life. It might be that you're very comfortable having long conversations, but being flirtatious is something that you find really challenging. In the imbalances are often the reasons why people don't call. Now, let's also be clear, some people don't call just because you're just not right for them. And that's okay.

That's true of everyone on this earth. So you're in good company. But it's also true that a lot of people who reject us had no idea who we were in the first place. So we have to ask ourselves how many parts of who I really am actually make an appearance on a date. If you stuck a random person in this chair right now and you interviewed them, honestly, one of the biggest barriers to them being interesting would not be that they're not interesting. It would be that they don't know how to bring the entirety of themselves to a situation that feels unnatural with love. lights and cameras and oh my God, someone's asking me questions. Well, that's what a date is like.

And it's hard to bring all of ourselves to that situation. And some of us have hidden those parts of ourselves for a very long time or we haven't been in touch with them for a very long time. When we start to bring more of ourselves to the table, we start to show what I think of as unique pairings, two different qualities that contrast each other, that when you find them in the same person instead of one in one person and one in another person, become very, very irresistible. If someone can go deep and intellectual with you and then five minutes later, they can be goofy or silly, you get like a little thing, like, oh my God, this is amazing. If someone can be playful with you, but then snap out of telling jokes and like take a sip

of their wine and look at you in a certain way and you feel like a sexual energy, it's powerful. But we tend to get addicted to certain gears that we have that we overuse. It's not that the gear that we have is a bad one in and of itself. It's that when it gets overused, it starts to stunt the way that we are seen. So now it's like, yeah, the conversation was good. I didn't like have that banter. Or we say, oh, well, I had such a fun time with them,

but I didn't have that deep connection with them. We overindex. And we tend to overindex in the places where we're, more comfortable. So a huge part of dating is explore some of those areas where maybe you're less comfortable and the parts of yourself that maybe come out with your best friend or with the people in your life that you're really comfortable with and start to bring more of them to the table earlier because people will see more of those unique pairings in you. And when people see unique pairings, they see someone that's hard to replace. I love that. Let's do, how can we

know what our true red flags are and what we're maybe being too nitpicky about. Oof. I mean, your true red flags should be the things that truly make you unhappy when they're there. You know, someone can't take accountability. They can't say sorry. They don't acknowledge your point of view. They don't respect you. They consistently lie. The true red flags should be the things that make you feel unseen, unrespected, and unsafe. But what if it's not a red flag per se, how do we know when we're being too dismissive of things like he's shorter than somebody I pictured myself dating? He doesn't have the job that I pictured myself dating somebody with.

He watches sports too much. How do we know when something's really a deal breaker versus something we should overlook? I think if you feel drawn back to someone because of the qualities they have and maybe you can still feel your ego fighting and being like, but you still feel drawn back to them, maybe because you find them actually uniquely interesting, or you feel very at home with this person. You really feel like you are more of yourself around that person, and they make you a better version of yourself, then it might be worth a few more dates.

But who knows whether you'll get there or not? Who knows whether you can get over that thing? But give yourself a lot more time to actually explore the things that are drawing you back, because the truth of how good this relationship could be or would be might be in the things that are drawing you back that have nothing to do with what your ego is screaming at you is not enough. Does that apply for I like them so much, but I'm not physically attracted to them? Or is physical attraction a necessity in a relationship? I think physical attraction is important, but in some ways sexual attraction is more descriptive

because you can have someone who maybe looks different. or you may not have pictured yourself with, but you have an incredible sexual chemistry with them. Maybe you only notice that when you kiss them for the first time. Well, when they touch you for the first time, you're like, whoa, there really is chemistry here. It's often worth exploring that. I'm not someone who says chemistry isn't important in a relationship.

It for sure is. It's going to be a long relationship if you're with someone that you don't have any chemistry with. but chemistry comes often in different packages than the one that you envision for yourself. Sometimes I feel like it's listening to something that tells you that this person is interesting or that there's something about them that you just really enjoy being around and just allowing yourself to see where that goes. And you might find that when you start to get physical with that person, that there's a way

you're physical together that starts to create a sense of chemistry. I'm picturing Harry and Charlotte from Sex and the City. Do you watch Sex and? I know who Charlotte is, but I don't know who. What does Harry look like? He's bald. I know the one you're talking about. He's shorter.

He's a lawyer. He's very sweaty. And she's like, I can't believe that like on paper I would not find this person attractive at all, but we have the best sex of my entire life. And that's a real thing. It's one of the biggest, for one of a better word, like ways that online dating betrays us because we are dismissing people who in a photo just don't feel like that person that we're normally attracted to and we are potentially dismissing people that we could have

the most chemistry with. And everyone, by the way, has had the experience of thinking someone looked apart in a photo and then you're around them and you're like, I don't know why I don't feel it. Like it's strange. I just don't feel it with them. And we've also, all had the experience of being around someone that made us feel something and then trying to show a picture to our friend and be like, this is them. And our friend's like, okay. Or I've had a girlfriend who apologizes. She's like, oh, like, you might not think he's that cute. And I'm like, I think he's cute and you're happy with him. That's ego. That's ego talking is what are you going to think? I am having great sex with this person. I love kissing them. I love cuddling up to them.

