The First Steps to Find Love with Matthew Hussey
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A lot of the work I do is not about saying go find a boring relationship devoid of chemistry, is saying, let's take some of these high standards that you have around certain things that are always predicts of great relationships and turn them towards areas that make a very good relationships. I regret .

having you on because you are causing me stress.

Saw a little bit of .

IT on your face. Okay, let's unpack this. Looking for love will get ready to throw out everything you think you knew about finding the right partner.

Matthew hussy is a leading love expert and best selling author who spent nearly two decades helping people find the kind of relationships that build their confidence and bring them joy. If you're looking for a relationship in a relationship or enjoy being single. I found the things Matthew said to be univerSally value fact.

He really chAllenged me on some of the decisions i've made in my own love life. Of this is a bit of optimism. Here's the reason why I think everyone should pay more attention to the work that you put out their versus so many other influencers quote on quote with various relationship advice. You have a humility about you and an honesty about you where you don't want from anything other than to see that other people can find some of the same joy, happiness that you have found, but also to learn some the lessons that you have learned. And I appreciate that you don't claim to be an expert, but rather you are just somebody on a journey who's got a curiosity, a fascination, and you, in some respective, made yourself the gni pig.

Well, that that means a great deal. I've admired you, your work for a very long time. So to hear that from you, as I don't take that lightly at all, that means a lot. I've i've learned a couple of things about myself over the last few years. One is that i'm willing to sacrifice money to speak about things I really, really care about because there's certain books that I know I could write that would create more opportunities.

Five ways to meet a bit partner.

But I have a deep, deep, deep love and connection for the heart of what i'm doing. Did nothing brings me more joy than being able to help I. I had a woman that came to me. He was in her sixties.

This was her first question to me, how do I kill the desire to find love when SHE said I had like, I got a ball in my throat because he had arrived at the point where SHE decided that the her wanting to find love had become the most painful thing in her life, SHE said, I haven't found what i'm looking for. I have. I feel invisible.

I don't get many opportunities at all. Every night I go to bed haunted by the space next to me, wanting to find love and not finding IT. And i'm worried that if I have this desire for the rest of my life, i'm gonna sad for the rest of my life, and I don't wanna be sad for the rest of my life. That's the kind of chronic pain, the chronic pain of loneliness, the chronic pain of I wanted to have a family and I didn't have a family in time, and now biologically, I can the the grief of life, not going the way that I wanted IT to go, or hope IT would go, or thought I would be by this stage. That is, my life's work is having those hard conversations.

What happened with the woman?

I helped her to say that there was the very physical component to her pain, which was that pang in her stomach, in her chest at night, and that initial feeling of god, I wish someone was there next to me. There was a relationship with that pain that was compounding that pain to an unmanageable degree. And I suffered from, for many years, a kind of chronic physical pain that I had in my head that at times got too much for me.

At times I thought, I don't know. I do not know how i'm gonna do this. I may mean utterly miserable. And someone really helped me to understand that I had a relationship with my pain.

of relationship of pain.

There was a whole bunch of ways that I was reacting to that pain that was making IT way worse. I was measuring my life by the worst moments of that pain, even though IT fluctuated. And in her case, there was a story that went along with her pain, that once he started telling herself that story, my life doesn't mean anything, because I never got married or I never found what I was looking for in this area.

I can never be happy because I haven't found someone. I never will find someone. Which was another story. All of these were things that turned her pain into overwhelm. We worry about fear, anxiety.

Er, overwhelm is one hundred percent the most dangerous motion because overwhelm is the question du of any and all of those emotions. And it's in overwhelm where we do things we've regret. It's in overwhelm where we think we can manage.

And so a huge part of what I try to do with people is lower the temperature. So that is below over one, because then you are empower again, and then you can create magic again. And we are not in those moments were with the whole story of our life is being reduced to I didn't meet someone or haven't met someone, or I still don't have someone, a kind of singular vision about our lines.

That is one story. Our life is many different stories. There are many different stories that can be started from where we are. now. This is not the only story of our lives.

