Writing my new book “Love Life” has been an intensely personal journey. It was written over four years, so I was working on these chapters at practically every stage of my love life: from heartbroken to single to meeting the love of my life and getting married. I was on a journey to overcome many of my most painful challenges—discovering the internal blockages that were preventing me from finding the love I wanted, and uncovering deeper levels of core confidence in both dating and life in general.
Whether you’re single, in a relationship, or married, there’s something in this book for you. In this video, I talk about some of my favorite chapters, and how they can apply to your life today.
I’ve poured so much of what I’ve learned over the last decade into this book, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of it!
Hi, friends. Welcome back to the channel. I am Matthew Hussey, and if you are new here, for the last 17 years, I’ve been a coach specializing in helping people find love through greater confidence and relational intelligence. I am also the author of the brand-new book, Love Life, which is all about how to raise your standards, find your person, and live happily no matter what.
I wrote this book to be a copilot for anybody who is serious about finding love, to be a set of tools and principles for letting go of past relationships and healing from previous pain, overcoming the fear of being left behind, and finally finding the love that we are all looking for that every single one of us wants to find in this life.
It’s not about games or tactics. It’s not a book about telling you you just need to get out there more or giving you clichés like, “It will happen when you least expect it.”
I wrote this book to understand the real reasons why we struggle to find love, what’s holding us back, and why it feels so difficult today. I wrote a book that is designed to see you, because that’s what I’ve been doing for nearly two decades of my life: studying people in this area of life and understanding the essence of what is holding them back.
You see, when our internal culture of fear and anxiety about never finding love meets an external dating culture of people who are taking what they can get while giving the minimum possible investment, it creates a recipe for low standards and expectations, and for settling for far less than we’re worth.
But as Morrie Schwartz told Mitch Albom: “If you don’t like the culture, don’t buy it. Create your own.”
When you create your own culture, not only will you be happier and more confident because you’ll be living a life that you love regardless of what anyone else is doing, but your culture will also be the thing that ends up changing how people treat you, and attracting the right person to you.
Love Life shows you how to do this. And guess what? It is finally out after four-and-a-half years, and months of talking about pre-ordering the book. I can now finally say that you can order the book. It has already been translated into a bunch of different languages, with more to come.
In this video, I want to share with you the philosophies in the book and why I decided to write it. And if you’ve already gotten the book, hopefully, it’ll encourage you to read it cover to cover, because if you’re anything like me, you buy a lot of books and only read 10% of them. But I really want you to read this one. So, hopefully, this will encourage you to do that. And if you haven’t gotten the book yet, and this video helps you see that there are things that are intensely relevant to you in the book, my hope is that it encourages you to grab one.
I am currently signing the very first-ever copies of this book as part of a giveaway that I’m doing that includes some signed copies of the book, a one-on-one with me, Live Retreat tickets to our six-day retreat in Florida this year, and lots more that you are entered into just for getting a copy of the book.
And every single person who buys a copy of Love Life is going to get an exclusive free ticket to an event I am doing on May 4, called Find Your Person. This virtual event is going to be a complete one-off moment where not only do I want to take the concepts from the book and bring them to life live, but I also want to answer the question: “If I was single again and I had one year to try to make finding love inevitable, what are the direct and indirect things I would do?” That’s what this event is about. And it’s designed to give you a plan—a roadmap for going out there over the next year of your life for your love life.
All you need to do to get all of this is confirm your purchase at lovelifebook.com.
So, why did this book come about?
I have had a front-row seat to the pain and the anxiety and the fear that people feel in this area of their life when it seems to be not working out, taking longer than we thought, or we’re just not where we thought we would be by this moment in our lives.
It can feel like something is wrong with us when we keep being told, especially by technology, that it’s easier than ever to meet people when we have all of these different ways of doing it. It’s almost like we’re being gaslit into thinking it’s easier, when in fact something about it feels harder.
Part of this book is me wanting people to know that they are not crazy for feeling that it’s difficult out there right now, that there is a lot of flakiness, there is a ton of bad behavior. There are so many people with absolutely zero intentionality in their dating lives who just want to use you for an experience, so that they can have a hit of attention or intimacy before dropping us at the first sign of something else, or the moment the relationship becomes an inconvenience.
