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Hey friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with academics and authors and creators and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and what we can learn from them to help build a life that we love.
What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Matthew Hussey.
Matthew Hussey has got a new book coming out called Love Life.
He is an absolutely enormously followed person on the internet and on his podcasts and on his first book, Get the Girl, giving relationship advice, mostly aimed at women, but his new book Love Life is aimed at everyone, not just women.
So this conversation is mostly about relationships and how to find and retain love in a healthy fashion in the context of a healthy relationship.
This was a super interesting conversation for me because we start off talking about some stuff around like masculine feminine energy and like kind of, are men and women looking for different things in that kind of sense.
But then after a little bit of time, the conversation transitions into me basically turning into a bit of a therapy session and asking Matthew for advice about my own love life.
And man, the stuff that Matthew shares is just absolutely incredible.
If you are in a relationship or have ever been in a relationship, I think you're gonna get a lot of value from this episode.
So I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Matthew Hussey.
Alrighty, Matthew, welcome to the podcast.
How are you doing? Yeah, I'm good, man, I'm good.
It's good to see you.
Thanks for having me.
I'm on a crazy three month, just running around everywhere right now.
So it's actually nice to have an hour with a friend.
Yeah, just telling.
So you have a funky new book.
Great title, by the way, Love Life.
Oh, what a title. How was that taken by the way?
I know, like every time I see really good titles, I'm so jealous.
I'm like, oh shit, I wish I'd written a book called Love Life.
What is the book about?
The book is designed to be a co -pilot for anybody who is looking for love.
The subtitle is How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What.
And it's been a real labor of love for me because I started this 17 years ago, working with people in their love lives and so much has changed in the way I think about this.
So much has changed in the way, in some of the things that I'm seeing out there with people trying to find love.
The work has gotten a lot deeper.
And I got to the point where I went, why is it so many of us are still struggling either to find opportunities in love or to find happiness in love?
Because opportunities and happiness are not the same thing.
And I know for a while, even past the point where I'd learned how to create opportunities in my love life, I still struggled to find what I felt was my person.
Like I struggled to find the kind of love that I thought I wanted or needed.
And I felt continuously not at peace in my own love life.
And I know so many people felt the same.
They either felt they were chasing someone who was exciting, but made them miserable because of how elusive they were, or they were settling for someone who made them feel safe, but they found themselves continuously doubting was the right person for them.
And kind of just going through that cycle over and over again.
And I felt like, you know what there needs to be a book out there that acknowledges these struggles in a very real way and in a very nuanced way.
And is that co -pilot for anybody at any stage of life that is looking for love, even if they are absolutely frustrated, exhausted, and burned out from the process of dating.
Nice, okay. So I have lots of questions on this.
Firstly, and this might be controversial, but to what extent, assuming heterosexual relationships and cisgendered people, to what extent do men and women have similar or different struggles when it comes to finding love?
There are things that I hear more from women than I do from men.
So, and this isn't necessarily just true of women, but I think I hear it a lot more from women is, why is it men don't want to commit?
And I think that there are some typically male challenges, I suppose, with settling down, whether they're societal or genetic or whatever, that's almost beyond my pay grade, but it is true that women seem to suffer more with men who don't want to commit than men suffer with women who don't want to commit.
So I would say that's probably a big one.
I think there are some interesting dynamics right now between men trying to figure out where their power comes from and facing women who, a lot of men were raised to believe that their tools for impressing someone were status and money and power.
Certainly as a guy, those feel like the tools we can control, right?
We may not be able to choose how tall we are or the bone structure we have, but we can make ourselves more successful and we can earn more money and we can get more status.
And I think that men are increasingly coming up against women who already have those things and at the very least aren't as easily impressed by those things in men or like I'm at that same level as you or I'm higher on the food chain in that way than you.
So I think men are suffering a little bit today from trying to figure out where does my power come from?
Where does my worthiness come from?
Because the old tools aren't working the way they used to.
It's not enough. There was a time where as a man, slapping money on the table for the night's dinner was enough.
That was like decades ago.
That was like, that was what you were supposed to do is provide and bonus points if you're not physically abusive.
It's like that. There was a time when like that was like the expectation and the expectation has got, thank God, significantly higher for men.
And I think a lot of men are trying to figure out now, they're either having to find someone who doesn't intimidate them.
So let me try and find someone who's not got as much going on as I have or someone who's needs me in all of those ways or they're having to reevaluate where their source of confidence comes from.
I think on the other side of the equation, there's something interesting going on with women where it's like a lot of, I think a lot of women are gonna face and already are facing a reevaluation of what they consider indicators of a great partner.
Because if you're in a strong position in your own life, if you've got to a certain place in your career and your financial independence, then I've always felt, well, that gives you more choice.
That gives you the ability to really pick who you wanna pick, you really can choose for love, you really can choose for who has the greatest qualities, who has the most character, who brings you the most as a partner, as opposed to feeling like the more I go up the food chain, the less options I have because I'm
still looking for someone who's at my level and there's less and less guys at my level.
I think that's a scarce way of looking at it and I think that depletes your options.
But I think it is important for women to reevaluate what's really important to me in a partner and is it all of these, well, at the very least, is it some of these things that I've told myself are important in the past that are actually not nearly as important as I thought they were, especially now
that I've got to this position for myself.
So I hope all that makes sense, I'm happy to dive in.
This is, again, this is empirical from me because I'm seeing what's going on out there, I'm not a data scientist in these areas, I'm not someone who is studying evolutionary biology, but watching the actual patterns empirically of what's going on for people in their love lives, these are very real things
that I think people are coming up against.
Okay, nice. So, I listen to the Modern Wisdom podcast from my friend Chris Williamson from time to time and he always has these psychologists or evolutionary psychology type people on talking about the mating crisis, talking about this exact point.
So if we take this point of a woman who is super successful, what these guests and supposed experts on this podcast would say is that that, you know, because of hypogamy where women want to date and marry upwards rather than downwards, it is just a fact, unfortunately, biologically or psychobiologically
where women are wired in a way as such that they will not be interested in someone who has lower status than them, they want someone on a higher level.