But I have to apologize to my friends for it. You know, it's like that is ego in a nutshell. And we have to be really, really careful because for a lot of people out there right now, ego is driving. And it is consistently leading them to the most vain, vacuous and often narcissistic people who excel at presenting themselves in a way that has mass appeal. Yeah, well, it's like, do you want to have your life look good? or do you want to have your life feel good? That's a great way of putting it. Okay.

Can you just give us one tip for the apps? I feel like you're kind of anti-app. No, no, no. I'm not anti-app. I'm not anti-app at all. I am a believer that it's a tool and that it should be used as such. It shouldn't be a substitute for meeting people in real life. It shouldn't stop you from leaving the house.

It's just one more tool to add to your portfolio of things that you're doing to help you find love. I think it's a problem when it becomes an addiction. I think it's a problem when you find yourself incessantly messaging someone on an app, but never demanding that it actually turns into a meetup. I have a problem when apps become a slot machine that you are just using for dopamine and a poor substitute for the real thing. But it's for that reason that if I give two pieces of quick advice for an app, one is to be human on an app when you're messaging someone.

There's a writer, William Zinzer, wrote a book called On Writing Well. And he said when he is reading someone a piece of writing, the first or second paragraph, he can just hear the author trying to impress him. But by the third or fourth paragraph, there'll be a detail in there that makes him think, aha, a person. And he said, when I feel like, oh, a person just jumped out at me in that detail, in that little vulnerability, in that quirk, whatever it may be, that's when he really connects with the writing. Well, on a dating app, we're so busy trying to be cool, indifferent,

we're so busy trying to impress that we're not really showing a human. And so showing a human doesn't mean your heart needs to bleed, you know, in every line. It's just, what's a way? Maybe it's like, what are you up to? I'm shopping for furniture for my sister right now at Target and dreading the fact that we have to put it together when we get home. That's a huge. human thing to say. Yeah. It's not, I'm good thanks, just chilling in my day. What are you doing? Like, smiley face. There's nothing for me to latch onto there. There's no human there. Well, and you know what's going to lead to having those things to say more often as going out and living your life, as you've said. That's absolutely right. The more you're living, the more you can bring

that living into the equation. And then the second thing is have a low tolerance for people who have zero intentionality. The dating apps are riddled with people who, have zero intentionality, they will happily message you for the next four weeks without asking you on a date. Don't buy into the culture. If you have been speaking to someone for the last three days and the messages have been really fun and you're enjoying yourself, then I offer to grab a coffee. And if they can't, if they say, oh, yeah, well, I guess, blah, blah, blah, then it's like, okay, this is not a serious person. It's okay for you to find out that they're not a serious person. What we shouldn't be doing is spending four weeks messaging someone and still going, I wonder when they're going to ask me on a date.

Why haven't they asked me on a date yet? The culture right now in dating for so many people is really dire. There's so much nonsense. There's so much bad behavior. There's so many people being strange versions of themselves in a world that feels anonymous and distant and 2D. you have to be a three-dimensional person in a 2D world. You have to have more intentionality in a world where everyone's afraid to show their intentions, as Mitch Album puts it, in a world where you don't like the culture,

you have to be brave enough to create your own. And I believe that creating your own culture is the thing that makes you stand out. I had two friends that I asked them recently how they met. Your guy said, well, I asked her to meet me for a drink before I went out with my friends. And they met for a drink. He went out with his friends, came home two hours later and called her. And he said, is this weird? I know we just met two hours ago.

Is it weird that I'm calling you already? And she was like, no, actually, I really like it. Now, it caught her by surprise. But that was an example of him creating his own culture. Instead of going, oh, it would be weird. No, people don't do that these days and so on. He's brave enough to create his own culture. That's what leadership is.

By the way, how great businesses are created. How do you stand out as a business? You come along in a world of businesses that are all vanilla and you create a different culture. You do something a little different. You make it your own. You put your own stamp on the world. You get to do that in dating too.

Why is it any different? That's how you stand out. Well, in the vein of our thesis of this conversation, too, I would say you should learn through your dating perhaps to have no tolerance for people who aren't intentional in your life. Yes. We have a very short amount of time on this planet. it, why are we wasting it, period, with people who aren't bringing that intentionality to us?

