How do you stop obsessing over someone you’ve recently started dating?
When someone seems to tick all our boxes, it can be hard to NOT become flooded with thoughts of a possible future together. We anxiously wait for their text. We put them on a pedestal . . . and as a result, potentially push them away.
In this week’s video, I share 5 things you can do to stop falling for someone too quickly. By following these steps, you’ll be able to keep your value and actually enjoy dating instead of getting stuck in anxiety.
Matthew Hussey
If you’ve clicked on this video, it probably means that you’ve met someone you like, and that person has taken over your brain.
We all know this feeling. You meet someone, you’re excited about what could be. They fulfill a lot of qualities that you want in a person, and you get that immediate excitement of, “What if this is it? What if this is the person I’ve been looking for? What if the key to my happiness and my future lies with this person?” We feel disappointed any time we get a text from someone who’s not them, secretly praying every second of the day that they are about to reach out to us. Anything that doesn’t involve them suddenly feels dull and gray, even if it mattered deeply to us yesterday.
And then we try to distract ourselves. We try to go to friends, family, work, anything that can get us out of this mindset. But I know the feeling. It can feel like you’re sitting with friends, trying to happily go about your day, and all you can think about is this person. It is maddening. It makes dating unenjoyable, because we live in that anxious state, and it can feel like if we don’t make this work, we’ll never be happy again. All of this leads to obsessive rumination, which at best makes it impossible to enjoy the process of getting to know someone and, at worst, risks pushing something good away.
For those of you that don’t know me, welcome to my YouTube channel. I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence, who for the last 17 years has been helping people find love. I’m also the author of the brand new book Love Life, a New York Times best seller, and today I want to talk about five things that you can do if you are struggling with this obsessive rumination about someone you like.
By the way, the third point I’m going to make on this might be one of the most practical things you hear on this subject anywhere. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to this channel. And if you haven’t already, I have a brand new private weekly email that I am sending out to people who are on my mailing list, where every single Friday, I send you my own personal writings. If you enjoy these free YouTube videos, that is something you should also be subscribed to, because every week, you’ll get something from me that you will really look forward to. Go to The3Relationships.com to sign up to that for free, and I will see you in your inbox this Friday.
First, let’s explore one of the key psychological phenomenons that is responsible for us getting too obsessed and too anxious about someone early on in the dating process. It is known as the halo effect. And Britannica defines the halo effect as follows: “The halo effect: the cognitive bias in which an impression formed from a single trait or characteristic is allowed to influence multiple judgments or ratings of unrelated factors.” What this essentially means is when we see a couple of things that create a positive impression about a person, we are far more likely to deduce, rightly or wrongly, other positive things about them from those initial impressions.
Now this is extremely dangerous. It can mean that we attribute all sorts of wonderful qualities to a person that they haven’t yet earned and have nothing to do with the original qualities that we were impressed by.
The halo effect is extremely prominent in our love lives, where we meet someone who is charismatic or good looking or super successful, and immediately we take these qualities and use them to build out a 360-degree picture of a person that may be completely false. So let’s talk about the five things we can do to negate this effect so that we can bring a much more powerful version of ourselves to our love lives.
Number one, don’t optimize for looks, money, or lifestyle. There has been a TikTok trend going around of late about this idea of people wanting “Trust Fund, six-foot-five, blue eyes” as their description of the partner they want. I fail most of those tests? I’ve slightly blue eyes. That’s it. But most people, 99.9% of people, fail that test. That, to me, is an example of taking things that some people put a premium on, like looks, money, and lifestyle, and trying to maximize those things, instead of creating a baseline for what they want in those areas.
This is the difference, by the way, between maximizing and satisficing. Satisficing is when you have enough of something. Maximizing is when you try to get the very most you can possibly get of something. But this misunderstands the way human beings work, that we’re never getting a quality in a person. We’re getting an entire suite of qualities in a person—a package. So if we’re trying to maximize in one to three narrow areas, we are almost certainly going to ignore some major deficits in other really important areas.
The trick, in other words, is to know how much we need of a thing. Do I need someone who’s rich enough to buy a boat, or someone who’s made enough money that they don’t need mine? What’s the level that we need in those areas? I’m not a fan of advice that talks about these things being completely unimportant, because we have to work with ourselves the way we actually are as human beings, not the way we’d like ourselves to be. We all want chemistry on some level. We all want a feeling of security on some level. How much of these things we want is personal, and we have agency in it. We can decide when enough is enough.
If we don’t, we will always find ourselves over-indexing for certain things that actually drop in their importance past a certain point, because someone being the best-looking person in every room or the tallest person we can find is not going to determine your quality of life 5, 10, 20 years from now in a relationship with that person. But if we don’t think about that, we will end up chasing someone relentlessly who makes us very unhappy, someone whose character along the way we have completely ignored.
