In today’s video, my brother Stephen and I provide you with four questions you can ask to determine if someone is a good fit for you . . . 

This video is all about helping you look out for “future you” while not silencing the “you” of today. 

Leave me a comment and let me know what you thought and if this video helped you.

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Matthew:

Everyone’s had that situation where you know that there might be issues in the future, but you’re enjoying something with someone now. And you ask a friend, you say, “What should I do?” And a friend says to you, “Well, are you having fun?”

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Stephen:

Could you ask a few key questions, to say people always ask, “Is this the right person for me? How do I know? Do I just need to intuitively feel the butterflies? Or is there something I should think about with this person?”

Matthew:

How many questions do you need to ask, Steve?

Stephen:

Four, according to my article.

Matthew:

Very good. I haven’t seen this article, Steve, in a long time, so I’m very curious to see whether I still agree with the questions. This is going to be good.

Stephen:

So what do you think of this one? First of all, do you feel a unique sexual attraction to this person? So I remember reading way back in, I think it was this old Steve Pavlina article, but it was just the fact that, look, couples get into a lot of trouble if you don’t choose someone who turns you on physically, who gives you some feeling of animalistic pull towards them. It’s very hard to get that flame going later on. So you want to start with some kind of unique sexual chemistry with that person.

Matthew:

Do you feel, Steve, that some people don’t experience the sexual chemistry that they could with another person on a date, not because those two people don’t have it, but because nerves have gotten in the way? Because a kind of over uptight feeling of that stuffiness of a first date has got in the way of the kind of loose, playful energy, that allows sexual chemistry to flourish.

Stephen:

Sure. There are environments where you’ll be more sexy, there are environments where you’ll feel more sexy, and you’ll be your more relaxed, playful, fun self.

Matthew:

Do you feel therefore that if you don’t feel it on a first date, it’s too early to judge, because nerves could have been getting in the way?

Stephen:

Yeah. I think a first date alone isn’t going to give you all the info, which is why if you are too dismissive, I think that works against people.

Matthew:

I remember Tony Robbins talking about his wife, Sage, and how they started out as friends. And sort of one day, she teased him. And perhaps, I guess from the story, it sounded like she teased him in a way that perhaps she hadn’t teased him before. But she teased him about his perfect hair, and how he was all really well put together. And he recalls how he was like… He almost gestures as if, “Come here,” that response you have when someone teases you and you are faux frustrated at them, but it’s really sexual tension for the first time. And that kind of sexual tension that gets built through teasing. And I suppose I’m bringing that example up because it is interesting to note that there can be dynamics between two people where there is a friendship and because it’s been sort of stuck in a certain gear.

Stephen:

Oh yeah.

Matthew:

Because of maybe the way the relationship started, you don’t actually know what you don’t know about how the two of you could be together until one person decides to throw a bolt of lightning into the interaction and see what happens. Now, there’s no guarantee that when you hit that moment with a moment of lightning that that’s going to turn into real tension between you, but until one person is brave enough to try, it’s actually very difficult to know for sure whether you do have a unique sexual chemistry or not.

Stephen:

Yeah. That absolutely happens. And I had a girlfriend once who we were friends for-

Matthew:

Oh, here we go. Storytime.

Stephen:

Here we go. We were friends for a year before and something changed in the dynamic and we realized we are attracted to each other. So that happens. But what I’m saying is if you’ve been literally dating this person.

Matthew:

It’s like beauty and the beast.

Stephen:

Don’t-

Matthew:

Something there that wasn’t there before.

Stephen:

Oh, I thought you were having a go.

Matthew:

No, you know this song.

Stephen:

Exactly, yeah. I didn’t capture her and make her live in my castle until she fell in love with me, if that’s what you mean.

Matthew:

But you are a beast.

Stephen:

Right.

Matthew:

You identify with that part.

Stephen:

A few hairs on my chest.

Matthew:

You didn’t say, “But I’m not a beast.” Sorry, Steve, go on.

Stephen:

But my point is, some people message us saying, “I’ve been dating this guy for several months and don’t feel that chemistry with him.” That’s when you’re in bad territory.

Matthew:

Yeah. I think that’s safe to say.

Stephen:

If you are actually dating that person and not feeling the chemistry. The flame isn’t going to suddenly appear. Number two, do you find it easy or difficult to get your needs met in a relationship? It doesn’t mean you always get your needs met, but how difficult is it to get your fundamental needs met, whether it’s for intimacy, respect, emotional connection, intellectual stimulation. We all have certain things we consider fundamental needs. Some things we’re like, “That’s nice and desirable, but it’s not fundamental.” But your fundamental needs, does that only happen once a month? Or is it something you can get met without a big complication, an argument, a discussion. I think that’s a big determinant of whether you are with the right person or not.

