Why Do They Always Come Back?

Matthew:

Before we get into the video, so many of you have been asking about what the dates are for the Virtual Retreat in 2023. They are now confirmed. They’re from June the 2nd to the 4th. And for one more week only, we have early bird tickets on offer. That is a deeply discounted ticket that is only available for one more week. I don’t want you to miss out. Go over to MHVirtualRetreat.com to get yours. And let’s get on with the video.

Have you got someone in your life who isn’t stepping up in the way that you would like? Have you got someone that’s blowing hot and cold? Maybe you have a great date with them, and then they fade out. Maybe they made promises that they didn’t keep, and you are left wondering what is going on.

Well, one of my clients recently asked me a particular question that I think is going to help a lot of you in this respect. She said, “How do I deal with a guy who keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up? I know, I know . . . dump him.” I like that’s the impression she just has of what we do is just, I know what you’re going to say, just dump him. “But I really like this guy. We have chemistry when we are together. We have common goals. It feels like we have everything we should have. But once I’m out of sight, he seemingly forgets about me. Just when I’ve decided to move on, I hear from him, and he lures me back in. I’ve continued dating, but nobody measures up.”

Let’s just break this down a little bit. How many people have had the experience of someone who says they’re going to do something, and they don’t really follow through? They sound very promising and like this is going to be a great romance, and then that person’s energy drops off after a date. And yet, it becomes impossible to forget about them and move on because every time you do, all of a sudden that person reappears somewhere on your phone. They’re either texting you, sending you a message on Instagram, or the most confusing of all, they just continue to watch your stories. Why, oh why, are they still watching my stories if they’re not interested?

One explanation is that they are madly in love with you. They can’t get you off their mind. They realize that though it’s hard to text you and reach out because that would be an act of vulnerability, the one thing they could do to stay in your life and to stay in your mind is to continue watching your stories just as a way of connecting to you from afar. Another possible explanation is that they were pooping.

What I know for sure is that it is a complete waste of time trying to figure out which of the two it is with someone who’s not actually trying. But there was a part of this that I thought was really interesting where she says, “We have chemistry when we are together. It feels like we have everything we should have.” Now, I want to take that idea of chemistry and just break it down a little bit because chemistry is the justification for so much. When someone feels like they have chemistry with a person, it’s like that person becomes sacred, especially because many of us don’t feel chemistry very often, so when we get close enough to someone to feel chemistry, when it feels mutual, it suddenly feels like this rare thing that I have to hold onto.

Now when we think about chemistry, I truly believe we often confuse chemistry with anxiety. What we’re really feeling a lot of the time, especially in a situation like this where this person is blowing hot and cold, they’re having a great time one minute, and then he just disappears. He doesn’t follow through. What we’re really seeing there is a situation that could easily make someone anxious, a situation where someone is pulling away, and our instinct when someone is pulling away is to do what? Invest in them more. We want to text them. We speak to our friends about what it all means. Even that is a strange form of investment, isn’t it? When you sit with your friends and you talk about it. But why did they just pull away? We had such a great time on the date. All of that is a kind of psychological footprint that this person has in your mind, and that’s a form of investment. Even if that person doesn’t feel it, even if you’re not texting them, you’re investing in them mentally.

And then of course, the more you think about them and the more you stress about are they going to get back to me? Are they not going to get back to me? Are they going to ask me on another date? All of that is a kind of investment. And we start to crave this thing that we don’t have, and it’s hard at that point to separate how much of the craving is to do with it being so out of this world great, and how much is to do with the fact that we don’t have it? How much is to do with the fact that this person is making us always second guess ourselves? There is a kind of game that we are in that is keeping us fully occupied.

We always have to suspect ourselves if we haven’t actually got someone, if we’re not actually with them in a committed and secure relationship, and yet we are saying that we have the greatest chemistry with them. You always have to suspect yourself if that’s going on because there is this whole artificial element of excitement and mystery that’s being created by the space between you and by the uncertainty of the situation itself. And by the way, everyone is more mysterious with space. Entire celebrity culture plays on that mystery, plays on my hysteria of you can’t get close to me, but I’m going to feed you just little details that make you think I’m compelling, mesmerizing, exciting.

The people that we think are mysterious, do you think Prince was mysterious to the people that knew him best? To his best mates, do you think he was mysterious? No. He was just a guy, a talented guy, a guy with a lot of success and fame, but to them, he’s just a person. And the real test of what we have with someone is at the point of them becoming boring, how do we feel about them then? Is this someone we want to be with at that point.

This person isn’t close enough to this man to find him boring. I believe that there’s this whole element of anxiety that she feels that she’s confusing with chemistry. And that feeling that there’s so much chemistry is what leads us to then overvalue somebody, put them on a pedestal, put the connection, the attraction on a pedestal, say things like, I’ve tried dating, but no one measures up. How can someone measure up? How can someone measure up to not there? How can someone measure up to what you have in your mind, in your imagination? I’m not saying that you imagined the moments where it was exciting, but you can have that excitement with many different people, and that excitement always seems more thrilling when you’re in that feeling of I don’t know where I stand, I don’t know what it’s going to be, that phase.

You have to think about it this way, in a relationship, people don’t live in that phase for the rest of their life where there’s always this sense of, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” That’s not a sustainable place to be. It’s not to say there isn’t passion in a relationship, but that initial not knowing and that first kiss and the feeling of chemistry that comes about in those first few dates. For people who end up together, that shifts. That’s an impossible thing to measure someone against. No one deserves that. That person you have the peak experience with can’t even live up to that. The only way they can live up to that is by not being around.

The second thing I want to address, “He keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up.” What we’re seeing there is this is a pattern that keeps repeating over and over and over. The first thing you can ask is why, if this is a pattern that keeps repeating over and over, is this even a question?

