What’s Love Got to Do with It?

The Problem with Matthew Hussey’s Dating System

“You can’t just ‘be yourself,'” Matthew Hussey laughs from my MacBook screen, bemused at the thought of finding love without having to work for it. Clearly, his success as a dating coach has nothing to do with his good looks or British accent. He got where he is by having the proper credentials, though what those credentials are, he disdains to say. Apparently, he’s more of a “don’t question the system if it works” kind of guy. The question is, does it? Have we commercialized romance or is marketing ourselves the only way to find love nowadays?

My introduction to dating coaches (i.e., life coaches for romantic relationships) was through a clickbait ad that promised to reveal the “secret” to making, and keeping, any woman addicted to you. I was incredulous, to say the least. Did people really fall for that stuff? What were men “secretly” being told about dating anyway? There was only one way to find out . . .

Half an hour later, the narrator was still explaining how he’d gone from zero to hero with women. Turns out, his personal transformation journey had been motivated by a desire to stick it to a girl who’d once rejected him. Insecure, arrogant, petty, vindictive . . . That’d show her. That’d teach her to run in the opposite direction without looking back.

The longer the guy talked, the more determined I was to get to his point, if only to prove that his “secret” was as ludicrous as I knew it would be. Sure enough, the latest pseudoscience proves that women are biologically addicted to, and incapable of resisting, male adoration. That’s right. No matter how mean, dumb, or ugly you are, pretending that you can’t live without us will have tens crawling to you on their knees. We are woman, hear us moan.

Who does this guy think he is? I thought indignantly. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t his target audience. The ad may have been about women but it was for men. It was designed to manipulate the average Joe’s subconscious desires. Depressing thought.

I decided to suss out the guy’s YouTube channel to see if his videos were as sexist as his ad. They weren’t, but that did nothing to allay my suspicions. Was he the frontman for a shady venture capitalist? Were the attendees at his seminars paid background actors?

Personally, I never take it for granted that self-professed influencers are legitimate. In an era when it’s possible to buy fake followers, a little checkmark next to someone’s name means nothing. And even if their followers are real, we have no way of knowing if those followers have sound judgement and good taste. Individually, “common men” can be heroes; collectively, they’re often idiots. Our Founding Fathers understood this and took precautions.

I had zero interest in following Mr. Infomercial but my due diligence led YouTube to recommend other dating coaches, like Matthew Hussey (honestly, no good deed). I clicked for his hair and stayed for his accent. Neither stopped me from wondering if he was a paid actor or a base opportunist, but now I was curious to know what women were being told about dating. What could a male British expat know about women dating in LA? Who was he to tell us how to act, dress, sleep, think, and breathe around men? And, more importantly, what did we think about it?

Here’s what I discovered . . .

The Expert Doth Protest Too Much

Matthew Hussey was born on June 19, 1987 and raised in Essex, England. Judging by his accent, he’s lower- to middle-class by British standards (think ancestry, not wealth). He seems to have a healthy relationship with his family and married Audrey Le Strat in October 2023. He read Dale Carnegie’s marketing classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), when he was thirteen and was fascinated by the idea that developing certain personality traits could give him the ability to attract and influence others.^{1 2}

According to one janky site (sorry, he’s notoriously private), he attended Williams College in Massachusetts before earning an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, but another site claims that he studied Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Exeter (so, he is a paid actor, wink). His only other credential appears to be an FU for people who presume to ask for any. Evidently, he made the FU video because he was tired of people challenging his qualifications and decided to address the problem by providing no proof of them whatsoever. Why couldn’t people just accept his authority without question already? Jesus.

Now, I’m not qualified to counsel on the legality of selling advice with or without a degree/business license, but I do think that the public has a right to know the qualifications of the person pocketing their hard-earned money (no, celebrity endorsements on a fancy website don’t count)—especially if he’s charging a whopping $10,000 for one-on-one coaching sessions as this source suggests.

It’s kind of like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). One side argues that rewording the US Constitution to include women is unnecessary because we already have equal rights in practice. The other side reasons that if it makes no difference one way, it makes no difference the other, so why not resolve the issue once and for all by giving the opposition what it wants? The very act of refusing to reword our Constitution to reflect female equality and women’s rights calls the security of those rights into question.

