Well with Arielle Lorre - 312: Love Life Advice: Leaving Long-Term Relationships, Finding Your Person, Dating Mistakes & Breaking Toxic Cycles with Matthew Hussey

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Matthew Hussey is NYT best-selling author, speaker, and coach specializing in confidence, dating, and relationship intelligence. His new book, Love Life, teaches readers how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily, and he’s been researching the topic of relationships for over a decade. He joins me today to share his top love life advice, from finding your person to leaving a long-term relationship, even when it’s a “good” one. He also shares what we all need to realize in order to truly love ourselves, and therefore have happy relationships. We also discuss dating from the biggest mistakes you can make to how to enjoy the process. Whether you’re single, dating, or in a long-term relationship, you’ll get something out of this episode!Matthew's latest book: https://rstyle.me/+IWDKlzluNAXs4kwEa5kaAASubscribe to Patreon for exclusive weekly content: patreon.com/ArielleLorreThis episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit ARTICLE.COM/blonde and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout.Visit Nuda.com and use code “BLONDE” for 20% off your order.Go to revolve.com/BLONDE today to shop my top picks for the season. Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health.You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/BLONDE and using code BLONDE at checkout.Right now, Chomps is offering our listeners 20% off your first order and free shipping when you go to Chomps.com/blonde.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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would auto-huees-on-sor-sondergare. Go to your rise-adviseur or sunnycars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Welcome to the Blonde Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve

optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits. I know there's so much information out there, so I'm bringing on expert guests and sharing my own experiences to help you sift through all the wellness stuff without the BS. Enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I feel like I have the ultimate relationship. episode for you today because I am talking to Matthew Hussie, who is the ultimate relationship expert. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He's a speaker and he's a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. His YouTube channel is number one in the world for love life advice with over half a billion views. He has inspired millions through practical advice

enabling them to find love and feel confident and in control of their happiness. And he has a new book out called Love Life, which is an essential set of tools and principles for healing your heart, finding love and loving life. And I really enjoyed our conversation so much. And I know that you guys will too. We talk a lot about how to find your person, how to raise your standards, how to live happily, which is something that he has been researching for over and a decade. But what I think you guys will appreciate about his advice and this episode in general that I really appreciated is that we also talked a lot about what we need to realize in order to truly love ourselves and therefore have happy relationships. So it's not just about the other.

But we do talk about, like I said, finding your person. We talk about leaving a long-term relationship, even if it's a good one. I know that this is something that so many people grapple with because when I talked about this on my solo episodes and discussed my own experience, I just got an outpouring of feedback from people who were in similar positions or considering leaving when they felt like they were in an okay relationship. So that's something that we delve into. We also talk about dating from the biggest mistakes you can make to how to enjoy the process. So whether you're single dating or in a long-term relationship, you will definitely get something out of this episode. So please enjoy Matthew Hudson.

I always think it's so funny when I'm podcasting with somebody and we're talking for however long before getting to know one another. And then we just start and jump into it. And then it's welcome 15 minutes later. Yeah. Yes. And I feel like sometimes I have the best conversations before we actually start recording. Yeah. There's something about the brain that says let me say all of the best things I want to say now when no one can hear them.

Yeah. Yeah. We were getting into my divorce. We were talking about how you and your wife met. All of that good stuff, which maybe we'll get to in this episode as well. But I'm really excited to have you here. And as I was just disclosing, this is all kind of top of mind for me because of what I've been going through in my own life. And I know so many listeners, whether they are in relationships or single, you know, are dealing with relational issues constantly, whether it's

relationships with somebody else or the relationship with themselves, which I know you talk about a lot in your new book. So what inspired Love Life? You know, I wrote a book 10 years ago and it did very well and I became kind of known for that book amongst other things like my YouTube channel and my retreats and everything else I do. And that was how to get the guy, right? That was called Get the Guy. Yeah. I think that, you know, over time, it became really apparent to me that there were deeper reasons why people were struggling to find love, including myself. And more and more I became passionate about exploring those and talking about those, because the original book was really about getting people to get out there and be more proactive.

And, you know, I started my career 15 years ago as a coach with a kind of simple idea. when I first started helping women in their love lives, you know, I was noticing so many women not being very proactive in their love lives. And this was pre-dating app era. And I got to a point where I was like, I really want to help women just take more chances because I feel like they keep ending up with the wrong people or people who don't treat them well because they're not creating enough choice. And when we don't create enough choice, we settle for something that's not great. And, you know, I had this whole thing about the handkerchief and, you know, when women would say to me, I'm old fashioned, I don't make the move. I would be like, that's nonsense.

Old fashioned was making the move. It was just making the other person feel like it was their idea. And I likened it to dropping the handkerchief in front of the person that you want to talk to. And that kind of turned into this whole mini movement on how women could be much more proactive than they had been led to believe. while still maintaining their power and not feeling like all of a sudden they turned into this desperate person that they didn't want to appear to be. And I was right in some ways that there was a problem with people not being nearly proactive enough in this part of their life. But I was also wrong about my assumption that when people generated more options that they would suddenly make better choices. And I learned that over the years, you know, over a decade of doing what I do,

literally worked with hundreds of thousands of people in my events and coaching. And I got to a point where I went, there's something else going on here because people seem in some way to be programmed, to be wired, to be drawn towards people and situations that hurt them, that take them away from a happy, peaceful life, that take them away from a happy, from the kind of love that they say they want and keep leading them into situations that make them really, really unhappy, feel really, really unsafe, feel miserable, and often just lead to them checking out altogether because they're like, I just can't do this anymore. This is too much.

