What can you do when you’re in a situationship and know you should end things . . . but you’re too hooked to risk letting them go? When you’re with them, it’s like all your dreams are coming true . . . but when they withdraw, you feel lost and confused.

In today’s new video, I share 7 steps to finally move on and get the love you deserve. And if you need help convincing your heart as well as your head, these steps will give you the courage you need to do it.

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Matthew Hussey

In today’s video, I’m going to talk about what to do when you are dating someone in a situationship who you cannot get off your mind, you cannot seem to let go of, even though they are not giving you what you want. Someone who has gotten under your skin and into your mind, and you just can’t seem to find the strength to cut them off and move on. I’m going to be giving you seven steps that you can take to find the strength you need to actually go out and find the love you deserve.

Welcome back to the channel. I’m Matthew Hussey. And if you are new here, I have spent the last 17 years of my life helping people find love, raise their standards and their confidence, and heal from the past.

This year, for those of you that don’t know, I released a brand-new book, Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What. If you haven’t got a copy, pick one up. I know a lot of you who I meet in the street come up to me and tell me that you’ve loved my work for many years. But when I mention that I have a new book, a lot of you still don’t know about it. So go check out the new book if you haven’t already. And let’s get into it.

So, how do these situations play out? We meet someone. They represent something exciting or familiar, or something that feels so alluring. And, maybe we feel a lot of chemistry. We feel great in their presence. The sex is great. We feel connected to them. We have great conversations with them.

Maybe when we’re with them, it even feels like a relationship. But when we’re not with them, it feels cold. It feels inconsistent. It feels like a hangover. It feels like we’re never really satisfied or fulfilled. We never feel safe.

Maybe because they don’t want the same things we do. Maybe their communication is really inconsistent. Maybe they want to keep seeing other people, but they don’t want to let us go, so they keep reaching out to us anyway. Or we can’t stop reaching out to them. We can find ourselves becoming kind of obsessed with this person—obsessed with the possibility of where it might go, of what it could be if this person was just willing to play full out in the way that you are. We feel like this is hurting us, and yet we can’t part ways with it because it feels too good when it’s good.

When we’re in a situation like this, there are such highs and such lows. But the one thing they have in common is that they become chronic. We get locked into this cycle of not being able to let the person go. And it’s for this reason that situations like this should be viewed less through the lens of romance and much more through the lens of addiction.

How, when we feel addicted to a person like this, can we begin the process of letting them go and doing what’s actually good for ourselves? That is the focus of this video.

Step One: Accept What You’re Really Dealing With

What you’re really dealing with is not a love story anymore. You’re dealing with an addiction. When you realize that, we stop repeating all of the details of the love story—how we met, how great the conversation is, how we can talk about anything with this person, how they know you so well, how the intimacy is so amazing, or “I’ve never felt like this before.” We can stop repeating all of the details that are part of the story and instead start to look at the whole thing a lot more clinically and go, “This is no longer a love story. This is simply a person—me—being addicted to a situation that keeps hurting me.” So now I know I’m not dealing with a love story; I’m dealing with an addiction. Let me treat the addiction.

Once we’ve done that, once we’ve named it, we can start taking the challenge of beating that addiction seriously.

That brings us on to step 2.

Step Two: Connect With the True Cost and the True Pain

Connect with the true cost and the true pain that this situation has caused you, is causing you, and will cause you in the future. What has it already cost you? How has it already hurt you? Maybe it’s cost you your peace of mind. Maybe it’s cost you your sanity. Maybe it’s cost you any sense of calm in your life because it’s made you feel anxious. Maybe it’s cost you your confidence.

Maybe the last two years you’ve lost productivity in your life. You haven’t achieved certain things because you’ve constantly been thinking about this person. Or it’s cost you the ability to meet someone else in those last two years because of how much you’ve been wrapped up in this situation. Even if it hasn’t been exclusive—even if this person has been seeing other people and you’ve had permission to see other people—you know you haven’t been open to seeing anyone else. You haven’t been an emotionally available person to anyone else because you’re so wrapped up in this person.

