Falling in “like” with someone can happen in a flash.

And while liking someone is an electric feeling that signals the potential for something exciting… it can also trick us into looking past bad behaviors that we wouldn’t normally tolerate…

In the video below, I explain WHY we sometimes let red flags slide and the simple mindset shift that will help protect your heart while you’re looking for your ultimate partner.

You know one of the reasons I think we get hurt more than we need to is because the way we come to like people tends to be somewhat binary. We go, “I’m not interested, I’m not interested, I’m not interested.” And then the point where some flash of lightning happens in our mind, maybe it’s because we think they look particularly beautiful or handsome. Maybe it’s because of something they’ve done or something that has been revealed to us about this person. We all of a sudden decide, “Now I like this person.” And so we go from that zero to a one like that and now we stick on the one.

The danger of this is that it creates a kind of static image of a person. So we now, in our minds say, “This person’s right for me. I really like this person. I want to be with this person.” And we’re no longer qualifying that based on what’s actually happening. We’ve decided in our mind. So now what we’re trying to do is make reality fit to the vision that we have in our mind.

I’m interested in looking at all of the little moments, the scenarios that happen between you and another person, that become signposts for whether this person is actually right for you. If you think about it, you have all of these requirements long term. Even if you don’t acknowledge them in the short-term infatuation stage, there are all these requirements that you have for the person that you would want to be with for the rest of your life. Whether it’s the way that they would treat your family, whether it’s the way they deal with stress, whether it’s how they deal with arguments. What I want us to begin doing is to make our vision for the kind of person we want to be with the more static part of the equation. That doesn’t mean it never changes or we don’t update our vision, but for the purposes of this mental exercise, let’s say that’s the static part, or it’s much more healthy and beneficial for that to be the static part. And the fluid part is the behavior we witness in somebody else.

If you do that, then when someone doesn’t communicate well with you, when someone decides for a week to just go off the radar and not text you or not call you, when someone treats you badly or just starts ignoring you, ghosting you, you don’t then tell yourself, “Oh, the love of my life is ghosting me.” You start to say, “Oh, they’re ghosting me. So I don’t think they’re the love of my life.”

But if, in those binary terms, you’ve decided, “This is my person. This is the person I want to be with,” then the fluid part becomes your vision, becomes your boundaries, becomes what you will and won’t accept, what behaviors you’ll justify. And that’s a very dangerous thing because I’ve made you the certain part and the uncertain part is how I should be treated or what kind of relationship I have. So now the compromise becomes all of my needs, not you. I want to flip that so that your needs become the most important part, they become the static part. The person is the thing that can be compromised if that person can’t live up to it.

See, I believe that real confidence and certainty is self-awareness of knowing what your deepest needs are in a relationship. And I’m not talking about all the superficial shit. You know, the stuff that we wanted as a teenager, that as we grow up, we learn, “Oh, that stuff’s not really that important.” I’m talking about the bedrock of the kind of relationship that you want to have. And then having the certainty to go out into the world and find that and not settle for less than that. But most people don’t have that level of confidence or certainty.

Insecurity, uncertainty is being unwilling to change the person and instead just making your vision mold the person you have. And that’s how you end up in a scenario where you go, “My God, I never would have imagined in my life that I would have tolerated this kind of behavior. I never would have imagined that I would accept this from someone. And here I am going through this hellish relationship, enduring all of this suffering, all of this bad treatment in order to stay with this person.” That’s because you made the person the static part and the vision the malleable aspect of your love life.