Should Dating Advice Come Only From People Who Know Rejection? Matthew Hussey on Stephanie Yeboah's Challenge
Matthew Hussey
The video starts from the title of a British Vogue article: "I no longer want to hear dating advice from conventionally attractive people." Matthew Hussey, a dating coach who says he has spent nearly two decades coaching people and has written two New York Times best-selling books on finding, attracting, and keeping love, calls the piece "too important," "too raw," and "too honest" to leave alone. It reflects many people's lived experience, he says. His question is what dating advice is actually useful to people who start from a disadvantage, as opposed to advice that only works for people who are already privileged.
Hussey describes the setting that makes the article sharp. Anyone who looks online for help finding love meets "an avalanche" of psychologists, therapists, coaches, and "super hot 20-something TikTokers." When the person giving advice doesn't look like you and has advantages you lack, he says, the advice can feel unhelpful, patronizing, and "borderline offensive."
Stephanie Yeboah's Original Argument
The Vogue article grew out of an Instagram video by writer Stephanie Yeboah, which Hussey plays before turning to the text. In the clip, Yeboah says she has disliked dating advice from conventionally attractive people since she was a teenager. She compares it to asking a rich person how to survive being poor: they have never lived at that level, so they can't understand it.
Hussey agrees with this point and restates it with a mountain metaphor. Someone at the top of a mountain may shout advice to the climbers below. But if that person started at a point on the mountain the climbers never reached, the advice can sound glib. The climbers' reply, in his paraphrase: I get that you know how to climb, but you started higher than me, so how does that help me from where I am?
Yeboah then names specific advice she finds condescending: "just be confident" and "put yourself out there." She accepts that it works, but only when "people are already lining up to say yes to you." In her words, "confidence looks different when society already sees you as desirable," and for people outside conventional beauty standards, "the rejection can hit a little bit harder."
Why Rejection Doesn't Weigh the Same for Everyone
Hussey calls this "a massively important point." Everyone faces rejection, he says, but rejection that comes between successes and moments of feeling desirable is different from rejection that follows a lifetime of rejection. The second kind confirms a belief that one is not worthy or desirable. Someone who generally feels attractive can treat a rejection as a brief setback on the way to the next person who finds them attractive.
Yeboah explains in the clip where her view comes from. Five years earlier she wrote Fattily Ever After, which has a chapter on dating based on conversations with plus-size Black women around the world. That work, she says, made her think about how disadvantaged certain groups are in dating. It was also one reason she wrote Chaotic Energy, a novel whose plus-size, dark-skinned main character is "the most confident person in the world" and keeps putting herself out there, "but again, to no avail."
Hussey asks viewers to keep that character in mind for the rest of the video. What matters to him is that the story has no reward at the end. The character's confidence does not produce results, and that runs against the usual claim that confidence gets you what you want.
At the end of the clip, Yeboah says she wishes more dating and relationship content came from people other than those who are "objectively, you know, very conventionally attractive" and who "get by on privilege," naming white privilege, light-skin privilege, and weight privilege.
The Irony of the Messenger
Hussey says he is aware of the irony. Yeboah, and some viewers, may feel he "ticks some of the boxes" she describes. He still chose to make the video because he doesn't want to skip a topic he considers important. If he thinks something is truthful and agrees with it at some level, he wants to draw attention to it. He addresses the rest of the video especially to viewers who feel marginalized by standard dating advice or by the people who give it.
Reactions That Erase the Experience
Hussey then reads from Yeboah's article, starting with her description of the comments on her video. Some told her to lose weight if she wanted to find a man. Others dismissed her view by insisting she is conventionally attractive. She calls that "an assertion I strongly reject and one that erases years of traumatic dating experience that say otherwise."
Hussey connects the second reaction to something he thinks many viewers know from family and friends. After one bad dating experience after another, loved ones say how beautiful you are and that everyone is insane for not seeing it. He says this "kind of gaslights you" on your own experience, which may be quite different from the experience of the person reassuring you.