And it sounds like what you're suggesting is that they should reevaluate that, but perhaps the evolutionary psychologist, Brows, might say, yeah, but in the same way that a guy can't choose to be attracted to a woman he's not attracted to, a woman cannot choose to be attracted to a man that she doesn't view
as above her level.
To what extent would you agree with that?
I think that a lot of these people have a very selective focus.
I don't doubt that they can find data and huge amounts of data to support their arguments and I don't doubt that there's an enormous amount of truth in some of what they're saying.
I don't think it's either or.
I think that if I look around in my life, I'm not sure of examples of women who have chosen men who are not in the same position as they are.
They are the person earning more, the woman is the person earning more money in the relationship, the woman is higher up the food chain.
And she's not in an unhappy relationship going, when can I get rid of this loser and go and find someone who's on my level?
She's found an incredible partner that she's incredibly happy with and her career is its own thing outside of that.
And not to mention, if I look on the male side of that equation, the men that I know in those relationships and granted, I'm talking about the successful ones.
I have no doubt that I could find unsuccessful versions of this too in my life.
But the guy in that relationship is also not saying, God, I feel like I hate myself because she earns more money than me and she's in a more high flying career than I am and what I do is more subtle or more modest or...
He's actually... Some of those men are the most confident men I know.
And I don't look at them from a distance and go, God, they wish they were more alpha.
They strike me as just incredibly secure men who have found their peace within a relationship where those men are not going, I have no significance because she earns more money than me.
They're saying, my significance didn't come from that in the first place.
So I know those relationships exist and I think it is entirely possible to look at ourselves and go, where does my happiness come from?
Maybe society has steered me this way or maybe even to some extent, nature has steered me in a certain direction but there's plenty of things in life that nature has steered us towards over time that we no longer do and we make more conscious decisions and more intent.
We human beings have the benefit of intent.
We can put intent behind things and we can, I believe.
We have a great degree to which we can choose what we value.
We can even train ourselves to value new things.
I mean, there was a stage in my life where I didn't date in a healthy way.
Like I would say my nature, my instincts guided me towards things that just felt good or things that felt like a buzz or a high.
I think there was an addictive quality to the way that I dated, which I look back on with some regret and the ways that I hurt other people, ways that I hurt myself in that process.
I don't look back on that with a huge degree of pride.
I go, oh, that was where I was then.
That was my degree of evolution then.
I had a lot to learn.
I didn't have the tools to, I didn't know how to make myself happy in my love life.
I just was this like ball of reactivity.
And at a certain point in my love life I started to value peace.
I started to go, I really want peace in this area of my life.
And yes, I still want attraction.
It's not, I'm not giving up on attraction.
Yes, I still want chemistry and I never could have been with a partner where I had no chemistry, but peace started to become this really important overriding thing.
Am I with someone who I can build with?
Am I with someone where I feel a high degree of peace?
Do I feel more of myself with this person?
And those things were not things, if you'd have asked me at 25 what I was looking for, I wouldn't have said peace.
But nowadays that's like the greatest thing in the world to me.
If you take a woman who has come out of a 10 year relationship or a 10 year marriage or a 30 year marriage with a narcissist, the things she's looking for at the end of that, when she gets to a place where she's healed and recovered enough from that relationship to go back out there again, the things
she's not looking, the things she's looking for will be different than the things she was once looking for.
And I guarantee you peace or safety will be a lot higher on her list.
So I do think our values change.
I do think what we want change is and whether you wait for life to do that to you, because you have to experience enough pain in chasing the other that you feel like your hand is forced to value something different, or whether you can see the writing on the wall early where you don't have to experience all
of that pain and you can start to pay attention to where your true happiness comes from, where your true peace comes from, where true alignment comes from for you.
I think we can actually start to choose what to value and those choices change the decisions that we would have once made in our dating lives.
No, okay. This is interesting.
So as you were talking, it was kind of reminding me of the concept of like first and second mountains from a book called the Second Mountain by David Brooks, where he kind of talks about how in life there are two mountains.
The first mountain is the mountain of success and achievement and money and freedom.
And then you get to the top of the first mountain and you realize it's kind of a bit hollow, or you get knocked off the first mountain by a health scare or someone close to you dying or something like that.
And then you realize there is the second mountain and that is the mountain of commitment, of family, of like really dedicating yourself to a particular cause.
It's not the mountain of like, I wanna be free to do whatever I want.
I actually, what I really want is to commit to this thing which myself at age 21 might've thought like, that's so boring, but actually that's the thing that brings me joy.
And it sounds like there's almost this sort of like two phases of how people view dating and relationships.
Will that be fair to say?
Where phase one is maybe, you know, call it the party years, call it the, have sex with as many people as possible years, call it the, I'm looking for someone really hot with like high drama years.
And then there's maybe like a phase two, which is more like, actually, I'm looking for peace, contentment, commitment, someone I can build a family with, someone I can build a life with.
Would you say that's a reasonable approximation?
Yes, well, I think that's very good, Ali.
I think that the comparison is really strong and some people never get over that first mountain, by the way, that's a scary thing, I think, for a lot of people in their love lives is that, you know, they get to their fifties or sixties and they're still chasing that first mountain as if that's the one
that's gonna make them happy.
And I don't come from a place of saying that everyone should end up in a place where they value marriage above all else.
I don't have any kind of a gender around what mountain people end up deciding is important.
But it does seem to me that we are happier at depth, whatever represents that depth for us in our life.
And I think that if we can get to that depth and decide what that is for us, that will be the thing that ends up making us a lot happier.
And often, you know, I think that the same thing you can, one thing I've been saying a lot that I talk about in this book is the difference between what serves your ego and what serves your happiness in your love life.
And I think that there is even maybe something analogous with the mountain idea of saying the first mountain, there's a hell of a lot of ego in that mountain.
And the second mountain, there's a hell of a lot more happiness because that, you know, money, status, excitement, opportunity, validation, all of that, there's a lot of ego behind all of that.
And, you know, we tend to get to a point where we find that that doesn't work nearly as well or as sustainably as we hoped it would.
And then the second mountain, there's in some ways it's the opposite of ego because the things that work for us on the second mountain are often a lot more subtle.
They don't necessarily come with as many applause as many cheers from the sidelines or they're not always as easy to show off.
You know, I have this challenge in my work today.
I'm sure you do too in some capacity, which is, you know, there was a propensity for me in my twenties to want to do the thing that would create the most applause.
And now in my late thirties, I'm going, I want to do the thing that fulfills me the most and makes me the happiest.
And that's often a very different thing.
And I have to be prepared to give up the thing that gets me the most attention for the thing that brings me the most joy.
The same is true in our love lives.
You know, when we're looking for a partner often the things that people do to get them attention push the real love that they want further away.
You know, you've got, how many guys message me every month that want to connect with me or do something with me.
And I look at their profile and it's all Ferraris and planes and you know, this insane lifestyle that they are putting forward as the be all end all.
And it's women in thongs sitting next to them on a cabana.
You know, it's like while they're drinking a cocktail in Dubai, it's not, that's not what I value.
So it's kind of like, I struggle with, I'm less likely to connect with that person not because I think they're a bad person but just because I'm like, I don't think we have a lot in common and people do that in their love lives too.
It's like, I have people that men that I've worked with who are like, why do women always only want me for my money or for my, you know, what I've achieved in my life?
And I'm like, well, you keep going to five star restaurants for a first date.
Why don't you stop doing that?
Why don't you take them to somewhere more normal?
And I know it's because they feel like their greatest weapon is what they've achieved but it's hurting them because it's attracting a certain kind of person all the time to achieve actual connection, to achieve actual love.
We sometimes have to be prepared to let go of the attention we've enjoyed or the attention we know how to get.
We might get a lot less attention but what we get instead as its replacement is a lot more depth.
And to David Brooks point, raising a family or being in an amazing relationship it doesn't necessarily get you a lot of applause but it can get you an awful lot of happiness but people can continue to chase the applause in their life and then wondering why they're unhappy at the end of it all.
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The thing I like about your view of the world compared to a lot of these like, you know, evolutionary psychology bros is that I think the evolutionary, I mean, this is a little bit of mischaracterization on my part, but broadly I think the evolutionary psychology bros around relationships act as if attraction is never
a choice and you have no control, broadly no control over who you fall enough with or the kind of relationship you end up in.
And therefore you are almost forced to, I guess guys just have to go after the hot girl.
I guess girls just have to go after the rich guy kind of thing.
And therefore as a girl, you've gotta be hot or you have no chance.
Or as a guy, you're gonna be rich or you have no chance.
But in much the same way as like sure, we might be default wired in that direction, just like we are default wired to seek status and money in our jobs, even if they're not that fulfilling.
Eventually people realize that actually chasing money and fame and shit in my job or in my life is not actually the thing that brings me fulfillment.
And even though it's not in line with your potentially your innate urge, you can in fact act against your innate urge.
Would that be a fair summary of your position unless that we actually can choose?
Yeah, absolutely it would.
I haven't studied the data that some of these people have studied or in some cases made a living out of that enough to know whether the extent to which they talk about it is true.
But even if we just take it at face value that everything they're saying is true on some level, I don't find it compelling because I know that there are so many decisions we make all day, every day that are intentional about what takes us towards a better life.
And I think that's so much of what you've done in your most recent book.
And what you talk about is sometimes it's actually saying, we have some bad instincts.
Some of our instincts make us incredibly unhappy.
This idea of, there's a chapter in my new book called Question Your Instincts.
And that kind of rails against a lot of common advice about trusting your instincts.
I don't think our instincts are always to be trusted.
I think that they often lead us down bad paths towards people who don't treat us well, towards lives that make us unhappy.
And I think our work intersects there, Ali, because I think a lot of your work is also training people out of bad instincts towards instincts that are gonna lead them to more fulfilling jobs, calmer lives, working at a sustainable pace, balancing their work life with other parts of their life that are also important.
So yeah, that stuff interests me more than the kind of very fatalistic, pessimistic view of the world, that it always seems to kind of, I find myself suspecting it a lot because it always ends up being tinged with feeling slightly misanthropic.
Like it really doesn't always seem to come from a place of liking people very much.
It always feels to me, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels to me like there's an edge there where it's like, I come from a place of really loving people and seeing the best in people.
And I just feel like so much of that is very surface level.
And when I get under the surface with people, I always find them much more interesting than those conclusions.
Nice, okay. What is your view on masculine and feminine energy?
Is it a thing? Do I have a, I always feel like I suck in these conversations because there are people that have thought about it so much.
And I can tell you this, in my relationship which is the happiest relationship I've ever been in, we never talk about masculine feminine energy ever.
Like it's never a, it's just never a thing.
Now, if I were to try and present the biggest counter argument to that, it would be, yeah, it's never a thing because you guys are nailing it.
Like it's going well.
Like there's a real femininity about Audrey and there's a masculinity that you bring to the table but I also have a lot of feminine energy too.
So I bring that to the table as well.
And I don't, is polarity a real thing?
Of course, of course it is.
There are areas where we need, like there are areas where people need to feel strong and they need someone to see them as strong and to recognize that they're strong.
I'm not sure that that goes hand in hand with that person not being able to be strong themselves.
I think they can still bring that strength to the table as long as they also are prepared in other moments to really recognize and acknowledge and celebrate the strength in the other person.
So I think, I don't know that I subscribe to this idea that one person has to always be feminine and the other person has to always be masculine.
I think that polarity is needed but I feel like you can experience polarity being, you know, you can experience reverse polarity in different days of the relationship depending on who's the one who's showing up as a leader that day or who's the one who's showing up as who's presenting as strong that day.
Who's the one in this conversation that is, you know, being the strength for the other person.
And where the masculine feminine arguments turned me off a little bit is, you know, I was part of a conversation, I was on red table talk with Jada Pinkett Smith and like round table of people all talking about masculine feminine energy.
And I was felt a slightly unprepared for it because again, it's just not something I talk about a lot.
And there was one particular argument put forward that there has to be a decision maker in the relationship and no points for guessing which gender was being put forward as the one that needed to be the decision maker.
But there needed to be one ultimate decision maker who was the leader of the relationship and ultimately the other partner in her feminine had to, you know, defer to that decision ultimately because you can't have two ultimate decision makers in a relationship.
And I have been doing this for 17 years and I know where that goes in so many relationships that that is a mandate for abuse in a relationship.
That is a mandate for narcissism in a relationship.
The, there are so many relationships that are terrible because at some point, and at some point the man decided my way is the way and you don't get a say or ultimately I don't need you to weigh in on these decisions because I make these decisions for our family and because, and I've seen how bad that gets.
So I can't subscribe to such, what I see as reductive ideas about delineating people in these ways and who's responsible for what.
I think that it's also true that people are more complex than I like to think I'm more complex than, I do a lot of very stereotypically masculine things.
Like I passed my hobby in my spare time is Brazilian jiu -jitsu and boxing.
You know, like I'm not, I'm someone who, and I don't do those things because they're manly.
I do them because I really enjoy them, but those would be typically associated with masculinity.
But I can tell you right now, there were plenty of other areas of my life where I don't fit into a traditionally masculine stereotype.
And it's nice for me to be able to play in both and for me to have a relationship that has the kind of ability, the versatility to be able to play in both.
So I, and I think vice versa.
So I just, I struggle, I struggle with where the argument goes with these things.
Do I think polarity is important?
Yes. But I think you can have a lot of polarity going in both directions in the same relationship on different days.
What we do have to ask ourselves I think is, is am I ever, am I ever helping to create the polarity that my partner needs in order to feel what they need to feel often enough, like as often as they need to feel it.
Because I don't need to feel like a strong man a hundred percent of every day.
It doesn't matter to me.
But sometimes I do want Audrey to be feminine and I want to be the man and I want to feel that polarity.
Sometimes I want to feel that.
And it's nice that she knows how to play that role and I know how to play that role.
And she enjoys that too.
So it works for both of us.
But my God, if our relationship needed to live by that lens a hundred percent of the time, that would be strange.
And I think it would be very reductive for both of us.
Nice, I really like that take.
That's very, yeah, it's nice and nuanced and kind of speaks to, you know, certainly rings true in my experience that polarity is a thing, but it doesn't need to be a thing a hundred percent of the time in order to have like a happy little life.
Yeah. I've been thinking about something over the last couple of weeks.
I would love to get your take on.
And that is the concept of personal boundaries within a relationship.
So for example, let's say I want to go on this boy's trip with my guy friends and the wife or my partner doesn't want me to go on this boy's trip.
clearly it's not, being in a relationship is about compromising some of the time and, you know, understanding why the other person feels that way and sometimes going with them.
But I also get the sense that it's not about always going with what the other person wants you to do or not or to not do.
So how do you think about this balance between personal autonomy, personal boundaries, but also compromise and respecting the other person's wishes and all of this sort of stuff?
Yeah, it's so interesting.
It's such a great question because we've all seen that from the outside as well, where we have a friend that can't come on the trip because, you know, their partner has an issue with the trip, even though, you know, that there's literally not a single thing about the trip that should raise any alarm
bell for anyone. And you just end up feeling a bit sad for your friend because you go, wow, that's, it's sort of sad for everybody because you're like, we, you know, his partner must be having a hard time about this, which is completely unnecessary.
And now my friend, now I know that my friend is in a relationship where there's that kind of dynamic, where there's something he would, I know he would really like to do, but he's not essentially allowed to do because it's presenting as a challenge for his partner.
It's always a bit scary sometimes to observe those relationships from the outside because of course you do, you tend to, on behalf of your friend extrapolate out what their life is gonna look like based on that.
And I think that's true in our own relationships as well.
When we're the one being controlling or when we're the one saying, I don't want you to do this, or I, you know, you have to do it like this or whatever, there's also an extrapolation going on on their side.
Also, human beings.
We struggle, we all have our struggles and we all have our trauma and our things that, you know, activate that trauma and make us afraid.
And our partner going on that trip, even though there might be nothing untoward about it does make us feel something that's very real to us.
And so how much do they owe us saying, you know what, I just won't do it because it makes you uncomfortable?
I think sometimes that's the right answer.
Sometimes the right answer is, it's not worth it to me to make you uncomfortable.
You know, it's a bit like you met someone two weeks ago that, you know, for business and that person wants to go to lunch with you one -on -one and there's something about that person that makes your partner deeply uncomfortable.
You know, if your partner says, this person makes me uncomfortable, you going for lunch one -to -one with them makes me feel weird.
Maybe that's a moment where you go, okay, fair enough.
Like, this isn't the business opportunity of my life and it's not make or break.
And I only met this person two weeks ago.
So frankly, it doesn't matter that much.
I don't need to have lunch with this person.
I can just say, you know what?
You get a pass on this one because this person makes you uncomfortable and you feeling good is much more important to me than this lunch with someone I met two weeks ago that for me was innocent, but if you feel uncomfortable, fair enough.
Now, if your partner does that with the next seven business meetings, then it's like, okay, we need to talk about this because then we need to have an, we need to understand where this comes from for you and how we can get you to a place of comfort.
How do we, can we look at this differently together?
Is there a different way of seeing this whole situation?
Can we, you know, I wanna understand more about you and what makes you feel unsafe in this situation.
You know, I think there needs to be more of that because if it's like, I think we always have to be asking ourselves the question, is me acquiescing to this sustainable for the relationship?
You know, if it's not, then we need to dig deeper on this and I don't think we should apply a lens of just, no, I'm not gonna change that for you.
I think it's more, let's understand our way around this better and where it comes from.
What situations in the past have made you feel unsafe or have represented not just unsafe, but like genuinely hurt you, genuinely resulted in bad times for you that are making you feel unsafe in this situation today in a context in which I know you are 100 % safe, but it's making you feel unsafe.
Let's talk about that.
And if we do it in therapy, great.
If we do it outside therapy, great, doesn't matter, but let's figure that out because actually those moments can be very, what would be talked about in therapy as corrective experiences.
If your partner can go on the boys trip that would normally have freaked you out and you have a very positive experience of that with a person who makes you feel very safe, with a person who gives you no reasons not to trust them, with a person who can check in with you, or like that can be a very corrective
experience. And that going towards that thing that makes you uncomfortable might actually end up being the most healing you can do.
I know that in my relationship today, there are things that 100 % would have made me jealous even five years ago.
