Matthew McConaughey’s Dating Advice

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Transcript provided by YouTube:

Special Guest Matthew McConaughey

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Oh, do I have something cool for you today! I had the insane opportunity to talk to none other than Matthew McConaughey about dating, love life. We were very much on board with the reconnaissance, as it became known. Yeah, but he didn’t stop there. He went and wrote a book called “Green Lights,” a book that I read in the last few weeks. An incredible book where he showed himself to be more than an extraordinary actor or someone capable of taking huge risks in his career, but a philosopher, a poet, an amazing giver of life advice, and someone who can provide a roadmap for living life to the full. And having read his book, I was so excited at the opportunity to talk to him, and it happened. I got the chance to speak with the man. And whatever you do, watch till the end of this because there is something happening that you need to know about, and we talk about it at the end of this video. I’m so excited; I can’t wait for you to see this. I present to you Matthew McConaughey.

Matthew: How you doing?

Pretty damn good, man.

A Manual for Loving Life

I’m good. I’m happy to say I’ve completed your book “Green Lights” in the last three days. And, you know, I’ve spent 15 years of my life helping people work on their love lives. It seems to me you’ve given people this incredible manual here for how to love their life, which is one of the most important things, I think, you can possibly do. In having a great love life is to develop a great relationship with life itself. And through your stories and through the vulnerability and everything you talk about in this book, it’s extraordinary to me what a practical kind of manual you’ve put together for people to be able to do that.

Matthew: Ah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you know, we talk about love stories, you know, and you said it, the relationship with our life. That’s a love story. You know, the relationship with ourselves. That’s a love story. You know, and I’ve been happy to hear from people that said, “Oh, you know, you gave me some tools to reapproach things in a different way. You showed me how you yourself, Matthew, you know, did not navigate the best way sometimes, did not navigate that relationship.” You know, I’ve had a lot of people say, “You helped me take more risk in my life and see myself as the subject in my own story in ways that I haven’t been able to do before.” And that felt really good to hear that.

Well, when you say people say, “You encouraged me to take more risk,” there was a phrase you used in the book that really stuck with me, which was “less impressed, more involved.” Yeah, and you told this story of being this guy in high school who had a truck, and you were having fun dates with girls, and you were having a fun time with your friends, and people, you were popular, people wanted to be around you and the energy you created. And then you got this red sports car, and you thought that would be an upgrade, but actually, as soon as you started acting like the cool guy with the red sports car, some of that attention died off. Could you explain that idea of “less impressed, more involved” because I think it’s so powerful, even for people’s love lives?

Matthew: Yeah, well, it came to me after my father passed away. And, you know, if you’ve had a loved one pass away, especially, I guess, a parent, it sobers you up pretty quickly. And I remember that soon after he passed away, I noticed that everything that I had been revering in life, like looking up to, wow, so impressed with, and I was impressed, I just became in my first acting gig and all my future, and, “Oh, my life’s really good, wow.” Everything that I revered lowered down to eye level. And I looked at it, and I also noticed that everything that I had been sort of condescending and patronizing and looking down upon, “Oh, that’s not worthy of me,” rose up, and I looked at my level. And I remember writing “The World is Flat.”

Something about that gave me courage to go, “Oh, well, what are we doing? Let’s go more boldly forward.” Be less impressed and more involved. In my acting career, it had to be less impressed. And I still, to this day, with success, gotta be less impressed with the things that I’ve got. Be respectful, very respectful, but if I’m overly impressed to be talking with you right now, I won’t be able to be present with you right now because I’ll be like, “I’ve got you on a pedestal.” We do it in relationships all the time. Our mate, we hold them up there as Wonder Woman or Superman, and it’s not fair.

Not only to them, it’s not fair to us because no one can live up to it, but we’re so impressed, we can’t be involved or be all honest or authentic in it. This was a time in my life where life was going good in high school. I was rolling. I decided I’m gonna get this candy red sports car with t-tops. I was like, “Ah, just an upgrade,” as you said. It was not an upgrade. It wasn’t me. And what I found, what that red sports car did, and we all have our red sports cars in our life that we need to unpack.

I began leaning against that red sports car, letting that red sports car trying to do the work for me. I thought I was cool because of my red sports car, and the people around me were like, “You’re kind of boring now, bro. You’re relying on this damn car you’re leaning against.” Used to be the fun guy, man. Used to be, we used to go in your truck, mudding after school. You had the speaker in the front of the truck where you’d jack with everybody in the morning in the parking lot. Now you’re just leaning against a sports car. I became the guy at the party who leans against the wall and smokes cigarettes to look cool instead of the guy who goes and gets on the dance floor and actually has a good time. That’s what that red sports car became, a crutch.

