Stop Chasing Love Directly: Matthew Hussey's Five Oblique Ways to Change Your Love Life in 2026
Matthew Hussey
Dating coach Matthew Hussey starts from a paradox. The most effective thing you can do to meet someone in 2026, he argues, is to stop focusing so hard on meeting someone in 2026. He expects the objection: if love is what you want most, how do you stop focusing on it, and why would that help? His answer is a set of indirect habits meant to create the conditions for connection instead of forcing the outcome. He says some of them draw on 18 years of coaching work with hundreds of thousands of people. The introduction promises four ways, but the video goes through five.
The Theory of Obliquity
Hussey builds his case on an idea from the economist John Kay, which Kay called obliquity. In Hussey's summary, our most valuable goals, such as finding love or building a thriving social life, are rarely reached by pursuing them directly. They are best approached indirectly.
Hussey argues that direct pursuit, for example "I want to meet the love of my life this month" or "I want this person back," produces narrow thinking, short-termism, and unintended bad consequences. Chasing love and obsessing over the outcome also makes people more anxious. The indirect route works on the underlying activities, values, and systems that produce the outcome. In his words, the goal is to "create the conditions in our lives that attract love." He frames his whole approach around this, describing his work as helping people manage three relationships: with others, with themselves, and with life itself.
1. Practice Micro-Interactions
The first oblique step is what Hussey calls micro-interactions: "almost imperceptibly small actions" that can open life-changing doors socially and romantically. He believes they have never been more necessary. Many people, he says, have "atrophied socially" to some degree, because a hectic work life, Netflix, and dating apps together provide a perfect excuse never to leave the house.
He sees a cognitive distortion behind this, all-or-nothing thinking. People treat their love lives as a false choice between two options. One is boldly walking up to someone and seducing them. The other is sitting in a corner with a phone and a coffee while the world goes by. His way out of this "social stalemate" is to think smaller rather than bigger, and to stop thinking in terms of courage and start thinking in terms of casual social moments.
His examples are deliberately modest:
- Say one human sentence to the barista instead of checking email while they make your coffee, such as "how's your day going?"
- If you see someone yawning, ask "Long day or just getting started?"
The second example, he notes, gives the other person permission to talk to you the next time they see you.
Hussey admits these moments feel too small to matter. He argues that over time they "exponentially increase the chances of serendipity working in your favor." He compares this to the butterfly effect from chaos theory, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causes a tornado in Texas. A micro-interaction is the human version of a wing flap. You cannot predict which small moment of connection might lead to the love of your life, so the trick is to give the butterfly effect "hundreds of opportunities" to work.
He also explains why the practice is easier than it sounds. It carries minimal risk. It is outcome-independent, meaning it is not designed to get anything. It is broader than trying to approach one person you are attracted to. It connects you socially and, as he puts it, "warms the world up to you" by giving off an open, receptive energy.
2. Find a New Place to Draw Confidence From
The second step addresses what to do when your confidence fails you. Hussey says one of the hardest parts of wanting a better year is that people carry last year's confidence into it, along with whatever damaged that confidence. When the foundation it rested on has fallen away, it is hard to feel confident at all. He adds that some people have never felt confident. They have tried to feel good about their looks or their charisma and could never get past the sense that they don't meet society's expectations.
His key point is that you can choose to draw confidence from different sources than before. He cites the Oxford Dictionary definition of confidence as "a feeling of certainty about something." This explains, in his view, why so many people struggle. Either the source of their certainty has been shaken, or they are looking for certainty where they have never had it. His example is trying to believe people find you attractive when your experience has taught you the opposite. If you keep basing certainty on something inherently uncertain, he says, it is no surprise that confidence won't come.
He then gives several alternative sources:
- A new area of competence. Someone who has just divorced may have lost a lot of confidence. Living alone for the first time can give them a new sense of empowerment and independence.
- Acceptance, or surrender to what is. Hussey describes suffering chronic physical pain for years. It slowly eroded his confidence and made him long for who he was before the pain. He says he found a new source of confidence by accepting his new starting point and focusing on mastering his relationship with the pain.