Likewise, every legitimate businessperson accepts that they need to establish credibility to turn a profit. Why make things harder on yourself by refusing to cooperate? Getting defensive about your qualifications only implies that you have none. Incidentally, so do Hussey’s Terms and Conditions (see “No Professional Advice”).

Get the Guy

In addition to Hussey’s YouTube channel, he has a personal website with access to his blog, podcast, retreats, tours, and two self-help books: Get the Guy (2013) and Love Life (2024). I haven’t read Get the Guy: Learn Secrets of the Male Mind to Find the Man You Want and the Love You Deserve, but if the subtitle is any indication, it’s essentially a practical guide to marketing yourself to the male sex.

From the publisher (HarperCollins):

Get the Guy, . . . reveals the secrets of the male mind and the fundamentals of dating and mating for a proven, revolutionary approach to help women to find lasting love.

Is it possible for something to be proven and revolutionary at the same time?

From the Table of Contents (Barnes & Noble):

Part One: Find the Guy

1. Put the Odds in Your Favor
2. Being a Woman of High Value
3. Get a Social Life That Serves Your Love Life
4. The Mindset of the Chooser
5. The Traits of Desirable Women
6. The White Handkerchief Approach
7. From Great Conversation to First Date
8. The Joy of Text
9. A Word about Online Dating

Part Two: Get the Guy

10. The Ultimate Formula for Attraction
11. A Word about Insecurity
12. The Art of Creating the Great Date
13. The Sex Talk (Part I)
14. Stuck in the Friend Trap
15. Why Hasn’t He Called?
16. Premature Obligation

Part Three: Keep the Guy

17. How to Be the Woman of His Dreams
18. Is He Mr. Right?
19. What Guys Really Think about the C-Word
20. The Sex Talk (Part II)
21. If You Want Him to Commit
22. Love for Life

High-Value Woman or Trophy Wife?

A few of the above chapter headings stand out to me:

Get a Social Life That Serves Your Love Life
The Mindset of the Chooser
The Traits of Desirable Women (as opposed to the traits of undesirable women?)
The Ultimate Formula for Attraction
How to Be the Woman of His Dreams
If You Want Him to Commit
Love for Life

I imagine that the first chapter is about having the “right” friends to attract the “right” people. Like attracts like, or as Hussey (quoting Jim Rohn) puts it, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that regardless of how desirable someone is, they won’t “get a social life that serves their love life” if they show up in a 2000 Toyota Corolla that makes them look like they operate a drug cartel. Hussey may not say so because it would cost him followers, but I think it’s safe to assume that attracting the “right” men requires the “right” lifestyle. We can’t be underprivileged and expect to be loved by the kind of men he has in mind. His “high-value man” will expect us to have high-value things. Otherwise, we’ll just “drag him down” (read: ruin the up-and-coming image he’s trying to cultivate).

Remember, Hussey’s “high-value man” is the male equivalent of his “high-value woman,” the kind of woman who he didn’t think he deserved before his own personal transformation journey. This suggests that he and other “high-value men” think that self-improvement entitles them to be particular, a subtle form of arrogance not typically associated with quality people. I’ve even had interactions with men on his site who thought that they were “high value” because they exercised. This demonstrates the kind of superficiality that quality women are up against in their pursuit of quality men and could explain why Hussey abandoned his initial platform as a man-to-man dating coach for the more lucrative rewards of helping women.

What it doesn’t explain is how Hussey expects us to believe that a bunch of “high-value men” will be available to us after adopting his system if they aren’t receiving, or seeking, the same instruction. Is he implying that men are inherently superior? Because the tacit suggestion is that we have to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars learning to be male fantasies, while men—who tend to be less intuitive, less likely to ask for help, and less likely to choose the kind of books or films, etc., which could clue them in—just pop out of the womb knowing what women want, when everything—from sexist comments online to the dating experiences of women everywhere—suggests that many of them don’t even care.

