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Matthew Hussey: 

I wish this story ended differently. It didn’t. And it might be a story you are very familiar with. A few years ago, I knew a woman named Erica who had just gone through a breakup with her boyfriend for the second time. It ended for the exact same reason it did the first time, which I will tell you about in a second.

But somehow, even though she had tried and failed to work through the issues with him, she still couldn’t face the idea of truly letting him go. Have you ever had someone you couldn’t say goodbye to, even though what they were offering you didn’t make you happy or meet your needs? As a coach for nearly 20 years, I have seen this story play out over and over again.

People question if it was right to.

Walk away, or if they’re letting go of something good too soon. It’s even harder when the relationship doesn’t have the bad parts that we so often hear about.

Cheating. Lying. Abuse. Just two people who seemingly were right for each other until they weren’t. If any of this describes you and you have a situation where you don’t feel good right now.

You’re not completely happy with the way it’s going. I want you to treat the next 10 to 15 minutes like you just joined a coaching session with me one on one.

Because I’m going to take you through a little process that I’ve taken thousands of people through for figuring out what needs to be the next step in their relationship. And this is designed to bring clarity to whether ending things is the right thing for you, or whether it would be premature to give up on this person. My hope is that by the end of this video, you feel a different level of peace in your decisions either way.

Erica’s story went like this. Erica wanted to find love her whole life. She was 31, successful in her career, a go getter, likable, had a couple of great friends and really loved life. But her dream, her deepest dream had always been to find love, to get married and to raise a family. Despite everything else in her life, this was her number one goal.

She loved love stories, romantic movies and listened eagerly any time she had dating advice that she thought could help her find that kind of love for herself. Then, after years of dating, she met someone who represented all she had been looking for. It finally felt like her very own love story had begun. The train had officially left the station and was on its way.

The only problem was she was now four years into that relationship and no closer to being engaged to a man who changed the subject every time she tried to bring up marriage. Now 35, she had just given him an ultimatum for the second time. I’d like to get engaged soon or I’m out. Her boyfriend chose out. He loved her.

He even said you are the love of my life during the breakup. But he wasn’t ready to take that big of a step. When things ended, she immediately second guessed her decision to speak up. Getting married was deeply important to her, but she couldn’t help how much she loved him.

So often in breakups, what should have ended with a period gets afforded those extra two dots that turn it into an ellipsis. In Erica’s case, her ex saying that she was the love of his.

Life during the breakup gave her hope one day. Then, a couple of weeks later, Erica texted him when her cat got sick and she felt lonely over the holidays, which led to them talking again. Two dots. So the story continued. Any time she got lonely, she would reach out to him.

And any time she was strong and went no contact. He became genuinely afraid that he was losing her for good and he would reach out to her. Eventually, they slipped back into a relationship.

Before I go any further, I just wanted to say to all of you. Thank you. You have been so loving and supportive of all of the work that’s been going into this channel, this year. It’s so lovely that you have noticed the hours of extra work that we’re putting in. For those of you wondering how you can help.

I would love for you to subscribe to this channel. That would mean the most. There are now hundreds of fake Matthew Hussey channels out there who are putting out content. That’s just AI slop generated. It’s not even things that I would say. They’re using my voice and my likeness to do it. And it’s bad. It’s bad for the people watching that content that think it’s really me.

It’s bad for a reputation for quality that I’ve built painstakingly over many years. It means more than, you know, to subscribe to this channel and to help us bolster the real channel in YouTube’s rankings. Please help us bring more attention to the authentic content that we do. It would mean the world to us. Thank you.

When we decide that holding onto a person is more important than our own needs or principles, we lose a part of ourselves. There is a deep sadness, perhaps even a sense of tragedy, about finding someone we love who loves us back, but then finding that our visions for the future are incompatible. But there is an even deeper tragedy at play than Erica’s boyfriend not wanting to marry her.

And that is Erica slowly trying to convince herself not to care about something that deeply mattered to her, just so that she could hold on to the relationship. That is a different kind of emotional injury, and it is one that can become chronic. This isn’t a video about the virtues of marriage. Plenty of people build beautiful lives and relationships without getting married.

The question here is how much marriage mattered to Erica. And it did matter to Erica. She wanted a husband. She wanted a family. She wanted the security and the commitment of building a life with someone who was excited to choose her fully. Erica had focused all of her attention on the perceived danger of losing her boyfriend. What she hadn’t factored into the equation was the danger, over time, of negotiating herself out of wanting what she truly wanted.

Her boyfriend wasn’t villainous. He might genuinely have loved her. He may be a good man who is genuinely conflicted, but a good person can still be the wrong partner for your life vision. And when we continue to go back to someone who has shown us repeatedly that their vision doesn’t align with ours, we are communicating something without words that their vision doesn’t have to change because our vision is pliable.

There are three factors at play in any relationship. The first is your standards. In other words, what behavior are you willing to accept from a partner?

This can also relate to your future. What vision of my future am I committed to as a standard? In Erica’s case, her standard was that dating someone for four years meant that she was ready to move things to the next level and get engaged. Endlessly dating was not something she desired or wanted for herself.

The second factor. In our model is their behavior. This is how someone you are with behaves both in life and towards you. Erica’s boyfriend’s behavior. Showed that he would rather lose her than make a commitment to marry her. The third factor. In our model is the status of the relationship. This is whether you choose to stay with them or not. Something that Erica struggled with.

In any relationship where you are not currently happy or at peace. One of these three things has to change either your standards, their behavior, or the status of the relationship. There is no scenario in which all three stay the same. The good news is that you have the power to make that choice. And this is something a lot of people forget.