Matthew:

That’s a good one. I like that. Especially when they’re your core needs, when they’re things that are really, really important to you. If you are someone who’s very affectionate and you are with someone who doesn’t want to hold your hand, walking down the street, because they just, or they want to sleep on opposite sides of the bed, they don’t actually enjoy a cuddle or a spoon in a movie. Then that’s going to be hard. It’s not going to stop being hard for you later down the line. If it’s one of your core needs is physical touch and it’s not at all important to the person you’re with, that is always going to be a point of conflict and resentment and hurt.

Stephen:

Right. Agreed. So next question is, “Is their lifestyle compatible with yours? Do you feel okay with how they spend their free time?” Now I think of this as not some judgemental, “Oh, I don’t like your hobbies.” I think of it more as your actual lifestyle, your time. Are you with a workaholic? Are you with someone who really wants to spend a life being nomadic and traveling all the time? Are you with someone who loves getting drunk at night and partying or they want to have a bottle of wine every night and socialize all the time or whatever. Literally your compatibility, how your lives fit together in terms of what you like to do and how you like to spend your time. I don’t think you need them to be the same, but you need to say, “Am I happy with the way they carve out their time? Does it work for me?” What do you think?

Matthew:

Let’s say, you know that your partner’s really happy when they’re playing golf. But you have no interest whatsoever in that activity, the very idea of it bores you to death.

Stephen:

Totally fine. Fine. Not a problem.

Matthew:

Would you though describe that as a difference in life’s in… What if they love to play golf every day?

Stephen:

I think this is where you decide, does it compromise your needs if they play golf every day, if they play golf for three hours every day and you are at work, maybe it affects nothing. If it affects, “Hey, we never spend any time together on a weekend because you play golf all day. And that’s a real problem for me.” You’ve got a conversation. I think it’s whether the lifestyle fits into yours, you might love that someone’s ambitious or works really hard. But if their work means that you haven’t taken a vacation in five years and they have no interest in it, and that’s a big thing you want to spend time seeing the world together or doing fun things. Problem.

Matthew:

I think the phenomenon of people getting to a certain point in life where they’ve been used to living it a certain way and they lack compromise once they get to a relationship, that’s something I see a lot, is if you’ve been single for a long time and doing your own thing, then you haven’t been used to meshing your life with somebody else’s.

Stephen:

For sure.

Matthew:

And there’s a lot of potential conflict and compatibility issues that can come up there. And really, I think one of the things that defines whether you can be compatible or not, is your willingness to make changes to certain ways that you spend your time or live your life based on the fact that you now find yourself in a new paradigm. One where you are part of a unit, with somebody else. And if you’ve been used to not being a unit, then you can get quite… your ways can become very set.

Stephen:

Yeah. You can become very selfish.

Matthew:

And you don’t even realize that you are selfish.

 

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Matthew:

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Matthew:

You don’t even realize that you have ways, but meeting someone can make you realize, “Oh, I have all these habits I didn’t even realize I have, I have all of these ways of spending my time I didn’t even realize would affect somebody else.” And I think that one of the greatest determinants of whether two people can work together is whether they find themselves malleable enough and they find their lifestyles malleable enough to create space for somebody else or whether there is such rigidity in the way that they want to live their life, that there’s not really much space for another person and their ways.

Lack of compatibility can either take the form of, “We are very different people and we like to do different things,” or it can take form of, “We have very different ideas about how much we are willing to adjust in order to accommodate somebody else in our life.” If you think about a great parent, a great parent is one that has some malleability and can adjust to the fact that the there’s now a new person in their life that they’re responsible for and have to take care of and nurture and help grow. A bad parent is often, well, I don’t think this is the only definition of a bad parent by any stretch, but one version of a bad parent is one that is unwilling to compromise their life now based on another person having entered it. So, and I think the same can be true of a relationship.

Stephen:

Compatibility for me really is being accommodating. It really is being like, “I’m okay with what this person does and likes doing.” And I’m not going to be the person who’s like, “Oh, I want you to not spend time doing that. I don’t want you to do that.” That’s probably not going to work. It’s probably better if you can accept what they prioritize now, which is why you got to be really careful with what you’re getting into.

Matthew:

Well, I think a distinction that you’ve made there, or that needs to be made is the difference between not wanting to spend your time the same way they want to spend a decent proportion of theirs, which I don’t necessarily think is a problem.

Stephen:

No.

