Dating can feel harder than ever in 2024. In today’s video, I explain why so many people are anxious about commitment, give 3 different mindsets on commitment that can totally change someone’s perspective on it, and show what makes someone want commitment with YOU. (Spoiler alert: persuading has nothing to do with it!) 

MATTHEW HUSSEY

If you feel like dating today is the hardest time in history to get someone to commit, you are not alone. For so many people out there who feel like they only find casual relationships, people who say they’re not ready, people who are not emotionally available, people who don’t believe in monogamy, people who don’t want to get married again because they’ve been married before and they don’t want to do it all over again, people coming across all of these scenarios get tired, they get exhausted, they get burnt out, and perhaps most tragically, they start believing that finding a relationship is no longer possible. At the very least, it can feel like we have to go through life convincing other people to want a relationship with us, to want commitment.

So, in today’s video, I want to talk about a piece of human psychology that I find really fascinating. I’m going to do it with a very unexpected example. But when you understand this, you’re no longer going through life and dating trying to convince people to commit. You’re the person who makes people want to commit.

By the way, while we’re on the subject and before we get into this video, there is an event I am holding live as a once-only experience on the 22nd of October called “Casual to Committed—the Three Core Principles for Getting to Commitment Without Games or Ultimatums.”

If you’re single right now and struggling to meet people who are ready for a relationship or emotionally available, if you’re in a relationship, sort of, with someone who’s not really committing and you want more, this is me sharing my best insights on how to get the committed, lasting relationship you want.

To sign up, go to LoveLifeTraining.com. It’s completely free. It’ll take seconds to sign up. And I will email you all the information you need to join us on the day. Don’t forget to do it now. Before you forget, go to a browser, type in LoveLifeTraining.com, and register now, and I will see you on the day.

All right. Let’s talk about this. I want you to imagine a scenario. You have just walked into a restaurant. You’re hungry. You’ve been waiting all day for this moment. You’ve been excited to go to this restaurant. You sit down, a waiter approaches and hands you a menu. Now, you’ve been waiting all day. So, you’re starving.

You open the menu and, immediately, you’re overwhelmed. There are so many options. This menu is big, like, Cheesecake Factory big.

And so, in this overwhelmed state, with all of your food anxiety about choosing the right thing, choosing the perfect meal, you look at the waiter and say, “I need your help. What’s good here?”

Imagine that there are three different scenarios that play out. Scenario 1—the waiter looks at you almost with a hopeless expression, with a pained look, as if this is going to be really hard for you, and says, “Oh boy. I mean, everything is good here.”

“Great,” you think. “How nice to have so many great options. But that doesn’t help me at all. I am still just as overwhelmed. I do not know what to choose. And you haven’t helped me.”

Scenario 2—you ask what’s good, and the waiter shrugs and in a lackluster, monotone voice, barely looks at you and says, “I mean, it’s whatever you like. The wings are pretty good, I guess.”

So many problems with this one. You were excited, you are hungry, and yet, now, you’re completely unexcited, you’re uninspired. It has deflated you. More so, you even start to wonder if there’s something wrong with the food. You actually love wings. It’s not hard to sell you on wings. And yet, right now, you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with the wings.

So, this waiter isn’t just unhelpful when it comes to making a decision. They actually undermine what could have been a good option that you would have enjoyed—the wings.

Scenario 3—a waiter comes over, water in hand, sets it down, looks you in the eye and says, “How can I help?” And you say, “What’s good?” And the waiter says, “Well, you know what? There’s a lot of good options. But the thing that you have to get here is this.”

And then they point to a specific dish on the menu.

“This is undoubtedly the best thing on the menu. And by the way, it’s something you can’t get anywhere else.”

Now, I don’t need to tell you what happens next in this scenario. Unless you are fiercely allergic to the thing they just pointed to, you’re in.

Now, why is that? Why is it that every single person watching this video right now knows that there’s one scenario among those three that feels so good and makes it so easy? It’s because of the psychological effect of certainty and its impact on our decision-making cannot be overstated.

This kind of certainty reassures us. It tells us we’re in good hands. It mutes our anxieties about choosing the wrong thing on the menu or missing out on the right thing. Quietens that part of our mind that makes us not enjoy things and instead, gives us permission to just lean in to the choice we’ve made, a choice that we have been reassured is the best one, so we don’t need to worry about it.

Now, how does all of this relate to your love life? Think about it. Dating today is not unlike the food anxiety we have when we’ve been starving all day and we’re about to eat. The difference is, we’re now not choosing what to have for dinner. We’re choosing who to have 10,000 dinners with for the rest of our lives. The stakes of that decision feel impossibly high. And of course, it’s not just who to have dinner with, it’s who we might raise children with. It’s who we’re going to trust with our financial situation. It’s who we’re going to be okay sharing a bed with every night for the rest of our lives.