It's not working for me. And so I wrote this book because A, I wanted people to understand that there's nothing, you are not broken. It is natural to find it difficult in this area. I don't care that your friend met someone when she was in college and has been married to him ever since. This is not an easy area to figure out. It's not. It's hard. And we don't have full control over it. If we want to get in shape, we have a lot more direct control. We can change our diet. We can go to the gym. We can train. and we'll see changes in our body. We may not get our body exactly the way we want,

but we will see changes. You could go on a day every night for the next six months and not find love. And so we feel very out of control in this area, and many of us have been very unlucky in this area, and that shouldn't be something that we constantly punish ourselves for or tell ourselves that we're in some way deficient or broken for not having the love life we want at this stage of our life.

but what I also wrote this book to address is what are some of the ways that we might be getting in our own way that if we were more aware of them, we could start to take a fresh approach to our love life that might finally bring us the kind of love that we have been looking for. And also hopefully to bring people a bit more enjoyment along the way because I absolutely want to expedite the process of people finding the love they want. but I also want them to be happier on the way there. So that they're not feeling like life doesn't start until I find this, which is why I said, you know,

the book's called Love Life, but I subtitled it, how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily no matter what. Because we can't wait to be happy. We have to find a sense of happiness and peace today. And so that's the big thesis about why I wrote the book. And in the book,

I get into all of the details of how we might be going wrong at this point. I would love to talk about all those ways that we might be going wrong at this point, but there are a lot of things there that you said that I would love to unpack a little bit. And just this idea of choosing the wrong partner and choosing situations that hurt us, what did you find when you were kind of delving into that topic? Because I think a lot of us learn that really it goes back to childhood, right? Like developmental psychology or attachment theory and that we're all just subconsciously seeking out to recreate the patterns and the relationships that we had when we were, you know, infants and children, even if those were not healthy. And then they just kind of leave it at that.

Is that one component of it? Or what is your theory about why we continually kind of seek out these patterns? So for sure, it's a huge, huge, huge part of it and a deep part of it and one of the hardest things to change. You know, what you're referring to is this, it really is what we know, right? It's as simple as that in many ways. It's is we gravitate towards what is familiar to us. And we don't know necessarily why it's familiar. We haven't necessarily done that excavation into our past to understand what's familiar about this.

something that is familiar about it, that we're driving towards. Our body recognizes it. Our nervous system recognizes it. We can recognize someone's push, pull, never know where I stand with them, never quite feel safe as love. You know, that feels somehow energizing. It feels like passion. It feels like romance. At least what I know to be romance and passion. And if I find something that's calmer, you might feel strange, it might feel disconcerting, it might feel boring, because it's just not what I've come to appreciate as love. Other people, it's, you know, love is what you have to work for. You have to earn love. You have to go out of your way to get love. It's not, it doesn't come easy. It's not peaceful. It's, you have to do a lot. You have to perform to get love. And so, you know,

we all have our relationship with what love is and our nervous system is addicted to, you know, If you grow up in a life of stress, you know, you can recreate stress all your life because you just, that's what you're wired for. Your nervous system knows chaos. And a lot of us say, well, I thrive when I'm in chaos. I thrive when I'm in stress. And it's what we're really saying is this isn't what makes me happy, but it's just very, very familiar to me. And so we look for ways to replicate that.

But, and I think it's really important for people because it's very common when we keep choosing people who are bad for us or who make us unhappy or who treat us poorly, it's very common for people nowadays just to say, well, you don't love yourself or that's a lack of self-worth. And they're not wrong, but it's a bit reductive because, you know, I use the example in the book of a dolphin that grows up in captivity and has to jump through hoops to get fish from people. if you release that dolphin into the ocean and it doesn't know how to find food and it swims up to boats in the ocean, you wouldn't say that dolphin has a self-worth problem. Right.

You'd say that this dolphin is doing what it knows, what it learned in the tank. And we all have our tank, every single one of us. So what did we learn in the tank? That's what we're replicating many of us in adult life. the deduction that many of us have made is what I've gotten so far must be what I'm worth. That must be my level in life. And any more than that makes us feel uncomfortable. By the way, often less than that also makes us feel uncomfortable.

But we find our level at that comfort zone where our brain has told us, this is your worth. a friend of mine she found herself with a nice guy who treated her very well after having been in a relationship with someone who treated her very, very poorly. And she said to her mum one day, she said, her mom said, how's it going? And she said, it's so weird. He's so nice to me. And her mom said, that's how it's supposed to be. But for her, it was so unfamiliar and it felt uncomfortable to her to be getting more.