On top of all of that, many of us have our own challenges that we take into our love lives. Many of us feel routinely drawn to people who are bad for us, and not attracted to the people who might be better for us. It can put us in this never-ending loop of dating someone who’s exciting but hurts us, and then going back to someone who’s safe, but we don’t feel a spark with. And we go round and round, never finding satisfaction, never finding what we’re really looking for.
I remember getting to a point in my love life where, even though I knew how to create opportunity, I still couldn’t seem to find what I was looking for. And when we don’t find what we’re looking for for long enough, we start to worry that we’re the one who’s broken. The last five years of my life have not just been about me helping other people on that journey, but me being on that journey of discovery myself, figuring out: What are the answers I need? What are the internal blockages that could be preventing me from finding the love that I say I want?
I didn’t write this book as a married person telling people how to go out there and find a long-term relationship. I wrote this book through every stage of my love life. I wrote it heartbroken, so there are chapters in this book where I’m devastated, and I’m writing from that energy. There are chapters of this book I wrote from a place of being single and not knowing if I would meet my person. I wrote chapters of this book when I was first dating Audrey, who is now my wife. And the final edits of this book, I did on our honeymoon.
This book has come with me through every emotion and every part of the arc of my own love life. So, let’s get into the journey of the book itself.
Now, the book starts with an introduction that’s called “Karma Is a Bitch.” In this chapter, I take myself off of any kind of pedestal that anyone could have ever put me on where they think that I was a great person to date. I think people are going to get a real kick out of this chapter, because it’s a genuine window into the kind of person I actually was to date.
I also talk about my own heartbreak and one of the dark moments of my life. Then I go on to talk about the difficulties of being single—difficulties we can all relate to: the pang of loneliness that never goes away when we really want to find someone but that person is nowhere to be found, and how to manage those difficult emotions. This is a much more vulnerable piece of work in general from me. I get way more personal about my own life than I ever have. I also open up about a lot of the pain in my life.
I think people are going to really enjoy this chapter, and my hope is that in those chapters, you feel like you’re not alone, because what you’re feeling is a very human thing. And the yearning for love is universal. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I then go on to talk about how this yearning for love can make us tell ourselves false love stories. So there’s a chapter called “How to Tell Love Stories.” In this chapter, I talk about the ways we value situations that shouldn’t have that much value placed on them. Just because we have a mutual attraction with someone, we think that this person, this situation, is the most important thing in the world. When that happens, it’s the beginning of us dropping our standards. It’s the beginning of us starting to do all sorts of things that we would tell a friend never to do.
There’s a chapter called “Question Your Instincts,” which is all about the bad instincts we have that lead us to more and more pain. I can think of a relationship in my own life where I had all sorts of bad instincts to give up things that were important to me to just try to please somebody else, to never have the conversations that I should have had about my own needs, and really ended up losing myself in the process, which is one of the scariest things, isn’t it? When we spend so long worrying about holding on to somebody else that we actually lose ourselves. And then, of course, when we get our heart broken, which we almost inevitably do in those situations, we find ourselves having to start building ourselves—and our confidence—up again from scratch.
I talk about the bad instincts we have because we’re taught a lot in our love lives to just “trust your instincts.” Our instincts don’t always serve us, especially if we learned instincts from parents or caregivers who taught us the wrong idea of love or who taught us that we had to earn love or that love was volatile or chaotic, or that it was hot and cold. We have instincts based on early imprints that don’t serve us later in life. So we have to question our instincts.
One of the worst instincts we have is the instinct to avoid conversations that would give us clarity about another person’s intentions. That instinct gets us into a lot of trouble, because over time, dating someone or having a relationship with someone, we build up a huge amount of resentment, never really speaking up.
There’s a chapter in the book called “Have Hard Conversations.” And this chapter, I believe, is one of the most important chapters in the whole book, because it teaches us how we can start to advocate differently for ourselves. How can I speak up about the things that I need? If I’m not sure where the relationship is going, how and when do I speak up about that so I don’t get another six months in only to find that this person was never serious in the first place?