This video, which has gone viral twice, shows you the kind of thing we’re up against. In it, a woman in Hussey’s audience asks who should pay for dinner “after four or five months of dating,” and he puts the umbrella question of who should pay on a date to the other attendees. When they shout, “The man!”, he shakes his head and laughs, rather patronizingly. The woman continues, “I told him . . . you’re the gentleman here. You’re supposed to pay.” Hussey says, “‘He’s supposed to pay’ . . . but you’re supposed to have sex with him whenever he says,” to which she immediately replies, “No.” He shrugs as if he’s made his point. “But where does this double standard come from [“wow,” a woman intones]? I’m sorry, it’s the reality. You guys can . . . moan at it all you want, but the moment you say to a guy, ‘you have to f*cking pay for my time,’ you’re saying, ‘this relationship isn’t equal.'”

First, Hussey is treating an opinion as if it’s a rule: if splitting the bill were already the standard, it wouldn’t even be a question. So, he’s essentially sneering at women for assuming that the standard is the standard. Second, he’s claiming that a man who foots the bill is paying for a woman’s time as if a woman who splits the bill is paying for a man’s respect. As if a woman who doesn’t pay half is obligated to put out and any woman who doesn’t is a “user.” As if a gentleman would resent the money that he chose to spend on a woman or think that it entitled him to sex. As if sex in exchange for favors weren’t the literal definition of prostitution. And as if a meal, regardless of its value, were equivalent to the privilege of sex and the risks that accompany it: murder, rape, unwanted pregnancy, and STDs/STIs, to name the worst. All because the guy is too stingy to pay the bill or too proud to admit that he can’t afford to. Once, my friend even went out with a guy whose first words to her were, “You have good birthing hips.” Talk about a Neanderthal. I’m surprised she didn’t close the door in his face.

But returning to the question of “high value,” I’d argue that what Hussey is really talking about are “trophy people”: “cool,” popular people who’ve taken themselves as far as they can go on almost every level. I say this not only because of Hussey’s YouTube videos but also because his personal transformation journey includes the story of a girl named Sarah, who pestered him to go out with her until he finally agreed, even though he wasn’t interested in her. One wonders if Sarah was in his league or below it. Would he have concluded that he needed a makeover because Sarah could’ve used one? Probably not. Judging by the women he’s dated, as well as how men tend to view their “desserts” in relation to ours, I suspect it was the former: Sarah was in his league but he aspired to the tens above them.

Well, bully for him. But what about the women who are forced to date down because the men in their league are dating up? What about the Sarahs who couldn’t get Matthews because the Matthews thought that working out or driving a sports car put them in the same league as the Camilas? What would Hussey say about their inability to get the men that they “deserve,” when those men are dating women who could’ve done better?

And while we’re on the subject of special snowflakes, let’s talk about what it takes to be one. By definition, “special” is the opposite of “ordinary.” It implies someone or something that’s rare—unique—different—unusual—even a bit peculiar. Anne Shirley. Holly Golightly. Amélie Poulain. Pretty much every character that Bette Davis played. I mean, what’s more iconic than that scene in All About Eve when Davis (who plays an aging diva being upstaged by her backstabbing protégé), downs her cocktail, turns in that fabulous gown designed by Edith Head (who you might know as Edna Mode in The Incredibles), and quips, “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night”? As one fan put it, “Bette has that thing where even when she makes you angry[,] you still want her to win!” That’s charisma.

Now, imagine if you had that much personality and the looks to back it up. It would be like that scene in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, when Mrs. Bennet and her two eldest daughters run into Lady Lucas and Charlotte and begin to discuss Mr. Bingley’s chance of falling in love with one of the girls. Lady Lucas tells her daughter, “You may not have beauty, my love, but you have character and some men prefer it.” To which the irrepressible Mrs. Bennet retorts, “How true, Lady Lucas, which is why girls with both are doubly fortunate.” Sadly, even the kindest, smartest “trophy people” tend to sell themselves short by avoiding the kind of weirdly wonderful, whimsically winsome qualities that make multifaceted people so enchanting.