She was getting more, but it felt uncomfortable to her to be getting more. So that's what we have to learn to become comfortable with is a new set level. And that's very, very hard for most of us. We shouldn't underestimate how hard it is to get comfortable with more or to get comfortable with love that doesn't come with a catch, which is what so many people are comfortable with is why I can get love, but as long as it comes with a lot of pain or suffering, you know, but to ask for someone this wonderful without being treated like crap behind the scenes or without, you know, it's intermittent outbursts or without them betraying me,

that would be asking too much. So it's hard. It's hard to get comfortable with more. If you haven't heard of Nuda yet, allow me to upgrade your life. So by now you all know, that I am skincare conscious. I truly care about the effectiveness and the quality of the products that I'm using. And on top of that, me and sun damage are not friends. I have spent many thousands of dollars lasering off sun damage from when I was younger. So in light of this, I have partnered with Nuda Sunless, a Sunless Skin Essentials brand that is professionally backed and carries everything from self-tan to skincare, to cosmetics, to suncare. So if you are looking for for a healthy way to bronze and glow without the fear of sun damage.

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I'm a mom, a comedian, a New York Times best-selling author, and yes, a total failure. Whether you've ruined your best friend's wedding, oops, or just have an unhealthy need to constantly compete with your younger and cuter sibling. This podcast will cover it. Join me each week as I talk to friends, comedians, celebrities, pet psychics, ex-boyfriends, and more. All the Fails is a podcast about failure in all its various forms. I know that's something that a lot of women and people in general struggle with is getting enough protein in their diets. So you might be getting your protein at your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but you still feel like you're not hitting those goals. And I know that a lot of people struggle with snacking.

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I've been in recovery for 10 years. And something that's so common with people, especially in early recovery, is that suddenly their life isn't to tumultuous and marked with all this drama and overstimulation and so many people don't know what to do with that feeling of what I would call serenity, but a lot of people kind of interpret that as boredom. And people go back to their old lifestyle. And I think that similarly, if you've been experiencing love in one way or relationships, one way since you've been a child maybe and then you recreate that in your romantic relationships and your self-worth and everything is wrapped up in that,

and you're used to that stimulation and nervous system activation and stress and all of that, when that goes away in the same way as an addict losing their drug of choice, you know, that feeling can be so uncomfortable that you would just go back to the familiar, to your point. It's a great point because you're training yourself to not just get used to a new feeling, but to value it. Yeah. Right. If you take someone who's dealing with drug addiction and on the day that they stop using,

you sit them in front of a sunset and say, appreciate this sunset. Like, this is not the day that they're going to... Not the day. That they're going to look at a sunset and go, how magnificent, how awe-inspiring. I feel so connected to nature right now. I feel so connected to myself. I feel so present. This is, my God, what a beautiful thing.

That's not the day you're going to appreciate that. The day that you give up drugs and the days following that are literally just retraining, you know, going through withdrawal and then retraining your nervous system. And it may take a lot of time to get to a point where you can say, oh my God, sunset's unbelievable. It's also learning. It's not about trying to make. mimic the feeling that you got in the old paradigm with the feeling that you're getting from a

more healthy source because they'll never be the same thing. A sunset will never be a crazy high that you get from a drug. It's not going to be that. So if we're waiting for the time where a sunset's going to feel like that, we're going to be waiting a very long time and we might end up saying, well, sunsets don't work. It's starting to see the new. new experience as inherently valuable but in a different way. And that can lead us into some other situations where it's not we got the feeling a different way. It's that we're no longer chasing that feeling and we're valuing something that at first may seem

more subtle. But once you connect to it, you realize it's profoundly more valuable than the old thing. So there's a lot of brain rewiring. right, that we have to do when we enter upon this work. So what are some of the first steps that somebody can take when they are wanting to change? Because you said like the fundamental relationship is the relationship we have with ourselves. And you hear everybody say like, oh, you just have to love yourself and then you can love another person or love yourself and and be whole. And then you'll attract the right person. But like I think it sounds good. What does that look like

and practice. Well, I think so much of the kind of advice out there on self-love these days is really, really unhelpful and misleading. And it has good intentions, but I just think that it leaves people not knowing what to do with it. We're told ad nauseum, self-love is the answer. And then ask anyone, what does it actually look like? And you get some version of bubble bath and candles. And I have never been able to connect with any of that. I also found it difficult inherently to connect with the kind of rhetoric around self-love that always seem to revolve around some version of connecting to how special I am and how unique I am and how I don't know about anyone else. For me, in my low points, I'm not feeling particularly special or unique or wonderful. And like that was not a root to

self-love for me. And by the way, in my lowest moment, is when I needed self-love the most. But that was exactly the time where I was like, I can't connect to feeling special and amazing right now. So I would ask audiences because I would want to play out with them, the internal dialogue around self-love, so that they could start to see where they were getting tripped up. So I would say to audiences in my events on my retreat,

why should you love yourself? And people would pause and they wouldn't initially have a good answer. and by the way, everyone, if I said, is it important to love yourself? Everyone would say yes. But then I said, okay, so why should you love yourself? Everyone got stumped. Then someone would say, well, we should love ourselves because we're special. And I said, what makes you special?

