JUDY WOODRUFF: It's Valentine's Day. And here at the NewsHour we want to mark the occasion by hearing from Matthew Hussey. He's a dating coach who tonight offers us his Brief But Spectacular take on modern love.
MATTHEW HUSSEY, Dating Coach: I am known predominantly for dealing with people's relationships.
QUESTION: Let's do a little glossary of sorts for the audience. Ghosting.
MATTHEW HUSSEY: So, ghosting is the term given to someone just falling off of the radar completely. They were talking to you, and now they just vanished. Bread-crumbing is different to the ghost. The ghost just vanishes. The bread-crumber gives you a little bit, and then moves away. So the bread-crumber's like the person who says, hey, how's your week going? And they haven't texted you for three weeks. And then, a month later, they come back and they go, thinking of you. In the dating environment today, sometimes, being higher maintenance is actually the thing that will work better for you. It's this race to the bottom, where everyone thinks that, oh, it's just fast-food dating, Tinder and Bumble and Match and all of these things that I just have to accept whatever treatment I'm given. And if someone wants to meet with me, and it's five minutes from now, I should do it, because, if I don't do it, somebody else will, and this guy seems like a great guy. The only way to stand out in dating today is to actually be more demanding than the next person. When a ship is sinking, and you see everyone running that way, follow the person who's walking that way. For anyone who's watching something like this and says, why aren't we talking politics, science, culture, this is all of those things. If you are in a toxic relationship, that poisons you everywhere else in your life. You don't think we'd have better politicians if they were happy in their relationships? If things were good back home, and they were happy, and they felt connected, people would be better everywhere in their lives. You master relationships, you master your relationship with the world. I believe that right now is actually the greatest time in history to date. People en masse have lost the ability to go out there and meet people in real life. This is the best opportunity that you could ever have, if you are still a human being that knows how to talk to another human being, because you're not competing with most of the world. One of the greatest ways to stand out in dating right now today is to be someone who could still pick up the phone on an evening and say, hi, how you doing? I'm Matthew Hussey, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on love and relationships today.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And that's all you need to know.