I recently caught an episode of Very Cavalleri at the gym. If you’ve never heard of it, I’m not far ahead of you. It’s a reality TV show about an entrepreneur named Kristin Cavalleri who owns a small but expanding business in Nashville called Uncommon James. On the surface, she, her friends, and (mostly female) employees are “high-value women”: attractive, fit, well groomed, and moderately successful. They’re the kind of women who get celebrity styled before their annual trade show/fashion week in LA, an event that one of them described as “living our best lives.” They also talk senseless sh*t behind each other’s backs and are easily frustrated by minor setbacks (read: first world problems). But the thing that struck me most was their lack of depth, their preoccupation with the relatively trivial details of their relatively trivial lives, as if they’d never read a book or lost a loved one or had existential thoughts about life and death—i.e., your stereotypical TV American in a non-serious role. Even accounting for bad acting and the fact that reality TV is fueled by melodrama, they came across as a bunch of Stepford wives masquerading as badass businesswomen. Other examples of glorifying superficiality include The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

From where I sit, these self-made entrepreneur types are as pretentious as Vogue, the high-end lifestyle magazine that glorifies French culture. According to the mystique that the publication seeks to perpetuate, French girls are effortlessly chic. They make under-eye circles seem sexy, never wear sweats in public, and can eat pastries without getting fat. Vogue‘s average reader apparently spends most of their free time at the salon, as opposed to the average person, who clearly doesn’t. I mean, I’ve been known to get spray tans and I have friends who get their eyebrows threaded, but I don’t know a single person whose income or inclination accommodates an endless round of beauty appointments. Vogue would have us believe that such people are little better than peasants. A French girl could pull off that look but not us savages.

Frankly, I expected better from a British expat. Far be it from me to glorify British culture, or any culture, at the expense of my own, but the victor can afford to give credit where credit is due, and the upside to having a class system based on ancestry is that it’s less superficial (though not, I’m sorry to say, less supercilious) than having one based on wealth. Case in point: many British celebrities have been disillusioned by success in the States. Keira Knightley spoke of being trotted down the red carpet like a poodle. An award-winning director talked of being ignored by the press in favor of more famous filmmakers. George Ezra wrote the song “Pretty Shining People.” The list goes on.

Like many middle-class, nouveau riche (“new money”) people, Hussey seems to be confusing wealth with success and status with worth. He may talk about cultivating internal qualities like kindness and confidence, but his choice of women like Camila Cabello and Audrey Le Strat suggests that he wouldn’t have settled for someone who was kind and smart unless she was also hot and well-to-do. In fact, one of his YouTube videos reveals that an undisclosed person close to him (his mother, perhaps?) chided him for having impossibly high standards. So, we have to take his definition of “high value” with a grain of salt.

Incidentally, Kristin Cavalleri’s “trophy husband” filed for divorce in 2020.

Extraordinarily Ordinary

Another problem with Hussey’s system is that it doesn’t explain how ordinary people—people who may be less X, Y, or Z than ourselves—end up in happy, longterm relationships. The three who gushed that his five was “the love of his life” a few months after begging a seven to cheat on her. The hot background actor who found his “soulmate” a few months after rejecting an equally desirable catch. The acquaintance who fell in love with a woman who didn’t shave or brush her hair. The friend who’d never dated before marrying someone cooler than herself. The pastor who’s still passionately in love with the kind, plain girl he met in high school. The woman in the news who married the grossly disfigured veteran. Everyone else who’s managed to muddle through without Hussey’s help. His parents. His brother. His own wife.

From what I’ve glimpsed of Hussey’s parents online, Stephen and Pauline are about as unremarkable as an ordinary couple could be. They’re not particularly attractive, fit, or fashionable, nor do they (or his brother, Stephen Jr.) exhibit social graces that would distinguish them from anyone else. What would Hussey say about the quality of their relationship, given that they’re still together, despite every apparent failure to fashion themselves into his idea of a “worthy” mate?

Let’s take the argument a step further. Hussey’s personal transformation journey was motivated by his inability to get the girls he liked at school, girls who probably seemed unattainable because they “effortlessly” embodied the qualities he thought he lacked. He also prefers organic, in-person connections to online dating (a somewhat old-fashioned approach for a “revolutionary” in his field). My question is this: when Hussey dreamed of falling in love, was it to someone who’d read his book, watched his tutorials, and rehearsed a witty pickup line until it sounded natural? Or, like most of us, did he fantasize about ending up with someone who already embodied the qualities he valued? Is it even possible to be “high value” if you need his help, or is it kind of like the saying that you’re not a leader if you have to ask if you are one? Aren’t the best things in life uncontrived? Isn’t that what makes them magical?

