Matthew Hussey: 

There’s popular advice online if you want to meet the love of your life. It helps to create the exact list of physical and emotional traits you’re looking for. The advice is well-meaning, and of course, on the surface it makes sense. It helps zero in on who might be right for us in a sea of options, and helps us recognize it faster when we see it on a dating app.

But this advice can also hurt us and delay the process of finding someone who will actually make us happy. At least that is the thesis of a recent article published in The Atlantic titled most People don’t Have a Type. The journalist concludes after pointing to research and speaking to experts, that many dieters have a list of traits they’re looking for in a partner, but can be perfectly happy with someone who has few of them.

As a coach who has worked with hundreds of thousands of people over the last two decades, I have seen this myself. The traits that people thought would bring them happiness in a relationship actually didn’t end up mattering at all. Now, you might be hearing this and thinking, but if I don’t hone in on a type or a list of qualities, I risk swiping right on everyone on the apps.

I can’t narrow down thousands of options if I’m thinking every single option could be the one for me. Or maybe you’re someone who likes structure and planning and the thought of winging it when it comes to your dating life gives you anxiety. In this video, I will show you how to stay selective without letting a rigid type quietly sabotage your love life.

If you’re still with me, hit subscribe and like on this video and let’s get started! So one of the lines in this article is when people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies, the article continues. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with a few of their must haves and a lot of haves.

They didn’t think they desired. I think that it’s a sign of healthy growth. If our list of must haves goes down as we age, we have to start discerning better what matters and what doesn’t. I wrote about this person that I met in my book, Love Life, and, I’ll read it to you because it’s very relevant to this.

I once spoke to a happily married man who told me that while he’d always chased after dances, his wife is one of the least coordinated people he has ever known. He laughed when I asked if this bothered him. What percentage of my life am I on a dance floor? My wife is the best person I’ve ever met. She’s an amazing mother and we adore each other’s company.

These things affect my life every single day. How often are we selecting for things when it comes to a dating app that aren’t going to affect our lives every single day? The article goes on. Physical attraction matters, too. Far more than most people realize. According to the researchers I spoke with, I being the writer, if two people in a relationship, a lucky infatuation will set in an obsession like mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them once that initial spark ignites.

Motivated reasoning. Essentially, seeing what you want to see takes over. This is interesting because it almost seems to conflict with the point about us going on apps looking for someone who has certain hobbies or interests. What this seems to suggest is we go on there looking for hot, and then when we find hot, when we find someone that we have this giant crush on or obsession with, we retroactively convince ourselves that everything about them is great.

This seems to me to be one of the more pessimistic, almost fatalistic points in the article. Because while it’s saying that we don’t necessarily have a type, it’s also saying everyone’s type is hot, and if we find hot, we’ll just make anyone our type. I don’t like that interpretation of things because, well, for one, it makes us feel disempowered when it comes to attracting other people, especially as we don’t identify as being animalistic hot to people.

But it also, I think, validates our wanting to dig our own heels in when it comes to the people were attracted to. You know, people want to say, Matthew, I’m attracted to what I’m attracted to. I like guys with tattoos and piercings. I’m not going to suddenly become attracted to some clean cut preppy jock. Now that person might ask, what would you say to someone who very much has a physical type?

And these apps, the dating apps, which are ultimately designed for you to judge someone on physique first, don’t allow you to swipe for personality. Or someone out there might say, Matthew, I like having a plan when I’m dating. If I open up the pool too widely, I’m going to be giving any man or woman a shot, and I’m going to waste my time on hundreds of meaningless dates.

I’m not saying we should date everyone, but we have to be careful of over filtering for trivia, whether it’s height, whether it’s exact personality, adjectives, niche, hobbies, micro impressions we have of a person, vides that we get from one message, or even judging someone on a slightly awkward first date or a phone call. The solution to this is to narrow the pool by one effort.

So do they ask thoughtful questions? Do they respond consistently? Do they suggest a real plan? The second is we can narrow it down based on emotional maturity signals. So in conversation, do they speak respectfully about past partners? Can they express something beyond surface level banter? Do they handle disagreement? Well? If any kind of friction comes up and three narrow it down by baseline attraction.

