The challenges they're talking about at the beginning of dating and the things they're coming across with women are often the same. Men get led on by people who not serious about them. When someone showers you with grandiose proclamations of love, how amazing you are, the future they want with you. If someone starts doing that after a week of knowing you, it can be a giant red flag. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on my show and congratulations on your new book, Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily Ever After, No Matter What. I found out that you were a love coach at the age of 19. And you wrote in your very first sentence saying, "You have to admit that in the past few years, you weren't really the best of dating partner." So you made that confession right away. I am very curious. How were you able to coach about love at that age? Because I met my husband. I started dating him when I was 19 and boy I did not know a thing about love and it took really 20 30 years to figure it out how to really be in a relationship. So, how did you start and how has it changed over the years? And how did you come to a realization that you weren't really the perfect dating partner? Um, a lot of pain over the years. Uh, a lot of stumbling in ways that I never thought I would stumble. Being humbled by life, hurting myself, hurting other people. It's taken me nearly two decades to get to where I am today. I'm 37 today and I have learned a lot in those years. You know, when I started out, I think it's not that everything I was saying was not right. I mean, I I still look back at those old videos of me at 19 years old and and I'm like, he's he said some decent things and some helpful things, but it no doubt the advice was more superficial. It was more based in social skills, right, and social interactions and creating opportunities. I think that's something that I did a lot of back when I first started was my work was probably most helpful to people who felt like their dating life had hit a rut and they weren't creating any opportunities for themselves or maybe they were quite shy or like me, introverted and felt like, you know what, I need to get out there more. I'm not meeting people. I'm not making things happen in my love life. My my advice back then was really good for that. And I gave lots of practical skills. But, you know, if you're talking about the person who is consistently going after the wrong people and getting themselves into very painful relationships or struggling to leave painful relationships back when I was, you know, in my 20s, I wasn't equipped to really understand on a deep level the healing that people needed to do, the trauma that that many of my audience had been through. I didn't even understand my own trauma at that age. So, I certainly wasn't equipped to discuss other people's and to help them with theirs and to appreciate the journey of healing that happens for people when they've been through really really difficult things in life. So, it's taken me a long time to to get to where I am today. I've I've been humbled many times and it's why if you go back and read my first book uh from Get the Guy, Get the Guy, many people still love that book and still find it incredibly helpful, but there's a different kind of depth and humility to this book that um I think people are really enjoying. I I definitely see that and I think it's important to have that um layer to talk about the social skills to be able to create situations that's beneficial for yourself. So I do believe momentum is bigger than motivation to start having that positive interaction and then as you grew your work began to explore your inner self right how to find inner peace even though the book is about relationship I think ultimately I see that you are talking about you loving yourself first before you go into a relationship that you don't need a partner to fulfill you so I do see how your work has evolved and I think every book really it it targets certain different groups of audience in this book. I I found it very interesting. You you talked a lot about the red flags we should watch out for in a person. In your own experience, in your own coaching experience, do you see a pattern that's more dominant in male and in female? Like what are the most common red flags you see in men versus women? That's a good question. Is there a pattern? You know, I deal with a lot of women. Mhm. I increasingly I'm working with men too, which is ironic given that I started with men before I was working, but now now my experience is I have a much greater volume of experience with women than men. What I'm always fascinated by and in some ways validated by is that actually the more I listen to men, the more I realize that the challenges they're talking about at the beginning of dating and the things they're coming across with women are often the same. Men get led on by people who not serious about them. you know that that woman might see him as a comfort for now and she doesn't see him as the person. But in her eyes, it's better to have someone right now while she's looking than to have no one. If a man did that to a woman, we would say he was using her or leading her on or so I I I see it on both sides. You know, there's a stereotype certainly of men struggling to commit in ways that that women maybe at the same scale are not. And I I think that's probably has some some of that has to do with biology because I think if women didn't have any concern about their own biological ability to have a child and the window for doing that then they would be relaxed in ways that men are relaxed. Yes. No, I I absolutely agree with you. And for women who have declared that they don't want kids, I think that creates that space for them. Yeah. It's a huge pressure valve. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. There are some things that, you know, men are stereotyped as the commitment phobes, but I think some of that is just to do with women saying, you know, I I really want a family and I feel like I'm running out of time for that. And so now I'm being extremely intentional and I'm still meeting a lot of men who are not being intentional, you know, but I nothing's coming to mind immediately as like this is a giant male red flag. You know, you hear about love bombing a lot these days, people coming in and I certainly hear I think it's fair to say I hear about more men doing that than I hear women doing that. Mhm. You know, I some of that perhaps has to do with sex and you know, men who are saying whatever they need to say or doing whatever they need to do in order to create an immediate intimate relationship. I think that that's there's more of evidence that I've seen of that on the man's side than the woman's side. Can you talk a little bit about love bombing? Because for the audience who haven't read the book, who are interested, what what does that term mean? It's when someone showers you with grandiose proclamations of love and how amazing you are and the future they want with you and all of the things they see for the two of you together all at a time where it feels very inorganic and unnatural to the stage of the process you're actually in. If someone starts doing that after a week of knowing you, it can be a giant red flag. It can also be a sign of an immature person who hasn't had a lot of experience. Sometimes that's true. It can be a sign of someone who has gotten carried away and is reckless. It's not always a sign of someone who has sinister intentions, but there are many many cases where it it