And what about his wife? Regardless of how sweet or smart Audrey may be, he wouldn’t have chosen her if she hadn’t had the looks and lifestyle that he thought he was entitled to as a “high-value man.” How can he claim to love her if it’s ultimately because she ticks all of his superficial boxes? What’s going to happen to their marriage when the novelty of being with the “perfect” person gives way to the inevitable imperfections that they’ll have to live with day after day? And how can he claim to be empowering women to find “true love” by being kind, confident, socially savvy, etc., when what it really comes down to for him and other “high-value men” is finding a woman who’s attractive and well-to-do enough to be a “trophy wife”?

Like the girls that Hussey liked at school, every child understands that if someone is likable, attractive, fashionable, or rich, they’ll automatically rank higher on the social scale than someone who’s unlikable, unattractive, unfashionable, or poor. Being cool may require as much conformity as Hussey’s system, but it’s not something that we need to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars learning on one of his retreats. It’s not rocket science; it’s Life 101. And if the most desirable people understand this without being told, of what value is his system?

Now, I’m not suggesting that we should choose the poorest, ugliest, most unstable person we can find just to prove how loving we are, as if we’re giving a three-legged dog its forever home (hashtag: automatic sainthood). Nor am I denying that Hussey’s system could improve our chance of finding the kind of men he has in mind. What I’m questioning is the true value of his “high-value man” and the wisdom of marketing ourselves in a way that’s anathema to the name of love. From where I sit, Hussey’s MO is about dating like you’re auditioning for a role, learning how to sell yourself to the highest-value bidder, and teaching women to see themselves as products instead of teaching men to see them as people.

If Marketing Is the Answer, Can You Rephrase the Question?

Hussey claims to be empowering women to take charge of their love lives by having “the mindset of the chooser.” But this premise is ludicrously at odds with the idea of molding ourselves into his idea of the “perfect” woman to convince Mr. Right to fall in love with us—or the people we’re pretending to be. Of all his opinions, I find this one the most problematic. It’s as if he’s taken everything he personally values in a woman, applied it to all men, slapped the word “high value” onto it, and decided that any woman who doesn’t have these traits is undesirable, not just in love but in life.

If Hussey’s system works, it works by giving men what they want, not by giving women the love they “deserve.” In fact, it’s less about what we “deserve” than about learning to “deserve” the “high-value men” who are allegedly waiting to date us. But regardless of how much you value self-improvement or how high value you were before you’d even heard of Matthew Hussey, you eventually reach a point where you think, “F*ck ‘deserve.’ I don’t want to be ‘deserving.’ I want to be loved. I don’t want the love I ‘deserve’; I want the love I don’t deserve.” Because that’s only kind worth having. That’s the only love that’s love.

Hussey’s premise begins with men. It’s about who they are and how they function and making them the standard for how women should behave, regardless of whether this is an acceptable worldview or a bizarre throwback to the 1950s that sets feminism back by several decades. The insidious implication is that “boys will be boys” and women have to learn to work the system or “dance, monkey, dance” to their tune. We have to play the dating game by their rules and paint within the lines they’ve drawn for us. Then maybe if we’re really lucky—if we mind our P’s and Q’s and practice the traits of “desirable women”—a “high-value man” will commit to us and it’ll all be worth it. Maybe.

The question is, what do we get out of it? Say we do the work: develop the traits of “desirable women,” convince Mr. Right to tie the noose knot, and so forth. What then? Have we become the people we were pretending to be or do we have to keep faking it till death do us part? What kind of schism will this create between us and our spouse in terms of intimacy? And why would we go through so much trouble for a man who doesn’t know or like us for who we truly are/were? If we have to give ourselves a complete makeover to be “worthy” of love, what’s the point? Is any relationship worth changing that much of our character, personality, or habits?

Hussey’s system may help women find, date, and marry his idea of a “high-value man,” but is such a person truly capable of love? What will happen when we start to age and lose our looks or, God forbid, commit one of the three deadly sins of disagreeing, criticizing, or nagging instead of embracing the perpetually soft, warm traits of “desirable women”?