And then people will be stumped again. And they'd say, well, it's because I'm kind or I'm good to people or I'm loving or I'm this or I'm that. And I'm like, that sounds a lot to me like grading yourself. What happens on the days where you're not those things? Because we're not, none of us are those things all the time? So when you're not those things, are you not deserving of love? And then people would be like, hmm.

And they'd stay, you know, people would keep coming up with vague answers like that because we deserve it. And I'd say, well, doesn't everyone deserve it? And they go, yeah. And I'd say, well, then if everyone deserves it, it doesn't really feel like this whole I'm special rhetoric seems to fall down because it just feels like, well, we're all the same. So I would get to a point where I would realize, oh, this is where people are getting tripped up. We have to have a different way of thinking about self-love.

It needs a rebrand. And I would realize that we're trying to love ourselves almost via the romantic model of love, the way we love other people. You know, we fall in love because someone is interesting. and charismatic and great to be around and all of these things. And so now we fall in love with them. But if you think about what the opposite of that is, there's a phrase that we all know, it's familiarity breeds contempt.

And it's why so many long-term relationships fail is because we get so familiar with someone that we take them for granted. We no longer appreciate what's amazing about them. We're too close to them. We develop contempt. And then we go out in search for someone more mysterious again so that we can get that feeling of falling in love all over again. Well, if familiarity breeds contempt, who would we have more contempt for than ourselves than the person we have spent every waking moment with since the day we were born? There's almost nothing. There's no room left for anything but contempt.

I take myself for granted, all the things that are good about me, I'm bored with, all of my mistakes I'm more aware of than anyone else in the world. So it's really hard to love ourselves through the romantic model. And I think that's why so many of us have struggled with self-love for so long. So then you have to ask, what would be a different model for loving ourselves that doesn't follow the romantic model? Because that's broken for self-love. I started looking around at places where a different model was applied.

So I'd look at the parent-child relationship. If you ask a parent, why do you love your child? Almost never does a parent say, well, last week they got an A in math, and they did a really cute thing the other day. And they don't do that. If you say to a parent, why do you love your child? They'll look at you with a strange look. And be like, what are you talking about?

Because they're my child. because he's my son, because she's my daughter, because they're mine. What are you talking about? That left a giant clue for me, because I started to realize that the essence of self-love isn't about finding reasons to love yourself. You only need one. And it's the most basic, fundamental reasonable that of eight million people on this earth, you are the only one who's responsible for the human that is you.

It's like at birth you were given a human. Here's your human. And okay, for the first 16 to 18 years of our life, someone's job was to keep us alive. They may or may not have done a good job of that, but it was someone else's job. And then when we came of age... Though probably no one ever said it to us, the reality is, hey, in case you didn't know, this human is yours. You're responsible for this human. Your job is to take care of this human now. You have custody for custody of this human. And because we never got told that, when we moved on from our parents taking care of us or whatever, we started looking for other people to do it. Who's going to make me feel loved now? Who's going to make me feel enough now? Who could I fall in love with so that they'll be there for me emotionally so that they'll take care of me so that they'll make me feel enough?

Who are the friends I can go to to? But no one ever told us, hey, you have one job. In this whole life, you have one job. And it is to take care of this human. Make this human as happy as you can possibly make them. When you realize that, it changes the entire way that we look at self-life. because you realize I don't need to think I'm awesome. I don't need to think I'm special.

I don't need to compare myself to other people and think that I match up. I don't need any of that. I only need to know that I have one job in this world and that is to take care of this human. And when you think like that, comparison with other people makes no sense anymore. I just have to parent this human. this human. I can't exchange this human for another human, so there's no point thinking, well, but they have this and they're better looking and they're taller and they're skinnier and they're... It's irrelevant. You can't exchange your human. You just have one human and one

job. Give that human the best life you can possibly give them. What that does is it turns loving ourselves from the noun, that feeling of love, to a verb, to love. Our job is to love ourselves as an approach. And then when you realize that, you realize, oh, loving myself can start today because I've been telling myself, how do I love myself? I don't even like myself. You don't need to like yourself in order to love yourself. Liking yourself can come later.

And by the way, in the parent-child relationship, it often does. The child, as they get older, realizes all the things the parent did for them. But often the fruits of that relationship, many of them, don't come until that child is an adult. It's the same with ourselves. We don't have to like ourselves right now. We don't have to like the position we've got ourselves into in life, the mistakes we've made, the things we feel regret over, the things we feel guilty for. You don't have to feel love for yourself. You have to love yourself as a verb, as a job.

and that changes everything. So the next question is, what would loving this human look like? You know, you ask that question, okay, if we're trying to rewire ourselves, what does loving myself in that context

actually look like? Well, the starting question is, what does this human need? What would give them the best shot at happiness, at peace, at improving their life? And often that starts with, well, what hasn't worked?

You know, what kinds of people have we been giving time to? Who have I allowed this human to be around year after year after year? Like, you know, who have I let get close to that human that should never have got close to that human? Yep. And how will I stop that from ever happening again? And I have a whole chapter in the book called How to Rewire Your Brain, where in a series of different steps, I show people what that looks like. But the first step is you make change necessary by saying, what is it I can never do again? You don't need self-belief for that.