And because of the relationship I'm in and how safe I feel in that relationship, it's been such a corrective relationship for me that I don't, Ali, I barely ever get jealous.
Like I can't remember the last time I got jealous and I'm not someone with a history of no jealousy.
So I don't feel jealous today.
And that's because this relationship has been highly corrective for me.
And part of that has been me feeling really safe.
So again, that invites another conversation.
If something about this experience is making you feel unsafe, is that just to do with this experience?
In which case, maybe we can address that.
Or is it to do with a greater feeling of unsafety you have in this relationship?
And we're not talking about that.
Because maybe what you're feeling about this experience is not about this experience at all.
Maybe it's pointing to something much broader in the landscape of this relationship that we need to address.
And this is just the inflamed representation of that.
Oh man. It's like you've read into my heart and mind at the same time as since you were giving that answer, which was like, wow, this is really good insight.
And I give you very little context about my situation because you just hit the nail on the head in terms of like, dang, that's really good advice.
Okay, again, purely asking for a friend, but what if you're in a situation where your partner wants to think X and your mom wants to think Y and think X and Y are somewhat contradictory?
How does one go about approaching the situation in this sense?
Again, purely asking for a friend.
Well, that's firstly, I think we have to show ourselves compassion in that situation because it's likely, that's likely an indicator of something that this isn't the first time that has caused us pain in some way.
There's probably something long standing there that has caused us a lot of pain in our lives.
And it's, we've adapted, to that we've adapted to needing to make various people happy in our lives.
That it's not always easy to make happy and maybe it should never have been our job as much as it is to appease that person or to make them happy with our decisions.
And so I think it's worth, it's worth taking a moment just to acknowledge ourselves and to go, oh, you've probably not had it easy in this area, have you?
There's been a lot of needing to live life in such a way as where we're managing someone else's feelings a lot of the time.
And this is just another representation of that.
I now have this other important person in my life whose feelings I'm also worried about.
And I've gotten as far as I have and I've survived by managing these feelings around me.
And so there's probably a gear that you're good at going into in those situations.
That is actually really good at taking care of people and managing people, but you're the one who ends up quite unhappy or resentful or burnt out at the end of it all.
So it's worth, firstly that compassion can be really healing because you realize like, oh, this is, it might be what I'm not getting from anyone else right now.
It might be the exact thing that I need is that acknowledgement.
And then saying, well, maybe this is an opportunity for me to put a boundary in place that I actually never did before.
This actually might be a moment for me.
This might be a healing moment for me and a moment where I get to make some progress in my life because maybe there are expectations that I have allowed to be set up over time that I've been able to manage so far.
I mean, it's kind of like, Ali, it reminds me of what you do so well with people in their careers is that you're so good at helping people see that there's like an expectation maybe you've had of yourself or your business or the way you work, your capacity for doing hard things that works until a point,
right? You're like nearly killing yourself and then it takes something bubbling over to make you realize like the insanity of the expectation you've had on yourself for so long that was like functional in a time where it wasn't, there wasn't like one more demand but the moment there was one more demand or the moment
like someone got sick or the moment there was a catastrophe, some other problem in your life that demanded that 10 % of energy that you do not have, that was when you realize like, oh, this isn't a problem that started with this catastrophe.
This is a problem that started 10 years ago that was waiting for a catastrophe to bring it out and I kind of think that is the same thing with what you're talking about in relationships is like, oh, there's probably something here that has been demanding an unreasonable amount of sacrifice or energy
or me managing someone else's feelings for a very long time and now because there's one more person in the mix, it's hit a kind of breaking point.
So those, I find those to be really good moments to have a conversation with a mother and a partner where we say to our partner, look, they're giving them context for your life, I think is really important in those moments.
Like, because it's very easy just to, for it to become an ego battle between, you know, your partner and your mom.
And that's the thing it has to be removed from because actually you and your partner have to be on the exact same team.
So I think that it's almost enrolling your partner as part of the team in saying, look, this is something I've had to manage my whole life.
And I love my mom to pieces and she's like an amazing friend to me and she's done so much for me.
And I also acknowledge she comes with her challenges and I don't wanna gaslight you that my mom's an angel and doesn't have any of these challenges because that will also, then your partner will like, they won't listen anymore cause they're like, don't you see this?
Or don't you like, what?
Surely you're seeing this and you're like, no, no, no, she's great, how dare you?
Like that, that's the quickest way to alienate your partner.
But if instead it's like, no, no, no, I see it.
I trust me, I see it.
In fact, more than I see it, I've been dealing with it my whole life and I've been trying to manage this my whole life.
And as much as you're exhausted by it in the last year, I am borderline burned out from it from a lifetime.
And I need you to be a teammate with me here because I actually need love and I need support in this because it's really, really hard.
And I don't maybe demonstrate always how hard it is.
You know, I keep the emotion in because I don't, part of this pattern is that I've never acknowledged myself and my own needs in this situation.
So an extension of that pattern is me also not communicating to you how hard this is for me.
So I need you on my team, but I also know that I need to be on your team as well.
And I know that part of that is me having boundaries that are healthy with my mom.
And for me to start to use these experiences as an opportunity to maybe have some boundaries that I haven't had before and to trust that my mom's love for me runs deeper than my ability to please her in this way and to make the decision that's gonna make her the happiest, that she loves me more than that.
And that if I do make a hard decision and I communicate that hard decision to my mom in the most loving way possible, that even if she's hurt in the beginning, actually her love for me is gonna be the thing that supersedes all of that once she's had a chance to understand not only that, but it gives
me, and this is the reframe for ourselves, it gives me a chance to reset a boundary with my mom.
That's actually gonna make both all of us a lot, lot happier in the future because once I've reset this boundary with my mom and said, mom, I love you so much and I'm so afraid to make this decision or I feel it's so hard to make this decision because one of the things that hurts me the most is hurting
you. And I hate the idea that this would hurt you or it would affect you negatively.
And that, I know the last thing you would want is for me to be unhappy.
And it makes me so unhappy to think that I've made you unhappy, but I need to do this because it's the right thing to do for right now.