And what about the men who don’t hold up their end of the “bargain,” the ones who don’t give us the consideration we crave in exchange for the respect they think they deserve (like the conclusion of The Taming of the Shrew)? How many of us have “played by the rules” only to be disrespected by men who took our respect for granted? Because a relationship where we have to be the bigger, better person to make it work isn’t a marriage of equals; it’s a mother/son relationship. Far from giving men the respect they crave, it breeds contempt in the women who have to baby them (such as letting him think that something was his idea, for example). Because it’s really hard to respect someone who behaves childishly or selfishly.

This is the point in the argument where toxic men will tell you to f*ck off and the more insidious sort will look at you with large, sad eyes and sigh, “I just want a woman who’s kind” (the tacit insult being that you’re not). LOL, no, you don’t. You want someone who’s young and sexy and somehow also kind and maternal. You want a young, hot, f*ckable mother whose desirability and admiration validate your manhood, and you’re only capable of valuing such a woman to the extent that she reflects your ideal image of yourself. You want to live vicariously through her eyes instead of acquiring the qualities that would actually make you a hero, and you’re completely contemptuous of any woman who doesn’t fill this role, even if she’s significantly more impressive than yourself.

It’s self-gratification wrapped in a veneer of “valuing the woman for herself.” It’s what some men actually mean when they say they married their “better half,” which for them is a humble way to brag about themself while unintentionally insulting their wife: “She could’ve had anyone but she chose me because I’m she’s so wonderful” (hashtag: thankful, hashtag: blessed, hashtag: me, hashtag: wow). In reality, only one man in a thousand truly believes that he’s undeserving of the woman he’s with. Privately, most think that her choice is a testimony not only to her good taste but also to his desirability. This enables him to stick it to the women who rejected him and the men he couldn’t compete with. But he can’t say this without sounding arrogant or insecure, so he plays up his wife’s desirability instead. The irony is that any woman who shortchanges herself romantically out of a misplaced sense of kindness is either insecure or foolish or both, which hardly makes either party a winner of the love lottery.

In the romantic comedy, Ask Any Girl (1959), the lovestruck Meg Wheeler (Shirley MacLaine) asks her straight-laced boss, Miles Doughton (David Niven), to help her snag his charming but irresponsible younger brother, Evan (Gig Young). Fed up with Evan’s womanizing and intrigued by the idea of applying their company’s market research techniques to matchmaking, Miles agrees to help Meg “hit Evan below the level of his awareness” by appealing to his subconscious desires, dryly remarking (as only the urbane Niven can) that almost any woman would be an improvement over his brother’s usual conquests. Everything goes according to plan—Miles dates all the women in Evan’s little black book and Meg “dresses up in all their best qualities”—until she realizes that she’s been so busy becoming the “perfect” woman that she’s lost sight of who she is. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she wails. “You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with ten different versions of me.”

It’s hard to see what’s “revolutionary” about an approach to love that a classic film rejected almost three decades before Hussey was born.

Will the Real True Love Please Stand Up?

I started down this path because I wanted to know what men and women were being told about dating. I learned that many people have no idea what they’re doing in romantic relationships but some of us are ahead of the curve in terms of common sense. If you don’t mind measuring your worth against a man’s fantasies or need someone to tell you not to “accidentally” leave your thong at his place so he has to see you again whether he wants to or not, you may well benefit from a dating coach like Hussey. But you won’t find love by taking his marketing advice because love doesn’t work that way.

First, “real, true, lasting” love doesn’t exist. You can have divine love, familial love, platonic love, romantic love, corrupted love (hate), and an absence of love (apathy/indifference), but there’s no such thing as “false love,” “conditional love,” or “temporary love.” Sure, some friendships fade and not all romances lead to marriage, but, in general, the idea that certain people enter our lives only to be loved for a limited time is bullsh*t. People invent these platitudes to make tragedies like divorce less tragic. Because “some loves aren’t meant to last” sounds a heap-ton better than “I don’t know how to love” or “I lost interest after the novelty wore off” or “I wasn’t expecting her to age” or “I didn’t think he’d be so human.”

Second, the idea that “love conquers all” isn’t just a savior mentality, or, as Hussey puts it on his website, a “myth that . . . becomes a recipe for chasing someone who is treating us badly.” It’s about believing in God’s ability to work all things for good (Rom. 8:28) and leaning on Him to weather life’s storms.

