Maybe you began this year with visions of finally creating the love life you always dreamed about. But then this year happened, and it made dating even more complicated, more exhausting, and more futile than it seemed to be already.

In this week’s new video, I’m going to give you a blueprint for what to do to still move your love life forward…

Are you single right now in this pandemic? Making you dismal, is it? Lugubrious? Lachrymose? How are you? It’s a time I think we’ve all become a little exhausted of. And there’s a lot of people – in fact, Amy sent a comment, she put a comment on our last video about dealing with depression and chronic anxiety and so on, “Being single in a pandemic makes me sad. There are so few social opportunities right now… It feels like forever.”

I want to deal with two parts of what you said, Amy. The first one, it feels like forever. The one good thing is that we know now that there is an end point to this. That it seems as though within a year of today, we will be out of this situation because a decent proportion of the world will be able to get vaccinated and life will return to some semblance of normal.

So, that’s the first part. The second thing you said is, “Few social opportunities.” Now, I get that part, but I would also say that the mindset I’m adopting right now is that this isn’t going to go on for that much longer. So it’s like someone told me, “Hey Matt, in a few weeks…” I realize it’s more than like a few months or half a year or slightly longer, but it’s like someone said to me, “Matt, in a few weeks, you’re going on vacation.” And then I go, “Oh, shit. There’s so many things I need to do before I go on this vacation. I need to write that blog post. I need to make those three videos that are going to allow me to go away. I need to do this, manage my team, whatever.” I suddenly would think of all of the things I need to do in order to enjoy that vacation.

Well, I ask you now, what are the things you need to do right now, this month, in the next six months, that will allow you to enjoy the “vacation” that’s coming? Whatever that vacation means for you metaphorically.

So, here are six things that I think represent a kind of homework to be doing right now – I don’t like that word, it has a negative connotation, but progress you can make right now– so that you can enjoy this time when it comes, and you can still make progress in your love life in the meantime.

Number one: Build relationships that you will be thankful for when social events return. Meeting a person at a party takes one minute. Having the friends that invite you to the party in the first place takes a little longer. So, build those relationships now. I know that we did this in the beginning of the pandemic. What did we all do? We all jumped on Houseparty, didn’t we? And that lasted for about 10 minutes before we all got bored of it and thought, “This is awful. This pops up. I’m being cold while I’m in the bath.” We did this at the beginning of the pandemic and then we realized we were sprinting in what was a marathon. Well, now the end of that race is coming up or at least has a defined end point. And, therefore, it will serve us to invest in those relationships right now – I don’t mean just selfishly, we should, of course, invest because we like those people and we want to give to them – but investing in those relationships right now is going to have real payoff when it comes to things returning to normal. You’ll be thankful for your relationships being in a good place six months from now because of the work you did on them today.

Number two: Assess the responsibilities and commitments that you have right now that would get in the way of your love life if things were back to normal. I, for example, at some point would like to go on tour again. But I know that one of the things that stops me going on tour is when there are creative projects that I need to get done. Because I know that once I start touring, traveling around, being on stage, doing all of that, it will be very hard for me to sit down and do the deep creative work on things that are enduring pieces of work for me. You will have your equivalent of this in your life. You might not be going on tour, but you might have a time when you want to spend more time socializing, where you would like to travel, where you would like to go to events, where you’d like to have more balance in your life. And just because more balance is possible on a macro level because the world has opened up, it doesn’t mean that more balance is possible for you on a micro level if you haven’t handled certain commitments and responsibilities that are causing you stress and, even in normal times, stop you from going out there and investing in your social life or in your leisure time. So ask yourself right now… Your love life is not just a meeting someone issue, it’s also a time management issue. Ask yourself, “Am I solving the time management issue right now, so that when balance is possible my life is actually in a position to take advantage of it?”

Number three: Become a better conversationalist now, so that it benefits your dates tomorrow. Becoming a better conversationalist is something we get better at by practicing, but it’s also something we get better at by living a richer life, by having more opinions, by knowing about different subjects. If we read right now, if we listen to podcasts, if we develop new interests of our own and live a rich life right now, we’re going to have more to talk about on those dates. We don’t want to get on a date three months from now or two months from now and find ourselves with nothing to talk about because we haven’t done anything. And we can do things in this time that feed our mind and make us a more interesting person. And by the way, simply watching the news and having opinions on political matters right now, doesn’t count. That’s going to get old really quickly. At some point, we need to transcend that to more interesting subjects.

Number four: Create more loves in your life. I believe that if we have more loves in life, we will have a better love life. That means, having hobbies that you really enjoy, losing yourself in a project or a passion that in some way consumes you, that feeds your soul. If you do that, you will be in a much better position in your love life. Because when you find someone you’ll always have something better to do than wait for a text back from that person. The thing that has us anxiously waiting for someone to respond to us – “Do they like me? What do they think of me?” – is not having enough that fulfills us in our own life. We don’t have enough purpose. So this is the time to build loves in your life so that you’re not overly reliant on the love of your life.

Number five: Get in shape. Not for anybody else, but for you. You know that there’s a shape that when you’re in it you feel your sexiest, most confident you when you’re on a date. Are you in that shape right now? If you’re not, this is a wonderful time to put in those hours and get the body you want so that when you do go on a date you feel awesome.

Number six: Get your house or your apartment love-life ready. Here’s the test: If I said to you that five minutes from now the love of your life was going to show up at your door for a cup of tea, would you shit your pants? If you would, there’s another thing to do right now before that happens.

Look, it’s really convenient in our love lives to suggest that the only problem we have is that we haven’t met the right person yet. That makes it really simple. It makes it very literal. And it always allows us to simply blame the situation on, “I just haven’t met them yet.” Now, that’s true on one level. It’s not that that’s not valid, it’s just that it’s not the whole story. If it was, dating apps would solve the problem for everybody all the time. Dating apps solve one part of the love life problem.

But here’s how we have to look at it. Meeting someone is a fixed moment in time. What we need to work on, and can work on right now, is the lifestyle that leads us to that opportunity because we’re living this rich and full life that consistently brings us into contact with other people.

We can work on the skills that mean, when we meet that person, we present ourselves in a charismatic and fun and interesting way, and we have things to say. And we can work on the character, the personality, and the inner confidence that means that meeting someone leads to keeping someone because of all of the work we’ve done on ourselves to present a beautiful life that we can share with that person, that is abundant and not reliant on that person.

All of these things are things that I do on the Virtual Retreat, which is designed to work on all of the oblique things that create an extraordinary quality of life, both on the outside and on the inside in terms of our emotions. And one of the things that I’m most proud of about the Virtual Retreat is that it’s not about finding someone so you can be happy, it’s about being happy. It’s about creating an extraordinary and fulfilled life.

So if you want to make massive progress in your life right now in all of the ways that you can, I implore you to sign up to the Virtual Retreat that is coming up in March. We are running it for the second time. We just ran it a few weeks ago. It was a huge success. We’re doing it again in March from the 19th to the 21st. And you, my friend, are invited to come and join us for three days of coaching immersion for your entire life, not just your love life. If you want to find out more, go to this link here. Speak to one of my team. Ask any question you have, but please be there.