So how is that you started? You know, so of, I would expect guys to give guys advice, and those sort of men's groups exist, and women to give women advice. How did you become a man giving women advice on on dating?

Originally I saw the like.

why not men?

Well, I had worked with men. I grew up in this sort nest of amazing women who I loved. So I was had a really good relationship with women.

When I was helping men for a few years, I had women coming to me and saying, won't you doing the same thing for us? And my first response was why I don't really, I don't really know what you're going through. I don't.

I didn't even know you are having these issues. You know, I was a nave one hundred and twenty year old guy, but then I started to pick up books that were designed for women, not designed for men. Now I like to read them.

And my first feeling was, I don't relate to this idea as a guy. There was a very famous book called the rules, which was really designed for women more than men. There was a lin there that said something like I hope i'm not mcroy IT, but this is at the time I read IT as if a guy isn't already talking to you. If he's not like coming over to you, don't go over to him like save yourself the trouble. He's not interested.

That's madness.

I had never related to that in my life. In fact, the opposite was true for me that the more attractive to I am, the more likely i'm going to avoid you.

Ah yeah, yeah.

So I just, I didn't resonate and I went, oh my god, if if these are the kinds of ideas people are living by, they're onna miss out. They're going to miss out on so many people. And Frankly, there are only ever going to meet the loud guy in the room. And the loudest guy in the room is no, you know, not always the best guy.

You know, there is in the sort of advice giving world, there's a lot of publish children. Divorce attorney is always divorced. Child psychologists have screwed up kids, you know, but you are happily married. And so so that gives a lot more incredible. Ts incredibility, when you dispensing relationship advice and you actually .

made IT work well. But actually, if I think about my earliest in my love life, the three of them was me not being that excited because I kind of felt like I was in situations where IT wasn't like the person that I really wanted to speak to, for me to be brave enough to go, even if you meant going on, getting rejected, just the ability to do something instead of doing nothing.

That stayed with me, so much so that my wife orgy, we met because I went home one year for Christmas, live in los Angeles. I went back to london. My friend from high school invited me to his engagement party, which I didn't want to go to.

I had other things I wanted to do, like sitting at home in my mum's house and relaxing and just being cozy for Christmas. But I said, yes. So I did something instead of nothing there.

And then I got, I actually call even, I don't think, take credit for speaking to her first, because there was A T. V, there was a big fight on and on a boxing fans. I was watching the fight, but he came over and stood next to me and asked me what was going on on the T. V, and that was how we started talking iron at great.

But you learn to the skills to go meet the people. And yet the person you married as the person .

who came over met you. Yeah, that was more, that was more like, SHE didn't know much about me, but that was more like the advice i've been giving two women for so long, which is that actually they're always that you can create more opportunity. You don't have to be in the passengers all the time.

Do you think that skill set is diminishing? Encourage to go and talk to a stranger because we don't have to. The technology has eliminated the practice.

I think, yes, I think it's been eroded as a skill set so that all .

that is a skill set like anything I mean.

you know being comfortable A A party is a skillset. You know, I know who didn't come out of code and feel more anxious going to a social event for the first time. If I don't socialize for a month, I start to like, get a kind of low level feeling of a god. I've got to go the here and talk to people like I remember.

I i've really remember being in new york on the evening and a guy I just met being like, how would you ever meet someone not on an APP? He was like, I was in my twenty at the time, but he was like, the idea of going to a bar, talking to someone. Are you kidding? like.

And I remember thinking, god, wow. Interesting statement as IT from a twenty something man that like the idea of going out to a barn saying something to someone with unthinkable to him. So I do think that skill has been eroded. And I think that it's a tremendous shame and a tremendous opportunity because if you are someone who even has a modern of an ability to go and make an impact in person your way ahead of the curve these days.

what are the most common ways that people get in their own way?

We don't gravitate often enough or a toll to the kinds of people that actually make us happy or bring us peace.