And I relied on it, and I noticed that. I was like, “Man, my social relations have gone dry. People don’t want to hang out with me anymore. What’s going on?” And I looked at that sports car. I said, “You son of a… I went down and I traded it back in for the truck, came back next day. I was back, but I was impressed with this red sports car. I was impressed. I got another story in the book about when you can ask yourself if you want to before you do it. It’s that story about when I got my jeans pressed for the first time. I had a housekeeper for the very first time, and she pressed my jeans.

And I was telling a friend, “It’s so awesome, man. I’ve got this housekeeper. She cleans the room. She makes me milk. Check this out. She presses my jeans, man. She makes that crease, that line down the front.” And my friend was like, “Well, that’s cool if you want your jeans pressed.” And I was like, “I never thought of that before. I just thought I was very impressed with it because of the first time I could get my jeans pressed.”

And I said, “I don’t like that line down my jeans.” And I should quit doing the… Like, quit pressing my jeans from then on. So there’s certain things that we’re impressed with because we can get them or because society says, “Oh, that’s the cool way to go. The red sports car makes you cooler. Or the jeans pressed is something more chic to get because you can get it.” That we gotta kind of ask ourselves, “Wait a minute, that may be more somebody may tell me that’s cooler, but is it really for me?”

And like, though they weren’t… And I’ve watched people do the same thing with people where they’re on a date, they’re trying to find love, and they’re so busy wondering if they can get someone that they never stop to ask themselves, “Is this someone worth getting?”

And they may see a lot of things in those early stages where, you know, you talk all about what represents green lights or yellow lights in the book. There’s a lot of things in early dating that represent red lights, like, “This person’s not gonna make you happy. This person’s not gonna be good for you. They’re not well-behaved. They disrespect you. They just treat… They mistreat you. They don’t show you they’re really investing.” And we pursue them anyway because we, instead of seeing a red light that, “Oh, this should be telling me to go in a different direction,” we see it as a green light to try harder.

How do you recognize the red lights in situations like that and then have the confidence to act on them? Why do you think we ignore those red lights when we see them?

Matthew: Look, we not only in love, but we have relationships where we get in them and it doesn’t quite live up. But we think we can coach them up. We think we can kind of mold them. We’re giving ourselves credit away. I can change this person. And usually there’s some things you can, but usually those red lights and those yellow lights and relationships are like, “Hey, if there’s any time that the person that I’m interested in is showing their best behavior, it’s now.” All right? If anybody’s overselling who they are, it’s now. It’s not gonna usually get better. If anything, it’s going to drop down to more of a realistic place where you’re going, “Oh, I saw the signs early, and now they’re just even more illuminated.” But we want to be accepted. We want approval. We want to get their approval. We feel like, like, as I said, we that we can maybe mold them and that maybe we should even sacrifice something of who we are. Maybe I shouldn’t be upset with that trait of that person. Maybe that’s on me. Okay, that’s a good thought. We got a compromise as well in relationships. But the ones that go against… And that word authentic is thrown around, but it’s a good word. The ones that go… The ones that go against, we got to have a more bottom line. What we can put up with, what we won’t put up with, how we respect ourselves and how we can respect each other.

But, you know, after that, if something crosses those lines, they’re usually not coming back. That’s a good sign to go, you know what? Probably not for me. Thank you for showing your true colors, by the way. Because in that oversell thing, we’ve all done, and I know I’ve done it, oversold myself early and I painted myself in a corner because I couldn’t live up to it later on, you know what I mean? And we’ve all been there where that person, like, what happened to the honeymoon phase, man? Oh, you were bullshitting back then? Oh, okay. Oh, well, now you let me know that this isn’t for me. But those early signs, if you meet on a more bottom line, I think they’re worth discussing and we’re saying, “Hey, can we update that a little bit? Can we shine the car on that a little bit? Can we amend that behavior a little bit? Because it may not bother you, but it really bothers me.” And you actually enjoy it. You know, that’s real confidence, is being able to do that, right? Because that’s where you’re actually, in a way, you’re testing whether it’s a yellow light or a red light. Because if it’s a red light and you have that conversation, it doesn’t improve.

If it’s a yellow light and you have that conversation, it can turn into a green light because you go, “Oh, progress.” One of the big reasons we ignore those red lights is, I think, this scarcity mindset we have that something better isn’t coming. And the part of the book that really spoke to me was the time in your life where you were wildly successful doing “Rom-Coms.” You wanted to do a different kind of acting. You felt like you needed to. There was more work for you to do internally to actualize in self-actualizing your abilities there, but it represented this huge risk that you are going to have to, as you put it, say yes by saying no. And you went through this whole period of time where you were saying no to things, and you didn’t know if something better was going to come. But you had that leap of faith. I feel like that’s true in every part of our lives. We have to be willing to say no to the wrong things now for the right thing to come. What gives you the courage to do that when so many people just grab at the shiny thing because they’re like, “I don’t know where the next great thing is going to come from, and if I say no to this, maybe I’ll be punished for it by life and nothing good will ever come”?

