So let me tell you a love story.
Once upon a time, not so long ago,
in a land I Googled to be 5,172 miles away,
I met a guy, and he was perfect.
So I'll tell you the meeting story.
I'd just taped this really cool TV show about experimenting with your sexuality,
and I met him at the after-party
through one of our famous friends who was a DJ.
He was tall, dark, handsome,
kind of a rock star,
and a little bit emotionally unavailable.
Very soon, we were spending all of our time together.
We threw these really cool parties for all of our cool friends,
we went backstage at every festival,
and, when my hands were cold,
he would take them under his arms to warm them up.
He was my best friend,
and I thought we would be together forever.
And so strong was that belief
that when the warning signs came, I just ignored them.
Until the day that I couldn't ignore them anymore.
I'd become quite unwell,
I wasn't so pretty anymore,
and I definitely couldn't go out to any of the parties.
In fact, I was, for the first time in my life, actually vulnerable
because I was miscarrying our baby.
And at that point, when I was at my weakest,
he left.
It's not a joke.
Ah ha, um -
Coming downstairs - and you you know what,
but I would have followed him out of the door to the ends of Earth.
But I couldn't get out of my bed.
When I did get up, I found that our house had been stripped bare.
The paintings were gone from the walls,
and the rooms that we used to dance in together were empty.
I walked around those rooms like an animal, howling.
Picking myself up off the literal floor that day,
I had to recognize
that after all of this excitement and this joy and this fantasy,
at the end of all that love,
I had nothing.
And you know what,
that wasn't even the first time something like that had happened to me.
I was a magnet for chaos.
I liked chaos,
because when I was in chaos,
I didn't have to confront anything about who I was.
Truthfully, I hadn't known who I was for years.
Because on the floor that day,
I did have someone, I had myself.
But for a long time,
that had come to feel like, it, well, meant nothing,
and it was invaluable.
So I know it seems a bit self-indulgent
to come out here today
and talk to you guys about, like, effectively a break-up story,
but it was one of a chain of many incidences
that made me think, "Maybe there's other people like me,
maybe there's other people that aren't approaching love in the right way."
Because I think we've all had experiences, right?
They look like love, they feel like love,
but when you open them up, there's nothing loving about them.
But we continued to chase love,
because I think love is sold to us
as almost like the ultimate solution to ourselves:
the things that makes our past okay,
that gives us the direction for the future,
and imbues our everyday reality with meaning.
I think love can be beautiful,
I think it can be exciting;
but I think sometimes it can also be an act of escapism.
And I've had a long time to think about this,
as the introduction said,
I am the artist formerly known as the UK's leading dating expert.
And before that I was a ghost writer in the pickup industry,
and I vlog about the reality of love on my YouTube.
And now I have a completely different approach,
a very minimalist strategy when it comes to dating.
And that's really because I'm concerned
that in our quest for love
sometimes it can be the ultimate distraction
to fixing ourselves
and doing the real work that will actually make us happy.
Because, don't get me wrong,
I think that the desire for attachment, for intimacy, for security, for love,
those goals are natural, they're human, and they're good.
But I think sometimes the way we go about them is a bit weird,
whether that's crazy, ridiculous, on-off, destructive relationships,
or needing to go out on a date every single night of the week
with a different person.
You know, like the hip form of dating,
where you have someone on the back burner,
someone on the front burner,
someone under the grill,
and then someone else over there in the freezer
(Laughter)
just in case, God forbid, you spend a night by yourself.
In this, it feels really like loneliness is the driver,
or escapism is the driver,
not love.
So, I'm kind of starting to preach the opposite belief now,
that, of course, the answer lies not in another person,
but within yourself.
Because I think, sometimes, the melodrama of love
takes us further away, rather than closer,
to who we actually are.
So I find that my dating advice
is gradually shrinking down to be essentially:
go meditate, get some therapy,
read a book.
Ha, ha. (Laughter)
It's not what you would call
a sexy strategy for the millennial generation.
A generation that is used to 4G download speeds,
skyping a friend abroad,
and Netflix and chill with someone you just met from Tinder.
(Laughter)
Um -
So I think when we're used to expecting everything we want right here, right now,
when we can't just vend an automatic level of human connection,
we not only feel like we're getting it wrong,
but like we're not getting what we're entitled to.
And then you just take one look at Instagram:
everybody else has it sorted out.
And we sort of live in the culture that surrounds us,
telling us that we should have fallen in love or be falling in love,
or at least have had great sex, right?
Like yesterday!?
You know, let's face it,
who actually enters into the arena of love
looking to, maybe, become a better person,
to be kinder, to have more integrity,
to get more grounded?
No one does that.
It's because our eyes are off ourselves,
we're looking for that next adventure,
that greener grass,
that new person,
so we don't have to deal with any of that stuff.
And I understand how easily it happens, right?
You just kind of meet someone sexy,
I don't know where,
maybe it was at a party, on the train, or the Tube, as we would say in London.
Or maybe you just met them, you both joined Tinder that day,
how magical!
(Laughter)
And before too long, you realize that you have some stuff in common,
like wow, you both like almond butter, Star Wars,
you can name all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles.
And then, like, suddenly, you're retelling how you met,
like, this serendipitous coincidence of cosmic proportions -
it's like move over Romeo and Juliet.
Not that that ended every well,
let's all remember that.
So, when you're thinking about you're not exactly being Romeo and Juliet,
and we're actually living in the real world,
I think the thing is, the main sell, when you kind of fall for someone,
is it 's like: Yippee, I'm not alone anymore.
Hooray! Nailed it! Uh ha.
Coz you get to - guess what you do?
You get to go home every night,
and you get to put your head on the pillow,
and you don't have to think about, you know, your needs,
your wants, your past,
and, actually, kind of all the stuff
that's really, probably, stopping you from becoming happy,
because you're not fixing it.
Instead, you get to be entrapped by somebody else,
you're intrigued by them,
your mind has someone new to spiral into and focus on.
But I think sometimes when you're focusing on that perfect romance,
you're not actually doing the real work
to fix the stuff that's stopping you from becoming happy.
And because of that,
I think that most of us, when it comes to love and dating,
kind of need an epic timeout and reset.
For myself, I did six months cold turkey.
No dating, no internet dating,
and I went to all of two parties.
Literally, you could have written up my love life
on the back of a postage stamp,
it was that exciting.
And all this from the girl who used to -
honestly, I used to pride myself on having a ridiculous love life.
The stories - if I was here two years ago guys,
I'd have told you some amazing stories.
But you know what?
After all of that, and after everything that happened,
I thought I would quite like to know who I am again.
Because, and I think I'm not alone here,
if you're experiencing a Groundhog Day when it comes to your dating life,
I think that the thing is
you think that it's because you're meeting loads of players,
or nice guys finish last, or you just haven't met the one yet,
or that dating is a numbers game,
but I think actually
these truisms that surround dating aren't in fact true at all.
In fact, I think they lead us away from what the real issue is.
Because the problem, and I know this doesn't make for comfy listening,
the problem, it's with you, it's with me,
it's with our ridiculous ideas around romance,
it's with our needs that we haven't realized yet,
it's with our past that we don't want to talk about,
it's with our desire,
it's with our inability to get through one day
with[out] picking up our smartphones,
and it's with what we value.
So I decided after all of that - I was like, you know what,
I'm done with Groundhog Day in love,
I actually want to discover a bit more about myself.
Because the truth is, I wasn't even born Hayley Quinn.
Right!? Right!?
I chose that name, I thought it sounded cool.
I was actually born Hayley Whittle.
And when I was born - I grew up in a poor family,
my parents were disabled,
I was really teased at school a lot for being the weird girl,
I used to work as a dishwasher,
and because of that, there was so much pain and shame in my past
I just didn't want to touch it.
And the way I ran away from it
is I ran away from it with love and with fantasy.
But I decided after all that running, I wasn't really getting anywhere,
I was just re-creating the same mistakes time and time again.
So I thought I'd better stop.
I was like I want to actually feel something.
And I can tell you, when I stopped, I did feel.
I think I cried every single day for the first month
on the phone to my Mum,
which was awkward
because I hadn't really spoken to her for about a decade at that stage.
And then I'd come home,
and I'd come home to this empty, dirty house,
with no guy and no baby and no possessions left in it.
And then some days I'd wake up
and the pain would be so bad that it felt like my heart was burning.
And to resist the temptation at that stage to not reach out
and take that little plaster of dating or love or some attention
to fix how I was feeling
was really hard.
But gradually, you know what?
A great thing happened, is that I came back into the room,
I became aware again, my mind started to work,
I reconnected with my family,
the friends that were left were the good ones,
and I stopped being so obsessed with going out every night of the week
or whether someone had read my messages on WhatsApp.
And so that's why,
if you're listening to what I'm saying,
if you even see a shadow of yourself,
a little shadow of your story in my ridiculous life,
I would advise just taking a time to take that pause,
and I'm going to tell you why, I'm actually going to sell it to you.
So here I go, first things first:
when you come home and your evening plans are make chicken soup and read a book,
this no longer sounds bad, this sounds awesome.
Although I'd like to point out
my chicken soup literally still has the consistency of porridge,
it's so bad.
Work in progress! Work in progress!
Second thing,
when you stop waiting for your prince or your princess
to come crashing through the door and save you and solve your life,
you start kind of living in the here and now more.
And when you live in the here and now,
you become more grounded, you become more confident,
you become stronger.
You also become more self-aware.
And when you're aware,
you become more aware of the people around you.
And you know what I saw, and what I see?
I see people running away all the time, every single day of their lives.
And then you see those situations,
and you have the foresight to step back for a change
rather than get involved.
I also learned that life is pretty dramatic as it is,
and it throws you plenty of challenges,
so you don't really need to create any more
and go out there on a mission
to have more drama,
you can just leave it.
I also finally realized,
you know, well, those people say to you, they say,
you need to be alone, or be by yourself, before you can meet someone else.
I used to think those people were boring;
now I think they're right, they're definitely, probably right.
Because I think, sometimes, actually, when we actually confront our aloneness,
and we start to deal with our needs and the past
and all that horrible pain
that, you know, as people, we just collect and carry with us throughout our lives,
when we deal with that, and we're not running from it
in endless people or endless dates,
when we don't have anything to prove anymore,
when you don't need a destructive, ridiculous on-off relationship
in order to feel alive, in order to feel like you exist,
when you can just be,
I kind of actually think that's real love.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)