It's a bold statement. I agree with you. yes. So who will we gravitating .

to people that on some level satisfy our ego, people that we might like to be seen with, people that we. Feel proud of because of what they represent people. We have massive amounts of initial chemistry with those butterflies that .

you get when you have amazing chemistry with someone and you like, my god, this is, this person is amazing, right? What i've learned is that all those amazing feelings of attraction are actually dopamine naoki tosa. Because the feeling that you found, the thing you're looking forward, you haven't necessarily built any foundation of anything. So initial chemistry can be exciting in intoxicates, but means nothing as to the viability .

of a relationship. Really nothing is.

Then what am I supposed to listen to, if not the chemistry and the intuition and the excitement of the butterflies look, and if not the familiarity? Because do I want to be with a friend who gives me comfort and peace and makes me feel safe.

like the familiarity may not make us feel safe. And maybe the familiar for us is someone who make us feel terribly unsafe. Many people find themselves in situations where someone doesn't text them back.

And all of a sudden you they want to fight for this person, for someone who's made us feel unsure of ourselves, who's made us feel less confident, who's made us feel more insecure. And yet, now my instinct is to fight harder. I'm very, very suspicious of the phrase trust your instincts.

Add a boxing coach once who told me your instincts will get you killed. He said, when a punch is being thrown at your head, your instincts to blink. Your instinct is not to slip or to parry or to get in a good position.

Your instinct is to blink and skin. You go blind in exactly the moment. You need to see our instincts in our love lives can get us emotionally killed because we have all sorts of bad instincts.

Someone makes me unsure of myself. Fight harder. I've decided I like someone after one day. Clear the schedule.

I'm going to see them as much as I can in the next two weeks, drop my friends or that class I enjoy doing or whatever is i'm just I am all in for this person who I don't even know who essentially is a perfect stranger. All I know is the impact they have had on me. I don't know their character.

The character can only be measured over time. IT can be measured on a date. Only impact can be measured on a date.

And so we have certain instincts that really do lead us to make big mistakes, like over investing. We do that all the time. In early dating, we make our mind up about someone we can't possibly have made our mind up about.

We get obsessed with someone where the obsession cannot possibly be an indicator of how right first they are. I think chemistry is important, but when people say I have high standards that usually talking about a very narrow group of things, they're often the same people who say I have really high standards. That's why I never meet anyone.

You learn that for the last two years, they're been an enough situation ship with someone who's been treating them horribly. So what do you mean when you say you have high standards? Do you mean you have high standards for looks?

Do you mean you have high standards for carma? You can't have high standards for kindness. You kind of high standards for empathy because they wouldn't you wouldn't value this person who's treating you with zero empathy. You can't have high standards for teamwork, of trust, of consistency. So a lot of the work I do is not about saying go find a boring relationship devoid of chemistry, is saying, let's take some of these high standards that you have around certain things that are always predicts of great relationships and turn them towards areas that make for very good relationships.

I regret having you on because you are causing me stress.

Saw a lot of bit of .

IT on your face. Okay, let's unpack this. I get excited when I meet someone, I want to spend all my time with them.

Younger me IT was insecurity, like I would spend a lot of time with this person, otherwise it'll meet some media immediately. And so I, I got to, i've gotta speed up to get to know me. process. Older me is born at a genuine excitement. Absolutely, when I get a cold response, IT makes me fight for IT and then sometimes get IT me like, uh.

you know, like I fought for.

And I think the hardest thing is not knowing what's right or who's right for me, because different people bring different energies. Some are exciting, some are coming, some are adventurous. Some chAllenge me intellectually, some chAllenge me the way of my life in the world to go in more adventures.

And they all have different kinds of appealing. But who's right for me? I don't want to date myself. I don't want to take much matches aggy because i'm smart enough to know that baLance is good. I want to give something that they don't give, and I want to them to give something that I can't give.

I once had prove spring stain talking about what a great show was when he's torn, what what does an audience want? And he said the audience simultaneously wants to be surprised and wants to be made to feel at home. And that's what makes a great show.

So i've never said this before, but I think there is something really profound to learn about relationships from that statement. Because of speaking for my own experience, i've never felt more home than in this relationship. I've never felt more accepted.