There’s a great moment in Catch Me If You Can, that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, where Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Frank Abagnale, talks about why the Yankees always win. He says it’s because the other team can’t stop staring at their damn pinstripes. And we act like that in dating as well. It feels like, in some ways, the people who are extraordinarily gifted with their looks or their bodies or with their finances can win because people are always looking at their pinstripes. They’re always looking at the surface. They’re never exploring the deeper character and values that would make that person either a wonderful partner or a terrible partner.
The second important way that we can lower our temperature and get less obsessed about someone in early dating is to lose the urgency. Urgency can quickly become our enemy. This is true in all walks of life. Advertisers can come along and try to make you urgently buy something. When we go on a date with someone, we can have our own internal sense of urgency that says, “I have to move fast with this person, because otherwise, they might get taken off the market.” We see this when we think, “I have to go on a date with this person tomorrow, because otherwise someone else might snap them up.”
We get taken out of the mindset of actually assessing this person, learning this person, and into the mindset of simply trying to get this person because we’ve already made our minds up. Another great example of this is when we go to rent a property or buy a house. If we walk in and we fall in love and we imagine a life in that house because it’s all so perfect, we stop paying attention to the house. We forget that, for all we know, there’s mold that’s going to create headaches for us for a long time to come trying to fix. It could be that there are expensive fixes or structural problems that the inspection is going to bring up when it happens in three weeks.
All sorts of things could still go wrong with this. But instead, we’ve made up our mind, and when we make up our mind, we suddenly get ourselves into all sorts of trouble because we think “I want it now,” and it doesn’t matter what comes up in the inspection weeks from now. We may even convince ourselves that even if something does come up in the inspection, we’ll fix it. It’s fine. The house is amazing.
Have you ever done that in a relationship? Have you ever done that in a dating scenario? “We’ll fix that part. This person’s amazing.” We stop paying attention because the urgency is something that often gets us into trouble, pain, heartbreak and suffering by giving time and attention to the wrong people, people we don’t even know we really want yet.
This idea brings me on to point number three, which is one of the most practical things you can do when you’re trying to stop anxiously obsessing over someone: be less impressed.
In that urgency I was talking about, we very quickly form a story of how amazing someone is. But if we actually stop to pay attention, to become mindful and present with what’s going on in this person’s behavior, the way they show up in different moments—not just on that one amazing date we had with them, or in that amazing moment of love making—if we actually start to look at how they are holistically in their life, we will inevitably see things that make them human, and those things can make them less impressive.
And I actually don’t mean this in a negative way. I mean it in a very positive way. It’s not like we’re looking for all these faults with people so that we can tell ourselves that they’re awful. It’s that we need to take them off of the angelic pedestal and put them back on the level of human, because when they’re back on that level, we no longer have the same sense of fear in dealing with them. We no longer think that it would be the end of the world if we lost them, and we stop over-respecting this person like they’re perfect and we’re awful.
So start paying more attention to the moments where they say or do something that gives you pause, where they spoke to someone in a way that you go, “Oh, I don’t really like that.” Or they reacted to something in a way where you went, “That was a little strange,” or “I don’t like that side of them as much.” Start actually paying attention to those details, because it allows you to just bring the scales to a more level place. Even if they’re awesome, it allows you to bring the scales to a slightly more level place, where you can actually start interacting with this person as yourself again, not as someone trying to impress this incredible being.
And that ability to see them as they are, to distinguish yourself from the other people that they may have had in their lives that just have the halo effect where they see them as perfect, and instead be someone who sees them as they are—that actually makes you special to them. That makes you a more unique person, someone who sees them as they are. And that’s one of the things that makes relationships so beautiful, is being seen by someone and accepted for who we really are. You can’t give someone that gift if you’ve put them on an impossible pedestal.
It’s worth noting that when you do start realizing that people aren’t perfect, you’ll inevitably see that there are things that you might want to speak with them about, things that they did that you don’t like, ways that you’re being treated right now that you would like to remind them of your standard on. And a lot of people are intensely uncomfortable with the kind of awkward tensions and mini confrontations that can come from just speaking up about things that you don’t like in the dating process.
I haven’t got time in this video because this is already long enough without it, but this is where it’s crucial to learn how to have standards and boundaries and communicate them. So I’ve put together a free guide for anyone who has something they want to say right now but doesn’t know how to say it at BoldStandards.com. It’s free. Go check it out. It makes a great partner with everything I’m talking about here.
The fourth way we can eliminate our obsessing about someone is to stop burying the lead. In the last point, we talked about being less impressed, allowing someone’s imperfections to be as visible to you as the things that we think make them perfect, thus creating a more rounded human. In this case, I’m talking about imperfections that are actually things that disqualify this person or this thing from being capable of making you happy. For example, someone says to you, “I don’t want a relationship. I’m not at that place in my life right now.” Or they say they never want kids when that’s something that’s massively important to you, or they say, after their third date and having an incredible time with you, “I’m moving to Thailand tomorrow for the next two years.”