Self-belief is built from doing things that build confidence. You take an action, you do something difficult, and now you believe in yourself a little more because you've done it. it before. But you don't need self-belief to stop doing something that just creates hell for you. You just need to learn. Like no one needs confidence to not put their hand in a flame. We just don't put our hand in the flame because it burns. Well, what's the flame in your life that you just know I can never stick my hand in that flame again? That is all you need. It's the necessity you need. Like when I say make change necessary, It's not, I don't start how to rewire your brain by saying believe you can have more.

It's make change necessary. What's the thing you can never do again because of how much pain it's caused you in the past? If you've been with people who you've been really attracted to or they've been very charismatic but they've not been loyal, they've not cared about your feelings, they've gaslit you, they're incapable of saying sorry. they are not, there's no empathy in the way they treat you. They don't even fully commit to a relationship with you. They keep telling you they're not ready.

What is the thing that in the last relationship you were in that caused you immense pain or the relationship you keep repeating? What's the thing that made you miserable in that relationship because it was missing? Whether it was decency, loyalty, being seen by. someone, feeling safe with someone. When you know what that is, the big realization you can have is, oh, if that thing's missing, it doesn't matter how amazing I think someone is. I'm miserable. I can never be happy. So from now on, no matter how amazing I think someone is, if I don't have that basic thing, that basic value, that basic trait or a basic, yes, I want to be in a

relationship with you, it's irrelevant how awesome I think they are or how sexy or how attractive or how charismatic I think they are. That's making change necessary. And we can go through the other steps if you want. I want to give you a chance to jump in. But that's the beginning of it is making it necessary. And again, that's much easier to do when you are actively loving yourself because you realize is my job to give this human a better life. It's been my job so far. I might have been sleeping on it. But it's been my job this whole time.

You know, I always say to myself, if I've let something happen in my life that I shouldn't have, or I say, Matthew, you had one job. Yeah. Where have you been? Yeah. And that wakes me up because I'm like, oh yeah, I can never let that happen again. that's making change necessary. Such a huge paradigm shift there.

And as you were talking, I was thinking of Akartol. Eckhart Tolly. I never know how to pronounce it. Depending on the day I'm speaking, I use a different one. But he talks about separating the I and myself. Like there are two different things, his revelation that he had when he said, I am going to kill myself and then not to get dark. But he went, wait, these are two different things.

And when you're talking about, caring for this human. Those are two different things. There's kind of these two different parts of us, even though it's the same. That was just one thought that came up. But yeah, when you put it that way, it reframes self-love completely. Because to your point, if you're listing off qualities or attributes, what about on those days that you don't have those, you don't love yourself or you don't deserve love or you're not worthy of love. How does this apply to loving another person when we are looking for a partner? Are we supposed to love them in that same way? Or I feel like it always gets conditional when it's somebody else, right? When it's unconditional with ourselves. The part that makes it

conditional is when loving that human in another person is at odds with your responsibilities to take care of the human that it is truly your job to take care of. You can love someone in ways that feel unconditional where you go, I would do anything for this person. And I love their soul. I love their essence. My love for them goes so much deeper than anything they're good at or anything they bring to the table or any of those things that they worry if they stop doing those things, they wouldn't be enough. I can love them more deeply than all of those things. But the point where it becomes conditional is if loving you in the way that I am today makes it impossible for me to do my job, of loving this human

who's literally like I said that's my one job I must do whatever other jobs I do in this world the one thing I must do is take care of this human if we go to the extreme and you're like you're in love with a narcissist who invalidates you at every turn

gas lights you distorts your entire reality separates you from yourself just in every way your life with them is miserable, pathologically lies to you, creates chaos in your life. Well, you can no longer say you're doing your job

by being with that person. Because you may have the dangerous kind of empathy that just has no limits. Where you keep excusing the things they're doing. Maybe you know their history and it makes you empathize with them and take pity on them. And that's why they are the way they are.

and they need my love, they need my support. But if that means abandoning yourself and the job that you have to do with yourself, then loving them has gone too far. As you guys probably know, I bought a house. I'm actually closing this week. And it's pretty crazy. I do not feel old enough or mature enough to be a homeowner. I still feel like I am like a teenager or in my 20s. But here we are. and I have so much space to decorate both indoor and outdoor. And one of my favorite go-to places for both indoor and outdoor furniture, decor, everything that you need for your house basically is article. So article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online-only model.

They have some amazing prices too. They have such a great curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial, Scandi, and Boho. design that makes furniture shopping simple. My place is pretty traditional. I'm going to go with pretty classic, not too trendy pieces. Some things that I have now that I absolutely love are the Gabriola Ivory Buclée chairs. They are kind of trendy, but also classic. They'll never go out of style. They're also amazing quality. They make a bench too that I'm really thinking about putting at the end of either my bed or a guest bed. And I also love their outdoor furniture. I have a lot of outdoor space at my new house and I really want it to be a place where people hang out. So

