What if the fastest way to meet someone this year isn’t trying harder—but stepping back? In this week’s video, Matthew breaks down a counterintuitive idea that could completely change how you think about dating in 2026. It’s not about forcing chemistry, endlessly swiping on apps, or summoning more confidence than you actually feel.
Instead, he shows how small, everyday shifts can quietly create the conditions where connection happens naturally. If you’ve been doing “all the right things” but still feel stuck, this video may explain why . . . and what you can do differently starting now.
Matthew Hussey:
There is something counterintuitive you can do to meet someone in 2026, and that is to stop focusing so much on meeting someone in 2026. But that is so hard, Matthew. It is what I want the most. How exactly would I even do that? And how will that even help? I’m going to show you in this video and the answers are, well, unexpected.
The economist John Kay put forward the counterintuitive theory of obesity, the idea that our most valuable goals in life, like finding love or building a thriving social life, are rarely achieved by pursuing them directly. They are actually best reached obliquely, meaning indirectly, when we pursue love directly, for example by saying, I want to meet the love of my life this month, or I want this person back.
It leads to narrow thinking, short termism, and unintended bad consequences. But in direct pursuit, focusing on the deeper activities, values and systems that create those outcomes is far more effective. It means instead of trying to find love by chasing it and obsessing over the outcome in a way that actually makes us more anxious, we need to create the conditions in our lives that attract love.
And I am on a mission this month to show you how to do that in 2026. Starting with this video where I am going to show you four unique ways you can start and make sure you stick around for number three and four. Because they are backed by 18 years of research, I have done as a coach to hundreds of thousands of people.
And if you’re new here, I’m Matthew Hussey and what we do here goes beyond just dating. It is about how we take control in each of the three major relationships in our life our relationship with others, with ourselves, and with life itself, and how to use proven psychology to build deep confidence and find the love we deserve. So let’s dive right in and give this video a quick like so that it can reach other people who need it too, and subscribe with the post notifications turned on so that you never miss these videos in the future.
So if we are following the theory of obesity, the indirect approach to getting what we want, here is the first oblique way that you can reinvent your love life and your social life this year. Practice micro interactions. Now what are micro interactions? They are the almost imperceptibly small actions that open life changing doors in our love lives and our social lives.
We are living in a time where it has never been more necessary to practice micro interactions. Most of us can relate to having atrophied socially on some level, a dangerous combination of a hectic work life. Netflix and dating apps give us the perfect excuse never to leave the house. One of the traps we’ve fallen into is a particular cognitive distortion called all or nothing thinking.
We turn our love lives into a false choice between bravely striding up to someone and seducing them, or sitting in the corner of a room with our phone and our coffee, watching the world go by without us. The antidote to this social stalemate is to start thinking smaller, not bigger. To stop thinking in terms of courage and to start thinking in terms of casual social moments instead of checking emails while your barista makes your coffee.
Maybe you say one human sentence a quick how’s your day going? Maybe you see someone yawning in your day and you say long day or just getting started, which gives them permission to say something to you the next time they see you on a different day. These things feel so small, it is hard to imagine that they’re going to change anything in our lives, but over time, they exponentially increase the chances of serendipity.
Working in your favor, think of our old friend the Butterfly Effect, or Chaos theory as it’s scientifically known. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado out in Texas, or you are basically doing the human equivalent of flapping your wings. When you apply micro interactions to your life, you can never predict how the smallest moment of connection could lead to the love of your life.
The trick is to start giving the butterfly effect hundreds of opportunities to work out in your favor, its minimal risk outcome independent. In other words, it’s not designed to get something, which is why it’s so much easier to practice. And lastly, it’s broader than trying to hit on someone that you know you want. It is socially connected, and it warms the world up to you by putting out an open and receptive energy.
So let’s move on to the second oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026. When your confidence fails, you find a new place to draw your confidence from. One of the hardest things about wanting a better life for ourselves in 2026 is that we bring last year’s confidence with us, along with whatever has knocked our confidence.
It is so hard to feel confident when the bedrock of whatever confidence we did have has fallen away. And by the way, some people can’t even relate to having had confidence. They’ve never felt it. They’ve tried in vain to have confidence about things like their looks or their charisma, but they can never get over the fact that they do not match up to society’s expected versions of those things.