In 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, the Apostle Paul says:

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. (New King James Version, emphasis mine).

Shakespeare put it this way:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Most cliches got where they are today by being true and “Sonnet 116” is no exception. The Bard’s less popular but equally profound “Sonnet 130” says, “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground” (l. 12), meaning that she doesn’t float from cloud to airy cloud like ladies do in proper blazons (i.e., a type of poem that compares a woman’s physical attributes to other things: “swanlike neck,” for example). It continues, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare” (ll. 13–14). Now, here’s a lover whose own feet are planted firmly on the ground, who views flaws as an opportunity to love rather than an excuse to run away—who doesn’t view these things as flaws at all. In fact, it’s so good, I’m going to give you the whole shabang:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, but well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

The truth is, love can make anyone seem extraordinary; it’s simply a question of if and when we’ll find them. Statistically, the odds of us having a “soulmate” aren’t in our favor, which actually increases the likelihood of finding someone compatible. We like to think that we’re one of a kind—and, from a certain perspective, we are—but the reality is that the global population is large enough to render many of our individual characteristics negligible, so it’s highly unlikely that any of us has one “perfect” match who, by some cosmic blunder, we may fail to meet. Paradoxically, the sheer size of the global population makes the probability of meeting more than one of our best matches equally unlikely, which may well be the only sense in which we’ll find “the one.”

Ironically, Christians are the only people who can reasonably entertain the idea of a “soulmate” due to our belief in an all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful, all-purposeful Creator who’s capable of introducing the proper person at the proper time. But nowhere does the Bible teach such a doctrine. It’s essentially a non-issue because the expectation is that we’ll choose our spouse wisely and love them as our own self, regardless of who they are or how they make us feel (Eph. 5:28–29, 33). Marriage is an exercise of mutually, wildly sacrificial love designed to render both halves of the whole more fully unto Himself, a messy business designed to refine our character (sanctification) on the bumpy road to heaven (glorification). Needless to say, it’s not as romantic as it sounds. Grace, forgiveness, and the ability to forbear with lesser shortcomings is key.

Furthermore, love stems from being loving, not from choosing the “perfect” partner to love us back. Love is “blind” not because some people see only what they wish to see but because the very act of loving someone makes them lovable, just as the act of desiring them makes them desirable. This is how we turn beasts into beauties and monsters into men. No one in the history of the world has ever loved someone because they were hot or affluent because love is incapable of viewing people with superficial eyes. As God told the prophet Samuel, “Do not look at his [Eliab’s] appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7, New King James Version). And once we understand that love is cultivated through character, it renders Hussey’s system obsolete because romantic love simply becomes an extension of who we already are rather than a persona we adopt to impress our date, which is hardly the best way to begin a quality relationship.

Hussey’s system claims to make women irresistible by teaching them to avoid the qualities men hate. But loving the unlovely elements of other people’s natures and our own is the essence not only of love but also confidence. It’s perfect acceptance married to constant improvement. After all, the decision to love someone for love’s sake, not to mention their own, without knowing exactly how the experiment will pan out, is kind of the point of marriage. It’s a leap of faith designed to reflect our faith in Christ. It’s supposed to entail a certain amount of risk, as well as pre-acceptance of the individual as whole. Otherwise, it’s just as transactional as an arranged marriage.

If anything, Hussey’s system prevents us from finding love because it encourages us to see people as a series of red and green flags based on how satisfied or dissatisfied we’re likely to feel about our selection in the long term. This could cause us to embark on the greatest relationship of our life with self-blinded perfectionism and self-entitled intolerance instead of the spirit of grace and humility that could make our marriage last. And the irony is that every time we choose someone for the wrong reasons—because they’re attractive or make us feel good about ourselves, etc.—we’re actually revealing the limits of our love. So, in a way, Hussey’s system—or any system devised to evaluate someone based on how high they score on the “trophy” scale—is actually a study in un-love.