I am eyeing a lot of things at Article right now. Articles team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. And they have really fast, affordable shipping across the U.S. and Canada. They don't leave you waiting around. You pick the delivery time. They send you updates every step of the way. And their knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. So right now, article is offering my listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more to claim visit article.com slash blonde and the discount will be automatically

applied at checkout. That's article.com slash blonde for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. When it comes to shopping, there is one place that I go to get pretty much everything. thing. It's always my first stop and that of course is revolve. I'm sure that it's the same for so many of you guys because they just have the best curation of fashion, I think personally, out there on the internet. They have everything. So whenever I have something like an event coming up or a trip, I go and I love that I can shop by occasion. So for example, this coming week, I'm going to Dear Media, IRL in Austin. And I want to do something that has like a little bit of a western flare. And I found the cutest things on Revolve. And then in a month, I'm going on a big trip

through Israel and Europe. I need all of the cute summer things. And I never know where to start. So I love that I can go and revolve. I can go and look at their vacation section and get inspo and ideas. and they truly just have everything that I need. They actually have 500 brands spanning, high-end, emerging, and exclusive labels in not only fashion, but beauty and home goods as well. They consistently have the latest and the most sought-after trends in fashion. Everything is authentic and high quality. They have new arrivals daily. And they also have inclusive sizing options. A lot of people ask me in Q&A is also like, where do I get style inspiration from? and truly it's from browsing new arrivals on Revolve.

And then I also love to shop on Forward as well for more luxury things. So Forward is Revolves luxury sister site. So when I'm looking for things from like San Laurent or the Row or I'm just looking for that higher end fashion, accessories, all of that, forward is my go-to for that. So from last minute trips to event dressing and seasonal refreshes, Revolve has you covered with fast two-day shipping and hassle-free returns all on them. So go to revolve.com slash blonde today to shop my top picks for the season. And don't forget to check out their latest arrivals while you're there.

They have new arrivals daily, so there's always something new to shop. Again, that's revolve.com slash blonde, r-e-o-l-v-e-com, slash B-L-O-N-D-E. And you can shop all my top picks for the season. If you haven't listened to my episode with Stephanie Van Watson on March 25th, I highly recommend you go back and listen to that because it's all about essential fatty acids and why they are so important to keep ourselves healthy. And I know that we all want to keep ourselves healthy because healthy cells are healthy bodies. So if you want to get sciency about it, studies show that C-15, which is this essential fatty acid that was discovered, by Stephanie Ben Watson. It works by strengthening our cells, improving our mitochondrial function, and protecting us against damaging free radicals, and the result is better long-term metabolic,

liver, and heart health. So it ends up that many of us are deficient in C-15, which results in weaker cells, and that means less energy. They quit working earlier than they should, and all of that makes us age faster. You can have things like poor sleep, you feel sluggish. So if this sounds familiar, then definitely you need to check out Fatty 15. It is a science-backed award-winning, vegan-friendly, and pure C-15 supplement. So by replenishing ourselves with that essential C-15 nutrient, fatty 15 effectively repairs our cells and restores our long-term health. Fatty 15 has three times more cellular benefits than omega-3 or fish oil. And this is something that Dr. Van Watson gets into in the episode. And it's really fascinating. It's also made from a

patented pure and oxidation resistant C-15 powder derived from plants. So it's vegan-friendly, it's free of flavors. It has no fillers, allergens, or preservatives. And C-15 is the only ingredient in fatty 15, so it's 100% pure. Omega-3 fish oil, by comparison, omega-3 fish oil supplements often go bad before they even leave the bottle, which results in supplements that don't improve your health at all. And Fatty 15 naturally protects against damaging oxidation, both in the bottle and your body. So it works in multiple ways. It repairs age-related damage to cells. It protects them from future breakdown. It can boost mitochondrial energy output. Activate the pathways in the body that help regulate sleep, mood, and natural repair mechanisms that support our overall health.

So Fatty 15 is on a mission to replenish your C-15 levels and restore your long-term. term help. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit by going to Fatty15.com slash blonde and use the code blonde at checkout. That's F-A-T-T-Y-15, the number 15.com slash blonde. And the code is blonde at checkout for 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit. When I did a solo episode recently about the end of my relationship, I got so much feedback from people who are in relationships and they don't know whether they should stay or leave. And I talked a lot about how my relationship wasn't quote unquote bad. And one of the questions that I got from a listener was, how do you leave or how do you know when to leave a

relationship if it's not quote unquote bad and it would actually look really good to other people? And I know there's so much ego and identity wrapped up in that. And, you know, for me, I just felt like you just always know, or at least I always knew. I knew deep down, but it was whether or not I was going to listen to that. Is that kind of the gauge? Am I sacrificing, loving myself by loving this person? I think firstly, it's always questionable for anyone else to tell you what bad is for you. Yeah. Because there's a lot of projection that happens in that. If someone was, in a very abusive relationship and there's no abuse in your relationship. You're just in a place where let's say you just truly do not feel seen and understood by your partner. You feel like you're

just talking different languages and that person doesn't really know who you are. It doesn't get you. Maybe to be with them is to feel alone because you, in conversation, you have absolutely. absolutely nothing in common. You don't understand the way each other see the world. There may not be any abuse in the relationship. So to someone who's suffered abuse, they may look at your relationship and go, you're giving away a good thing. I would give to be in a relationship where someone wasn't abusive and they treated me well and blah, blah, blah, and they worked hard and they were responsible. But their bad is very focused on abuse and your bad is focused on the fact that you're in a relationship where you feel completely alone and you feel like I haven't found someone who really gets me.