We've never felt more like I could truly reveal the parts of me that I thought would always be shameful, or that would make someone not want me anymore, and felt like I can say any of those things, and i'll still be met with love and i'll still be met with acceptance. And that's the home part for me. But I think that the surprised part is, I suppose, that kind of James holly question of, will this diminish me or enlarge me? And I think you can apply that to a relationship. Well, being with this person diminish me, or will IT enlarge me?

How much do we listen to our friends and family? I let my parents choose everyone I dated. I know the ones, I know the ones they like. They like the ones with the big personalities.

Yeah, every.

every girl that ever brought home that my father had a big personality.

I think my mom has that to my mom. SHE could be charmed and that's a dangerous instinct because now your mum is falling for the same thing. Yeah.

you are. yeah. And the award wants my parents like, no, don't like that. You know.

I think when you feel like you're really growing with someone and when you feel like you actually make a really great team, is one thing to observe someone in isolation and go sexy person, charismatic person, successful person, like this person's great, look at them go.

But I don't think that's the same thing is me and this person make a really great team together, like we take care of each other, we've got each other's backs and we function really well together. I talk about in my book four levels of importance in any relationship or in any situation with the person, the first admiration. And that's just where we admire someone.

When we may they may not even know we exist, but we just think they're great. The second is mutual attraction, and that's the point of chemistry and connection. The third is commitment, that when we're actually saying yes to each other and the often overlooked part is compatibility, IT is do we actually work together?

You know, it's one thing to say yes and to commit to each other, but does that work? Do we function well together? And as i've had .

a lot of failure relations with really good people, like really, really amazing human beings, who, with a couple of exceptions, I had struggled to say anything bad about anybody I data because they were good people. If I dated them, I just didn't work as a relationship but they're good people um and you know wrong time, wrong place, wrong maturity, wrung circumstances, whatever IT is. But so that's that's an interesting one.

I also think that there's a thing that happens to us as we get older. IT can be a bit dangerous, which is the we feel the need now to justify all of the nose that we've handed out in the past, all of the times we said, not quite right when we're looking for someone today, the stakes feel almost impossibly high because it's like now I have to find someone who makes sense of the people that I have decided not to be with. And I think I can raise the stakes massively of the person we eventually choose.

So much of what you say makes sense, and I think those four things are brilliant. But a lot of what you say i'm struggling with because there is paradoxes involved that I can't trust my instinct. I can't worry about chemistry on the first few times.

I can't give too much too soon. I can't chase someone and give a lot of energy up front. I have to consider, am I growing or my diminishing, which really only discover in time.

So there's that rub, which is I, how do how do I even know? I have to feel safe. I have to feel at home.

And sometimes you have that feeling, and that feeling goes away, or sometimes that feeling comes later. And what i've been guilty of is projecting safety, because I want you so badly. I see a couple things.

I get a couple of good responses than I project a level of safety that I don't have ve done that. And so much of what you say is so insight ful. But I had I was one start for .

all of this. There's more no once when you get into IT because these the paradoxes you're seeing a very like that to me, what makes IT so chAllenging.

But it's what's forced me to to make distinctions that I think if you if I only started what I was doing, doing what I was doing last year, I wouldn't have made certain distinctions， but i've had to make those distinctions because the very contradictions and paradoxes that you point out there are very real to me. And i've come across them again and again. For example, a phrase I used to say a lot, I still believe in IT today, but that needs nuance. A phrase I used to say a lot was don't invest in someone based on how much you like them, invest in who invests in you. And that's a very important.

I say again, because that is something good.

Don't invest in someone based on how much you like them st in who invest in you. Invest in someone based on how much they invest in you. That is a very, very important idea.

And if we just did that, we would save ourselves from eighty percent of the heart break that we're ever gonna experience in our lives. Now there's a problem with that idea. The problem is if both parties go into the situation with that in mind, we are in a stand of who who goes. I don't know if you're gone to invest in me yet, but I have to invest a little bit.

otherwise i'll never know. Or what if you they both read your books and take the advice in both invest and so you get a false sense of investment because falling with strategy and IT feels good. And some investing, somebody who's investing because they have falling, same strategy. me. But well.

