Five Principles for Flirting in Real Life, According to Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey opens by observing that more people than ever are telling him they want to get offline and meet others in person, something he says he has advocated on his channel for nearly two decades. The difficulty, in his view, is that people have spent years handing the earliest stages of dating over to apps, and in doing so have lost their "flirting muscle": the small, everyday gestures that used to create real possibility between strangers. He describes many people today as more socially awkward and anxious than before. They don't know how to start a conversation or signal interest, they fear looking "cringe," and there is no sign above anyone's head saying whether they are single or what they want.
His goal in the video is to make flirting feel less overwhelming. He does this through five principles about the psychology of flirting and why certain approaches work, and he closes with a line he considers one of the best he has come up with in years.
Principle One: Start Small
Hussey argues that flirting is too often treated as a search for the wittiest, most attractive thing one could possibly say or do. He blames the apps partly for this, because they have fed a culture in which it feels like there is only a very short window to stand out before someone moves on to the next person. Real life, he says, doesn't work that way. In a normal social situation, someone arriving with the perfect line isn't necessarily what grabs us. What matters is warmth and how comfortable the other person makes us feel.
He also criticizes ideas that he says stop people, especially women, from feeling they can make any move at all. His examples are "black cat energy," "women don't chase," "vulnerability is weak," and "showing interest makes them run." He describes all of these as resting on the assumption that showing your cards or being vulnerable lowers your value. His counterclaim is that, whatever one believes, more opportunities will come from taking small steps to engage people, taking oneself a little less seriously, and no longer thinking of flirting as something that must be executed smoothly and perfectly.
As an illustration, Hussey recounts the night he met his wife, Audrey. He was standing at a TV in a bar watching a boxing match, and Audrey spoke first. There was no brilliant line and no overt compliment. As an example of what Audrey didn't say, Hussey offers the joke "From the look of your biceps, you must be a boxer yourself." What Audrey actually asked was some version of how boxing works, perhaps how many rounds there are in a fight. Hussey admits he can't remember the exact question, and he treats that as the point: the wording wasn't important. What mattered was that something began, and that one person became comfortable enough to have a conversation with the other.
From this he draws a reframing. Talking to people shouldn't be thought of as going around hitting on people, because that framing is frightening and stops people from ever doing it. Instead it should be thought of as a way of increasing your approachability. At this small scale, he says, there is no need to obsess over avoiding rejection, because rejections at this stage are tiny. They are little experiments, and if someone doesn't keep the conversation going, it's no big deal. A brief comic skit with a "flirting fish" follows, playing on the boxer-biceps line.
Principle Two: Create Space
Hussey then turns to what he calls a huge and very common mistake that can make the other person so uncomfortable they can't focus on the interaction: making them fear you will never leave. One of the most important things to signal early, he says, is that you are not going to stick around forever. In his words, warmth shouldn't mean intensity. Once someone thinks they won't be able to get away, their brain gets "hijacked" and they can no longer enjoy the moment.
He offers a simple rule of thumb. If your feet are pointed directly at someone during the first two minutes of talking, you risk making them focus on how to escape. He adds that this isn't a rule to apply obsessively 100% of the time, but he considers it a good indicator. The alternative is to angle your body away while you are first engaging someone. This happened naturally when he and Audrey met, because they were standing side by side commenting on the TV in front of them, which gave the conversation a "semi-external focus." He compares it to sitting on a barstool and speaking to the person next to you. You wouldn't stand up and turn your stool to face them. You would turn your upper body toward them while speaking, in a way that could easily turn back to face forward.
A second way to create space is to break away from the conversation to do something else. In a coffee shop, you might return to your book for a while. At a party or get-together, you might engage someone else in the room or bring another person into the conversation. According to Hussey, showing that you can break away signals that you aren't needy, that you are independent, and that you have the social skill to move between people. The key effect, he says, is that the other person starts wondering whether you'll come back and talk to them, rather than how to get away from you.
Principle Three: Indirect Flirting, or the "Drive-By Compliment"
The third principle concerns how to show attraction. Hussey says people often go in overly direct, telling someone in a very overt way how attractive they find them. This can make it look as though attraction is the whole focus, and it can feel overly sincere or intense. He still thinks it is important to let someone know you find them attractive or appealing, because that is part of signaling that there is something beyond the platonic. The question is how to do it in a way that feels lighter, more playful, and less fazed, in a way that actually feels like flirting. His answer is to do it indirectly.