Nor is this person my normal type. Nor is this person my fantasy. Not do I think they’re insanely hot. Just could I see myself kissing this person? If the answer is no, don’t proceed. If the answer is yes. Explore. So instead of ruthlessly filtering at the front end, a better way of thinking about this might be be selective about someone’s behavior, but be curious about their personality.

You may be watching this video knowing that you have ended up with the wrong person in the past, even though they were completely your type, they had all the traits you look for in a person, but ultimately they couldn’t make you happy. Or worse, they made you utterly miserable. Maybe you’re heartbroken over that person right now. If that is you and you’re going through that heartbreak right now, I have a free webinar called Heal From Heartbreak.

You can watch it today at Heartbreakplan.com. In this training, I give you some of my best advice for moving forward from heartbreak. This is stuff that I used as a personal survival strategy when I went through the worst heartbreak of my life. I promise you, at the end of this hour, you’re going to feel a lot better than you do right now.

So go check that out of Heartbreakplan.com. Now, some of you at this point in the video will still be shouting through the screen, but I don’t want to be attracted to a different kind of person. I want my type. To which I say, are you trying to satisfy your ego or find love? Because the strategies are different.

One of the things I encourage people to look at when trying to dislodge from this over Concretized idea of their type is to help them realize you don’t have a type. You have a story, a story of the way your life was supposed to go and who you were supposed to end up with. And it’s really hard to unshackle ourselves from a story about where our life was supposed to go.

But that kind of adaptability is where happiness lies. We may have thought that we were going to meet someone that looks like this, or who lived on the other side of the world, or who was nothing like the people that we grew up with. And then we could meet someone who lives three streets from where we grew up and is totally right for us.

The question is whether we can be flexible enough in our vision for our life to allow ourselves to love that person, or to even get to know that person in the first place. This is the kind of flexibility in our vision that creates happiness in life. But to develop those feelings, we often need to be in person with someone for a number of reasons.

Firstly, animation creates attraction. The way someone moves and gestures and emotes. We need repeated exposure because you often need to see someone in multiple contexts to see what’s attractive about them. And we also, and this is the big one, need to get over ourselves. Because perhaps the number one thing getting in the way of us finding love because we’re a slave to our type is ego.

Ego gets in the way. Ego makes us settle in all of the wrong ways, and it stops us settling in all of the right ways. It’s almost the logical inverse of what’s talked about in the article, which is that if I have a crush on someone, I will justify everything else about them, because in context, I’ll see it as great.

When we don’t immediately feel fireworks with someone, or there’s something about them that we don’t quite think is right for us and our type. We swing all the way to the other side where we become a judgmental asshole about that person. Here’s a good litmus test if you’re on a date and you find something you don’t like about a person.

Ask yourself, am I immediately writing them off to something that should not be a deal breaker right now? And am I only turning it into a deal breaker because I’m frustrated and annoyed that I’m not feeling exactly what I want to be feeling at this stage? We also have to factor in that a huge amount of our ego comes from social pressure.

Our ego feels a desire to conform to the kinds of people our friends have seen us with, or going for in the past. We have this problem in life of being observed. We don’t get attracted to people in a vacuum, which and this is even worse, by the way, in the age of social media and soft launching relationships on Instagram.

There is now a much larger pool of people who can judge you for your choices, even if they never say it out loud. It might be in our heads that we’re being judged for our choices, and it’s worth asking yourself if no one was watching or judging. Would I be as invested in trying to maintain this type as I am right now?

Whether it’s because of outside social pressure or it’s because of our own internal pressure of who we think we should be with, who we feel entitled to, or who we think is going to make us enough if we can get them. So much of who we pick is not about who is right for us. It is about our insecurity.

And our concept of our type will expand as our insecurity lessens in life. I know that this video isn’t going to make you magically go out into the world and be attracted to different people. That’s not how this works. My hope, though, is that it helps you unclench your fist a little bit when it comes to what you think you’re looking for.

That it creates a bit more room for curiosity, that it encourages you to follow interesting feelings that you might have with someone you wouldn’t normally expect to be attracted to. Even if you don’t fully understand it, and to give yourself a lot more leeway to spend time with these kinds of people. Have you ever been attracted to someone who was not your type?

Leave me a comment and tell me about it or tell me your favorite part of this video. I will be in the comments, reading and responding right now. I look forward to reading them.

*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).*