Clarity, Not Bitterness
The passage Hussey quotes most fully is Yeboah's explanation of her position. She writes that rejecting advice from conventionally attractive people "isn't a show of bitterness. It feels more like clarity." She knows the terrain she walks on, "full of obstacles and pitfalls they've never had to face," and in a dating world "this uneven" she would rather hear from "those who know what it means to stumble, to be overlooked, and to still keep going." She ends: "I don't need another TikToker telling me how to find a man. I need voices that recognize the battlefield I'm already on." Hussey calls it a beautifully written piece.
He then states how he sees dating. Confidence is easier when the world already affirms your desirability. Pretty privilege is real and acts as an invisible buffer against rejection. The social-media advice economy often rewards looks over real insight. For many people, rejection is not neutral but cumulative and often traumatic. To someone who has lived through that, "just be confident" can sound like an instruction to ignore all the evidence that the world treats them differently.
Hussey also admits a limit in his own work. Many of his videos cover spotting bad behavior, noticing incompatibilities, unequal investment, and looking for consistency. He says those can feel "completely irrelevant and redundant" to someone who never gets far enough in dating for any of that to matter.
When Hope Becomes Chronic Pain
Hussey says plainly that life isn't fair and that privilege is unevenly distributed. That can make people want to leave dating altogether, and he calls this "completely understandable." He says he never judges people who decide they're done: no romantic relationships, just friends, taking the expectation off the table so they can breathe and be at peace.
What such people want to escape, in his description, is "constant hope, which is after a while a form of chronic pain." We usually treat hope as positive, he says, but over time it can hurt. Removing the possibility of ever finding someone can feel like relief.
He warns about a risk even in that choice. It can turn into contempt for other people. Even in non-romantic interactions, the thought that someone would treat you better if you were more conventionally attractive can make you dislike people, even hate them.
Empathy and What It Tells You to Look For
Hussey suggests part of the answer is a highly developed empathy: recognizing that people often fall into the trap of overvaluing superficial qualities and overreacting to them, and that we have probably done the same ourselves.
He says this recognition also clarifies whom to look for: people who have in some way moved past that trap and look for deeper qualities. Such people may have consciously decided, perhaps after experience and wrong choices, to value something beyond or above appearance.
Love Is Not a Popularity Contest
Coming back to his main question, Hussey's first point is that love is "not a popularity contest," which he calls a relief. Someone seeking a long-term committed relationship isn't looking for the whole world or crowds of people to want them. They want one person. He grants that being found attractive by many people makes finding that one easier. His point is that you only need one person who truly understands you and truly wants you.
He calls the difficult part the need for "our light" to shine. Meeting that person requires warmth or playfulness and keeping one's spirits up, because that is how the person will notice us. Even if the right person is "one in a thousand," he wants people to meet them as a version of themselves that person will pay attention to. He acknowledges this is harder after repeated rejection, and that people in that position will have to "source our confidence from somewhere else than the average person."
Fit Over Mass Appeal
Hussey asks viewers to imagine that someone out there is looking for them. He believes that even people who don't feel conventionally attractive have many possible matches looking for someone like them. That person may need to be "a special kind of person," one who doesn't put looks and conventional attractiveness above everything and who values what you offer.
He puts it this way: finding love "is not about trying to create mass appeal," it's about fit. He also says the right fit can produce confidence one never had or has lost to rejection. One of the best things about the right relationship, he says, is that acceptance, love, and validation from another person can help us shine more brightly and become more confident. He separates this from depending on a partner for confidence, while saying that being with someone who sees your value can still change it.
Building Confidence From Self-Respect
For the time before meeting that person, when rejection has made confidence hard to find, Hussey's main advice is to live in a way that makes you proud of yourself. That includes how you take each step in life, how you treat people, what you do, and the small and large challenges you overcome. He argues that the resulting pride can create a kind of confidence. People who are proud of themselves carry themselves differently, and that, he says, makes them more likely to be noticed by someone who will appreciate them.
