How to Know If Someone Is Right for You
One of the most torturous debates we have inside our own head in our love lives is whether the person we have started dating is right for us.
What if we already have too much friction? What if I’m more physically attracted than they are? What if there isn’t enough of a spark, or too much of a spark? They love to dance. They love mountain climbing. What if they judge me for my diet?
You know what? If we’re even thinking about this, we should just dump them and get it over with.
No, that’s enough. Because in this video, I want to give you four useful tips that I have learned from 18 years of coaching people in their love lives that you can use to identify if the person you’re seeing right now is right for you.
My hope is that this video will both provide comfort and be a necessary pressure valve for what you are feeling right now.
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Here is a summary of the transcript from YouTube, slightly edited with AI.
1. They Close the Investment Gap
The first sign you know someone is right for you is if they close the investment gap.
The investment gap is when the potential of a relationship is never realized because one person isn’t willing to try and the other person is too scared to.
You’re left wondering, “What the hell is this?” But you don’t really feel like you can bring that up and have clarity because they’ve not really made you feel comfortable being able to bring something up.
With the right person, you feel like you can communicate. You know where you stand. And if you don’t, you actually feel like it’s okay to broach the subject.
It flows.
So ask yourself: Is the person I’m dating someone I actually feel I can communicate with?
The wrong person, directly or indirectly, gives you these little cues that it’s not safe to bring things up.
How do they do that? They might say an off-hand comment like, “I just feel like everyone I ever date moves insanely fast, you know? I just always feel like, wow, slow down.”
They might just say something like that that puts the idea in your head that if you move too fast, it’s wrong. So now you’re preoccupied with not moving fast.
They may never bring up where it’s going or what this is. They may be inconsistent with their communication and therefore leave you always feeling unsure of yourself.
If someone disappears and then reappears, it keeps you distracted. When they come back, you’re not thinking, “I really need to communicate with them about where this is going.”
You’re just thinking, “Oh my God, I’m so glad they’re back.”
It all becomes this way of occupying your mental bandwidth so that you can’t actually focus on progression.
With the right person, things actually progress organically. It’s not too fast. It doesn’t feel love-bombing. It’s not too slow.
You do become exclusive. You can openly share how you feel about each other, and you start becoming more a part of each other’s lives. You can make plans.
Demand Your Value
One of the great lessons we all learn in our love lives is that we have to demand our value.
We cannot expect people to show up and tell us what our value is and treat us well. We have to have the expectation of being treated well and know how to communicate that we want that.
The reason most of us aren’t doing it is because there are deeper things going on within us, deeper confidence issues that we need to work on.
2. You Feel More Like Yourself Around Them
The second sign that someone is right for you is when you feel more yourself around them.
Feeling seen by somebody is ultimately about feeling safe. Because when you feel seen, you feel accepted. You feel safe to be who you actually are.
And it’s from this place that you get to go out and conquer the world.
I think that’s one of the best things about the right relationship: it is a springboard into the outer world where you can then go and become more.
Interestingly, when my wife Audrey and I first started dating, I noticed something she was doing that I ended up calling out because I didn’t love it.
She would sometimes be sarcastic in ways that cut through the authenticity or the sincerity of a moment we were having.
I ended up calling that out. Not in a mean way, but I would just point it out and be like, “That was a little unnecessarily sarcastic.”
Over time, I realized Audrey’s sarcasm was not innate to her. It had been developed as a defense mechanism for people she had dated in her past who constantly made her feel like she was too much, too sensitive, or too emotional.
Her feelings got too easily hurt, and her sensitivity started to take a backseat. Sarcasm became her weapon of choice. It was protective, and she had been in that mode for quite some time.
So when I first pointed it out, it caught her by surprise and caught her off guard. But it made her remember a part of herself.
What she realized was that she was dating someone who was as sensitive as she was.
Rather than looking at me and going, “Why are you being so sensitive?” she saw me and saw herself and went, “Oh, I can just be sincere with this person. I don’t need to do this.”
She started to let her guard down as a result and actually be more of who she really was.
So it was actually a defense mechanism that became a kind of portal to a way that we were deeply compatible once it was pointed out.
I’m not saying that you have to be the same as the person you’re dating.
You could be with someone who’s not very sensitive in the ways that you are, and it can work because they really love that about you. They really appreciate the difference between you in that area.
What we can’t have is a person who doesn’t understand or see that about us. And if they do, they see it simply as a point of contention and judgment, a way to shame us, or a way to decide to go cold on us.
It can’t be that.
We either have to see each other because we truly understand each other, or I see you in your differences and I love our differences. They become things that I treasure about you.
Either way, it encourages you to be more of yourself, not less of yourself.
3. They Accept Where You Are in Life
The third sign someone is right for you is that they accept where you are in your life.
I did a recent group coaching session where a woman was talking about how she had been through a divorce. She had then taken time to heal from that divorce and then she went back out there and dated.
She met a guy in the first few months of dating. She had a couple of moments where she got triggered, her anxiety was triggered, and she became reactive.