Having hard conversations is one of the most valuable skills in the world. And if you’re anything like me, you haven’t always been good at it. I have a people-pleaser in me. I have a part of me that doesn’t want to upset people. I have a part of me that worries—if I really speak up for myself—that someone is going to go away, that I won’t be loved. And so, hard conversations were something I really had to learn. I had to learn how to feel safe to have difficult conversations with people. And how to, of course, connect with the fact that I was worthy of asking for what I really needed.
That’s a very important chapter that I think is also very practical, and it’s going to give you lots of very practical things you can say for different situations. I think you’re really going to enjoy that one.
But then I start to talk about the deeper wiring we have that can get in the way of us being attracted to people who would actually make us far happier than the people we’ve been with in the past. One of the hardest things is this feeling that “I just keep drawing the wrong people to me.” And sometimes it’s even worse than that: “I get attracted to the wrong people.”
There’s a chapter I write—it’s one of my favorite chapters in the whole book—and it’s called “Never Satisfied.” This chapter lists out five reasons why we keep going for the wrong people and what we can do about it. By the end of that chapter, you will understand your wiring on a whole different level. It will be illuminating for you when you realize, “Oh, these are some of the ways I’ve been getting in my own way.” I know that because it was a process I went through.
In that chapter, I tell you a very personal story about my own life that was an indication of how I kept creating a result unconsciously that I didn’t want. And it will prompt you to look for the ways that you might be creating a result you don’t want without even knowing it right now. Becoming aware of that is the first step, because once you are aware of it, you can then move to the next chapter, which is “How to Rewire Your Brain.”
I think for a lot of us, we know we want to change. We may even have some awareness of what we want to change, but we don’t know how to change it. Especially in our love lives, we can go through feeling like we’re broken: “There is something wrong with me. I don’t know how to change. I just keep getting attracted to this thing, or I keep sabotaging in this way, or I keep running away because I’m scared of getting hurt, or I’m just terrified of abandonment. And any time I start to like someone, I turn into a different version of myself that I don’t like.”
We all have wiring like that. But how do you rewire yourself? That chapter gives you specific steps on how to do it.
The next few chapters are all about getting the strength to handle what are some of the most difficult situations we can find ourselves in, especially in our love lives. One such chapter is chapter 10. It is called “The Question of Having a Child.” And I wrote this chapter for anybody at any stage who is suffering from the difficult emotions that come from either wanting a child but feeling like the circumstances haven’t arisen for you to have a child, or someone who has already missed their window and is now grieving and dealing with the difficult emotions that come with that.
This chapter is for you if you relate to any of that. I have, for the last 17 years of my life, been on the front lines of hearing these anxieties and fears from women who want this more than anything in the world. And they are now fearful or even panicking that this part of their life doesn’t align with what they had hoped for.
I have walked people through exercises to help them regain a sense of control and make a plan. And I put these exercises into this chapter. I don’t take on this chapter alone. I interview fertility experts—people who are at the top of their field in this area. But for anyone going through those emotions right now, this chapter is designed to restore a sense of calm and help you devise a plan that puts you back in control.
Then there’s a chapter on “Surviving a Breakup,” which is going to be so important to so many people, because many of you are not going to be picking this book up from a point of being ready to find love. You’re going to be picking this book up at the point of the most acute pain, of having just been left by somebody, of a relationship or a marriage ending that you thought would keep going—you thought would last forever, or at least you’d hoped would last forever. And you’re trying to get past that heartbreak. That chapter is for you.
There’s also a chapter called “How to Leave When You Can’t Seem to Leave,” which is for anyone out there who finds themselves in a painful or toxic relationship that you’ve been in maybe for some time, maybe for most of your life, and you’re struggling to get out. Or maybe it’s a situation with someone that you couldn’t even call it a relationship. It’s a dynamic you have with someone that you feel like you are just locked into, hoping they’ll change, hoping that one day, it will become what you want it to become. But your day-to-day experience of this person in this situation is misery. That chapter gives you the steps and strength to finally move on from somebody who brings pain to your life.