Matthew:

And genuinely having a problem with the way they spend their time, having a real lack of respect for how they spend their time. That, to me is… you don’t have to like that your partner likes golf. You just have to, if you truly think that that says something about them, you don’t like, if you can not respect that that’s how they like to spend their time, then that is revealing of a difference in values. Not just a difference in the way that you spend your time.

Stephen:

Yes. Number four, “Do you both want the same things in your future and have the same vision for the next five, 10, 15 years?” Now, this comes with the caveat that I don’t think everyone has a 10-year plan for their life. That isn’t how we tend to think, most of us. But if the idea of having some shared vision with someone for that period scares the living daylights out of you, that’s probably a problem.

Matthew:

Steve, I was listening to the Sam Harris podcast recently, and there was an episode about time. He was talking with a time management expert, or I should actually backtrack on that. The guy has an issue with a lot of time management literature. I’m not sure, he wouldn’t call himself a time management expert, but he wrote a book on time called 4,000 weeks. And he described the difference between being and doing and how, when we’re raising kids, we have to enjoy the moment with our kids. We can’t just think I’m just raising my five-year-old right now to be a respectable teenager, or I’m just raising my 15 year old right now to be a respectable, hardworking adult. Because if you do that, you’re always just living in the future of what they’re going to be. You’re never actually enjoying what they are.

You’re not enjoying the being. You’re just doing the doing for some end result. And the end result is always a receding horizon, because every time you get there, there’s some other thing that they need to become after that. You’re never living in the moment. And when I was listening to this, I thought about this in the context of relationships. And it relates to what you just said, because what you are talking about here, is that whilst you can be enjoying someone’s company right now, and you can be enjoying the chemistry you have with them right now, it’s dangerous to be doing so if you have wildly different ideas about what a well-lived future is because the being with someone right now is getting you very, very invested. You’re spending time and energy with someone and going further and further down a path with someone that of course is denying you the ability to go down that path with somebody else.

And so there is an opportunity cost and is going to land you in a massive heartbreak later, if, as it turns out, that person meant it when they said, “I don’t want kids,” or, “I don’t want marriage,” or, “I want to spend my life traveling from country to country or every two months, and never want to settle down anywhere.” And so Steve, when I listened to that episode, I had this question in my mind, which I think I’ve just resolved in listening to you. The question in my mind was, what do you say to people who- because we’ve all, everyone’s had that situation where you know that there might be issues in the future, but you’re enjoying something with someone now, and you ask a friend, you say, “What should I do?”

And a friend says to you, “Well, are you having fun? Are you enjoying it?” And you say, “Yeah.” And they go, “Then, then do it. What’s the big deal? Stop over analyzing it, if you’re having fun, and if your heart feels good, then just do it.” Now you could say, from either a romantic perspective or are even interestingly, you could say from a mindfulness perspective, if you are enjoying it now, then don’t obsess over the future, be in the moment and enjoy what it is now.

And a lot of people get into relationships and get their heart very tied up with someone in the short term who may not be great for them in the long term, or may have wildly different goals in the long term. So does that mean that you should get out of a situation that you’re enjoying right now? Just because you may not end up in the same place in the future? And I think the rule that we have to set for ourselves is, “I have to enjoy what I’m doing in the moment now, unless what I’m doing is going to create massive future pain for me.”

In other words, if the moment I’m enjoying now is going to be responsible for many, many unhappy moments in the future, that I can avoid today, by not doing this thing now, that’s something we have to listen to. And what you are saying in question number four, which is- what was the exact wording of it?

Stephen:

“Do you both want the same things in your future and see yourself being able to give the same amount to the relationship in five, 10, 15 years?”

Matthew:

Right. What you are saying is, don’t be so busy enjoying the chemistry and the fun and the attraction now that you ignore a massive amount of pain that’s coming, that’s going to be… Really, it’s an act of… What do I want to say? It’s an act of recklessness and ignorance towards a future you. If we take the view that we should do things today that our future self will benefit from, will thank us for, one of the things that’s going to be a very cruel thing to do to our future self… Because throughout our lives, we go through many different us, right? Many, many different, “You’s,” over the course of your life.

It’s a cruel act to a future you, to do something that feels good today, that’s going to cause her a ton of pain. And ignoring the fact that somebody sees a wildly different future, than the one that would make you happy, ignoring the fact that somebody isn’t willing to give what you are willing to give, or isn’t even willing to admit that they want to sign up to all of that. It may be something that feels good today, but it’s something that’s incredibly cruel to a future you.

 

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Matthew:

This next video I have for you is really, really important. Click here to watch.

 

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Matthew:

They want to come in and make you fall in love with them as quickly as possible, because that’s where they get their validation. And once they feel validated, once they feel like, “Ah, I did it, I made them fall for me. Look how wonderful I am,” they can then move on.