She talked about two moments in particular. I don’t know what happened in those moments, but they obviously caused some friction, and the guy ended up saying to her, “This is not for me. I’m out.”
So, he left.
Now, she was beating herself up. Part of her was wondering if she shouldn’t have dated so soon. Part of her was wondering, “Am I not enough? Am I going to scare people away with the way that I am?”
She also pointed out to him that she’s in therapy, she’s working through these things, and she’s doing the work, which I think is an amazing level of transparency and vulnerability.
She wasn’t taking no responsibility for these things.
Now, it’s tempting for someone in that position to be like, “He was the right person. I just screwed it up.”
But the reality is, the right person for us is the person who signs up for the stage of our journey we are actually in.
None of us are coming to a relationship perfect. None of us are coming without baggage. None of us are coming unscathed or fully healed.
This idea of “heal yourself and then go have a relationship” — life is not that simple or binary.
We are all always a work in progress.
The Right Person Makes Space for Your Journey
The right person isn’t the person who would be right for us if only we had never been through a divorce, or didn’t have issues from that. If only we hadn’t had parents who caused us trauma that we’re now having to untangle.
That’s not the right person.
The right person is the person who either understands where we’re at, seeks to understand where we’re at, or likes us enough that they’re going to be with us through the stage that we’re at and is in for that ride.
I’m not saying someone else is responsible for everything we do and the problems we bring to a relationship.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take responsibility for working on ourselves.
But I am saying that the two right people for each other are two people who see where the other person is in their life and say yes.
4. The Relationship Can Handle Difficult Moments
The fourth sign that someone is right for us is that the relationship can actually handle difficult moments.
The right relationship isn’t brittle.
I know that in my most anxious moments of dating personally, I have tortured myself over a text that I sent that then didn’t get a response, or an argument I caused in a moment of jealousy or frustration that created coldness and made me think I ruined the whole thing.
Many of you will relate to that feeling of having your first argument with someone and then thinking, “Well, it was nice knowing you. I’m going to go and get my toothbrush.”
Our hope, obviously, when we do something like this is that the person looks at us and goes, “What are you talking about? It’s fine. Stop it. Go get your pajamas on. It’s movie night.”
That’s the relationship that we want to be in.
It’s the relationship where we can actually butt heads with someone, but the way that we resolve it is beautiful. It’s forgiving, and we make space for the screw-ups.
The right relationship has great suspension. You may still feel the speed bump when you go over it, but the car continues on its journey.
Who We Think Is Right vs. Who Is Actually Right
I want to finish by talking about the difference between who we think is right for us and who is actually right for us, which are often two very different things.
There is a British writer, David Whyte, who once described an intense feeling of jealousy he had when he went into another writer’s house and saw his writing space.
He saw this gorgeous room with a desk that looked out of a window onto rolling hills with mountains in the background, and he thought, “This is the dream writing space.”
He was overcome with jealousy as he thought about how he needed a writing space like this in which to do his work.
But once he left, it dawned on him that his actual writing space, the space that worked for him, was far more austere.
The real thing he needed was the intense focus of his mind, which very quickly made all of that beautiful background fade into the distance.
There is a huge difference between what we desire and what will make us happy.
We want what we seem not to be able to have. We often want the person we seem not to be able to hold on to.
But this becomes a way of watching real life and the opportunities it brings pass us by.
Our resistance to leaning into real life is often the result of seeing real life as a consolation prize.
When we do that, we can actually miss a situation or a person who is far more appropriate for us.
Someone who is actually right for us, and whose rightness will only be seen if we can lean into what we have with them.
I fundamentally believe that it’s the love and attention we give something that gives it a chance to truly blossom.
I’m not saying that you can make things blossom with anyone. I’m saying there are people who are far more right for us than the people we’re fixated on, but we never see them blossom because we never give our attention to them.
We are so busy looking for the flowers in life that we fail to take up our responsibility as a gardener whose job it is to bring the flowers about.
The problem with our fixation on someone who isn’t even choosing us, or who is seeing us casually in a situationship that isn’t offering us a real committed relationship, is that so much of what has us fixating on them is an imagined rightness.
It didn’t grow organically out of the two of us weaving our stories together.
It’s an imagined rightness born out of a desire to have them, born out of ego, and often out of insecurity that I won’t be enough unless I can prove that I can get them.
The compatibility we imagine is not a natural outcome of how we are together, but how we imagine we might be together given the chance.
The reality of what will make us feel calm and content in a relationship may be totally different from what we lust after in early dating.
What will actually make a great relationship is one in which we can continuously see ourselves giving to it, not out of a desperate desire to make someone love us, but because we find ourselves deeply and generously loving them.
Not for how impressive they are, but for how much we appreciate their deeper nature and how grateful we become for their generous interpretation of us.
In other words, it is not a rightness that has been earned. It is a rightness we are attributing to the situation simply because we want it.
Let me know in the comments what you thought about this video. I love reading your comments.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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