If you want to keep your standard the same, which is factor one, and you want to stay in the relationship, which is factor three, then what you’re betting on is that their behavior is going to change. In this scenario, you’ll need to be your own advocate and communicate that you’re not happy with the way things are going and that for things to progress, you’ll need the other person to behave differently.

In Erica’s case, she communicated that by saying she’d like to get engaged after dating him for four years. If you have had repeated conversations with someone about your needs, and their behavior still hasn’t shifted in the direction of meeting those needs, something will have to change in this three part equation. And if it’s not your standard and it’s not their behavior, then it will be the status of the relationship itself.

In Erica’s case, when she gave him an ultimatum, she was saying that she was willing to change the status of the relationship if he wasn’t willing to meet her where she was. But when she went back to him and went back therefore, on that ultimatum, despite nothing having changed on his side, she communicated to him that she was willing to change her standard.

In other words, factor one changed in order to preserve the relationship because his behavior factor two wasn’t changing.

If, like Erica, you are dealing with someone who is struggling to commit right now and you want to know how to communicate, factor one your standards in a productive way that gives you the best possible chance at changing their behavior and the decisions they are making right now. I have a free workshop packed with my very best advice on how you can get commitment.

You can watch that right after this video at GetCommitment.com. There is even an exact conversation in there that I have crafted, that I have given to thousands of people who need to have that conversation. Two friends of mine had this exact conversation when things weren’t going well. He was dragging his feet. She wanted more. She had this conversation with him and within eight months they were engaged.

Then I’m married and have three kids so you can check out exactly what that conversation was at GetCommitment.com.

Here’s the important lesson. If your standards change really easily, their behaviors will not. To be unwilling to let go of something or someone is to agree. Whether you consciously realize it or not, to bend your own rules in order to stay in it.

I wanted to say one more thing about this. There is a telltale sign that we are in a situation like this. When the people who know us best and love us the most. Start recognizing that we have become a different version of ourselves. They recognize that we have abandoned parts of ourselves and what we have wanted in this relationship or in life.

And so they’ll start pointing those observations out to us, and that becomes a triggering event of its own, because it reminds us of the ways that we are unhappy, that we don’t want to be reminded of. So we have different reactions to that. Sometimes we start hiding parts of the relationship from our friends and family. You know, we don’t want to answer questions about things we don’t have good answers for.

We may even start parroting the excuses made by our partner to us.

To our family, in an effort to defend.

Them and thereby defend our decision to be okay with whatever is happening. It almost becomes like our partner is ventriloquist us to the people we love. All of this leads us to internally reset our expectations for what we accept from the relationship, away from the people who know us well enough to know what our heart really wants. We quietly recalibrate our standards to a new norm.

By the way, if you don’t have anyone that you can speak to about this that doesn’t bring drama or doesn’t shame you or make you feel worse. This is a great thing to talk to Matthew about because it’s objective. It’s safe. It’s private. So try that out. The link is in the bio.

When you go back to a relationship that isn’t working for you who you really are and what you once wanted still remain lurking deep inside, but buried beneath layers and layers of acquiescence. And these adjustments often happen gradually. So over time we don’t notice just how far we have departed from our original vision of the relationship. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is completely healthy and even normal to evolve your standards over time. It can be a sign of maturity and wisdom.

It would be weird to have the same exact standards at 35 or 65 as we did at 22. The question we have to ask ourselves is, can I adjust my standards in the ways that this relationship calls for and still be happy? In Erica’s case, retracting her ultimatum and going back to her ex meant that she was willing to stay in a relationship that may never lead to an engagement and a wedding, both of which she really wanted.

By the way, this is why her boyfriend didn’t panic when they broke up the second time. He had gotten used to the fact that the breakup didn’t mean he was losing her. The only time he ever really panicked was when she got strong and went no contact, and he didn’t hear from her for a while because it was in those moments that he actually felt her loss.

In other words, any time it looked like she might actually make good on her promise of changing the status of the relationship. Factor three and our model, he would suddenly freak out and reach out to her with the dread of losing her. But what did he say when he reached out that he was wrong and wanted to get engaged?

No, there was no new information which left Erica to decide if she, this time, was finally going to do what she hadn’t done before, which is truly changed the status of the relationship from sort of done to actually done. And in order to do this, she would need to say to herself, this is not the right man for me.

He can’t give me what I want and need, and I would rather be single than settle for something that fundamentally forces me to accept less than I want and deserve. Unfortunately, Erica didn’t do that, and we don’t get what we deserve in life. We get what we accept. The ultimate answer to the proverbial question why do people continue to treat us casually is simple because we let them.

I wish her story had ended differently. It didn’t. But yours can. You can take a look right now. A situation in which you are unhappy for whatever reason, which may be different from Erica’s. And you can ask yourself which one of the three factors will need to change in order for you to feel at peace and content? Will it be their behavior which you can influence by advocating for yourself and your needs?

Will it be your standards if they don’t change their behavior? Or will it be the status of the relationship? By ending it so that you can make room for one that is right for you? Thank you so much for watching.

If there is anything you wish I had answered in this video, leave me a comment below. And also let me know in your situation right now. Which of the three factors needs to change for you to start being happier? Thank you so much for watching. I will see you next week.

 

*This transcript was whipped up with the help of AI. While it does a pretty impressive job, it may have the occasional typo, mix-up, or moment of creative interpretation. If you spot anything that looks a little . . . adventurous . . . thanks for your patience (and your sense of humor).*