What is it costing you right now? Tell yourself, “It’s continuing to cost me happiness in my love life because I’m not finding it here in my addiction, and this addiction is preventing me from meeting anybody else. So it continues, day by day, to rob me of any opportunity to have real happiness in my life. It’s costing me my time every single day that I stay in it. It’s costing me my sanity. It’s making me a worse friend to the people around me. It’s making me a worse sister or brother, family member to the people around me, because I can’t be my best self with anyone. Because all I keep doing is talking about this person, being anxious about this person, being wrapped up in how much pain I’m feeling that this isn’t going my way. So I’m not able to show up for the people in my life.”

What is it going to cost you in the future? Because here’s the thing: sometimes the reason we haven’t left yet is because it hasn’t become painful enough. We tend to change when something becomes so painful that there’s no other option. But let’s imagine that right now it’s not painful enough for you to leave. Well, we can find pain in the future because there is a reckoning coming.

There will be a time—I know this because I deal with people every single day who are in this position—there will be a time where all of a sudden you look back on the amount of time this person has cost you, and it will be a day of deep, deep regret and sorrow. There will be a time where you become so angry at what this person has done, at what they have robbed you of, that you’ll wish you could take it all back. There’ll be a time where this person shows you that after everything you’ve been through together, they can still just up and leave or decide to go with somebody else—that it all counts for nothing. There is a much greater cost coming.

So don’t just connect to the pain it’s caused you or the cost of being in it right now. Connect to the cost of staying in this situation another year, another five years, another 10 years, another 20 years. And if you think that’s far-fetched, I am here to tell you that this happens all the time. I’ve been working with people for 17 years of my life now—many, many thousands of people all over the world—and it is incredibly common for people to be in these situations for decades, not years. And when you start talking about decades, you’re talking about your life.

Connect to the true cost of continuing this addiction.

Step Three: Connect With the Fact That Seeing This Person Never Works

There is a phrase that is used in recovery, which is play the tape forward. And I want you to apply this phrase to your situationship with someone.

Play the tape forward refers to that idea of: if you’re going to have that drink, then play the tape forward. Play it forward to the next drink, and the next one, and the end of the evening—and how you feel at that point—and the next morning when you wake up, and how you feel at that point: how you feel about yourself, how you feel in your mind, how you feel in your body. The anxiety you feel the next day, the shame you feel the next day, the damage you’ve done by the next day. Play the tape forward.

Now, you can do the same thing in this dynamic with someone. Okay, they just texted you. They just asked you what you’re up to. It feels really good that they reached out. You feel excited that this person that you want more with is thinking about you, that they want to see you this weekend or tonight. Play the tape forward.

What happens if you text back? What happens if you go and see them? What happens if you spend the next two days in this little love nest with them—getting close to them again, getting connected to them again, having sex with them again, feeling intimate? Reopening the wound? What happens the day after you leave them? What happens when they now don’t text you back, or when you know you’re not going to see them for another couple of weeks or a month? What happens when you realize that they’re seeing other people in the time that they’re not seeing you? Play the tape forward.

Experience the hangover that you’re going to feel after you’ve seen this person, after you’ve gotten reconnected. And remind yourself that every time you have played out that scenario, it has never worked. If you want just a little bit of meaningless fun in the moment, it might work for that. But if your goal is to feel happy, is to feel loved, is to feel safe in a relationship, it has never worked for any of those goals.

Step Four: Get the Liquor Out of the House

This is an acknowledgment of the fact that the greater our proximity to the thing we’re trying to break free of, the less control we feel, especially in the early stages. And we want to set ourselves up to win. No matter how much we logically know this person is bad for us and this situation hurts us, there is an irrational part of us that doesn’t run on logic—that just has the craving.

“I don’t care. I just want to see this person. I just want to be with them.”

And we have to make sure that when that irrational part of us rears its head, there aren’t things in easy reach that allow us to go and satisfy that craving—the one that’s going to leave us with a giant hangover and, if we play the tape forward, make us really unhappy all over again.

So what does this look like? It might mean removing reminders of this person from our space, from our house. It might mean muting them on social media so that we don’t see their posts, we’re not seeing what they’re up to, or being reminded of them in that way. It might mean not going to events where we know they are going to be there, because we know that’s going to trigger us. We know that’s going to make us want to go home with them.

