Should You Ever Chase Someone? Matthew Hussey Takes Pushback From His Own Producer

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Overview

In this episode of the Love Life podcast, the usual co-hosts Audrey and Stephen are absent. Instead, Matthew Hussey sits down one-on-one with David Kirk, who produces the show behind the scenes and reads through its comment sections. Kirk arrives with questions and viewer comments Hussey hasn't seen in advance, and some of them are meant to challenge him. The central challenge is to one of the most repeated pieces of modern dating advice, "don't chase." Kirk argues that it leaves people too comfortable. Hussey agrees persistence can work, but says it only becomes attractive when it comes from confidence and is paired with a standard. The conversation then moves to whether finding love is harder now than ever, where Hussey's affinity with women comes from, and how to answer men in the comments who have concluded that "it's always about money."

24 min read
0:28

Why a producer-led episode

Kirk explains that he wanted a more concentrated, one-on-one format. It lets him get more of Hussey's views on specific topics. It also lets him raise things he has been noticing in the comments, which he reads regularly and can often recall from memory, and ask questions he hasn't personally heard Hussey answer before. Hussey says he likes the idea because Kirk can go beyond what audiences want to hear and challenge him "in ways that portions of the audience" would want. He describes himself as Kirk's "hostage for the next hour."

1:59

"The three of them agree on everything"

Kirk opens with a comment he admits he partly agrees with. A viewer named Driver Surf Camp wrote that the podcast "would benefit so much from having a person with a different perspective," because the three hosts agree on everything. Kirk notes the comment had about 190 likes and appeared under a recent episode on why women are giving up on men, which was about gender dynamics.

Hussey first says he'd like to ask the commenter directly what they mean. His guess is that they feel the hosts all sit on one side of gender dynamics. He doesn't think that's entirely true, but he concedes part of the criticism. He says that in the past the show hasn't always given men "a fair shake." In his account this was never intentional. It came from spending so long "in the trenches" with women's challenges that his thinking became wired toward them, and in the process he could lose touch with what men were struggling with. When men have made this criticism, he says, "there have been times where they've had a point."

He is less sure what the commenter actually wants. He speculates they may want someone who talks about how bad women can be, or perhaps someone with different politics. Kirk jokes about whether they want Audrey to slam her fist on the table and tell Matthew he's wrong. Hussey suggests that anyone who wants the show to argue a fundamentally opposite position may really want "a different podcast," not a different co-host.

He says he'd be very interested to know how many of those 190 likers are women. If the likes were split between men and women, he says, he would seriously wonder what the show isn't representing. His suspicion is that they are mostly or entirely men, and possibly a certain type of man, though he stops himself from assuming. He invites anyone who agrees with the comment to email the show and say specifically which opinions aren't being aired. He says he enjoys debating ideas and would like to hear valid points that aren't being made.

6:31

Kirk's case against "don't chase"

Kirk says he has listened to the show for about a year and a half. In his view, a lot of the advice genuinely works and bears repeating, and that is partly why nobody at the table pushes back: they have all integrated it into their lives. But he has one area where he "pretty harshly" disagrees. That is the message, from Hussey and across YouTube and social media generally, of "don't chase."

Kirk describes himself as "a tryer." By chasing, he says, he has felt embarrassed and has probably pushed some people away. But he doesn't regret it, because he put himself out there, got rejected, and felt stronger for it. He also says that the person he ended up with was someone he chased at a certain point, and that "it all came back around at the end."

His concern is psychological. People would love to hear "don't chase," because it can be heard as "don't try, it's not going to work anyway." That gives them permission to relax and stop putting themselves out there. So he asks whether the pendulum has swung too far, and whether the nuance has been lost that there are times when pursuing someone works.

8:35

What actually made persistence work

Hussey suggests "persistence" as a better word and asks Kirk why it worked in the cases where it did. Kirk says it was because he felt he gave each situation a fair shake and left nothing on the table. He established himself as someone who would "shamelessly" send the extra text or reach out again. He acknowledges he may have seemed a little desperate, or like a romantic. But he believes that because he had no shame about it, people stopped pitying or judging him for it; it was just who he was.

When it didn't work, Kirk says, he felt "terrible" and embarrassed for a while. Then he told himself it was part of the game. He decided not to change his behavior, because the right person wouldn't be turned off by being pursued. The nuance he would add to the advice is that operating this way requires "a short memory" for rejection.

Hussey then offers his own read of what was going on, and explicitly asks Kirk to tell him if he's wrong rather than give him the benefit of the doubt. He suspects "a cocktail" of two ingredients. The first is a feeling that people don't always see what's great about Kirk right away, so giving himself a fair chance might mean continuing a bit further. The second, already implied in the first, is a kind of confidence: I do know I have something. You may not know it yet, and you may never know it, but the more persistent I am, the more chance you have of finding out. Hussey says he'd find it hard to believe Kirk chased solely out of insecurity and need.