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Could you tell us a little bit in your own words about your beautiful new book? I know we've talked about it a little bit, but I'd love to hear more. The book is called Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and live happily no matter what. I'm very, very proud of it. Ten years ago, I wrote my first book. It was a New York Times bestseller, and it took me a long time to write this one. It is for anyone who deeply wants to find love.

Maybe you're only just admitting that to yourself now. Maybe you've been searching for it for a long time and struggling. But this book is designed to be your co-pilot in finding love. So that you don't feel alone because so many people feel very, very alone and isolated on that journey. They have been searching for some time. they have been disappointed. Maybe they were in a relationship they thought would work out and it didn't.

They've been through a lot of heartbreak. They're starting to worry that there's something wrong with them, that they're broken. You're not, by the way. It feels like your friends are all getting married and pairing off and, you know, you have less people to even socialize with. Maybe you feel increasingly invisible.

The older you get, you worry it's going to keep getting harder. The pull keeps getting harder. smaller, dating keeps getting more confusing, every ghosting, every time someone fades, every time someone lies to you, betrays you, says they're ready when they're not, says that they love you and they're not ready, every single one of those just confirms this idea that it's never going to happen for you. And it's a very, very scary and painful place for people to be that this thing they've wanted their whole lives doesn't seem to be arriving and that their life

in their love life does not look like the life they thought they'd have by now and this book is about helping people understand that you are not broken that the past does not have to equal the future in this area that there is a fresh approach that you can take that is still gentle it's not going to suddenly make you do a thousand things you don't want to do or live in a way you don't want to live, but it is going to help you understand some of the deeper reasons why you might have been having a hard time in this area. And also it acknowledges that it's just hard. There are deeper reasons why we're struggling that we can change and that we can work on. And it's hard. Objectively speaking, it's hard. But once you know how to take a fresh approach, not only will you be able to

to find love much, much faster than perhaps you would on your own without that co-pilot. But you'll actually enjoy the way there a lot, lot more than you are right now. And enjoying the way there happens to be something that helps us find it faster in the first place. So that's what the book's about. I'm really truly, truly, truly excited for people to read it. I've put much more of myself in this book than I have. It's vulnerable. Yeah, I think people can expect to get to know me a lot better than they have.

Even through my YouTube channel, if they've watched a lot of my videos, I think this is going to be a much greater introduction to me and the things I've struggled with. And, you know, when I started writing this book, I was single and heartbroken and I finished editing it on my honeymoon. And I don't believe that's a coincidence that the things that I write about in this book are not just the things that I was doing for, all of the people that engage with my work that help them find love, they also happen to be the things that help me find love. And, you know, I'm really grateful that I learn them now instead of 10 years from now because I truly think I would have kept banging my head against the wall over and over and over again if I hadn't learned them. And for anyone who wants a copy, the website lovelifebook.com not only has links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a

of other retailers, but we're doing a live event on May the 4th called Find Your Person, which is going to be me, my wife, Audrey, she's going to be there, we're going to be coaching people and walking people through a lot of the key lessons from the book in a way that they can really apply this year to finding love and finding their person. So you can't buy your way on to that event. The book is your ticket. But when you go and grab a copy of the book, You can get it direct from Amazon or anywhere else, but if you come back once you've got it to lovelifebook.com, you can enter your receipt and get your ticket, or email you a ticket to that live event on May 4th, which is virtual, by the way. So you can come to it from anywhere in the world.

And like I said, you can also buy the book from that website as well. Amazing. Well, thank you for this book. I absolutely loved it. I think it's a classic. It's going to last a long time and help a lot of people. And thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for this beautiful conversation. I really appreciated it. I loved it. It's a testament to how good you are at what you do because I really feel like I talked about some things here that I haven't spoken about anywhere else. And I'm excited for people to see this conversation. I love this conversation so much. And while I know that it is a great listen if you are in a partnership, it is an absolute game changer if you are out there dating.

So please send it to anyone in your life who is looking for love. If someone should a link with you and you are new to the podcast, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. If you are not following the podcast, I want you to go to the main podcast page on whatever platform you like to listen on. That's the one that lists all of the Liz Moody podcast episodes, and you'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. There's also a recent Apple update that has changed things up a little bit. So even if you've been following the podcast forever on there, even if you've been following it since the healthier together days, go to the little button in the top right. of that page that lists all of the Lizamody podcast episodes and click turn on automatic downloads

so the pod keeps showing up in your feed. That way you will not miss out on any new episodes. They'll appear right in your feed every single Wednesday and every other Monday. And you do not want to miss out. We have some really, really good ones coming up. We've got the debut of a brand new series called Life Lessons. And our very first guest for that is an iconic, an iconic podcast host. You are going to be so excited. And then we have a really beautiful. episode about handling loss and grief. We have our fertility episode, our long-awaited fertility episode. So make sure that you're following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you. And I'll see you on Monday for the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast.