Why is it that we seem to be attracted to certain people who only give us scraps of attention? It often happens when we tell ourselves that someone is so rare and desirable that they’re worth holding on to even if they don’t want the same things as us.
In today’s video, I’ll show you the trap that many people end up falling into, plus one key quality that results in more commitment. Whether you’re sick of superficial situationships or want to learn how to grow closer in your relationship, this is for you!
MATTHEW HUSSEY
There is a quality that if we adopt it can change our lives when it comes to the willingness of other people to commit to us for a real relationship. There’s also a trap that so many of us are falling into that is consistently leading us towards casual relationships or flings or being used in situations that never go anywhere.
In this video, I’m going to start with the trap and then I’m going to talk to you about the quality that you can adopt today that will begin to change everything. If you want a long-term relationship, this video might be one of the most important videos of mine that you have ever watched.
Now, before we get into it, I just want to say hello to anyone who’s new to the channel. I am Matthew Hussey. For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people find love through relational intelligence and confidence. I just wrote a brand-new book called Love Life, and if you want to do a live training with me, I have one coming up in two days on October the 22nd, all about getting into a real relationship. So, if one of your big goals right now is finding a committed, long-term relationship, this should be essential watching for you. And it is only happening live this once. You can join this event for free by signing up at LoveLifeTraining.com. It would take you seconds to do that, and then come back, and then watch the rest of this video. LoveLifeTraining.com is the link. Go there now and I’ll see you in a second.
Okay, on with this video. Why is it so many of us are struggling to find commitment?
Well, let’s start with where many of us are beginning—wanting a relationship, maybe wanting it more than anything else in the world right now. But also, feeling like a relationship is really hard to find. Maybe even more than that, that attraction is really hard to find.
So, now, what happens is, when we find some attraction or when we find even the slightest hope of something that could lead to a relationship, we cling onto it. Why? Because when a deep desire for a relationship meets a scarcity mindset around the possibility of getting one, that leads to a sense of panic, desperation, and lowering our standards.
Now, what happens is we meet people who are only willing to give scraps. And those people, when they see someone who’s willing to lower their standards, realize that this is a match because they can continue to give little with all the things they want to get—sex, intimacy, in many cases, true emotional connection, emotional support, companionship. But they never need to give real commitment. They never need to make the sacrifices or the compromises or the true investment necessary to have a real relationship.
So, this ends up creating this worldview for people who want commitment, that no one wants commitment because their fear makes them lower their standards and lowering their standards makes them attract the very people who only want to give scraps, and then by investing in people who only want to give scraps, they start being convinced that the only people around are people who give scraps.
Now, people who give little have a vested interest in convincing you that you should accept little or that you’re not worth more than that. And that starts to feed into our own insecurities that maybe we’re not worth more than that. Maybe I’ve never quite felt enough. Maybe I’ve started to convince myself I’m not attractive anymore now that I’m older. Maybe I’ve been told my whole life that I’m odd or not the hot one or someone who’s always going to have a hard time in love.
But I have an internal story of insecurity that starts to meet an external force that is validating that story. But that external force doesn’t just come from the people we date. It can come from society and it does. We live in a world now where, to a scary degree, arguments are being put forward about the reality of the dating marketplace, and how all men just want a woman who is young and hot. All women just want a guy who is tall and muscular and has made a lot of money. And everything you need to know about how attractive you are in the world, you can break down to these kinds of metrics. And they also can point to why you’re having such trouble because you’re missing these key ingredients that make you attractive.
This, to me, is yet another form of messaging that argues for you to lower your standards. And I’m not talking about on superficial things like looks and status and how successful someone is or anything like that. I’ve long argued and do so in this book that those are the wrong things to chase. By all means, make sure that when you go for a relationship, there’s some chemistry, but chasing those metrics, I have been arguing for quite some time now is the wrong approach to finding happiness in love. But lowering our standards for how someone treats us or how much they invest in us is a losing game. And when we keep hearing these messages from society, that we’re not attractive enough, we’re not young enough, we’re not successful enough, we’re not something enough, we start to feel like lowering our standards is the only way we’re ever going to find some form of companionship, and that maybe a relationship isn’t possible anymore. So, I’ll just take what I can get.
I don’t believe in this world that is being put forward by people who talk in this way. Is it true that there is a reality where those things are the laws that govern people’s behavior in dating?
Of course. In the same way that for a gangster, their reality is crime and not being able to trust people, and always looking over their shoulder. In the same way that reality for a Silicon Valley start-up is one of an obsessive focus on unlimited growth that never ends.
Saying everyone cares about these things and if you don’t live up to this idea of what is attractive, you’re in trouble and you’re going to have to start really lowering your standards. To me, that’s like making a universal statement like “All anyone cares about is money.”
Now, there, of course, are realities where that’s true. There are enormous number of people who are driven predominantly, in some cases, solely, by money. But clearly, we don’t live in a world where everyone only cares about money. We don’t even live in a world where everyone is driven by money. There are plenty of people who live lives who have no care for having more money than they actually need to get by. There are plenty of people who choose jobs that are eminently capable of doing other jobs that would make more money but do this job because it feeds their creativity or it feeds their passion or their soul.
So, we don’t live in a world where everyone cares about money. But it is true that many people are motivated by money, and it’s also true that there are people who only care about money.
My argument is not that those worlds don’t exist. It’s that those aren’t the only world. There are multiple realities all going on at the same time. And we get to choose which one we want to live in and which one we are going to engage with.
I submit to you, are there people you know who have made choices in love, not based on all of these factors but based on how incredible the person is that they’re with? What an incredible human being they are or what an amazing teammate they are.
The fact that they’re buds, you know? This idea of, this is what you have to have, to have a relationship or to be worthy in the marketplace, is an insult to the things that transcend all of that, that are actually the things that make a great relationship, that you’re buds, that you’re in it together, that you’re a team. That you have something that’s bigger than all of that.
And by the way, it better be because since we’re talking about commitment, commitment doesn’t exist if it’s purely predicated on these transactional factors of you staying as hot as you are today, you looking as young as you look today, you having as much money as you had on the day I met you, what kind of relationship is that? What that means is what, the day I lose money, you’re not going to be with me anymore? I have to start to losing sleep at night, not knowing if you’re going to stick around?
Then what we had wasn’t love. What we had wasn’t a real commitment. It’s ironic that the very thing that people talk about are the things that will get you a relationship, these metrics that if you don’t live up to them, you’re going to have a really hard time and you’re going to have to settle for less, are the same things that make a relationship so wildly insecure because now, based on that idea, you have a bunch of people who are in relationships, thinking that what they have is love, when in actual fact, what they have is complete and utter superficiality masking as love that only exists as long as those superficial metrics are maintained.
And the subtext is always that you should accept what you can get and be grateful for it.
Now, my argument is that that is a reality and why on earth would you want to date someone in that reality? But that there are also other realities, realities that are far more beautiful, that look at human beings with a far greater respect, that are far less ugly and crude in their analysis of how we make decisions. And that there are people in that world that are absolutely worth meeting and dating and falling in love with.
So, now, we arrive at that quality I was talking about that can lead to more commitment in our lives. That quality is discipline.
You see, in order to not fall prey to a reality that doesn’t serve us and to only align ourselves with a reality full of people that do serve us, we have to be disciplined about being able to say no to short-term reward because often, the people who are giving us scraps are still feeding some kind of dopamine cycle for us. They’re still feeding some kind of hope that one day, the situation will change and we’ll finally get what we want. They’re still giving us a sense of progress, at least, in the very beginning when we feel like at least we’ve met someone and it’s not the case that I have no one. At least they give us a story. We can tell our friends that something that’s going on in our love lives, and that can feel like a form of progress.
We have to have the discipline to be truly connected to what it is we want in this life to what feels good to us, to the kind of relationship that is going to make us happy. And then be disciplined about saying no to what clearly does not represent that. Even if there’s not someone else to say yes to right now because even when it feels like there’s nothing but blank space in our love lives, if we are saying no to the wrong reality, we are still saying yes to the right one. We are saying yes to the kind of culture that we want to create in our love lives. We are saying yes to the kinds of relationships that are beautiful to us, that are deep, that are magical, that are predicated on the right things.
And when we’re able to be disciplined in this way, what we get is more respect. We are respected for being someone who is aligned with our intentions, for someone who has the internal sense of integrity that says, “I’m not going to be way late from the thing that really matters to me, the kind of relationship that I really want.”
And that respect ends up being one of the primary reasons that we get attraction, and that we get other people’s discipline in continuing to invest in us. This is one of the great ironies is that I believe on our part, we need more discipline in sticking to what we actually want. But what we also need is someone who has the kind of discipline that makes it possible for them to have a real relationship. Because one of the things that a long-term relationship requires is discipline. It requires someone to show up day after day, and the days where they don’t feel like it or when the honeymoon period has worn off. That’s when commitment actually matters. Commitment doesn’t matter when there’s just this velocity to the attraction because everyone’s really excited and it feels good and our dopamine is just firing constantly.
Then you don’t need commitment. There is just this force pulling you forward toward something. But when that force subsides in the same way that at a certain point when you have a great business idea, at some point, the reality will set in of running a business is no longer an idea that you’re excited to talk about, that’s when commitment steps in. And commitment, at that level, requires discipline.
The most powerful quality will wind up being the respect that you engender in other people through your discipline about staying true to what you want.
And by the way, the respect that people have for us when we’re like this, when we have that discipline, is evergreen. That is something that can last a lifetime, which cannot be said for many of these other qualities we’ve been talking about. Our looks will fade. We may very well go through ups and downs financially. Men, we will not look as strong and as manly as we do today when we are 80. We are not going to maintain these things. But respect is something that can be maintained.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t work on the things that you can work on. Work hard if you feel inclined to. Put yourself in a nice position financially. Become as hot as you can be without doing anything that compromises your values or obsessing over it.
Do what you can do to become attractive superficially to a wide range of people. There’s nothing wrong with that. But never be under the assumption that if you don’t match up to other people in those areas, there is going to be no one in the world that sees your value, a value that transcends all of those things.
I would argue that for me, what is absolutely a truth is that the person worthy of your commitment is, by definition, the person who sees your value beyond those things. So, you have to 1) give yourself more credit for being attractive beyond those things that the world is telling you or certain people at least are telling you, you have to have or you’re worthless. We also have to give a little more credit to the world that just because some people in the world tell us that this is all that matters, it doesn’t make it true. That there are many people in the world who don’t think like that. And there are many people in the world that can’t wait to give you credit for how amazing you are as a human being and that the ones that do are the ones that you will have the greatest relationships with and the ones that don’t are people that you should be thankful you missed out on along the way.
Now, if you want to come and work on this with me in a practical way, because this video, I’ve been putting forward a point of view, but my work in my actual coaching is showing people how to make this practical in their lives. I want to show you how to do that. And in two days, I am running a big live event on exactly how you can apply the things that I’m talking about in this video. It is called “Casual to Committed: The Three Core Principles for Getting to Commitment without Games and without Ultimatums.” And we have many thousands of people already signed up for this. It’s a free event, but it’s an event that is only happening this once.
So, come and join us. If you’ve never done a live coaching session with me, then you have to come. And if you have come before, well, you have to come again because we worked really hard on this one, and it’s my final one of the year.
So, come join us. Go to LoveLifeTraining.com to sign up for free. I will see you there on Tuesday, in two days’ time, and I can’t wait. Thank you so much for watching. As always, be well, love life, and I’ll see you on Tuesday.
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