Kirk says it resonates, though he adds that there were times when need really was the driver, because it was "all that I knew how to do." He agrees there was also a confidence that what he was saying was good, funny, or interesting, and that if the other person just kept interacting, more of those moments would come. He calls this "a bit of hubris." He adds that at some point you simply have to pursue even when you're not sure, or you never put your belief to the test.

13:45

Why persistence comes more easily to some people

Hussey offers two reasons why this kind of persistence is easier for some people than others.

The first is gender conditioning. He believes society values persistence romantically more in men than in women. A persistent man is often seen as attractive or chivalrous, while a woman who "endlessly pursues" gets called crazy. In his view, that imprint serves men more than women.

The second is ego and identity. He describes people who were told from high school onward that they were the best-looking or most popular person in the room, and who built an identity on that. For them chasing is very hard, because being rejected, or even seeing themselves as chasing, threatens the whole identity they've decided is their value. People who never attached themselves to such a "stifling identity" are freer to make mistakes and get rejected, because their identity doesn't depend on never being rejected.

16:08

Persistence becomes attractive when paired with a standard

The crucial ingredient, Hussey argues, is that persistence has to be paired with a standard. Pursuing someone indefinitely, with no point at which you conclude if you don't see what's valuable about me, you don't deserve for me to keep pursuing you, doesn't work. When persistence does come with that limit, he says, it can be very attractive. The other person may eventually say, "I get it about you."

He also connects this to how relationships last. If the persistent person turns out to have standards about how they want to be treated once the relationship begins, the partner experiences them very differently from someone who chased and then, once in the relationship, never feels good enough and effectively says, "I'll let you walk all over me, just please don't go anywhere." Hussey says you won't hold on to the latter kind of partner for long. He says he doesn't know Kirk's relationship history but knows something about the relationship Kirk is in now. His guess is that it has lasted because, even if Kirk persisted at the start, the person his partner discovered "was a person who actually did have standards." Kirk agrees, joking that this risks proving the "same perspective" complaint right.

18:13

Is it becoming attractive for women to pursue?

Kirk does disagree on one point. He believes it is becoming more attractive for women to be persistent. He acknowledges this may be anecdotal and just his own perspective. He links it to an earlier podcast discussion about changing economics: women increasingly feel they can go after what they want. He sees nothing wrong with a woman who knows what she wants and says so. For men, he argues, being attracted to women who pursue them widens their pool. He also finds it "kind of cool" not to be the only one who does things.

Hussey says Kirk isn't wrong and that it comes down to the source of the chasing. If the core is "I need you," there's a problem. If the core is closer to "I'm doing this because you're wrong," there's "something sexy about that." The other person senses that this person is trying harder, won't do it forever, isn't coming from a weak or needy place, and seems to be onto something.

He uses Audrey as an example. She was persistent, he says, but in a way that communicated: I know I have something, I know we have something, you're wrong and I'm right, while not giving him the benefit of the doubt indefinitely if he failed to see it. There were times, he says, when she tried harder than he did "100%."

20:44

The scale between pride and proactivity

Hussey frames the issue as a scale between pride and proactivity, and says it's important to be self-critical about where you fall on it. At the extreme of proactivity, a person becomes "a masochist" who always chases, gets taken advantage of, and gets hurt. At the extreme of pride, a person can die saying "I never got rejected, good for me," but never really lived, never took risks, and never saw how many relationships could have been available. He says many people sit too far toward one end or the other.

He ties this to a concept he values, robustness. He attributes a phrasing of it to David Whyte: your ability "to meet the world and survive the encounter." That might mean asking someone out, playing a sport and losing, or trying a business and failing. Hussey treats robustness as a measure of confidence. People so proud that they never try are low on it. Kirk's willingness to push and be persistent, he says, was also a sign of robustness.

He argues that people who fixate on never double-texting, or on the "tit for tat" of who is giving more, are revealing their insecurity through that focus. His own experience is that the more confident he has become, the more willing he is to be the one who puts in more effort for a while. He is also now confident enough to recognize when that effort has become unrewarding and to stop.

He applies this to friendships too. He used to avoid texting someone to suggest coffee for fear of looking like he wanted the friendship more than they did. Today he says he is "far more proactive over prideful" in relationships generally. It has served him well, because relationships have opened up to him that wouldn't have when he was less persistent. On that point, he tells Kirk, "you're right."

26:12

Is this an unprecedented era of difficulty in dating?