This differs from the "just be confident" advice criticized earlier. Hussey doesn't ask people to ignore the evidence of how they've been treated. He points to self-respect as a source of confidence that doesn't depend on outside approval.
Resilience
Hussey ends with resilience, which he calls one of the most powerful human traits and possibly the most powerful. Someone who has faced 99% or 99.9% rejection in their love life needs a great deal of resilience to keep believing the right person exists and will accept them for who they are.
In his experience, resilience tends to appear when there is no other option. For people who deeply value and want human connection, he says, resilience may seem like the only choice, because giving up on connection makes even less sense than continuing to put themselves out there. If it takes extraordinary resilience, he suggests they remember that resilience may be the most valuable transferable skill they can develop, and if dating is where they build it, "so be it."
He closes by saying people should take this message from whoever they need to hear it from, whether him or someone else. He is glad the conversation is happening because it is real, honest, and truthful.
“I no longer want to hear dating advice from conventionally attractive people.” That was the title of an article in Vogue that I read recently that caught my attention, and I thought, I have to make a video about this. It's too important. It's too raw. It's too honest, and it is so many people's lived experience out there.
If you are looking for love and you go online looking for advice about how to find love, you are going to be met by an avalanche of psychologists, therapists, coaches, and super hot 20-something TikTokers all giving you their two cents on how you should be going about finding love. And when that person who's giving you the advice doesn't look like you, has advantages you do not have, it can feel unhelpful, patronizing, and borderline offensive.
As someone who has been coaching people for nearly two decades of my life, I've worked with millions of people, I've written two New York Times best-selling books on the subject of finding, attracting, and keeping love, I want to bring light to this conversation because I think it's extraordinarily important.
Now, this Vogue article actually originated as a video on the Instagram account of Stephanie Yeboah. Stephanie, I hope I'm saying your last name correctly. We are going to play that video first before we dive into the article.
I don't like hearing dating advice from conventionally attractive people, and I've always thought this way since I was a teenager. It's like asking a rich person how to survive being poor. They've never had to live at that level, so they wouldn't understand.
I think that in itself is a very important point. The idea that if someone is standing at the top of a mountain yelling advice for people trying to get to the top of the mountain, but the advice you're giving is to people who started at a place in the mountain that you never had to climb in the first place because you started at base camp, then it can feel patronizing and glib to the people who are like, I get that you have advice for how to get up this mountain, but you started higher on the mountain than me. So, how is that going to help me where I am right now?
People say things that can come across as really condescending like, just be confident. Put yourself out there. And I'm sure that works. Of course that's going to work when people are already lining up to say yes to you. Confidence looks different when society already sees you as desirable. For a lot of us who don't fit into those conventional standards of beauty, the rejection can hit a little bit harder.
That is a massively important point. We all experience rejection. No one is immune to rejection, but rejection mixed in with a bunch of successes and moments where you're made to feel desirable is a very different thing than the kind of rejection that comes on the back of a lifetime of rejection. So, that kind of rejection confirms the idea that we're not worthy, that we're not desirable in the world. But someone who does generally feel attractive can write off a rejection more easily as a momentary setback on the road to yet another person who finds them attractive.
I wrote a book five years ago called Fattily Ever After, and in it I have a whole dating chapter where I have spoken to plus-size Black women from around the world about their dating experiences. And it was something that really helped me think about how disadvantaged certain groups are when it comes to the dating game. And it's one of the reasons why I wrote Chaotic Energy, where you have a plus-size dark-skinned character who is the most confident person in the world, and she's always putting herself out there, but again, to no avail.