And who's to say that's not bad? If you spend your whole life with someone like that and that's the person you're going to spend the most time with by definition, you're going to have an incredibly lonely existence that is bad for you. I'm not saying you because I don't know your situation. No, I can identify. Right. that's a slow eating away at your chronic pain. And so I think we all have to ask ourselves, what's really important to me?

Because maybe there was a time in my life where I over-indexed on charisma or, you know, over-indexed on looks or height or whatever, like things that I look back on now and I'm like, God, that's not where it's at. But man, can I be unhappy when I'm with someone who doesn't get me? And so you realize, oh, next time around, that's got to be the most important thing in the world to me. The fact that they don't exactly look exactly how I thought someone would look or that they, you know, a shorter or that they're this or that. Honestly, for anyone, it could be you let go of certain things that you find are less important. Yes. But you gravitate towards the things that you realize I can't live without. And that's where it goes back to the self-love is what?

If I stay in this relationship, what am I depriving myself of that is essentially starving me of a, okay, if my basic, basic core need is for safety at the very baseline of, you know, take like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the first fundamental thing is physiological needs. Yes, I need a roof over my head. Yes, I need to feel like I'm not, my body's not threatened every day or whatever. But once you're meeting those needs, then you get to higher level needs. A certain point, if you're in a relationship where you don't feel understood, then one of your

higher level needs isn't being met. And yes, that will be a problem. Yeah. Can you tolerate that problem over a lifetime is the big question is whether, you know, should I, shouldn't I leave? Can I tolerate the absence of this thing over a lifetime? Is it the kind of thing that will get better? Can it get better?

I'd done what I can to try to improve it. And I think anyone who's truly given it their best shot to try to improve that thing and felt like it's just not happening. You know, no one should spend a lifetime in an unhappy relationship simply because it's not as bad as someone else's bad relationship. Well, I think there's also a lot of fear and, you know, kind of a scarcity mindset that a lot of us probably have, especially given the landscape of dating now, it has changed so much to your point earlier. And nightmare stories from single friends and nightmare stories of the

dating apps and everything. And, you know, I can say for myself, that would start to creep in. And I would go, well, this isn't bad. Okay. So yeah, I feel a little lonely sometimes and maybe I don't feel seen, but look at all this that I do have. And this is a good person. And what if I don't find, you know, and it's, and then it just spirals. And that fear, I know this is so common. And I'm sure you know it so well too. That will keep somebody in a relationship for a long time. Yes. And it does. Yeah. People go to their grave with that. Yeah. You know. It's heartbreaking. When we're afraid, we give ourselves false dichotomies. I either stay here and I'm unhappy or I leave and I'm in this crazy wild west of bad dating behavior that I now have to deal with. And there's like a thousand shades

of or I'm alone forever. Or I'm alone forever. And we all have a tendency to do that. We we catastrophes and we look at the worst possible scenarios and we don't. see all of the different, if you start slicing it between your current situation and the worst possible scenario, there's a thousand in-betweens. Life is not so simple. Life is not so black and white. Yes, you're back into the dating market and you might have a few bad experiences. You can also control that to some extent. You can turn off the tap when you want to turn off the tap. You can walk away when you get a bad experience where a younger you might not have. You don't have to, your friend who got locked into a bad experience for two years,

you might spot that on week three and go, I'm not going to spend two years in this bad experience. You know, a lot of the reasons people burn out in dating is because they give too much energy to something they already know is bad or not going to be fruitful with someone who doesn't deserve it. They use up all their bandwidth on that. But if you protect your energy and you give it only where you see that it's rewarded or only

where you see that it's with the right kinds of human beings, then Dayton's going to be a different experience for you than a lot of people, those horror stories that you see out there. Because in a lot, not in all, but in a lot of cases, horror stories unfold the way they do because there were things that we hadn't learned to act on earlier. There are things we chose to. ignore or didn't see the signs of. And when we're more in tune with what we want, it's very hard for someone, they may take us down the wrong road for a little bit until we realize it's very hard for someone to take us too far down that road before we sense the incongruencies of what's going on or what they're telling us versus what they're doing. Yes. I totally agree with that. And I feel like if you

are in a situation or a relationship and you do choose to leave despite the fear, despite the anxiety, uncertainty, all of that, I'll just speak for myself. Like, I'm so clear on what I want and what I don't want and what I'm okay with and what I'm not okay with. And, you know, when I entered into my last relationship eight years ago, I wanted different things than I want now for so many different reasons and I was okay with certain things back then that, you know, I wouldn't be okay with now. And the things that I thought that I wanted then are not the things that I want now. And that's, and that's, there's so much power in that. Yeah.

And I, I think that as we get older and hopefully as we get more attuned to what we want, there's, you know, there's this bittersweet thing where I think sometimes if we haven't met someone by a certain point, we can look at, you know, even if, even if I met someone today, I wouldn't have 10 years of history with them. And that makes me sad. You know, I would be starting again today. But the more attuned we get to what we want, the more we catch up to each other more quickly. Because I know what I want. You know what you want.