I think for me.

I mean this like an intellectually investment. There's an emotional investment like I can intellectual do something because I think it's more likely to yield what i'm looking, where I can feel IT and IT feels that i'll give you a real life example. I met A, A, A couple at a.

They were a wedding. As out of wedding, they were wonderful couple. They were clearly in love. In fact, I think they now engaged. They said to me, when we hug, we make sure to hug for at least whatever the number was twenty seconds, because that's when the oxytocin releases and I was like, I mean, okay, sure, you know and cynical, a cynical busted, even though I ve know a lot of the science, i'm still cynical. And I was talking to to her and SHE says, gna give you hug.

I D love a hugging and we started hugging and I said to her, your counting in your head, aren't you? SHE goes, yeah, I like, stop. Was wearing this hugger right now, right? Yeah, you've intellectually, zed, an emotional connection, right? Here's the great thing about human beings.

Human beings, they know they can feel right. We are social. Animals like this is all in built as we're gona do this hug again right this time to be the favorite.

And just don't count, just hug, just be in the hugg, right? And we hugged, and IT was beautiful. I don't know.

Maybe was fifteen seconds. I was twenty six. Me was twenty five seconds when I started to feel like magic.

And I step back and I had had that field to that field. fantastic. You say again, like i'm no counting required.

I resonate so much with what you're saying.

And I think this is part of the problem with the work that I do and the work that you do and the work that others like us do, which is we're explaining things to the point where people are following the advice, but they're forgetting that the relationship is emotional.

My feeling about all of this is exactly the same as yours. I was hated my own work for that, like I think of therapists, there is an irony that we all know intuitively to be true. That is both helpful if you in a relationship where you need therapy around sex and intimacy to get help, but also by shining a lie on IT, there's something immediately unsexy about that. And the we're not gonna to get over that her dle that we've talked about the fact that there's an issue and now that in the room IT IT doesn't make things bad advice, but IT doesn't mean that you can you can intellectualize things to the point of like you've poveri ze them into nothing. But I think that's .

the world we live in. I think that's the world we live in. Of, you know, thirty second tiktok videos and real and stories, all for terrible reasons, which is, you know, well intentioned people are trying to help. They're also counting the clicks, the views, the fords and saves, you know and and the incentive structures all screwed up in the advice giving world.

But I think you you find people that make sense to you and it's gonna make mentors really important who you decide you vibe with and who you listen to because you're gonna connect with someone who you're going, you're going to hear the authenticity and what they're saying. Like to me, the other side of the equation of the donee intellectualize IT .

is that I can stop thinking like I interested .

lize everything in the same way I over hyperrational hyp ological. And most very sensitive, emotional. But I like breaking things down for me as a single person. I made choices that consistently LED me to more anxiety and consistently let me in directions that went right for me, either because I was, I just wanted to be with someone instead of no one. Well, I think that we we live in a world today where they're truly, whether or not is true for us or not, truly feels like this end, this options.

We go shopping on dating up. We're shopping for people with amazon and scrolling you're scrolling through the products on the shopping APP.

And once you done there, you this instagram and once you're done there, this hint, once they are done there, there's like you could just keeps going to a new platform and being presented with what feel like constantly Better options. These persons got more of this, that person got more of that. And we end up with this kind of composite, in our mind, of the person we want, that is built on all of these different inflate standards. IT gets really dangerous because IT starts to miss the point of what actually makes us happy.

Like guys sometimes think of people going from east to western amErica and how, like at some point, every person had to say when enough was enough, like one person would say IT in chicago and another person would say in montana and another person would say, in a seaton is like, when do you decide this is home? And do you keep saying that? Will they have mountains over there? If we keep going, we might find an amazing ocean.

A certain point. What makes a home a home is that we actually put down roots, you know, foo, being something that is kind of a bit of joke because by definition, anytime we're doing anything, we are by definition missing out on practically everything. So worrying about the party you miss tonight, you aren't we worrying about every event on earth we're missing tonight? We're always missing out on basically everything.