When you hear these things, it’s incredibly tempting to bury the lead. I have coached people for 17 years, and most of the time when people come to me, they will say, “Matt, I’ve met this amazing person. They’re incredible. We have amazing sex. We can’t stop talking to each other. The chemistry is unbelievable. I’ve never felt this way before.” And they’ll talk about all of these amazing things. I in the back of my mind, am always waiting for the but, because I know there’s a but coming or they wouldn’t even be asking the question. So they’ll say all of those things, and then after saying all of the things that make this person perfect, they’ll say, “but he’s moving to Thailand tomorrow.” That is burying the lead, because the headline of this story is person is moving to Thailand tomorrow, not worth having a relationship with them. But instead, someone has made the headline how they feel about this person, often because of the very qualities that create the halo effect.
I think this person is amazing in these ways. So the halo effect makes me think that they would be amazing for a relationship, but anyone who’s not available for a relationship can’t be amazing for a relationship. So we have to start asking ourselves, what is the lead that I’ve been burying that might make this person not worth stressing about at all? And by the way, and this is a video for another time, it’s worth noting that for some people, the reason they obsess in the first place is because someone isn’t available, which is an instinct that has nothing to do with valuing someone because of how inherently valuable they are, but instead valuing them simply because they are unavailable.
All right, you’ve made it this far to point number five in how to reduce your anxiety and the obsessive rumination when you like someone. I want to talk to you about the goose and the golden eggs. Most people have heard the fable at some point or another. The goose is laying golden eggs, and the farmer thinks that this is amazing. You know, I’m getting rich off of these eggs. But at a certain point starts making the mistake of thinking that the value is in the eggs, not the goose who’s laying the eggs.
We often make that mistake in our lives. We think that our value is in the eggs that we’ve laid. Now there are all sorts of golden eggs that we lay in our lives. Sometimes it’s a career opportunity that we went out and fought for and finally got that interview for that amazing job. Sometimes it’s money we’ve made, other times it’s a love interest. You know, we went out one night and we put on our nice clothes, and we made ourselves look good, and we have the courage to go and speak to someone. And because of that, we now find ourselves texting with someone, or we find ourselves on a date, and if God forbid we decide we like that person, we start seeing them as the golden egg.
But our focus of what’s most valuable shifts in a really dangerous way. We stop looking in the mirror at the golden goose, the one who actually laid the egg, the one who made it happen, the one who created the opportunity. Instead, we start looking at that name that’s in our phone of that person we’ve just texted, thinking that’s where the value really is. That’s what’s really important. In other words, we transfer our value from ourselves to something on the outside. But when we do that, our perception of what is most valuable starts to drift in a really dangerous way.
When we start telling ourselves that the most valuable thing about me is on the outside of me, we transfer the locus of our power from here to here. To a person, a thing, an opportunity. When we do that in dating, we have suddenly made our entire emotional ecosystem beholden to how this person treats us, whether they text us back, whether they decide they want to be with us. Now to correct this, there’s two ways of looking at it, and both of them can be valid.
The first one is to realize that if you laid one golden egg, you can lay other golden eggs, to realize that you’re powerful, that it’s not the case, that every great thing in your life you got through luck. You got it because you’re you, because you make things happen, because you’re wonderful, you’re awesome. There are wonderful things about you that attract other wonderful things in life. So you don’t need to freak out and worry that you’ll never be able to do this again, because you did it so you can do it again.
But even if you can’t quite do that exact same thing again, it still makes sense to see the value as being in the goose because the goose, us, is all we ever own. That’s what we take with us, no matter what happens in life, no matter what changes or who we lose or what we lose, we always take us with us to the next thing. So I like to be a little ruthless about this and say to myself, the real source of my value is me. And if I know that, I know that I can manage anything else in life that changes, anything that happens? Will I be hurt? Will I be heartbroken? But the source of my value and my power is still with me, because I’m the only thing I ever truly own while I’m still here.
There’s a wonderful story of Margaret Atwood at a certain stage in her life, walking around her house and realizing that it wasn’t her house—that this place that she had called her own for so long didn’t really belong to her, that one day she wouldn’t be here anymore, and it wouldn’t be thought of as her house anymore. Someone else would be in that house.
There’s something humbling about that, and many people may even see there being something intensely melancholic about that. But I also see it as a pressure valve—that when we realize that everything is transient, everything is borrowed or rented, we can stop gripping onto it so tightly.
And even while we’re here, these things and people we acquire will come and go, but we are the thing that will always remain. So never, ever transfer your power and your value to the golden eggs. Always keep it with the goose.
Thank you so much for watching, everybody. Don’t forget to leave me a comment before you go. Let me know what meant something to you, what moved you from this video, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
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