Becoming a dad recently made something click for me that I’d been circling for years: Choosing the right partner might be the single most important decision you’ll ever make. It shapes your finances, your health, how you parent, and how you handle life’s hardest moments. And yet, modern dating has made it harder than ever to get this right—too many options, too many clichés, too much conflicting advice.

In this video, I give you a framework I’ve developed to help you cut through the noise . . . so you’re not just following your feelings, but making a decision you’ll be proud of years from now.

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Matthew Hussey: 

I recently became a dad and one of the crucial things, one of the many crucial things that taught me is how extraordinarily important it is to pick the right partner in life. Picking the partner that you spend the rest of your life with might be the most important decision you make, because it shapes everything that comes after it: your finances, the way you parent, how well you overcome or manage illness, and so much more.

 

This is not a decision we should take lightly, especially if you have a pretty good life right now as a single person. Why would you rock your peace in your routine and put your future on the line for just anybody? And yet, modern dating and social media have made this decision more difficult than ever. There is conflicting advice online.

 

There are too many cliches that fall apart under the complexities of real life, and there are seemingly an endless buffet of options that paralyze us into indecision. When it comes to picking who is right for us, in this video, I want to give you a framework that I have developed to help you cut through the noise for everyone new here I am, Matthew Hussey.

 

I’ve spent the last two decades coaching hundreds of thousands of people about love and relationships. My latest book, Love Life, was an international bestseller on this subject. Subscribe and like this video and let’s dive into today’s topic. A lot of people are bad judges of what will make them happy long term. Myself included. I struggled with this for a long time.

 

That whole when, you know, you know, shtick didn’t sit right with me because I don’t know about you, but someone who struggled with anxiety for a lot of life. I had a habit of overthinking and questioning my decisions when it came to love. And ironically, any time I did feel certain about someone, it had nothing to do with how right that person was for me, and everything to do with how much that person triggered my insecurity.

 

I wasn’t certain they were right for me. I was just certain I had to have them, even if it cost me my voice. The problem is partly to do with what initially grabs our attention and how little connection that thing actually has to our future happiness. Maybe you’re attracted to the way a person can command a room when they walk into it, or how much charisma they have at parties, or what your friends think about this person’s job.

 

Now, these aren’t bad qualities when it comes to short term excitement, or if our priority is to find someone who’s great to show off on Instagram. But are any of these characteristics ones that will help you when you are sick and have a crying baby that your partner needs to tend to? Or when you’ve lost your job and you need to lean on your partner for support for a few months until you find your footing again.

 

Or when you’re dealing with an illness and you need emotional support. I have coached many people who claim their problem is that they have high standards, when what they really mean is, I am super picky when it comes to superficial traits. When it comes to how safe they want to feel emotionally, how they’re treated by someone, or whether that person actually shows up for them on their hardest days.

 

They have no standards, which is why they keep trying to win someone over who makes them feel terrible. Look, if you want to know who excites you in dating, you don’t need me for that. Just follow your feelings in dating. But if you want to know who’s right for you, I have a four part model that you can rely on to manage your feelings in early dating.

 

Know who you should invest in and make sure your decision about who you spend your life with is not something you spend years recovering from, but instead ages like a fine Medjool date your folds and wrinkles have only increased your allure with time.

 

The model is called the four Levels of importance because it gives you a way of measuring how important what you have with someone really is. So if you have someone right now in your life, think about them as you listen to this model. The first level of this model is admiration. You may find someone attractive, intriguing, impressive. Maybe it’s someone on social media you have mutual friends with or someone at a party you’ve been noticing all night.

 

It could even be a celebrity you’ve never met and maybe will never meet. At this stage, you are just admiring this person. They may not even know you exist. Hopefully we can all agree that this level isn’t very important. The second level is mutual attraction. This is when you’ve made a connection with someone. It seems massively important because you’ve not only met someone you like, but they like you back, which in dating today can feel like a celestial event that will not occur for another decade.

 

So we can’t let it go. It is where all of that glorious chemistry happens, and it feels like the most important thing in the world. It feels like all we need to decide that this is the person I am supposed to be with my soulmate. But mutual attraction can’t tell you how great this person would be inside of a relationship, or whether this person is even capable of having one in the first place.

 

Here’s the danger. When someone we liked likes us back, we stop being objective because the stakes feel so impossibly high. We know that this stage has the possibility of becoming the meaningful relationship we have always dreamt about, but it also has the possibility of winding up as just another dreaded situationship. So we become someone who’s frightened to mess it up.