Kirk raises a cynicism he sees in dating culture, one he thinks has seeped into some of the show's own content, and asks whether this really is an unprecedented era of difficulty in finding love.

Hussey thinks it is harder, and says the trend has been building since people became addicted to their phones. He believes social skills have been eroded to varying degrees. Many people now feel genuinely odd standing in a coffee line without their phone, or sitting alone at a restaurant table for a few minutes while a friend is in the bathroom.

Kirk pushes back. A hundred years ago, people faced major economic pressures, and many lacked the basic freedom to choose whom they loved. He asks whether it's "almost arrogant" to insist things have now gotten uniquely bad. Hussey grants that earlier eras had their own problems. He quips that a century ago the equivalent of reaching for your phone would have been lighting a cigarette.

But he argues that one problem is particular to this time: overstimulation from an almost infinite "buffet" of people on dating apps and Instagram, a "conveyor belt" that seems to endlessly produce new people who each might have something the last one didn't. This, he says, produces a decision paralysis that didn't exist in the same way before, because humans aren't designed to see so many options.

He adds a second point about trust. In the past you saw the people in your town in real life, so you had a reliable sense of how attracted you were to them. Now people meet filtered versions of each other. He describes a date years ago where he couldn't find the woman he was meeting at a coffee shop. She was there the whole time, and he walked past her a couple of times because she looked so different from her photos. He stresses that this isn't only something women do. Men do it too, and everyone does it to some extent, some far more than others. AI adds another layer, he says, because you can no longer tell from someone's writing whether they wrote it themselves. His conclusion is that trust is at "peak levels" of distrust. Until you meet someone in person, "our trust levels are on the floor," in dating and in life generally.

35:39

Where Hussey's affinity with women comes from

Kirk observes that Hussey projects trust and empathy toward his audience, much of which is women, and asks whether some person or event gave him that resonance.

Hussey first describes how he was branded early on. At 21 he was dubbed something like "the man whisperer," a guy who knows men and can explain them to women. He says he found it a tacky angle even then, though it was useful for getting through the door when he lacked decades of life experience. Today he calls the concept "silly." Kirk agrees that it doesn't represent him. In Kirk's view, Hussey isn't constantly identifying with "the dude," and has a genuine connection with people of a different gender that many people lack.

The real source, Hussey says, is his family. He describes coming from "really strong stock" when it comes to women. His great-grandmother lived to 98, had a large anchor tattoo on her arm, and was "the toughest woman around." She raised a tough daughter, his grandmother, who in turn had twins, his mother and his aunt. He respects all of them for their ability to "weather the storm." He also sees them as women who weren't taught the right lessons about men and weren't given the opportunities they should have had.

In his family, which comes from the East End of London, the men were away all day and the women raised the children. The women hosted the Friday sleepovers and led the weekend adventures. So, he says, when he sees women having a hard time, it's easy for him to relate it back to the women who raised him. He says he has been angry many times in his career about how women are treated, how men talk about them, and what men feel entitled to with them. He "doesn't have to dig deep" for that anger. He believes it has served him well because it came from "a raw place" rather than a virtue-signaling decision to jump on a bandwagon.

41:34

"It's always about money": responding to angry male commenters

Kirk connects that anger to a type of comment the show sees often. Under an episode about men's fear that women only care about money, a commenter named Dmitri 3876 wrote: "It's always about money. No matter how sophisticated tales women make it, stable future, safety," followed by a smiley face. Kirk says comments like this frustrate him. They seem to reflect a desire to stay in distrust, and in a reality worse than the actual one, in which women are nuanced, diverse, and varied. He wants to draw such men in and show them things could be better, but the anger behind the comments makes it hard to respond with anything but revulsion. He asks Hussey how the show should engage with them.

Hussey says anyone can arrive at that level of frustration and disillusionment, and that the same thing happens in reverse: women who conclude that with men it's always about looks, or always about age. He sympathizes, but says that's not someone who has had healthy mentors. In his view, much of what men believe about women comes from childhood, from watching their mothers or absorbing what their fathers and other male role models told them. If you're angry that it's all about money, he suggests, there's a good chance money is a trigger or an insecurity for you, an area where you never feel good enough.

He does not deny the evidence. There are women who care too much about money and who will leave one man for a richer one, and anyone looking for examples will find them. The problem, he argues, is becoming convinced that this is the only reality. He mentions his wife's sister, who had been staying with them that week. She is in a happy relationship, is ambitious, is "a top lawyer," and has a long list of wonderful qualities. According to Hussey, money barely registers in her values beyond having enough to live comfortably. He says he doesn't have to look far to find women who don't choose partners based on money, and suspects Kirk doesn't either. So he wonders who these men are who lack any counterexamples. Either they have embedded themselves in a social world he'd like to pull them out of, or they are "willfully ignoring" evidence that contradicts what they've decided to believe.