Matthew: That’s part of the art I live in there, isn’t it? I mean, because on the flip side, we miss out on things, and we look back and we go, “Why didn’t I take the chance? Why didn’t I follow through?” But then I think of equal value is, and I would say probably even maybe more so when it comes to affairs of the heart and love, is going and believing that time is on our side. But we have a clock. I have a friend who had his life planned. Very successful guy. “I’m gonna go through 20s as a graduate, get a job. 30s, I’m gonna, early 30s, I’m gonna meet the woman for me. I’m going to be married. 35, when I have kids, at 36.” So he was racing and pressing to get in relationships because he was coming up on 30, and then he was in their 30, 31, 32, and he hadn’t met the one. So he was pressing, trying to force relationships to work because that was going to fit his timeline. And all of a sudden, at 35, none of those had worked out. And this was the time he was supposed to be married and start having kids. 36, it hadn’t worked out. 40, it hadn’t worked out. 50, that time worked out.

Now, if you want to go back and deconstruct going backwards, I would argue you had a better chance if he would have tried to force things to work, to meet that timeline when he was in his late 20s and early 30s, and actually been patient and believed a little more in himself, and going, “You know what? I need to really check and measure if this person’s right for me or not,” instead of trying to force my hand or trying to turn them in or trying to make them work for me because you seem to me from the outside as his friend that doesn’t… That’s not a good match. And now he’s looking up at 50 going, “What the hell happened? Well, now do I get patient? I’m behind the eight ball. I missed my… I missed my timeline, you know?” But to believe time’s on our side at those times, like I’ll say this, I met Camilla. She’s the right woman for me. Yes, was it also the right time for me? I believe so. Sometimes we’ll… May meet the right person, but it’s not the right time for us to receive their love. Sometimes we’re in the right time where we’re open, and it’s not the right person. And we got to watch because we feel like what we’re talking about in the first question, “Oh, no, I can make this work because I can see the beauty in them. I can see the upside. I can be the optimist on this. I’ll just keep… I’ll keep brushing over the reality and say, ‘No, this will work.’ We got to watch that too, which is what the first question you were bringing up is, is part of what we got to watch. So I think it needs to be the right person and the right time, and we got to calibrate those two because we enter that relationship, make sure that someone’s not crossing or trespassing across our more bottom lines that they really, hopefully, appreciate us for the most of who we are. And hell, we’re all trying to figure out who the hell we are all the time. That’s not like we… There’s a ta-da moment, and then hopefully we meet someone that we can grow with them. And, you know, this now, I know this. Most of us all out there, I think, know this.

Growing With the Other Person

They’re never who we absolutely hoped they would be; we have to go with the audibles that are called in a relationship. As people grow, there are certain relationships, and I know I’ve been in one, like, “Wait, what happened to the person I fell in love with early on?” When I met them, essentially, I hope they are on those more bottom lines of time, but they’re gonna change, and hopefully, we are too. They can change, they can respect and feed the changes that we go through. It’s a balance act going forward, but I think if we can just say we know on our own what things we probably are just talking ourselves into thinking this person’s the right person for me, and we don’t need to force that hand. If we can trust that you don’t find who you’re looking for when you’re looking, we have a better chance of meeting the right person.

Finding What You’re Looking for

I didn’t find Camilla; it took me a while. I was looking in the produce section at every red light. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I wasn’t going to meet her like that. It was when I was like, “McConaughey, stay with yourself, be aware, be open to receiving, but don’t try so hard.” Don’t look at every street corner, thinking, “I could make that work, she could work.” When we sit back, stay aware, and pursue without over-pursuing, we have a better chance of meeting the right person.

Wanting to Have a Family

A major stressor for many women is wanting to have a family and kids, and they have a different biological clock. People need to develop the idea that time is on their side. To put time back on your side, create peace with what is or what might be. Be relative with the inevitable. Even if I’m a bachelor forever, I could still have kids and make a family. I had an Immaculate sort of interruption spiritually, and that dream allowed me to be at peace with that possibility, which then allowed me to find the right person.

That surrender was part of it, part of the submission to the surrender of the idea. I forgave the possibility of that not being the outcome, which then allowed me to find the person that made the outcome happen.

This liberates people from thinking there’s only one neat and tidy way to be happy. You might find a better path to happiness by staying open to different possibilities.

It’s not about getting callous or saying you don’t want to meet someone; it’s about staying in your space and not intruding. Becoming more attractive in that way. Accepting that there’s more than one way to find happiness, and being open to other possibilities. You might play the one hand you have a better chance of meeting the one that gets you what you want.

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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