This would also be a good time to point out that romantic love as we know it is a relatively modern social construct that isn’t practiced in every culture. Some people don’t have the luxury of choice; yet, arranged marriages have been known to lead to romantic love, partly because we’re psychologically wired to find people more attractive the longer that we know them. I can think of at least two people who ended up married to friends who they weren’t initially attracted to. Granted, we’re all susceptible to outward appearance to some degree. If there were two equally substantial people and one of them looked the way we wanted them to and the other didn’t, we’d make out that the first person was a special snowflake every time. Wanting to be with someone objectively or subjectively attractive is very human, but we can’t build a lifelong relationship on qualities that won’t last. That’s just common sense.

Once, my friend and I were lunching at Panera Bread when an elderly couple sat down at the next table. The wife had no sooner tottered off to get something than her husband leaned over to us and whispered, “We’re celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Isn’t she beautiful?” My heart. It reminds me of Ed Sheeran’s “Nancy Mulligan” or Tom Odell’s “Grow Old with Me” (which I’ve already claimed for my own wedding, sorry). That’s the kind of love that conquers all. Those are the kind of man you want—not some self-entitled entrepreneur who plays the dating field like the stock market, dispassionately adding and subtracting your pros and cons like he’s balancing an Excel sheet and trying to calculate the exact degree to which you’re likely to increase or decrease his carefully homogenized lifestyle.

Parting Shots Thoughts

It’s hard to cite the exact moment when I stopped being entertained by Hussey’s YouTube videos. Maybe it was when I realized that I’d never get a man in my league if they thought they “deserved” tens like Camila Cabello. Maybe it was when it occurred to me that a woman could follow all his advice without getting a “high-value man” if she drove an old car or worked an entry-level job. Maybe it was when it dawned on me that Hussey encourages women to cater to men’s fantasies under the guise of empowering them to live their best lives. Maybe it was when I realized that men like him are only capable of “falling in love” with “trophy women.” Maybe it was when it occurred to me that every time he laughs at the idea of falling in love with someone’s character, he’s mocking love’s very essence. Maybe it was when it dawned on me that these lies reach ten million followers and teach them to look down on people who are better than that.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with anything Hussey says. He has a plausible explanation for everything. For every video directed at women, there’s one to remind us that his system is equally applicable to men. For every contradiction or inconsistency, there’s a video that explains, with his signature smirk, that he’s allowed to change his mind. Everything he says is so rational and the manner in which he says it so reasonable, it’s impossible to doubt that he genuinely thinks he’s helping people. But having good intentions doesn’t necessarily make him right and wanting to push him off a tall pier and throw him a lead rope doesn’t necessarily make me wrong. It would be one thing if he admitted that he has no professional qualifications (that we know of) and that his system could improve our chance of dating attractive, affluent men who treated us well as long as we didn’t challenge their male “precedent.” But claiming that we’ll find love by adopting attitudes and techniques that contradict love’s unconditional nature is just false advertising, and it’s troubling to see him aggrandizing himself at our expense, regardless of whether its intentional or unintentional.

If Hussey has been monitoring his social media engagement, he’ll notice that his life coaching videos—the ones focused on being a good person—are actually more popular than the ones focused on being the “perfect” date. Perhaps he’s already aware of this and is simply reluctant to rebrand himself solely as a life coach. Perhaps he feels that abandoning “Get the Guy” would be tantamount to betraying his fans—or himself. Perhaps he feels that if he put in the work to earn “love,” we should too. Otherwise, it implies that his advice was only applicable to his younger self or, worse still, unnecessary to begin with.

It’ll be interesting to see how Hussey’s brand evolves as his first-generation followers age, with or without finding the “love” he promised them, and he begins to lose some of his twinkly British charm. If he’s like other celebrities, he’ll probably be married to his “soulmate” for all of five seconds before retiring to Ibiza at the ripe old age of fifty, the better to conceal his bachelorhood and serial dating habits, as the age gap between him and his twenty-something girlfriends grows more and more grotesque. Unlike a pre-Amal George Clooney, he can’t really afford to do anything else. Eventually, people will want proof that his system works for the person most intimately involved in its success, and what better proof to offer them than his own love life—which he probably thinks, adorably, is private? If all good brands start with their founder, he’s the best advertisement he has. So, he better hope his system is wrong or his newfound “love” won’t last. No pressure, Matt.