Another way to look at it is, okay, something can’t be a pattern in your life if you don’t allow it to be a pattern. Something can only be a pattern if you are the dance partner. A pattern needs a dance partner. It needs someone to participate in that dynamic. He can’t keep coming back and doing the same thing if you demonstrate real consequences for his behavior.

What this is really about, what it comes down to me is culture. What culture do you want to have for not just your romance but your life in general, for the friends you have? Culture is everything, and we have to start taking culture really seriously for ourselves. What’s my culture that I want to have in my life? It’s no different to an organization. In my organization, we have over 30 people. That’s a lot of different dynamics, but the one thing that unites that group of people is culture. Different personalities, same culture. And if someone isn’t the right culture, they don’t last.

By the way, sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes someone’s brought into that world, and we only discover after a few weeks or even after a couple of months, oh, this person doesn’t vibe with this culture. They spoke like they did, but in actually watching their actions, they don’t. And in those moments we make hard decisions. It’s not easy to let someone go, but we do because the culture is king. The culture is what we’re protecting. And culture isn’t free. It’s sculpted. It’s sculpted by releasing the wrong people. It’s sculpted by having hard conversations, sometimes even with the right people, in fact, inevitably with the right people. You’re still going to have cultural clashes. You’re still going to have moments where you have to have a hard conversation with that person, but every hard conversation sculpts the culture of what you get in an organization.

Your love life is like an organization. Who are you letting into that organization? Who are you partnering with in the business that is your life? Who’s getting through the door? What’s your filter like? And that culture has to be made clear. In this case, the culture is I want someone who’s consistent. Now what I’m reading from this question is this isn’t culture. It’s a hope. I hope for someone who’s consistent. I would like someone who’s consistent. But for me in my organization, I don’t think I would like someone who’s kind. It’s an absolute non-negotiable. It’s culture. When someone says they’re not consistent by keep letting them back in, I know it’s not culture.

So we have to start taking our culture really, really seriously. And that means saying to someone the next time they tried to come back and say I want to see you this weekend after they disappeared off the map for weeks on end, or they underdelivered last time when they said they were going to do all of these things, and they didn’t, you say to that person, “Hey, listen, I really do want, some part of me really wants to see you, but the reality is you’re so inconsistent that I don’t know what you want. I don’t know where we stand with each other, and what I want in my life is someone who is consistent because I know I have so much to give. What I’m prepared to give someone, what I have to bring to the table to someone is incredibly valuable. I know that. So it’s not something that I’m just going to give to somebody when I don’t feel like that person is showing up in the way that I’m showing up. And I don’t feel that with you.”

There’s a lot that’s right about that. You’re showing that you take your culture seriously. You’re actually telling someone what that culture is is consistency, is someone showing up in the way that I show up. And you are also doing something that demonstrates incredible confidence. You’re saying, “I know that I bring enormous value to the table. I know that I have a lot to give that’s valuable. I know that. I don’t need you to tell me that. I know that. My life has taught me that. The people around me have taught me that. My belief in the value of the things that I’m giving in my life has taught me that. I know that independent of you. And I’m not going to give that to someone for free. That has to be earned. It doesn’t have to be earned in some convoluted way like you chase me. No, it has to be earned by you being prepared to meet me there.”

And when you do that, it A, it says to someone, whoa, I’m missing out on a lot by letting go of this person because it does make you think twice when someone says something like that to you. When someone says, I know how much I have to give, and you can tell they believe it, you do think twice because you think to yourself, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to lose all of that.” There’s even maybe a competitive element of you that goes “Someone else is going to get all of that, and I’ve got this amazing person in front of me. I don’t want let them go.” But it also shows just incredible confidence, and that makes you attractive. You believe in your own value. That makes you attractive.

What I see in this question is someone who’s not believing in their own value right now. At the start of the question, “How do I deal with a guy who keeps promising to do things together but then never steps up?” You deal with them by showing that you have this incredible value, and this, what they’re giving, that’s not it. That’s not what you need to keep giving this value. This value has a way higher price than that. No one is going to be serious about us if we are not serious about ourselves.

So I want to give you an exercise to do. I don’t normally give you exercises in these videos, and this is probably something I would do more on one of my programs or in my membership, but do this with me. Write down what the things are that you have that give you tremendous value to somebody else. What are the things that, in your personality, in who you are as a human being, in what you’ve learned over the course of your lifetime, in how you’re prepared to show up for someone, the amount of effort that you are willing to make to truly see someone and look at them through a compassionate lens or to help and support their growth or to just be an amazing teammate or your ability to be playful or have fun or have an amazing sexual connection? What are the things that you know give you so much to offer somebody?

Write them down and really connect with them. If you don’t feel connected to it, don’t write it down. If it’s something that doesn’t really, you feel like you’re saying it, but you don’t really believe it, don’t write that down. But do write down the things that you know in your bones are true because the next time you go to the table with someone, that’s what you need to be connected to, not how great they are, not the fear of losing them, not the worry that you’ll never get someone with that much chemistry again. I want you to be connected to the value of what you are bringing to the table and to not allow anybody to keep getting your time and energy whose actions show that they do not respect that value.

I hope you enjoyed that video. Before you go, like I said, the early bird tickets to the Virtual Retreat are only available for a couple more days. This is three days of live coaching with me and my team, not just for your love life. This is not a love life retreat. It’s a life retreat. And we’re going to spend three days analyzing the patterns, the behaviors, and the habits that are going to get you where you need to be and get you to experience the peace and the happiness that you want to feel.

Come check it out at MHVirtualRetreat.com while those early bird tickets are still available. And I’ll see you there.