And the same is true in our love lives. There's plenty of people that would be awesome to marry. There's a lot of them. And I think that there is this feeling if if I don't make the choice, everything is still possible, so .

that. Whoever you settle down with, you're gonna miss out on everyone else. Everyone, I promise you. And I promise you, whatever you wish, your partner head, I guarantee body has.

And and at some point, I think we have to decide what where where our piece is, is gonna. E okay.

So gratitude is the thing we're talking about here, which is going into a relationship the same way we should be going into life, which is like, I don't believe in bucket lists. To me, a bucket list is a list of things I haven't done, right? And so i'm forced to look at the things that are missing in my life.

That's what a bucket list is. So I live my life with a reverse bucket list where I will write down something i've done or experience I had, or a place I visited that I never thought i'd ever have. The opportunity to do that was magical.

And then I write IT down. That's great. I will look at the list of things that i've done and the people i've met and experiences i've had.

And every day I go, oh my god, my life incredible. I keep adding to IT. That's insane. Like this should be done, you know. And I saw I think what you're talking about a relationship is instead of looking for the things that are missing and knowing that somebody else has them to also say or just replace that with, look at the things that i'm getting and other people can't give me those things because just as you are missing out on everything, other people are missing out on this. And if you can't be grateful, then maybe this is the wrong person for you.

My friend, doctor romney, he's an expert on notices. m.

SHE says, the moment someone says, what what is IT about this person? What do you love about them? The moment you find yourself saying, I don't know there's just something about them, you're in trouble you because IT shouldn't be hard to talk about the incredible qualities no, and the incredible character of the person that you ve decided yeah to spend your life with someone who has the raw materials for a great relationship with you and vice vera, I see IT like it's a plot of land, and we often make the mistake of really overvaluing the land. And a relationship is in a plot of land. It's like it's the castle the two of you build on that land yeah and it's all of the ways that the stone gets wethered over time.

It's by the house of the home yes.

what you invest in IT is that the fact that the two of you have this incredible thing you've built together that becomes IT actually does become one of kind, because the two of you, only this combination of these two people could make.

So here are some of things that i'm getting right, gratitude in the relationship and looking for the things to be grateful for, rather than the things that are missing, teamwork, which I love, that we will build this. We can break this. We have the opportunity to to make IT whatever we want to build, however, we want to build IT, which I think is magical.

One of the things that I, that I need you to to wax full self colon is confidence. Is that correct? That we first have to find confidence in love for ourselves before we can find love for another? Or can the right partner help us find that thing that has been elusive, even to ourselves both?

I don't think you you don't get to show up with zero ability to connect to yourself or to love yourself and to just give someone else the responsibility. But i'm not a big fan of like this thing that goes around where it's like you have to have done the work on yourself before you ever meet someone else.

You have to be happy first like give me a break how we ve been a possible day, how many people do we know there are in happy relationships that absolutely we're not enlightened people on the day they met their partner like it's kind of an insult to people who are actually out there and single that we keep telling everyone you just haven't done enough work. Yeah, like the rest, all the rest of the world is married. Kate, who met brda university, twenty one.

yeah. Theyd figured that out. Like, and they are still married and that's because you just, you know, enlighten enough yeah, I have a real problem with that idea idea because could .

be insecure a relationship and the relationship can be highly functional? Or can you not?

I mean, we all have in secured, but we all have in section. We can be insecure and the relationship can be functional, but IT doesn't mean the relationship wouldn't be a lot stronger if we worked on those things.

Can I answer my own question and then you can tell me i'm right, wrong.

yeah. And then I want to tell you something about confidence because this is like this. You're onto a whole passion for me right now.

It's OK to be in securing your own relationship. You always going have security in relationship. The thing that makes the relationship one of the things that makes the relationship work is that you're open and vulnerable with your partner about those insecurities. And if you attempt to hide those insecurities from your partner, that's when the problems will arise. But I think to have a successful partnership to able to sit in that very uncomfortable space, even with someone we love and say, I need to tell you about me and what i'm secure about and what I fear, even if it's completely nonsense. That's what most of them are.

irrational as very freeing.