Firstly, I'm going to link Stephanie's books up in the description so that if you want to hear more from Stephanie and you want to read more of Stephanie's work and characters that you can relate to, you can grab those. I think that character that Stephanie presents of there being a woman of color who is confident and does put herself out there, but to no avail—it's not like, and therefore she gets all these results—is a really, really important image to hold in our mind as we go through this video.
Just wish that there was more dating relationship content that didn't always have to come from the mouth of an objectively very conventionally attractive person who gets by on privilege, whether that's white privilege, light skin privilege, weight privilege, all of that kind of stuff.
I'm conscious, of course, of the irony of me making this video right now talking about this subject when Stephanie and some of you may feel I tick some of the boxes that she is talking about. I never want to not make a video that I think is important. If I think that it's truthful and I agree with what someone is saying on some level, I want to bring light to it. So, that's what I want to do with this conversation today, especially for those of you who feel marginalized by regular dating advice or by who it's coming from.
So, let's get into the article that Stephanie wrote because there's some really, really important lines in this article. Stephanie talks about the reaction to that video that you just watched. She said, “The comments are telling. Some are urging me to lose weight if I want to find a man. Others are dismissing my perspective outright by insisting I am conventionally attractive, an assertion I strongly reject and one that erases years of traumatic dating experience that say otherwise.”
You may have experienced this from your family or from your friends who, whenever you have a bad dating experience or one bad dating experience after another, keep telling you how beautiful you are, how gorgeous you are, how everyone is insane for not seeing it, but really it just kind of gaslights you on the experience that you're having, which is maybe a different one from the experience of the person who's saying this to you.
She goes on to say, “So, when I reject dating advice from conventionally attractive people, it isn't a show of bitterness. It feels more like clarity. I'm aware of the terrain I walk on, full of obstacles and pitfalls they've never had to face. And in a dating world this uneven, I'd rather take advice from those who know what it means to stumble, to be overlooked, and to still keep going because at the end of the day, I don't need another TikToker telling me how to find a man. I need voices that recognize the battlefield I'm already on.” What a beautifully written piece, by the way.
Here's the reality of dating. Confidence is easier when the world already affirms your desirability. Pretty privilege is real. It creates an invisible buffer from rejection. The advice economy on social media does often reward aesthetics over genuine, meaningful insight. And for many people, rejection is not neutral. It is cumulative and often traumatic. For people who have lived through that, the advice to just be confident can sound like, “Ignore all of the evidence that you have experienced that the world treats you differently.”
And by the way, I am so aware that many of my videos on looking for the wrong behavior, being aware of incompatibilities, unequal investment, looking for consistency in someone's behavior, all feel completely irrelevant and redundant if you never even get to that stage. The reality is life isn't fair. And various forms of privilege are not distributed equally.
That can make one feel like they want to check out of the process altogether. And I think it's completely understandable. I never judge people for thinking or deciding, “I'm done. I'm done. I don't want to date anymore. I'm not going to have relationships romantically. I'm just going to have my friends. I'm going to go through life taking that expectation off the table so I can breathe better, be at peace, not live in this constant hope, which is after a while a form of chronic pain.” We always think of hope as a positive thing, but hope can become a form of chronic pain over time.
“I don't want to live in that place anymore. So, I'm just going to eliminate the possibility in my mind of ever finding someone.” But even that can lead to contempt of other people because even if you're talking to people with no intention of it being romantic, just the idea that you would be treating me better right now if I was more conventionally attractive, if I aesthetically looked the part, can make us not like people, can make us hate people even.
I think partly this can be solved with a kind of empathy that we develop on a very advanced level for other people where we realize that human beings often fall into the trap of overvaluing superficial qualities and reacting too much to superficial qualities. We ourselves have probably fallen into that trap before, but it does also inform what we're looking for, which is people who on some level have transcended that, people who do actually look for the deeper qualities in life, who have very consciously, maybe through experience and making the wrong choices, decided to value something beyond aesthetics, above aesthetics.