It might mean, if we’re really brave, sending a message to this person and saying, “Please don’t reach out to me again. This isn’t working for me. I’m moving on. This is it for me.”

Or, if you can’t do that right now, it might just mean not texting them. It might mean going away for a while. Getting space.

I want you to imagine that every time you get proximity to this person, it makes you feel weaker. And that is antithetical to our goal right now. What we want is to become stronger, is to become more powerful. And with that distance, we give ourselves the space to become strong again. And once we get stronger, that person won’t be able to tempt us in the same way. We’ll be strong enough to resist anything that comes from them.

But right now, we have to get strong by getting space. And that means getting the liquor out of our house—and off of our phone.

Step Five: Anticipate the Crash

Understand that when you get the liquor out of the house, when you stop texting this person, when you get space from them, you’re now going to be sitting in a life without them. And it’s not going to have the highs, and the lows, and the roller coaster that you’ve been on. And that might feel bland, or boring, or tasteless, or even meaningless.

And is at those moments that, your cravings—that part of you that just wants its fix with this person—will kick and scream and tell you a story about how you can’t be without this person, about how you’re giving up some incredibly special connection, about how you’re being too ruthless, about how something amazing could happen if you just saw them one more time, about how you’ll never meet anyone like this again, or you’ll never find a feeling like this again.

It will all start telling you a story, because its one goal is to get you to go back to that person and get the comfort that you so sorely want. Now we have to sit in that discomfort and understand that this pain—these cravings—although they’re in the foreground now, they are actually transient. If we can sit with them, they will dissolve.

And yes, they will come in waves. It’s not like they’ll dissolve once and never come back again. But with every wave that we sit in and allow to pass, we realize that it’s possible for these waves to pass. And gradually, we start to need that thing less. We get distance—not just from the person, but from the feeling that person provided. And the pain—the craving—stops being the foreground, stops being the headline, and starts becoming the background.

Anyone who’s ever been through this knows that it doesn’t necessarily go away altogether in the medium term. But once the pain is the background, not the foreground of your life, it gets much, much easier to manage. And actually, even more than that, it starts to make space for other feelings to emerge:

A feeling of connection to our friends that might deepen with this extra bandwidth and space. A feeling of expansion in our community, if we start actually meeting new people with this new energy and these reserves we have.

You might even surprise yourself to find that you actually start to get excited at the prospect of meeting someone new—an excitement you couldn’t have felt without the space you’ve created from this addiction. Or just a new kind of addiction that we feel to the calm that we’re starting to feel because this chaotic presence—or this person who makes us feel anxious or unworthy—is no longer in our life. So we start to feel calmer, more centered. We start to feel a bit better. And now that the pain is in the background and these new feelings start to take over in the foreground, we can start getting addicted to these new feelings.

And by the way, when you are in those early stages of your mind kicking and screaming that you need this person—it can help to have the same thing that many people have in recovery, which is a sponsor.

Someone you can call and say, “I feel like I’m reaching for this person right now. I’m about to text them. I need you to talk to me because I’m having the worst night. I feel so depressed. I feel so lonely. I feel so anxious. I feel like I need them. I feel like I need to text them.”

That person can be the loving, compassionate, and objective presence that you need in that moment. Find yourself a friend who will tell you, “If you’re about to call or text them, call or text me instead.”

And if you don’t have someone like that in your life, I have a tool that can help you. It’s called Matthew AI, and a lot of people are using Matthew AI specifically for this right now, to help emotionally support them through exactly this kind of situation.

I’ll leave a link at the bottom for anyone who hasn’t tried it yet. You don’t have to sign up right away if you just want to try it for free and see how it can make you feel. Check it out. It’s super powerful and is helping a lot of people right now in this situation.

Step Number Six: Develop a New Identity for Yourself

Identity is one of the most powerful forces in human beings. When we have an identity for ourselves, we feel the need to live in accordance with that identity. Now, the old identity might have been, “I’m so in love with this person, and I have this amazing story with this person, and you know, this person is my soulmate.” And that identity is part of what draws you back to them.

