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Matthew Hussey on Becoming a Father: Fear, Making Space, and Choosing Peace Over Routine

Matthew Hussey · ▶ 15:16 · 10 min read
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Overview

Matthew Hussey usually publishes structured, instructional videos on dating and relationships. This one is unscripted. He uses it to share news many viewers had asked about: in the past couple of months, he and his wife Audrey welcomed their son. Hussey describes himself as someone who has spent almost two decades coaching people in their love lives and has written two New York Times best-selling books on love and dating. He notes that this is the first time in all those years that he has been both married and a parent. The video covers his fear of commitment, what changed it, what the first weeks of fatherhood have been like, and how he is trying to rethink his priorities.

10 min read
1:30

The Questions That Follow You at Every Stage

Hussey starts with an irony of his profession. When he was single, people constantly asked why he wasn't in a relationship. He says his answer was probably the same as many of his viewers': he hadn't found the right person yet, it hadn't worked out, or it never quite felt right when he wanted it to. Once he was in a relationship, the question changed to when he was going to have kids, often followed by the comment that he'd make a great dad.

2:15

Why Marriage and Children Terrified Him

Hussey says he was always "quite scared" of the big forms of commitment, marriage and children. Both felt like enormous leaps, and he found each decision frightening for different reasons.

His fear of marriage came from how he had lived. Much of his life, he says, was about opening doors and creating more opportunities. Marriage felt like saying no to everything, or at least to everyone on earth except one person.

Having children felt even more frightening. Hussey explains that he has carried a lot of responsibility for most of his life: taking care of family and running a large organization. A child felt like one more thing on top of all that, and he remembers asking himself whether he could really take on anything else.

3:20

A Therapist's Advice: Actively Create Space

He says a conversation with his therapist helped a great deal. He had been struggling with his fear of having children, and his therapist offered a reframing. As Hussey recounts it, the therapist said that he loves intensely, is very close to his family and the people he cares about, and in many ways fits the profile of someone who would love having children. But the therapist didn't think Hussey could even connect with that feeling at the moment, because his life was so full and so loaded with responsibility that there was no space. The suggestion was that he might need to actively create space just to find out what he felt.

Hussey acted on this. He cancelled a planned world tour he had been organizing with his team. He started traveling less, and he and Audrey built a more rooted life. He began turning down many things. He is careful not to overstate the change: it wasn't as if he got half his schedule back, but bit by bit he freed up some room. As that happened, he found himself growing more excited about the idea of having a child.

4:30

"You'll Feel Different When It's Your Own"

He was told over and over that the responsibilities that seemed so heavy would feel different once the child was his own. He hoped that was true, but he admits he had no way of knowing before his son arrived. He even felt anxious about whether he would feel what he was "supposed" to feel at the birth.

His reaction turned out to be immediate. He wanted to remember the moment, partly because his memory isn't always reliable, but he didn't want to hold up a phone and be distracted from being present. So he wore Meta Ray-Ban glasses to record the moment the doctors held his son up (he adds that he didn't film any of the gory parts). According to Hussey, all you can hear on the recording is him weeping. He describes the crying as uncontrollable and reflexive, and says he loved his son "so much so quickly."

He immediately adds a caveat. Not everyone feels this way, and he notes that people tend to judge themselves over whether they are experiencing these moments "right." He mentions friends who are now obsessed with their children but say it took them a few months to get there. From what he understands, he says, it is different for everyone; for him it simply happened very fast.

6:09

The Hardest Part, and What It Did for His Marriage

In some ways, Hussey says, the hardest part has been how much he just wants to spend time with his son. He describes "these blissful two weeks" at the start when he could simply be with the baby and Audrey.

He praises Audrey at length. He says he was blown away by how she handled pregnancy and birth and by how she has shown up as a mother over the past two months. He already respected her enormously, he says, but watching her in this role took his love and respect to a whole new level, and the experience has been "amazing for our relationship."