After talking about these challenging scenarios, I take on the subject of confidence in a big way. So many people feel like their self-esteem, or their lack of self-worth, is at the core of all of their issues when it comes to their love life. It is the deepest reason why they are accepting poor treatment. It is why they don’t believe in themselves. It is why they feel everyone is out of their league. It’s why they feel it’s never going to happen for them. It’s why when they find a relationship, they feel like they can’t enjoy it because “I always feel like someone is going to leave” or “I always feel like I’m not good enough for somebody.”
In these chapters, I give you a model for confidence that I have developed over 17 years of my career. It is the three layers of confidence—the surface, the identity, and the core. As I break these down, you’re going to understand confidence on a level that perhaps you never have before. This model clarifies it for people and provides a real sense of what they can do to feel confident in a way they’ve never been able to achieve before.
This on its own is worth getting a copy of this book. I don’t care if you’ve just met the love of your life and finding your person is a box you’ve already ticked. That chapter on core confidence is something everybody needs.
And last, but absolutely not least, we get to the final chapter “Happy Enough.” I don’t want to do any spoilers on this chapter. Just please read it. When you get your copy of the book, promise me you will read this chapter. I know it’s at the end of the book. I know, myself included, how few of us ever get to the end of a book we start reading, but I promise you, in this case, it will be worth it.
So, for those of you who have been on the fence or just haven’t gotten around to it, I hope that this has given you enough information to know you want it, and to adopt one of my little books for yourself.
And I also want to just take this opportunity to say “thank you” to all of you who have supported me over the years. It is not lost on me that a huge part of the reason that I’m able to get a book deal with a major publisher like HarperCollins is because of the audience that is loyal to me, loyal to my work, and would be excited for me to produce something like this. You make this possible for me at this scale. You have supported me in such beautiful ways in my life.
I have been doing this . . . I’m 36 now . . . I’ve been doing this since I was 19 years old. And that’s crazy. I’ve been through so many different times in my life during that time. I’ve been through some really, really difficult times that people don’t know about. I’ve had some very dark moments, more than a few dark nights of the soul. For a long time, I wasn’t vulnerable enough, I don’t think . . . not about the private details of my life, but about some of the struggles I was going through that you out there were also going through and are going through right now. And I wish I had been braver sooner in being able to talk the way that I talk in this book about some of those struggles, because I think I could have helped even more people by doing that.
But one of the most beautiful things about the last few years is that as I have gotten a little braver, and as I have shared more of myself, the response from all of you has been stunning. You have not judged me. You have only encouraged me and supported me and been my friends, and I felt so accepted by all of you. And then that’s made me braver.
I want to thank you, because you’ve had a big part in encouraging the kind of vulnerability that shows up in this book, and I believe that’s a vulnerability that’s going to change a lot of people’s lives beyond simply the knowledge and the expertise that I’ve poured into this book.
So, thank you for supporting me, thank you for believing in me, thank you to every single one of you who gets a copy of this book. You don’t know what it means to me. It’s been four-and-a-half years of my life and my work, and many more years before that, of experience leading up to those four-and-a-half years. And I’m just so grateful.
I’m also grateful to the lessons learned in this book, for everything they’ve allowed me to do because the things that I learned, that I’ve poured into this book, are also the reasons I’ve found peace and joy and happiness in this area of my life.
It’s no coincidence that in the arc of me writing this book, there was also the arc of me finding my person and getting married. I can draw a direct line between everything I was learning and everything I was applying in my own life that led me to find this extraordinary healthy and beautiful love that I have in my life now. And it’s a love that I know so many of you feel because you love Audrey too, and you’ve been so welcoming to her. Thank you.
I can’t wait to see what you think of this book. Please write to me and let me know what you think of it when you get your copy. And like I said, the link is lovelifebook.com. Make sure that when you do get your copy of the book, wherever you get it from, go to that website and register your purchase, so that you’re entered into the prize draw, and you get a ticket to the event I’m doing on May 4, where I can’t wait to see you.
Thank you for being here and thank you for supporting me and showing me love. I can’t wait for you to read this. I’ll see you soon.
matthewhussey.com