 

We stop thinking straight. If you’re wondering whether someone you have mutual attraction with can turn into something more, I can help you with that. You can ask me about your particular situation using Matthew AI. It is built on 20 years of my coaching, and you will feel like you are talking to me directly. Getting very nuanced answers to your tailored situation.

 

The details of your situation matter to the answer I give you. And while I can’t reach through the screen and get the details I need from you in this video, I actually can using Matthew AI, go to AskMH.com. This is free to try, so just give it a go and it remembers your conversation so you can come back to it as the situation unfolds and give it more detail.

 

If this video is resonating with you, why not find out how it applies to your situation directly? Let’s move on to level three of our model commitment. This is the stage where both people say yes. Not maybe not will see. Not. Work is busy right now, but maybe in the future and not the heart belongs to the open ocean, to the soft spray of Mother Nature.

 

Oh, because then they would be a pirate. And I don’t say this enough, but we shouldn’t date pirates. It is the stage where both people show up and are enthusiastically committing to each other. Now I know what you’re thinking. Surely. Commitment is the final stage. Surely that’s enough. But commitment is only stage three. Without the fourth and final part of our model, any relationship is doomed to fail.

 

Level four is compatibility. Commitment can keep you together for a time. Compatibility tells you if it can actually work between you. Chemistry tells us there is a spark. Compatibility asks if our morality and our values align, if our lifestyles work together, and if we want the same futures. While chemistry is lovely. What is truly valuable is whether the relationship actually works.

 

And anyone who has ever had commitment without compatibility knows the special kind of hell it can be. Leave me a comment if you’ve been there before. It can cost you the things that we talked about in the beginning of this video. Like your health, your finances, your relationship with your kids, your career, your future, your voice. Now, here’s the problem.

 

It’s not easy to judge life mate. Level compatibility from a profile picture in online dating and a few prompts, many of which people don’t even fill out. And herein lies the danger. Chemistry feels immediate, and so does the absence of it when we don’t feel it. Not to mention many of us, myself included, are sexual beings who care deeply about physical attraction.

 

We can’t fathom dating someone that we don’t feel chemistry with and we do not want to settle. Now, I would never advocate for that. There needs to be some amount of desire or spark. So if you have met someone with whom you feel compatible, can attraction and chemistry grow? The answer is yes and no. It is unlikely to grow if you feel repelled.

 

Chronically bored. Don’t respect the person or physical attraction is entirely absent. But there are things you can do to get out of your own way when it comes to chemistry. We can stop confusing anxiety with genuine chemistry. The highs, the lows, the waiting, the chasing, the euphoria when we get just enough of someone to keep us hooked. All of that can feel like passion and chemistry.

 

But if someone suddenly feels more exciting to you at the moment, they pull away. That’s not attraction. That’s your nervous system getting hijacked. We can also make space for the surprising ways that chemistry can show up. When we detox from this synthetic form of it that comes from emotional scarcity. Maybe it’s a quiet confidence not of the person who owns the room, like the people we fell for in the past, but the person who doesn’t feel the need to.

 

Or the unique attraction you feel the first time you see someone performing in their element. This kind of person might actually make you feel better than you’ve ever felt. Not more excited. Better. And when that’s true, you won’t be settling for that person. You’ll be settling on that person. They may not be the person your younger self wanted you to be with, but what the hell did they know?

 

Instead, a wiser you will be making an intentional and conscious decision to invest in someone who is awesome. Settling for someone means shortchanging yourself. Settling on someone is powerful. You have acknowledged that you could stay in the dating pool endlessly exploring options, but instead you are choosing someone and committing to building something extraordinary with them. Do not waste more energy than you should on the person you met at the party or the bar who you had a great conversation with, but who can’t show up for you.

 

That is not your soulmate. Maybe one day they could be if they showed up consistently in your life, you got to know each other and they stuck together with you through good times and bad. But you cannot project forward to a future that doesn’t exist yet and say you found your soulmate. That’s like having a business idea we’ve done nothing with and telling everyone around us it’s already made us millions of dollars.

 

If you’re looking for something serious, it is time to shift your lens. What you have with someone has to go beyond chemistry. It has to go beyond connection. It even has to go beyond commitment because many couples who commit never make it. Why? Because in romantic relationships, love is not all you need and it doesn’t conquer all. Compatibility does.

 

Does this perspective help you realize how incompatible you were with someone you fell for in the past? What made you incompatible with that person? I would love to know. Tell me in the comments. I will be reading them and responding to them personally. I’ll see you soon.

 

*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).*