If you have a safe part, A, F.

and if you learn your partner not safe, that becomes a kind of filter for the right of the wrong relationship, like my relationship. Now I can be very, very honest about these things. And I met with love.

I've had relation. I had one relationship where I said something made me insecure that night. And the response I got was, I find that really unattractive.

Simon IT destroyed me. And like, really like direct me course IT for me at the time. I was like, I yeah ever doing that again? Yeah, exactly.

Last time. Like, I could have cused burnie Brown's name. I was like, bri Brown's all about vulnerability.

This doesn't work for us. You can use this as a man when you're in a relationship. And of course you can. And she's right. I was with the wrong person course. And that's not a lesson that you always learn at the time because you you turn inward and you say all on the problem, or I am gross, I am tragic.

I have to stop doing this.

Yeah, I was wrong with me. And the same security is really unattractive. yeah. But I the thing I think that's really important relation to loving ourselves because that's very, very overused idea, is that the loving ourselves thing, it's a it's become very try.

I I was fixed ted on that for a very long time because I was not someone who was good at that. I never really connected with that idea. I got IT unlike I get IT love yourself, never any real emotional connection there for me.

And I needed a more robust model for that. Otherwise I was never gonna able to connect to IT. And for me, loving myself, and is what I tell people these days, is you can actually make IT very, very simple, which is, firstly, if I like people, if I care about people, then i'm a citizen of the world.

There's no reason why I should treat myself worse than I would treat anyone else. Forget treating yourself Better for a moment. There's no reason why I should treat myself worse if I care about people. The reason we treat ourselves worse by the ways, because we apply a romantic model to loving ourselves.

We in the romantic model, we fall in love with someone because there's a sense of mystery and excitement and space between us and all the of things as a parl talks about, we want to close down that space and we want to grab into someone. And you know what we do romantically in love, and we don't need help with that. IT just happens to us when IT comes to loving ourselves.

That's not natural, a toll for most of us. And the reason is because the romantic model doesn't work. You, if familiarity breeds contempt, who would you have more contempt for? Then the person you spend every minute with entire life, entire life, right?

You know, every one of your floors, you know the worst thing you've ever done, you know all of your bad points on a level of detail, microscopic detail, that you'll never know about anyone else. So it's really easy to hate ourselves. And for anyone is this thing today.

I want, if you really strugling to love yourself, and you find that really easy to have yourself, welcome to the club. That, to me, that's the Normal state of affairs for someone that you've had to room with for your entire life. If we take away the romantic model and we look for a different model, I think there we find the basis for actually loving ourselves, which like I said, with i'm one of those eight billion people in the world, there's no reason treat myself worse.

Could there be a reason to treat myself Better though? And if so, what would I be? And the way i've come to look at that is the we are the only person who's been given the job, by nature, by god, whatever you believe, with the only person who's been signed the job of taking care of the human, that is us.

No one else on earth has been given that as their primary job. There's one human that is your job to take care of, and that's you. When we start to look at IT through that lens, IT changes things is a bit like the way a parent is with a child.

If you ask a parent, why do you love your child? Most parents will not say, because they got an a in english literature last week, and they are really gorgeous, and they dress well. And just say what you talking about, this my son, this my daughter, their mind, do you know it's .

really funny is how onest people are with about their kids as well. Like like, I mean, you hear parents talk about IT and especially somebody who doesn't have kids is really funny to hear, which is like you look at their friends but I got, my god, that kids are really good look and kid, it's kind of funny looking. You know, people haven't romanticize that their kids are the most gorgeous kids. They haven't. They know that there are other kids who are more talented, smarter, more athletic.

Better looking. But this one, mine, this one's.