- Making yourself proud. From wherever you are, you can ask what small actions you could take today that would make you proud of yourself.
He connects this back to attraction. When people sense confidence in you, that energy makes you "a magnet," so not having what someone else has does not mean you can't be attractive. He calls confidence "the great equalizer": if one route to it is closed, another is always available.
3. Stop Sharing Your Love Life Like It's News or Gossip
Hussey expects the third point to surprise viewers. He acknowledges that sharing dating stories is one way single people stay sane. The problem, in his view, starts when those stories stop being about the past and become a running commentary on the present.
He lays out several consequences. Sharing the highs can make friends and family over-excited, which winds you up further. You then get ahead of where things actually stand and put too much pressure on something at a premature stage. More often, people share the lows, or the minute details of everything a date did, while they are still forming opinions. This brings in more opinions than is helpful. It can lead you to overreact or judge someone too quickly based on the projections of people who were not even on the date. Hussey says asking for opinions is fine when you need them. You should first give yourself a chance to be present and work out what you actually think and feel, because that is what allows a real connection to form.
He describes a subtler danger too: the habit "kind of pits you against the person you're dating." Instead of deepening the conversation with them, you are having it behind their back, often judgmentally, and it replaces actual communication. Talking directly with the person is what shows you can be on the same team, or at least that you raise problems with them instead of turning them into gossip for your friends. He suggests reversing the situation and asking how you would feel if your date were telling all their friends about something you did.
The last danger he names is identity. If you treat your love life like a "dating horrors" magazine column where every headline reads "You won't believe what happened," you create an identity for that column's author, which is you. Hussey says this cements a "classic me" story, keeps it alive, and can make you unconsciously look for more situations that confirm it. His conclusion: "This is your life. It is not other people's entertainment," so be present in it instead of reporting it in real time.
4. Make Your Mind Your Temple
The fourth step is about what you feed your mind. Hussey says he has always believed that "learning equals impact." The more interesting ideas you carry, the more interesting and surprising you can be in conversation. Learning requires focus, though, and he sees the ability to focus as one of the things most eroded today.
He speaks from his own experience. He is grateful for the hours spent focused on a great book, fiction or non-fiction, or watching a YouTube debate that changed him and gave him interesting points of view. He calls this a "superpower" or "edge," because it lets him say things in a distinctive way or bring an unusual reference into a conversation. That only works if the information was taken in and stored first. His question for viewers is what information they are consuming in 2026.
He points to two things working against people. First, he says Webster's word of the year for 2025 was "slop," which he connects to the flood of AI-generated content online. He also says studies have shown AI-generated videos are "hurting our brains," and that people are getting watered-down, often bad, or simply wrong content. Second, he argues short-form content can be just as damaging. It rarely offers deep ideas. People come away from their phones with "a thousand different influences" that don't get stored anywhere, that "zombify" them in the moment, and that are not available as useful knowledge later. In his view this makes people less interesting in conversation, "consumers" instead of people who bring ideas and thought to the table. So he urges treating your brain as a temple and choosing your sources of information and influence carefully.
5. Choose Your Mentors Wisely
This leads directly to the fifth step. Hussey says the creator economy is full of would-be mentors and "a hell of a lot of grift," with many who look one way on the surface and are quite different underneath, their values not matching what they say. His advice is to find people you genuinely believe in, whose message rings true to you.
He calls himself "a humble student in life," intensely curious and fond of learning, but also "a real snob" about whose advice he takes. He thinks of it as having a board of advisers. The people around that table largely determine the quality of his life, because they determine the quality of the advice and ideas he adopts.
He stresses that this board is not only people you follow from a distance through YouTube or books. It also includes friends and family. Sometimes, he says, we let people close who hold bad ideas about love, about people in general, or about men or women. Because the people we take advice from shape our reality, he argues, we have to choose carefully who we let close. He ends by asking what kind of life you really want and who represents it, not only on the surface ("front of house") but in the values they live by. His advice is to find those people, befriend them or make them mentors, and get as close to them as you can.