48:12

A listener who earns three times what her boyfriend does

Kirk reads one of several emails women sent in response to that episode offering counterexamples. The writer says she earns $150,000 in a major Texas city, about three times what her boyfriend earned when they met. At the time he was living with his grandmother, while she owned her home. She says she deliberately chose to "see the person, not the circumstance." She describes being deeply in love with someone attractive who shares her values and cares for her "in a way that's rare." She also writes that navigating love, gender expectations, and money at the same time has been more complex than she expected.

Hussey reads this as maturity. She doesn't pretend there are no dynamics, but she knows her "north star," and it isn't finding someone with equal or greater earnings at any cost. If a man resents a woman for even acknowledging such dynamics, he argues, that cuts both ways. He compares it to a woman resenting a man for ever being attracted to younger women, when he has consciously chosen a partner his own age or older because of their connection. People make choices because they decide some things matter more, he says. Someone else might be richer or might have had a different initial sex appeal, but "this is who I want a life with." Being angry that people even have those thoughts, he says, amounts to being "mad at life."

51:16

Rising standards require evolution on both sides

Hussey also turns a critical eye on women. He describes recent changes, including more women than men graduating from university, women's earning power rising sharply, and many women out-earning men, as "nothing but positive." But he says they require evolution on both sides.

He recalls a film set, he thinks, in the 1970s in the East End of London. During an argument, the husband asks what's so bad about their relationship, since he puts food on the table and has never raised a hand to her. She replies that never raising a hand to her is simply how it should be. If women's standards have risen to the point where earning a paycheck and not being abusive are no longer enough, Hussey says, "good."

That shift leaves many men realizing that their usual ways of impressing someone, such as a decent job and being a generally decent person, carry less weight. Women who don't need a man for a paycheck have a different level of freedom and will naturally look for more. Men, he says, "have a long way to go" in getting comfortable with this. But women who are rewriting what they want also have "soul-searching" to do. If a woman says she wants a man who earns what she earns, she should ask why, and whether it is really as important as she once decided. With the ability to choose, he says, comes the responsibility to choose.

Kirk takes this back to the commenter. We can trust that such choices may be made for good reasons, he says. He would rather believe in a world where, even with all the options available, people value you for your connection and for being in touch with what makes you special, than one where people always choose "the best thing" once they have a choice. He says he is glad such comments appear, because they create an opening to invite those men to believe in a better alternative, on both sides.

55:38

Taking responsibility for the world you date in

Hussey adds a harder point. If everyone you choose cares most about money, at some point that says something about your choices. You are "playing in a certain world" with a certain kind of person. Rather than condemning all women, or all men, you may need to ask why you keep being drawn to people who value only one thing. He also suggests asking whether you hold some contempt for the other people who exist, contempt that keeps you from ever considering them.

He draws on his own history. He says he has been hurt, heartbroken, and dumped for someone who looked the part, someone who seemed to be "everything that I didn't feel like I was." He says people sometimes talk as if nobody else knows that kind of pain. At that point, he says, you choose. You can spend your life chasing the person who dumped you "with another face and another name," or you can recognize there's a game being played that you don't want to join again and look for a different kind of person.

If you move toward different people and notice contempt for them, perhaps because they weren't the cheerleader or the football captain, "now you're on to something," he says. The question becomes why you're so determined to win over people who treat you badly and keep deciding you're not rich enough or tall enough. "They're just not the only people that exist," he says, "and if you think they are, you're not paying attention."

59:07

A lighter ending: pie and mash

The episode closes on a joke. Kirk asks whether Hussey worries that Kirk has become the new favorite son of Hussey's mother, Pauline, who greets Kirk with "Oh, how are you, love?" and a kiss on the cheek. Hussey says the real threat is that Kirk enjoyed pie and mash on a team retreat to England. Hussey describes it as a very regional, old East End dish rather than a national one: a meat pie with mash, covered in "liquor," a thick green parsley sauce that has nothing to do with alcohol. Kirk even knew the lingo. Hussey explains that you order by numbers, such as "a two and one" for two pies and one mash, and that the shops take cash only. Kirk managed just one pie. Hussey concedes there is little left he can offer his mother that Kirk can't: "My mom loves a good eater."

Because this was the first episode in this format, Hussey and Kirk end by asking listeners whether they'd like it repeated every few weeks or monthly. They invite anyone with a challenge for Hussey, or a comment they'd like Kirk to read out, to email the show.