His example: in a conversation that is flowing well, where both people are clearly having a good time, you might say, "You're really easy to talk to, even if I am occasionally a little distracted by your eyes." (Here the flirting-fish skit returns briefly.) What he likes about this is that it introduces a "little bolt of electricity" into the interaction. The comment can be delivered matter-of-factly, and then you simply move on. Right after the remark about the eyes, you might say, "Anyway, the thing I wanted to say about that movie is…" and keep going.
He also broadens what counts as a compliment. It doesn't have to be literally about looks. Saying something like "Wow, that's so interesting, I hadn't thought about it like that, I really agree with that" compliments someone's mind, and he says it will make them feel very good. His broader point is that flirting doesn't have to be literal, and nothing needs to be overtly sexual, or even obviously tied to sexual tension, to count as flirting.
Principle Four: Go Slow
Hussey acknowledges that these conversations can feel high-stakes. People want to find love, and meeting someone they like naturally makes them nervous. Nervousness makes people speed up, and he describes speed as often a product of anxiety and excessive self-awareness. Seduction, sensuality, and flirting, he argues, exist in the slower moments: the pauses and the things left unsaid. What draws people in is an ebb and flow in pace.
He calls breath control one of the most important skills here and credits it to his boxing trainer, Martin Snow, who taught it to a group of women at one of Hussey's retreats. A clip from that session follows. In it, Snow says people instinctively hold their breath to protect the spine, and blink when a punch is thrown, which leaves everything else exposed. He wants people to control their breathing instead. Snow also says that, regardless of how hard someone works or how smart they are, what matters is "guts," and tells the women they have guts because they wouldn't have come otherwise. He then leads them through jab-and-cross drills.
The second tool for controlling pace, Hussey says, is becoming present with what the other person is actually saying. Slowing down and paying attention creates room for flirting to happen. His example: you make eye contact with someone, they ask "What?", and you answer, "I don't know. I just wasn't expecting you to say that. I really like that." He calls that flirting, and says it comes from changing the pace. He recommends leaving room for pauses, eye contact, and simply smiling, or even taking a beat, looking at the person, and saying "This is fun." In his view these are the moments that linger and create genuine chemistry.
Principle Five: More Mystery
The last principle is mystery, introduced with a joke ("Mo' mystery, less problems. Mo' mystery, mo' problems"). Hussey describes a current dating culture of saying too much, in which people treat early meetings as occasions to hand over large amounts of personal information: what happened in the last relationship, why they haven't spoken to someone in years, and so on. He points to a newer complication as well. Whether people meet on apps or in person, there is a tendency to immediately exchange social media, such as Instagram handles. As a result, someone who has known you for five minutes instantly gains access to ten years of your history.
For Hussey, being mysterious means not revealing everything about yourself at once; less is more at the beginning. He stresses that this isn't inauthentic. It means distributing information about yourself at an organic pace to someone who is, after all, a stranger. There is no need to list all your impressive qualities right away. Instead, he suggests staying in the moment of what is happening now, rather than in the energy of who you are, what you've done, and what you've achieved. His phrasing is to be "less focused on impressing and more focused on connecting."
He partly blames the self-development world for oversharing, saying it has made people feel they must share "their truth" about their lives and feelings on a first date. A first-date partner, he argues, doesn't need to know your trauma, what your therapist said in your last session, or how your last relationship went. What they need to know is whether they have a good time with you.
He illustrates this with television. People watch an entire season of a series because in the first episode they see a character in a situation and something about that character is captivating. The viewer builds context as the series goes on, and episode one doesn't open with a full explanation of why the character is the way they are. Likewise, Hussey says, you don't need to contextualize yourself on date one. Your job is to be a character someone wants to go on a second date with, and over later dates you add information that explains the person they have become intrigued by.