He also acknowledges why this period strains many couples. Parents are sleep deprived, sometimes forget to eat, and are tired, hungry, and nervous about doing things wrong while they figure it all out. In that environment, he says, it is very easy to fight.

7:06

"Our Nervous Systems Are Training His"

The awareness Hussey keeps returning to comes from a familiar parenting lesson: children watch what you do far more than they listen to what you say. He argues this is even more true of a baby, who doesn't understand words at all. He believes his son is feeling his parents' energy on some level. He admits he doesn't know on what level, but he takes seriously the idea that his and Audrey's nervous systems are training their son's nervous system right now.

That has made him very conscious of how he and Audrey behave with each other and with the baby. He is candid that calm has not been one of his strengths; he would not describe himself as a particularly calm person. In recent years, though, he says he has worked hard to bring more calm into his life. Where he once chased ambition, success, and getting ahead, he now tries to "chase peace," and he wants to pass that on to his son.

He describes this as a constant check on his own chronic stress. He finds himself asking whether he is presenting as a good version of himself and whether he is calm in that moment. The motivation is personal. He doesn't want his son to grow up with the same anxieties he has had, which he names as hypervigilance and the constant worry that "the other shoe's going to drop."

He also reflects on having brought someone into the world who didn't choose to be here, and he imagines his son thinking, "What the hell am I doing here?" That feeling, he says, makes him want his son to have a great life. He recognizes that you can't protect someone from everything, but he wants his son to feel really safe, to suffer as little as possible, or at least not to suffer in all the same ways he did.

10:30

The Fear That Came True: Routines

One of Hussey's specific fears was that his routines would fall apart. A member of his team reminded him, somewhat to his embarrassment, of an interview from a couple of years earlier with his friend Ali Abdaal, and he plays a clip of it. Asked what scared him about having kids, Hussey listed "so much life change," "so much responsibility," and the feeling that there's never a break. He also described a kind of claustrophobia at the idea that a person might need you every moment of the day. He added the worry that he hadn't yet done everything he wanted to: after working so hard for so long, he hadn't traveled as much as he'd like or shared enough time with Audrey doing things together as a couple, and he thought there might be more experiences to have first. In the clip, he notices a theme running through all of these answers.

Looking back now, he says he was right about the routines, because they have "gone out the bloody window." He has barely seen the inside of a gym or any of his friends, and he and Audrey are both running on fumes in many ways.

12:17

Loyalty to Present Values, Not Old Standards

The odd thing, Hussey says, is that although caring for his son is the greatest responsibility of his life, he doesn't mind. He then qualifies this: he does mind not getting to the gym, and there are things he wishes he could do more. But they aren't the priority right now.

He says what has "saved" him is staying loyal to what matters most to him now, in terms of his values, rather than to standards he set for himself at a different time in his life. His example is simple. If the choice is between an hour at the gym and an hour of quality time with his son, he spends it with his son and accepts being somewhat more out of shape for now, "and maybe for a minute, who knows." He stresses that this doesn't mean he'll do nothing. He is still finding his feet with new rhythms and routines, and he and Audrey are finding their feet as a couple, because things are different right now.

His guiding reminder is that "it's all living." At the end of his life, he wants to look back and say he did a lot of living, and he believes he is doing a lot of it now. That may offend the perfectionist in him, the part that likes neat order, clean lines, and shirts not wrinkled by a baby squished against them all day. But he says he can embrace the imperfection and mess, knowing that the highest vision he has for his life is being realized.

14:14

Questions for Viewers

Hussey stops there, saying he could go on much longer and plans to do so in a podcast episode on the subject. He closes with questions for his audience. Those who are afraid of a future commitment: how are they dealing with that fear, and what exactly is it? Those who are married, have children, or have made another big commitment: looking back at a fear they once had, was it legitimate? Did it turn out to be true, or was it something they never needed to worry about? He also asks viewers whether they would like more videos in this unscripted style.

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