We have a better sense of people. We sense the tender spots in each other. Because when you've been through it in life, when you've lived, whatever that means for you, there's a thousand different ways to have experienced life. But when you meet someone who has been through it on some level two, you see each other. It's unmistakable. You talk and you sense their life, not just in what they say, but in what they don't say, or in how measured they are in what they say, or the nuance.

and the energy they bring, you sense this is someone else who gets it. And if they get it, then they kind of get me. And so what might have taken you five years to arrive at as a younger version of yourself, you arrive at much quicker with someone as two people who are coming to the table with a different level of knowledge and experience and wisdom and scars. And I think there's something very, very beautiful in that. of leaving a relationship that's wrong is learning to trust ourselves, which may not be something we have learned to do in the past, or that relationship may have made us not trust ourselves.

Part of the leap is jumping into unknown territory where we will have to learn to trust ourselves as we go. We will have to learn that we can trust ourselves in a room alone for a weekend to get through it on the go, because there won't be a choice. You know, we will have to learn to trust our judgment a little more this time around as we go. But the more you do learn to trust yourself, I really believe this, the less you will run into the kinds of stories that people talk about when they're dating. Because you trust yourself enough to be happy. And the last chapter of this book is called Happy Enough, because I don't think you have to be

happy, happy. I think you have to be happy enough. Yeah. But if you learn how to be happy enough on your own, then if you see things you don't like, you can say no. You can walk away because you don't need that person anymore. You can wait. And you can even admit to yourself that I'd probably be happier if I found the love of my life.

That's okay. You don't need to pretend that that's not true. You just have to know that you can be happy enough without that person. to say no to the wrong thing. So it's learning to trust ourselves again, which is a hard thing. If you don't trust yourself, you're afraid to go out there and date because you're afraid of what will happen to you if you get attached to the wrong person. And if you do, that you're not going to be strong enough to walk away. And now you're going to be a whole new cycle of pain. Yep. Amazing. Well, I think that's such an encouraging note to end on. And I totally agree with you

that last piece that you were saying, getting somewhere more quickly with somebody at this stage in your life. When you do have that life experience and wisdom and you know yourself better, I feel like you can have a connection with somebody in a couple months that you wouldn't have with somebody in years before you learn that about yourself. So I think that's really, it's a hopeful message and probably provides a lot of encouragement for any of my listeners who are also single or I think the book is amazing and tell everybody where they can find the book and find you. Well, thank you for having me on first, Ariel. I really appreciate it and, you know, exposing this book to your audience. The book is called Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards,

find your person, and live happily no matter what. Very proud of it. I've been working on it for many years now. And I really think it's going to help a lot of people. And for anyone out there who wants to find love, this book is for you. If it's felt really hard, I promise you, this is going to help you look at things differently. But it's also, there's chapters in there about how to recover from heartbreak. There's a chapter on the question of having a child. If you are afraid because you want a child, but you feel like time is running out. There's an entire chapter in there for you to read that would be worth getting the book alone just to read that chapter. There's chapters on how to rewire ourselves for success in love, how to build confidence. It's

very, very complete book in many ways. And if people go to lovelifebook.com, they'll be able to get a copy. But also, I'm doing a live event on the 4th of May, which is, there's no way to buy a ticket to this event. Your book is your ticket. So it's a virtual event. No matter where you are in the world, you'll be able to watch this event from home. But the event is called Find Your Person, and it's designed to be this perfect pairing with the book where you read the book. But then if you really have that goal of finding your person this year, then this is going to help set you up with a plan to do that. And if you go to lovelifebook.com, you can still buy the book through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you want to buy it. But if you come to lovelifebook.com, there's a place there

where you can enter the receipt to get your ticket to May 4th and join us for the Find Your Person event. Amazing. I'm going to be reading it. I'm going to find my person. That's why I love about it as well is whatever stage you're in, even if you're right now, you're grieving or even if you're just trying to find your feet again after a massive change in circumstances. I promise you this book meets you at whatever stage you're at. There's a chapter called How to Leave when you can't seem to leave, which is for anyone who's in a relationship right now and trying to figure out how they can get the strength to leave if it's not right for them. It'll help you figure out if it's not right too. So it meets you where you're at. I'm so excited for people

to read. I haven't been this passionate. I don't think I've ever been this passionate about something I've created. And I think it's the most meaningful work I've ever done. So I just can't wait for people to read it. In conversation with you and hearing you talk about it, this really comes from your heart and that you are really passionate about this. Thank you. Thank you. I started writing this book as a single person. That's the crazy part. I was single and heartbroken. And I finished editing the book on my honeymoon, which it wasn't okay. But we were away for a month for our honeymoon. Oh, a month.

So I feel like I had an excuse. But no, I've every stage of pain in my own love life, you'll see in these pages. This is not a story of a married person writing a book on love. It's me going through every stage of this for myself and also the heart. For sure, for sure. So, yeah, thank you for having me, Ariel. Thank you so much for coming. I hope you enjoyed that episode.

and if you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. You can go to Arialore.com, and I'm always posting about each episode over on my personal page at Arial Lori. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.