The Line: "One of Us Had to"
To finish, Hussey shares the line he promised, which he says he came up with on the fly at Love Life New York, a private event for his members. One attendee told him they were trying to be more proactive and talk to more people, and considered themselves generally good at it. Sometimes on the New York subway they would notice a man, the two would make eye contact, and they would go over and talk, and it would turn into something. Other times it didn't work out: they were between stops, it was hard to walk over without worrying about embarrassment in front of everyone, or one of them had only one more stop to go. The member asked what to do when their stop was next and they didn't want to miss a moment with someone who was clearly giving signals.
Hussey's advice was to write their name and number on a piece of paper, add one line to make it flirtatious and give it a confident, sexy feel, and hand it over while getting off the train. The line is: "One of us had to." Hussey calls it brilliant and suggests it could work in many other situations as well.
I have never heard so many people say that they want to get offline and meet people the way we used to, in person. The thing I have been talking about on this channel for nearly two decades. The problem is that for a while now, en masse, we have been outsourcing the earliest stages of our dating life to the dating apps. The apps have made us lose our flirting muscle by stealing the little ways we used to flirt with each other to create real possibility.
Today, many of us are more socially awkward and anxious than ever. We don't know how to connect or start a conversation or do the things that will let someone know that we like them. We hate the idea of looking cringe, and there is no sign over everyone's head saying whether they're single and what they are looking for. But, if you are serious about creating more opportunities in the real world, I want to help you feel more confident in bringing a little flirtation back into your everyday life. And to do that, we have to find a way to make the whole thing less overwhelming.
In this video, I am going to give you five principles on the psychology of flirting and why certain things just work. And by the way, at the end of the video, stay tuned because I am going to give you a line I came up with recently that I think is one of the best lines I have come up with in years.
Number one, start small. Too often, flirting is seen as trying to figure out the wittiest, most attractive thing possible that you could do or say. The apps have not helped. They have fed a culture where it feels like we only have a very short window to stand out before someone is onto the next person. But, you can breathe because real life doesn't actually work like that. In a normal social situation, someone coming over to you and saying the perfect thing isn't necessarily going to be the thing that grabs you. It's the warmth and how comfortable someone makes us.
Unfortunately, these days there are so many ideas out there that prevent people, especially women, from feeling like they can do anything. Black cat energy, women don't chase, vulnerability is weak, showing interest makes them run. All concepts based on the idea that showing your cards or being vulnerable in any way lowers your value. Whatever you believe, I promise you more opportunities will come to you if you take small steps to engage people, take yourself a little less seriously, and stop thinking of flirting as this thing that you have to smoothly and perfectly execute.
The night I met Audrey, my wife, I was standing at a TV in a bar watching a boxing match, and she was the one who spoke to me first. She didn't say some brilliant line, and she didn't come out with some overt compliment like, "From the look of your biceps, you must be a boxer yourself." She said, "How does it work?" I mean, she didn't literally say, "How does it work?" She was something like, "How many rounds are there in a fight?" or something. It was some version of how does boxing work? And by the way, the fact I can't remember exactly what she asked me about the boxing is kind of the point. It's not that important. What is important is that something begins. It all starts with that very first interaction, with someone getting comfortable enough to have a conversation with you.
Don't think of talking to people as your way of going around and hitting on people. That will scare you, and you'll never do it. Think of talking to people as your way of increasing your approachability. When you start small like I'm talking about here, you don't need to obsess about avoiding rejection, because the rejections at this stage are tiny. You're just running little experiments, and if someone doesn't keep the conversation going, no big deal.
But, my flirting fish.
Oh, hi. I didn't even realize you noticed me.
No, no, no.
Mhm.
I'm sorry, married flirting fish.
Ah. But, those biceps. I thought you were a boxer.
Go on.
But, when we do this, there is a huge and very common flirting mistake that we need to avoid, which if we don't, can make someone so uncomfortable that they can't actually focus on how great we are. Making someone scared that we are never going to leave, which is why our second principle for flirting today is create space.
Anytime we start talking to someone, one of the most important things we can indicate early on is that we are not going to stick around forever. Warmth shouldn't mean intensity, because the moment someone thinks that they're not going to be able to get away, their brain gets hijacked and they can't actually focus on enjoying the moment anymore.