But if you develop a new identity—one that is in conflict with the idea of continuing to go back to this person—that identity will be the stronger force. Your new identity might be, “I am a person who respects themselves,” or “I am a person who is brave.” “I’m a person who takes care of themselves.” And someone like that would never keep going back to someone who disrespects them, or who isn’t prepared to really show up for them, or who makes them an option while they continue to sleep with other people.

That goes against my identity for myself. You know, I think of Rich Roll, who talks very openly about his alcoholism and his journey to sobriety. And a huge part of that journey is that he became someone who ran marathons, ultramans, and did these incredible feats of physical stamina.

And all of those things became a huge part of his new identity—an identity that was massively in conflict with his old life as an alcoholic. To go back to that life would be in conflict with this entire new identity that he had created for himself.

And that could be true for you, too. What kind of person do you want to be going forward? What will be the new and empowering identity that you have for yourself?

Step Seven: Put Evidence Behind That Identity

And that brings us on to step 7, which is: you have to put evidence behind that identity. You have to give that identity substance by making decisions that are in accordance with that identity.

Every time someone sends you a message and you say, “I’m not responding to that, because I am the person who respects themselves,” or “I am the person who doesn’t settle for less than the thing they really want.” “I am the person who has really high standards for the people they let into their life.” “I am the person who cultivates a really beautiful circle of human beings who care about each other, who are there for each other.”

“I am someone who values reciprocity. I am someone who has people’s backs, but I give that to people who have my back.”

If that’s your identity and you get a text from someone who’s never really had your back, who’s never been reliable, who won’t commit to you, when you get that text, you say, “I’m not going to give this person the time of day. I’m the person who invests in people who invest in me.”

And when you don’t text back, you put weight behind that identity. You show that you mean it.

I had a woman join me on my Retreat who would go on dates and she would sleep with guys very quickly when she met them on a date. She would, you know, go on a first date and she would feel excited about someone and she’d go home with them. But then she would say “The next day I didn’t feel good about myself. I didn’t enjoy the feeling that I had afterward. It would erode my confidence each time, and it would make me feel anxious.”

And she said, “One day, I went on a date with a really hot guy, and I felt like he was kind of out of my league. And that made it even more difficult because I was excited to be with this person. And at the end of the day, he wanted to go home with me, but I had already made a rule for myself that I am not going home with this person tonight, no matter what, no matter how I feel, no matter how excited or turned on I feel. I am not going home with this person.”

And so, she told him that when it got to that part of the date, she told him she had to go home. The next day, she said, “Far from regretting that decision, I actually felt really, really good about myself. I felt more confident. I felt empowered. And I felt even more empowered because of how tempting this person was. That they were someone who was especially hard to say no to. And I said, no.”

When she declined his offer that night, she put weight behind her new identity. She reinforced the person she now was.

It’s like you’re saying, “There was a before when I just allowed these things to happen. And there’s an after, where I stand up for myself.” And every time you do stand up for yourself, you’re reinforcing that new identity you have as a person who does that.

None of this is easy. What we’re talking about here in this video is big stuff, but the stakes are high because it’s our happiness that we’re ultimately talking about. We are waging a war against our addiction, which is something that has been making us chronically unhappy.

And we deserve to be happy. Everything that I’m talking about in this video is possible. And day by day, it will get easier. The pain will get less. And you will create the space for new and wonderful things to happen in your love life that will eventually make this situation you’re addicted to look like a joke compared to the real thing.

If, by the way, you’re out there dating right now and you want real progression with someone—not getting stuck in this stasis that never goes anywhere—I have a program called The Momentum Texts, which is about the price of a latte these days. It will show you 67 messages that you can send in the course of dating to both move things forward and to assess whether someone else is willing to move things forward.

I know that many of you love my practical advice when it comes to being out there and dating. This program is one of my most practical ever. So, if you haven’t tried it yet, go check it out. It’s called The Momentum Texts. I will leave a link right here. It is MomentumTexts.com for you to go and grab a copy of that program.

Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to reading your responses, and I’ll see you next time.