But there is something people do not realize about confidence, even if we have always struggled to have it, or when it’s been shattered in areas that we had come to rely on, we can choose to derive our confidence from different things than we used to. The Oxford Dictionary defines confidence as simply a feeling of certainty about something. That’s why so many of us find it hard or impossible to feel confident.
Either the source of our certainty has been rocked, or we’re trying to find certainty in an area where we’ve never had it. Like the idea that people find us attractive even when our experience has taught us the opposite. If we are continuously trying to base our certainty on something that is inherently uncertain, then it’s no wonder we’re struggling to be confident.
So what are some better places to start deriving our certainty and therefore our confidence from? Well, for one, it could be a new area of competence in your life. Maybe you just got divorced and your confidence took a huge hit in the process, but now you’re living on your own for the first time and there’s a new sense of personal empowerment and independence that’s being born out of that.
Or you can find confidence and acceptance or surrender to what it is. I went through a time where for years I was plagued by chronic physical pain, so much so that it slowly eroded my confidence and it made me long for the person I was. Before that pain started, I found this entirely new source of confidence. By accepting my new starting point and focusing on mastering my relationship with my pain.
Another source of confidence can be just making yourself proud. This is one of the great ways to build confidence from wherever you are now, wherever you’re starting from. You can ask, what small actions could I perform today that would make me proud of me? When people feel confidence coming off of you, the very energy of it is what makes you a magnet.
So don’t ever think that because you don’t have what someone else does, you can’t be attractive. Confidence is the great equalizer, and if you can’t get it one way, there’s always another way you can. So we are about to move on to number three, which I know you are not going to see coming. But if you’re enjoying this video, I want to tell you that you can work with me for a full 90 minutes on how to create the oblique conditions to attract love and an amazing social life this year, because in just one week I am holding a special free event (In 15 days).
I am calling the Year of Love. If you’re tired of relationships that fizzle, if you’re feeling like you keep forcing connections, or you find yourself wondering if love is even truly possible in the modern age, this event was literally made for you. After 18 plus years of coaching hundreds of thousands of people around the world through the ups and downs of modern dating, I have seen what works, and I have seen what burns people out and the masterful way is not about forcing connections that don’t feel right, giving more chances than someone is, and doing more inner work until you are drained and exhausted or grinding through the apps like it’s your part time job.
In this live event, The Year of Love, I am going to give you the four step indirect approach to attract love in 2026, none of which I talk about in this video. I need longer for that, but I am going to show you how to do this while enjoying your life. Instead of anxiously burning out, chasing the result, you’re going to learn how to intentionally design your year around finding love without adding more to your plate or neglecting the other parts of your life.
I’m going to show you how pushing harder might be the very thing that is holding you back, and how you can get far better results with a lot less effort. And I’m going to share with you the routines, the habits, and the mindsets that help you create inevitability when it comes to finding love so that you don’t attract love someday. But this year, just go to Lovein26.com signing up is easy. It takes seconds, the event is free and this is only happening this month, but it will set you up for the entire rest of your year, both in your love life and socially. This isn’t about tactic. This is about building a year that creates a sense of inevitability.
This is the one event you need to be at for your love life this year. I hope you make it. Are you ready for number three, the third oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026 is to stop sharing your love life like it is. News and gossip. I get it, one of the ways we stay sane when we’re single is by sharing dating stories with other people.
The problem is, when those stories aren’t something that happened in the past, but are instead a running commentary on your love life in the present. Why is this a problem? Well, sometimes we share the highs of our love life in a way that makes our friends and family get overexcited, which amps us up even more. And then all of a sudden, we’re getting ahead of the situation we’re in, and we’re putting way too much pressure on it at a premature stage.
Other times, and more commonly, we are sharing the lows or just the minute details of everything someone did on a date that we are forming opinions on. And this has some very negative side effects. For one, it invites in more opinions than is helpful, which can make you overreact to things that someone has done or judged them too quickly based on the personal projections of people who weren’t even on the date with you.
There’s nothing wrong with inviting people’s opinions where you need them, but make sure you’ve given yourself a chance to be present first, and to really know how you think and feel about someone. That’s what gives you the opportunity to form a real connection. But there’s another, more subtle danger. It kind of pits you against the person you’re dating.
Instead of being present with them, connecting with them, and learning more about them through deepening the conversation, you’re having those conversations behind their back and often in a judgmental way, and it becomes a substitute for actually communicating with them, because communicating with them is what gives you the chance to show that you’re capable of being on the same team as them, or at the very least, communicating with them when something is up, instead of with your friends, where it just becomes fodder for gossip.