Here is a simple rule. If in the first two minutes of talking to someone, your feet are pointed directly at them, you are in danger of making them focus on how to get away. I'm not saying this is a rule that you have to obsessively apply 100% of the time, but it's a pretty good indicator. What you can do instead is find a way to angle your body away from someone while you're initially engaging them. This was natural when me and Audrey met, because we were standing side by side commenting on what was going on on a TV screen in front of us. There was a semi-external focus.
You can think of it the same way as if you were sat on a barstool and you engaged someone next to you at a bar. You wouldn't suddenly, just because you started talking to them, stand up and turn your stool to face them. Instead, what you would do is you would just turn the top part of your body towards them in the moments you were speaking to them, which could easily turn back to face forward.
Another thing you can do to create space is break away from the conversation to do something else. So, if you're in a coffee shop, go back to reading your book for a bit. If you're in a social situation, maybe you're at a party or a get-together, don't be afraid to engage someone else in the room or even bring someone else into the conversation with you and this person. When you demonstrate the ability to break away from someone, you're showing that you're not needy, that you're independent, that you have the social ability to move between people. And here's the important point. It leaves someone wondering if you're going to come back and talk to them rather than how they are going to get away.
Our third principle for flirting is called indirect flirting, or what I like to sometimes call the drive-by compliment. Too often, we go in overly direct with people, letting them know how attractive we think they are in a very overt way. And it kind of makes it look like that's the focus for us. Sometimes it can feel overly sincere or intense. But we do want to let someone know that we find them attractive or appealing because that's part of showing someone that there's something beyond the platonic here. The question is, how do we do that in a way that feels a little more unfazed, a little lighter, a little more playful? How do we do it in a way that feels like flirting?
We do it indirectly. So, you might be having a really great conversation with someone where it's really flowing, you can tell both of you are having a good time, and then you say to that person, "You're really easy to talk to, even if I am occasionally a little distracted by your eyes."
Aw. Thank you. I knew you liked me.
Please. Please. It would never have worked between us.
The thing I like about this is you're introducing this little bolt of electricity into the interaction. You can be quite matter-of-fact when you're being indirect in this way, and you can just move on with the conversation. So, the moment you said the comment about that person's eyes, immediately you can say, "Anyway, the thing I wanted to say about that movie is" and then you keep going.
And by the way, you don't even need to think as literally with compliments as I'm going to comment on this person's looks, like you're so good-looking. You can say something like, "Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it like that. I really agree with that." That's a compliment. You're complimenting someone's brain, and it's going to make someone feel really good. Again, with flirting, it's a very important point. Not everything has to be so literal. Nothing needs to be overtly sexual or even connected to obvious sexual tension in order for it to be flirting.
If you want more ideas on how to flirt with people, maybe you're texting someone right now and you're wondering, it feels nice, it feels fine, but it doesn't feel like it's got that chemistry or that bolt of electricity going through it. What could I send that's more flirtatious? Or I've got a date tonight. How do I show up with a more flirtatious energy? What are some ideas for conversation topics or things I could say or do?
Go ask your question of Matthew AI. It is designed specifically to help you with the most specific, tailored situations that you find yourself in. So, whether this is someone you just met on an app, whether it's someone you've been dating for the last three weeks, but you want to bring a more flirtatious energy to it and you're not quite sure how to do that. Ask Matthew AI how to do it. It will give you very practical advice on what you can do and you can even ask a couple of free questions if you have never used it before. So, go check it out at askmh.com.
The fourth principle for flirting is go slow.
Look, the stakes feel so high in some of these conversations. We really want to find love and when we meet someone we like, it's natural to get nervous. But, when we get nervous, we speed up. Speed is often a result of anxiety, of being too aware of ourselves. But, seduction, sensuality, flirting, all of these things exist in the slower moments, in the pauses, in the things that remain unsaid. What pulls us in is this kind of ebb and flow in our speed. Here's one of the most important things you can learn for this, the ability to control your breathing.
This is something a boxing trainer of mine, Martin Snow, taught me. He even taught it to a group of women live on my retreat. Check out what he said.