Guys, while you're watching this video, I wanted to bring you something you could do after this video that really related to the content of the video. And I know that when we're in a bad place, our defenses are low in dating. That's when we invite the wrong kind of person into our lives. We overinvest, we give too much too soon, we obsess over someone, and often we enable their bad behavior. What I tried to do is train good instincts that not only help people attract the right person, but protect them from the wrong person.
I have created a free training called Dating with Results. Hundreds of thousands of people have been through it. I'm very proud of it, and it's helped a lot of people. I'd love for you to try it as well. You can try it for free at datingwithresults.com. And if you're not ready to give up on love, it is a wonderful place for you to start after you finish this video.
But what does all of this mean for what dating advice is actually useful versus only being applicable for the already privileged? First, I think it's important to recognize that love is not a popularity contest. Thank God. There's no points for being the most popular person when it comes to the game of love because if you're looking for a long-term committed relationship, you're not looking for the world to love you or for hordes of people to want you. You just want one.
Now, I realize that having hordes of people who think you're attractive makes it easier to find that one, but at the end of the day all of us who want a committed relationship are looking for one person. So, you only need one. One person who truly gets you. One person that truly wants you. And in order to meet that person, the hard part is that our light has to shine.
There has to be a level of warmth or playfulness. We have to find a way to keep our spirits up because that's how that person is going to see us. And when we do meet that person, even if it's one in a thousand, we want to meet them as a version of ourselves that they're actually going to pay attention to. This is obviously going to be harder to keep our spirits up if we keep facing rejections. And we're going to have to source our confidence from somewhere else than the average person.
But imagine that there is someone out there who is looking for you. And even if you feel that you are not conventionally attractive, I still believe that there are many possible ones for you who are looking for someone like you. But that person might need to be a special kind of person. They need to be the kind of person that doesn't value looks and someone being conventionally attractive above all else. They need to be the kind of person that values what you have to offer.
Finding love is not about trying to create mass appeal. Finding love is about fit. We're trying to find the right fit for us. And when we do find the right fit for us, it can even bring out a kind of confidence that we've never had or that has become lost to the rejections of our life. It's one of the most beautiful things about the right relationship is that we can actually shine more brightly. We can become more confident because of the acceptance and the love and the validation that we are given by somebody else. It's not the same as relying on it, but of course it can change our confidence to be with someone who really sees what's valuable about us.
In the meantime, before you find that person, if you're struggling because of everything you've been through to locate that confidence, I think one of the most important pieces of advice is to do things and to live in such a way that you make yourself proud. That you like the person that you show up as. That the way you put one foot in front of the other in life, the way you treat people, the things you do, the small and big challenges that you conquer make you a person that you are proud of.
And that personal pride that comes from that can engender a kind of confidence. And when we go out into the world as a person who's proud of themselves, we carry ourselves differently. And when we carry ourselves differently, we're far more likely to show up on the radar of that person who will appreciate us.
Resilience is one of the most powerful human traits there is. There's an argument to say resilience is the most powerful human trait there is. If you've experienced 99% or 99.9% rejection in your love life, it takes a whole lot of resilience to continue to believe that the right person is out there for you. That someone will one day accept you and love you for what you present and what you have to offer.
My experience of resilience is that it tends to be the thing that shows up when there's no other option. And when you know that human connection is something that you deeply value and deeply, deeply desire, regardless of how much rejection you may have faced, resilience, you may decide, is your only option. Because giving up on human connection makes even less sense than continuing to put yourself out there in the world to get human connection.
But if it requires extraordinary resilience for you to do that, if nothing else, remind yourself that resilience might be the most powerful transferable skill that you can ever develop in life. And if this is where you end up building it, so be it.
Whoever you need to hear this message from, whether it's me or somebody else, I just appreciate us having the conversation because it's real, it's honest, it's truthful. And those are the only kinds of conversations I want us to have. I'll see you next time.
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