Where Hussey Lands
Across all five points, Hussey argues that a better love life comes less from pursuing a partner directly and more from building a year whose habits make connection likely. Those habits are small daily interactions, sturdier sources of confidence, privacy and presence while dating, better mental inputs, and better advisers. He describes the aim not as tactics but as "building a year" that makes finding love "as close to inevitable as possible," with a richer social life along the way.
There is something counterintuitive you can do to meet someone in 2026, and that is to stop focusing so much on meeting someone in 2026. But that is so hard, Matthew. It is what I want the most. How exactly would I even do that? And how will that even help? I'm going to show you in this video. And the answers are unexpected.
The economist John Kay put forward the counterintuitive theory of obliquity, the idea that our most valuable goals in life, like finding love or building a thriving social life, are rarely achieved by pursuing them directly. They are actually best reached obliquely, meaning indirectly. When we pursue love directly, for example, by saying, "I want to meet the love of my life this month," or, "I want this person back," it leads to narrow thinking, short-termism, and unintended bad consequences. But indirect pursuit, focusing on the deeper activities, values, and systems that create those outcomes, is far more effective.
It means instead of trying to find love by chasing it and obsessing over the outcome in a way that actually makes us more anxious, we need to create the conditions in our lives that attract love. And I am on a mission this month to show you how to do that in 2026, starting with this video where I am going to show you four unique ways you can start. And make sure you stick around for number three and four because they are backed by 18 years of research I have done as a coach to hundreds of thousands of people.
And if you're new here, I'm Matthew Hussey. And what we do here goes beyond just dating. It is about how we take control in each of the three major relationships in our life, our relationship with others, with ourselves, and with life itself, and how to use proven psychology to build deep confidence and find the love we deserve. So let's dive right in. And give this video a quick like so that it can reach other people who need it, too. And subscribe with the post notifications turned on so that you never miss these videos in the future.
So, if we are following the theory of obliquity, the indirect approach to getting what we want, here is the first oblique way that you can reinvent your love life and your social life this year. Practice micro-interactions.
Now, what are micro-interactions? They are the almost imperceptibly small actions that open life-changing doors in our love lives and our social lives. We are living in a time where it has never been more necessary to practice micro-interactions. Most of us can relate to having atrophied socially on some level. A dangerous combination of a hectic work life, Netflix, and dating apps give us the perfect excuse never to leave the house.
One of the traps we've fallen into is a particular cognitive distortion called all-or-nothing thinking. We turn our love lives into a false choice between bravely striding up to someone and seducing them or sitting in the corner of a room with our phone and our coffee watching the world go by without us. The antidote to this social stalemate is to start thinking smaller, not bigger. To stop thinking in terms of courage and to start thinking in terms of casual social moments.
Instead of checking emails while your barista makes your coffee, maybe you say one human sentence. A quick, "How's your day going?" Maybe you see someone yawning in your day and you say, "Long day or just getting started?" Which gives them permission to say something to you the next time they see you on a different day. These things feel so small it is hard to imagine that they're going to change anything in our lives. But over time, they exponentially increase the chances of serendipity working in your favor.
Think of our old friend the butterfly effect, or chaos theory as it's scientifically known. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. Or you are basically doing the human equivalent of flapping your wings when you apply micro-interactions to your life. You can never predict how the smallest moment of connection could lead to the love of your life. The trick is to start giving the butterfly effect hundreds of opportunities to work out in your favor.
It's minimal risk, outcome independent. In other words, it's not designed to get something, which is why it's so much easier to practice. And lastly, it's broader than trying to hit on someone that you know you want. It is socially connective, and it warms the world up to you by putting out an open and receptive energy.
So let's move on to the second oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026. When your confidence fails you, find a new place to draw your confidence from. One of the hardest things about wanting a better life for ourselves in 2026 is that we bring last year's confidence with us, along with whatever has knocked our confidence. It is so hard to feel confident when the bedrock of whatever the confidence we did have has fallen away.
And by the way, some people can't even relate to having had confidence. They've never felt it. They've tried in vain to have confidence about things like their looks or their charisma, but they can never get over the fact that they do not match up to society's expectations of those things. But there is something people do not realize about confidence. Even if we have always struggled to have it, or when it's been shattered in areas that we had come to rely on, we can choose to derive our confidence from different things than we used to.