And I think that if we can have the same, this one's mine, love for a kid, what we can completely say, not the smart is good. Not that. Let me get all, by the way, my kids got two left feet and two left hands, you know? And I love when parents talk with absolute love about the imperfections or the comparisons of their kids versus the other kids.

which is amazing. If you think about .

like if we could apply that.

you guess what? You never had a choice. You didn't get to go to the buffet of humans and choose one you got, given this is your human. You never got .

the change, gets to design their kid. No, you know, other than the partner that they choose, I guess.

is some element which is where comparison becomes silly for all of this because is like, what did I have a chance to be? Simon? No, I only got the chance to be Matthew.

So my job is not to worry about what Matthew doesn't have. My job is to give Matthew the best life I can possibly give Matthew, because Matthew is my responsibility. My job is to make Matthew as happy as I could make him.

And if I was making Matthew as happy as I could make him, what would I do today? And if you ask people that question, if I was, if IT was my job to take care of this human, to make them happy, to keep them out of harms way, to keep them away from unnecessary suffering, to put them in the line of sight of people who actually want the best for them, what would I do for them? To do that is different from why did yesterday and the number of people that having asked that question would say, or today I wouldn't text that person back is vast, because yesterday, their primary directive was not to take care of their human. Yesterday, their primary directive was to trying get an instant feeling of gratification or satisfy ego or feel comfortable or feel in that moment like i'm just doing something that feels familiar or but you don't necessarily do any of those things when you actually care about someone in the same way that a parent doesn't give their child everything their child wants because they actually are vested in their child's happiness, not in what's comfortable for the child every day or what the child thinks they want to everyday.

It's such a great metaphor, such a great little trick. This is your human. What would you do to to look after IT? Because it's very easy to be objective.

Yes, it's very hard to be about ourselves, but it's very easy to be objective about others. It's not I have have to take care of myself. It's I have to take care of of that cat.

I look .

to my human. It's quite brilliant actually. What are you doing for the next nine hours you want to keep talking because this is brilliant. You can do a twelve part series. I tell you are really funny story.

And then we're done, I promise, anybody who's still clinging on, it's very often a woman who say to women, what are you thinking? What's sitting there watching T, V, quiet moment, women return to men, say, what are you thinking? And the guy will say nothing.

And we've all said IT. And what we mean is nothing of consequence, but we say nothing. And the number of people we accidentally make in secure, because how can you be thinking nothing is something I said is something I did is this is something with the relationship and then this and then you are sitting.

They're just watching T, V. And there's a whole so I don't know what's going on next to me, but it'll come out in the day or two and IT won't be pretty right. And so somebody gave me some advice a long time ago, which is answer the question literally, like if they say, what do you thinking actually the thing that you think is of no kind of actually say what you're thinking, let them in on IT.

And I remember i'm sitting next to my golf end SHE, because would you thinking? And I told exactly what I was inking in that moment. And what I was talking in that moment is I wonder if their more control will work. If I pointed backwards instead of four words, and SHE said, that's what you're thinking, and you went, never mind, and everything was fine.

I IT is so funny. You say this to do exactly what I was thinking. I do exactly this, exactly this.

And it's the source of so many ridiculous moments. IT reminds me of like garreth in the original british office. Yeah, yeah. He gets asked, like what he's thinking, and he says, I was thinking, I was wondering if they're ever be a boy born who can swim faster than a shark. That's the will happen if I point the remote yeah in the wrong way but it's you're right because it's this is exactly .

like my mind wonders yeah and he thinks about ridiculous and I just say them now if somebody asked me the question, what do you thinking I will tell you exactly what i'm doing in that moment and you will be very disappointed but you won't be seure because unknown is worse than bad news yeah no tell something that the things we can talk through but if I tell you nothing I don't know where you're taken that now on that note, and if you thank you so much, this has been an absolute joy, an absolute education. I wish you in your work to be nothing but out there and in the hope you have a great cess helping people the way you want to help them.

thanks. So I am a thank you for inspiring me over the years. And I I sincerely, we get to do again, really fun.

If you enjoy this podcast would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, Simonon ic dot com, for glasses, videos and more. Until then, take care of yourself.

Take care of each other. A bit of optimism is a production of the optimism company. It's produced and edited by lynsey gardenias, David jaw and David Johnson. Our executive producers are hinted conrad and greg rooter sham.