You only have to ask how you would feel if the situation were reversed and someone was talking to all of their friends about something you did on the date. And then there’s the final danger identity. When we treat our love life like it’s a dating horror magazine column that we write, where every headline is akin to, you won’t believe what happened.
You’re creating an identity for the author of that column. You. You are cementing your story in a way that says classic me, and that keeps the story alive, and it will have you unconsciously looking for more situations that provide evidence for that narrative. This is your life. It is not other people’s entertainment, so be present with it. Rather than feeling the need to report it in real time.
Before we get any further with this list, leave me a comment letting me know what’s resonated with you. If you have made it this far into the video and how you’re going to apply it, your comment might be the thing that someone else needs to hear, or it might give them an idea. The fourth oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life this year is to make your mind your temple.
I have always had the belief that learning equals impact. The more ideas you have in your head that are interesting, the more you can be an interesting conversationalist, a surprising conversationalist. But in order to learn, you have to be able to focus. And that’s one of the big things that’s been eroded for us these days is the ability to focus.
I have always been so grateful for the hours that I focused in reading, a great book, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, watching a debate on YouTube that changed me somehow put really interesting points of view in my head. It’s always given me this kind of superpower, this edge where I can come along and I have a unique way of saying something or a need, a unique reference that I can bring into the mix.
In order to have that, we have to have stored that information in the first place. We have to be engaging with new information this year. So my question to you is in 2026, what information are you taking in? And this is really relevant today because there are a couple of things working against us in 2025. The Webster word of the year was slop.
Not surprising for many of you who know that I slop, as it’s known, flooded the internet. Studies have shown that I generated videos are hurting our brains. So this is a problem. We’re getting water down in many cases, bad or even just wrong content. On top of that, we have short form content that can be equally damaging. It’s not necessarily presenting us with deep ideas.
We’re not coming away with a real rich sense of knowledge. We’re just coming away from our phones with a thousand different influences that don’t get stored anywhere. They just end up being things that zombified us in the moment and then on accessible as useful information later. It is not making us more interesting in conversation. It’s making us a lot less interesting with the coming consumers were not espouses of ideas, were not people who are actually bringing thought to the table.
That is why I’m saying you should treat your brain like it’s your temple. Choose your sources of information wisely. Choose your influences wisely. Which brings me on to point number five. In the oblique approach to creating an amazing love life this year, choose your mentors wisely. There are so many mentors these days. The creator economy is so full.
We are saturated with content. There’s a hell of a lot of grift. There are a hell of a lot of mentors who look like one thing on the surface, and are a very different thing behind the surface, where values don’t align with what’s actually said. We have to find people that we really believe in, people whose message really rings true for us.
I’m a humble student in life, I love learning, I’m an intensely curious person. I’m a real snob when it comes to who I take advice from. I see it like I have a board of advisors in life, and the people who sit around that table are the people who really, in many ways dictate the quality of my life because they dictate the quality of the advice I take.
The ideas that I take on board. And your board of directors isn’t just made up of people that you get influenced by from afar, through YouTube or books or anything else. Your board of advisors can be friends, they can be family. And sometimes we allow people to be close to us who have really bad ideas about things bad ideas about love, bad ideas about the the you know, about people in general or about men or about women.
We have to choose very wisely who it is we’re going to allow close to us who we’re going to take advice from, because those people are dictating your reality. So what kind of life do you really want? Who represents that? Not just front of house, but in the values that they have in general in their lives? Find those people, make friends with them, or make them your mentors and get as close as possible.
And if you want to do this with me this year, go to Lovein26.com and we’re going to do it together. This is not about tactics. This is about building a year that is going to make finding the love you want as close to inevitable as possible, and building an extraordinary social life along the way. Let’s do it together.
I’ll see you over there and I’ll see you this month for The Year of Love.
Hi Matthew ,
I just watched your video “ 5 counterintuitive ways to transform your life in 2026 “ , and thank you for reminding us of these opportunities for fun and connectivity that exist within the fabric of everyday life should we chose to pay attention . I am 64 years old , I am in a beautiful long term loving relationship ( never too late!) I value your podcasts and videos to help guide me as I navigate my life so I can turn up a better version of myself for my partner and everyone in my life including myself !! So I conclude that the work of loving life and “ dating “ is something that is continuous , in or out of a committed relationship with significant other .