The Oxford Dictionary defines confidence as simply a feeling of certainty about something. That's why so many of us find it hard or impossible to feel confident. Either the source of our certainty has been rocked, or we're trying to find certainty in an area where we've never had it, like the idea that people find us attractive even when our experience has taught us the opposite. If we are continuously trying to base our certainty on something that is inherently uncertain, then it's no wonder we're struggling to be confident.
So what are some better places to start deriving our certainty and therefore our confidence from? For one, it could be a new area of competence in your life. Maybe you just got divorced and your confidence took a huge hit in the process. But now you're living on your own for the first time, and there's a new sense of personal empowerment and independence that's being born out of that.
Or you can find confidence in acceptance, or surrender to what is. I went through a time where for years I was plagued by chronic physical pain. So much so that it slowly eroded my confidence, and it made me long for the person I was before that pain started. I found this entirely new source of confidence by accepting my new starting point and focusing on mastering my relationship with my pain.
Another source of confidence can be just making yourself proud. This is one of the great ways to build confidence from wherever you are now. Wherever you're starting from, you can ask, "What small actions could I perform today that would make me proud of me?" When people feel confidence coming off of you, the very energy of it is what makes you a magnet. So don't ever think that because you don't have what someone else does, you can't be attractive. Confidence is the great equalizer. And if you can't get it one way, there's always another way you can.
So we are about to move on to number three, which I know you are not going to see coming. But if you're enjoying this video, I want to tell you that you can work with me for a full 90 minutes on how to create the oblique conditions to attract love and an amazing social life this year. Because in just one week, I am holding a special free event I am calling The Year of Love.
If you're tired of relationships that fizzle, if you're feeling like you keep forcing connections, or you find yourself wondering if love is even truly possible in the modern age, this event was literally made for you. After 18-plus years of coaching hundreds of thousands of people around the world through the ups and downs of modern dating, I have seen what works and I have seen what burns people out. And the masterful way is more inner work until you are drained and exhausted, or grinding through the apps like it's your part-time job.
In this live event, The Year of Love, I am going to give you the four-step indirect approach to attract love in 2026, none of which I talk about in this video. I need longer for that. But I am going to show you how to do this while enjoying your life instead of anxiously burning out chasing the result. You're going to learn how to intentionally design your year around finding love without adding more to your plate or neglecting the other parts of your life.
I'm going to show you how pushing harder might be the very thing that is holding you back and how you can get far better results with a lot less effort. And I'm going to share with you the routines, the habits, and the mindsets that help you create inevitability when it comes to finding love so that you don't attract love someday or eventually, but this year.
Just go to lovein26.com. Signing up is easy, it takes seconds, the event is free, and this is only happening this month. But it will set you up for the entire rest of your year, both in your love life and socially. This isn't about tactic, this is about building a year that creates a sense of inevitability. This is the one event you need to be at for your love life this year. I hope you make it. Are you ready for number three?
The third oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life in 2026 is to stop sharing your love life like it is news and gossip. I get it. One of the ways we stay sane when we're single is by sharing dating stories with other people. The problem is when those stories aren't something that happened in the past, but are instead a running commentary on your love life in the present.
Why is this a problem? Sometimes we share the highs of our love life in a way that makes our friends and family get overexcited, which amps us up even more, and then all of a sudden we're getting ahead of the situation we're in, and we're putting way too much pressure on it at a premature stage. Other times, and more commonly, we are sharing the lows, or just the minute details of everything someone did on a date that we are forming opinions on. And this has some very negative side effects.
For one, it invites in more opinions than is helpful, which can make you overreact to things that someone has done, or judge them too quickly based on the personal projections of people who weren't even on the date with you. There's nothing wrong with inviting people's opinions where you need them, but make sure you've given yourself a chance to be present first, and to really know how you think and feel about someone. That's what gives you the opportunity to form a real connection.