If we can overcome the initial guilt that we'll feel and the initial feeling of like, oh God, I've hurt my mom and she's angry at me and she's this and she's that, if we can overcome that, then I actually think it opens us up to a much more real relationship with our mom.
It opens us up to a relationship that's not based on pleasing the parent all the time, but one where we actually, it's just based on love.
And here's the beautiful part about it.
Like this to me is the real catharsis is that when we suddenly feel like we're doing something that's good for us and not just good for somebody else, the love that you can then give your mom is so pure.
Because it's not like, we've all done that with a parent where we show up because we feel like we should or we did something because we think it would make them happy.
And what we're giving them in that moment is not our like pure love.
What we're giving them is like service.
But when we stop giving them the thing that we've kind of brainwashed ourselves or been brainwashed by them to think is the source of our love with them, when we stop doing that and we start meeting our own needs again, all of a sudden it like frees up energy and then we're calling our mom or visiting
our mom or sitting and having a quality moment with our mom just because we love them and because we want to and I believe that deep down, they start to feel that shift in energy and they start to feel like even if they couldn't see it in the beginning because they were just afraid of losing something,
they start to realize, oh my God, I'm getting more back.
What I'm getting is much more pure and much more intentional and the basis of a different kind of relationship.
So I apologize because I feel like that was a really long winded answer but I feel like it's important to add all of that nuance because otherwise it's incomplete.
Yeah, that mate smashed out the park.
That was great. I'll pass that along to my friend.
It sounds like you had personal experience with that particular issue.
Well, I think that I've certainly had my experience of operating so much of my life out of a feeling of obligation or guilt and resentment deep down and not realizing how close I was to snapping and how close I was to breaking point at trying to manage so many different people's feelings all the time
and it's been a pattern not with one person in my life but with multiple people in my life where I've had to really learn to not only set boundaries but to feel safe in having set boundaries that it's not like I'm gonna irrevocably upset someone to the point where they're now never gonna be happy again that actually
something better can come in its place if I'm brave enough to do that but that's been a real journey for me and I sympathize with anyone who's going through that because it is not easy and it requires a lot of healing to be able to do that.
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So okay, so one thing that I've been thinking about a lot is the idea of duty and respect in a way, I guess.
You know, as you know, I'm from a South Asian background and I'm sure there are people in your audience and in your programs and retreats and stuff who are from family backgrounds which is not necessarily tied to ethnicity but is often correlated with it.
Well, I feel like I've got the most ethnic, non -ethnic family in the world because my family are all from the East end of London and there's everything people describe whether they're from a Middle Eastern family, Asian family, like Italian, like I always feel like my family's come with all of that same
stuff so I get it. Oh, okay.
So the idea of like duty and respect to parents compared to, you know, this more, I think in Asian cultures, the parent is the parent rather than a friend and that has like these concepts of duty and obligation and should, I should do X, Y, Z for my mom or my grandma or my family because it's just,
you know, familial duty in that sense comes before, I don't know, a personal relationship.
I think as I'm saying, this is maybe a parallel in Islam, for example, like duty and submission to God comes way before personal relationship with God.
And when I first heard Christians talk about personal relationship with God, I was like, wait, what?
Like, that seems completely, and I'm often surprised when people I know have kind of friend kind of relationships with their parents because that's just, it's not the model of parental and child relations that I'm familiar with kind of way from a South Asian background.
Any thoughts on any of that random spiel which didn't really have a question in there?
You know, sometimes it's different in that it's a different culture, but maybe there's some similarity, but I, you know, I sometimes would hear, let's say an expectation my mom had and feel that same sense of like duty, obligation, and respect and so on.
And then I'd be like, then I'd be like, but wait, you did this with that.
Like the thing that I'm, you know, you prioritized that.
So like clearly at some point you broke with minded less obligation to your family and did what was right for your relationship.
And I think there was something a little bit freeing about that to me because, and maybe not everyone has that example in their life.
So I sympathize with that, but it was good to almost point out a little bit of the hypocrisy that I was seeing that my mom didn't just have some mindless obligation to her mom and dad.
That in her trauma, she might wish for me to have, you know, with her.
Actually, there were times in her life where I can point to examples where she did what was right for her.
Where she did what felt right for her new family that she was building.
And that we are all going to navigate in our lives, this respect for the structures that have been built before us that already exist.
And generational trauma is very real.
And these, you know, we are some of us lucky enough, especially I've got friends in Indian families, for example, where I've got both types of friends.
I've got friends in Indian families who the generations above them, their mom, their grandmother, never were in any way unshackled from a automatic sense of obligation and sacrifice that permeated every facet of their lives for as long as they lived and they never knew any different.
I also have Indian friends who have seen, they've had the gift of a mother.
One friend of mine in particular has the gift of a mother who has actually exercised the freedom in her 70s and 80s, that she never saw of her mother and that she got to see what her mother looks like when her mother is starting to heal and realize that she can, if she chooses, have a kind of autonomy
of her own, that she doesn't just have to live in relation to a man or to her parents.
And that for her, for my friend, was a very healing experience because she realized, oh, there isn't just some law somewhere that says that this is the way it is.
Even the older generations can sometimes surprise us and if you're lucky enough to have someone like that in your family, it's a very, or even to know someone like that, if anyone who's ever seen it knows, it is an incredibly, man, it's like one of the most powerful things you can ever see is someone
who's lived their whole life being in service, suddenly realize that it doesn't have to be that way and that they can have a life of their own or a mind of their own that they never realized their power, they never realized what they were capable of, that they spent a whole life in some way, being constrained
and never realizing what was possible for them.
God only knows who would they have been if they had had the resources or the influences to be able to set those boundaries or realize that about themselves 20 years earlier.
God, who knows who they would have been or what they would have done or what they would have been capable of and the tragic part is for so many, we'll never know because it just didn't happen in their time.
But my point with that is if we weren't lucky enough to experience that with our elders, with a grandmother who got to experience something that her grandmother didn't or a mother who got to experience something that her mother didn't, we might actually, we might be the one we might, it might be us
who is the inspiration.
It might be us who breaks that generational cycle and being the one who breaks that generational cycle of just automatic or even mindless service and obligation against all of our wishes or all of our needs and the subjugation of that inner child of ourselves or that part of ourselves that wants to
express itself but can't in that environment.
