Telling the difference between an avoidant person and someone who just likes to take things slowly is HARD.
In this week’s short-and-sweet new video, I share 3 principles that can help you move on sooner from someone who’s not as invested as you are.
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Matthew Hussey:
So I recently had someone ask me, “How do you tell the difference between someone who is avoidant and is never going to want a relationship and someone who is just taking things slow with you?” She described the last couple of situations she had where she met guys. In the beginning they stated that they were interested in finding a relationship, but then two months later after she’d already become emotionally invested, they suddenly had a turnaround and said, actually, “I’m not emotionally ready for a relationship.” Or, “My life isn’t logistically in a place where I can have a relationship.” What she was asking is, “Is there a way to figure out sooner whether someone is just avoidant without wasting my time and getting emotionally invested in the process?” To her and to you, if you relate to this, I have three principles that can serve you in not wasting your time. Before we get into the video and these three principles, don’t forget to like the video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell, so that the next time I make a video, you find out first.
The first principle is that not everyone who says they’re looking for a relationship is saying the same thing. It’s a bit like people who say they’re looking to move when they want to move house. When some people say that, they mean, “We need to move in the next month.” And when they go to a real estate agent, they are on the hunt for their next house. There are other people who say, “We’re looking to move,” who mean in the next few years. And for that person, real estate agents know they can be a giant waste of time, because that person you keep sending listings, I’m talking like I’m a real estate agent, but I understand for the people in that position, you keep sending listings to someone and you don’t know if they’re really serious or not.
All you know is they never really buy anything you send. There are some people who just want to wander around open houses on the weekend. It’s a nice thing. You go stroll around, you imagine what it would be like to be there. You drink the complimentary champagne, you eat the little cookie on the side, you take a little swim in the pool until they catch you without your trousers on and call the authorities. And then having drunk the champagne and eaten the open house cookie and swam trouserless in the open house pool, on your way out, you pick up the form when the agent says, “Could you please just sign your name on the way out, so that we can contact you?”
And you sign your name and you give them your number and your email address and you know that this agent can reach out to you every day for the rest of his life. You won’t be responding to any of it. So many people when they meet someone they like hear someone say, “Yeah, I’d like a relationship.” And what they hear is, “Oh, I can now relax because that person says that what they’re looking for is the same thing as what I’m looking for.” But we can never assume that them saying they want a relationship means they have the same intentionality about it that we do, or that they’re on the same timeframe as we are.
The second principle, I want you to ask yourself honestly, “Are they being selectively slow?” In other words, when someone is “going slow,” you have to say to yourself, “Are they going slow in every department or just the one that suits them?” They’re quite happy to be very sexual. They’re quite happy to see you in very intense ways. They’re quite happy to gush about you emotionally, be very affectionate, say grandiose things. When you feel like the only area they’re really taking it slow is in the department of saying, “I don’t want to sleep with other people,” Then you know that there’s a disconnect between what they’re saying and what they’re actually doing. Now, you may say, “No, Matt, they are going slow. I don’t see them all that often. We’re not sleeping together right now. We don’t talk all that often.”
If that’s the case, then you have to ask yourself, honestly, “Why am I investing so much of my psychological focus in this person? Why am I not still exploring my other options?” What we’re looking for is intentionality. Intentionality is someone who really is looking for a relationship, who is asking you the kinds of questions that people ask when they want to have a relationship, someone who is actually progressing with you. Two important words are consistency and progress, are they consistent and is there a sense of progress?
Which brings us on to principle number three:
You get to decide if someone wastes your time. A lot of the time we behave like a very passive player, like we’re concerned someone else is going to waste our time. Now, if someone outright lies to us, if they say, “I am in a relationship with you and only you,” and it turns out a couple of months later they’ve been cheating on you or they’re not serious, then fine, someone lied to us and wasted our time in that way. But so many of these situations I hear are about us being complicit in wasting our time. They’re about not being honest with ourselves when someone is not having the conversation about what it is, they’re not saying that they’re exclusive, they’re just seeing us, having sex, emotionally entwined, but there’s no real sense of progression towards commitment.
And when that’s the case, we get to decide, “What is it that I want?” And instead of always pandering to somebody else’s rhythm, we should go in with the confidence of saying to someone, “If we’re sleeping together, I’m not doing that with anyone else. Are you on the same page? You’re not? Okay, no problem. But then I can’t keep going down this road.” We get to say to someone who only sees us once every week or once every two weeks, “I’m keeping my options open because I don’t know where this is going.” We get to decide what we want to do. If we keep our options open without the coming fixated on a person before that person has really earned it, we’re never going to be resentful that someone has wasted our time.
It’s no different to someone saying, “I’m not really sure if I’m ready for a relationship.” And us saying, “That’s all good, I don’t want to keep investing in someone who’s not sure what they want. I’m going to keep exploring my options.” If they come back again and they say, “Hey, I’m serious now,” then that’s something worth entertaining. But you won’t feel like you wasted the three months in between because you went and did your own thing. You went and did what you wanted to do. What you didn’t do, was sit there and hope that maybe something would shift with that person. That’s where wasting our time comes from. It comes from someone not being clear about wanting the same thing as us and us hanging around for them anyway.
Now, look, in this video I said that there were two words that are really important in early dating, consistency and progress. And if you want to know how to create both of those things with someone that you’ve met, who you want it to go further with, I have something for you that can show you practically how to create them. It’s called the Momentum Texts. It is a highly practical program that shows you what you can do and say at different junctures, that instead of taking you down a casual road, take you down a serious road with someone. No matter what stage of early dating you’re in, this has something for you. It’s really easy to use and I promise you, you’ll literally grab it and you’ll find something in there today that you’ll want to use with someone. It’s $7 as well, so it’s a really easy, simple decision to make. Come join us over at MomentumTexts.com and grab your copy. And as always, I will see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.