You hold your breath to protect your spine, period. It's an animal instinct. That's it. You hold your breath to protect your spine. Your lungs fill up with air to protect your spine, right? I want to change that, all right? Now, I do this, I throw a punch. What do you do? You blink. Why? You put that in your eyes. Everything else exposed. I want you to control your breath. Control your breathing. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how smart you are, it's guts, all right? And do you have guts? Absolutely, because you wouldn't have come here if you didn't, all right? In position. Now, I think I'm better than you, right? Jab. Jab. Cross. But, twist that foot. Cross, cross, cross, and you're better than me.
The other thing that allows us to play on pace is becoming really aware and present with what the other person is actually saying. Because when we slow down and we become aware of what they're saying, it creates space for flirting to occur. Awareness is what allows you to look at someone, make eye contact, and when they say, "What?" you say, "I don't know. I just wasn't expecting you to say that. I really like that." That's flirting, and it comes from changing the pace. So, leave room for pauses, moments of eye contact, and just smiling. You can even take a beat and look at someone and just be like, "This is fun." Those are the moments that linger and create genuine chemistry between two people.
Our fifth principle for flirting is more mystery. Mo' mystery, less problems. Mo' mystery, mo' problems.
There is this culture in dating today of just saying too much, of thinking that when we meet in dating today, we're doing so for the purposes of giving all of this information about ourselves. This is my last relationship. We haven't talked in years because blah blah blah. And now there's the added issue that when we meet people on the apps or when we meet someone in person, there is this tendency to think that we need to add each other on our social media, that we need to tell them our Instagram. So, now they haven't just met us for five minutes, they've instantly gained access to 10 years of your history.
Being mysterious means not letting on everything about ourselves all in one go. Think about it this way, less is more in the beginning. That doesn't mean you're being inauthentic, it simply means that you're distributing information about yourself at an organic pace to a perfect stranger. We don't have to tell someone all of the impressive things about us out of the gate. We can instead just live in the moment of what's actually going on right now rather than the energy of who we are and what we've done and what we've achieved. It's more about showing up authentically where you really connect with the person in front of you. Be less focused on impressing and more focused on connecting.
I think the self-development world is partly responsible for the oversharing we do. We feel like we need to share our truth about our life or about our feelings on things on date one. But no one needs to know all of these things on date one. They don't need to know our trauma. They don't need to know what our therapist said in our last session or how your last relationship was. What they need to know is whether they have a good time with you.
Why do we watch an entire season of a TV series? We get to know a character a little bit in the first episode. Really, we just see them in a situation and there's something about that character that keeps us watching. There's something about them that's captivating. That's what keeps us watching is that we're contextualizing that character as we go. But we didn't start episode one by having full context for why that character was the way they was. And in the same fashion, you do not have to worry about contextualizing yourself on date one. Your job is to be a character that someone wants to go on date two with and then as you go on more dates, you bring in more information that contextualizes the person they are now intrigued by.
All right, before you go, I said I would do this. There is a line that I came up with recently, on the fly I might add, when I was at an event of mine, Love Life New York. This was an event I did for my members. If you want to become a member, I'll leave a link in the description. But, I did a private event for these members, and one of them came up to me and said, "Matthew, I have a situation where I don't know what to do. I'm trying to be more proactive. I'm trying to talk to more people. I'm pretty good at it in general, but sometimes I'm on the subway in New York, and I see a guy, and we're making eye contact, and I do go over there and talk to them, and it turns into something."
She said, "But, sometimes it just doesn't work out that way. We're between stops. It's hard for me to go over there without worrying I'm going to embarrass myself in front of everybody, or it's only one more stop before I have to go, or they have to go, and we've been making eye contact with each other. What do I do if my stop is the next stop, and I don't want to miss the moment with someone who is clearly giving me signs?"
I said, "Write your name and your number on a piece of paper. And there's one more line I want you to add to that piece of paper that is going to make it flirtatious. That's going to create this confident, sexy vibe. And that line is this: 'One of us had to.' Then, as you're getting off the train, you give that piece of paper to them." I think this line is brilliant. One of us had to. By the way, I think that could be used in a whole bunch of different situations.
Don't forget to go check out From Casual to Committed. If you're seeing someone right now, and you want more from them, you can find that at getcommitment.com. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought of this video. I love reading your comments, and I'm going to respond to as many as I can, and I will see you in next week's video.
Mhm.
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