Breaking that is an incredibly brave thing to do.
You become the pioneer of your family and for a long time, you'll never get any thanks for that.
You'll only get resistance and fear and resentment and that will be in many ways, the hardest part about it is that it's like in family therapy, there is a concept of homeostatic pull, the desire for the system to remain the same and if something changes, it will reassert itself and when you're the part
of the system that's changing, the system will work to reassert itself and change you back because that's easier than the system living now with this uncertainty and having to somehow figure out a way to evolve around you which is much more work for everyone in that system but if you can be brave and stay
with it, knowing that you're gonna create a better life for yourself for those who come after you and maybe even the people that came before you, if you're lucky, if you can stick with it, it can be one of the most surprising things in life to learn at some point that you've not only inspired the people
that will come after you but you've actually in some way changed the course of a life from someone who came before you that sees you and gets a reference point for themselves, they never knew they would get and it starts to change them too and you cannot rely on the luxury of that, that is a bonus because there
will always be people in your life that it's not in them to be able to make that change at this point but I know that for me, some of the ways that I have broken that cycle in my own family, I can tell you Ali, the changes I've seen in my mum who remains to this day, one of my best friends in the entire
world, I love this woman to pieces and we've been through so much together, we've had our ups and downs.
The ways that I'm seeing her brain today form new connections and evolve is one of the most rewarding things in my entire life and is one of the most inspiring things in my entire life to see that she's making those connections at her age so I just would encourage you, if you haven't got the reference point
for someone breaking free of that cycle in your life, you might be the pioneer in your family and rather than seeing that as like, somehow this fatalistic thing, like it's always just this way in my family, you can actually see it as a very kind of inspiring and deep thing that you get to be that person.
Me, I love that. It's turning into a therapy session for my friend.
You should do this every week.
So I've read the book, No More Mr.
Nice Guy about a dozen times over the last 10 years, it's absolutely sick and every time I read it, I take something new away because I think I have this strong, people pleasing tendency, the strong sense that if I do things right, then the people around me will be happy and that is the recipe for a chill
and fulfilled life and stuff and then at various points in my life, I've Googled how to set boundaries and stuff like that and the thing I haven't quite been able to shake is the word selfish, like the concept of selfishness that is putting my own needs.
It's like, and I think needs, the other one needs, they're more like wants.
I have a need for food and water and oxygen.
I don't really have a need to, I don't know, make decisions about my career or make decisions about who I marry or any of the sorts, these aren't needs, they're wants really.
So is it, to what extent is it selfish of me to not put someone else's quote, needs and wants ahead of my own needs and wants, if that makes sense?
Well, I tried to look at it like this, that the idea that I have that the things I'm doing for people is making them happy is in itself a flawed thought because it's not the people in my life that I have with all my might wished that would be happy with, like, cause that often is why I'm showing up,
right? It's not just a sense of obligation.
It's a feeling of I really want this person to be happy.
And if I do this for them, they'll be happy.
And if I don't do this for them, they'll be unhappy.
And then that feeds into the guilt.
I don't wanna be the source of their unhappiness because I love them so much.
But nothing I have ever done on that basis has ever made happy any of those people.
Like, it's never worked, in other words.
There's always a next week.
And the next week, they're the same person they were the week before in spite of the thing I did the week before that was designed to try to make them happy.
So when I realized, like, oh, I'm not, there's almost a God -like arrogance about this thing that I'm doing.
That I think that me going and picking up these things that they need me to pick up or that me going and spending the extra hour or doing this or doing that or running around like a crazy person to try to make them, that that's actually the thing.
Like, I'm the reason they're happy.
If you're the reason they're happy, why are they still not happy?
Or why are they still frustrated?
Or why are they still complaining about the same things?
So I think that that's like an important pressure valve is to be like, oh, I'm not making them happy.
That they're as happy as they are because of so many bigger things than me.
There's their DNA, the way they're wired, the unresolved trauma of their life that they're not even focused on and they're not doing any work to actually heal.
Maybe they're not even aware of it.
Their view on life, the fact that they're making me the source of their positive emotions in the first place.
Like, there's all these reasons why they're not feeling as good as I would like them to feel that have nothing to do with me.
So I think that allows us to stand back and almost like put down all of these things we're carrying and go, that's clearly not the answer.
And then to go, the only really sustainable way for me to live is in a way that allows me to bring my best energy and to model my best self for the people that I love.
And then to say what way of living allows me to do that?
What way of operating allows me to do that?
And I think that when we think of our own needs, I think it's about saying I'm just a person in the room like everybody else.
Like if I imagine me in a room with all of my family, we often think of there being, I'm in a room with my five family members, but on a human level, there's six human beings in that room.
And I think it's really important for us to remind ourselves of that.
Cause I often think we don't think of ourselves as a person in the room with needs.
I think we think like, no, I'm just two eyes looking out onto the world.
And everyone else is people whose feelings I worry about, who I concern myself with whether I'm doing enough for, where I worry if I've said the wrong thing and hurt someone's feelings.
I feel like I didn't stand up for that person enough in my life or whatever it is, those are the people, I'm just me.
Well, we have to start including ourselves as a human being in the room.
And going, at the very least, I deserve as much love as I'm giving to other people.
I deserve as much time and attention as I'm giving to other people.
Anything else doesn't make sense, especially if I say I care about people, I am a person.
So if I care about people, then I have to include myself in the calculation.
There's no special reason I should be exempting myself from my love for people.
But I actually think we have to go one step further than that, Ali.
Which is, and this is, there's a chapter in the book where I talk about this.
And I think it's one of the, for me, it's one of the most important concepts I've ever discovered.
Because, and there's various versions of this in different teachings in the world, but I found a way to connect to it myself that really changed the way I felt about self -love.
Which was to say, it's not just that I am a person in the room and therefore I shouldn't exempt myself from the same dignity and love and care that I give to everyone else.
It's actually a little bit more nuanced than that.
There's an important distinction between us and everyone else in that room.
That of all the human beings in that room, there's only one human being that I am truly responsible for.
I don't, I think people waste their lives trying to figure out why they're special or how to feel special.
I think it's an utter waste of life.