But there's another, more subtle danger. It kind of pits you against the person you're dating. Instead of being present with them, connecting with them, and learning more about them through deepening the conversation, you're having those conversations behind their back, and often in a judgmental way. And it becomes a substitute for actually communicating with them. Because communicating with them is what gives you the chance to show that you're capable of being on the same team as them, or at the very least, communicating with them when something is up, instead of with your friends, where it just becomes fodder for gossip. You only have to ask how you would feel if the situation were reversed, and someone was talking to all of their friends about something you did on the date.
And then there's the final danger, identity. When we treat our love life like it's a dating horrors magazine column that we write, where every headline is akin to, "You won't believe what happened," you're creating an identity for the author of that column, you. You are cementing your story in a way that says, "Classic me." And that keeps the story alive, and it will have you unconsciously looking for more situations that provide evidence for that narrative. This is your life. It is not other people's entertainment, so be present with it, rather than feeling the need to report it in real time.
Before we get any further with this list, leave me a comment letting me know what's resonated with you if you have made it this far into the video, and how you're going to apply it. Your comment might be the thing that someone else needs to hear, or it might give them an idea.
The fourth oblique way to reinvent your love life and your social life this year is to make your mind your temple. I have always had the belief that learning equals impact. The more ideas you have in your head that are interesting, the more you can be an interesting conversationalist, a surprising conversationalist. But in order to learn, you have to be able to focus, and that's one of the big things that's been eroded for us these days is the ability to focus.
I have always been so grateful for the hours that I focused in reading a great book, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, watching a debate on YouTube that changed me somehow, put really interesting points of view in my head. It's always given me this kind of superpower, this edge, where I can come along and I have a unique way of saying something, or a unique reference that I can bring into the mix. In order to have that, we have to have stored that information in the first place. We have to be engaging with new information this year.
So, my question to you is, in 2026, what information are you taking in? And this is really relevant today, because there are a couple of things working against us. In 2025, the Webster word of the year was slop. Not surprising for many of you who know that AI slop, as it's known, flooded the internet. Studies have shown that AI-generated videos are hurting our brains. So, this is a problem. We're getting watered-down, in many cases, bad or even just wrong content.
On top of that, we have short-form content that can be equally damaging. It's not necessarily presenting us with deep ideas. We're not coming away with a real rich sense of knowledge. We're just coming away from our phones with a thousand different influences that don't get stored anywhere. They just end up being things that zombify us in the moment, and then aren't accessible as useful information later. It is not making us more interesting in conversation. It's making us a lot less interesting. We're becoming consumers. We're not espousers of ideas. We're not people who are actually bringing thought to the table. That is why I'm saying you should treat your brain like it's your temple. Choose your sources of information wisely.
Choose your influences wisely, which brings me on to point number five in the oblique approach to creating an amazing love life this year. Choose your mentors wisely. There are so many mentors these days. The creator economy is so full with content. There's a hell of a lot of grift. There are a hell of a lot of mentors who look like one thing on the surface and are a very different thing behind the surface, where values don't align with what's actually said. We have to find people that we really believe in, people whose message really rings true for us.
I'm a humble student in life. I love learning. I'm an intensely curious person. I am a real snob when it comes to who I take advice from. I see it like I have a board of advisers in life, and the people who sit around that table are the people who really, in many ways, dictate the quality of my life, because they dictate the quality of the advice I take, the ideas that I take on board.
And your board of directors isn't just made up of people that you get influenced by from afar through YouTube or books or anything else. Your board of advisers can be friends. They can be family. And sometimes we allow people to be close to us who have really bad ideas about things. Bad ideas about love. Bad ideas about people in general, or about men, or about women. We have to choose very wisely who it is we're going to allow close to us, who we're going to take advice from, because those people are dictating your reality. So, what kind of life do you really want? Who represents that? Not just front of
house, but in the values that they have in general in their lives. Find those people, make friends with them, or make them your mentors, and get as close as possible.
And if you want to do this with me this year, go to lovein26.com, and we're going to do it together. This is not about tactics. This is about building a year that is going to make finding the love you want as close to inevitable as possible, and building an extraordinary social life along the way.
Let's do it together. I'll see you over there, and I'll see you this month for the Year of Love.
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