It’s no wonder we feel anxious in this area. Men and women alike. This isn’t just, “Oh, people don’t commit these days.” This is, people are nervous about making the wrong choice.

And by the way, the menu seems really big. Dating apps make it look like there is this endless buffet of people and every different kind you can imagine. Now, whether someone can get all of those people or not is kind of irrelevant. It feels like there’s a lot of choice and the feeling of there being a lot of choice only compounds the anxiety we feel about making the wrong choice.

So, when we’re in that situation, we look for certainty. We look to have our hand held in making the right decision, so that we can feel safe in knowing we’re doing the right thing.

The big human psychological insight of this video is recognizing that you can actually represent the certainty that other people need. This isn’t about convincing anyone to want commitment. This is about representing an energy that makes other people want commitment with you. This means recognizing that you can be your representative. You can be the waiter that makes it easy for someone to decide what to get on the menu. And by the way, we have to start by not giving people so much credit all the time. People don’t necessarily know what they want or what they think they want is some idea of the person they thought they’d end up with from 15 years ago that’s never been updated.

There is a great Steve Jobs quote that goes, “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.

I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

What we can do in dating and relationships is make people realize through our infectious sense of certainty that the thing that they want, that maybe they didn’t even know they wanted is the person standing right in front of them.

That means opting to be waiter number 3, the one who actually guides people with a sense of certainty to the right option. In this case, the right option is you for a relationship. The first waiter didn’t give any solid recommendation. They weren’t making you feel weird about items on the menu or feeling like they weren’t good. It still wasn’t helpful and it wasn’t recommending anything.

And that’s the important part about dating is that if you want someone to choose you, you have to be willing to recommend yourself. You can’t get away with saying, “Everyone’s great. I’m great too. Do your thing.”

How many YouTube channels are there? How many channels are there like my YouTube channel? A bunch. When I’m talking about my YouTube channel, especially when I want people to actually engage with it and watch, I don’t say, “There’s plenty of great YouTube channels. I’m one of them.” I say, “Here’s why you should watch mine. Here’s what’s awesome about my YouTube channel.” And perhaps, most importantly, “Here’s why it’s awesome for you, specifically you.”

That ability to recommend myself makes all the difference. So, you don’t want to be waiter number 1 when you’re going out there to find love. You also don’t want to be waiter number 2 who is making someone question whether they want that thing in the first place. That’s the equivalent in dating of talking ourselves down, talking with a high degree of uncertainty, not having any passion about recommending ourselves, and leaving someone thinking, “Well, even if I was excited about this person to begin with, I’m now actually starting to question my choices by the energy they’re giving off.”

We want to be waiter number 3, the one that, with confidence and certainty, recommends something.

Now, a lot of people will be watching this and feeling like, “This sounds amazing but this feels like an unattainable level of certainty. This feels like I have to be a kind of confident that I can’t even relate to. Because I can’t go out there and talk about myself like I’m the greatest person in the world and that someone should be with me above all others.”

I understand that. But we don’t have to base our certainty on a kind of confidence that I’m never going to get rejected because I’m so great. We can base our certainty on far more concrete ground like certainty about what we’re looking for and what we value, certainty about what we don’t value and what we don’t want, certainty about what we bring to the table, certainty about what isn’t interesting enough for us to keep giving our time and energy to.

And when we start developing certainty around these things, it actually has the same effect because it’s all certainty. So, this isn’t the certainty that comes from arrogance. This is a very different, much more mature kind of certainty that anyone can have by the way.

So, quick recap. What have we talked about today? That, whether we’re choosing our dinner at a nice restaurant or whether we are choosing a partner for life, we come to the table with an internal anxiety about making the right choice. When that internal anxiety meets the external, big menu problem, in food or in dating, that creates decision paralysis. And that is what’s happening in modern dating today for so many people. That if we come along as the outside certainty that someone needs to develop the internal peace of mind about their choices, we will get a completely different level of commitment to other people.

I want to show you how to apply this psychological insight in practical ways in your dating life moving forward whether you’re completely single right now and not seeing anyone or whether you’re seeing someone but is not progressing in the way that you want. I want to show you how to apply this, so that you can develop that sense of certainty that changes the way people operate around you, and has them really step up for you and choose you.

On October the 22nd, I am going to be going through all of this in detail for free in a very rare, once-only live event. I want you to join me. You can go to LoveLifeTraining.com right now and register, and I will see you on the day.

I hope you enjoyed this video. I’ve really enjoyed making it for you. And I can’t wait to see you on October the 22nd. LoveLifeTraining.com is the link. Look for me in your inbox today once you’ve signed up. I’ll send you all of the information and I will see you on the 22nd of October.

Thank you for watching. Be well and love life.