Because the truth is, as long as you're playing that game, you're playing an ego game and you'll always lose because there'll always be someone who walks into the room who's more impressive, who's better looking, who has made more money, who is more talented, who's more likable, who's funnier.
Like, you're just never gonna win the battle of trying to tell yourself you're special.
But there is something special about us that doesn't require any of that.
And it's realizing that of the 8 billion people on this earth, you're the only one who has custody of the human that is you.
And that means that what's special about you is not all of your qualities.
What's special about you is the relationship that you have with you, which is, imagine at birth you were given a human and someone told you at a time, whispered in your ear at the beginning of your time and said, hey, just so you know, you have one job, your job.
You may take on many voluntary jobs in your life, but you have one job that is undeniable.
And that is for the rest of your life, you have to take care of this human.
You have to stand up for them, you have to encourage them, you have to take care of them, you have to try to nurture them and their potential.
You have to try to give them the best life you can possibly give them, that's your job.
You have one job, do it well.
Now, most of us have never truly understood that that's our job and we have abandoned our post.
When I'm burnt out and I feel like I'm gonna, I'm overworked, I'm unhappy, I'm being mean to myself, I'm saying horrible things to myself, I stop these days and I say, Matt, what the hell?
You had one job, where the hell have you been?
That to me turns self -love into a feeling we think we're supposed to have, which by the way, good luck, good luck having a feelings of love for yourself on a daily basis, it's not easy, but you don't need the feeling when you realize it's your job.
That loving yourself isn't a feeling, it's an approach.
And when you take that job seriously, you don't cater into your needs, doesn't look like a selfish thing through that lens.
It looks like doing your job.
And from there, what I really believe is when you take care of those needs for yourself, the amount that you then have to give to the job you have volunteered for in loving everyone else is a whole different thing.
That's great, love that.
So we were talking about this idea of you're not responsible for someone else's happiness because there's nothing you can do that would actually make them happy.
To what extent does that hold true for being responsible for someone else's unhappiness as well?
Like, could I not say, well, I cheated on my partner, but hey, I'm not responsible for their unhappiness as a result of that, it's just the story they're telling themselves, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing.
Well, that's true in some way.
If you look at life through the lens of accountability, I'm a big believer in separating accountability from blame.
For example, the way I overcome my own mistakes or regrets in life is I go, that was a version of me that was less able or less evolved than I am today.
I'm not gonna blame me today for that mistake, but I do have to be accountable for fixing it, right?
So I can free myself of the burden of blame here, but I can't free myself from accountability.
I have to make myself accountable for fixing whatever mistakes a past version of me has done, whatever damage they've done, whatever chaos they've created.
I don't have to take on all the blame as the person living today, but I have to take accountability.
Well, if you apply that to what you just said, I cheated on my partner, they're unhappy, that I'm not responsible for their unhappiness, well, fine, but you may be responsible for them leaving you.
If they decide that because of what you've done, they're so unhappy that they can't be in this relationship anymore, their version of taking control of their happiness might be you not being in the picture anymore.
So if you take the view that I'm not responsible for their unhappiness, that's fine, but you're also going to suffer the consequences of not valuing their happiness and not taking ownership of the thing that you have done that's helped to create the unhappiness and the insecurity that they feel today.
So I would be looking at that going, if something I've done has contributed to them feeling unhappy and unsafe, how much do I value keeping this person in my life?
What are the corrective, if I'm being truly accountable, what are the corrective measures that I can take that can help create the conditions for them to be happier?
If you've cheated on someone, it's true to say, I can't, it's both, what you did was you created the conditions for them to be incredibly unhappy, right?
Now, are you ultimately, in the truest sense, are you responsible for their unhappiness?
Well, I would say they're responsible for creating the emotions they wanna feel.
So if they're responsible for their happiness today, even if you did something that made them unhappy and that might mean trying to find happiness within this relationship or it might mean leaving you, but they're responsible today for creating their happiness.
You, if you wanna keep them, better make yourself responsible for creating the conditions for them to be happy.
So you can't make them happy either.
But I would say, if you value this relationship, you better treat creating the conditions for them to be happy today like it's your job.
Because if you don't, then you're playing with fire because you can say, I'm not responsible for their emotions, but if they leave you tomorrow, you will be responsible for why you're alone.
Nice. Matt, thank you very much.
This has been great.
Where can people find out more about the book and who's the book aimed at?
Who should read the book?
Honestly, anyone who wants to find love, anyone who is trying to recover from lost love, anyone who is experiencing the pain of being single and feeling like I'm lonely and I don't know what to do with those feelings because I really want, I want to find love, but I feel like I'm chronically unhappy.
Anyone who's struggling with chronic indecision in their love life, it really, this is a book about doing love better, whether we have it or whether we don't.
And I've aimed it to be, I've written this book to be a co -pilot for anyone who is trying to find love in their lives and be happier along the way because I think that a lot, anything can change in our lives.
We can find love, we can lose it.
We can find ourselves in a long stint of being single while we're waiting for the right love to come along.
Anything can happen in life and I believe we have to find the resources and the tools to learn to be happy enough in any of those seasons.
And the book also shows you how to do that through very practical tools.
So, I invite anyone at any stage of life who relates to any of what I've just said to read it.
I'm very proud of it.
It's called Love Life, how to raise your standards, find your person and live happily no matter what.
And you can pre -order it from any of the normal, or actually no, by the time this comes out, I think it's actually out and ready.
So you can order it right now.
But you can order it from wherever you like.
I would suggest that you order it from lovelifebook .com.
You can still order it from any retailer you want on that page.
But what's cool about that page is right now I have a really special bonus whereby anyone who buys a book gets a ticket for free to an event I'm doing on May 4th, which is a virtual event called Find Your Person.
And it's gonna take all of the ideas of the book and bring them to life in helping you create a path over the next year of your life to find your person.
So if you go to lovelifebook .com and enter the code from your receipt, whether you get it from Amazon or a physical bookstore, it doesn't matter.
If you enter your code from your receipt, you can get a ticket to the event on May 4th with me as well.
So that website is lovelifebook .com.
Matt, thank you so much.
All the best with book promo and I will see you later.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Ali, appreciate you.
All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.
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