is a sign of narcissism and someone who is trying to manipulate you into giving more than you would ever normally give to someone who you knew so little of. Right? And it's a very seductive thing because if we are looking for love and we are struggling to find it and especially if we're a victim of trauma in relationships or in childhood where we were made to feel uncertain and where we experienced a lot of abandonment or betrayal. If someone comes along and they start saying all of the things we always wished that we would hear either from a caregiver or from our first partner or in a marriage, they start saying all of the things we wished someone would have said to us all along that can hijack our brain, right? If there's some part of us that's kind of feels like something feels a little bit strange about this, but maybe this is exactly what I've been looking for. Maybe this level of certainty is exactly what I've been looking for this whole time. This is the soul connection I've always wanted. So maybe it's not weird. Maybe it's just amazing. And then we stop taking our time to assess someone's character. We just become overwhelmed by the grandio the the feelings that they're giving us and the things they're saying to us. And people get into a lot of trouble with that because character, and I talk about this in the book, character can only be truly assessed over time. Absolutely. On a first date, whatever someone does, you may love someone's company. You may think they're an amazing person, but on a first date, you don't know their character. You you're just feeling their impact, right? And there's a lot of projection, too. like what you see in that person might not be who he actually is, right? You're projecting some of your scarcity, your lack onto that person. And the shower of love, it's you're interpreting in a way like you said, it's what I've always wanted. You sort of trick yourself into believing that. So, that's awesome advice. I know we're almost out of time, but one last question. I know you're recently married. Congratulations. So you talked about commitment issues for a lot of men that at least that's a general stereotype. What made you make that leap and has anything changed in a relationship dynamic before the marriage and after you got married? Well firstly meeting someone who it was so clear to me my life will always be better for having this person in it. you know, this this is an amazing human being. She inspired me. She had qualities or has qualities that just I thought was so rare and so beautiful. I just thought this is I'm going to be a better version of me by being with this person and I really admired her. I was simultaneously kind of in a place in my life where I was ready to build something. M I I didn't want to. For me, continuing to date was like hitting reset every time. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I I was at a stage of my life where I realized there's nothing for me. I I felt like I was getting diminishing returns by dating. It wasn't offering me new newness in the same way. And and by the way, I I think it always does offer newness in a in a sense, but I just what was more attractive to me was really building something like that was the newness that excited me at that stage was building something together that I could be really proud of and keep adding to. And I don't think that we can do that with just anybody. I think that we do have to find the right person to do that with. is why I don't I didn't get I swore I was like I'm not going to get married and suddenly become an evangelist for marriage like that that's not me because I I was never that before when people used to say to me like you know you talk about marriage and relate I was like whoa whoa I don't think everyone should get married I don't even know if I want to get married so I got married because I genuinely felt like I found an amazing builder to build a life with I could imagine a scenario where I didn't get married. What has perhaps changed for me was just this feeling of a friend of mine said when I asked him why he got married, this was before I got married. I said, "Why did you get married?" Cuz he's not religious. He's not coming from any place of agenda in getting married. He just got married because he felt like it was the right thing to do. And I said, "Why did you do it?" And he said, you know, there is something about that piece of paper in a world where we struggle so much to commit to anything. There is something about that piece of paper that when we have an argument, I say to myself, I do give it a second thought. Mhm. Or just walking out. And without that, it it's so easy for us to say that, yeah, this is too hard. I'm going. And there is something special about saying it's you and me in that way. That's what I felt. It made sense to me. So for me getting married became it became symbolic in a very beautiful way. Uh I'm not religious and you know I have no love for getting an institution involved in my personal life. It doesn't speak to the contrarian in me who doesn't want any outside forces in my own life in that way. But I still saw a real beauty in it. And I found a person who it was finally beautiful to me. You know, it it didn't feel scary. It suddenly felt beautiful. And since doing it, it has felt like, oh, we're we're in this together. We're building something. There was a kind of added level of safety. I'm someone who's been through a lot in my life and so has my wife and we both value safety more than I think we ever realized. And there's something about the safety of of being like yeah we are we have made it a little bit harder to leave in a good way and we are building something real together and there's a kind of stability that has come from it that I didn't know if I would feel but I have felt since getting married if I'm honest. So yeah, that's that's it's been a lovely lovely feeling. But I also believe that it's when you make the decision with the wrong person. Oh, that's a really really painful thing. And I I coach people who are going through divorces all the time. I coach people who just got married and 6 months in realize I've made a terrible mistake. So I I don't want anyone to hear what I'm saying and think that this is kind of an advertisement for marriage. I think it's extremely personal. It's extremely person dependent and we have to develop and I hope that's what I've done with this book. We have to to develop really great tools for assessing the kind of relationship that we are in for seeing how strong it can be, how much we can trust in that relationship, what level of loyalty there is, how great of a teammate we have before we ever make a decision like marriage with that person. Marriage or whether or not you should leave the relationship, right? or whether or not you should have kids with them or, you know, or whether or not you should move to their country and leave your life behind. All of the these are big decisions that shape our lives. And, you know, I really want to help people with this book to make better decisions about what to do with their precious precious time and energy and their heart. Right. No, it's a wonderful book and with lots and lots of tools. So, thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure talking with you and I really want to get there because it's such an honor to me that I have so many people who like my work and follow my work in Taiwan. It really means a lot to me. I can come and practice my Mandarin which is almost non-existent at this stage. What are you learning? So do come